Disclaimer: Twilight belongs to Stephanie Meyer. I'm just playing with her characters. Also, I did not come up with Jasper as the God of War. That idea belongs to IdreamofEddy.

A/N: Thank you to my awesome beta Laurie Whitlock, my pre-readers AlwaysJASPERsLOVE and Shadman, and my beloved sister Shelljayz who also happens to pre-read for me. :)

Thank you to Ellie Wolf for the beautiful banner she made for Longing and to Laurie for surprising me with it. I will be setting up a link in my bio so you can view it.

The response to the last couple chapters has been amazing! I can't thank all of you enough for reading this story, favoriting, and following it. To the people who have reviewed you are awesome. I usually try to respond to each and every one of them. This week I didn't get a chance to. My interpersonal communication professor had me doing some crazy, crazy things that I would never in a million years do if he hadn't made them an assignment and the rest of my week was just as busy. If I didn't respond to your review, I'm sorry. :(

So, this chapter is all about Jasper and how he has been doing since Bella left. Enjoy!

oOo

September 2080

Dr. & Mrs. Cullen,

We didn't part on the best of terms and I can't say that I'm sorry for that, but there is one thing I am sorry for. I shouldn't have left without telling you thank you for everything you did for me. I'm not the greatest at expressing things like gratitude. Sarcasm and stubbornness are more my forte, but I am grateful nonetheless. Despite how we left things, I do believe you cared about me and that you really did want to help me in your own misguided way.

I don't like owing people things so I had to find some way to repay you for your kindness and since money is obviously something you don't need, I had to think outside the box a little. It occurred to me that you might be "pay it forward" kind of people, so I donated the clothing you gave me to Goodwill (no I'm not running around naked) and some canned food to the local food bank. It wasn't much but I'm sure it will do someone somewhere some good.

Take care of yourselves,

Storm

oOo

JPOV

I was annoyed; seriously, utterly, endlessly annoyed. Carlisle and Esme, Edward and Alice, and Emmett and Rosalie were all in their respective rooms doing God knows what. I may not have known what exactly they were doing but I definitely knew what they weren't. Not one of the mated couples living in this house were having sex and for the first time since I'd come to live with the Cullens, I wished that at least one of them, if not all, was.

The emotions coming from all three couples were the sweet, intense, deep ones only the mating bond could produce and it was driving me crazy. Normally, I laid back and absorbed that shit like a dry sponge but I wasn't in the mood for it at the moment. I hadn't been for a long time. Love, contentment, happiness, peace ... I could feel it but I couldn't feel it lately; not that I ever really had, but it had gotten worse. Seeing it, hearing it, feeling it, being fuckin' immersed in it all the fuckin' time but not being a part of it was doing nothing but making me restless and fuckin' itchy. I didn't know what the hell to do with all that mushy, lovey-dovey shit, but good, old-fashioned, rip your clothes off, animalistic lust? I definitely knew what to do with that and the end result of said knowledge would do wonders in helping to take the edge off of how tense I was.

Of course, it wasn't like I really needed to leech off their hormones while in the throes of passion to get off, but in the past weeks there had only been one person I seemed capable of fantasizing about when my hand was on my cock whether she was the woman that started out in my head in the beginning or not. When I was using everyone else's lust to satiate my body's cravings, it was mindless, frenzied, uncomplicated, and when I was finished I didn't have to spend hours trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with me for picturing her of all people. For wanting her brown eyes looking into my golden ones, the soft silk of her brown hair sliding through my fingers or the heat of her skin pressed against mine. Even when I'd been in Denali with Kate, Tanya, or Irina, the last two of the three of them I had steadfastly refused to touch in that way in decades since they didn't understand the concept of friends with benefits until that weekend, it was still her face I saw and those things I craved.

But it wasn't just her body I thought about. I wondered about her, about how she was doing, if she was okay. I imagined having conversations with her, asking her what her favorite color was, if she liked to read.

Fuckin' human!

This wasn't how it was supposed to work. She was supposed to leave and I was never supposed to think about her again. That was how it was supposed to be. Instead, it seemed like she was all I thought about and if I ever managed not to think about her, I was being sucked back into memories of my life before the Cullens, to my life with Maria in the Southern Vampire Wars ... blood, death, destruction, chaos, and violence; and that was just as much her fault as all my deviant sexual thoughts. The way she'd carried herself - never leaving her back unprotected, constantly aware of her surroundings, her clear dislike of being touched; all of it had thrown me into a tailspin. It wasn't that I didn't struggle with that stuff anyway. You didn't spend a century at war and just leave that shit behind, but I'd finally been able to get a handle on some of it, box it up and leave it in the figurative attic in my brain so to speak. Her presence had gone and fucked that up and that, in conjunction with her naked body continually popping into my head, had been pissing me off for five goddamn weeks. If I ever saw her again I was going to snap her skinny, little neck.

On top of all that, I'd been calling Peter for nearly as long as the human had been driving me insane and the fucker wasn't returning my phone calls.

After an hour of failed attempts to read and absorb the first paragraph of the newest book I'd bought, another hour of trying to get lost in the music as I strummed my beloved acoustic guitar, Charlotte Rose, and still failing to wall myself off from the soft, romantic devotion of my family members, I couldn't take it anymore. So it was three o'clock in the morning on a Tuesday and it was only the second week of school, at which I had to be in five hours. I couldn't bring myself to care, I just needed to get the hell out of the fuckin' house.

Decision made, I raced to the garage at vampire speed, grabbing my keys and heading to my Mustang. As I climbed into the driver's seat, I waited with mounting dread for one or more of my family members to appear … to ask me where I was going when I didn't know the answer or, worse yet, try to stop me from going when, for whatever reason, this was what I needed to do. No one did. Deciding not to push my luck or tempt fate by lingering any longer than I already had, I started the engine, put the car in gear and took off.

oOo

As I passed by the "You are now leaving Forks" sign, I reflected on a scene a couple weeks earlier; a scene very similar to the one today, except for the fact that I had actually been present to witness the actions behind the emotions.

-Flashback-

I was sitting in a corner pretending to be absorbed in the book in my lap, which was something I did often. Most of the time I used it as a way to covertly, with the exclusion of Alice, observe my family, though that wasn't its sole function; especially on a quiet Sunday morning like this when we were all together but at the same time wrapped up in our own thing.

Alice was on the couch with a sketch pad in her lap, giving life to the newest fashion masterpiece she'd conjured up. Edward was at her feet, scribbling in a composition book as he hummed the latest piece of music swirling around in his head. Her foot drifted until it was flush against his arm, where her big toe began rubbing little circles against his skin. He smiled softly before reaching up, grabbing it and giving it a squeeze, causing Alice to smile tenderly.

Emmett was sitting at the opposite end of the couch, gripping a game console controller as tightly in his fists as he could without breaking it. He was playing a new racing game and the tip of his tongue was poking out of the side of his mouth as he concentrated on winning his current race. He couldn't seem to keep his eyes from straying in Rosalie's direction to see if she was paying attention. He did things like this from time to time, like buying a video game that had a direct correlation to something he knew Rose was passionate about in an attempt to bring them together in a way that didn't revolve around sex.

For all Emmett's jokes and innuendos, his underlying emotions regarding her were really very sweet. Rose, who was sitting in an arm chair right next to the couch on Emmett's side with a thick European auto parts catalogue braced diagonally across her forearms, let her lips curl upward just the tiniest bit as she pretended not to notice. It was her standard response to the gesture because she was Rose and she had to make him work for it, but she could never keep that up for very long. She would be asking him to teach her how to play within the hour.

Carlisle and Esme were seated at opposite ends of the family chess set, absorbed in their game strategy. Like their hands had magnets embedded in their fingertips, they reached for each other under the table at precisely the same moment. They met halfway, their fingers lacing neatly together as a soft sigh escaped both of them at each other's touch.

The couples' interactions were a big part of why I secretly watched them. I found all of it to be equal parts fascinating and irritating because all of it was directly linked to the mating bond and I was always trying to understand the whole thing. I'd just never been able to grasp the appeal.

-End Flashback-

I hadn't been able to stomach that day either and I'd ended up using hunting as an excuse to leave. There were only so many times a guy could throw up in his mouth before he started to get really uncomfortable, after all. I'd been gone for hours when Alice had come to find me.

-Flashback-

I heard, smelled, and felt Alice approach but didn't turn my head to look at her. I didn't know where I was because I hadn't cared enough to pay attention. All I knew was that I was deep in the woods somewhere northeast of Forks, and was currently lounging up against an ancient redwood tree that was big enough around that four Emmetts with their arms all linked together couldn't manage to encompass, watching as twilight transformed into evening.

"Jasper?" Her voice was uncertain, her primary emotion concern.

"Hey, munchkin," I greeted lazily, knowing how much she hated that nickname, and using it to purposely annoy her. Despite this, I was glad to see her. I wasn't really keyed up anymore and it had been a little while since she and I had spent any time alone together. I missed her and the days when it had just been the two of us. Things had been less complicated then. She'd just been Alice and I'd just been Jasper, two vampires with fucked up pasts finding comfort in each other and, well, fuckin'. We loved each other but we didn't love each other, and that had been enough for me, aside from the trying not to kill humans bit anyway.

"You smell," she told me, wrinkling her nose. I could tell from her emotions that she was more amused than disgusted.

"Gee," I said sarcastically, "thanks."

"No, no," she protested, teasing, "it's a good thing you decided to wear more of that mountain lion and that cougar and that bear and those deer than you actually managed to eat of them; otherwise, it would have taken me forever to find you."

"Ha ha," I said, rolling my eyes as she took a seat next to me. So I hadn't been quite as neat with my hunting this time as I usually was. I didn't really care about that either because clean or dirty, I still itched. It wasn't an itch that could be relieved by raking your fingernails across your skin. It was an internal kind of itch, one I felt in my bones and it made me want to crawl out of my skin. "You're hilarious."

"Obviously," she remarked, as though I'd just said the most idiotic thing in the world. "You really do need a shower."

"I'll get right on that."

"Put these on," Alice commanded in that bossy way she seemed to reserve for Edward and I, tossing a shopping bag at my head.

I caught it, still without looking at her, before it beaned me in the ear.

"What's wrong with what I have on?" I asked, crossing my arms over my chest with a scowl and letting my irritation flow out into the forest freely. Alice knew how much I hated it when she tried to dress me.

"Oh relax," she huffed impatiently. "It's a t-shirt and jeans, 100% Jasper-approved apparel."

"I still don't see what's wrong with what I have on," I said stubbornly.

"Aside from the fact that you're wearing most of your dinner and half the forest," Alice said, her disapproval rolling over me, "you let all those carnivores murder your clothes before you ate them. How have you not noticed that there's hardly anything left of what you were wearing before you went hunting?"

"Yes," I said, my tone mildly acerbic, "wardrobe is obviously my first priority right now."

"Jasper," she scolded, "you're practically naked!"

I finally turned to look at her, smirking. "It's nothin' you haven't seen before, Ali."

She smacked me in the shoulder, hard. "Doesn't mean I need to see it again."

"Suit yourself," I said with a shrug, getting to my feet and moving behind the tree to change. The fact that I was practically naked was yet another thing I didn't care about but Alice was obviously mourning the gruesome demise of my previous outfit.

Wouldn't want to drag out the grievin' process, would I?

When I was finished dressing, I came out from behind the tree and dug a little hole a few feet in front of it, then cast a glance over my shoulder at Alice. Having seen my intentions, she was by my side in an instant, eyes alight with laughter. She had retrieved the ruined clothing, folded it carefully, and now placed it gingerly into the hole.

"Would you like to eulogize or shall I?" I asked.

"You should do the honors, Jasper," Alice answered, restin' her hand on my forearm in mock-comfort. "You knew them so much better than I."

I blew out a melodramatic breath, blanketing the forest in manufactured melancholy, and clasped my hands together behind my back.

"Dolce & Gabbana jeans and Armani t-shirt, as we lay you to your eternal rest, we pray you know that you will be missed. You served your purpose well and you met an ugly end far before your time, and damn it, you were designer," I mock-raged in faux heartbreak. "It's just … it's just not fair!" I wailed, turning to Alice and burying my face in her shoulder, which was difficult to do since she was so short and I was so not.

Alice's tiny arms flew around me as she shushed and comforted me, her whole body vibrating with the effort not to burst out giggling at my antics. We lasted a full minute before we lost it. Her loud peals and my quieter, more subdued laughter echoed through the trees, clearing them of birds for several hundred yards around us. Even with the glow of her light-hearted happiness floating around me like early morning fog, it didn't quite penetrate me. I still felt off and that realization sucked all the fun and humor out of our silly playing around. I kept on pumping out the good humor to keep up appearances even though I wasn't in the moment anymore. I didn't want to answer any questions my abrupt mood change might have aroused because there was nothing wrong with me. I was fine. So, I was a moody bastard. I was an empath for Christ's sake! Sue me.

After Alice calmed down, we sat down and settled back against the tree the way we had before. We were quiet for a while after that, sitting next to each other and looking up at the stars.

"You've been out here a long time," she said, breaking the silence.

"Have I?" I returned airily, trying to make everything seem as insignificant as it was. She was worried about me and she wanted to have a serious conversation about it, but I didn't want serious and I didn't want her worry. I was fine. Restless and itchy, but fine.

"Mmhmm," she hummed. I expected her to dive right into her interrogation but she lapsed into silence again, one that lasted for several minutes. "You gonna tell me what's wrong?"

"Nothin' is wrong," I told her without hesitation, my voice strong and unyielding.

Alice snorted in disbelief, "And I wear underwear from Walmart."

"The day you wear underwear from Walmart is the day that I will allow Lauren Mallory to dry hump me in the middle of the hallway of Forks High," I deadpanned.

"Well," Alice said thoughtfully, mischief snaking out of her despite her attempts to keep it in, "there is a Walmart in Port Angeles. If I start running now, I can get there by the time they open."

"Bitch," I grumbled crossly. The thought of Lauren Mallory touching me made the itching stop but replaced it with something worse – the searing burn of permanent defilement.

Alice giggled briefly before turning and getting back down to business, "Seriously, Jazz."

"I already told you I'm fine," I insisted. And I was.

"Jasper…" she trailed off warningly.

"Why did you bother askin' me at all if you were just goin' to ignore my answers?" I snapped.

"Because it's polite," she said matter-of-factly.

I turned to glare at her but she already had the puppy dog look firmly in place with the emotions to match. That shit pissed me the fuck off. After a while it would melt me, but for now I was holding onto the anger.

"Don't you already know?" I asked bitingly, projecting just how irritated I was.

"I'm not omniscient, Jasper," Alice said. I could feel how hard she was trying to be patient with me but I wasn't making it easy on her and I could feel her starting to lose the battle.

"Nothin' is wrong," I insisted again, my tone not the least bit changed.

"You're just …" she trailed off again, this time hesitantly, trying to find the right words. Hesitancy wasn't the only emotion she was feeling though. Alice was sad. She was my best friend; outside of Peter, and I had made her sad. I should have felt bad about that but I felt … nothing.

"Just what?"

"You're not acting like yourself," she concluded.

"And who, exactly, is that?" I asked, my voice vehement.

Alice frowned, confused, her concern intensifying. "What does that mean, Jasper?"

"Nothin'," I answered, refocusing my gaze on the stars.

"Is it …"

"Is it what Alice?" I only asked because it was what you were supposed to do in polite conversation and I was suddenly too tired (yes, I know, a tired vampire – how very oxymoronic) to be angry with her for prying.

"Is it her?" she asked quietly.

Just as suddenly as the fatigue had settled over me, it fled and I lay there, frozen.

How the fuck could she possibly know the way the human had been haunting me? How?

"It's okay, you know," Alice continued. She was speaking to me as if I was a wounded animal ready to attack if approached the wrong way and I was. "You spent such a long time with her there in that hell hole …"

Wait? What?

I was confused but just for a moment before I realized who she was talking about. She wasn't talking about the human, she was talking about Maria. Maria was one of my biggest issues but the current bane of my existence was the human. I was relieved that she hadn't figured out that it was the human driving me batshit crazy but I didn't want to talk about Maria either. I never wanted to talk about her or the Southern Wars. I never did or would. Alice knew this, the whole family did, and by now they knew better than to ask, not unless they wanted to lose a limb or risk me retreating so far into myself I didn't speak for months. I guess I really must have been in a funk if she went against that unspoken agreement.

"Leave it alone, Alice," I said with finality and unmistakable warning.

She nodded and grabbed my chin between her thumb and index finger, forcing me to look at her. Her sadness was reflected in her eyes when she told me, "I'm here, Jazz. I'm always here if you ever change your mind."

"I know Ali, but I'm fine. Stop worryin'," I ordered with an easy grin that had her beaming back at me. The thing about being an empath, it's real easy to fake shit like that, but just because I faked it didn't mean I wasn't okay. It just meant I needed to be alone again. "Thanks for the clothes."

Alice's smile went from beamin' to nearly splitting her face in two, "Of course! See you back at the house."

I tipped an imaginary cowboy hat at her and she turned on her heel, disappearing into the trees and leaving me in peace.

-End Flashback-

Even though I experienced the emotions that were irreversibly connected with mating because of my relationships with Esme and Carlisle, Edward and Alice, Rosalie and Emmett, and Peter and Charlotte I still had a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that love like that really existed. I sometimes entertained the idea that if I watched all the mated couples I knew enough I might find some evidence, no matter how big or small, that might prove that mating was a myth. It wasn't that I wanted to deny my family members that earth-shattering, soul-quaking, unbreakable eternal bond; hell, I didn't want to deny myself the ability to mooch it off them like a phantom third wheel. I just didn't like the idea of mating at all. The two instances in which I'd actually seen two vampires come together through the pull of that bond had effectively cemented that viewpoint. Under the influence of its power, all choice was taken completely out of your hands. You weren't asked your opinion on the matter, you couldn't choose who to be with and you couldn't not love them … your freedom was essentially stripped from you like flesh being peeled away from a bone.

It was a loss of control that was completely unacceptable to me because I'm anal as fuck about bein' in control, though I didn't have any personal desire to be in control of anyone besides myself. Control-freak automaton was a role I'd had to play while serving in the Southern Wars under Maria. I'd only done it to please her, stupid though that had been, not because it was who I was as a person, and I'd had enough of that shit long before I'd created Charlotte. Now, I didn't concern myself with what a person did or didn't do as long as their actions and decisions didn't pose a direct threat to me or the people I cared about, but my change and my time fighting was where my need for control over my own fate came from.

Maria had swooped into my life, ruthless and unstoppable, and taken everything from me—my career, my friends, my family and my heartbeat. I had been powerless to stop her as a human, carrying over the feeling of that disadvantage despite the burn of the change, and I'd spent the first century of my life as a vampire living under her thumb not only suffering her cruelty myself, but bringing others along for the ride through my ignorance. I'd thought that Maria had been a force of nature but I'd been wrong because nothing can kill Mother Nature and indestructible though vampires are, we can still be killed. No, mating was the force of nature. It was unstoppable, ruthless and utterly unforgiving. There was no turning away from it, no trying to make it see reason or begging it to leave you the fuck alone. If it ever swept into my life I would be just as powerless against it as I'd been when I met Maria that day in Galveston, and that loss of control wasn't something I ever wanted to feel again. I wouldn't have minded handing over my control if it meant deciding whether or not I preferred the sun to the moon or rain to snow because that was trivial stuff that didn't mean much, and I wasn't so anal that I'd lose my shit over little details like that; but something as huge and life-altering as the person I'd spend eternity with? No fuckin' thank you. I didn't want anything to do with any freaky vampire love-potion hoopla.

This was what I thought about as I drove. Aside from going hunting once in what I was pretty sure was Colorado, I only stopped to fill my gas tank. When I drove in a direction that didn't feel right, I turned around and drove until I found a direction that did and then drove until that direction didn't anymore. I didn't know where I was going or why, and I didn't care. I just knew that I needed to be doing this, driving, that it felt better to me than anything had in a while and I would keep doing it until I lost that.

Finally, after what I would later learn was four days of haphazard travel, I felt something ease in my chest, the itching that had been grating on my sanity calming a bit, and looked up to see a "Welcome to Louisville, Kentucky" sign pass me by. This seemed like a good place to stop for a little while.

oOo

A/N: Just so we're clear, I did not enjoy writing Jasper hooking up with any of the Denali girls. Many reviewers expressed an issue with this and I happen to share that sense of yuckiness. However, I do have my reasons for writing that so I hope all of you can forgive me for it.

Hopefully, the insight into Jasper's views on mating has shed some light on his cluelessness as well as his stubbornness.

So what did you think? And why would he possibly think Louisville is a good place to stop? :)