Eclipse, Chapter 14

"Carys? D'you have a minute?"

Carys grimaced, stiffened. Clearing her expression, she slowly turned around. She had hardly spoken to anyone other than Carlisle in the past few days.

There had been a couple of noncommittal exchanges with the group about the film on Sunday, a call from Leah on Monday (during which she complained bitterly about Jacob having taken Bella to a council meeting - the first one she, Seth, Quil and Kim had attended - on Sunday, including comments on: how easily the other wolves and Emily accepted Bella's presence; that Bella had spent a good ten minutes staring at her; that Bella had spent longer staring at Kim - first as if she was (in Leah's opinion) judging the teenager's looks, and later as if Jared's awe and amazement of Kim had changed her mind on her suitability as his girlfriend; that Bella had been privy to their histories; and, lastly, that Quil had made her new favourite observation when Billy explained that the wolves' fur reflected who they were inside: "So that's why Sam is all black; black heart, black fur."), and a short call with her Mum that morning.

Leah's call had left a strange pain in the left side of her chest that had yet to fully disperse, and if she was honest with herself, Carys had hoped the relative silence in her life might last a little longer, at least until it did. More even than that, she'd hoped to avoid Jasper in particular when she had snuck out of her bedroom half a minute before, but he was a vampire and so she should have expected it was fruitless.

It was Tuesday morning, and the house was only so large; she was bound to bump into him. Alone, that was.

"Jasper," she greeted with a touch too much false cheer. "What brings you here?"

"To the... Hall?"

Guided by his tone, Carys allowed hers to reflect her feeling. "Yes..." She kicked herself. She'd hoped she wouldn't sound quite as bleak as she did.

"Much the same thing I imagine as you," he replied.

Carys doubted that. Unless he'd suddenly become human again, it was doubtful he was heading to the kitchen for snacks.

They stared at each other in silence.

"I'm headin' South this afternoon-"

"Carlisle said you were off-"

Their voices intermingled as they spoke, and they broke off as one. They were going to say the same thing - that Jasper was going to search for Peter, Charlotte, and Maria, to ask for their help.

Carys took a deep breath and ducked her head, tucking her hair behind her ear. If they were going to have this conversation now, when she wasn't sure she was ready for it, she was going to be frank.

"I want to hate you," she said simply, her tone devoid of emotion. Raising her head, she added, "I really want to hate you."

"But you can't," he murmured with a faint frown.

"No," Carys accepted. "So I have to ask why you couldn't've told me before I loved you? I think it would have been easier to work out how I felt if I wasn't so close to you..."

"I've been cowardly in that respect, I admit."

"Cowardly..." Carys whispered the word. Steeling herself, she asked, "Show me? What you were feeling?"

She supposed it would help to understand how he could hide the truth for so long.

A moment later, she wished she hadn't. Interest turned to worry. Worry turned to fear and guilt, the intensity of which set her heart to racing, her hands to clenching.

It wasn't the sort of feeling that set your teeth on edge or caused the hairs on the nape of your neck to raise. It was the sort of feeling that caught you in the gut, sank its claws into your heart, ran cold through your veins. The inescapable feeling of a loss yet to come.

Carys bit her lip, winced, and the feeling passed.

"I wouldn't expect you t'understand, Care..." He hesitated over the name, ready to add "riss" if she reacted. He was the only person she never minded pronouncing her name like that. Care-iss instead of Cah-rss.

Carys frowned lightly at that. What on earth could he mean?

"Wouldn't expect me to understand?" she prompted.

Propping a shoulder against the wall, he adjusted his hair.

"You're free o' blind prejudices an' hate for the sake o' hate; you make up your own mind, and that mind is so... Caring. You're good... A good person, in the truest sense o' the word."

He paused and took a deep, sighing breath.

"But I wasn't good... I didn't see past what I was raised on. If you tell someone somethin' from when they're knee-high to a splinter, an' you drum it into them, they'll grow to believe it.

"Sure as you or I say the sky is blue or the leaves are green - I was brought up bein' told blue was red and green was orange, that's all I cared to know.

"Now, I ain't excusing anything I reckoned before. I can't say I wasn't old enough an' hadn't seen enough in my life to know better. It was there in front of me; it was all around me every single day.

"I don't know what I woulda become had I not been thrust into this other life. I can't stand here and rightly say I would've seen fit to change my mind on any of it.

"But I can say: I'm not the man I was one hundred and forty-five years ago. I don't ask for forgiveness for what I believed in or what I was a part of, but I hope you can see I've changed."

Carys hesitated. "You weren't born in America, were you?" she asked, her voice barely louder than a whisper.

"No," he confirmed. "My great-grandparents were born in America. My parents were born in Mexico. I was born scarcely a year before Texas moved from a Republic to become a U.S. State."

"This wasn't a 'we didn't know better' or 'times were different' thing," Carys surmised quietly, "though that wouldn't have made a difference because slavery is a fundamental wrong, and always has been." With every other word, she had run her right index finger slowly up and down her left arm. "This was fighting repeated wars in order to continue something."

Eyes widening, nostrils flaring slightly on a deep inhale, she gripped her elbows. Speaking just as quietly, just as slowly, almost without emotion, she said:

"Just to get it straight in my mind...? You mean..."

"I mean that I was taught those things. By people who looked as I did." Jasper briefly closed his eyes against the pain in both their gazes and took a shuddering breath. "There was no real way to be shielded from recent history or what was going on around us. There's no such thing as ignorance when people are talkin' about slaves; you're seein' slaves... Even if there were a way, I was from Houston."

Carys tried to wrap her head around it. "People you trusted implicitly to teach you about the world; right from wrong; good from bad... They were the ones who taught you this was right... That you could see these things and not..."

She passed a hand across her eyes and rubbed at her cheek. Jasper waited for her to speak, but for long moments her mind was a blank.

"If you were nineteen still," she eventually said just as slowly and calmly as before, "and you were here in front of me, I would... I would've wanted to do things I'm not sure I can put words to just now, and I would have been scared of you just as much as I loathed you...

"But you're not that person and you haven't been for a long while..." Carys glared at the ground as she trailed off. Stretching one leg out before her, she shifted her weight and stared at her foot instead. "I just wish you were never that person..."

Looking up at him, she sighed and said, "You volunteered... Conscription started in eighteen-sixty-two. You would have been eighteen then, or near enough to it - they'd've conscripted you."

"If I'd waited for conscription, I woulda been fighting the same war, Care. I woulda been believin' in the same things."

"But you volunteered, and that's worse somehow...," she said as she released her hold on her arms and tugged on the ends of her hair, pulling a few curls taut to her hip. "I just..."

"Would you rather hate me?" he asked. She could see he would be willing to accept it if she did.

Carys sighed. "Yes... Probably... No..." She shook her head and crossed her arms again. "I don't know...," she whined. Swiping at her eyes, she sniffled and straightened. "No. I don't want to hate you...

"I hate who you were... I hate what you were part of. I hate that first you, but then," she swung her arm through the air, "you say you spent years getting back to who you were as a human, and-I... I don't... How can I hate the part of you that makes you you, and still love or stand to be around you?" He didn't respond, and so she sank her nails into her arms. "I'm genuinely asking," she whispered.

Jasper clasped his hands together before him. "I think... I just hope," he amended softly, "that my humanity was not solely defined by what I believed... I hope what made me human wasn't the same thing that made me believe it was my right or led me to fight," he explained. "I have to hope that I know myself better now than I did then."

Carys turned slowly this way and that, her knuckles pressed to her lips. Lowering her hand a little, she said, "Some people are moulded by what they're told, some believe it because it's all they know, and some fight against it because they have a moral and empathetic conscience...

"You chose to fight for what you believed in - that people like me were sub-human and should be enslaved, and yet you must have had empathy and a conscience if you're an empath now... I just... I can't," she emphasised the word with a tip of her head, a wave of her hand, and a slight change of tone, "understand how someone with so much as an ounce of humanity or empathy could..."

"I fear you might be looking for a way to find it in yourself to forgive who I was," Jasper said quietly when Carys trailed off, "in order to then accept me as I am."

"I'm not," Carys said thoughtfully. "The last person I would accept would be a full card-holding nineteenth-century-" she paused when he flinched "-Confederate..."

Jasper relaxed and turned to lean back against the wall. Carys sighed and looked down once again, watching as she picked up a curl and twisted it around one of her fingers. Jasper waited, unmoving save for the flex of his fingers against the wall at his back.

Carys believed in his redemption; he'd redeemed himself from so much. He'd lived his human life eight or nine times over, more than three lifetimes of which had been spent in hell... He'd learned. He'd strived to change so that he could find peace - not one or two parts, but every part of himself.

She truly believed that if he had come across this life on his own, he would have done the same as he was. He would have fought to master his blood-thirst and thrown himself into deriving his sustenance from animals so that he no longer hurt humans.

He was Jasper, and that wasn't the same person as Jasper the vampiric soldier or Jasper Whitlock who had grown up with those beliefs and fought for the Confederacy.

But for a short lifetime... For a short lifetime, he had been.

"Did you feel what they felt?" she asked suddenly, surprising him out of his reverie. "Once you were changed, I mean - did you ever-"

"I felt it all; I felt everything whenever my travels took me close enough."

So he knew, better than many...

God.

He wasn't that person.

But something was different between them now.

It was almost a physical pain. Carys wondered if he felt the same chasm - if he too felt as if a hole had been punched in his gut - not simply felt that one that had been punched into hers.

"Did your father fight in the first war?" she asked unsteadily. "The one to form the Republic?'

"No, he didn't, but my grandfather did. I was taught to fight was gallant, a duty, a privilege."

"What did you feel in your heart-"

"Please." Jasper hung his head and shook it from side to side. "Don't try. From what I remember, I knew what I was fighting for and I wanted to fight just the same. Just as I didn't commit the atrocity myself does not change that. I knew the laws. I knew of the slaves. I knew we were fighting for the same thing over again."

They fell into another uneasy silence. A minute later, Carys took a deep breath and broke it.

"I know this isn't you anymore, but I don't know if I can go back to... To being friends; to what we were. Not yet. I just need some time, I think.

"That's not to say I don't truly understand that you're different now. I've probably repeated that enough that I hope you can see and feel that it's true. And I won't ice you out or anything, but I think... I think you understand why I need time. Your fear - the way you hid your human past - you knew exactly how this news would affect me; you knew why-" Carys broke off with a soft whine.

A few moments later, when she could speak, she added, "I get why you were scared, and you know why I'm deeply hurt. We both know I need time to process."

"It's the mark of a good pers-"

Carys cut him off, faintly frustrated by his attempt. "You and Carlisle think too much of me when you say things like that... I'm not. I mean, I can be, but I can also be harsh and unforgiving, and..."

"Maybe you want to be, but you're kind an' good instead," Jasper said. "Because you could have - perhaps you should have - turned your back on me - not simply for what I once was, but for keeping it from you, especially, but you aren't. You're tryna find ways to move forward."

"Hmm..." Carys pressed her knuckles to her lips and stared once more at the floor.

"I'll leave you to your day," Jasper said. "Thank you, Carys."

"Hmm?" Carys, confused, looked up. "For what?"

"For seein' the good in me."

"Oh... Well..., it's there."

His chuckle was bleak. "I wouldn't be surprised if compassion made its way into your vampiric abilities as well."

Carys nodded absentmindedly, having fallen headfirst into her thoughts.

By the time she glanced up again, Jasper was gone and Emmett stood before her. He didn't speak as he guided her back to her room and tucked her into bed.

He disappeared for a few minutes and returned with a tray - more of a serving platter really - laden with a box of chocolates, tea, cake, biscuits, five romantic comedies, and all three Lord of the Rings films for some reason she couldn't be quite as sure of as the rest.

When he reappeared again, he was carrying a television under one arm and a cabinet under the other. He set both up at the end of the bed.

And then, just when she thought he was done, he carefully handed her an envelope.

Carys opened it to find it contained a letter written on pages which appeared to be cut from a blank-paged notebook.

He left her alone to read.

Dear Ma,

Nothing in the world is going to make what Jasper is about to say any easier to take.

Rosalie is going to pretend to read her newspaper; Esme is going to pretend she's not watching you; Carlisle is going to hold you; Edward is going to focus on Bella; Alice is going to watch for the future, and I am going to sit here and write down everything I want you to know.

It begins with this simple truth: I love you. We all love you.

One of the hardest things about trauma is that it is not always contained to the person who suffered it. If it is bad enough, it can be passed down...

A/N: I don't know if it's silly, but I genuinely started crying at Emmett's letter which is why I may never write the whole of it down.

This (really sad chapter (for me at least)! I'm so sorry) marks:

- The 90th chapter.

- The 6 month anniversary of the story.

- The first chapter since I achieved a dream I've had since I was 13 - to write a story that people responded to so much that it reached 1000 reviews.

- The first chapter since the story surpassed 150,000 views.

I want to say a huge, unbelievable thanks to you all - none of this could have been done without you! Here's to cheerier and more action-packed times ahead. I hope you can all stay with Carys through this. The next chapter will have Carlisle, Leah, and a whole host of wolves. I promise it'll be worth staying for. Now. Enough of the sop.

Thank you: BMBMDooDooDoo- Doo- Doo, jhaenox, souverian, chellekathrynnn, KEZZ 1, Guest (I hope you're still with us - you reviewed Chapter 40 and I'm sure if you are still reading, Eleazar's power will have been explained to Carys more thoroughly in the next chapter), Momochan77, BubblyYork, Adela (thank you!), and GhostWriter71 for your reviews!