Here it is! I'm so excited!

**NOTE** Major spoilers here for 1950, chapters 5 and onward!

Rachel asked to see some of Alice and Jasper's journey to the Cullens, and dkjkaden asked for an outtake with some early Alice/Jasper moments, so both are included here, the latter in flashback form. Enjoy!

Jasper POV

We were lying in a meadow together, sparkling in the full sunlight. I was comfortably propped up against a sizeable rock, with Alice tucked under my right arm as she laid against me, her eyes closed. I was running my fingers through her hair while I drifted along with the nameless song she was humming. Her voice matched her appearance and her personality perfectly; she was a delicate soprano, with an ethereal lightness to her tone that never failed to calm me. Her music swirled around us, borne on the gentle breeze of our contentment. I inhaled deeply, breathing in her scent as the deeper parts of my consciousness breathed in her love. I exhaled slowly, showering her with my own love and tenderness, and she smiled in response, snuggling more deeply into my chest as she continued her song. This was heaven.

It had been nearly a year and a half since my life had been turned upside down. I had only ducked into that diner in Philadelphia to get out of the rain. I was just going inside to stay dry while I waited for my prey to come out into the open. When I saw him coming, I was going to slide out of my seat, make the kill, and then suffer the emotional consequences as soon as I had fed. It was the same as it had always been, and it was never going to get any better. Kill, feel, wait, thirst, kill. I was going to continue the cycle until my disgust finally overcame my preservation instinct, and then I was going to escape the wretched existence that I had been doomed to. I had been hoping that it wouldn't take too much longer.

But I hadn't known what, and who, was waiting for me inside that diner. Alice. I whispered her name reverently as I remembered, and I felt her love tinge with curiosity as she shifted her position, gazing up at me. Her song stopped. "Remembering again?" she teased.

"The day we met," I said softly, tracing my fingers across her knowing smile. I sighed in wonder as her pure, uncomplicated happiness lit up the whole meadow. She rolled back to where she had been lying and picked up her song again.

It was three weeks after we had met that she had sung for me for the first time. We hadn't even spoken for the first two days; we had just walked right through the rain out of Philadelphia and up into the mountains. It hadn't occurred to either of us to have any sort of ceremony, or even conversation; we had just gone and given ourselves to each other. When we came to our senses three days later, I told her that my name was Jasper.

"I know," she giggled.

Her odd response naturally led to a lot of questions on my part, and a lot of very confusing information on her part. She spent the better part of the next day telling me about her past, my past, her visions, the Cullens, the animal diet, and our destiny, which apparently included this bizarre "family" that she had never even met. Needless to say, I was overwhelmed.

For one thing, I had just gone six days without feeding. This was beyond impossible, and as my throat burst into flames at the realization, I felt an awkward reluctance. It was obvious that Alice expected me to try this animal diet of hers, but for right now, I needed to feed, immediately, and I told her so.

"Of course you do," she said smoothly. "I'll help."

Help?

She led me deeper into the mountains, bringing me toward a scent that I probably never would have even noticed on my own: the earthy scent of a coyote. "Go ahead," she urged, shoving me forward with a secretive smile. "And don't forget to kill it first; it's cleaner that way."

I looked suspiciously at the coyote, inhaling again and wrinkling my nose at the thought of tasting its blood. What a peculiar idea! But I wanted to humor her, and so I ran up to the animal, grabbed it by its neck and gave it a death blow before biting.

Ugh! It was even worse than I had imagined. The taste brought up a vague memory of my human grandmother shaking her finger at me, telling me to eat my spinach. But Alice wasn't my grandmother, and from that first moment in the diner, my entire existence had belonged to her. I would do anything she asked, and so I drank until there was nothing left. I felt absolutely nothing during the experience, other than Alice's pride and my own revulsion at the taste and the fur. I finally dropped the dried-up coyote in disgust, and instinctively tensed myself against the emotional deluge that always came after feeding.

... nothing.

Still nothing. Just love and pride, coming from less than a foot away.

I creaked my eyes open to find Alice standing in front of me. "That's better, isn't it?" she whispered. She reached up and dusted the fur off of my mouth, and I nodded dumbly. It was infinitely better. She let out a gasp as I grabbed her up in my arms, letting her feel the full force of my love and gratitude. This was a whole new world, and it was all because of her. She had set me free!

.

.

.

The weeks that followed hadn't been all sunshine and roses. I had still been afraid of being recognized by other vampires, even more so now that I had begun to value my life again, along with the life of my mate. I insisted that we withdraw even deeper into the wilderness, and she was willing; anything to get me farther away from the humans was good, she said. And by the second week of the new diet, I began having what Alice called withdrawal symptoms. I was plagued by a horrible, relentless thirst, emotional hallucinations, and tremors that were far worse than any I had dealt with before.

I thought, a few times, about giving up on animal blood... for Alice's sake. I hated the fact that the beginning of our life together was being ruined by the distraction of my constant fantasizing about human blood and by the withdrawal itself. I didn't want to go back to that life, but at least I would be able to offer Alice more of my attention. But every time I considered it, she knew. Her fear and disappointment made me feel sick, and I would resolve anew to offer her this gift that she wanted. I let her love and her pity wash over me in waves as I suffered... and she suffered it too. Try as I might, I couldn't protect her from my emotional pain when she insisted on holding me close, whispering her comfort in my ear, kissing each scar until every inch of me believed in her healing love. My venom flowed constantly. We hunted as often as my stomach could bear it, and still, the symptoms grew worse—especially the tremors. It got so bad by the third week that Alice just held me on the ground as I shook, and then she began to sing.

I was startled by the sound; I hadn't heard singing since I had been human, and even those memories had the distant, cloudy feel of childhood. My mother had died when I was small, and her deep, lilting lullabies had been the only thing I remembered about her, even as a human. So when Alice's high-pitched fairy voice suddenly pierced the flames inside my head, the tremors jerked to a stop. She sang for hours, and I held onto the sound like a lifeline, even as the tremors eventually returned. When she stopped abruptly, I spoke for the first time in days, my voice hoarse with venom.

"When is it going to get better?"

She didn't answer right away, but her sorrow said enough. She knew the answer, obviously, and it was bad.

"Just t-tell me," I demanded, my words shivering as another tremor rocked through me. I didn't think these tremors were the same as human ones; every spasm was a violent tug-of-war between my free will and my body's desperate lunge toward the one thing that would soothe the bloodlust. Each time I trembled and held my ground was a battle silently won, and I paid dearly for that victory every minute.

"Two months," she said sadly. "Do you want me to sing again?"

I nodded, and she began again. I laid my head back down on her lap, trying to imagine a tiny Alice-fairy dancing to her song, instead of the blood-drenched fantasies that my monstrous imagination insisted upon.

But I felt a spike of panic a few minutes later, and she let go of me. She stood up, backing away and keeping her eyes on the ground. She wasn't singing anymore, and her panic was quickly turning to sorrow.

"Alice, what—"

I smelled it then: the most wonderful, soothing, glorious scent in the world. I leapt up snarling and the trees began to blur past me. The next thing I knew, I was rocketing through the heavens as I fed, and when I opened my eyes there was a dead man in my arms. Alice was standing a few feet away, saturated with pity as the man's dying emotions flooded through me with a punishing vengeance. The two together were just too much. I bowed my face over my mangled prey, weeping as I begged her forgiveness.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, when it was over. I opened my eyes to find her arms wrapped around me. Her love quickly soothing the emotional pain away. The dead man still lay on the ground beside us, cold now.

Sorry?

"You knew," I said slowly, the realization dawning over me like a wave of nausea. "You knew this was going to happen. Why didn't you stop me?"

"I only knew for a few seconds," she said. "And it was better this way. Trust me."

I demanded to know how killing a human and betraying her trust was better than anything, but she had refused to tell me that day. We headed north after that, burying ourselves deep inside the emptiness of the Arctic circle. Once the worst of the withdrawal symptoms were past, she finally told me the truth about that day.

"You would have attacked me, if I had tried to stop you," she admitted. "You would have bitten me and torn my legs off. I would have been fine, but… it would have been worse, for you. And you would have killed him anyway."

"I would never have hurt you," I protested vehemently. "Never." Didn't she understand that yet?

"Yes, you would. I saw it."

I had no answer to that. And she was right; killing a human was much better than hurting her. I just hated the fact that she had actually seen me doing both.

There had been seven other accidents, since then. Once I was through the worst of the withdrawal, we began travelling to find better cover and better game, but that also meant more humans. And all seven times were the same: Alice saw it happening too late, and saw that trying to stop me would make things worse. So she just watched me kill, helped me through the aftershocks, and then she helped me clean up. She never once spoke her disappointment, and I could tell that she always tried so hard not to even feel it. I loved her for that.

I also loved her for her visions—not only because they had brought us together, but because they had helped me avoid a grand total of eighty-two other accidents, besides the hundreds of humans I would have killed over the past year and a half if she hadn't come and set me free. So eight really was a pretty good casualty rate, all things considered, in my new war against the deliciousness of humanity. I was fighting this new war for several good causes: for my own happiness, for Alice's happiness, for the human lives that we were saving, for our future. I was even doing it for the Cullens, and I cared even less about them than the humans. They were just characters in a story, for my part. But Alice loved them, and I knew that they were my destiny as well as hers. I would need to be worthy of them someday.

The last accident had been four weeks ago. I hadn't had any of the withdrawal symptoms this time, and my throat was on a low sizzle now, having fed on a black-tailed deer this morning. The burn never went away, and Alice couldn't tell me if it ever would. Her own throat was more comfortable, having only hunted humans consistently for a couple of years, if that. She hadn't suffered anything like I had, when she had stopped. She did admit that even after all these years, the animal diet still didn't satisfy like the real one. But she tried, for my sake, to feed more often than she really needed to, because her thirst always magnified my own. I never felt it reflect in my own throat, thankfully, but I had been around newborns enough to know what another vampire's thirst felt like, emotionally.

Maria had used me to do some experimentation with thirst back in the 1880s. She wanted to determine what the optimal level of thirst was for a newborn going into battle. The idea was that a soldier would be the most effective when the thirst was enough to enhance the battle fury, but not enough to distract from the mission. I was, naturally, the unlucky barometer in these experiments: we starved newborns of various ages to determine what the emotional state was at each level of thirst. I suffered along with our subjects, of course, but when I begged Maria to take over the experiments herself, she had just reminded me that I was the only one who could conduct them effectively, and that my sacrifice was a small price to pay for victory.

And so I had dutifully continued with my task, keeping myself well-fed even as I suffered the emotional escalation that the thirst in our subjects gave me. It always began as a gnawing feeling of impatience, and depending on the vampire's age, it slowly or quickly grew into desire, and then anger, shifting eventually to a desperate, reckless rage. And we found, as expected, that madness was the eventual result of thirst, if it was denied too long. The emotional deterioration was always reversible, at least. My official report to Maria in the end was that our kind weren't lucky enough to go permanently insane.

But my emotional habitat now was just… Alice. We were never near anyone else, and so I never felt anyone else. I had reached the point in my new diet where I was able to drink animal blood without even making a face, though I still hated it. But we both knew that I was nowhere near ready to begin approaching human civilization. I had completely lost the ability to control myself now, but it didn't bother me much. I had no desire to see a human ever again. I had everything I needed. Her tranquility, her love, her happiness, her desire for me, her relief at finding me, her indulgent pride in my half-hearted effort to get my eyes golden, her amusement with the Cullens' antics… I just drank it in, day after day. How could I need anything else, when I had this?

Our plan, as of right now, was to wait a few more years. I knew that we would eventually be joining "our family", as she called them; she had seen it almost as soon as she had awoken to this life. But we both wanted to wait until my eyes were consistently golden—which they had never yet been—and until I had worked up at least some fledgling control around humans. It would be a while before the second condition could be met, and I was glad. I had Alice all to myself, and I liked it that way. I was more than happy to stretch out our time alone together. I would never go hunt a human on purpose now, but in all honesty, I had no real motivation to try and relearn my control anytime soon; that would only bring us to the Cullens sooner. I was happy with the way things were, and so was she; and if an occasional human paid the price for our contentment, then so be it. I took my due penance when it came, after each kill, but Alice had assured me that the worst of the withdrawal was over.

Today was a perfect example of why I didn't want to rush anything. We were miles from civilization, up here somewhere in northern Ontario. I wasn't afraid of running into any old enemies, this far north, and the likelihood of a human wandering up here, especially in April, was minimal. We were completely relaxed, and we had nothing whatsoever to do, except enjoy the sun and each other. If the Cullens were around, they would probably want to go do something human, or even with the humans. From what I had gathered, Rosalie had a particular appetite for their society, though she never had any real human friends. I wondered if there was something wrong with her.

Most of our days were like this now. I ran my fingers through Alice's hair again, sending her gentle bursts of happiness in time with her song. I generally held Alice's emotions to be sacred and untouchable, but in times like this, I liked to enjoy a little harmless enhancement. She knew I was doing it, and she liked it. Of course, I affected her all the time, especially during times of intense emotion, good and bad. I tried my best to hold in the darker stuff, especially after my accidents, but I really wasn't very good at it. And instead of her sharing my burden, as she wanted to do, it only made it worse as our sorrow escalated itself, building off the emotional ricochet between us. Of course, the effect was the same with intensely positive emotions, so at least there was a balance. I punctuated the thought with an extra jolt of happiness, and she jerked in my arms, spinning around to kiss me.

"I wasn't sending you that," I laughed. I surrendered easily, pulling her even tighter against me, washing through her heart with my answering desire.

But her kiss ended just as abruptly as it had begun. She gasped and pulled away, her eyes glazing over to stare at nothing. I released her and waited for the vision to end. I knew from experience that trying to interrupt it would just agitate her further. And this one was important; these unplanned ones usually were. But instead of coming out of it, she jumped to her feet, her eyes still glazed over and darting back and forth in panic. The first wave of her distress finally hit me; a bad vision, then. I drew in a deep breath and held it, just in case it was about a nearby human who had just changed his mind about which way to hike.

The visions continued. I could tell there was more than one, because as she paced around in a circle, she stumbled a few times, and gasped again occasionally, finally bringing her hand to her mouth and chewing on her thumbnail in concentration. Now I was feeling more distress, panic, and… despair?

That wasn't good.

"Alice," I said impatiently. "Alice!"

She went another minute before turning to look at me. It was like she was miles away, even now that she had come back to the present. She opened her mouth, and then shut it, looking suddenly annoyed.

"Jasper," she scolded me.

"What?" Now what did I do? Or more accurately, what was I about to do? "Come on, darlin'," I sighed. "Just tell me what's going on."

She relaxed into my arms, her despair melting into worry. "It's Edward," she said.

"Again?" I growled. She just looked up at me with a look that said, I told you so.

"Sorry," I sighed. "It's just… can't he take care of himself?"

Alice spent an inordinate amount of time watching Edward's future, compared to the others. I knew it was because she had been watching him the longest, and because of his killing spree back in the late twenties. His future tended to be the murkiest, and so I knew she checked on him a lot, but I couldn't help feeling… well, jealous, sometimes. He was the unmated one. And it wasn't like Alice had ever met another vampire besides me. I had a lot of romantic notions about the finality of our bond, but aside from Peter and Charlotte's example, I didn't actually know much about how this worked. There were the comforting examples in the Cullen family, but I hadn't actually met these people. I didn't know how much of Alice's interpretation of her visions was colored by her own romantic notions.

"Apparently not," she huffed, her eyes glazing over again. "Of all the melodramatic, idiotic brothers in the world… oh!" Another vision hit her, a quick one this time, and when it was gone, she wasn't worried. She was furious.

"I don't believe this!" she fumed, beginning to pace again. "Jasper, we have to go. Now."

"Go where?" I asked in alarm.

"To the family! I'm sorry, Jasper, but I really need you to decide it right now. Please?"

I grabbed her hands, halting her pacing. "Hold on! You know I'm… you know we're nowhere near ready for that. We have our plan."

"I know, I know," she whined, breaking free to pace again. "It might make it worse, instead. Which is why I need us both to decide to do it, right now, so I can see. Please?"

"No."

Not anytime soon, and certainly not for Edward. At least she had called him her brother again—that was reassuring. And he had behaved himself in her visions lately. But apparently he had a history of throwing his own future for a loop, and for driving Alice crazy. And she had seen enough to guess that this instability was generally his own fault. I wasn't looking forward to being near his volatile emotions, not one bit.

"We have to try!" Alice insisted.

"No," I repeated just as firmly, not looking her in the eye. I had a sinking suspicion that I was about to lose this one.

"Jasper, he's our brother, and he needs us. He's going to leave again, and it's going to be worse this time!"

I clamped my mouth shut, to avoid saying the words So what? That probably wasn't the right answer.

She heard it anyway, of course. "Look. I know you don't love them right now, but you will. I've seen it! Just trust me when I say we need to try this!"

"But—"

"Jasper, please!" She tackled me to the ground, sticking her pouting face right over mine. "I know," she said. "I know you didn't want this day to come so soon. But we will have this again someday. I promise."

Her desperation, and worse—her trust, ate at me for a good five seconds until I finally stood both of us up… and surrendered.

"Fine. We're going to find the Cullens, now," I decided aloud. And I meant it, too: she would know if I didn't. We were really going to do this. We would be at their house by this time next week. Ugh.

She closed her eyes, standing frozen as she registered the changes in her visions. Finally, she heaved a sigh of relief and opened her eyes. "Thank you," she breathed, resting her forehead against my chest. "That's much better."

"Our going there now really is going to help?"

She chewed on her lip, glancing away toward the southeast. "Definitely."

"But my eyes aren't even ready!"

"I know," she said slowly. "I think that will help, actually. Edward will probably be worried enough to stay because of that."

I snorted in disgust. "I would think meeting someone like me would send him off faster."

"No," she said firmly. "I know him. The only thing more important to him than his own drama is the safety of his family. Your eyes are perfect."

"I still don't understand. He was fine yesterday, wasn't he? What happened?"

She shook her head, annoyed. "I don't know. I try not to watch when he goes to play doctor. But something changed, something big."

"So, now what?" I asked.

She took a deep breath. "Now we run. We've got less than two days."