Fandom: Twilight
Pairing: Jasper/Alice, Jasper/Edward, gen Alice&Edward
Genre: Angst
Rating: I'm not sure, a firm PG – there's nothing explicit, but parental guidance is advised.
Warning: Dodgy characterisation (ha, characterisation), total lack of plot, trite cliché.

Title: Visions of China
Author: FyrMaiden
Summary: Alice has ice-cold crescent-shaped scars on her thighs…
Word Count: 2189

Disclaimer: Fan authored for fun not profit. Twilight and all its content remain copyright and intellectual property of Stephenie Meyer and Little Brown. (I merely play in the sandpit.)
Author's Note: The pretty ate my brain. Sorry.

Edward strokes her hair while she heals, sings her a soft familiar lullaby, croons her name low when her mind is too fractured to hear him. She moans softly, her eyelids hiding the anguished black of her starving eyes, and when she speaks she calls for Jasper. Edward can only hold her close and listen, reach out with his mind for Jasper's troubled thoughts.

It's times like these that Jasper slips, and why he'll be gone longer. Edward knows, and he knows that Alice understands – Jasper struggles against his own nature, and against the pain he causes Alice. He'll stay gone until his eyes are the same burnished gold as Edward's, the colour Alice knows and loves the best.

Edward worries about her, but – her body burning through the venom and healing faster every time – Alice kisses his nose and whispers in her wind chime voice for him not to worry. "Jasper loves me," she says, and Edward closes his eyes, because for creatures like Jasper love might not be enough, and so he intrudes on her thoughts at night, watches her examine the pale marble of her body in the moonlight. Staring at her reflection in the vanity, her guard slips and he can see her as she sees herself. He knows she thinks the same thing.

Jasper returns earlier than usual this time, though, early enough that his eyes are still red, but he looks contrite, ashamed. Alice hurls herself at him, presses her cold lips to his cheeks and eyes. He says nothing but holds her gently, smoothes her spiky hair until slowly, eventually, the corner of his mouth quirks up into a crooked smile. The earliest memories – or some of them at least – that Alice has are of him, his face serene, his eyes violent crimson, his manner troubled and burdened. She'd had a date and a place, and he'd been taller than she'd imagined, older. He'd met her gaze and known her for what she was. She'd taken in the scars, his eyes blackening with starvation, and she'd known she'd want to be with him forever.

Edward hunts with him, and neither of them says anything. Jasper keeps his mind deliberately blank, and Edward matches his pace easily, until Jasper comes to an abrupt halt. "I wish -" he breathes, voice no louder than the breeze that stirs the leaves of the trees, and Edward circles back to face him, eyes narrowing as he listens. "I wish I knew how -" but he either can't or won't finish the sentence. Edward knows how it ends anyway, and he wishes Jasper knew how not to hurt her as well. Alice is far from fragile – she's lithe and ferocious and as demanding as any of them, and when the sun catches her face she is terrifyingly rivetingly beautiful.

And then Jasper's whole posture changes, his head snapping around as he hears what he's been waiting for. Jasper's predatory smile reveals glittering teeth, and he glances back at Edward, who nods his head quickly. "Bear," he says, and Jasper is gone. Edward follows, neither of them thirsty but they know it's better for Jasper when his eyes returned to the dark hued familiar gold.

Both of them like to think that Alice is sweetly naïve of what happens in the aftermath of their hunting trips. Jasper washes his hands and his hair in the closest free flowing water he can find, and Edward watches how his muscles move beneath the marred white marble of his skin. Jasper's scars are so clear to him that he doesn't understand how human eyes can't see them. Thirst sated and frenzy fading, Jasper says he wishes he could stop hurting Alice. Edward crouches beside him and splays his hand on Jasper's spine. Jasper glances at him, and Edward drops his head to kiss him quietly, whispers, "She'll love you regardless." And Jasper, his mouth hungry and demanding against Edward's, his aura anything but calm now, tells Edward that he thinks, feels, that maybe Alice's forgiveness is just one more thing that he doesn't deserve.

And, although they both know better, every time they think that perhaps Alice doesn't know – she doesn't see snap decisions, not all the time…

Alice waits for them and fixes Jasper with her prettiest smile. Jasper run his fingers through her hair and breathes in the scent of her, fills his lungs until it's an almost physical ache. He glances over her head at Edward, who smiles. He knows, and he knows that Jasper knows as well. Jasper feels Alice's emotions sharply, and he understands that she sees straight through them. She touches the scar in his eyebrow, and her gold eyes glitter with the tears she can't cry.

Jasper is careful for some time after, holds her gently and loves her intensely, and she curls her fingers in his hair, whispers his name into his skin. She throws a party to justify her shopping trip with Rosalie, and invites Tanya and her family from Denali because she can. Jasper is benevolent as he bows to her whims and changes of fancy. She hunts with him, and they stay gone for weeks. Carlisle asks Edward for updates, but he shakes his head and says they're too far gone, too far away, but he keeps listening all the same. When they return, Alice flashes a new ring and a glittering smile, and gushes about their trip to Vegas ("Drive through wedding, Edward!" she enthuses, and Edward laughs as he holds her close against him) and then their honeymoon in South America. The glitter in her golden eyes is carefree, and she talks endlessly about the wonders of the deep Amazon delta. She speaks of this half-human child they saw, who'd grown up but never old, and he strokes her hair as he listens intently. He catches Jasper's gaze and takes in the glittering ruby of his irises. Alice glances at him and back at Edward, and her mouth twists bitterly. "Don't – blame him," she says, and Edward understands.

Even so, he worries about her, about how long she spends alone with Jasper and, more so, how much time she spends alone without him. He pushes open the door of her room, and she glances up at him from where she sits transcribing ancient Greek, always how she keeps him from her mind, always how she stops herself from thinking. "Did you know it would be so hard?" he asks, and she sighs softly, her breath fluttering the wafer thin pages of her book. Eventually, she glances up at him, her eyes black with starvation, and Edward's face is sad, hollow.

"No," she says quietly, and then cants her head, flicks him a smile that lights up her face. "Yes. I – he's -" and her voice trails off. Edward pushes himself away from the wall, crouches before her and brushes the tips of his fingers across her cheekbones. She laughs, lyrical, musical, and he says, "You need to hunt, Alice. He'll be back soon, and your hunger makes him worse."

And then her voice, quiet, sad, desperate, piercing his mind with its plaintive lilt, "Help him, Edward. Help me." In her mind, in his mind, flash all possible versions of the future, and too many of them for her fracturing stability to handle do not contain Jasper's scarred beautiful face.

Alice holds his face between her hands, croons his name low in her throat. Her fingers are deft, and her granite body feels supple, soft against his. Jasper closes his eyes, but her face fills his mind regardless, and his lips, when they meet hers, are as hard and demanding as her fingers in his hair.

He doesn't undress her, not anymore – it seems as if her clothes disintegrate between them, melt away from the curves of her pixie body. She tears at his clothes with a voracious hunger, her lips never leaving his skin, and even like this she smells beautiful to him. Alice is the soft scent of meadow flowers, the smell of sunlight and the glittering yellow of buttercups. He can only imagine how she would have smelled when her blood actually moved through her veins, when her heart beat a steady rhythm. He wishes he'd known her human, and then again, thinks perhaps not. He would have been James in that scenario, a monster incapable of love or trust. And for all his failings, Jasper trusts her implicitly.

Alice moves against him, the scarred white of her thighs soft against his hard, hungry flesh, legs hooking around him as she draws him closer to her, groaning his name as her nails rip against him, leaving neither mark nor scar. He buries his face against her throat and she arches impishly, throws her head back, lengthening the lean familiar lines.

He feels the hunger curl deep within him, feels himself fighting against it, but the longer he spends with her the stronger the creature becomes. He feels his fingers press harder, hears the whimper as she bucks against him, her fingers curling in his hair, pushing, pulling, and Jasper thinks that they are blood and greed, desire and heat…

His teeth don't break her skin, not this time. She curls against him and runs her fingers daintily across the pale scars criss-crossing his torso, his shoulders, his neck. He holds her gently and she murmurs that she's proud of him. He kisses her hair and closes his eyes against the bloodlust that threatens to engulf him.

Edward counts weeks as if they are days, and so it's often hard to judge how long they go between episodes of transgression. Edward thinks maybe it's months, but the likelihood is that Jasper goes for years before he fails completely. This – lifestyle isn't his first choice, and the smell of blood burns so hot for him. Edward doesn't remember a time when he couldn't control his lust, but Jasper is a different creature entirely, born in blood and raised in war, without the sanctuary and support of the family to fall back on.

"He tries," Alice says, crouching on a rock to watch him hunt. Her fingers curl around her wrists, her eyes flicking after Edward, landing where he will be just moments before he arrives. "It hurts him so much. When they die. It's like – like you, like he feels the desperation and the fight to survive, all the emotion leeching into him with the slowing of their hearts, and it chokes him. You of all of us should understand." He glances back at her and she looks suddenly alarmed, gasps "Edward!" before he is bowled to the ground, caught unaware by his bear of a brother. Their collision rumbles in the trees, the sound of thunder as it tumbles down the mountain.

"You're back then," Edward observes dryly as Emmett hauls him back to his feet and dusts him off. Emmett's grin is infectious, and Edward can't help but grin back at him. "Did you-?" and his voice trails off as Emmett shakes his head too quickly, drops his voice so low that even Alice's sharp ears can't hear, "Can't she, you know, see him?"

"No," Edward murmurs, and grips Emmett's shoulder. "And she's worried, because there's only one reason for that, and she can't consider it."

Edward is not a tracker, not by nature. He is too easily distracted to follow one person's course or scent for long, but he knows Jasper, knows his mind well enough to know where he will head. He's not really tracking so much as following, hoping he can get there in time, or he is tracking but only in as much as he stops occasionally, to fill the car with gas and to catch the scent of Jasper.

Edward's fingers are long and cold, his gold eyes sad as he touches Jasper's face. Jasper stares with rage filled red eyes, before dropping his eyelids to cover them. Edward tries not to listen, courtesy as much as anything, but Jasper directs his thoughts directly toward him, and his voice is achingly soft. "It's better like this," he says, and Edward shakes his head, unable to agree with Jasper's assessment.

"Better for whom?" he asks, tone clipped and brittle, his fingers digging into Jasper's shoulder.

"For both of you." And he tears himself from Edward's hands. In the darkness, Edward hears the low, threatening rumble of the wolves. He knows their thoughts – they know Jasper and they know the smell of human blood. 'Not kill,' they say, 'only bite.'

Edward knows enough to know when he has lost, and Jasper smiles kindly and touches his face. "Keep her safe for me," he says, and Edward nods as he backs away. He thinks, at least this explains why Alice can't see how it happens. She can't see this decision of Jasper's, and maybe, just maybe, the wolves will cloud Edward's future for long enough that he can compose his thoughts for her.

And he's running, already running, by the time he hears the pack howl, and he knows Jasper has crossed the line.

FIN