Disclaimer: I do not own Twilight or its characters.
Note: It's taken this long for another chapter because there was real life stuff going on this month. I'm hoping to get another chapter out this week, but I apologize now if that doesn't happen. I will work hard on it though. Also, thank you to my reviewers! I really do appreciate them all.
Pain. At first, I was in constant pain. There was nothing but blackness and pain. Then I started seeing flashes of light shooting across the expansive darkness, making bright splotches wherever they landed. Vaguely aware of what my body was doing at the moment, I focused on those lights and noticed each one wasn't just a white light but a memory.
Charlie was pushing me on a swing. We were seven, Bella and I, but Bella insisted she was too old to be pushed. Charlie tried to hide the sadness, but I caught it and let him push me. He looked happy, glad one of his girls didn't feel like growing up that visit.
"Come on, Daddy. You can do better than that," I yelled through the laughter.
The seven year old version of me continued to laugh until the vision started swirling with the black down into an unseen point, making the picture distorted and muddy and turning the laughter into a scream.
The black enveloped me again, jolting me back into a world of constant pain.
Then the burning started.
When Jasper and I talked about the process, how it felt, how long it would most likely take, he spoke about the pain and how it was the worst thing imaginable. He only lightly mentioned the burning. I couldn't figure out why he would misplace that information. No matter what happened to me during the process, the outcome would be him, so I wasn't going to change my mind. Besides, he wanted me to change my mind. Wouldn't this have helped his case?
My mind wouldn't let me focus on questions I couldn't ask.
Another shooting star fell and showed me standing in front of a mirror staring at myself. My long black hair flowed past my shoulders, stopping just below my small chest. I was just a few days over fifteen. For a month, I was thinking about the vision I had: my hair was short, shorter than it had ever been, cut in strange layers that made the ends stick out in odd angles away from my head, and I was in the woods waiting for someone I had a strong connection to. It was a picture of the future; there was no other explanation. My intuition meter was off the charts, and it led me to believe if I didn't cut my hair off, I wasn't going to be sitting in the woods and waiting for the someone I needed to see.
So I cut my hair.
"What are you doing?" yelled my mother from the door of the bathroom.
I stopped mid snip and turned my head to smile at her. "Don't worry, Mom. I have to do this for…him."
Understandably freaked out by my actions and comment, Renee carefully pulled the scissors out of my hand but not before I heard one more 'shh' of the shears cutting off my past.
As it faded away, I prepared myself for the pain. I quickly realized there could be no preparation for it.
There was another light, another memory.
This time, Bella and I were sitting in her room talking about what we were going to do now that the fork appeared in our journey. We both liked Renee's new husband Phil, but we weren't as excited about traveling with him as much as our mom was. So we started talking about Charlie and Forks. Bella, though reluctant, agreed it would be better because of the stability. I agreed because I wanted to be there for Charlie in the way we were there for Renee before she found Phil.
"And…" she said, sensing I wasn't telling the whole truth.
I looked her right in the eye, still unafraid of telling my twin sister about my intuitions since the incident two years before. "I'm supposed to be there. It's the reason for…" I shrugged. "Everything."
Bella rolled her eyes. "You've just run out of guys to turn down in Phoenix, that's all."
"You just wait, Bella. You'll get your fair share of them soon," I laughed.
Pain and lights of the past, the cycle continued until only the burning remained.
The burning became worse than the initial pain; there was no reprieve from it. So I focused on the burn. With each rapid beat from my heart, the burn sluggishly moved away from my chest and to the ends of my fingers and toes. I don't know how long I stayed stuck in the fire, but it was starting to feel like an eternity, the same eternity I was supposed to be spending with Jasper.
Then… A ticking clock. A whispering voice. Fabric moving against fabric. Rubber softly tapping on… Wood? Sounds I knew intermingled with sounds I never found myself paying attention to before weaved around me as the fire in my toes started to fade. I smiled, although I wasn't sure this showed on my lips. It was all coming to an end. Hopefully, it was the end I wanted.
The burning slowly receded back over my ankles and to my knees. It left my fingers, too. The only problem was my heart. It took off, beating faster than I knew it was able to handle. It pulled the last of the pain and the burn from my shoulders and abdomen and sucked it right into the middle of my heart. My chest rose as if someone was pulling me by a string attached to my chest. The imaginary giant holding that cord let go soon after the burning faded completely and, with a moan from my lips, my heart beat for the last time.
I stopped breathing.
The sound of someone speeding to get to my side reached my sensitive hearing.
"Jasper," I finally spoke through a raw throat.
A thud on the side of the bed and the small crack of splintering wood echoed past me.
I opened my eyes and looked at Jasper for the first time…again.
Many scars littered his face and neck, throwing off the light the rest of his face reflected from the lamp on the side of the bed. I could see them falling down past the open collar of his shirt, and I cocked my head to the side, wondering how many more there were on the rest of his body.
"Alice," he said, smiling and making a scar on his cheek tighten.
Something shining from the corner caught my eye which made me realize how unaware of my surroundings I was before now. Instinctively, I knew it was dangerous, and I breathed in, causing the small dust particles I wasn't paying attention to sweep into my mouth. My throat burned with the taste of old blood, and, in a matter of seconds, I pulled myself off the bed and moved to the other end of the small cabin into a protective stance.
My widened eyes took in everything. The shining I saw before was just the rainbow coming from the light in the kitchen, complete with colors I couldn't remember ever seeing before. The dull memory of the lack of dust was becoming overshadowed with the reality that there was a thin layer of dust on everything despite its cleanliness. The wood of the walls looked perfect before. Now, I saw the imperfections, the tiny holes made by other residents and insects. Because of the defensive position of my hands in front of me, I could also clearly see each diamond's flaw. However, the strangest thing of all was my ability to see all this without looking away from my new husband.
"Don't come any closer," I said, seeing him stand up to his full height. "I won't be able to stop myself."
"Have you forgotten who I am?" he asked, taking a step closer.
"No. But you need to stop," I said, my anger starting to rise as he continued to step closer.
"This is what I'm good at," he said with a hint of sadness. Within his next step, my anger dissipated and my body relaxed. With his next step, the false calm left my being.
"Don't," I pleaded, my anxiousness taking over. "Don't make me do it by myself."
"You'll have to learn some day."
Forcing myself to stand up to my full height and putting my hands back down to my side, I tried unsuccessfully to steal some of his confidence. I wondered how he knew I wasn't going to go after him, to give him another scar or worse. I wondered how he knew everything was going to be fine between us as I trudged my way through being a newborn. I wondered…
I watched Jasper take another step, but he never completed it. Instead, I was looking at the two of us. Jasper had his arm wrapped around my bare arm and his face was buried in the hair on the top of my head. I had my head on his chest, tracing the scar just above his belly button. The bed we were on was different. Unlike the wooden double bed currently in the cabin, it was a king sized wrought iron one. When I saw a fully clothed Jasper standing in front of me again, I smiled, feeling almost ashamed of my sneak peak.
"Everything okay?" he asked, a slight panic on his tongue.
"I saw you and me and…" I trailed off and looked away, not caring about the two feet gap between us. "Well, I still have my visions, so that's good. And we were fine. And the bed was beautiful. I'll have to start looking for it for when we go back home. I know it won't be for a while, but–"
Jasper touched my hand, effectively stopping my rambling about the future. I was surprised by how it felt. Before, he was odd, cold and different. Now, he was normal and warm, the same as me. I lifted my free hand to trace a scar on his face. His shaky breath pushed the small particles of dust and dirt toward me, and I sucked them in while I fought with my instincts and closed my eyes. It tasted sweet like honeydew and spicy like cinnamon. I grabbed onto his shirt to pull him toward me. It was a little too hard and caused the fabric to rip, but it didn't matter as much as the feeling that jolted through me when our lips softly met.
I pushed myself into him from the tips of my toes and swung my arms around him. The intensity of the light touch made me want to experience more, made me want my whole body to flutter, not just my head, but the resulting crash onto the floor by my unknown strength woke Jasper up enough to push me back by my shoulders. A rumble dislodged from my chest as I looked down at him. It made him laugh. The sound was deep but musical, something my old ears never caught.
"First, we hunt."
The raw burn of my throat flared, reminding me of the hunger I didn't know I was feeling when my heart stopped beating. "Should I change?"
"You don't need to."
"But I should. That's what you're not saying." I pushed myself off Jasper and stood up, the movement happening so fluid and so fast, it was barely ten seconds later when my hands reached for the simple jeans and t-shirt I thought to pack days before.
"How long did it take?" I asked, not bothering to look at Jasper as I walked into the bathroom at a human's pace.
"You were moving into your fourth day."
"Four?"
"It's average."
I turned around and backed into the bathroom. "So I'm average now?" I teased.
"You know you're anything but," he smiled back.
I giggled, letting the song bounce around with my feet as I closed the door.
Stripping down, I paid attention to what the light of the bathroom did to my skin. It wasn't as strong as the sunlight, but each cell that made up my light skin took the already colorful light and refracted it off me, making a low key shimmer. After covering my skin with the jeans and a blue, long sleeved t-shirt, I looked up at the mirror. I took a shocking breath in, tasting stale water and rusted metal along with chemicals and flowery soap. My reflection did the same, except she was looking at me with blood red eyes. Once again, I had been coached on what the changes were going to be, but I never once gave the red eyes this bright color. I blinked a few times, trying to make them dull, but it didn't work.
I let myself experiment. I closed my eyes and focused on me, on seeing me in the future, trying to see for sure that my eyes would dull and even turn into the wonderful honey color of Jasper's. A smile appeared in front of me followed by my face. I was staring into a mirror as I was now, only my eyes were a dull red with specks of bright gold trying to burst through. Letting it fade away, I opened my eyes to see my pale face and bright red eyes once more.
My reflection unexpectedly frowned.
How was I sure this was a vision and not a hope for the future? How could I have been sure the other vision I fell upon was truth? How could I believe in anything brought from a past that was growing increasingly fuzzier by the second? I stared at a darkening reflection as I tried to remember Bella, Charlie, and Renee. The memory of the two of us driving through Forks and the day before we started school was blurry at best. The sounds of us laughing about the bustling town barely reached my ears. Charlie watching TV while I sat on the couch doing homework was fading. Renee pressuring Bella to tell her about Edward one last time before we got on the plane back to Forks just weeks ago couldn't compare to when I first saw Jasper from the bed I spent almost four agonizing days on.
I tried to cry. My memories were leaving me and I wanted to weep for each one, but all I could do was contort my face into something resembling sadness and pain. It left me very unfulfilled.
Arms slowly curled around me and I hissed, brushing them off violently. My eyes came to focus on the mirror as an empty calm flushed through me. Jasper was behind me, a hand reaching out above my right shoulder. The contorted face staring back at me faded with the memories.
"Why?" I asked, allowing Jasper's hand to sit on my shoulder.
"You'll have to ask Carlisle."
"But I'm asking you."
He sighed. "It has something to do with the venom. It repairs you, fixes everything wrong with your human body to make it the perfect being. It repairs your brain too. It changes the links between them which causes the memories formed as a human to break up." He hesitantly pulled me back against him. "If you keep focusing on the memories you want to keep, you'll keep them."
"What if I don't get to all of them before they fade?" I asked, my tone low and scared like a child afraid to go back to sleep after hearing strange noises.
"It will happen, but the ones you do get to will be ones you want to keep. To remind you of who you were and…who you have to be."
"Jasper–"
"Tell me your stories. It'll help."
"And then you tell me yours. And don't leave anything out this time."
A minute chuckle escaped from behind me. "It's a deal."
There was no need to keep staring at my likeness anymore. I pulled away from Jasper and walked out of the bathroom to find my shoes. The calm pulled away with each step and the hunger worked its way back into my conscious. I slid my feet into the shoes at the end of the bed while looking at my rings. With a glance at a waiting Jasper, I took them off and set them on the kitchen counter. I reached up for the necklace I already knew I took off before coming out of the bathroom the night my change started, but I still found myself in a slight panic when it wasn't there. Jasper shook his head and took the necklace off his own neck and placed it next to the rings.
"Let's go," he said, catching my hand and pulling me to the door. "It'll be fun."