Not mine, and all that yada yada. Don't sue me, please.
Also – one of you requested a oneshot about Jasper and Alice in the diner... I've lost the email and failed to write your screen name down. Who was it? * searches with flashlight *
Because You Loved Me
Part 5/?
Our Own Novel...
They're lost. Jasper knows it, and Alice knows that he knows. The problem is that Alice won't admit it. She says they're just between visions of the Cullens right now; they're exactly where they need to be. Jasper thinks she's just being stubborn.
Their journey has brought them to a field, with snow as far as Jasper can see. A flat, long field of white nothingness. "Alice, we're lost."
"We aren't lost," she insists.
When the snow gets so deep that every step Alice takes buries her almost to her chin, Jasper carries her on his back. "We aren't lost," she hisses in his ear. He agrees because he doesn't want to argue. They walk for two days; forty-eight hours straight, because the cloud cover allows it, and even if it didn't there was no one else around to see them, anyway.
On the third day, Jasper decides to put his foot down. He likes Alice – maybe even more- and he knows that if it weren't for her he'd probably be dead or worse by now... but he can't take it any longer. When he inhales deeply out of irritation, he catches a scent. A familiar scent.
Their own scent.
He looks down at the ground, a few hundred yards across from where they're standing now and he sees it: a set of footprints in the shape of his own boots. Next to them was a tiny path, almost like a tunnel, where Alice had shoveled her way through the snow.
"We're going in circles," he growls.
Alice blinks at the prints on the ground, then scrambles off his back and goes to inspect them closer. She stands there for a long time with her back to him and her head down, her arms folded and her nose wrinkled.
Sighing, Jasper flops onto the ground and sits there. "I'm not taking another step, Alice. Not until we find out where the hell we are."
She sniffs affectedly and taps her foot on the snow. "We're not lost..."
He scoffs.
Upon hearing the snow crunch under her flats, he looks up. She's standing in front of him with her hands folded in front of her and her eyes on her feet, like a scolded child. She sniffs again, and again, and Jasper stands quickly.
The sadness and shame coming from her is enough to make him forget why he was upset in the first place. "Oh, Alice... I'm sorry, darlin', I didn't mean it..."
"No," she says in a high-pitched and slightly panicked tone. "We're lost. We're lost, Jasper!" She takes his hands in her own tiny ones, and looks at him with wide and wild eyes. "I've been lying to you; I haven't had a vision of the Cullens since we left Minnesota."
...They left Minnesota over a month ago.
"Alice... it's alright. It's fine, maybe we're just not meant to find them right now."
A tiny, quivering mumble escapes her and he immediately leans down and wraps his arms around her shoulders. Lifting her up off the ground, he pats her back gently as she hangs there limp in his arms like a doll, her feet dangling near his knees. "But we're lost, and I lied to you! I'm so, so sorry, Jasper."
"I understand why you lied, Alice. It's okay, really. I'm not even upset, see?"
He tries to flood her with something – anything other than the irritation and annoyance that he's really feeling. She could have just told him she wasn't seeing anything...
"You hate me!"
His eyes fly open. "I do not hate you, Alice. Stop that, right now. You made a mistake. God knows I've made my share. Besides, what good would it do for me to be upset?"
"You're gonna leave, aren't you? I'm such a joke."
Jasper sets her down and kneels to be eye-level with her. He studies her face carefully; her sad, golden eyes – oh, how he's come to love those eyes...- her bottom lip, poking out in a very human pout, her delicate eyebrows drawn together. Reaching up, he brushes the back of his hand against her porcelain cheek.
"...Alice, where am I gonna go?"
She sniffs once more and looks up at him from underneath her dark lashes. "Anywhere you want."
"And do what? Go back to the way I was? Alice... you don't know what you've done for me, do you? I'm happy. D'you know how long it's been since I've been able to truthfully say that? Even here, in wherever we are, I am happy."
"How can you be happy when we're running in circles, Jasper? For a month, I've been leading a wild goose chase."
"I may be on a goose chase," he whispers, taking her hands and pulling her closer to him, "but I'm on it with you."
Alice blinks rapidly, stares at him. "What?"
"You make me happy, Alice. It doesn't matter if we're lost in a tundra or wandering around in a desert or... fighting over who's faster. As long as I can look to my left or right and see you, I don't care."
She bites her bottom lip.
"When I first met you in that diner and you started rambling about seeing the future and that we're meant to be together, I thought you'd escaped from a nut house or something..."
She thinks that doesn't sound so far fetched...
"But I trusted you because of the way you made me feel."
"Thank you, Jasper," she says, rubbing at her eyes with the back of her hand. "You make me happy, too. ...Let's keep moving, okay?"
Alice starts to turn away, to circle around and climb up onto his back again, but he catches her wrist and when he tugs on her, she turns her head at just right angle to catch the very corner of his lips with her own.
Her eyes fly open and they meet with his; a dark, deep amber with just the hint of a pinkish hue. She blinks, but she doesn't pull away and she doesn't shut her eyes. She thinks they must've sat there like that for hours – him on knees, with one hand on her wrist and the other on her shoulder, and her with her head bent down and her hands resting on the sides of his neck.
Unmoving, unblinking. Two statues that could've been linked together that way, even in first flurries of an oncoming storm, for the rest of eternity.
She would've liked that.
Jasper pulls away (too soon, she thinks, kiss me again), and stands. She takes the hand he offers, linking her fingers with his in a grip that would've crushed the bones of any human, and they walk on in silence.
There were no words needed, not this time.
At last – in a mix of snow and wind so thick that even their enhanced vision is nearly useless - they come across a patch of land that doesn't smell familiar to either one of them. Jasper's hesitant at first, thinks something isn't quite right, but she urges him on.
Alice is about to quite literally jump for joy at finally getting out of their repeated circle, but before she can finish her first "yay!", Jasper grabs her and pulls her close.
"Hush," he hisses.
She clings to his arm and closes her mouth. She's learned now; when Jasper tells her to be quiet, it's for good reason. She waits, turning with him as he squints in the snow and she's about to ask him what the problem is when she hears a loud, almost deafening, crack.
Alice feels as though the ground is moving, but she isn't. Caught unprepared, her feet slide beneath her and she lands hard on her bottom, feeling Jasper's arm slip from her hands.
"Jasper!"
She gasps when she's slapped in the face with something cold, and extremely wet.
Water.
Kicking her feet, she gathers her bearings and looks around; they'd been walking on a ground made of ice. The ground had broken. Reaching up out of the freezing water, she digs her fingers into a patch of hard snow... she thinks this ground appears to be safe; perhaps there's actual earth underneath it.
She pulls herself out of the water, and her eyes immediately begin searching frantically. "Jasper?!"
Nothing. Ice and loud, rushing water, snow and howling wind. Nothing.
Alice stands, ignoring the frost that's beginning to form on her hands and face – she can't feel the cold, and even if she could, she wouldn't care. There's another loud cracking sound, and her head snaps around to the direction it came from.
There. She sees something in the water, something blue. His coat. Taking off in a sprint, she dances over the frozen lake and across the floating rafts of ice; a tiny blur in the storm. Skidding to a halt, she plunges her arm into the rushing water just in time to grab his collar. She jerks upwards, hard and yelps when she feels herself flying backwards.
Her head makes contact with something hard, and it hurts a little, but she decides to complain later. "Hi," she gasps.
With the force of sheer strength, she's yanked Jasper out of the water and he'd landed almost directly on top of her. "...Hi. I just couldn't get a--"
"Don't make excuses because you can't swim," she teases.
"I had it handled."
"Yes, you were doing a wonderful job, Major."
He glares down at her, then his expression softens. "When we find this family we're looking for... don't tell them you had to save me from the water. Please."
Alice grins. "Not a word from me. ...But you really should learn to swim."
* * *
The storm's passed now, and they're lying out in the open on top of a fresh patch of snow. Alice is picking icicles out of Jasper's hair.
"Thank you, Alice. For earlier. I know I wouldn't have drowned, but..."
She frowns down at him. "But?"
"I was scared," he mumbles. "I nearly drowned once as a kid, and though I know it can't happen now... I was taken back to that moment."
"What happened?" she whispers, feeling bad for teasing him about not being able to swim.
"I had a friend called Dallas when I was a kid; we were inseparable. Anyway, in the summer after all the work was done, we used to go this river. There was a tree there that we liked to climb. The summer I turned twelve, I think, it had flooded. I stepped on a dead branch, the current was too strong... you know. Dallas saved me..."
Alice stares at him, and wonders what would've happened if his friend had not been there. Where would she be right now? Would she even be alive?
What happens when one's soulmate dies...?
"Beautiful," he whispers.
She frowns and blinks. "What?"
He nods his head upwards, and for one bizarre moment, she thinks he's gesturing to her. But when he reaches up and, with one finger under her chin, gently turns her head, she sees what he really means. "Aurora Borealis," she whispers. "The Northern Lights."
"Have you been here before?"
"No," she explains, "but I've read about them. I've always wanted to see them, and now..."
Jasper is silent as he waits for her to finish her sentence, and when she doesn't continue, he sits up and looks at her. "And now...?"
"Seems kinda trivial," she mumbles. "Before I realized I was gonna live forever, I thought, 'That's a once in a lifetime kinda thing...,' you know?"
He makes a hmm noise in agreement.
"But now I think about it, I can come here any time. Tomorrow, next month, next year... next century. Something else is more important to me than seeing all these strange things, now. These past few months, instead of wondering where I'm gonna travel next, I find myself wondering what would've happened to me if I hadn't had my visions of you? If I'd been born a year later, or earlier... would I still be sitting here with you right now?"
Silence.
Because he's thinking the same thing. What if he hadn't left when he did? What if he hadn't found this confusing little creature?
"I used to read these romance novels and think that I'd like to have that. Some big, strong flawless man to sweep me off my feet and..." she trails off, then sighs. "And I found you. This troubled, scarred man with a past he doesn't like to talk about... and it's so much better, Jasper. It's more than what those silly girls get in those books. It's real, and it's mine and I don't want anything else in the world."
Jasper watches her closely as she sits up on her knees and wraps her arms around his neck carefully. Then, after a moment of caution, she leans forward and places a single kiss on his cheek.
I love you. He tenses, and she pulls away. Had she done something wrong? No... she'd spoken out loud. "I'm sorry, I--"
She stops, because the tip of his finger is on her lips. They sit there for a long moment, his eyebrows drawn together and his mouth open slightly, as though he's trying to form words but can't quite get them right in his head first.
Alice realizes the feelings of confusion and uncertainty are not coming from her...
"You don't have to say it back, Jasper."
"But I do," he says quickly. "It's just, I've never said it, and I'm not really sure how to..."
She smiles at him and leans forward to rest her head on his shoulder. "Because you're not ready."
Disappointment. "I'm sorry. But I do, Alice."
"I know."
And she does know. She knows because she can feel it... and that, she thinks, is worth more than hearing three tiny words.