DEAREST

"Just now when I sat down to write to you I kept saying 'dearest' to myself, and didn't realize it till later. If only, just for once, I could make you understand what you mean to me! And for that matter I am even less capable of doing it when we are close than when we're far apart."

—Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

—

SEPTEMBER 7TH 2039

1:01PM MST

NEDERLAND, COLORADO

The buzzing of his phone forced Jasper to open one eye and glance toward the dresser where it resided. Then, he glanced down at Alice, tucked into the crook of his arm, and waited.

"It's just Emmett." She spoke before he could ask. "Nothing important." Silence took hold once more as the buzzing stopped. "I promise."

Alice lifted a hand and reached across both her body and his. Jasper knew what she was doing before she could grasp or pull at his hand, and shifted so that he could have not just one, but two arms wrapped around her.

Alice sighed happily as she wormed her way up the bed, moving her cheek off his chest to bury her nose against his neck. She inhaled once more, and then didn't for a while after. He kept his hold firm against her, knowing that she always enjoyed the pressure of this contact.

Funny enough, Jasper had handled her like she was made of glass during their first few years together. It wasn't until a very enlightening hunting experience that he realized she very much desired the opposite.

He tightened his grip ever so slightly and could feel her lips smile against his skin. He continued sending forth a steady stream of love and peace and contentment, the contact between their skin giving him a direct connection to bypass her limbic system entirely. The firm pressure combined with the emotions he was expelling were always able to put her into what Alice referred to as the closest thing she could imagine that sleep was like.

Artificial emotion or not, Alice didn't care about the source. She only cared that she was able to experience this every now and again. On days like today, when the house was alive with bustle far livelier than was typical, it was always a good addition to their routine. Not just for Alice, but for himself, too. It was easy to get wrapped up in the symphony of emotions when too much was happening in the house.

And despite what his family always told him, Jasper knew how to relax.

When the backdoor slammed shut and the sound of angry muttering and stomping toward the woods reached his ears, Jasper focused even harder on the way Alice's hand lazily scratched at the back of his neck, ever-so-often rising up to drag her nails lightly against his scalp.

While Alice enjoyed the pressure of his arms around her, Jasper enjoyed little things like this: the light drag of nails across skin, the fluttering feeling of her lips smiling against him, an arm or leg looped lazily around his own.

He'd spent far too long only receiving the embrace of violence. The simplest caress—the softest kiss, a brush of fingers, a whisper against skin—was priceless to him. Even as they relaxed, settling in for what would likely be a few hours of soothing rest to break up their week, Jasper knew that they were both listening in on the ruckus occurring on the main floor.

Alice let out a huff of breath against his neck, "Jeez," she mumbled.

"I missed the second part of what she said," he murmured, keeping his voice low enough so that this conversation would only be for them. Jasper was only ever willing to speak during these moments when she did first. This was more her rest than it was his. Alice would always dictate how this small time spent together would go. "Where does she want to go?"

"It's not that she wants to go," Alice sighed, lifting her hand upward to comb through the thicker patches of his hair, "it's that she knows she can't."

"Ah."

Alice sighed again and resettled herself against him. "She knows she's being silly. She'll apologize later."

Jasper hummed and his mind drifted toward Ness just as he heard the back door open and close again. He could tell, by the heavy footsteps alone, that it was Jacob. Off to do damage control.

Again.

"I wonder if he misses fighting with Rose," Alice mused. "He didn't have to bite his tongue back then."

Even though Alice's words were soft, spoken so they weren't overheard, Jasper still felt a tick of irritation from below. Edward's mind reading was always more of an inconvenience to himself than it was to the rest of them.

Bella only put Edward under cover of her shield when he specifically requested it. (Or, when she thought he needed it. They almost always argued when Bella thought he needed it.) Currently, Bella was downstairs with him, her own annoyance and exasperation dwarfing Edward's. There was silence for a little while, and Edward's emotions fluctuated slightly. Bella must've moved her shield to tell him something. She clearly wasn't willing to be overheard in that moment.

The argument seemed silly anyways. It had been Ness's idea in the first place for Jacob to spend more time back in Washington. Not that she wanted to get rid of him—not that any of them did—but because the guilt of the imprint had only started weighing on her in the past couple years. It was, and always had been, a fucking mess.

Truthfully, Jasper would've called Jacob a 'breath of fresh air' if he didn't stink so bad.

No matter how they referred to him, it would always be a known fact in their family that Jacob had become as central and necessary as any of them. Jasper was personally always grateful for his temperament; having an additional optimist in the house had been refreshing after they'd left Forks all those years ago.

The amount of upset in their Boston house would have otherwise driven Jasper mad.

"Is this why Emmett was calling?"

"Hm? Oh, no. Jake hasn't texted Emmett yet. He and Rose are just looking at more dealerships than they'd planned. He wanted to show you something silly on FaceTime."

"Silly?"

"Don't worry. He took a video to show you later," her amusement warmed him and he smiled despite the turbulent emotions radiating from the lower level. Esme, who, judging by her own emotions, had been listening to the argument from the ground floor, was just as upset as Edward. But as Edward's mood lessened in severity, whatever silent conversation he was having with Bella calming him, the overall mood of the house began to steadily improve.

Alice claimed she didn't know when exactly Jacob would start spending more time in La Push than he would with them, as a family, but Jasper had a suspicion that she just didn't want to upset Ness.

Ness loved her Jacob—and god damn if he wasn't the only reason Ness was still alive and had made it through her awful, turbulent twenties—but she'd only recently begun to realize how his imprint had taken him away from everything he'd known.

Jacob had only been back for a few days. Another funeral back in Washington had required attention; the second in the last month. A cousin, this time. No one they'd known personally. Jacob wouldn't be allowed to attend the actual funeral, of course. Only a select few tribe members knew what Jacob was up to and fewer knew where he was. Tribal secrecy meant that only his old pack mates—all of whom had stopped phasing over twenty years ago—knew anything at all about his situation.

Jacob usually showed up in La Push, spent a few days with old friends, wrote a few paper checks (attached to one of the Cullens' many accounts) from whatever alias he'd been assigned, effectively and anonymously paying for whatever wedding, funeral, or graduation party he was unable to physically attend, and then left to return back home.

Or, at least, what home had become for him.

The mourning fog currently followed Jacob everywhere he went. It cleared more and more every day, but Jasper hadn't been able to spend more than a few hours at a time close to him recently. Human suffering had never settled into his awareness well. Even now.

"Would I guess what Emmett wants to show me?"

Alice laughed quietly, and the feeling of her body moving against him was a steady, welcome weight. She shook her head. "It would take you several minutes," she relented. The grin in her voice was another comfort. "It'll be worth it when he shows you. You're going to laugh a lot."

He smiled and pressed his nose against her hair, inhaling the sharp citrus-mint of her shampoo, and beneath it all a scent he could only liken to fresh rainfall.

The swirl of emotions, good and bad, was sure to last through the rest of the month. Or at least until after Ness's birthday next week. Jasper was bracing himself for a longer period of restless feelings, knowing it was always better to over prepare himself than the alternative.

He thought forward to their future and wondered if, in a hundred years, when Jacob had finally returned and aged and died like his friends and family ultimately would before him, life would finally begin to settle in a more permanent way.

But even with Nahuel's proof that his life was more permanent than his mother's had been, they were still unsure whether Ness was immortal. Jasper had, a few years after they'd left Forks, accompanied most of the family on a trip to Chile.

It hadn't been a productive visit. Despite their success as witnesses, Nahuel and his aunt were still unnerved by the fact that the Volturi hadn't put a stop to Joham yet, and worried about what that meant for them, and their future.

Alice had confided in Jasper, later, that she'd felt bad she couldn't give them a clear answer. Despite all her power, she still couldn't see the future of the hybrid children.

It didn't help ease their worries when Nahuel told them about his father's most recent visit. Joham had regaled his son with tales of his most recent attempts to provide him with another sibling. Nahuel worried about his sisters in more ways than one, and the Cullens hadn't known what to say to provide any comfort.

Their trip home had been thickened by fraught silence.

Sometimes it felt unfair to use Renesmee's birth as a marker. As a date they could look back on and think 'this was when peace died'. After a couple of years with the child, it had felt wrong to pin such a morbid moment on her. Even Bella's move to Forks hardly felt fair to blame, despite it being a far more accurate date to pinpoint. Bella had been far too eager to blame herself for everything that had gone wrong.

They would never forget the day she broke down, apologizing for the danger she'd caused and the death of Irina and the way she'd damaged their quiet, restful lives.

It had been the first and only time any of them had ever laid a hand on Bella. Rosalie hadn't slapped her out of fury or because she believed Bella deserved to be hit. But because "We've all wasted too much time regretting things we can't fucking control. You aren't allowed to start that, too."

Then Edward had started yelling and Emmett had gotten in the middle of it and Jasper had used his gift to put half of his family on their asses with all calm he was dispersing but not feeling himself.

The blame game hadn't done any of them any good. Edward had apologized to them all eventually. One by one as the years passed and Renesmee stopped aging Edward had forced apologies through his reluctant, stubborn lips, hoping that now with the passage of time his family had all grown to understand. Hoping that they had come to forgive him.

Jasper had been the only one who hadn't forgiven him. He probably never would. But he wasn't going to waste his energy on trying to hate his own brother. Jasper wasn't even angry anymore. His frustration had boiled down into a solid, stubborn restlessness that now found an outlet with his surveillance hobby. Jasper could still feel Edward's guilt, always lying beneath the surface, and most of the time he did his best not to make it worse.

Jasper despised anything that put Alice in danger. Jasper didn't despise him, but Edward had a point: the Volturi's attention had been Edward's fault from the beginning.

"One day," he heard Esme finally speak from the main floor. It seemed she'd joined both Edward and Bella in the kitchen, "she'll understand that everything you two do is to keep her safe. To keep her well."

"One day Jake won't be around to help with that."

Jasper hated the deep sinking dread that drifted up through the house as Edward spoke, his voice cracking. Alice moved her fingers from Jasper's hair back down to his neck, her fingers twisting around the wisps of hair that curled at the base of his skull. He felt Alice frown against his neck. He kissed the top of her head.

When Jacob eventually left them—whether it would be in ten years or fifty—Jasper and Alice knew that it wasn't just Bella and Ness that would be devastated.

"Then you better get your practice in now."

A few minutes later the back door opened and closed again, softly this time. Edward was alone as he ran across the yard and off toward where Ness had run, and where Jacob had followed.

Almost an hour later, Alice spoke up again. "That's another thing I hate," she whispered against his neck. "I can't help them. Jacob or Ness."

Jasper finally released his firm embrace and tilted Alice's head up so that he could lean back and meet her gaze. She didn't. Alice kept her eyes closed, a slight frown pulling a line between her eyebrows that only existed when she was sad. And down beneath the peace and calm Jasper was creating, it was there. The soft twinge of sadness. A dull, familiar ache.

Whenever Alice could feel things in spite of his influence, he knew she was truly wrapped up too far in her own head.

He leaned down and kissed her cheeks, one after the next. Then, he kissed her forehead, between her brows, the tip of her nose, and then her mouth. "Watching their future isn't the only way to help them."

Alice opened her eyes. The gold had darkened enough to indicate that she was due for a hunt soon. "It is, though," she sighed, so beautiful and so sad. "It's all I know how to do."

Two hours later, she lifted her head back up from the space between his chin and shoulder and pulled away. She smiled, kissed him tenderly, and Jasper was at least pleased to feel the warmth radiating from her and to see the sadness gone from her expression.

He knew it wasn't gone though. Her melancholy was a stone dropped into the waters of her mind. It was still there whether you could see it or not.

For his family's sake, Jasper hoped they could get through September and have a pleasant October. November was bound to be a disaster with Jacob leaving again to spend a couple months back home for the holidays. He prayed for at least some peace to exist while they continued to live under the same roof.

It never served him well, but it had always benefited the rest of his family. If they were happy, at least he could experience it by proxy.