A/N: For the time being, updates will probably be once a week, and I'm aiming for every Sunday.

As always, thanks for reading:)


Mexico


The closer Jasper, Alice, Peter, and Charlotte got to Maria's territory, the more uneasy they all grew. Jasper had been fairly quiet since leaving Leah behind, but he'd stopped speaking entirely by the time they were about fifty miles from where they expected to find Maria's scout.

They ran a few more miles in complete silence, and then Jasper came to a stop and said he needed a few minutes alone. When he asked if he could use the satellite phone, Peter had handed it over without a word. Alice knew what he wanted privacy for, so she just gave him a hug and reassured him that they'd wait right there for him.

Once Jasper knew he was out of hearing range, he sat on the ground under a tree and dialed a number he knew by heart.

"Jas?"

Jasper almost managed a smile at hearing Rosalie's voice. They hadn't been gone too terribly long by that point, only about two weeks, but he already missed the woman he'd loved like a sister for seven decades. "Hey."

"Are you okay?" she asked quietly. There was none of the brusqueness or impatience in her voice that was often there, or the panic he'd heard when he called her after his and Alice's first meeting with Maria. Rosalie just sounded worried. She knew exactly what it was costing him to walk into Maria's camp, just for the sake of helping a woman who didn't truly deserve his help.

Jasper didn't answer right away and he was grateful that Rose just quietly waited for him to untangle his thoughts.

"Yes and no," he said eventually. "I'm not physically hurt, and I'm not in danger, but emotionally? It feels like there's a storm raging inside me. I feel unsteady in a way I haven't since about 1950," he admitted.

Rosalie just hummed in acknowledgment. The two of them had more than one conversation about the possibility of this happening before Jasper left Washington.

They both knew Jasper leaving Leah was going to be difficult, and even physically painful as the bond between them was strained under the distance separating them, but it was the time he'd have to spend at Maria's camp that they'd talked about the most often. Rosalie and Emmett were the only people he'd been completely honest with about how he felt about that. Like Rose, Jasper wasn't a huge fan of showing his vulnerability, although that had changed some once he found his mate. From the very beginning, he'd laid himself bare to Leah.

The rest of his family - along with Seth, Sue, Charlie, and Bella - had been so worried about their little mission that Jasper didn't want to add to that by expressing his own worry. He didn't outright lie when asked how he felt, if he was nervous, but he downplayed the true extent of the turmoil he was feeling.

"How close are you?" Rose asked.

"A little under fifty miles from the northern boundary line of her territory. I don't know exactly where the camp is but she'll undoubtedly have a scout keeping watch for us."

"So you have forty miles to brace yourself and get that stoic mask firmly in place?"

Jasper nodded even though she couldn't see him. "We both know I can't afford to show any weakness."

That was a small contributor to Jasper's uneasiness. Back in his bad old days, he'd learned quickly that showing any emotions only brought him trouble he didn't want to deal with, so he'd gotten used to keeping everything locked up inside him. He lived like that for decade upon decade upon decade. It was only turning Peter that changed that, and even then, it took him a good couple years to drop his guard completely.

Since meeting Alice and joining the Cullens, he'd slowly gotten used to openly showing his emotions and found it made his life about eighty-seven percent easier. Not only did it allow him to create real, lasting bonds with them, but it meant he wasn't constantly having to expend unnecessary energy to suppress or conceal his true self.

As an empath, it isn't easy pretending that you feel no emotion.

But by the time Jasper stepped a single toe over that northern boundary line, he needed to close himself off again. At least outwardly.

"How are the others doing?" Rosalie asked, worried that the weight of Peter, Charlotte, and Alice's emotions were only adding to the strain he was under.

"They're about as uneasy as I am," he answered. "Which is completely understandable, but it doesn't do me any favors."

Rosalie was quiet for a few moments, knowing there wasn't really anything she could say to ease her brother's mind. "You think you'll be at camp long?"

"I doubt it. She's eager enough to set out that I don't think she'll drag her feet. My guess is less than a day."

"Well that's something, I guess," she sighed.

Jasper acknowledged it was. Once they were traveling south again, there would probably be less strain on him. He still couldn't afford to show any weakness in front of Maria because he knew she'd try to exploit it somehow, but he was fairly confident everyone's emotions would settle down some after they were out of Maria's territory.

Peter and Charlotte were struggling with the same thing Jasper was. They were walking straight back into a setting that had been nothing but hell for all three of them, a place they'd thought was behind them forever. Alice obviously hadn't been part of Maria's coven, but she'd had her first vision of Jasper when she woke up in 1920 and she saw him on a regular basis until they finally met in 1948. She'd seen an extraordinary amount of his life in the army.

"Can you try and block out everyone else and focus only on Alice?" Rosalie asked after another moment. "She doesn't have the same trauma you, Peter, and Charlotte do. And before you argue that you have no lasting trauma from your time with Maria, I'll just go ahead and point out that we wouldn't be having this conversation at all if you didn't."

Jasper laughed a little because she was right. He was going to argue that he didn't have trauma from his time in the south, and the way he was feeling in that moment did contradict that belief.

Rosalie continued, not wanting him to have to verbally agree with her. They both knew it was true, but she also knew that was a difficult thing for him to admit. "My guess is the closer to camp you get, Alice's emotions will shift. You know how she feels about you, so some of that nervousness will disappear and she'll be her typical fiercely protective self with that calm, focused determination she's so good at."

"True," Jasper laughed. The two stayed quiet for another minute before Jasper sighed. "I need to get going. They're waiting for me."

Rosalie sighed too. "Alright. Call when you can, okay?"

"I will," Jasper assured her.

"And don't forget I love you. We all do."

Jasper smiled and felt some of the tension leave his shoulders. "I love you too."

After he hung up, he made a quick call to Leah, just to hear her voice one more time before walking back into his personal hell.

By the time Jasper rejoined the others, he felt a little more confident that he could get through this whole thing without some weird empathic breakdown that would knock everyone within a ten-mile radius clear off their feet.

"You good?" Peter asked quietly.

Jasper just nodded and handed back the phone. "I'll be fine."

It didn't escape anyone's notice that he hadn't actually answered yes to Peter's question, but after eyeing him carefully for a few moments, they saw that he looked marginally better than he had ten minutes before. It probably helped that the three of them had spent those ten minutes trying to wrangle their tumultuous emotions and push them to the back of their minds in an attempt to ease some of the weight on him.

Reassured that he was ready to keep going, they all started running again.


Alice knew she needed to keep her shit together. She knew she needed to stay calm, and she knew she needed to try and ensure that her instinctive protectiveness over Jasper, and by extension over Peter and Charlotte, was her most prominent emotion.

But boy was that hard to do when she had to watch him closing himself off more and more with every passing mile. By the time they were a mile out from Maria's northern boundary line, it was almost like she was looking at the impassive man she'd watched lead an army from a distance all through the 1920s and '30s. The man whose only moments of peace and happiness had to stay hidden out of necessity. It was only when he and Peter were far from any watchful eyes that Jasper let his guard down.

Alice would be lying if she said it didn't hurt her heart a little.

There were, however, some subtle differences from the man she'd used her visions to watch over all those years ago.

Back then, Jasper's face was expressionless a lot of the time, but his eyes and his body spoke volumes. His eyes were typically cold and hard, and his muscles were always coiled, prepared to immediately strike out at any threat. Now, his eyes were guarded and watchful, constantly scanning their surroundings, but there was still a softness to them that had only appeared after escaping Maria. Now, the line of his shoulders was taut, but there was still some of that looseness to his body that only came after years of living a life where he didn't have to always be vigilant, always watching his back. A life where he knew there wasn't a threat around every corner.

Those were the things Alice held onto. The things that helped her push aside her uneasiness to focus on her protectiveness. Those subtle differences - the contrast of who he'd been as Maria's Major and who he'd become as Jasper Whitlock - were the very things she wanted to protect.

When Jasper came to a stop and held his hand out to tell them to do the same, Alice knew it was because they were now close enough to Maria's scout that he was in range of Jasper's gift.

"Let him come to us," he said quietly, subtly moving so Alice, Peter, and Charlotte were behind him.

As they waited for the scout to come into view, Alice closed her eyes and scanned the future again. She hadn't seen anything yet that was a cause for concern, but if there was ever a time to take full advantage of her gift so they could be armed with as much information as possible, this was it.

"There are two of them," she whispered to Jasper when she snapped back to the present. "One in front of us and another who's going to circle around and come from behind. He'll be within your range in three… two… one."

Jasper nodded when he could feel the second vamp, and Peter then shifted slightly so Charlotte and Alice were in front of him. He was still facing forward, but he had his head turned slightly so he could see anything that was coming up behind them. At any other time, Alice and Charlotte would have rolled their eyes a little with some amused smiles at the protective stances, but it wasn't the time for that. They both knew Jasper and Peter would only be more ill at ease if the two of them weren't covered from the front and the back.

Jasper was just about to ask Alice if there was anything to worry about with the second approaching vampire when she briefly put her hand on his back and silently let him feel her reassurance that everything would be fine. It wasn't an ambush, Maria had just decided to have two vampires lead them in - one to show them the way and one to follow from behind.

Alice had a sneaking suspicion that Maria was doing it as a way to unsettle them.

They weren't exactly being treated as enemy combatants crossing onto her land, but having someone at their backs was her way of silently implying that she didn't fully trust them. Which was bullshit. Maria knew perfectly well that they weren't coming with some secret, nefarious plan to destroy her. She was just a woman who was used to having full control over every situation and every person around her, and she was annoyed that she didn't have any control over the four vampires who were coming there strictly to help her.

Jasper wasn't at all surprised by the decision to send a second vamp to follow behind them. Not only was it exactly what he would do if he was in their position, but he knew Maria about as well as it was possible to know a woman like her. His thinking differed slightly from Alice's though. It was definitely Maria's attempt at a power move, but he didn't think it was because she was trying to pretend she didn't trust them just for the sake of unsettling them.

He thought it was far more likely that she'd tried to sow some doubt in the final two members of her coven about whether or not the three Whitlocks and Alice might have an ulterior motive for traveling all the way to Mexico to help her.

All of the vampires currently in Maria's 'army' had been with her for multiple years and were well past their newborn year. They weren't with Maria because she forced them to be, they were there because they wanted to be. They were all loyal to her, so if Maria had subtly implied she didn't trust them, the two vamps Jasper still hadn't met would treat them as potential threats to their sire.

It was why Jasper had stopped to wait rather than just crossing into Maria's territory unannounced. Yes they were expected, but it didn't cost Jasper anything to let the scouts have the illusion of being in control.

Besides, going off the incoming emotions, Jasper knew Maria hadn't been as successful as she'd thought. Or perhaps Sebastian had just spoken up in their defense and undermined his sire. Like Sebastian, the approaching scouts were cautious and guarded but they weren't hostile and they weren't coming with the intention of a fight. Unlike Sebastian, who hadn't felt any fear meeting Jasper and Peter, the last two members of Maria's coven had some trepidation about the four vamps coming onto their land. Not fear exactly, but they had less confidence than Maria's second.

Nearly everyone in their world who knew the Whitlock name, and certainly everyone in the south who was connected to the Southern Wars, knew that Jasper and Peter had earned their reputations.

Alice scanned the future one final time and then quickly reached around Jasper to pull his sleeves down. He'd gotten so accustomed to living with a family who never batted an eye at his scars anymore that he sometimes didn't think about how unsettling they were to strangers. The less scars on display, the less edgy the incoming vamps would be.

Jasper nodded his thanks and then smiled inwardly at a memory from the two years he and Alice had spent traveling between meeting at that diner in Philadelphia and finding the Cullens.

They'd crossed paths with a nomad on the east coast who thought instigating a fight with them would be a fun way to spend an afternoon. He'd seen tiny little Alice and a vamp who was covered in bitemarks and came to the completely wrong conclusion. He thought the number of scars on Jasper was actually a sign that he couldn't fight well. If he could, he never would have been bitten at all. He had no idea how old Jasper was or that he'd spent the better part of a century in the wars down south.

The nomad's incorrect assumptions had cost him his life that day. Much to his surprise, the fight was over remarkably quickly. Not even three minutes passed between the moment the nomad blocked their path and the moment Alice dropped a match on him.

Jasper pushed the memory from his mind and focused back on the present when the first vamp came into view in front of them. The one circling from behind still wasn't within hearing distance, and seemed to be waiting before making his presence known.

While Jasper was turning his focus away from the past, Alice was turning hers away from the future.

As soon as she was confident there was nothing coming except the four of them being escorted to Maria, she directed her attention inward. With one part of her mind, she listened as Jasper spoke to the first scout - Miguel - and she nodded when Jasper introduced her, but most of her mind was focused on keeping her emotions steady. It wasn't always the easiest thing to change how you feel, but she'd had decades of practice by that point, and she knew in that moment that it was more important to protect Jasper from her slightly turbulent emotions than it was to protect him from any physical threat.

"What signal did y'all work out to tell your friend to come in from behind us?" Jasper asked Miguel, impatient to get moving.

Miguel felt a little bit of surprise that Jasper knew there was another person who would be escorting them, but he wasn't completely shocked. His surprise also didn't show on his face. Without the benefit of his gift, Jasper wouldn't have known what he was feeling. The dude had an excellent poker face and he absently wondered if he could get some pointers from the guy. His own poker face had been slipping since he'd met Leah.

Ignoring the pain that flared in his chest at the thought of his mate, and without waiting for a response from Miguel, Jasper let out a loud and piercing whistle. Unless one of them was gifted in some way, it was the most logical way for the two vamps from Maria's coven to communicate with each other at that distance.

Miguel scowled a little at the move, not liking that Jasper knew the signal, and irritated that he'd given it before Miguel was ready.

Jasper just shrugged, unbothered by his annoyance. "Sorry, but we don't have unlimited time. I'd prefer to just get this whole thing moving along."

Miguel's coven mate came closer, but he stayed about a hundred yards behind him. He was virtually silent as he moved, and again, without the benefit of his gift, Jasper might not have known that he was closing in on them. If he was in the habit of offering praise to strangers, Jasper might have said he was impressed that Maria had taught them so well. That wasn't his habit though so he just stayed quiet and waited.

Thanks to a well-timed vision, Alice knew the still-unknown vamp was there so she subtly signaled to Peter that he was behind them.

"We're not here for a fight," Peter reminded Miguel with an exasperated sigh. "We're here to find your coven mate, so if you actually want our help, maybe stop pretending we've come for some kind of ambush to kill all of you. Not only do I have far less patient than my brother here, but he's also a hell of a lot nicer than I am. Maria means very little to me, and everything she does mean to me is purely on the negative end of the spectrum. My mate and I are willing to help her because Jasper thinks it's the right thing to do, not because I think she deserves our help. If y'all can't chill the fuck out and get moving, I'm perfectly happy to turn around and go home."

"And the only thing that comes from stalling is our irritation with you and Maria's anger for delaying our departure," Alice added calmly. "And I don't mean this in any way to imply that we're hostile, but like Peter, I'm far less patient than Jasper. However, like both of them, I'm not against using violence to get my point across."

Jasper couldn't even help it. He snorted a laugh when he felt the skepticism from both vamps in Maria's coven. "Don't let her appearance fool you. She may be tiny, and she may not have spent any time fighting in the wars, but she's a fierce little thing when she needs to be and I'd put my money on her every time. Even against Maria herself."

Peter and Charlotte both nodded their agreement. "We all would," Peter said.

Miguel's eyes darted back to Alice and she gave him one of her bright, cheerful smiles. "It's true. I tend to get a little grumpy when I'm irritated, and I'm not very tolerant of threats against the people I love. I have no interest in a fight with any of you, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be a mistake to underestimate me."

Miguel gave Alice a long and lingering look, then he nodded once and tipped his head in the direction he'd come from. "Come on. I'll show you the way."


Besides Maria's impatience to get moving, the other thing working in Jasper's favor when it came to entering her camp - the thing that made it feel like he was walking into something similar to his own personal hell, but not an exact replica of it - was that she'd destroyed all of her newborns before setting out to find Jasper a few months before.

The only additional emotions he had to contend with were those of Maria, Sebastian, Miguel, and the fourth member of her coven - a young man named Andrew. There wasn't that same turbulent edge to the air, that feeling of barely restrained violence that he'd lived with for so long. And because there were no newborns to train, punish, or destroy, there were no fighting rings, no screams of pain or rage, and no fire pits strategically placed around the camp.

So yeah. It was similar to the hell he'd escaped over eighty years before, but it was just different enough that Jasper didn't react exactly the way he'd feared he would. He didn't feel like he was drowning or suffocating, he merely felt uncomfortable. Slightly anxious. Like his skin was a little too tight and there were a thousand needles prickling it.

The camp Maria currently inhabited was more like an abandoned farm or ranch than an actual camp. There were a few permanent structures dotted around, including an actual house that Maria and the others appeared to live in. And the first thing Jasper registered as they approached the house was the sound of three separate heartbeats.

He sighed to himself. What a very Maria thing to do.

The heartbeats were thready and barely there, and going by the lack of emotions, he'd wager that the humans were close to death.

As Miguel led Jasper and the others into the yard, Maria stepped out the front door, her face nearly blank but an unmistakably amused and slightly gleeful glint in her eyes.

"You'll have to try harder than that to break me," Jasper told her, rolling his eyes a little at her stupidity. He'd been solely feeding off animals for nearly as long as he'd spent in the army, and he often lived in close proximity to human towns and cities. Maria's spiteful attempt to 'seduce' him with human blood was completely ineffective.

Alice was briefly pulled into the future and then she rolled her eyes also. "That won't make a bit of difference. We already told you about our brother's mate being human. The girl trips over air so we're very accustomed by now to being around fresh blood."

Maria just laughed lightly and shrugged. "Your diet is unnatural. It works in my favor for you both to be at your strongest."

"Bullshit," Jasper scoffed. "This has nothing to do with strength and everything to do with you being pissed and lashing out at me. But it won't work. And I already warned you about using your manners," he reminded her. Maria glared at him and then turned her eyes to Peter and Charlotte. Her anger and resentment as she looked at Charlotte had Jasper growling at her. "Watch it."

Charlotte's face as she gazed back at Maria was surprisingly serene. Her emotions were a little tangled up, but it didn't show on her face. "Maria," she nodded. "Lovely to see you again."

Maria's glare turned to a scowl, irritated that Charlotte didn't appear to fear her the way she once had.

Before Maria could snarl out a reply that would surely annoy everyone he'd come with, Jasper cleared his throat to get her attention off Charlotte. "How long 'til you're ready to move?"

Maria sighed long and hard. The three former members of her army weren't nearly as fun to try and torment now that she had no power over them. "An hour," she answered shortly, not willing to admit that she'd been ready to leave for hours. "There are some things I need to get in order first," she added with a slight sneer, echoing Jasper's earlier excuse back at him just to really nail home the point that she was getting back at him for all of his delays.

"Fine," Jasper nodded, completely unruffled or unsurprised by her attitude. "While you're doing whatever it is you're pretending you need to do, where can I find Sebastian?" he asked, merely to be polite. He already knew the man was somewhere on the other side of the house.

Miguel and Andrew had been silently watching the scene, a little uncomfortable that these strange vampires were so openly disdainful of their sire. But both of them silently acknowledged that their feelings for the woman they'd served under weren't a complete surprise. They'd both heard many, many stories about the Major's time leading Maria's army, which meant they'd also heard about the man who'd been his second and the petite blond at their side who'd ultimately been the catalyst for all three of them escaping.

Life in Maria's army was often harsh, and it had been infinitely worse when she still had a steady supply of newborns. Jasper and Peter Whitlock had lived that life far longer than either of them had.

Sebastian walked around the side of the house then and greeted Jasper and Peter by shaking their hands, but he waited for Jasper to introduce Alice and Charlotte before holding his hand out to them. He didn't have much first-hand experience being around mates, but he knew how protective they were of each other and he didn't want to risk ruffling Peter's feathers. Maria had told him that Alice wasn't Jasper's mate but he should treat her as if she was. As far as Maria could tell when she'd met the two a while back, they were every bit as protective of each other as mates were.

After the introductions were out of the way, Jasper got done to business. "I assume you have maps?" he asked Sebastian. Hearing Maria sigh quietly and turn to go back into the house, Jasper figured it couldn't hurt to offer her an olive branch. They were about to spend a lot of time in close proximity and it didn't do any of them any favors for there to be animosity between them. He called her name and then took off the backpack he was carrying and walked up the porch steps. "I've got plenty of room in here if you want," he offered, handing it to her. "I'm sure whatever you want to bring along will fit and that way you won't have to run with a bag."

Aside from a few changes of clothes, none of them had any need to carry much with them as they started their journey south, as they had no need for food or water. Some clothes, some maps, and maybe a phone were all he anticipated Maria packing.

Jasper had very deliberately made sure nothing personal of his was anywhere where Maria could access it. He had a whole slew of photos and videos of Leah and the rest of his family, but they were locked away in his phone that was tucked in his pocket. The only other personal items he had with him were the letters from Sue and the other elders. Peter's bag had a secret compartment, so they were hidden in there in a waterproof pouch.

Maria looked at Jasper with a little bit of surprise, but she recognized the olive branch for what it was, and thanked him as she took the bag from him. Like Jasper, she knew animosity did them no favors so she tried to push aside everything negative she was feeling. She needed their help to find Matthew, and the only thing antagonizing them would accomplish was making them turn back and leave her to keep searching without them. She looked at Peter and Charlotte and gestured to the house behind her, offering an olive branch of her own. "Are you thirsty?"

Both of them shook their heads. "No thank you, we hunted before leaving Texas," Charlotte answered. She even managed to give the woman she hated with every fiber of her being a polite smile.

When Maria went inside, Jasper and the others followed Sebastian, Miguel, and Andrew to a small outbuilding behind the house. It seemed to be a command center of sorts, and Sebastian already had maps laid out on the desk.

Jasper, Alice, Peter, and Charlotte listened closely as Maria's second showed them every known boundary line of every coven in Mexico and Central America. From Alice's vision, they knew they'd eventually end up in Venezuela, but they still needed to search everywhere relevant along the way. It was unlikely that Matthew would be anywhere close to Maria's territory, but Jasper had learned a long time ago that nothing was impossible.

Jasper and Peter knew many of the coven leaders of the various armies, and they were both a little surprised by how many had actually managed to survive the last eight decades. They asked for any information Sebastian, Miguel, and Andrew had about each army, including numbers and any known gifts. After a moment of consideration, Jasper also asked if they knew of any mated pairs among Maria's enemies. He had no intention of killing anyone's mate, but sometimes threats were enough to force cooperation or information sharing.

It took less than an hour to learn everything they needed to know for the time being, and when Maria rejoined them, Jasper asked Miguel and Andrew if they'd be coming with them or staying behind. As he'd expected, they were staying back to watch over Maria's territory. He gave them the number to the satellite phone and asked them to please call if they learned anything that might help them with the search.

As the group of six vampires began their run southwest, Jasper internally breathed a sigh of relief. They hadn't even been at Maria's camp for two hours, and as soon as it was behind them, he felt the pressure on his chest ease up. He'd gone back to the one place he'd always sworn he'd never see again, and he'd gotten through it just fine. No empathic breakdown at all.

The only strain he felt now was the painful tugging in his chest as he got further and further from his mate. Unlike leaving Maria's camp behind and the relief that brought, Jasper knew nothing would ease the ache in his heart until he was back at Leah's side.