Chapter Thirteen

Revelations

Bella Swan

March 2005

"So, how'd that feel?" Jasper asked me from where he stood on a low ridge across from me.

"That was great!" I nearly smiled at him as I dropped the deer I'd just drained.

I felt more encouraged than ever that there was a different way of life possible for me. I'd had no idea how different this coven functioned and, I had to admit, I'd been skeptical that animal blood would truly be an alternative for me. I was sure Jasper had been messing with me as he explained the nature in which they hunt animals. Now, I felt like I might actually do well here with this strange coven.

Jasper just chuckled, "that really wasn't what I was expecting you to say. You had to have been starving to think that was remotely appetizing."

"Oh, no, animal blood is terrible." I assured him that I wasn't insane. "But I don't care what it tastes like as long as it means I don't have to hurt anyone ever again."

His eyes softened as he joined me, "it shouldn't be so surprising to me, but it is. Alice told me how much we'd have in common, and of course I always believe her, but it's still surprising that I'm finding so many similarities."

"What do we have in common?" I asked and he motioned for me to sit on a fallen tree with him.

It was still difficult to talk myself into trusting him. After he'd taken me down during my brief lapse in sanity, he'd practically begged to be the first person I choose to trust. I wanted to be able to share things with him, especially since I knew he'd understand the life I'd lived the best out of anyone else from his coven, but it was still so hard to relax. He seemed kind but guarded at the same time. It was like he wasn't fully comfortable letting people see under his mask, but I wasn't one to judge him for that at all.

Finally, I decided I was just too curious to leave the topic alone. I joined him where he sat and gave him my full attention.

"There's several things about our time spent with Maria that are vastly different. Our relationship with her, our status in the group, how much time we spent there, and how we let it change us." Jasper sighed again, and it was so tired-sounding that I worried about him. I was going to tell him he didn't have to talk anymore, but he kept going. "I don't know if she said anything to you about this, but Maria and I...we had a relationship. I would say a romantic one but even that's pushing the limits."

I was horrified, "you were partners? With her?"

"I know, I know-"

"I mean, I thought I'd figured out why Maria seemed to hate Alice so much, she was so mean in how she described Alice to me, but I didn't expect it was a mutual feeling. I thought she was just jealous you'd chosen Alice as a partner and that she thought you were only here because of her." I ranted. "What could you have possibly seen in Maria?"

Jasper groaned in embarrassment, "I know, Bella, trust me I had a long time where I struggled with understanding that time in my existence. I'm so shamed by it now. But, you have to understand something. I honestly didn't think there was anything better for me out in the world. When Maria discovered my gift and started taking a special interest in me, I convinced myself it was genuine feelings of care she had for me. I was young then, I hadn't experienced a lot of feelings for myself, and I was not trained in my gift enough to spot her lie." He hung his head down and I could see the pain it brought him.

"By the time I'd realized I was just another in a line of lovers, that her mate had been killed decades before I'd been changed, it was too late to convince myself that she didn't truly love me. We were together twenty years before she ever admitted her mates death to me. That's a kind of relationship that you don't recover from losing. The loss of a mate is maddening. At the time, I'd rather believe the lie of her love than live with the truth. I was already so depressed because of my gift and surroundings. I couldn't face the fact that I'd never be respected or loved. I was just a puppet on some strings to her, like you were to her. I was held in a little higher regard, but I was never close to being an equal. Plus, the moment she sensed a major shift in my priorities she quickly began planning how to dispose of me."

"What happened?" I asked him. "What shifted that made you so untrustworthy to her that she'd try to kill you? After all that time together?"

"I'd been with her for nearly seventy years, doing her bidding and terminating anyone she asked me to, but one of the yearly mass disposals really got to me." His mood shifted and became a little brighter. "She'd kept several past their year marks, the ones with more potential and better fighting abilities, and one in particular, Peter, stood out from the rest. He nearly matched me in fighting ability and was much younger than me. He and I were the closest things to friends we could have in Maria's army. I consider him as one of my best friends now. Well, he'd met his mate in one the newborns marked to be killed in that years disposal. When it was Charlotte's turn, Peter told her to run, and the two of them tried to escape right in front of me."

"What did you do?" I gasped.

I couldn't think of any time I'd been so interested to hear about Maria's army. The complexities of Jasper's time as a soldier, mainly because Maria relied too much on him, all seemed much more interesting (and dangerous) than my time with her had been. It seemed like the chaos had been better managed by Jasper, but barely. It also seemed like he'd ruled with more fear and manipulation than I even thought possible.

Jasper smirked at me, "Charlotte was not going to be my next target, even if she was deserting. I realized how deeply Peter cared for her by risking himself to get them both to safety. I wouldn't end Peter, he'd been my only friend, and so I let them both go."

That didn't match up at all with the vision of the Major that Maria had given me. Words like "skilled", "lethal to extremes", and "unbelievably talented" ran through my mind. She said he'd help her be an unstoppable force again and that no coven would ever be able to defeat her. Jasper letting his friend go, to save his lover from a cruel end, and helping them escape off into the night to try to find a better life just didn't sound like something the dangerous and lethal Major would do.

Despite my inner turmoil, Jasper continued on, "year after year the killing of the newborns made me so sick and depressed. I could feel everything they felt. The fear and the pain. No amount of me using my talent to flood their systems with sedation or dopamine ever worked completely. When the moment just before their end came, then the happy feelings stopped and the terror set in. When Maria found out I'd let Peter and Charlotte go, she started to become paranoid of me. She didn't like the feeling that her grip on me was loose and convinced herself that I had to be killed before I could turn on her. She rounded up some of the older ones, started to make plans with them about turning against me, and she promised them my position if one of them managed to kill me."

"Oh my god!" I gasped in horror. "That's so terrible."

"Well, I was no better." He hung his head again. "After the first few attacks on me, I started recognizing more of the signs that things weren't the same plastic perfectness we'd had before. I started my own quiet campaign to have them turn against her. Whenever she would find out I'd sent someone after her, she'd lose her mind and launch herself at me. I'd grab her and fill her head full of so much dopamine and lust that she'd forget completely about my involvement in the attacks against her. And we'd continue on until the next attack on either one of us."

"Okay, sure, you both tried to wage a quiet war against each other, but she'd been acting like a monster for forever at that point! And she still is a complete nightmare!" I refuted his stance that he wasn't better than her. "I'm only sorry that you weren't successful in ridding the world of her."

Jasper just chuckled, "I was nearly there. I'd just put a plan in place that was perfect in design. Nothing could go wrong and I'd be rid of her forever, but, I didn't want to lead the army in her absence. I couldn't just kill them all either. Anyways, I didn't go through with any of my plans in the end. Peter, my friend I'd let go, returned with his mate one evening. They tried to convince me that the north was free of any fighting and that they had lived peacefully in the years they'd been away. They knew how tormented I was with Maria and begged me to flee with them. After all that time of being a monster, I didn't hesitate. Even if the north turned out to be just as complicated, I was needing any change I could find."

"And then you found Alice?" I guessed.

"No, not quite." He laughed and I could tell that we both heard the lithe footfall approaching us. "I spent a few months with Peter and Charlotte before I left to wander on my own. My emotions were all over the place and I was accidentally influencing them when I got into one of my moods. I was on my own for about seven years, struggling to adjust to a more calm way of existing and failing miserably, when Alice found me."

"Finally!" Alice laughed as she joined us in the small clearing of trees near our shared seat. "He'd kept me waiting twenty-eight years at that point, you know." She fussed teasingly.

"You learning the tricks to your visions is not on me." He bickered with her. "I only feel bad about not leaving the army sooner. Oh, and that you waited at that dinner everyday for a week."

"Who knew it rained so much in Philadelphia?" Alice griped before explaining the missing information to me, "I'd seen that he'd come into that specific dinner to escape a storm in the city for a bit. He couldn't walk out of the city in a storm like that without attracting attention. But, I had no idea what day it would be, just that it would be raining. Unlucky for me, it rained every day for a week straight right around the time I knew to wait for him."

"I had barely stepped through the door when she waved me over to the booth she sat in, and, as I walked towards her, I couldn't figure out why I was choosing to join her at all. I guess that I'd realized she wasn't a threat, but the way her eyes seemed to know me was so unsettling."

"I know that feeling." I agreed and they both laughed at me. Again, I hadn't meant to make a joke.

"Anyways," Jasper recovered and continued on, "she fussed that I had kept her waiting for too long and started telling me everything about myself in order to prove her visions were real to me."

"And he's never questioned me since." Alice smiled proudly. "You, on the other hand, are apparently going to be a little bit more tricky to convince." She turned her gaze on me and her serious expression threw me for a moment. "Edward told me that you almost didn't join him and Carlisle in the study this morning. He said that you didn't want to feel like a bother. Bella, you don't have to feel like you're a disruption to any of us. Least of all with those two. We all want you here, no matter what, so please trust that."

"I'm starting to see that, Alice." I nodded. "Thank you, by the way. I didn't realize just how much you all were expecting me to stay. The room and the plans that were put in place would've been for nothing, and you worked so hard."

"It was my pleasure, really." She smiled like I was one of her favorite people in the world.

Alice had said that she'd seen Jasper in a vision nearly three decades before meeting him. She'd seen me since December, and I began to wonder just how much she lived in the future. How often did she plan and make decisions based on potentially huge and life-changing future events? And, if she'd seen me and immediately planned for my joining them, then what kind of future did she see for me with her coven? Surely I couldn't be that solid of an outcome. Not with as much fear and distrust I'd had for them so far.

"Alice," I chose to venture into the subject carefully, "you saw Jasper and knew you'd be partners one day, right? You saw how important he'd be to you, or, what your lives might be like together?"

"Yes." She nodded and her eyes looked mischievous again. "I'd seen the Cullens too and knew that we'd be family. My visions of Carlisle and Edward, and then the others as they entered the family, all helped me to learn about this life. Edward was my brother immediately in my own mind. It was freaky to me when we joined the family and Edward was terrified of me. It was hard to process that he didn't know a thing about me when I already loved him so much after thirty years of seeing him."

"Then, should I even ask what you saw about my future that got you so excited to have me stay?" I asked her. "It had to have been something really good with all the work you put into trying to make me feel comfortable here. You've already done so much in such little time, like I was a sure thing."

"Ooo!" She squealed in excitement. "You're going to-"

Jasper launched himself at her. In trying to shut her mouth, he covered most of her face with his huge hands. I had noticed how drastic their height difference was, Jasper towered a good foot and a half over Alice, but, as she grabbed at his hands, the difference was even more apparent. Her hands seemed like a dolls hands compared to his. Again, I questioned the view of the Major I had in my head. He was able to treat someone so small but so unbelievably powerful with such care and devotion. That didn't align with Maria's description at all to me.

"Darlin', should you really be telling her anything about your visions of her? Like this?" Jasper worried to her. "You don't want to freak her out or overwhelm her, do you? Think of your experiences with our family when we first joined them. Are you certain that she won't panic?"

Alice peeled his hands off her face, "I love how much you worry about her, but I do know how to control myself now." She giggled. "I wasn't going to say much at all, really. But now I might tell her every little detail, down the the pearl-colored ribbons, just to spite you. Also, you're so lucky I didn't bite your hand just then." She warned him.

"So? Should I know something, or, am I better off in the dark?" I asked. I wondered if I was making a terrible decision to get involved with my own future.

"Well," Alice smiled fondly at me again, "I can tell you that you're going to be so loved here, more than you might think, and it's going to be wonderful."

"And we're going to be best friends, aren't we?"

She and Jasper both blinked in surprise at my statement, "How'd you guess that?" Jasper asked. "With as pushy and cryptic as she's been?"

"The way you smile at me, how you talk to me like there's some inside joke between us, and just how much you've done for me. I'm sure there's things I don't even know you've done to help me." I explained to them. "I know there's the more basic things like the room and clothes, but I think you're partially behind the plans of how everyone should treat me while I'm adjusting. I'm assuming it's mostly been Jasper's advice mixed with your visions that have helped you all figure out the right path. So, thank you both."

They stared at me for a moment, "That's all correct. Well, Carlisle had some things to say on how to address your trauma too. He knows so much about psychology, and he had plenty to go by based on my experience he saw, so he's partially behind the plan as well." Jasper finally broke the silence. "And, of course, you're right in that Alice has seen plenty of your friendship together, along with other relationships in the house."

That was unsurprising to me, "makes sense. I can see how we'd be friends."

"Really?" Alice smiled.

"Easily." I nodded. "You're kind and your energy is so cheerful. I've been surrounded by people who were the worst versions of themselves. The friend I thought I had was just manipulating me along with everyone else. I can see that you're not that way, even with a massively powerful gift capable of similar influence."

Alice sighed happily, "I love to hear you say that. I can't wait for you to experience everything that I have. We'll be a dynamic duo, you and me."

I took a deep breath as I tried to steady myself. The talk of the future I wanted, but one that wasn't close to happening yet, was making my head spin. However, with my breath, I recognized suddenly that Jasper and Alice's combined scents were extremely familiar to me.

"Oh my god. It was you, wasn't it?" I looked back and forth between Alice and Jasper.

Alice's head quirked to the side in confusion, "what did we do?"

"Garrett! The two of you told Garrett I'd be coming along with Archer soon and told him I'd be in trouble! Didn't you?" I asked them.

I felt entirely overwhelmed that they had gone to an even more extreme level to help me than I'd imagined.

Jasper grinned down at Alice before meeting my eye contact again, "you're a quick one, Bella."

"Before you get upset with me, just know that I was only intervening in order to be sure the outcome was in yours, and our, favor!" Alice rushed through her words quickly. "There was a small probability that Garrett wouldn't realize the warning signs of your abuse and wouldn't help you. Still, even in visions where he did help you, there was a chance that Archer would use his gift to have Garrett help him dispose of you. I couldn't let that happen. I had to step in. Jasper would never have let me gone alone though and so he came along too. Please, please don't be mad."

"Woah, Alice, breathe!" I begged her. "I'm not mad. I'm the furthest thing from mad right now."

"Really?" She relaxed. "You're not mad we manipulated the outcome a tiny little bit?"

"The both of you left your home, where you're safe and loved, and traveled across states just to make sure I'd get away from Archer forever." I told her, and a heavy emotion I couldn't name bubbled inside me. "I can't even begin to tell you how much that means to me. I don't think anyone has ever gone to those lengths to make sure I'd be safe. Thank you."

"You're very welcome." Alice smiled sweetly at me. "Our honor, really."

"It took everything in us to not step in ourselves and bring you home with us then." Jasper confessed to me. "Alice saw that wouldn't go over very well at all. I'd scare you too badly and her talk of her visions would send you over the edge. Even when you got to Washington, when you'd stumble across Edward or someone else in the woods, you'd spend quite some time avoiding us at all costs."

"Almost as similar as throwing a rock to distract someone away from your hiding spot." Alice smirked at me and I would've been blushing if I were human still. "That rock is on your dresser, by the way."

"Wait, what?" Jasper asked, but Alice shook her head. I realized we had our first inside joke between us as she winked at me. "Okay, anyways, I'm curious how you managed to put it together that we'd spoken to Garrett. How did you piece it all together?"

"Your scents." I told them easily. "Sitting here with you both, I realized that I recognized your combined scents. I smelled two foreign vampires in the area right before Archer and I met Garrett. I knew there was a male and a female scent, but Archer said that only Garrett was nearby. When we met Garrett, he didn't smell at all like either of the scents I'd ran across, and I thought that was strange, but I let it go to focus on the situation I was in. You're the vampires I smelled in the area. I must've crossed one of your paths."

"Very impressive." Jasper smiled proudly. "Anything else interesting happen on your way here?"

"The laughter in the forest." I said the moment I thought of it, and it seemed stupid to me that I hadn't connected those dots already. "It was Alice laughing off through the trees."

"Sorry, I couldn't help it." Alice didn't look at all sorry. "You were being so funny, hiding from the sun in the little hut you'd made, and I couldn't help but laugh. I didn't know if you'd even really heard me or not."

"I heard you, but I thought my mind was playing tricks on me or something so I let it go." I smirked back at her. "Wait, Jasper, were you implying that there's other things I might've missed than just the scents in the woods?"

"Well, we did trail you all the way back here, nearly, so I was curious to see if you'd caught us other times." He disclosed and my mouth dropped. "I knew you'd hide out from the sun, that was always one of Maria's favorite ways of keeping a firm hand on her army, and so we took the opportunity to get a little ahead of you both times you stopped for the daylight. You're a lot faster than we are still and got very far ahead of us both nights you spent running."

"We had to take a detour the first night to keep you from running right into us, actually." Alice giggled. "The day you spent in the forest, we made a wide arc around the path I knew you'd take so that you wouldn't smell us and get suspicious. We'd only been home about three hours before I saw you near Edward in the woods."

"So the others know then? That you went to make sure I'd arrive here safely?" I asked.

"They know now, yes." Alice agreed. "When we left, we told everyone that Peter and Charlotte were just a few states away and we wanted to find them and catch up. I apologized when we got home though, and told everyone the truth. We didn't want to disappoint everyone if we'd accidentally scared you off."

Jasper chuckled, "we didn't really need to apologize at all. The moment we told everyone that you were extremely close to arriving, they launched into preparing for you. It was the most excited I'd ever seen them act, and trust me this family can get very enthusiastic."

"Only Edward had no idea you'd show up soon." Alice revealed. "He was already out in the clearing, and I wouldn't risk going to tell him and accidentally running into your path."

I felt slightly bad then, especially when I knew I'd been planning to hurt Edward in order to get away right before Alice showed up. He'd had no idea it was me nearby, but he'd still called out to me anyway. I was beginning to think he was genuinely a good person.

"He was so nice. He was just trying to reach out to me, but I nearly decapitated him in order to escape your coven." I sighed. "I don't know how I'll ever make it up to him."

"Okay, didn't know about the decapitation plan...but I'm sure you will make it up to him." Jasper chuckled. "Come on, we should probably head back to the house before Esme starts to worry about the wild one."

"Hey," I faked a complaint, "I'm working on it."

Again, they laughed at me. However, instead of feeling awkward, I felt myself begin to grin. I'd actually been trying to be funny that time and apparently I'd succeeded.

As we trekked back towards the house at a slower pace, I realized the absurdity of my situation. I'd spoken with the Major for the better part of the afternoon and hadn't lost my life. I had even seemed to have made an easy friend in his future-seeing and all-knowing wife. They both had gone to so much trouble to ensure I'd make it to their family safely. Here I was, joking and making them laugh, like I was almost normal again. Out of the entire coven, I had not expected my first friends to be found in Jasper and Alice, but I was grateful anyways.