#jalice fanfiction
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Jalice Masterlist
(prompt response coming soon)
#jalice#jalice fanfiction#jasper x alice#alice x jasper#jasper hale x alice cullen#alice cullen x jasper hale#twilight fanfiction#twilight fandom#jalice masterlist#jasper hale#alice cullen
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So you know how there’s a group of us on here who think Jasper and Alice are “doomed” when it comes to the Volturi and we make a joke about all the events (New Moon) that makes it basically Edward and Bella’s fault that Aro knows of Alice’s existence..is there a fic that explores this? Maybe a conversation between Jasper and Edward, Jasper and Alice, Carlisle? I’m thirsty for this type of content. Like how is Jasper not bursting at the seams with fury, worry and frustration over this? That realisation that Alice will eventually be taken away from him.
Funny you should ask that... I am actually working on a new fic behind the scenes that follows up on this topic and this headcanon I posted a while back.
Other than that and a few unpublished drafts for Recollections chapters situated in New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn, which I have been working on too, I have unfortunately not read any content regarding this particular headcanon. I'd love some though! So if you come across some, PLEASE tell me all about it!
#the twilight saga#twilight renaissance#alice cullen#jasper hale#alice x jasper#jalice#jalice fanfiction
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*kicks fic into the void*
has it really been *looks at clipboard* almost 3 years since posting a jalice fic??? yes. am i as active as i was then? absolutely not. is this completely random considering the answer to those two questions? yes. anyway! i am officially throwing this bit of fic i had started writing into the void. i didn't realize i had 2k of it written but the following part is what i had planned to be the ending/what really inspired it
context!/summary: nomadic jasper au. Alice has been living with the cullens on her own for a while. Jasper has long since split from charlotte and peter. He stumbles across a small town with an unusually high (living) body count considering there's 4+ vampires residing there. never feels good enough to approach but soon he and alice are having their own little forest clearing visits. he knows she knows an uncanny amount about him. but still hasn't shown his face or introduced himself. until now
He’s standing in his usual tree; high enough that a human would never spot him, and with enough branch covering that he felt a little sense of protection from Alice.
Alice, who’s currently prattling on about her day, telling him how she had had the funniest visions of a guy named Mike Newton get shot down by a girl named Lauren.
Suddenly, her eyes lose focus a little and he loses his emotional read on her. It had freaked him out at first; she essentially disappeared to him. But he’s used to it now, even though his eyes do a quick sweep for any potential dangers. She comes to with a smile that seems mostly to herself.
“Anyway, I do believe it’s time for me to head back,” she says abruptly. Jasper frowns, never liking the thought of her leaving him to go back to that coven of vampires. “I’m sure you’ve already figured it out,” she interrupts, “but I just realized I’ve never formally introduced myself.” The small vampire is correct. He figured out all their names within a day of stumbling across their strange house. Still, he appreciates the sentiment of introducing oneself.
“I’m Alice Cullen,” she announces cheerfully, as seemed to be her default mood. “I’d love for you to introduce yourself, too.” A small frown graces her lips, and Jasper feels a twinge of shame at having been the one to put it there, even if done so indirectly. “Maybe one day you’ll do me the honor.”
She turns to leave, like every other day, never expecting anything from him. And Jasper, he has had enough of this hiding.
“Jasper,” he finds himself saying before he can second guess it. He takes his time descending branches in what he hopes is a graceful, non-scary manner. “My name is Jasper Whitlock.”
He doesn’t know what to expect, but it sure isn’t what happens next. The small vampire holds out her hand and smiles a smile so bright it’d put the sun to shame.
“I know. You’ve kept me waiting a long time.”
Clearly having lost all reason, he advances so he’s just a foot away from her. She still doesn’t flinch.
“My apologies, ma’am.”
Hand still extended, he knows this is one of those moments. One he’ll remember for the rest of his existence. She doesn’t react when he places his scar covered hand in her clean, petite one.
With a feeling of happiness stronger than he’d ever experienced and a warm feeling he wasn’t quite sure he knew a word for enveloping him, she starts to lead him towards the house.
And for the first time in nearly a century, he feels a feeling he’s never felt before.
Hope.
#lmaoooo wtf#y am i posting#it's sunday#have the ending of a fic ya'll#jalice fanfiction#mine#my word doc says i started this in september2019#anyway off to go read the rest of this#bc i really don't remember anything else but this bit#my fic
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The Call of the Night Series*
In a world where vampires live alongside humans in society, Alice, a mysterious vampire with a shaky past, is pulled into a world of deception and danger; where secrets are plentiful and every choice she makes leads her closer to death.
Call of the Night (complete)
- Rated: T - 249k words
- Read on AO3 // FF.net
The Death of Dusk (in-progress)
- Rated: T - 31k+ words*
-Read on AO3 // FF.net
Walk in the Dark (complete)
- Rated: M - 157k words
- Read on AO3 // FF.net
Untitled Novella (in-progress/coming fall 2022) Rated: T
Friends with the Fire (coming fall 2023) - Rated: M
Outtakes/One-Shots/AUs:
Filtered Futures (complete) - Rated: Explicit
- Read on AO3 // FF.net
Borrowed Time (complete) - Rated: T
- Read on Tumblr
Extras:
- playlist masterlist
- bonus content^
- CotN Series Guide (coming soon)
Thank you for your support! <3 Shannon
*unfinished/still a work-in-progress
^ beware of potential spoilers if you’re not caught up!
#cotn#twilight fanfiction#jalice fanfiction#witd#my writing#this will be updated as I post more stories in this series#updated and reblogged accordingly
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Some Things Are Meant to Be
Fandom: Twilight
Pairing: Jasper Hale x GN!Reader x Alice Cullen
Summary: It was the way Alice and Jasper found eternal happiness, against the odds, in a way no one expected.
Words: 1515 (oneshot)
Note: Oh, to be in a relationship with these two! You didn't specify, and I am such a sucker for the human x vampire pairing, so that's what I went with here. I hope I did okay and you're not too disappointed!
Vampiric culture differed in many ways from those of humans. Transitioning from mortal to immortal meant changing your entire way of life—nothing would be the same. Diet, socialization, and routines all shifted to accommodate the transformation. Some settled well into the new arrangement while others found it more difficult even with time to adjust.
How relationships developed and worked was something most didn’t think about until it hit them. Vampires could “date around” like any human, but no romantic relationship could compare to finding your singer or mate. The chemistry bound you deeper than any soulmate humans claimed to have found.
What most didn’t realize was there could be more than one.
The rustic smell of fresh blood pumping through the elk had venom filling their mouths. It would never compare to the agonizing burn inspired by humans, but it would be more than enough to satisfy the ache. Alice and Jasper stalked through the trees with the grace of a lion hiding in the tall grass. The game of predator and prey never failed in nature.
Oh, to be the once helpless prey turned into the ruthless predator.
The couple waited for the right moment before pouncing. Sharp enamel ripped into soft flesh, rich blood sliding down their throats to ease the ever-present pang of thirst. Alice allowed herself a shred of vulnerability and closed her eyes to savor her meal—only for them to snap back open.
Jasper noted his mate's shift in emotion and was at her side in an instant, leaving his elk half-drained but mercifully unaware of its quick death. "Alice? What do you see?"
Her petite hands dropped the animal to the forest floor as her eyes stared ahead blankly. She vaguely recognized Jasper's hands grasping her arms, felt his body close to hers as he waited for her to share. His worry faded into mere curiosity as he registered her emotional state—confusion to surprise to happiness.
"It's..." Alice grinned. "They're beautiful."
You turned, your eyes falling on the couple a few feet behind you. Your brow furrowed slightly before a small smile graced them. You lifted your hand in a gentle wave before turning back around to face the front.
Jasper frowned. "Who?"
The way your laugh crinkled your eyes nearly made her inert heart start beating once more—like when she first saw Jasper in her mind's eye. You shook your head before bending down to pick up the fallen paper from the floor.
"I am so sorry! I swear, I'd lose my head if it weren't attached to my body." You stood back up and stuck out your hand. "I'm (Y/N). I just moved here."
Alice repeated your name softly as she blinked away the vision. She liked the way it sounded on her tongue. The pixie-like vampire squealed and turned to Jasper.
"Jazz! They're coming!"
Her excitement infected him. Jasper chuckled and cradled her face in his hands to ground her. "Who's coming, darling?"
"Our mate! Oh!" She threw her arms around his waist. "Oh, they're perfect, Jazz!"
Neither vampire had heard of multiple mates before. Carlisle shared his experience in witnessing such a phenomenon when the confused yet anxious couple brought the vision to him. He had only seen it a couple of times in his immortal years.
Alice shared a glance with Jasper before revealing their new mate was human—and a whole new bout of anxiety swept throughout the Olympic Coven. They had nearly lost their entire family because their brother had fallen in love with a human. Bella was a treasured member of their coven—none of them would trade her or their beloved Renesmee for anything—but her presence in their lives had caused more trouble than any of them had predicted.
Jasper, Rosalie, and Edward had more reservations than the others. While Jasper had come miles in controlling his thirst, he remembered how difficult it had been for Edward to control his thirst around Bella and was terrified it might be the same. Rosalie and Edward were concerned about the possibility of the Volturi getting involved if yet another human discovered their secret. They would not be as forgiving as they had been with Bella after all the confrontations.
Your arrival had the coven on edge. They prepared themselves for whatever would happen but hoped for the best possible outcome.
Alice grabbed Jasper's hand. "There's (Y/N)."
Time stopped when you walked into the lecture. The couple sucked in a breath they both knew they didn't need. They watched in varying emotions—Alice vibrated with energy and Jasper swallowed warily—as the professor greeted you. You took the empty seat a couple rows in front of them.
Transferring to another university was not easy for you, but you were determined to make the best of it. It would only take another couple of credits for you to get your degree. You were just thankful it wasn't like high school where the teachers treated a new student as some sort of event and made you introduce yourself to the class.
Your pencil bounced in your hand. Jasper noted your anxiety and focused on sending a wave of calm to settle over you. The effect was instantaneous as you inhaled deeply and relaxed in your seat. You glanced around to see the lecture hall seemed scarce—less people meant less opportunity for embarrassment.
"How are you feeling?" Alice's words were silent to any nearby human ears.
Jasper shifted—a habit long since instilled in him to appear normal. "All right," he muttered. "It's... They don't affect me. Not... like that."
Your hand paused its notations on your paper. You turned around slightly after a moment before your gaze fell upon the couple. It had been their eyes you'd felt on the back of your head. Your forehead crinkled faintly.
Alice grinned at you. Jasper acknowledged you with a friendly nod of his head. Your frown lifted into a small smile but the confusion had written itself over your face. You slowly waved your fingers before shifting back to the front.
The couple remained on your mind the rest of the lecture. They seemed nice enough, but you couldn't shake the way your chest fluttered when they'd smiled at you. It was a strange tightening—not entirely unpleasant but definitely uncommon.
You gathered your belongings at the end of the lecture and stretched once you stood. Your muscles had trouble sitting still for so long.
"I don't think we've met."
"Oh!" You brought a hand to your chest, the paper fluttering to the ground at your feet.
Jasper muttered Alice's name fondly as her sudden voice startled you. He couldn't help the small smirk gracing his lips at the sharp increase of your heartbeat. Your wide eyes landed on the couple who seemed to appear beside you.
A sigh escaped you before you laughed quietly, shaking your head at your own reaction. You bent down to pick up the paper before it could get crumpled.
"I am so sorry! I swear, I'd lose my head if it weren't attached to my body." You didn't exactly know why you apologized, but you felt it was the right thing to do once a swift calmness wiped out any embarrassment. "I'm (Y/N). I just moved here."
Your grin seemed to light up your face as you held your hand out to your fellow students. Alice eagerly placed her hand in yours—her skin felt like ice.
"I'm Alice and this is Jasper! I just know we're going to be the best of friends."
If only you had known how misdirected those words were when she'd said them. Alice and Jasper did become your best friends, but the connection was so much more intimate than that. They became your greatest inspiration to finish school, your biggest motivation for chasing your dreams, and your first chance at genuine love.
It was the way they spent hours with you, how they listened to you rant and rave, how they comforted you when you were down, the way they somehow always knew exactly what you needed to go about your day. It was the small tokens of affection, the coffee they would bring you in the mornings, the small touches here and there, the terms of endearment.
It was the way they planned nights with you, the stay-in movie dates, the meals you would cook together despite them never eating, the tender kisses and gentle caresses. It was how they sat you down and let you in on their biggest secret, how they trusted you not to tell anyone, how they went against everything they had learned to let you into their life because they loved you that much.
It was the way they discussed the future with you, how they let you know it was your choice, how they only wanted the best for you. It was how they held you as fire spread throughout your entire body, how they took turns staying with you until the transition was complete, how they embraced you in your rebirth, how they happily introduced you officially into your new family.
It was the way they completed you.
It was the way you were meant to be.
#twilight#twilight saga#twilight fanfiction#twilight renaissance#twilight revival#twilight x reader#jasper hale#jasper hale x reader#alice cullen#alice cullen x reader#jalice#jalice x reader#jasper whitlock#jasper x alice#alice x reader#jasper x reader#ashley greene#jackson rathbone#smeyer#new moon#eclipse#breaking dawn#multi fandom blog#multi fandoms posts#multifandom account#multifixwritings
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So back in August, @pupupuphuca drew this adorable and beautiful piece of Jalice fanart, and I immediately volunteered to write a little ficlet about it because it was so beautiful.
It took me forever to get this at least close to how I wanted it, but it's here. @pupupuphuca, I hope you like it and thank you so, so much for sharing your gorgeous art!
The coffee house is like a dozen others that they’ve visited in the last decade. The smell of real coffee in the air, the mismatched furniture dotted around, the low music playing.
The reason they chose coffee places is because the smell of the giant roasters and grinders; enough to cover up the smell of the humans that inhabit the space so that it’s tolerable. That they can be… well, not entirely comfortable, but a hell of a lot more comfortable than they are in a high school classroom.
This is one of those spaces that makes him - makes them - feel more real and somehow more insubstantial than ever. It's... it's nice.
It’s nice to come and sit; watch whatever aspiring singer or poet or performer might be standing in the corner, where a discoloured circle on the floor outlines the wannabe ‘stage’. Just to talk about anything and everything, and maybe lean into feeling normal - feeling human - for a little while.
Alice loves it. She loves finding another one of their little bolt holes, the place that none of their family will think to look for them if they needed to. She has stacks of business cards, loyalty cards, collected in a box somewhere.
“We met in one of these places, Jasper,” she says when he watches her add another one to the pile - right down to the very faded Moonlite Diner matchbook she has. “Of course I want to remember them all.”
Tonight is just like the others, in a good way. It’s warm, and there’s a couch near the door free, tucked back from the rest of the tables and patrons which is for the best. Alice leaves him with her bag, and returns with drinks - straight coffee with ice cubes. She has always picked the drinks carefully - the cold cups are opaque, so no one realizes they aren’t consuming them. Cold drinks smell less than hot drinks, and the scent is tolerable without chemicals and sweeteners or animal products mixed in. They’ve work-shopped this over the years.
She tucks herself next to him when she returns, placing the drinks on the small table in front of them. She leans against him for a moment, her emotions bright and happy; she loves these nights. Getting out, being a normal girl going out with a normal boy. And he likes that he can give her this one small taste of it.
There is a musician with a guitar at the microphone, a crooning woman who isn’t too loud. She’s quite good, actually; there are more people here than usual. A pair of girls are whispering in unsubtle admiration about Alice’s outfit, and his girl is practically bubbling over with glee.
And then Alice’s emotional signature flickers. For a split second, it’s like she’s disappeared. One moment where she doesn’t exist next to him - it’s a very cold feeling, a shocking one. A second later, she’s back and the vision is already upon her.
It’s been exactly the same since he met her. The visions make her blip out for a second. It’s a good warning, honestly, and right now he’s already focused on her, holding her hand and waiting for her return, the music already forgotten.
Alice looks and feels very distant, muted, when she’s having a vision. Her fingers grasp weakly at his sleeve as she stares off at something only she can see, and they wait. Frustration, disappointment, and curiosity leak out of her.
And then she’s back.
“It’s okay,” she says quietly, settling against him and the couch again. “Nothing urgent, nothing we need to worry about.”
“You’re sure?”
“I promise,” she smiled up at him. “But we are going to have to cut our night short - maybe go for a walk instead?”
“Of course, love.”
“Are you okay?”
They both look up at the barista who has appeared in front of them.
“I’m fine,” Alice smiles and the barista nods, and moves on. Alice watches her leave, ostensibly testing the future to see if the barista has found them strange enough to be memorable. A moment passes and Alice relaxes.
“Let’s go,” Jasper murmurs in her ear. “A walk sounds nice.”
“It does,” Alice takes his hand, slinging her bag over her shoulder. The drinks are forgotten on the table as they slip out, a few dollar bills tucked next to the untouched cups, as they step out into the rain.
“Might be a while before we can go back,” Alice says ruefully as they walk away. “Just in case.”
“Mmm. Maybe.” His arm slings around her shoulders as they slip down the street. “Gives us time to scope out some other places.”
Maybe it’s never been about playing human, about feeling human, coming to this coffee house, and all of the dozens in their past. Maybe’s it’s just about being in the world together. Hundreds and thousands of little coffee dates because it never gets old, being together.
Alice perks up and gives him a bright smile. “Anywhere with you is perfect.”
He takes her hand and presses a kiss to the knuckle as she smiles up at him and they slip away into the night.
#pupupuphuca#alice cullen#jasper hale#jalice#twilight fanfiction#canon compliant#my fic: one shot#a little slice of life#for that gorgeous art
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Chapters: 4/25
Fandom: Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer, Twilight Series - All Media Types
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Alice Cullen/Jasper Hale, Carlisle Cullen/Esme Cullen, Emmett Cullen/Rosalie Hale, Edward Cullen/Bella Swan
Characters: Jasper Hale, Alice Cullen, Esme Cullen, Carlisle Cullen, Edward Cullen, Bella Swan, Emmett Cullen, Rosalie Hale, Renesmee Cullen, Jacob Black, Maria (Twilight), The Volturi (Twilight), Peter (Twilight), Charlotte (Twilight)
Additional Tags: Hurt/Comfort, Protective Jasper Hale, Protective Alice Cullen, Family, Friendship, Fluff, Romance, Vampires, Blood, Implied/Referenced Torture, Major Jasper Whitlock, Jasper Hale is Not a Confederate Soldier, Starvation, Brother-Sister Relationships, Healing, Trust Issues, Flashbacks, Panic Attacks, Dissociation, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Multiple Personalities, BAMF Jasper Hale, Protective Rosalie Hale, Parent Esme Cullen, Parent Carlisle Cullen, Protective Carlisle Cullen, Vampire Bella Swan, Bella Swan with a Backbone, Post-Canon, Repressed Memories, Angst, Whump, Amnesia, Suicidal Thoughts, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Dark Jasper Hale, Not Beta Read, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Evil Volturi, Union Spy Jasper Hale
Summary:
Jasper disappeared in 1949. Alice thought him dead.
But then a vision of him strikes her in 2023.
Also, my black blood headcanon will be used in here, for those of you who don't know about it it will be explained throughout the fic, but they are basically similar to the classic vampires, I just mixed the myths and added some details of my own to create a new species for the Twilight world.
#the twilight saga#twilight#twilight renaissance#jalice#jasper whitlock#jasper hale#jasper x alice#alice cullen#alice/jasper#ao3 fanfic#my fanfiction#emmett cullen#carlisle cullen#esme cullen#rosalie hale#renesmee cullen#edward cullen#bella swan#jacob black
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Okay hear me out!, im fuckin tired of the jalice fanfics with a villain Maria, in the canon she's only into her southern Wars, without a little tought to Jasper or Alice, she's just taking territories and probably thinking on her dead mate. Please give me more obssesive James like villain, or evil Alice's father, i need read something like that please!
if someone have fanfic recomendation tell me! in english or spanish idc.
#jalice#alice cullen#jasper hale#jasper x alice#twilight#twilight fanfiction#James witherdale#MariaTwilight#And i need an AU where Maria and her Mate live happily#english is not my first language
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I think "not fluent in English but trying my best" is my new motto since I'm working on a Jalice fic, for the first time in English and I'm going to post it on here when it's finished (I'm already scared)
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Jalice X Reader Headcanons
Jasper Whitlock/Hale and Alice Cullen X Reader
Warnings: cursing, mentions of vampirism… NSFW at the end.
SFW
–Alice had seen you coming and told Jasper all about it. They fell for you so quickly, even if it took Jasper a bit longer (he definitely had to meet you first and get to know you) than it took Alice (who saw you in her vision and told Jasper everything… he surprisingly took it well)
–Alice spoils you rotten. She gets you clothes, jewelry if you are a girl, literally anything, even if you don’t ask.
–Alice got your first kiss. It had been an accident, she was kissing all over your face and didn’t think and kissed your lips... It was actually cute.
–Jasper took a while before he could touch you, and when he did for the first time Alice had to be right next to you. She didn’t think he would hurt you–no, she knew–but it was for his comfort.
–”It’s alright, Jasper, you won’t hurt her/him,” is a common saying from Alice.
–Once Jasper could finally touch you, physical touch would 100% be his love language. (Along with words of affirmation)
–Alice’s love languages are gifts and quality time… but she likes all of them.
–You are their singer, which makes it harder for the poor cowboy.
–Yes, you call him cowboy. It’s just teasing, but it’s super cute.
–They give you the cutest (or most random nicknames ever) ex. “Baby Love” was used once.
–Alice unironically called you kitten for a while.
–If you turned and were together in the 2020s, you and Alice would jokingly call Jasper Pookie and he hates it so much.
–Jasper is always the first to apologize after a fight. Always.
–Jasper is such a fucking gentleman. Opening doors, guiding either you or Alice on his arm, relatively open-minded, mostly the mature one in fights. He’s also just the peacekeeper.
–Alice is very progressive in relationship stuff, but can work with whatever you need; whereas, Jasper can sometimes stick to certain older tendencies. (Although he listens to what you have to say if you’re a woman, he does think that even if you could kill him if you were a vampire, he needs to protect you.)
–Jasper wouldn’t even think about touching you inappropriately until you were married, even after that he would be hesitant… unless you were a vampire.
–Alice loves doing your hair.
–So does Jasper, but he doesn’t ask… unless you’re like laying with him and he’ll mindlessly play with your hair.
–It’s gentle love. Very much. Mostly because of Jasper, but Alice is gentle as well.
–The first area of you Jasper kissed was your hand. Argue with the wall.
–Alice casually leans her head on your shoulder a lot. She’s a cuddle bug; a lot of little touches from her like she’ll have a hand on your arm or something like that.
–Casual dominance with Jasper… anyways.
–They both are always checking if you’ve eaten or drank anything.
–Jasper 100% regulates your mood. Not all the time, but if something happens and you get SUPER mad or something like that he’ll calm you down. If you weren’t okay with it, he wouldn’t do it all the time, but in a case where something bad was gonna happen, he would.
–Jasper would let you and Alice paint his nails if you begged hard enough. (Guilt trip the already manipulated boyyyy)
NSFW
–They’re both relatively dominant. They’re both soft doms, though.
–I know you see fanfictions that are like “Oh the Major would come out and he would span–” No, boy wouldn’t harm you to save his life. The worst that’ll happen is he’ll rail you into oblivion, but never physically harm you… besides the fucking into oblivion.
–They both love to give, but receiving >>>> just depends on when you ask them though.
–Jasper would not touch you until after you got married, although Alice didn’t believe in that, she wanted the first time to be special and if you wanted it to be with all three of them she would wait.
–If you were still human, it would be SO gentle. Like S O G E N T L E. They would focus all on you, Jasper would keep his mouth away from you though.
–Jasper used his gift to make you feel pleasure, which led to overstimulation… safe to say that is what the “punishment” would be if you were into that, rather than spanking.
–If you’re not into any of that, they can be vanilla too. Jasper is obviously close to vanilla anyways, so…
–Alice loves it when you go down on her.
–Jasper was afraid to let either of you go on top at first, but after a while (and a lot of praising to him) he would.
–In that case, he would call you “ma’am/sir.” He normally calls you that, but when he says it in a whiny voice >>>>
–Once you have turned… it lasts a long time.
–Jasper will kiss you all over, ALL OVER. and Alice is just like, “Woah, save some for me–” he’s just making up for lost kisses.
–Sweetest nicknames that could go in SFW as well, but oh well.
Ex. From Jasper: “Hon, doll, sugar, darlin’, babydoll, LITTLE ONE? even princess( if you were a girl)” From Alice: “Sweet boy/girl, sweetie, sweetness, honey, baby, kitten..”
–Jasper calls it lovemaking, Alice calls it whatever most people call it at the time.
#twilight saga#twilight x reader#twilight x y/n#twilight headcanons#jalice#alice cullen#jasper hale#jasper hale x reader#jasper whitlock#headcanons#x reader
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decided to do some fun miscellaneous twilight related facts about myself ⬇️
1. i have a pinterest board named “yes my vampires sparkle”. i have hundreds of photos of ashley greene and jackson rathbone from almost every angle for reference. i have cute moments of other characters too ofc.
2. i think my artworks are out of character. my drawings are my own interpretation inspired from fics. i cant draw consistent faces or get it close to my imagination. also its because
3. ive never read the books. I’M SORRY. i watched the movies and went straight to jalice fanfiction. also after i got on twilight tumblr i discovered the difference between the books and the movies, and i read metas, and thought my interpretation of the characters is so different from the books. so… yeah. also there’s not enough jalice moments in the books anyway amirite?
4. i got on tumblr and ao3 because of jalice. i had a tumblr account and knew about ao3 but have never read fanfiction that much. so the fandom culture on tumblr was mind blowing for me.
5. i love love love jalice fanfiction. urgh cant say it enough. some fics i read over and over ive memorized them. i have so many scenes i may never able to draw 😭
6. and so, getting interactions from fanfic authors is WILD for me. cant thank you all enough.
7. this is embarrassing but, one of my motivation is i wanna be THAT artist in the fandom (including but not limited to jalice hehe). i wanna contribute, i wanna draw characters exactly how i imagine them, i wanna make people feel something. and so i think my art has improved a lot while drawing jalice.
thank you again, for just being here, making up this lovely fandom, for writing fics, for giving me many treasured moments for the past 2 years.
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Recollections - Chapter 1
Recollections is a collection of interconnected OneShots that span Jasper's life with Alice. They are in the same continuity, but can be read as stand-alones.
You can also find this fanfiction AO3 or FF.net.
Summary: On a stormy day in Philadelphia, Alice and Jasper meet for the very first time. [Alice and Jasper's first meeting - Part 1: The Diner.]
Timeline for this chapter: This is my version of Jasper an Alice's meeting in Philadelphia in 1948 (Part 1 of it).
Word Count for this chapter: 2'893
Trigger Warnings: none
Rating: PG
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October 28, 1948 - Philadelphia, PA | Part 1.
Loud thunder echoed through the empty street as the rain continued to pelt against my shoulders. The storm was close now. In an effort to look human, I pulled the long coat, which I’d taken off my last victim, closer. A futile effort. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew, it wouldn’t be enough. It was only a matter of minutes before lightning would start to crackle right above the roofs of Philadelphia. Before a lone man in the middle of the empty streets would start to attract attention.
Life was dark these days. Pain and hate followed my every step. Thirst burnt like acid at the back of my throat but satisfying it only pushed me farther into nothingness. I couldn’t bring myself to care about much anymore, only noticing the humans around me if they made the mistake to come too close. But being noticed myself was something I couldn’t allow.
Fear made me care about staying undetected. Fear of the dark henchmen that hovered over the entirety of my immortal life. One newborn out of line, one corpse not disposed of carefully enough, one human that took a tiny bit too much interest in a lonesome wanderer in the streets of Philadelphia. That’s all it took to overthrow the fragile balance between being ‘alive’—if one could even call it that— or hunted down by the Volturi. I shuddered, remembering the pure terror that immobilized Maria every single time their name fell.
Pushing forward through the rain and counting the seconds between one booming thunder and the next, I weighed my options. I didn’t have many. There was a small diner up ahead, only a few hundred feet from where I was standing. The crooked sign on the door proclaimed that it was open but from what I could perceive, there were only a few customers inside. Still enough to set my throat ablaze before my hand even touched the door handle though.
I held my breath and let some shaggy strands of hair fall into my eyes to hide their red hue. The stuffy air hit me like a battering ram, and I had to swallow twice to get rid of all the venom that pooled in my mouth. Even without breathing, I sensed them. I heard their heartbeats, felt the warmth of their skin and the incredible dullness of their emotions. Or not?
My head shot up and my eyes met liquid gold. I flinched and took a small step back. Another vampire. No, she couldn’t be. Her eyes were all wrong. But she wasn’t breathing either. And she was floating across the worn wooden floor more elegantly than a human would ever have been able to. She was coming straight at me.
Is she going to attack? Here in the middle of these humans? Doesn’t she see my scars? Attacking would be suicide.
No, she was smiling. And these emotions… I had lost grip of my talent a long time ago when I still was with Peter and Charlotte. But it had only gotten worse from there. Once, I was able to detect the slightest changes in the emotional plane around me, a trait that had saved my life many times. But with the years, depression had become overwhelming. These days it was near impossible to tell the individual sentiments apart, never knowing what was mine. Even the strongest of them got mangled in the numbness of my mind, never able to truly get through to me.
But hers were clear as day. Pure and certain, like nothing I had ever experienced before. I felt like a blind man seeing sunlight for the first time. And she was my sun, emanating joy and love deeper than what I believed possible. It was intoxicating.
“You’ve kept me waiting a long time.” Her voice, quiet and still clear and warm as summer rain, resonated within every cell of my body, shaking me out of rigidity.
Instinctively, I ducked my head and took a shallow breath, ignoring the explosive pain that soared in my throat. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”
And then she held out her hand.
I didn’t consider my actions. I didn’t need to. It was as if I had always known exactly what to do. After having considered myself to be a lost cause for almost a decade, I suddenly saw a way forward in the pale, alabaster palm of her hand. And as my scarred fingers slowly interlaced with hers and her warmth spread through my whole body, I could finally feel it. For the first time in almost a century, I felt hope.
xxxx
The strange vampire gently nudged me forward, past the solitary customers at the bar towards the last booth at the windows—as far away from the humans as possible. Stiff as a board, I sat down across from her. Only half cognisant, dazed by the constant waves of love, joy and warmth that pumped from her hand directly into me. After all the darkness of the last years, her positivity was exhilarating. I had immediately become addicted.
“I’m Alice, by the way.” Her voice sent shivers through my body. It wasn’t necessarily the sound of it. It was the way she talked to me; her words laced with immense affection. I couldn’t remember anyone ever talking to me like that.
I hesitantly took another breath so I could introduce myself as well but the force with which the fire in the back of my throat blazed, immediately choked my efforts. Alice smiled and quickly put a finger against her lips. “You’re Jasper. I know, you don’t have to talk if it pains you.”
My eyes widened and a few rational thoughts finally pushed themselves through the paralyzing cloud of her emotions. How does she know my name? Is this a trap? Has Maria come for me?
I had finally mustered the strength to let go and flee, when her tiny hand suddenly clutched mine tighter. Desperately holding on. “Please don’t run. I can explain,” she pleaded.
I clenched my jaw.
I should have run anyway. Even if I could not perceive the slightest sign of hostility from her, my gift hadn’t been reliable for years. But I couldn’t. After spending so much time in the darkness, only a few more seconds of the pure bliss that her touch sent up my arm seemed worth the risk.
“Like you, I have a special talent. I can see visions, flashes of things that are coming.”
This time, the explosion of excruciating thirst couldn’t stop me from opening my mouth. “Like… the future?”
“Nothing I see is set in stone. It always depends on the decisions people make. I suppose you could call it possible versions of the future,” she explained and smiled gently. “I saw you coming here a long time ago. But it wasn’t clear exactly when this moment was going to occur. Not until a few days ago. I’m so glad to finally meet you!”
What a powerful gift. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how useful her talent would have been in the wars.
“Oh!” Her surprised outburst caught my attention, and I shifted my gaze to where she was looking at. Plain drywall was staring back at me.
“We need to leave. Right now.” She didn’t wait for me to respond. The strange little vampire got up and urgently ushered me towards the door. Not truly comprehending the situation, I did what felt most natural. And that was to follow her.
Alice hastily grabbed a coat from the rack next to the door and pulled me outside without stopping to put it on. The rain immediately drenched us, and the darkness started to draw me in again as she let go of my hand to slip into her coat. I could still feel it, her happiness, her positivity. But without direct skin contact, it felt farther and farther away every second. Still, I clung to it. I didn’t want to drown again.
“What was that about?” I asked, still confused by the quick exit she had forced on me. Just in that moment, the sound of shattering glass met my ears. The noise was followed by the sweet smell of fresh human blood that crept through the doorway before it closed.
I groaned in pain as venom pooled my mouth again. My hand had already gripped the door handle, ready to rip it open and finally satisfy my thirst, when another jolt of affection shot through me and immediately snapped me out of my frenzy.
Alice had wrapped her fingers around the wrist of my other hand, determinedly pulling me away from the diner and down the street. I followed, dumbfounded by how easy it had been for her to keep me from creating a bloodbath. Sure, I had only fed a few days ago and wasn’t at my limit yet. But still…
We passed a few blocks and I had just started breathing again when my sensitive nose picked up another mouth-watering scent. Due to the rain, it took me a split second longer than usual to locate its origin. A lonely drunkard, only a few intersections from us. I could smell the alcohol in his blood. It dulled the sweetness slightly, which was why in the earlier days we had always left drunkards to the newborns. But in recent years, I had started to welcome it, knowing that they were too drunk to realise what was going on until it was too late. Less time for fear, pain, and terror.
I didn’t even notice that Alice had frozen next to me, her eyes no longer focused on the present, when I dashed forward. Moving at inhumane speed, I grabbed the man by his shoulders and pulled him into the next dark alley. My hands had snapped his neck before his eyes were able to refocus— another measure to keep the emotions which he subjected me to as limited as possible.
There still was a short spike of fear followed by immense pain as the bone snapped. But I didn’t truly feel the ramifications of it until I had drunk my fill and regained some control over my instincts. As always, it was overwhelming.
Letting my victim sink to the wet ground, I regarded the bottle of whiskey I had instinctively snatched from his hand. In times like these, I wished vampires could get drunk. I didn’t recall if I’d ever had too much back in my human days, but I knew the dulling effect the liquor seemed to have on humans and their senses intimately. Unfortunately, whatever that effect was, our venom destroyed it quicker than it could develop. Thus, this bottle was only of minor use to me.
I emptied the contents over its previous owner’s body and then pulled a matchbox from the depths of my coat. A few seconds later, flames licked over the corpse. Not strong enough to make him unidentifiable, but it would be sufficient to hide the bitemark on his neck.
Guilt and hate returned in full force as I watched the man burn, a crushing weight that made me feel like I needed to steady myself. The stranger’s pain and horror lingered under my skin, reminding me of the monster I was.
‘Oh, get over it!’ Maria’s voice echoed in my ears. ‘I made you stronger than this.’
xxxx
Just as I was about to give in to the depression once more, something started to nibble at the edges of my consciousness. A second set of emotions fought its way through the thick fog of darkness that clouded my mind. They were weaker than before but still perceptible. Less scorching sunlight, more lonely candle in the window.
I found strange, little, golden-eyed Alice at the entrance to the alley, disappearing beneath an umbrella. Now, with the blinding effect of her affection was dulled by the fresh memory of my kill, I got a good look at her for the first time. By God, she was tiny.
Looking at her, I somehow felt myself reminded of a story about a fairy that had lost her wings.
Where did I hear about it? From my little sister? Did I even have a sister? I wasn’t sure, my human memories got hazier every day.
Her face was truly befitting a fairy—delicate lines, big golden eyes, a small nose, and perfectly shaped lips that reminded me of the porcelain dolls I had seen in the display of a shop a few months ago. She wore a yellow dress with a matching belt around her waist. The skirt was obscenely short, only reaching to the middle of her shin, showing off her pale legs and ankle. But that was how women wore it these days. Her legs ended in a pair of grey heels, indicating that she was in fact even shorter than she appeared right now. The grey woollen coat she had taken from the diner was draped around her shoulders and she had put a pair of matching yellow gloves on.
I didn’t need to look down at myself to know that I looked like a vagrant next to her. Everything about her screamed elegance, while I had been roaming through forests without ever changing the clothes I stole from my victims.
“I’m sorry, Jasper. I should have seen this,” she apologised, and I unexpectedly found myself liking the way she said my name. There was so much fondness in it. It was the way Maria had said it, back before she got irritated with my deteriorating condition.
And then it finally hit me. All the affection, care, and compassion that had blinded and completely overtaken me in the diner, had been directed at me. For some reason that completely eluded my consciousness, the tiny vampire in front of me was in love with me.
The realisation made me fall back a few steps. Once more, I felt the incredible urge to run and get away from her. Just as the thought crossed my mind, however, her face fell and pain like nothing I’d ever felt before shot through her fragile body. I was accustomed to the ache humans felt when they realised that their life was over, and they would never get to see their loved ones again. This was worse.
“No, please don’t go. I’ve waited so long for this already,” she pleaded and reached a gloved hand out towards me.
I flinched back a few more steps, almost tripping over the smouldering corpse. “I have no idea who you think I am, but I’m definitely not him. You’ve got the wrong guy.”
Her expression quickly turned from pained to upset. “No, I don’t, Jasper. And I can prove it.”
As if it were the most natural thing in the world, she closed the distance between us, handing me her umbrella which I took hesitantly. Then, she reached into her coat and searched for a moment, before pulling out a piece of folded paper. Her fingers unfolded it gently, as if it was very precious to her, and held it out towards me.
It was a drawing of a group of people. Unfinished, as only six of the seven figures had been intricately shaded while the last one remained a rough sketch. But that didn’t matter. All my attention immediately focused on the figure on the far left, which seemed to have gotten most of the artist’s attention. It was a near-perfect rendition of myself. Sure, there were fewer holes in his clothing, less filth in his hair. But the resemblance was undeniable.
“What is this?” I mumbled, still unable to take my eyes off the drawing. The man’s—my—posture seemed relaxed. I was smiling, one arm wrapped around the smaller person in front of me. Alice, I realised.
“Our family. Or at least it’s going to be, someday.” The certainty and affection with which she spoke these words, shocked me.
Could it be? Another coven? No, I couldn’t imagine myself ever going back to fight for another’s cause again. This couldn’t be right. But she was the one with visions of the future. And she had been right about me coming to Philadelphia.
“When?” was all, I managed to get out of my mouth. She sighed, and I got the impression that my question somehow bothered her. But at the same time, she felt cautiously optimistic. Hopeful.
“It’s still unclear. But not too long now, less than a decade.”
Less than a decade? No, I couldn’t believe that. I didn’t want to believe that. I had given over seven decades of my life to war, nearly eight if you counted my time in the Confederate army. And now she told me that I would be back in that hell of hate and death in less than a decade? No, I refused to believe that.
Shoving her hand with the picture away from me, I clenched my jaw. “You said your visions are subjective, just possibilities of the future. What if I decide to leave right now and never look back?”
I could feel her hopefulness fade, but it was only a short flicker. For a moment, it seemed like her presence was somewhere far, far away. But then, suddenly, her smile and confidence returned. “You won’t. I can’t see you running away anymore.”
#jalice#jasper hale#alice cullen#jalice fanfiction#twilight fanfiction#twilight renaissance#pre canon#jalice first meeting#canon compliant#Recollections
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Opinion on Jalice x ocs
Okay, sorry asker (and I still have a bunch more things in my asks but this one just made me want to unleash). But sit down, because here is "Giselle gets too srs bsns about OCs."
Disclaimer: I want to be completely clear here. The absolute core of fanfic, IMO, the thing that makes it so much more valuable culturally than commercial fiction, and the thing that makes the world go round, is this: in fic, you get to write for yourself. You get to spin the story you want to see told, in whatever way pleases you most, with no interference from the commercial publishing industry, or readers' taste, or anything other than "I wanted to experience this story, so I wrote it." This is super rare. Writing for just the sake of it is totally misunderstood--with any other hobby, we wouldn't go, "Oh are you trying to become a professional pickleballer?" or "Are you planning to try out for symphonies on your ukulele?" But for some reason, writing confuses people--we don't imagine it as ever being done just for fun.
Fanfiction is for fun, and that's what makes it so subversive and incredible.
So if you want to write a story that is you in the story, or Jalice in space, or wolfpack ABO--you should do that. That is literally where all the value in fanfic comes from. We get to hedonistically write exactly the thing we most want; to spend time with the characters exactly the way we want to, and sometimes a few readers come with us, and sometimes more readers come with us, and sometimes lots of readers come with us. And that's the whole amazing thing of it. So nothing I say here should be construed as "Don't write OCs." If OC x Jalice is your jam, fucking write that because that is literally what this whole thing is for, and what makes it so valuable and what makes it so unique.
HOWEVER.
Characters exist because they add something to the story that otherwise wouldn't exist without them. This is all characters, "original" or not. So any time you write a character, the question to ask is, "Why is this character in the story? What do they add? What's missing if they aren't here?"
This is not how most people write OCs.
OCs are often written so that the writer can imagine some scenario that they can't see happening with canon. That scenario is often, "What if I was in the story?"
"I" is a very seductive person to put into a story. As I said above, the whole fun of fanfic is the ability to imagine exactly how we want the world to go, and adding ourselves to the story is a logical extension of that. But what becomes difficult about that is that when you write a story, your reader needs to care about all the major characters in the story. In fanfic, we get to shortcut a little because our readers are already invested in the canon characters (although I still think it is well worth it to act as though we don't have that buy-in and to develop the canon characters just as much) but for an OC? You've got to do a lot of heavy lifting to make the reader convinced that this character is someone we should care about achieving their goal.
If the OC is a self-insert, that's tough emotionally, because of course the author cares about achieving her imaginary goal, so it's easy to accidentally leave out of the writing the part where we convince the reader that it matters. Then readers are mad, and we as authors feel like we've stuck our heart out there and gotten skewered.
If the OC is not a self-insert, it still takes time and skill and practice to draw a character in such a way that the reader agrees they belong in the story. This is hard, period, but doubly hard in fanfiction because the reader already has expectations about where the edges of the world are. So if you introduce an extra character, you really have to sell them, in a way you do not if you are writing a novel that is 100% yours. The result is that a lot of OCs feel like they serve no purpose, and readers don't buy them, and they don't understand why they are there.
Characters need to advance the story. If they get a name, they need to advance the story. If they do not advance the story, they do not belong in the story. If the answer to "what does this character add to the story" is "I just like them," then they don't belong. The story should be different if that character was absent, or if that character was different. (Different rant for a different day but this is why I don't buy for a minute the argument that published fanfic has changed the story enough to warrant its publication.) If you write an OC, or even if you give serious time to a character who was just a side mention in canon, you must do that work of making their story and their perspective integral to the story you're trying to tell.
I actually love this about OCs and near-OCs. Because they have no grounding in canon, you can make them serve whatever purpose you need them to, and however you choose to characterize them is entirely up to you, which gives you a lot of writerly freedom. I put OCs or near-OCs in almost every one of my fics—even the short ones. Off the top of my head: Tony Mason in Ithaca Is Gorges, Elizabeth Bradshawe in Stregoni Benefici, Dierdre in "For a Season," Dorothy in Stregoni Benefici, and more. And that's nothing compared to the canon-mentioned characters I've given fuller life in my fanfic. The reason I do this is because that freedom lets me show something about the canon characters, or the canon situation, that is more easily revealed by another party. But the onus is on me, the writer, to make it clear to the reader why this character matters so much and to tell the story in such a way that the OC becomes a fully fleshed-out character, and the story is such that it seems inevitable that the OC would be a part of it.
The most effective OCs in fanfiction are ones which drive the story of the characters that most people came to fanfic to read about--the canon characters--in a way that feels intrinsic and real. That means a lot of legwork on the part of the writer to understand the OC, and to create them in a way that makes the reader identify with them and care about their role in the story, and in a burden that is additional due to the nature of fic itself--convince the reader that they belong in a story the reader is expecting to only consist of the canon characters.
This is hard. It's hard to do well, especially if you don't have a lot of experience writing, as many fanfic writers do not, and it's hard to receive negative feedback when and if people don't connect with the OC that you've imagined being such an amazing person. This difference in what the writer thinks they're doing (having some fun with a new person) and what the reader wants to read (a story that makes sense with all the characters on the page) leads to a disconnect, and that disconnect is the source of a lot of the "people don't like OCs" / "OCs are bad" discourse in fandom.
So. I don't really have an opinion on any given paring, Jalice or otherwise, or any given character, "x OC." I love a good OC; I think they can do a lot in fic that canon characters cannot. If you can sell it, I will read it. But the less clear it is that this character has, well, character, and the less clear it is why this character is necessary to the story--the more it's going to feel like the OC is some strange, authorial hand.
And that's a hard sell in fanfic, period. It's not just because there's an OC; it's because it's genuinely difficult to do.
(My tumblr title is based on the idea of characterization, and for me, exploring characterization is at the center of why I write fic. That approach not true of everyone, so apply grains of salt as appropriate.)
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Hi!!! Loved CotN (binged the whole series in 2 days), and had one question that's bugged me since: you mention that Jasper's *only* fears relate to Alice, and that's why Skye can't fully crack him until his fears become reality and he kills her. But what if he had never met Alice? Did he have no fears before her, or he did it's just that they were insignificant in the face of meeting Alice? What would've happened with Skye - would he have been easier or more difficult to crack? (sorry if sent 2x
TWO DAYS god that's so fast for how long it is 😭😭 thanks so much for reading it and I'm glad you loved it!
IMO even canon Jasper has a very... unique experience with all emotion but especially fear. for a vampire he hasn't lived too long; 160 years sounds like a long time, but there are vampires in the Twilight universe who are literal millennia old. when you 'grow up' (for lack of a better term) as part of the southern wars and that's your introduction into vampirism, you're sort of exposed to a lot of the brutal shit that gets glossed over in 95% of the Twilight saga. you aren't going to find yourself scared of too much when you're arguably one of the scariest things around.
even Edward, remarking at one point in Midnight Sun when they're rushing to the ballet studio says “As a man of peace, Jasper struggled. But as a man of war, he was more that I'd ever imagined.” because despite the circumstances—and I'm assuming, despite the potent fucking fear Edward was experiencing—Jasper was making it so that entire stolen car full of vampires was utterly fucking focused on their mission. (and if the focus was somewhat-inspired by a certain someone's excitement willingness to finally get to murder another vampire after so long, that's for Edward and Jasper to know, and for us to only just guess about 👀)
but of course your question is about CotN Jasper, so I'll try to stay on topic here. in order to understand that part I think I have to explain more about Skye and her ability. I go into it pretty decently in Walk in the Dark, but there are still some things I both left vague and haven't fully had the opportunity to go into more depth about. she has the passive part of her ability, where she can walk into a room and low-key clock everyone's fear in the vicinity without even really trying too hard. it's not like unlike Jasper's ability in a way and it has some similarities to Edward's too. she can't turn it off, but she can focus it.
get ready for some Skye lore bestie 😛
in Call of the Night we're introduced to Skye's ability because Alice can't see Jasper when he's "under". I've never fully explained what that means in detail I don't think (but if I have, and if that contradicts anything I'm about to say, forget about that: this is the Real Lore) but when a person is "under" her ability it means that she has full reign of a portion of their subconscious. whichever part that is in charge of fear; I don't know what part that is since I don't know jack shit about the actual mechanics of the brain, sorry about that. (edit: I googled it, and it's the amygdala apparently. fun!)
Skye's ability is a fully mental/psychic one. (which is why at the end of CotN, Bella is able to give Jasper a few vital hours of precious clarity immediately post-battle.) where Edward is able to hear people's thoughts like spoken words, Skye is able to see people's fears; it's not unlike how Alice can see people's futures. they play out for Skye like a fast-paced vision that goes through her mind in an instant where she can look across a room and think "oh wow that guy really is convinced his wife is going to cheat on him with her coworker huh?" or "plane crashes? really? how original". the only catch is that when she's focusing in on these people directly it doesn't go unnoticed. Alice remarks upon the strange but faint tingling sensation that occurs in chapter 10 of Walk in the Dark when Skye tries to quite literally scare her off by reciting to Alice what her selfish fears are.
but remember: this is the relatively harmless part of her ability. (harmless to others, at least.) Skye can also force you to fully live these fears that occupy space in your brain. whatever you're afraid of, whatever would scare you, whatever is something that would cause panic or anxiety, Skye can make your brain experience these the same way that she can 'see' those very fears play out when she's detecting them. it causes the victim to lose full control over themselves and they remain trapped in an endless loop of what are essentially nightmares.
Skye is a relatively new vampire. she's only been around for a few years. the ability of hers is something that she only barely knows how to control. we even see in a vision of Alice's where Maria is frustrated by Skye's inability to control Jasper the way she needs her to, and Skye remarks "That’s not how this works, you know that’s not how this works!" because Skye is using her ability the only way she knows how to, by cycling the victim through their nightmares as much as she can to create a sort of helpless comatose state. it puts them in a state that makes manipulation easy because they become so wrapped in this alternate-reality where they're so entrapped by these horrors that telling dream from reality becomes as hard as telling up from down. (I explore this slightly in a very spoiler-heavy CotN AU in which the final battle doesn't go well.)
and as the use of the active ability increases, and as the target becomes more accustomed to what they're experiencing, it makes things more and more... interesting for sure. (with enough exposure, Jasper was able to become the killing machine that he was by the climax of the story) I won't get too into this part of the lore, because it becomes a little spoilery for Friends with the Fire and I want to keep you guys still wondering a liiiiittle bit over the next couple of years 🤠
now, is losing Alice his only fear? not exactly. if we look back up at the point I made above, Jasper has been through some rough experiences. and by rough I mean that canonically by the Saga's standards Jasper was "undeniably a nightmare, a monster of the grisliest kind." in that scene in Twilight he even goes on to tell Bella that no matter where he was, whether it was with Maria or just living as a nomad, fear was a constant companion of his. he felt it from every person he fed on. in both the actual Twilight saga and the CotN one, Jasper has had to face fear in a way that others don't have to. because of this, he's able to be more objective about his own emotion.
does that mean he doesn't care about his fellow Protectors? no, not at all. but he isn't afraid of losing them since he knows how capable they are, as fighters and just as vampires maneuvering through their strange lifestyle. some of them have even faced Jasper in battle on opposite sides fighting in a way; Jasper isn't scared of them getting hurt or dying. it doesn't mean he doesn't want them in harms way or that he doesn't care, but he knows that being anxious over their safety is a little silly. (Esme is a notable exception to this, and we'll look more into that, again, in FwtF.)
but Alice is a curveball. she has existed in a constant state of fight or flight and has "chosen flight" her entire life in an attempt to avoid, what she considers, her inevitable demise. as Jasper gets to know Alice, and as Jasper learns that Alice's visions are real, and uncanny, and scarily accurate, Jasper starts to get uneasy. and when Jasper begins to develop feelings for her, that uneasiness transforms into horror at the idea of hurting her.
the reason that Skye was so set on using the "him killing Alice" thing to crack Jasper is because it's so goddamn prevalent in his mind, that it's quite literally the only thing she can find that she knows will provide Maria with any form of potential permanent results. and even then, Skye is just doing her best. this gift is new, her control is heavily practiced and trained, but it's only been a couple of years and she's doing everything she can to make it through to sunrise each day.
fear, as an emotion, is something that our brains have developed to protect us from danger. throughout the entirety of CotN, fear is Alice's biggest companion since it's her largest hurdle, but fear is also very prevalent in Jasper's life, too, since he's had to face all of his in order to continue living the life he does. I think they're interesting foils in CotN because of this little detail. Alice meets Jasper and has to face her fears for the first time in her life. Jasper meets Alice and quickly develops a real, concrete fear for the first time in decades.
Maria tasking Skye with "cracking" Jasper—the one person on the goddamn planet who knows how to maneuver around feeling a constant aura of horror and fear—for me feels like a university professor giving an advanced biochemistry exam to an average fifteen year old. there's no way in fucking hell she's going to pass that test. but Skye is a determined little devil and she's more clever than she gives herself credit for and she was going to do everything in and out of her power to figure something out. too bad for Maria that since Skye has to also go through Jasper's nightmares along with him as he does, she formed an attachment to him. but this attachment, no matter how fucked and wild, is the only thing that keeps Alice alive in the end.
TLDR;
if Skye had been tasked with trying to "crack" a Jasper who hadn't met Alice and fallen in love? she would have reported back to Maria that first day that it was a pointless endeavor and something that would take far, far longer than they had time for. (their next step likely would've been tracking down Peter/Charlotte as a backup and then killing all of the Protectors one by one. again, a nearly impossible feat is what it would have been. and even if it had been possible, it would've taken them years, assuming that the Volturi or another country wouldn't step in to help before then)
Jasper isn't fearless, but there isn't a fear he has that he hasn't faced head-on because of who he is and where he came from.
anyways, listen to my Skye-inspired playlist nightmare induction because it's chock full of bangers and I listened to it twice while replying to this message lmfao
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→ age: nineteen
→ religion: Christian
→ pronouns: she/her
→ zodiac: leo ☼ libra ☽ aquarius ↑
→ personality: enfp ☆ 2w3 ☆ gryffindor
→ other stuff: chronically ill ☆ suspected neuro divergent ☆ currently studying creative writing
My Favorites:
→ shows/movies: criminal minds, stranger things, supernatural, dharma & greg, alexa & katie, monsters inc, the princess bride, hot air, peanuts, twilight, harry potter, christopher robin
→ characters: spencer reid, penelope garcia, steve harrington, robin buckley, max mayfield, sam winchester, dharma montgomery, greg montgomery, alexa mendoza, sulley, westley, buttercup, lesley smith juniment, woodstock, snoopy, alice cullen, seth clearwater, winnie the pooh
→ music: one direction, niall horan, harry styles, noah kahan, blake rose, taylor swift, hozier, sabrina carpenter, five seconds of summer, bts, lewis capaldi, julia michaels, phoebe bridgers
→ romantic ships: spencelle/reidaway, hotchniss, demily, garvez, dharma x greg, spenlexa, buttercup x westley, lesley x summer, jalice
→ platonic ships: garceid, moreid, morcia, stobin, elmax, stustin, kalexa (?), bellice
→ interests: novel writing, screenwriting, acting, fashion, baking, listening to music, watching new shows + movies
About This Blog:
→ who i will write for: steve harrington, eddie munson, billy hargrove, jonathan byers (i may branch out in the future, these are just the ones i feel comfortable and confident writing right now!)
→ things i will write: fluff, angst, somewhat suggestive content (never full smut), hurt/comfort, pretty much any genre you can think of
→ things i won't write: character x character (just because i don't really have anything i ship enough to want to write fics for it), kids x reader, full on smut (you can redirect these requests to my nsfw blog @hornyhornyhimbos), self harm, anything non-consentual
Links and Such:
→ main blog: @ofwilliamandwalter
→ fanfiction recs blog: @paperbackprettyboy
→ icons blog (inactive): @scrapbookspence
-> nsfw blog: @hornyhornyhimbos
→ beta reader signups: linked here!
→ masterlist: linked here!
→ current pfp: these icons by @ilovegilmoregirls
→ header image: pinterest
→ navigation images: pinterest
→ navigation dividers: these dividers by @firefly-graphics
-> masterlist icon: these icons by @peachy-ash
-> masterlist images: pinterest
-> masterlist dividers: these dividers by @anlian-aishang
Tags:
-> steve reblogs - #steve 🫶🏻
-> eddie reblogs - #eddie 🎸
-> robin reblogs - #robin 🍦
-> chrissy reblogs - #chrissy 📣
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whumptober 2022: day 15: unimaginable things (jasper/alice, AU)
Title: Unimaginable Things
Prompt: day 15: lies
Rating: M (body horror)
He joined the Olympia seven years ago now, still on probation from everything that happened with Maria and the Monterrey... Everything about these people, he cares about fiercely. But they also scare the shit out of him just by existing.
Viltri is a graveyard. It’s a place of death and dying.
He used to like the story of Viltri. An old planet, a small one, riddled with volcanic activity that was slowly dissolving it. The Federation reinforced the surface with an alloy frame, one that reminded him of the old-fashioned models - an orrery, that’s right - from Earth. But shit happens, and slowly the planet dissolved and took more than half the frame with it and then Viltri was just a curve of alloy flowing in space, a docking station with slums surrounding it, carving out some kind of living with booze, weapons, sex, and scavenging. A real shithole.
That was the Viltri he knew as a kid. A place to get totally shitfaced and gamble a month’s wages in a few hours, and wake up in a shitty box of a room with some stranger who was just a little too gaunt and a little too worn down to be beautiful.
But five years ago, the Federation acknowledged that it was over. The remnants of the frame were decaying, crumbling away. Entire buildings on the fringe were quickly collapsing, and the deaths were becoming noticeable. And because of the docks, because of the risk to ships passing through, Viltri had to be evacuated and abandoned, no questions asked. Third-generation criminals had been delighted they had finally found a way off without Federation paperwork, whilst the handful of native descendants had staged ceremonies of passing for the remnants of their home.
And now it was empty. No vermin underfoot, no smell of cheap food cooked and fried and replicated. No music or shouting or rumble from the dock station. No cloud of smoke that was. some kind of miasma of fuel and smoke and shit. Nothing.
The lights are off, the buildings are empty, and Viltri is just waiting for its slow descent into nothing.
They shouldn’t even be there; Carlisle is back on the ship, fielding numerous messages about why they passed the safety barrier against Federation decree. Promising that they have enough fuel and rations to last them.
“We received an SOS, and whilst the origins and timestamp were corrupted, we’re doing a sweep of the area.”
Such an easy explanation, an act of a good Samaritan. Edward’s probably already created the false message in the system for proof when some bureaucrat demands it - they’ve already demanded fuel and ration records. Rosalie’s signed off on more documents in the last hour than all month, and she’s still pissy that they came at all.
Glass and debris crunch under his boots, and he wonders if they were wrong, if the message was old. There had been no response to the reply messages that they had sent through and that’s… well, it was the I.D. chip in their wrist (her left one) that ran the messaging system and it was powered by their bodies. The lack of reply implied…
He doesn’t think about that. Instead, he focuses on the groan of the alloy frame, a death rattle. Viltri’s got only weeks left, if Edward’s analysis is correct.
That its final orbit was always destined to be very slow and then fast and then over.
(That hits a little too close to home. Or it will, when he looks back.)
—
His story isn’t an interesting one, like Charlotte’s. Or an adventure, like Peter’s. Born on Earth to a pair of young parents who were dazzled by the promise of space, they set off with nothing but what they could carry.
And it was everything they hoped for. Until it wasn’t.
He remembers how his father died far more clearly than he wants to.
(People are always visibly disappointed that his mom lives over in Panai with his stepfather and his three half-siblings. Things aren’t exactly warm and fuzzy between them - she insists she doesn’t understand him anymore - but he talks to her sometimes. She’s happy and safe. Apparently, his story would be better if she had become a vigilante or a villain or gone and died as well.)
He’s the least interesting of the Olympia crew; Carlisle, the heavily augmented doctor, scientist, and engineer who was one of the early pioneers in space, and was right there when Earth signed on as honorary Federation members. The owner and leader of their little clan, he’s at least a hundred years old, and his augmentations are the oldest, hydraulic-powered type that he refuses to upgrade.
Then there’s Esme, the Atargatian female. Something about her features - the slope of her nose and the tilt of her eyes - remind him of Earth deer from his childhood picture books. In all the documentation, she’s a personal care assistant for Carlisle. That’s not really his story to tell, though. But she’s the heart of them all, the one that never flinches back from the bad, the disgusting, the grotesque.
There’s sad, arrogant Edward who is a monument to Carlisle’s grief more than anything else.
Sharp, vain Rosalie who captains the ship, a refugee in her own right, and smarter than all of them put together.
And then Emmett, the one-man deck crew. Emmett had never met an order he wouldn’t take - especially if it came from Rose. The man had been mooning over Rosalie ever since he’d joined the ship according to Edward, and Jasper had to admire Emmett’s commitment.
There wasn’t really enough for a ship the size of the Olympia - there were more than a few spaces that sat empty and forgotten - but they all tend to think of it as a luxury. They all appreciate the space to be alone, to not have to fight for water and food, and peace. And sometimes Carlisle would call up the Denali or any one of his old friends who freelance if they needed an extra body or some fresh blood for a season.
A leader, a ghost, a nurse, a captain slash engineer, an… Emmett (whose job is everything and nothing; one day he might be co-piloting with Rose, but the next he’s running the comms. He’s too good to be on a ship like the Olympia, too reasonable and proactive. A jack of all trades, and a good one.)
And him, security.
No analyst, not anymore.
He and Emmett cover the tech side of things, with Edward’s input. That position has been open for more than five years. Long-term dispatch under her name in the system, like the computer won’t archive her profile in a few months and the Federation won’t send them paperwork to confirm her permanent departure from their crew.
(And it’s his fault she left.)
—
He picks his way north and pretends the only thing crunching underfoot is glass and rubble. A few candles are still burning, jammed into nooks of walls, and spilling the red and yellowy wax down the bricks, like a burst wound. He leaves them to burn because they were lit by the descendants, the ones who watched their planet dying, only to be saved, and then lost again. The ones who finally realized that the Federation, despite their promises, didn’t really care that much about a remote planet with no long-term resources they could lay claim to.
Maybe he’s getting bitter in his old age.
Their farewell had been poignant, piecing together the reports from the final departure - candles and prayers and ancient dirt saved in jars for decades flung out in memory of where they had begun.
There’s an old sign, dull and broken, and when he kicks the rubble off it, he recognizes it. Not the language - no one can read Viltrian, a language with more than 900 characters across five alphabets - but the English speakers (it’s fuckin’ ridiculous they still call themselves ‘English’ speakers, but it’s been over a century and Earth is still refusing to name its official language, and there’s still a furious battle between English, Mandarin, and - inexplicably - French. The next argument will be whether Earth changes its designation to Terra or Sol or something because ‘Earth’ does not translate well to a lot of Federation languages) called it Rocco’s, due to some complex series of events long before Jasper’s time.
Either way, he’d spent more than a few nights there - drinking and smoking and ending up in a shitty cot above the bar with a glassy-eyed companion. It had been the safest bar in Viltri for humans, the one place they wouldn’t risk being beaten or skinned or molested or just killed. The one place where the food was guaranteed not to be poisonous, the drink wouldn’t burn a literal hole in your stomach, and most of the barmaids knew enough human first aid to be useful.
The sign is too big to drag with him, and that’s regrettable. The loss of that little safe place, that sanctuary, reminds him of things he’d rather forget. Reminds him of people he’ll never see again, and a person he’ll never be again.
If he reaches down to snap off the end of one character, brace-laser cutting through it clean, then no one is around to see it.
He feels like a vulture, like a carrion bird, picking over a body.
They shouldn’t have come, there’s nothing here.
That’s when his radio crackles to life, Rosalie’s voice sharp and serious, summoning them west - and he turns on a dime, both reluctant and anticipatory.
—
He joined the Olympia seven years ago now, still on probation from everything that happened with Maria and the Monterrey, and tired and used up by the scavenging ships. Even the legit ones were the kind of place that wore everyone right down to nothing. The Olympia seemed like a cushy job; security for some soft-hearted millionaire running a traveling medic ship. There was nothing special about the pay or the brief, but he’d applied and gotten the job in two days.
It had been surprising, how small the crew was. There were three empty rooms on his deck alone - one used for overflow storage. But it was… nice. Nice to have his own room and not just a bunk. A private washroom. Requisitions that were more of a formality than a process or game of roulette.
Meeting everyone was done over dinner, a communal meal that resembled the family meals at his mother’s home more than any he’d taken aboard a ship - second and third helpings were taken without a blink, and it was mostly fresh food and not the typical stock rations most ships fed their crew. Emmett is boisterous and fun, Edward is seated and irritable, with no food or drink in front of him (it’ll be a week before Esme clues him in to Edward and the perfect tragedy of his existence, and a couple of months before his presence at dinner isn’t uncomfortable. But he’ll never be comfortable with Edward’s complete and utter access to every corner of the Olympia, to every security camera and microphone and file.)
And then she had breezed into dinner late, and he had frozen for a moment.
Five feet nothing, easily, and with the biggest brown eyes he’s ever seen; the tell-tale gold disc fitted over her left iris revealing some kind of augmentation, mirrored in the slim vein of alloy outlining the left side of her jaw. Barefoot and in loose pants and a tank top, her hair piled messily on top of her head, she’s just the most beautiful thing he’s seen in a long time.
“Jasper, this is Alice - our analyst tech,” Carlisle said, smiling brightly as the girl snagged the remaining plate on the counter. “Alice, Jasper is our new security officer.”
“Hi Jasper, the new security officer,” she replies with a smile that feels brighter than anything he’s seen in a long time. “Nice to meet you.”
(Her left arm has the silvery plates of alloy peaking through the skin, especially around her elbow and wrist; it’ll be several months later when he finds the plating runs all the way down her left side, and she’s gone through and etched flowers on all the surface plating, like tattooing over a scar. There are a million different reasons for augmentation and the invisible kind is outrageously expensive. Later, when he’s going over all the onboarding paperwork, he examines the crew profiles and is secretly pleased that there are no android disclaimers on Alice’s. Some people would say he’s discriminating, but he’s not fucking anything without a soul.
That’s crude and unfair. He just … doesn’t want to get his hopes up if Alice isn’t real, if she’s just a tool to help them get their jobs done. If nothing else, he wants the Olympia and all of its unexpected promises to be real.)
—
Rosalie is already with her when he and Emmett make it to the old docking station.
And for a moment, he doesn’t recognize her. The tiny figure in the black hood, sitting on the ground with Rosalie crouched beside her, slapping some med-patches onto her, is not one he associates with Alice.
“What a shithole,” Emmett says cheerfully. “No idea why you’d camp out here, Alice.”
Rosalie tugs the hood off Alice’s face to add a med-patch to her temple and jugular, and he’s surprised at how much she’s changed. Her hair is cut harshly to her chin, uneven on one side. She looks smaller, beaten, in layers of worn pro-tex that doesn’t seem to fit right. And clutching a worn-out duffle. She glances at him, and then immediately away.
“I don’t even want you to fucking look at me, you understand?” His hand was fisted so tightly in her hair that when he lets go, the strands are tangled in his watch and he doesn’t give a shit when he rips the hair from her lying head. He pretends her terror, the tears rolling down her cheeks didn’t cut into him sharply. Pretends he’s in control of his rage and fear and trauma, and that this isn’t just him wildly lashing out like a feral animal. He just storms away and leaves her there, without looking back.
“Ready to go?” Is all he says, as Rosalie checks something on the med-screen and nods.
“I…” Alice begins, but the look Rose shoots her stops her. “Ready.”
She’s unsteady on her feet, but she doesn’t relinquish the bag. Instead, she trails after them, limping and fragile to watch. He can see how worn her clothing is, and pro-tex is compromised when it wears. And when it’s as ill-fitted as Alice’s set is. She might as well be walking around in pajamas.
They had to dock on the opposite side, and it’s a slow walk back. Rosalie makes them stop a few times, offering Alice pouches of rehydration fluids, and checking her vitals with a blank look on her face.
The luminous blue mesh of the med-patches on her face draws his eyes and he tries to remember his own first-aid training. He’s not qualified to use the blue ones, but the green ones need to be placed directly over the injury and she has them everywhere, and the worry is tight in his chest, and he hates himself for caring even a little.
Emmett finds an old Viltri flag amongst the wreckage and ties it to a broken pole and carries it like they’re on some kind of adventure mission and not just an SOS call from an old crew member on a dead planet.
What would have happened if they hadn’t come?
How did she get here?
How could she have gotten off Viltri before it collapsed?
She walks in silence, her head bowed, blue mesh glowing on her skin, and he wonders what he’s going to say to her when they get back. What can he say? Nothing has really changed; they’re both just five years older.
The shudder and groan of Viltri’s death underscores their silence as they pick their way through the wreckage. There are a handful of bodies, and it’s not hard to imagine residents choosing suicide over evacuation in the face of everything… or even for career criminals to hide and choose to die free than risk being discovered.
He breathes a sight of relief as the Olympia comes into view. It’s become home, somehow.
But Alice’s head ducks further, and one hand shoots up to tug her hood up, and the fresh wave of guilt settles in nicely.
Why does he still care so damn much?
—
The first few weeks on the ship are weird, he decides. And then it becomes… not quite home, he hasn’t had one of those in a very long time. But a place he’s okay being in.
Rosalie is one of the Faceless from Velea, and he is quickly warned to never ask about her life before the Olympia; she’s whip-smart, with an engineering background and Carlisle training her as a ship-level medic. Emmett had been working on ships since he was a kid, piecing together a living to help out his family and maybe save for his own small ship one day. Esme was a runaway, and he’s surprised that someone so kind and steady could do something as spontaneous as fleeing home and joining a med support ship as a barely-qualified nurse.
Edward was an enigma until Jasper catches him walk through a fucking wall and Esme kindly takes him aside and explains that Edward is a hologram AI designed off of Carlisle’s missing son. The whole story is horrible, and there’s something morbid about sitting down with what is essentially a memory. But despite everything, Edward is smart and occasionally witty.
Alice is a delight, and he hasn’t enjoyed someone’s company so much in a long time. She’s always smiling, always happy to pause for a conversation. She seems to have an easy back-and-forth with everyone on the ship. She’s terribly vague about her past - the most he gets out of her is that she doesn’t have any memories of her family, and was on her own until Carlisle was willing to offer her a place on the Olympia.
He finds himself drawn to her, seeking her out when she’s on break. He tries to justify it to himself, that it’s just been a long time since Maria; it’s been a while since he’s spent time with friends, with people who aren’t as miserable as he is. It’s a good thing that he’s making normal friends.
(If he sticks close to her side when they dock, fetches the drinks, and turns down smoking, ignores the pointed looks of the willing around the bar… well, it would be fucking rude to abandon her.)
They are a sight to behold, he knows, about more than one person whispers about them when they are docked on a new planet. Two humans together? A rare sight on the more rural planets. And they are an interesting contrast; he towers over her, with blond hair and sharp grey eyes. She’s so slender, with black hair that she changes on a whim - sometimes it’s long and pin straight, or short and curly, or braided with bright purple streaks.
It’s… nice to be normal. Ordinary. Emmett’s quick to show him how to hide the parole anklet in the style of boots they’re issued on the Olympia (nicer than anything else he’s ever gotten on any other job), and Rosalie is quick to pay the bill if she suspects he’s short on cash. No one judges him too hard when he wants to smoke; Rosalie huffs and rolls her eyes, Emmett jokes about it but very, very rarely joins him. Alice does, but she’s tiny enough that she’s a lightweight, and Emmett ends up carrying her back to the dock dorms more than once.
It’s especially nice when those outings somehow turn into just him and Alice. Sometimes they bum around in the crew bars, the ones where the food is greasy, the music is loud, and the booze is cheap. Sometimes they end up in nicer places, where the lighting is low and the food is good, and they have to sit too close to each other.
It starts with a drink and a kiss, a dance, and an awkward night bunking together at the dock dorms because they checked in too late and there was only one bed.
Alice feels like a fresh start, like something good and happy and safe. Like maybe he’s been looking for a place where he could be happy when he should have been looking for a person. He never thought he’d meet someone he’d be okay with being stuck out in the middle of space for weeks on end.
Then he met Alice and, well, he’d get lost with her any time.
(Too goddamn good to be true.)
—
Carlisle is delighted by their return, only a flicker in his expression when he glimpses Alice.
“Food and then med bay,” Rosalie orders, pushing past to head to the cockpit, dumping the stash bags in the alcove. “Then rest. Anything else can wait.”
“Thanks Captain,” Edward says snottily and Rose just flips her fingers rudely at him, ignoring Emmett’s chortle, the flag still in his grip.
“I’ve got food waiting,” Esme beams at Alice, and Alice nods silently, accepting the gentle squeeze on the shoulder that Esme offers as she takes them all to the galley, to plate up the food and settle around the table.
For a moment, Alice is wolfing down the food in the kind of way that indicates she hasn’t eaten in a while. Esme’s a good cook, even with the shelf-stable shit they have to keep between docking.
But just as suddenly as she starts, she stops before bolting to the flush sink, hurling before she’s even still. Esme is there with water and comfort and Carlisle shakes his head.
“A little too much too fast,” he says as Alice wipes her mouth.
“Sorry,” she mutters, keeping her gaze on the ground as she sits back at the table, not bothering to reach for her plate again.
It’s an odd reunion of the crew, Alice fidgeting for a while. He doesn’t know what to say to her because he doesn’t know how he feels about her. Five years is a long time, but nothing has changed.
Or maybe he has. Maybe five years apart, knowing he was the reason she left, has shamed him and softened him. Maybe all of those lessons he was supposed to learn from the debacle with Maria, he really learned from Alice.
She should have told him the truth. But he should never have been that angry, that cruel and terrible to her.
He still hasn’t worked out what to say to her when Esme escorts her to the guest suite, with Carlisle promising to look over her med report, and Alice still clutching her duffle bag.
“I-I need to talk to you, Carlisle,” Alice says in a small voice, and something passes between the pair when she says that.
“Of course. After dinner - you need some rest,” Carlisle says and everything feels a little off-centre, so he skips the rest of lunch and spends the day locked in the old analyst office doing ship paperwork because somehow that’s more appealing than being alone with his thoughts right now.
—
Every year, Carlisle gives them ten days off. They dock on one of the capital Federation planets so that the Olympia can be serviced and maintain its accreditation, and they get a break.
They usually choose late summer-early autumn - or what passes for it - for Emmett’s benefit, so he can spend time with his family. This year, he’s loaded up with gifts and dragging Rose along with him; Carlisle (and Edward) are headed to the University of Namen; Esme and Alice are going off with the crew from the Denali, and he’s headed off to see his mother.
Panai is one of the planets most like Earth’s visions of the future, of alien cities. A futuristic white city with abundant green-space, clean air, and children playing in the street. His mother lives on the hill, with her new family, a bit of a local oddity being the only humanoid living in the Panai equivalent of suburbia.
Cass Whitlock lights up when she sees him, her smile genuine as she embraces him and brings him inside the house, but he still feels the words they exchanged right before he left with Maria sitting between them. With every argument and disagreement and look of frustrated disappointment on her face.
His half-siblings peer around the corner of the meal-room; two giggling girls and a toddler boy - Cat, Nori, and Baby Lo. Cat’s the one that looks most like him and his mom; the blonde hair, her nose. But all three of them strongly resemble their father with the mottled blue skin, the extra digits on each hand, and the two smaller eyes under each humanoid eye. Nori has sinuous blue strands in place of hair, and both she and Lo have the flat, serpentine nose of their father, Najo.
Jasper’s never gotten along with Najo, whose strict religious leanings made him distant and cold to outsiders. The few times Jasper had been to the house, had chosen to stay there instead of at the dock dorms, it had been uncomfortable at best. But the man keeps the space for Jasper’s father in the shrine wall out of respect for Cass, and his mom is happy with her life. That’s all he wanted for her. He’s just hurt that her happiness never seemed to have a space for him when he was younger, and now that she has made a space, it’s not a shape that he fits into anymore.
“How are you, Jas?” Cass is already preparing snacks, and he pretends not to hear Cat hush the others. He’s got gifts for them - Najo had been seething with offence the first time he’d arrived without traditional offerings, even as Cass tried to explain that human culture didn’t involve the guest - especially family - making an ‘offering’ to allow their presence.
“I’m good. I brought stuff,” he says, and there’s a whoop of delight as Nori darts out, visibly sniffing the air. He piles the boxes on the table - wine and tea and the candy Nori ferrets out. The books make Cass smile and kiss his head, and it’s times like this he misses the outpost he was raised, the quasi-human compound that was just familiar enough to give his parents confidence.
“You don’t have to, you know,” she says as she scoops up Lo, handing him a piece of the candy. “Najo understands.”
“Najo was genuinely disappointed I wasn’t executed or sentenced off-planet,” Jasper says and regrets it when Cat’s smile disappears. Old enough to understand, then. “I don’t want to cause trouble.”
“I appreciate that.”
The visit goes surprisingly well, and when Najo gets home, he is polite - warm to his children and Cass, so Jasper doesn’t really care how he’s treated.
Unexpectedly, Nori seems taken with him, staring at him as they eat, but he really doesn’t know how to talk to kids, especially these children that share his mother.
It’s late when he goes to the shrine-wall; dozens of little alcoves with photocells of the dead. Cass only has five alcoves - Jack Whitlock, her parents, a brother who died as a kid, and a friend who died at the same time as Jack. The rest are Najo’s family and friends.
He leaves a stone, from Yavanna, at his father’s memorial. Najo hates it, hates the symbol of an Earth faith in his home. And Jasper himself was not raised in any faith, but his father had been and it was just … one thing he could do for him.
“You seem lighter.” He turns to see Cass. The children are asleep, and Najo is in the sanctuary, so it’s finally just them.
“Easier work,” he shrugs. And it’s true, the salvage ships are hellish; he lost fifteen pounds his first stint, and it had only been a half-time job.
Cass shook her head. “You’re less angry,” she clarified. “I’m glad you’ve found a better place.” She moves towards the opposite wall, the one that bears the photocells of the living with incense and coins to ensure a good life. His photo hasn't been there in years - probably destroyed when he was arrested - and he hasn’t been bitter about it in a while.
“Tell me about your new crew.” Cass begins to tidy up the shrine, picking up bits of dried fruit and candy that the children have left there, and he finds himself talking, explaining, and trying to gloss over the stranger or more personal details of the people he works with. He finds himself talking about Rosalie and Alice, about their educations and how goddamn smart they are, before musing about Alice’s fascination with all things Earth and how much more celebrated someone as skilled as she was would be back there.
“Alice, huh? Are you close? She sounds like she likes you,” Cass has a knowing look on her face as she watches him, and he looks away. Alice is a lot of things, but they aren’t anything serious. A teasing kiss in the tech room, a drink at a bar wherever they’ve docked, a soft conversation when everyone else is asleep over coffee about everything and anything… it’s becoming something, but slowly. And he’s cautious. After everything that Maria did, promised him, and everything that she ruined… he never told Cass any of that, and he doesn’t want to confirm that it was worse than she already assumed.
He lets out a huff of breath and Cass beams at him, reaching out to squeeze his hand.
“I only ever wanted you to be happy, Jas. To let go of that anger and fear and let yourself be happy. I know it’s hard, but that’s all I’ve ever wanted for you. Sometimes it feels like I lost you and Jack at the same time, even when I had you by my side.”
He nods, but the old anger flares; the one that let her move on so easily. That she was sad for a while and she packed it away after a while. Met Najo and picked him over Jasper; build herself a brand new perfect little family.
“Do you even remember that day?” he asks, after she’s turned to leave, and when she looks around again, she just looks frustrated.
“Of course I do, Jasper. I still have nightmares. But being angry after twelve years… it doesn’t fix a thing.”
“Maybe not for you.” Because you weren’t there. You only showed up when it was too late, when it was all over. The words he spat at her as a traumatized fifteen-year-old hover in the air.
“I’m not having this conversation again. I’m glad you’re happy, and I’m glad you’ve made friends. Good night, Jasper.”
(Cass always thought it was like magic, the idea that a few chemicals in a petri-dish could create a fetus; he knows she was enchanted that she could go to the equivalent of a 711 and buy a baby, a child, another whole person, in a test tube. He wondered why she had never done it, grabbed the green and purple tubes of Synth, and taken it home to build the second child she and Jack could never manage. Afterward, well, she had always just been sad. Never angry.)
They don’t talk alone again before he leaves after breakfast, and he finds himself mulling over his mother’s words. Not about being happy - that ship sailed when he realised how deep he was in it with Maria. But about Alice. About that maybe being something.
He still hugs Cass when he leaves and she wishes him well. As usual, he makes no promises when he’ll be back, and she doesn’t invite him.
—
Edward shimmers as he strides irritably across the galley, and Jasper idly wonders what it’s like to be eternally seventeen. To have all the thoughts and feelings and memories of an ordinary kid, to think you are that kid but in reality, you aren’t. Just a database of code.
(There’s a panel in the hall outside of Carlisle’s room and everyone hates it. Of a redheaded girl at a piano, smiling as she plays; then she looks over her shoulder and laughs. Miss Edythe Cullen, frozen forever at her piano; an eternal shrine that is a little too lifelike, a little too convincing.)
Rose strides into the kitchen and for a second, she’s faceless before her usual, perfected facade drops into place. He winces because Rose hates it when she lets her facades drop, when others see her in those moments.
“She still in there with him?” She asks grumpily.
“Yes,” Edward scowls. “Carlisle turned off the projection in there. Wanted privacy.”
“Esme’s retired for the night,” he adds in casually, and they all exchange looks. Esme is privy to so much of the crew’s … mess that it feels notable that she’s not included in whatever Carlisle and Alice are discussing in his quarters.
He wants to not care, honestly. Not to desperately want to know how the fuck she ended up on Viltri after the evacuation. Why she had waited five goddamn years to call them.
“Well, I’m not waiting up,” Rosalie said, turning on her heel and leaving. “Whatever she wants or has or knows is just going to be more drama.”
Edward huffs and continues pacing and Jasper slumps at the table and wonders again what its like to be eternally seventeen, and not being able to sleep or eat or fuck or do anything but wait.
Everything about these people, he cares about fiercely. But they also scare the shit out of him just by existing.
—
When he walks into the galley the next morning, he expects a crisis. He expects Rosalie to be percolating with irritation, Emmett to be shoveling in breakfast so that he can get on with whatever plans they need to put into action, Carlisle arguing with Edward and trying to talk Rosalie out of her snit, and Alice and Esme to be trying not to trigger an argument.
He’s not expecting silence, of Rose and Emmett drinking coffee alone.
“Where is everyone?” He asks. Esme prides herself on cooking for them regularly, but this morning is pre-packaged rations that Emmett is attempting to reanimate with gels and the precious bottle of honey they snagged during the last supply run.
“Edward and Alice haven’t come to breakfast,” Rosalie said, her stern look masking her worry. “Esme is tending to Carlisle.”
That’s bad. ‘Tending’ means she’s there in a professional sense, as Carlisle’s nurse. ‘Tending’ means that something is wrong. He can’t even begin to understand Carlisle’s health or medical status, but the few incidents he’s seen are clear reasons that Esme is employed on the ship, her relationship with Carlisle notwithstanding.
“Rose thinks she’s handing out a nice relaxing sedative,” Emmett says, taking an experimental bite out of his breakfast and looking satisfied with the results. “Eddie hasn’t told us anything.”
“Probably just a long night,” he says, snapping off a chunk of the breakfast bar and popping it in his mouth. He regrets it immediately; it’s the same brand and flavor the Monterrey used to stock and it takes him back to a place he’d rather not be, mentally. “Or his hydraulics fucked up again. You know how he gets.”
“Maybe.” Rose pushes her untouched breakfast toward Emmett and stands up. “If you see Alice, tell her I want to see her in the med bay. You two are on dinner duty - no reheats or rations. I’ll take lunch.”
That’s when the sense of dread really settles into his bones. Rosalie offering to cook.
It’s nothing. What could it be? They’re all here, the ship is fine, they have supplies.
Anything that has happened, they can fix.
He tries to convince himself of that as he throws away his breakfast bar, but the bad taste continues to linger.
—
Of all the secrets he kept - the ones that kept Peter and Charlotte out of prison, the ones that let him still see his mom, the ones that mean the difference between life and death - the dumbest is the one that has always weighed the heaviest on him, has gnawed at him over the last five years.
They got married on Xevis, drunk and high and happy. It was a fucking cliche, and when they had sobered up, she had laughed until tears rolled down her cheeks and he was just embarrassed that he didn’t do it properly.
(Grandma Whitlock was still alive down there in Texas, and he’d always promised himself that he’d take himself back to see her one last time. With a bride in tow… well, that would have made her so happy.)
The paperwork sat in the inbox for nine weeks before everything went to hell, and then she left the ship, and he didn’t bother doing anything with it. Just an ugly, sour memory split between fear and resentment of everything that she hid from him, and regret for how he had driven her out of her home.
(The marriage was legal and binding on Xevis, but never filed with the Federation. Meaningless unless they wanted to work or live on Xevis, and that would never fucking happen. He’d be more likely to set up shop on Viltri.)
But it was still a vow. A moment where consequences and rationality had been damned, and he - they - had just done what they wanted. And then, when everything had gone wrong, he’d become the person everyone feared he always would end up being.
Sometimes he wondered what would have happened if he’d never found out. If she’d just been another pretty augmented human girl to him, and his wife. He’d never wanted kids, and she’d never be able to have them, so that wouldn’t have revealed her.
(He’d been shitfaced when Emmett dragged him back to the ship that last night, and loudly slurred if he ever saw the fuckin’ Synth again, he’d shoot her between the eyes. Esme and Rosalie had been horrified, and Emmett had blamed the drink. She’d already left by then, but it would take him another two days to notice her absence, those words echoing in his head.)
—
The compound he was raised on was one of two that Earth had contributed funding to, for expats. He remembered a scarlet sky with two suns, and lush grass that was more blue than green. He remembered their bungalow of straw and mottled wood.
He remembers most of the residents at the compound being humans; the adults had grand plans of raising earth animals and selling them to alien worlds and making millions.
(He was only young. He didn’t know everything. He didn’t know anything. He knew three languages, and that watermelon, corn, and blueberries became poisonous when grown in alien soil, and that the half-alien girl in the house down by the northeast corner was the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen. He didn’t know the price on human bodies, on human tissue. He was a white boy from Texas; he could never have dreamed up how dangerous and unfair and cruel life could be.)
He was nearly twelve, by Earth-time, when it all went to hell.
They were supposed to be safe.
That’s why when the compound bought the Synths as support workers, they included security. It was probably more expensive than necessary but it was important
Back then, Synths were not really special, not to him. Humans made in Petri dishes and grown in labs weren’t all that interesting when he might see something blue and gelatinous or with five legs or sixteen eyes at the docking station. They were just neighbours to all the kids in the community.
And the Synths ones in the compound weren’t fancy; they looked like regular people. They were treated like regular people, mostly. The only real difference was the tattooed serial number on the inside of their middle finger, a shade darker than their skin. Something you had to look for, designed to be subtle.
No one knew they were unhappy; they were good at hiding it. Or rather, they were upset as the Federation began the Synth restrictions - tougher than androids because Synths could blend in so much easier. But no one noticed their rage.
(The trigger was when Earth refused them passports, refused their entry, and made them stateless. He remembers his father promising his mother that it would be okay, they would look after their own.)
He remembers it being a hot day, helping his father with the precious few chickens they were attempting to acclimatize in a corner of the barn.
He remembers being confused when the barn doors closed.
He remembers his teacher, her gaze hard and cold against him, holding him back as the others cut Jack’s throat.
As they laid Jasper’s father down next to the other men, the older teenagers (nine of them died that day), and stripped them down.
When they began to cut and slice and peel, as they bagged and boxed each piece, they didn’t need to hold him back anymore. He just stared, blood sticky on his face and hands. Too young to be worth a dime.
Sixteen hours in that building, before they packed up their bounty and bid him farewell, and left him there with nine splayed out bodies, cut down to the bone and hollowed out for profit.
(The one with the dark hair blew him a kiss and promised they’d come back for him when he was older. He still has that nightmare where he’s just another body on the floor, eyes and tongue and organs scooped out.)
Cass had howled when she saw Jack, screamed when she saw Jasper, and grabbed him in her arms so tightly when he reached for her that there were bruises on his arms. He shook but he didn’t cry, didn’t make a sound.
Not even when the community lined up the other Synths, the ones that were just as confused and afraid as the humans were, and executed them on the spot.
Monsters were real and they wore human skin.
—
Carlisle comes to dinner with red, tired eyes.
Edward appears not at all. Neither does Alice.
The meal is eaten in silence, Carlisle looking exhausted and worn and utterly hopeless and nothing is said until the plates are cleared and Rosalie is pouring cups of coffee.
“Rosalie, please run co-ordinates for Noctuae, Small Island,” Carlisle finally says, deflated. “They should be in the system.”
“Of course,” Rosalie says cautiously; she’s been quiet all day - like the rest of them, she’s been waiting for whatever bomb is about to be dropped.
“Emmett, send a message through to Masen House that we will be docking for three in nine,” Carlisle adds, staring down at the translucent slices of fruit remaining on his plate with the sort of hopelessness Jasper is familiar with.
“Masen House?” Rosalie asks, and Jasper surreptitiously runs a search for the name in with his Lens, the name ringing some faint bell. Edward Masen Cullen. “What’s going on, Carlisle?”
There is a terrible, hollow pause as they watch Carlisle try to gather himself.
“Alice brought me Edward,” Carlisle says simply, staring into his mug. “She found him being used as a tissue farm and…” His head bows and Esme’s gone pale in horror, and Emmett looks vaguely ill.
Tissue farming had popped up before the Synths and continued on after them; it wasn’t something they could be blamed for. It just… wasn’t taboo in some quarters of space. DNA splicing, transplants, blood, and organ donation… it was all legal. The problem was in that there was always a demand for more variety, more choices, especially exotic ones. Like humans. And where there was demand, there was always going to be someone willing to provide.
He imagines what Alice found when she saw Edward. If it was a nice place, probably a man kept alive on life-support, harvested at the whim of wealthy clients. Probably brain-dead from the chemical coma.
If it wasn’t a nice place… he didn’t want to imagine that. Edward’s just a kid.
Or he was. He always has been. Always will be, now.
Carlisle sets the metal box down, a rough label slapped on the front, along with a blood-stained microchip.
“She had no way of traveling with him,” Carlisle began, and he can already see the sobs building. “And he couldn’t have anyway, he was gone.” The sobs break through and Jasper wonders what that level of love felt like when turned to grief. If he’d sob if any of his half-ling siblings were found too far gone to help.
“We’ll take him to Small Island,” Esme rushes to comfort Carlisle, her own face streaked with tears. “With Edythe and Elizabeth.”
“Yes. The end of a chapter,” Carlisle manages with a shuddering breath. “A father without his children…” He shakes his head.
“You’ve still got a child,” Rosalie says softly, and looks down the hallway and for a second, Jasper expects to see Edward’s mopey visage, trying to compute the idea that he’s a hologram and AI of a dead person and how exactly he needs to mourn himself.
Instead, he sees a flash of black hair and worn pro-tex, and he just feels pity for them both.
—
It starts - or ends, really, with Alice flipping Emmett off.
They’re in the galley, doing the quarterly reports on supplies. It’s boring as hell, documenting every mug and every spoon, with the knowledge that once the galley is done, they have to check over every other common or unoccupied room in the ship.
(“It’s fucking stupid, but at one time any human goods fetched a good price on the black market,” Emmett informed him solemnly during his first year. “When I was a kid, a potato peeler was worth more than a new optical drive. So now we log every fuckin’ dish towel for the Federation to make sure Carlisle doesn’t make his dough hocking tube socks and chopsticks on the down-low.”)
It’s a good night; Rose mixed drinks for them and they’ve bypassed Edward to pick the music themselves, and Emmett’s making salacious jokes at their expense because their last date-night at the Peremai dock involved too much liquor and not a whole lot of discretion, and Alice flips Emmett off and that’s when he sees the tattoo.
The shiny glint of the genetic-tattoo a shade darker than her skin, running up the inside of her middle finger, and the bottom drops out of his stomach. The world tilts, and he hears static, and then he feels sick before he feels anything else.
Maria reassured him, all those years ago, that the Federation had outlawed Synths after the attacks on the Earth compounds, and the small population of them were tagged and monitored - virtually the only forms of employment for a Synth were wet work and sex work. You had to go looking to find a Synth.
That was what she was good at - they were good at.
And Alice is standing there, laughing with a drink in her hand, and he doesn’t know how to speak.
(What happens next is that he grabs her by the arm and drags her out of the room, and Rosalie demands to know where they’re going and Emmett wolf-whistles, but really he takes her back to his quarters and he demands to know the truth. There is screaming and crying and words that he doesn’t remember saying. He remembers punching the wall over and over again, and when Esme is bandaging up his hands the next morning, he can’t convince himself that’s the only thing he hit. It’s all a messy blur in his mind, of terror and rage and betrayal and the kind of fear that never ever leaves him, that remembers the shape of him. He doesn’t remember a word she says in her defense, and for a long time, he doesn’t care.)
Carlisle finds him three days later and invites him into his lab. He’s hungover and an open wound, ready to be fired and dumped at the next docking station. He wants to fucking yell every obscenity at the man for not disclosing Alice’s status anywhere at any time.
But he’s not fired. He’s given a cup of coffee, and Carlisle is serious but kind. Every human knows of the Earth Nine, knows their names. They’re in the history books, even in space.
“Alice has been put on an alternative schedule for the foreseeable future,” is the first thing out of Carlisle’s mouth and he is petty enough to be pleased that she - it - will be on shift alone, maybe with Edward for company whilst the rest of them sleep. The rest of what Carlisle says is the usual - counseling, time off. Nothing he hasn’t heard before, and he doesn’t want to admit that he can’t afford extra leave because of all the fines and shit that were a part of his sentence.
It’s late at night when he’s trying not to listen out for her moving about the ship and get some fucking sleep, that he allows himself to mourn what he thought he had. To let the great well of sadness swallow up the rage. And he blames himself for thinking that he could ever expect anything to be good, to be safe, to be happy.
(Maybe, after she’s gone, he starts gathering two stones from the places he visits - one for his father’s shrine at his mother’s house and a spare, one that he lines along his port window and never acknowledges.)
—
It’s quiet after they find out about Edward. Carlisle spends a lot of time in the mostly-unused sanctuary of the ship, lighting cells and whispering prayers from one of the Earth religions over the box of ashes.
Esme takes to cooking, and everyone pretends they don’t see her sniffle over cookie batter - another child lost to them. If the world was a perfect place, everyone on the ship would have their children, their siblings, and their parents. But it isn’t, and he’s the one that goes with Esme with her little bundle of things - a cookie, some strands of hair from an old hairbrush, writing he cannot read on a piece of paper - to throw into the airlock and release into the sky as Esme kneels and whispers the prayers of her childhood.
Rosalie just looks sad in the few absent moments he catches her; she prefers to remain busy, moving between the cockpit and the med bay, to make sure everything is textbook-perfect.
Emmett’s in the tech room and Jasper runs into him having a conversation with his siblings on the video-comm, and Emmett looks a little sheepish, but he understands - you want to hold a little tighter to what you have when there is a loss.
Edward and Alice are both absent from public spaces, and he feels slightly pathetic when he leaves a hydration pouch and some snacks outside the guest room door - along with a spare pillow and a set of clean pyjamas - instead of knocking on the door and talking to her face to face.
He wishes she’d chosen to stay in her old room, but he understands why she doesn’t. She emptied it before she left; he remembers Carlisle telling him she’d left the ship, and going straight to her room like she’d be waiting there for him. And it had been empty, smelling of antiseptic, the bunks folded up and the walls blank. The guest quarters are always made up and ready. He doesn’t even know where her stuff is - he assumes in storage but he doesn’t know.
He finds himself wandering the ship under the guise of keeping an eye on things but really, he’s thinking about Edward, about tissue farms, about his father and eight others splayed on the barn floor, hollowed out for profit. It makes him feel old and tired and lost. It makes him hope that Edward’s death was soft and peaceful, that he just drifted off and eventually his brain gave out from the drugs.
He hopes it wasn’t ugly and dirty and scary. No one deserved the death his father had, what he witnessed. He wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
It’s quiet, but the weight of everyone’s grief is the loudest thing he’s heard for a long, long time.
—
Alice’s quarters were always the smallest on the ship, and she’d joke that it was because she was too. Narrow and programmed to have purple walls with flowers that bloomed around doorframes, it held a pair of single bunks, a locker, and a small desk. She used the washroom across the hall and he was bewildered that an analyst with seniority was given worse quarters than he was.
But there was the window. The one opposite her bed that took up the entire wall and offered an uninterrupted view of the sky. It was beautiful, and the entire reason she kept the room.
The night he spends in her room, he keeps finding new things to look at - the moons and stars and suns she’s painted onto the underside of the top bunk; garlands from every planet she’s visited, each of them with a different meaning, strung across the ceiling. How she requisitioned as many blankets as she could and cut them all up to make a hideously ugly quilt of industrials greys and greens and blues, and then spent a fortune on inks and brushes to painstakingly paint each square in bright colours. How she’s piled half the bed with pillows like she’s trying to create some kind of nest.
“It’s a mess,” she says shyly, as she begins gathering up her clothing to cram them into her locker. She has more clothes than any of them, picked up at markets all over space. It reminds him of some kind of home seeing her swan down to breakfast in a floral bathrobe and duck-print pajamas; to drag him off the ship when they dock clad in a white sundress and ballet slippers.
“It’s perfect,” he says, and she beams at him, crawling onto the bed with him.
“You know what?” She asked him shyly, her hair falling into her face.
“What?” She’s so tiny in his arms, he worries he’s going to hurt her as he gathers her up.
“I love you, Jasper. The most I’ve ever loved anyone in my entire life. I just wanted you to know that.” Her eyes are wide and she smiles at him before she kisses him, and that’s the moment that imprints itself on his brain; surrounded by stars with the scent of floral shampoo, and them wrapped up in each other.
(Something in him breaks, months later, when he finds that room empty and grey, and smelling of antiseptic cleaner. It’s the kind of despair that cuts deep, and he knows that he deserves it, every ounce of pain. But it takes years for the rage to dull and let the shame and regret through.)
—
It’s Edward that finds her.
Three days later - three days of Edward hiding away from everyone, three days of Carlisle shutting himself in his quarters to mourn. Three days of Alice emerging for meals she picked at in silence before returning to the guest quarters, never going near her old room.
He hears the alarm go off for med bay, and Rosalie and Carlisle dash through the ship to the guest quarters; he and Emmett follow and for a moment he wonders if she’s killed herself.
She’s on the floor in her sleep clothes, so pale she looks translucent, with Rosalie already slapping med-patches onto her and Carlisle checking her vitals.
“I told her to go to the med bay,” Edward says waspishly, the first words he’s spoken since he found out, and it is comforting that he’s at least been confiding in Alice.
“How long has she been sick?” Carlisle asks.
“She wasn’t in great shape when she boarded, Carlisle,” Rosalie’s answer is short, and Carlisle looks away and he realizes that even though she arrived covered in med patches, Carlisle had been too distracted to look over the health report Rose had compiled.
“Two nights ago,” Edward says quietly. “She said she found treatment before she left for Viltri, but she implied it wasn’t good.”
Carlisle nods, his whole demeanor changing. “Get her to the med bay,” he says, flicking the screens on the med-screen authoritatively. “I’ll stabilize her and pull up her records.”
Emmett is the one to carry her, with Rose and Carlisle hot on his heels. He stays back with Edward - he knows basic first aid, nothing useful at this moment and he’s seen enough dead bodies not to enjoy this part much.
Edward’s looking at him, and he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say.
“How sick is she?” Is what he goes with, and he’s surprised how lost he sounds in that moment.
“She’s been sick a long time,” is what Edward says. “Do you know how hard it is to find doctors that know human physiology and will see a Synth? Let alone treat one?”
Edward leaves without another word, and not for the first time, he wonders where she’s been and how she ended up here.
—
Alice leaves them.
There's not much else to say about that, really.
It's weeks after he found out the truth and she's been working second-shift the whole time. He barely sees her, and he's glad of it.
He goes with Emmett and Rose when they dock, and he walks past her on the ship, holding a cup of coffee and looking tired.
Edward tells them not to bother taking the projection cells, he's staying on the ship with Carlisle.
He walks out and goes and gets blackout drunk, and when his hangover passes, and they are two days out in the middle of nowhere, it finally registers that she's not on the schedule anywhere, that it's been Emmett in the tech office.
"Alice decided to take extended leave" is Carlisle's diplomatic answer when he asks. And that's it.
She's gone.
Alice left (and she never planned to come back.)
—
He’s not allowed to see her until the next day.
Edward tells him everything, refusing to speak about anything but Alice when he appears - that she did regain consciousness but only long enough for Carlisle and Rose to question her.
He selfishly wants to know if she asked for him, and the look Edward gives him implies that he knows what Jasper is thinking and that he really is a fuckwit to think that the girl he so fantastically terrorized out of her home wants anything to do with him anymore.
“She was out of it,” Edward finally says. “Answered direct questions but didn’t realise she was here. Kept trying to give out our call-signal. Rose was pretty generous with the pain meds I think.”
Rosalie is never generous with pain medications; insisting on a stockpile in case they really needed them. Emmett needed laser-stitches up his back a few years ago, and even then Rosalie had been stingy. It makes his stomach twist, that Alice needed them bad enough that Rose was willing to give them.
He waits for a while before decamping to the galley, where Esme is waiting with lunch and a sympathetic touch to his shoulder as he paces, uninterested in food.
“She would hate seeing you so upset. Carlisle and Rosalie are beyond capable of handling this,” Esme says so gently, her words punctuated with a soft click-pop typical of her species. It’s comforting.
He shakes his head and keeps pacing, gets himself coffee just to give himself something to do. Esme sets the table and Edward slouches against the wall, scowling at the pair of them.
“Do you think…” Jasper begins and Edward huffs.
“Tell him Esme,” Edward says and Esme frowns before looking over at Jasper.
“Alice corresponded with me a few times over the years. Very superficial messages,” Esme says, and he whirls around at the idea that there are clues and information that has led them to this moment. “There was nothing to tell, so I didn’t think it was worth mentioning.”
“What did she say?” He wants to yell. That any message was better than nothing. As if it is Esme’s fault she’s so sick she doesn’t know where she is.
“She said she hoped we were all well and safe. She mentioned that she hoped you were happy once or twice. Edward seems to think that withholding this information from you was tantamount to betrayal, but they were nothing, Jasper. I write longer supply reports.” Esme looks so sad.
“You went to her room the other night and spoke with her,” Edward retorts, and he and Esme have always had an odd, sibling-like relationship where they both know best and both want the best for Carlisle. Normally, it is funnier. Now, it’s just irritating.
Before Esme can respond, Rosalie emerges from the med bay, looking tired. She plucks the coffee out of Jasper’s hands without a word and takes a long draw from it.
“Carlisle said you can see her if you want to,” is all she says to him, as she takes a seat at the table and pulls a plate towards herself, ignoring Esme and Edward’s bickering. “He’s put her under though - advanced systemic shock.”
Life-support. It sounds worse than it is; he knows this. Humans are put on life-support for bad fevers, infections, setting badly broken limbs - anything where the body needs to be stabilized and supported. It just makes him nervous.
The med bay is quiet when he slips in the door, his eyes finding her immediately. She lies on the gurney like a dead body, wrapped in medical modesty garments and nothing else, staring blindly at the ceiling and seeing absolutely nothing. He sees the white tubing threaded through her nose and mouth, into both wrists, and he knows that it's the life-support system that will keep her sustained until the treatment is over. But the tubes are almost as thin as wire, enough to render them invisible in the bigger picture, and mostly she just looks like a corpse on a slab. He can see her skin now, blue and black mottling all over her right side, pink and scarlet lines of infection just under the skin.
(Did he read everything he could on Synths after she left them? Yes, he did. He knows about systemic shock, and he knows about every single hellish detail about the long-term effects of lab-generated tissue. Somewhere, Maria is laughing at him and calling him a hypocrite and a traitor.)
Carlisle looks at him with pity. “I haven’t prepared her yet. Taped her eyes and such,” the man says and that makes Jasper want to gag a little.
“How long will she be under?” is what he manages.
“It’s been a long time since I treated advanced systemic shock, let alone of this severity,” Carlisle admits. “She’ll be under for a while, at this rate. Alice knows the risks and accepted them.”
Ninety days. That’s the limit of life-support for Synths. They die quickly after that; and it takes at least twenty-one to grow new tissue if the infection on her side is too far gone. He knows that.
That’s why she’s got so much plating down her side, he realizes suddenly. A previous infection. He never asked and she never told him. But it makes sense. If a tissue-graft hadn’t taken or had needed some kind of binding and reinforcement, plating would have been the most effective option.
And this is all assuming the infection hasn’t gone to her brain or heart, he swallows hard and drifts to the seat at her side. If it has, there’s nothing anyone can do for her. She’ll just die.
Maybe that’s why she chose Viltri to send an SOS. Planned to be quietly dead when they arrived, with Edward’s ashes in her bag.
Or maybe she never planned on coming home, and planned to pass on her message, and stay behind to die with the planet they met on.
(Carlisle lets him stay as he tapes her eyes close, draws blood, and links up with the chip in her wrist. At some point, he finds himself holding her hand and pressing his lips against her knuckles as Carlisle drills into the bone of her thigh for tissue.
If he finds himself praying, saying the words a half-remembered grandmother once taught him, well, maybe that’s okay.)
I’m here and I’m so, so sorry.
I’m sorry for hurting you, I’m sorry for forcing you to leave, I’m sorry for forgetting how much I love you.
And I do, I love you, and I’ll wait for you as long as it takes.
—
She’ll be okay.
He doesn’t believe in much, but he has to believe that.
—
Notes
For those who don't dwell in the same media spaces as I do, 'wet work' is killing for hire.
I have detailed backstories for every single character. I just need you all the know the idea captured me and became a thing. Thanks for the inspo, Archer 1999.
Jasper’s father was raised by a Jewish mother, and whilst Cass and Jack Whitlock were more science over religion, they did teach Jasper as much about his origins as they could. Leaving a stone from his travels at his father’s memorial was the way that Jasper could honour his father that had multiple meanings. But I really wanted to mention that yes, Jack Whitlock was raised by a Jewish mother.
Rosalie’s backstory here is somehow grimmer than her canon backstory, but I hope to explore that in an expansion of this fic. Basically in this fic, Rosalie’s parents were far more active in her downfall, that Rosalie is a 100% self-made alien.
Edward as an AI hologram allows him to keep so many of his canon personality traits, as well as some of the hurdles his relationship with Bella faces. Edythe’s demise weighs heavily on both him and Carlisle. There is a story there, and if I get the opportunity to tell the full, multi-chapter version of this fic I don’t want to spoil it ahead of time. But Edward and Edythe were not Carlisle's bio-children.
The Lens is something that didn't get explored enough but is essentially a permanent contact lens that allows users to access their computing network - that's what the gold overlay over Alice's eye was. Alice chose one that was very visible over her eye, mostly people chose them to blend in with their eye colour.
Cass Whitlock's story is a lot more complex than gets touched on here - I have a whole backstory for her. I'm still undecided whether she's kind of an asshole to her eldest son, or if she was just totally unprepared to deal with his level of trauma.
#whumptober2022#no.15#twilight#fic#jalice#twilight fanfiction#my fic: space fic#my fic: unimaginable things#some implied violence#body horror#space au#alice cullen#jasper hale#angst#drama#the space au no one asked me for
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