the hot water at ten. and if it rains, a closed car at four.
~
the first. where the dead men lost their bones
His prey is blind.
He can tell by the way she wanders along the moorland, one hand slightly in front of her, balancing herself, as she picks her way patiently across long grass and unforgiving stone, foolishly wandering at dusk in a place with no tree cover. Just open land, endless sightlines for a patient hunter.
Monsters like him grow strong on the blood of creatures like her, and he grew tired of trying to understand the rationale behind the laws of nature centuries ago.
She does not even have the good sense, like any nervous deer or even the slowest rabbit, to realise there’s a hunter near. Her emotions are smooth, lavender- and indigo-tinged; calm, pensive, unhurried. In her sightless eyes, there is not one single trace of fear, and this lack of self-preservation stirs a feeling from him that he has not felt for a very long time - something close to anger. He is usually dutiful and dispassionate about his feeding, but his anger makes him just a little more... animalistic.
His prey grasps the thread of compulsion that Jasper sends towards her, unrolling like a ribbon: a gentle gold, glimmering, intriguing. It disturbs him, as always, how eagerly they grasp the ribbon, how lightly they dance towards him. When she is close enough for him to see the pulse in her throat rise and fall, he springs.
Mid-leap, he is assaulted.
Their bodies meet with a thunder’s boom and crack, the crash of falling buildings, and he is disoriented by a wave of war rage so strong that a pair of fangs are at his throat before he recognises his attacker.
He taught her to do that, he remembered. Go for the jugular.
His attacker snarls “Mara!” and then an order, in a wild, leaping language that he does not understand, guttural and powerful. He does not feel her breath upon his skin because this woman has no need for air.
His escaped prey is now dizzy from orange-grey jags of shock pierced with bright blue spots of worry, but she is obedient, and she is hurrying, scrambling over the rock and through the brush as quickly as she can. He calculates his chances of breaking free and speeding after her, but the woman pinning him snarls again and her fangs just score his neck with a hiss like cutting diamonds.
Then he feels her shock as well, flaring spikes of an even brighter orange as she finally recognises him.
“Jasper,” she rasps, and he realises, dimly, Yes, that is my name. It has been so long since anyone has said it, so long since has had a need for a name.
“Bella,” he acknowledges. He tests out sending a lavender wave of calm towards her, and is relieved when her fangs withdraw him from his throat by a fraction of an inch.
Of all things - she laughs, and then seems startled by the sound.
She lets him up. “Come,” she says. “Dinner’s on me.”
~
They travel deep into the mountains, where Bella tracks elk. She gestures, Go ahead, towards the animals, and he notes that her eyes are brilliant as autumn leaves: shimmering scarlet-gold. A mixed diet, then.
In due time, she leads him back to her den - a hollowed out hill, not quite underground, but comfortable, nonetheless. And not very far, he notices, from the moorlands where his prey escaped. In her den, she builds a fire, not for its heat, which neither of them feel, but for its dim and flickering light.
She crouches gracefully in her home, reminding him, strangely enough, of Victoria when they first met her. Her hair has grown wild and matted, woven here and there with long grass into tiny braids tied off with sinew. She wears rough trousers and what could, in kinder times, be called a kind of cloak, grey green and woven of some shaggy wool. Despite the weathered appearance of her cloak, obviously chosen for its utility, someone has stitched a small design of white petals along the edge. Her feet are now the colour of earth, automatically splayed out in the manner in the manner of those who walk and run and hunt barefoot. Around one of these bare ankles is a bracelet, again made of woven sinew and different kinds of long grass. A green stone hangs at her throat, but no diamonds.
He notes, clinically, that she is beautiful, the way their kind is. A much different kind of beauty, now: wilder, fierce and careless. Like the moorlands and the mountains, like a burning city, like the last night of a war.
But that’s a lie, too: he’s known from the moment he saw her that one of them will kill the other, because some wars just never end. A little polite chitchat can’t hurt while they pass the time.
“I wish I had tea,” she muses. He wonders if the roughness in her silken voice is from age or disuse; perhaps she is merely unused to English, after so long. “Not that either of us would drink it, but making it would give me something to do while we awkwardly think of what to say to one another.”
After endless centuries of the warfare, slaughter, guilt, horror, grief, vengeance, depression, despair, numbness, and more slaughtering, he almost… laughs.
“So tell me, brother,” she says, obviously encouraged by the very slight twitch of his mouth. “What have you been up to for the past few centuries?”
~
He talks to Bella because he hasn’t talked in forever. Once, in another lifetime eons ago, Alice had chided him (well, bullied him) about “opening up” and “talking about his feelings” and “just because you can feel everybody’s feelings doesn’t mean they can all instantly divine yours, Mister I am In Pain and So Misunderstood”. If wasn’t open, she pried him open.
Lovingly, of course. That was Alice.
It almost didn’t hurt to think of her anymore (and that was obviously bullshit, but the kind of bullshit that he had gotten better and better at telling himself over the years).
He talks to Bella about the last raid he went on with Alice; about her death, and how it never occurred to him except as a dim, nebulous thought that he might return to the Cullens; about joining the Volturi and becoming a general in their army; about slaughtering humans and vampires alike and wondering, vaguely, when the feelings of guilt and remorse would return, until he accustomed himself to the fact that maybe they never would. He allowed himself to be pointed in a direction and just kept killing and killing, brutally, efficiently, until he realised that dozens upon dozens of years had passed and there were now very few people left to kill, especially after the Volturi eventually tore themselves apart as the food supply dwindled, and kept dwindling.
There is no revulsion in Bella, no judgement; she listens, interested but cool, sometimes surprised but never horrified.
There is no pity in her, either.
And then she begins to speak, and he understands how she can be so calm.
He was there when they lost Rosalie and Emmett, so she picks up from there and tells him about Edward and Esme and Carlisle. She tells him how beautiful Esme was under fire, taking out no less than twenty-seven Navy SEALS with her when she went down. She counts off the exact number of colours in the stained glass windows in the church where she burns what’s left of Carlisle. She tells him, quite simply, how Edward made her promise to live, and how much she has hated him for it, because her love forces her to honour this promise as seriously as any of her wedding vows.
She tells him about the fall of the United States, the prayers Carlisle and Edward said over every heap of human bodies, the scavenging in ruined cities, the street children who always seemed to seek her out so that it barely felt like hunting at all, the running and the hiding and the ever-present hysterical fear of being caught, the hunger, the hunger, the hunger. She saw a woman shove a cyanide capsule into her three-year-old’s mouth when she saw Bella coming, and it saved the three-year-old but not the woman; blood is blood, after all, and an adult holds more than a child. She knows what bones look like when they break free of flesh, can time to the second how long it takes a ruptured eyeball to fill with blood, has seen a man slowly eaten by rats as he screamed about the fact that he was missing one of his shoes.
She tells him about her werewolf, Jacob, who somehow managed to survive throughout all the years and find her in the burned out shell of Seattle. About how Jacob leapt and then mid-leap, transformed back into a human when he recognised her. About how seeing him made her wish that she could still cry. And then how he was knifed by a scavenging gang when he was in his human form, and how she massacred them all through the veil of tears that she couldn’t even cry. How ridiculous, she said, to live through centuries as a giant wolf, and then get shanked in a shabby alleyway. Only Jake could be stupid enough to pull something like that. He was probably rolling around laughing his ass off in some heaven that she didn’t believe in anymore.
They talk and they talk and they talk, the talk filling them up and emptying them out until the silence grows longer between their words, and there is more silence than words. They talk more in that hollowed out hill than they did in their past lives put together, their words soaking into the earth. He wonders what strange plants will grow out of their stories, or if anything will grow at all.
“So,” Bella says, finally. “How do we do this? A duel at dawn? Swords or pistols? Should we find a convenient stretch of dusty desert road, or just a bamboo forest?”
He looks up and feels… something he hasn’t felt for a very, very long time. The beginnings of guilt.
Bella smiles gently. For that smile, a human would leap off a cliff. It only makes him feel guiltier.
“Jasper,” she says, patiently. “There’s barely any wildlife anymore. Even fewer humans. You need herd lands. You know that I sent Mara somewhere, back to other humans. You know that I protected her. You are going to challenge me for my territory.”
He doesn’t know what makes him feel worse: the fact that she knows all of this already, or the fact that all their talking, the pouring out of their whole histories, has not done one thing to change the fact that he is going to kill her.
“Believe me,” she says, with a wry little smile. “I understand when you say it’s nothing personal.”
“How did you come upon your… humans?” he asks, genuinely curious; he’s avoiding the immediate issue, but she allows him to, for now. “You didn’t mention that.”
Her smile goes a little more crooked, and for one dizzying moment, she reminds him of Edward, smug as a god.
“I’ll tell you tomorrow,” she says. “We can put off our duel to the death until then, I suppose. I need a few hours to rest, and it couldn’t hurt you, either.”
He agrees. They pass the next three or four hours sitting in companionable silence, as the flames of the fire leap lower and lower. Her eyelids are closed, but they don’t twitch, like humans do when they dream. The dreams of their kind are waking dreams, and even worse than the usual kind, because they are often memories.
(Stop being so emo, Alice said once, or a million times. And stop making that face, you pull off white leather that like nobody’s business. Even Rosalie is jealous.)
~
the second. the nightingale fills all the desert with inviolable voice
Bella will not lead him anywhere near the humans, so they rest in the curve of a comfortably distant mountain, far enough so that the humans’ scent will not carry, close enough that he can make out individuals if he strains his eyes enough. In the rough little village hidden in the valley, he manages to catch a glimpse of a familiar dark-haired figure, wearing a cloak of the same grey-green as Bella.
“Her name is Mara,” Bella says, following his gaze. “She is the only one of the humans that I speak to directly, the only one that makes… contact.” She smiled a little again, that wry little smile. “I suppose you could call her my priestess.”
“You’re the local god?”
“The local monster,” she corrects. “It all started off innocently enough. About, oh, eighty years ago, I stumbled upon this little band of humans who had managed to survive the wars, the Inquisition, the whole horror show; they were a hardy lot. There weren’t very many of them, so I had to be careful to take only a few every month. I supplemented the rest of my diet with some wildlife that also, surprisingly, began to spring up here in the mountains -elk, like you saw, a few varieties of deer, sometimes wolves. I didn’t even try touching their sheep. That went just fine for a few years. Every month or so, someone disappeared, but they got used to it, after a time, the way they got used to landslides and thunderstorms and wild animals and sickness. And then… another vampire stumbled upon the scene. Someone I didn’t know, from - Mexico, I think? He wanted the herdland, so I killed him without even thinking about it. But some of the villagers saw, and - can you believe it?”
She lets out a disgusted sigh. “The next month, they sent out a young girl to the cairn, not to far from my den. It must’ve taken her days and days to get there. I asked her what the hell she was doing so far from the village. She said that she was an offering to the ‘guardian of the mountain’. Naturally I asked her who this guardian person was. And naturally she said it was me.”
Bella scrubs at her face a little - such a human gesture. “And that’s how the gig has been, ever since. I get human for dinner once a month, and they are saved from sundry ‘monsters’ or other big predators, and any other natural disasters I can battle against. Once I was able to prevent a huge land slide, that was nice.”
“And Mara?”
“Mara…” Bella smiles a different sort of smile, then, almost secretive. He can feel something rare sparking from her- silvery, buzzing, closer to delight than anything else. “They brought Mara to me as an offering when she was a child. I was a little insulted - she was literally pint-sized - and even more insulted when I realised that the reason she was given to me was because she was blind. But we had a very interesting conversation, and I sent her back to the village with strict instructions that her family raise her and never try to get rid of her again. It took me a while to figure out among the usual four-year-old’s babble but Mara… Mara had a very, very special gift.”
“Out with it,” Jasper says impatiently, not above needling her already barely contained excitement into outright urgency.
Bella’s smile widened. “She has visions.”
~
If he could breathe, he’d be winded; if he could stagger, he would already be falling off their precarious perch on this thin mountain ledge.
“Not funny, Bella,” he hisses, through clenched teeth, and he wishes for the thousandth time that his ability to spread calm would work on himself. “Not even remotely.”
“It wasn’t meant to be. Her visions are nowhere near as clear, nor do they come as frequently, as Alice’s, but then again - Alice was one of us. Her gift as a human might been very much like Mara’s is now.”
“Why are you…”
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” Bella says. “Surely you’ve noticed the resemblance?”
He forces himself to look closer.
Mara. Her hair is long, nearly sweeping her waist, but the same dark colour, like spilled ink. Her skin is not marble, but still pale, more like the whiteness of certain blossoms in spring, white with a flush in it. Her body moved, even amongst the moors, gracefully as music, lithe as long grass.
And that gift. That damnable gift that left her exposed on a mountaintop in a stony cairn, left as an offering for a monster. Some genetic quirk, perhaps, or…?
“No,” he says, softly, to himself, not knowing what he is denying, what he is forcing himself not to see.
“Alice still had family in Tennessee,” Bella says. “And even humans pack up and move to other continents.”
“It’s impossible for her bloodline to have survived. It’s been… centuries, maybe millennia - ”
“We’re still alive, aren’t we, brother?”
“We’re already dead,” he says automatically, and she tut-tuts in the exact way that that sort of melodramatic comment deserves.
“But Mara is not.” Again, a flash of a needle bright smile. “I gave her the name, by the way. They don’t name children until five or six around here; it’s considered bad luck, since many of the children don’t survive. She was just about to be named when they left her to me.”
“Mara…” He tries to tease apart the threads of Bella’s blue-green satisfaction and follow them back to their source; a click goes on in his head. “Mary Alice?”
“One and the same.”
And then he realises - “You’re manipulating me,” he says, and once again, feels the distant tinges of something like anger. “Into feeling something for these - humans -”
“That wasn’t my intent,” she says. Her surprise is genuine. “I didn’t think you could be manipulated, not emotionally, anyway. I simply wanted you to understand. How I came to be here. And why, as deathly tired as I am, I will fight you until only one of us is left.”
She spreads one pale marble arm before her, as if she brought the village into being, as if she could sweep it into safety with one frail gesture.
“This is my atonement,” she says.
~
He meets Mara, sort of.
Bella gives him precise instructions of where to position himself so that he is not downwind of the girl when she and Bella meet on the cairn. From a safe distance, he can pick up their words and at least read their lips . It helps that their words sometimes echo against and are almost contained within the rough hewn stone of the cairn. He is surprised to hear that they are not speaking that strange language of before, but he supposes that Bella has planned this for his benefit. The girl speaks English passably, in a lilting accent.
“… My brother,” Bella is saying. “We have not seen each other for a very long time. Actually, we all thought he was dead.”
Mara - he winces privately at the name - has wing-tipped eyebrows that raise a little at her comment. Her face is fascinating, changeable, transparent in its emotions, sharp and intelligent, with a sort of sweetness that he is not fooled by for a second. No human who can comfortably chat with a known vampire could stay sweet for so long.
“And he has not tried to find you before?”
Amusement laces Bella’s tone. “I’m fairly sure he thought I was dead, too.”
“And he wishes to kill us all,” the girl says, in a very reasonable tone.
“Pretty much,” Bella says.
“Hmm,” she says. “That’s - what’s the word? A predicament.”
“I will fight him, but I am not sure I can win. He was raised as a soldier, and has spent much more time on the front than I have.”
“I’m sure you’ll do your best,” the girl says, placatingly. “And if you fail, we’ll not be long round enough to worry, yeah?”
“Mara, that’s why you’re my favourite Mara.”
The girl grins, pixie bright, and Jasper feels, even from this distance, the shock and bloom of something rose-coloured that he thought fell out of existence when Alice did.
It’s love.
This girl loves Bella. Loves her. Her sister-mother-protector-friend. To her, Bella is anything but a monster. And nothing close to a god.
And Bella loves her in return.
An odd expression passes over Mara’s face; her blind eyes squint slightly, as if she is listening to something very far away. “You want me to be at the fight,” Mara says, “to oversee it,” and Jasper realises that she has just had some sort of vision. Alice’s faced simply smoothed out and went blank…
“To tell the others the outcome,” Bella agrees, “if - well, if things go well.”
And, Jasper realises, if Mara is at the fight and Bella loses, Mara at least will be spared having to watch her entire village be slaughtered - she’ll probably be the first to die.
“Will he not be distracted if I’m there?” Mara asks, curiously. “Will you not be distracted?”
Bella bares her fangs in a lovely smile. “We’ll be concentrating on each other rather hard, and we’ll make sure you’re a safe distance away. Why? Have you seen anything else?”
Mara shakes her head. “Everything keeps shifting…”
“A fight is based on many split decisions,” Bella muses. “But I wonder if that’s the only reason it’s unclear?” And her eyes shoot directly to where he’s badly hidden behind some rocky outcropping, eavesdropping on their whole conversation.
“Hmm,” Mara says, inscrutable. Then something lightens and clears in her expression; from this far away, he can only catch the thinnest wisp of it, something soft, violet-shaded, something like… relief. Like peace.
She speaks again, but in that strange language this time, and Bella replies in the same manner. Jasper slips away, deciding to give them some privacy; it might be the last time they ever speak to each other, after all.
~
the last. HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
They are waiting for the moon to rise.
Bella sprawls on the moor, watching the clouds drag by; the moor is as good and as empty a playing field as any for their little duel. He sits cross-legged from her, rather more gracefully.
“I wish we had some tumbleweeds,” Bella says, sounding disappointed. She pulls up heather by the handfuls.
“Theatrical,” he says, grimacing a little. “Even the bit about duelling at moonrise.”
“Appropriate,” she shoots back. “I thought all Southern gentlemen adhered to strict codes of chivalry. After all, this is a battle between probably the last two vampires in existence. Unless,” and she gives him a thoughtful, shuttered look, “have you…?”
“No,” he says, blindly. “I would never.”
She nods. “I haven’t either. There was only one, maybe…”
“Mara?”
“Who else? Never thought I would come around to Edward’s point of view on this point, but I actually understood his horror when I half-accidentally suggested it to Mara and she was all for it.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“My reasons were selfish.” She goes back to denuding the moor of its heather. “I didn’t want her to live alone with the guilt of having killed me, since that’s why I wanted to turn her. And I was equally afraid too, that if I turned her, I would want to keep living.”
Somewhere along the way, he realised that Bella’s anklet, her tiny braids, the design sewn on the edge of her cloak were all Mara’s doing. Was an obsession with fashion passed down in Alice’s bloodline too? He could see Mara’s hands weaving together the dried sinew, the long grass, endlessly patient; could see her lift that hand to brush the dark hair from her forehead, could see a smile quirk on her mouth every time it fell into her dark, bright, blinded eyes, greener than anything in the perpetually grey mountains, in the haunted moors.
He found himself asking a question that he hadn’t meant to, a question that was entirely un-Jasper like: “What’s wrong with living?”
“Good question. Very good question.” Bella smiles slowly, thoughtfully. “Jasper, can you humour me and promise me something?”
“That depends.”
“Oh come on, there’s no harm in promising. After all, if I die here tonight, my wandering ghost won’t be around to make sure you keep your word. I don’t think vampires have ghosts.”
“What do you want, Bella?”
Her smile blossomed like flame. “Take my place.”
They could hear Mara slowly picking her way across the familiar stone; her slightly laboured breathing, the grass parting before her, the whistling song that the wind made from the green stone hanging around her neck, twin sister to the one around Bella’s. Her heartbeat was soft and steady, stirring in her ribcage like a bird.
“She knows,” Bella says. “I’ve told her everything I told you. She knows exactly what we are.”
And still, Jasper thought, she loves you.
… Mara, then was capable of loving monsters. If that was true, she was nearly the most reckless human being he’d ever met, besides the one sitting in front of him that he now called sister.
But Bella had become a monster out of love. And even now, after the horror of countless centuries, she wore her sacrifice lightly and well.
Could Mara do the same?
“Why?”
“It’s not a bad job. A tasty human once a month, permanent lodgings, some security. Hunting’s not bad. Comes with a great view. The worshippers smell a little like sheep, but that wears off with some bathing.”
“Bella.”
“Jasper. You know exactly why.”
“… Mara.”
“Yes. And Mara too.”
Mara comes into sight. Bella hails her, and she smiles in return, a smile like flowers opening, like the moon parting a tangled, tumbled curtain of clouds, and bathing the moor all silver.
Making it sacred. Making it pure.
“I’ll think about it,” he says.
“It’s a promise, then.”
Bella rises to her feet, and Jasper does the same. They stand maybe twenty paces from each other. Mara is at the very edges of the boundaries they’ve marked, sitting on a little pile of stones like a young queen. He wonders if she has already seen the outcome of this match in her mind and if that is what gives her such unshakeable calm at the outset of a fight that she will hear but never see.
She thrums with something far steadier than hope, pearly-sheened in its perfection: the only word for it is faith.
He wonders if her faith is in Bella: that she will protect the village.
He wonders if her faith is in him: that he will keep his promise.
In her sightless eyes, he can see the clouds still tumbling, and the thin crescents of the moon.
But he can find not one single trace of fear.
end.