#when jasper is healed he's going to be the most doting and overprotective nightmare ever

[goldeneyedgirl]

TwiFicmas23 Day 8: Mary-Alice & Feral Jasper

Good evening!

Tonight we're opting for some Mary-Alice & Feral Jasper because @sonyawix deserves nice things, and these two are so cute to write. It's a soft and gentle little fic where they get to be cute and awkward together.

This is a bit of a patchwork of bits and pieces from throughout the fic, and kind of establishes some of the dynamic.

I am off to sleep for eight hours and procrastinate over tomorrow's post! I hope you enjoy this!

She watches him from the bower of the tree, as he picks his path away from his coven. She’s lucky she’s downwind; her visions show her that they won’t scent her from this perch. 

And she finally gets to see him in person. 

He’s very tall and lean, but he walks slightly stooped and she wonders why. He looks like he’s waiting for a blow to fall, and she doesn’t like that at all. His hair looks clean and is pulled back from his face, and his clothes are … better than hers, at least. She had to rip up a shirt into strips and knot them tightly into a belt to make her dress sit a little better, and it was filthy and torn. His are ill-fitting and worn, but they aren’t dirty. 

His eyes are still black, and that worries her. She cannot think of any vampire whose eyes have remained black for so long, not even when Maria was holding hostages to get more information.

But she doesn’t know how long he was locked away, and she knows nothing about torpor. Mary-Alice has never been around a vampire that wasn’t healed up in a day or two. Or rather, they’d never kept any soldier that wasn’t healed that fast unless they had a special reason to keep them. This kind of injury is entirely foreign to her. 

//

The girl appears from the trees in a split second, as if she’s materialised from  thin air, and there’s enormous relief that he’s not imagining her, like the Cullens think, and he’s not going mad. There was someone watching him

He stares at her with unbridled fascination. 

She’s so … beautiful. Wide red eyes, a pale face framed in uneven black hair with hopeful little curls. She’s tiny, she doesn’t come up to the middle of his chest, and as thin as a dancer. Her clothing is shredded and filthy, there’s blood and mud on her dress indiscriminately. She’s a new kind of vampire, not like the Cullens, and not like the kinds that he can vaguely remember from his past. There’s something wild about her, like she’s just been formed out of the trees and dirt around them, and he likes that.

The scars take a moment for him to notice. They are littering her bare arms and legs, some of them faded and worn into the fabric of her skin, some of them fresher. There’s a nasty one over her eye, and he’s suddenly intensely aware of his own scars. He remembers the pain that came with them, the suffering, and he hopes this girl hasn’t fallen victim to the same misery he only remembers in fragments of agony and rage and fear. 

“Hello?” His voice is still more of a rasp; his healing is slow, and it’s embarrassing to show such weakness to her. He’s also not the one who usually speaks first, and he wonders if he should have waited. He doesn’t know. Usually, the Cullens correct him if he makes a mistake, but they aren’t here. 

It took him weeks to convince them that he was well enough to go on walks alone. He’s grateful that Emmett took his side. He’s got nowhere to run to; he doesn’t understand this world and how it works, and he knows that until he heals, he probably wouldn’t survive long. 

But Esme worried so much, as if the foxes and deer in the woods might be the thing that carried him off. 

He’s rather tickled that only his second time out alone, and he’s found… her. Except, she just studies him with a blank look; not anger but no pleasure or joy. Just quiet consideration, and he wonders too late if she’s planning to attack him. 

//

He looks better. 

She likes that. 

He’s clean and wearing new clothing, and not stooping any longer. His eyes are a funny gold-tinted colour but he’s been feeding - they’re lighter and they’re clearer now, no longer clouded over. Good, that’s good; she’s oddly grateful that the Cullens know how to help him because she had asked Maria casually about some of the injuries he’d bore, and Maria had not had the faintest clue about what she spoke of. It had made her suspicious, which had slowed down her escape exponentially. 

She might still be annoyed about that. She could have been here weeks ago if Maria hadn’t decided to be difficult. 

Jasper seems calm and curious as he moves closer to her; but he’s still limping. And it does frustrate her that the Cullens have let him out to roam the forest without warnings that he shouldn’t be approaching strange vampires. Anyone else might have taken his head before he realised they were even there. 

Something else she’ll have to explain to him then. She’s got a mental list of things already, and she wasn’t expecting to stay that long, truly - just long enough to make sure that he was okay and safe. Then she was going to go and see what snow was like. 

It looked nice in the pictures she’d seen. 

He’s getting worried now, at the silence since he greeted her, and that’s her fault. She’s not used to having people to talk to - unless she was fucking them or they had a particular gift (well, at least, one that was common knowledge), Maria liked her soldiers silent. 

“They’re taking good care of you,” she says abruptly and wonders when she lost the ability to converse with others normally, and not like a soldier. 

“Who? The Cullens?” He stops and gives her a strange look. “Do you… know the Cullens?” The words rasp and catch in his throat, and he struggles to form the entire sentence, as if he’s trying to find and catch each word. Definitely still healing, and it sounds painful and dry when he speaks. 

Perhaps she can convince him to hunt more often to try and speed up the process. There’s a town less than an hour’s run from this place, it wouldn’t be hard for him to slip away and return before the family even knew. 

“Mmm. I wanted to … I wanted to make sure you were safe.” Her words are flat and short, and she can see his uncertainty. 

//

Emmett recognises the longing in Jasper’s eyes as he stares after the small girl wading in the lake. It’s pretty much the same look that Emmett had on his own face when he woke up and saw Rosalie - properly saw her - for the first time. 

Mary-Alice is really strange, but it doesn’t take rocket science to realize she’s had a bad time - even just the overlapping scars on her arms tell a story of violence and fear, but it’s in every part of her - by the way she moves, the way that she watches and stares, the way she speaks in the flat, even voice devoid of emotion, in short sentences. Wherever she came from, it wasn’t a good place, and Emmett’s oddly pleased that she’d found them - even if she was only hanging around because of Jasper like a stray cat, a thought that made him chuckle to himself - and had looked vaguely disgusted with the idea of spending time with the rest of the family.  

Of course, the rest of the family still thought Mary-Alice was some kind of imaginary coping-mechanism for Jasper that they were tentatively ignoring, so maybe she was offended. 

He should be grateful, actually. It’s taken a few weeks for Mary-Alice to stop glaring at him, to stop prowling around like some kind of jungle cat and freeze up, the second he appears. She’s still distant and rigid whenever Emmett appears, but she doesn’t treat him like he’s a danger anymore. And maybe he’d believe that this was trust and the path to friendship, except he’s seen her with Jasper.

When she’s focused on Jasper, there’s a gentleness in every aspect of her. She’s softer with him, patient and sweet. And she revolves around him like she’s his bodyguard against the world. She almost fusses over him, demanding to know when he’s hunted and how he’s healing. Emmett’s nearly certain he’s caught her smelling Jasper’s hair and clothing - perhaps to make sure he’s clean? Mary-Alice doesn’t seem to give much thought to her own state of cleanliness or her clothing, but Jasper’s are clearly important to her. And the way she stares up at Jasper - Mary-Alice has to be the tiniest vampire that Emmett’s ever seen, and Jasper’s only a few centimetres shorter than him - with this look that he suspects might have human feelings behind them.

Jasper would know better than him, though. But on the few attempts Emmett’s made to ask about that, Jasper’s given him a flat, stubborn look and refused to speak. 

So the longing is probably reciprocated - maybe. Alice just hides it better, behind a wall of protectiveness and anti-social personality traits. Emmett honestly can’t work out why she’d be caring and smelling and fussing over his brother if she didn’t care. 

But Emmett also worries; Jasper was walled up alone for so long that they’ve practically had to resocialize him. He remembered so little of human interaction that it had been a war zone at home for a while. Even now, he still had so many behaviours that Esme politely referred to as ‘quirks’ that they had to correct every day (and now Emmett’s wondering how many of the newer ‘quirks’ had been introduced or encouraged by Mary-Alice, who is practically a wild animal). The idea that Jasper is pining for a girl and all that a relationship entails…

Emmett really, really doesn’t want to have to give his new brother the sex talk.  And he knows if he tries to convince either Edward or Carlisle to step in and have the world’s most uncomfortable conversation, they’re going to want toknow why and then remind Emmett that they aren’t encouraging the idea that Mary-Alice is real. And if Mary-Alice isn’t real, then Jasper doesn’t need to suffer through the indignity of a sex-talk. 

It’s a mess. And Emmett’s relieved that Carlisle has decided not to introduce Jasper to the cousins yet because they all know that the sisters are incorrigible flirts, and he’s got a fifty on Jasper (and Mary-Alice) being utterly humourless about that kind of behaviour. 

Emmett also knows that if he tries to push Jasper into introducing Mary-Alice to the rest of the family, it will be a complete disaster. She’ll refuse point blank and then he will be persona non grata around her and … he doesn’t want to piss her off, and he doesn’t want to piss Jasper off. 

He also doesn’t want to have to refresh his brother’s memory on the mechanics of sex and why waiting to be fully healed might be the best choice …

He’s overthinking this. He should really stay out of it entirely. The thing is, he really wants this to work out for Jasper. He’s a good guy, if weird as fuck, and he deserves to have a nice home and a girlfriend that he’s madly in love with - even if the girl happens to be some scary little traumatized gremlin who Emmett can’t imagine smiling let alone being in love with someone. 

He really hopes this works out. 

—