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goldeneyedgirl · 2 years

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Ficmas22: Day 3: History Switch

Okay I thought I'd posted snippets of this but apparently not?

But just in case I made it extra long.

This one is based on the idea that Alice was 'recruited' from Mississippi in the late 1800s by Maria, and after running away to join WWI, Jasper ends up in an asylum in Texas, unable to cope with his PTSD. A few details had to be fudged (Jasper would have been born a little later than Alice to be able to go to WWI, and would have been changed in the early 20s, I believe; Alice's relationship with the Cullens is definitely altered.) It was just a fun experiment I'd love to finish because they are so different from their usual selves? I mean, Jasper's still simping for Alice hard, but is this even a Jalice fic if he isn't?

Lil bit of smut in this one. Nothing graphic but definitely implied. Until tomorrow, ducklings!

He sneaks away to join the army when he is sixteen and gets dragged into a war halfway across the world. He’s back less than a year later, wrecked and ruined. Broken.

He never heals, certainly not fast enough for his family. He might be the first born son, but there is still another boy, and they only needed one to carry on the Whitlock name.

They call it respite and help. That he’s too strong and difficult and violent to be reasoned with when he’s in one of his episodes. That they will heal him and fix him and send him back home, good as new.

It is none of those things, and it’s the last time he ever sees his family.

(For a while, he misses his sisters. Then he doesn’t remember that he has sisters to miss.)

—

Everyone knows of the Brandon girl. The one that’s not all right in the head.

The one that has an uncanny knack for guessing what’s going to happen. Like that Marlene Fisher’s baby would be stillborn, or the Jenkins boy had drowned long before the search party found him. The gossip is that that’s the only reason that her granddaddy saved Brandon Imports - he gambled on his granddaughter’s oddity and won.

She really is a strange creature, always laughing and dancing and running around town like she’s still a girl and not a woman grown. Her sister is always chasing after her, and everyone worries both Brandon girls will turn out the same.

Especially their father. No one notices the bruises on Mary-Alice anymore; they don’t change anything so why should they care.

They all think they know how the story will end - Mary-Alice will be a spinster, because no one is interested in her as a bride, trapped in her father’s house laughing at a joke no one else heard.

Instead, Mary-Alice disappears in the night, walking home from her father’s store. It’s a Friday night, and everyone says that it was the same as always - Mary-Alice might not be good for much, but she is trusted with the money box. The other shop assistant reports that she finished cleaning, donned her coat and hat and gloves, picked up the money box, and bid him good night. That everything was quite normal - the Brandon home was only a twenty minute walk through the park, very safe, and many young women walked unchaperoned through it.

But she never makes it home. They find her hat and one of her gloves - torn, with blood on it - and nothing more.

—

He wakes up suddenly, as if he was never asleep at all.

It’s as if this is the first second he has existed. It’s night, and he is alone in the stillness, covered in mud and dried blood.

He has nothing.

Just a chain knotted around his wrist with a bent pice of metal that says ‘Jasper W-‘ on it in worn-down letters.

It’s as good a name as any, honestly.

He’s more focused on the raw, burning feeling of his throat, and he would do anything to end it, to make it stop.

(That is his beginning. Alone, thirsty, and left in the mud. If he remembered anything from the war, he’d laugh at the parallels.)

—

There’s one thing that they all agree on - Nettie and Lucy, Peter and Charlotte, Alice, and the other few that last beyond their newborn year.

You have to be a little bit mad to survive the Southern Wars. You have to let go of everything and anything you know about yourself and simply be. That’s the only way you’re going to make it through to the other side.

Luckily, Alice’s has always been a little be mad. It suits her as well as anything does, and at least now when someone hits her, she can hit them back twice as hard.

He finds her in Philadelphia and he’s in awe of her. Five foot-nothing, in a powder blue ensemble, she’s beautiful. Shiny black hair falls to her collar bones, and her lips are painted shiny red. She’s slim and tiny and utterly covered in half-moon scars, and he’s like a moth to a flame.

(Even after decades together, he will still be obsessed with her hair. The way it tries desperately to curl when she leaves it alone; the way she twists it and braids it and ties it up a million different ways. The one curl by her left eye that seems to escape every single time. How soft it is, and how he’s the only one that she lets touch it, let’s only him stretch those hopeful little wannabe-curls out. But then, he could wax lyrical about every part of her, of her orange-red eyes that are so big and round that they make her seem more like a doll than a person right up until she gets her hands on some cosmetics and lines her eyes with kohl and glitter to look like a devilish dream. She’s so perfect, so unbearably beautiful to him.)

For her, it’s like coming home to someone she’s missed dearly, the person whose face she’s been looking for in the crowds. He’s perfect in all the ways she can count, and he smells exactly right and he’s just… beautiful, even in an ill-fitting coat and bare feet, looking slightly bewildered when she approaches him. (He’s hungry, starving; she knows that immediately. He flinches when she reaches for him, only relaxing when he registers the glove she’s wearing. She’s not sure if she wants to laugh or hug or start sobbing because she’s waited for him forever.)

She knows about the empty space where his human memories should rest, like dusty, forgotten books. Somehow she uses her memories to fill his spaces, to give him back some of his understanding of family and humanity without shaming his own lacking biography.

Apropos of nothing, she will tell him her story in little fragments, like pages torn from a book and tossed into the air.

“Mother was terribly unstable after my sister was born. She used to hit, used to scream and rage. Then I walked into the sitting room one day when I was twelve and she had hanged herself from the chandelier,” she had told him, as if she was commenting on the weather as they watch a woman hurry down the street with her children, her arm looped in his.

“Oh, we had an orchard behind our house! We had peaches, though. I used to make myself utterly ill on them when I was small - I’d climb the trees and sit in the branches with the fruit gathered in my skirt,” she bounces as she descends towards the neat rows of trees, tugging him along behind her, and there’s a memory made as she kisses him in the branches of apple trees.

She wears three necklaces, always has - a little gold cross she took off a body down south; a brass one with ‘Alice’ in script that he bought her years ago at a street fair; and a little amethyst flower with tiny tanzanite leaves.

That necklace is her legacy - one of ten her father designed to display in the shop window, to attract wealthy clients. He had claimed there was one for each of the women in his life - Diamond for her mother, sapphire for her grandmother, ruby for her stepmother, amethyst for Alice, and pink sapphire for Cynthia. Opal, topaz, aquamarine, pearl, and emerald rounded out the collection, for his sisters and cousins.

“He’d talk about them as if they were gifts to us, a token of his love for us,” Alice had sighed, as he examined it closely. “They weren’t. They were props, to make him seem like a loving man. To make us seem like high society, to lure in the rich.

“I spoilt it all when I stole Mother’s and through it into her grave when no one was looking. The collection was incomplete then, and no one wanted to buy the set from him with two missing. Went back when I was eighteen and stole mine right from the cabinet one night. I figured I deserved it since I would never need a dowry,” she had said carelessly, and he understands how hard she fought to keep that delicate necklace. That it is the tragedy of her human family, the victory of her own rebellion, and her private legacy in one tiny necklace.

It’s nearly a year after they meet that he shows her the chain with the tag that gave him his name. He feels ashamed when he confesses he doesn’t even know if Jasper is his name, it was just all he had.

Alice had kissed him hard, and held the chain so carefully. “It’s yours now, if you still want it. If we can ever find out your story, find your first name, then you can use whichever one you want.”

There’s something freeing in that, that Alice accepts him exactly as he is, borrowed name and all. He asks her to keep the chain safe for him. He expects her to zip it up in the little pouch she pins to the inside of her clothing, but instead she puts it around her neck.

“I’ve got you,” is all she says, tucking the disc down the front of her top.

When it comes to the south, Alice tells them all stories that say everything but nothing. Maria looms large in those tellings, a vicious and conniving warlord with no empathy and less compassion. She tells of her own abduction like it’s some kind of comedy of errors, her years as a soldier as a hard-knock life.

He knows better. He knows what her survival cost her, and what haunts her in the dark. He knows that Maria built her from her ashes, strung her together like her personal little marionette. He finds teeth marks on the inside of her legs and is horrified at the implications until Alice tells him the entirety of her and Maria, of at least a decade wrapped up in each other. Simultaneous parasites, Alice says as she twists her fingers in his hair.

“She didn’t make me a good or nice person, Jas. She made me into something monstrous, something vile and rotten. And I made her manipulative, vicious, cruel.” She shakes her head. “It wasn’t love or like or anything good. It was destructive.”

The idea of Alice and Maria together makes him pause, only because he hadn’t considered the two of them like that before. He spent his life haunting libraries, yes, but he had always been invested in world histories, in the biographies of great men. Salacious novels had never been to his tastes. The only people he spoke to were his victims. He’s socially stunted, so behind, that he finds himself faltering in the face of so many new things. Alice seems to know when he needs her guidance, an explanation. And she’s never seemed to falter telling him the uglier things she’s seen and done.

Perhaps there was subtext he missed in all her stories of Maria. It wouldn’t be the first time she’s had to stop and spell something out.

But the very idea of someone else seeing Alice like this, with her slip pushed up her thighs and her breast exposed as she reclines in the bed makes him feel snappish and possessive, makes him crawl up the bed and cage her body underneath his, his arms bracing him on either side of her head.

“You’re mine now,” he says in a low voice, and she leans up to snag a kiss, a desperate pleading kiss that he resists for a moment before he sinks against her, against violet-and-moonshine scented satin and moon-white limbs, against the flutter of her hair against his cheek.

“All yours,” she says breathlessly, and it’s girlish and giddy and so very genuine that he falls a little bit more in love with her (as if there is a bottom of the well that he feels for her).

Peter is a tall, skinny, and vaguely sly man who was changed at twenty-two-ish with a mop of blond-brown hair and a suave grin that makes Jasper not trust him.

He trusts him less when he sweeps Alice into a hug with, “Hello beautiful,” practically purred at her. And Alice just laughs and hugs him back.

Peter’s mate is a sugar-sweet looking girl named Charlotte with strawberry blonde curls and eyes just a little too far apart for her to considered conventionally beautiful. Around the same age as Peter when she was recruited, she smiles politely at Jasper and hugs Alice briefly.

He’s aggravated to discover Alice and Peter’s history from Peter’s never-ending innuendo; his emotions are joking and light, there is no attraction or lust or bitterness directed towards him or Alice. Some curiosity. And it’s reassuring that Peter isn’t looking for something from Alice, but the way he moves around her, talks to her… it makes Jasper irritated.

(They’ve only been together a few years, and he still finds himself a little awkward around her. Like when to take her hand, and when to steal a kiss, and when to start unzipping her clothes. Alice says it’s because he was alone for twenty years, with no maker to guide him and no memories to remind him. That he’s still finding his rhythm, and she doesn’t mind being the one to take his hand or pressing surprise kisses to his cheeks.

“It doesn’t help you’re so tall,” Alice says but with a flicker of delight in her emotions. She dances around the fact that she loves their size difference, that she adores feeling precious and protected for once in their life, with him at her side. That every part of being with him makes her feel less like the killer, monster, soldier that she spent so very long being.)

The thing is, he knows she’s not normal. She knows it too. And she has no excuse. Maybe it’s the visions. Maybe she really was nuts as a human and it came with her that night Maria found her in the park. Alice thinks it was years in a vampire army that curdled her brain - or finished the job, at least.

But he loves his half-feral, crazy wife. He loves that she laughs too loud and asks strange questions and has no sense of modesty or propriety. He loves that all the shadows and spaces on his body line up with her slender curves, that she moves over him with awe and lust in her eyes every single time; that the reverence in her gaze and her mood are better attributed to some greek god than his sharp, bony frame.

That for every comment whispered across a locker room or behind hands that he’s weak or sickly or somehow lacking, Alice is there with her eyes full of him and only him. That she’s not above a filthy kiss in a classroom to stake her claim and remind everyone - including him - that he is utterly desirable, the heart-throb and prince of her story. That their easy dismissal of him is the joke she’s always laughing at.

He doesn’t bother to try to explain to their family that he had nothing before he woke up in the middle of what he assumes was Texas, alone and unknowing. It was only old dog tags with ‘Jasper W-’, the surname worn away, knotted around his wrist to give him a name. Ragged clothing and old dog tags - he had nothing else. And then he found her and she grounded him, tethered him into a time and place at her side. That she had poured out everything he ever needed before she’d even kissed him for the first time.

She’d been upfront too, looking him in the eye at her grand height of five feet high, that she was a mess but maybe they could be a mess together. He’d initially assumed she meant the scars, but it had taken him only a few hours to realise that the scars were nothing.

(He loves the scars, loves pinning her to the mattress so she can’t squirm away, and reopening them, pressing his own venom into her tissue to make every single of them his; to make her his for forever and a day. She hisses and cries but she still begs with him not to stop, to at least fuck her as he tears her open. If he could, he’d carve open her chest and take her heart for his own; a bloody trophy she’d be all too willing to give.)

That Alice might be crazy, unpredictable and volatile, but in her heart of hearts, she’s soft and fragile and ephemeral; a girl who is half rabid and terrified of slowing down and desperate to be loved as she is. That only he sees the vulnerable part of her, when Esme gets frustrated with her riddles and double talk, when Rosalie gets angry at her constant innuendo, when Edward storms out at her twisted little thoughts, he stays at her side.

He watches her face fall when one of their classmates calls her crazy, insinuate things about her to the new girl; feels her lean against him, her emotions a cocktail of disappointment and shame and hurt; one that makes him drop a kiss to the top of her head, to take her hand. Every school in every place claims Alice struggles with impulse control, from calling out inappropriate things in class, to skipping school, to having sex with Jasper in empty classrooms. It’s not like the Cullens can explain all the pieces that make up Alice - the ostracised daughter, the vampire soldier, the powerful psychic, the repentant murderer… that she still struggles with the unspoken rules, with remembering she’s supposed to be human, acting like a human teenager.

But she does try - she has a whole section of her closet dedicated to high school clothing that she carefully curates from magazines and online. Her own tastes opt for couture, for vintage dresses and cocktail dresses. She mutters and complains as she is forced to pick out ‘school approved’ garments - today’s ensemble is a graphic t-shirt, a satiny red skirt that glides against her thighs in a way that should be illegal, and shimmery tights. Her hair hangs in loose waves to her collarbone, and she’s perfectly lovely. A normal human girl would burn to be as genuinely pretty as Alice is.

"You're biased," she sighs when he tells her that. "And stop saying that in front of Rose, you know it pisses her off."

The nomads are sauntering towards them with the arrogance of predators. They are dirty and blood-stained and look every bit threatening as a vampire should.

Alice is standing beside him, and he’s reassured that she’s wearing a long sleeved shirt under her baseball shirt; leggings, a mini-skirt and knee-high socks; it means the only scars that can be seen are Maria’s and his (he hates it, a little, that her Cullen choker covers up those scars like there is something shameful about her past, that she should regret her marks.)

He feels like a traitor, thinking that. But it wouldn’t be the first time that a nomad has come across the family, seen Alice’s scars and things have gone sour. He wants her beside him, safe, unthreatened by these nomads - she looks utterly innocent and harmless, with her hair twisted up into cute little buns.

He washes the females of their group in mundanity and it should be enough, it should make things easier. Except Alice reaches out and grabs his arm, her eyes flashing to their whites as she utters his name. It’s a bad vision, one that has her emotions punch him straight in the chest and scatter his intention - her horror and shock and rage.

The vision lasts seconds and Alice’s knees buckle for a second before she is rigid and furious.

It’s just enough time for Jasper’s influence to fade from the nomads, for them to take stock of the Cullen family.

And James’ face stretches into a delighted grin, his pleasure sickening as he moves closer.

“Major Jasper Whitlock! What an unexpected surprise!”

“Do I know you?”

Alice is full-on growling now, her body leaning forwards and he’s suddenly and intensely aware of how much she’s restraining herself, how angry she is.

“I never thought that you’d make it this far.” James is pacing back and forth right now. “And you brought a snack!”

“Get Bella out of here, Edward.” Alice’s voice is low and angry and he’s not sure if he should hold her back or get everyone else clear of whatever is about to happen. He’s seen Alice fight before, when they were travelling together and the nomads then weren’t nearly as high stakes as this moment.

But this man knew who he had been. Major Whitlock? That was more than he’d ever had before.

“Alice, please,” he murmurs but Alice is already slinking forward.

“Don’t, Jasper,” is all she says. And then she lunges.

—

The fight is not fast, but it is thorough. Laurent gets away missing a hand, and Victoria’s face is disfigured, but James is shredded and strewn around Alice, her shirt torn and her eyes black.

She’s practically trembling as James’ remains burn, and Jasper pushes aside the horror of the Cullens, of finally seeing what Alice is capable of when threatened.

It’s not fear that has Alice coiled up; the tension is primal - ready for the next attacker, ready to fight, still processing the threat to her mate and coven. The absolutely rage and terror has her limbs alight for the next strike, and he moves forward cautiously, telegraphing his movements as he gets closer. Her eyes track him as he gets closer before his scent catches her and her body visibly relaxes, a flash of a vision passing over her as she reaches out to pull him closer.

“I let the other two get away,” she mumbles into his shirt. “He was a goddamn monster.”

“You got them good, though,” he says, his hands gentle on her back.

Alice is quiet after the Cullens’ meeting; he finds her up to her nose in a bubble bath. But it’s not the usual bubble bath, where there is incense burning - the stuff that smells like forest flowers and moss - and Alice’s hair is tied up in a scarf with some pointless but indulgent green face mask on, music playing, and maybe a magazine held just above the bubbles.

No, her hair hangs wet and lank in the water and half stuck to her face. Her eyes are a dark gold, even after hunting. She just lies there, staring, and he leaves her be.

He doesn’t say anything, not even the she pads out of the bathroom in actual pyjama bottoms and an oversized t-shirt; not one of her lingerie sets that she takes so much pride in teasing him with. Her hair is still wet and she looks inhuman and sad.

He opens his arms to her, and she reaches for him, as they curl together on their bed. She buries her face in his neck, and then she tells him everything that she saw - that James was involved in his change, that James had known him back at some kind of hospital and had hunted him to his death.

That Jasper had once been Major Jasper Whitlock.

That there had been someone on Jasper’s side. Another vampire who had not lived to see through Jasper’s change.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry that I couldn’t let you find out more… he would have attacked; we would have gotten hurt.” Her lips graze his neck as she speaks and he hears what she’s saying but he doesn’t listen. He can’t. It’s so much more than he’s ever had before that it doesn’t seem real.

Major Jasper Whitlock. It feels like a joke. So many years he thought that his name was nothing more than borrowed boots, but it was his all along. That someone had cared enough to make sure he had that little token with him through the change. That awakening alone had never been the plan, just a tragedy.

Her fingers trace under his shirt, dipping around his ribs and he tightens his grip on her. It’s easier to focus on her right now, when he’s feeling so distant from everything with the new information rattling around in his brain.

He’s sorry she washed her hair; the little pigtail-buns were cute and made her eyes bigger. He could drown in those eyes, gold and ochre and lemon. Or scarlet, ruby, burgundy. Whatever colour she has, they swallow him whole every time.

If they got married now, he wouldn’t have to be Jasper Brandon, he realises suddenly. They don’t talk about marriage - Alice says it’s a Cullen thing, that they don’t need to be married. But he still thinks about it, and wonders if she rejects it because she still hates herself for some of the things she did in the south, because of how steadfastly she rejected it as a human.

She’d be Alice Whitlock now. That makes him feel odd; a little guilty that he’s somehow letting her down wanting her to take his name even when she’s mentioned a lot of times she hates it. Hates Brandon and the human life she lived.

There’s smoke and yelling and he cannot see or hear her anywhere on the field. There’s too many people to filter out emotional flavours and panic is beginning to rise in his chest.

Alice isn’t dead. Alice can’t be dead. There isn’t a world without Alice. He doesn’t exist without Alice. He doesn’t know how to be without her.

Panic is like stinging nettles and running out of air underwater. Every fragment of body scattered on the battlefield could be her.

It feels like someone has carved away half his chest.

Then Emmett is there, grabbing him by the shoulders - Emmett has a nasty bite mark and a long scratch down his arm, and one over his eye.

“Jasper, what is it?”

His knees are buckling and he can’t get the words out. The family knows he gets depressed, gets anxious. But they never see the panic attacks - he hasn’t had one in a good amount of time, and Alice is the one that takes care of him then, takes him somewhere quiet or says something outrageous so that everyone is too busy being annoyed or shocked to notice him. He needs her violet-and-liquor scent to ground him and she’s not here, she’s not fucking here.

It’s because she’s dead, he knows it. There are pyres scattered all over the battlefield, the smoke a gathering haze around their ankles.

“Alice,” he croaks and Emmett’s eyes widen in understanding, in terrible comprehension.

“She’s here, I saw her tangling with Caius,” Emmett says, looking around. That’s worse, somehow; he knows she’s lethal, a death wish in a cocktail dress, but Caius. The one who destroyed the werewolves, who is legendary for his fighting skills. Not his Alice, no.

Peter and Charlotte are heading over, and the tangle of panic and outside emotions round him feels like an ice shelf cracking, like something has to break inside him for it all to stop. Charlotte immediately goes to him; he doesn’t need a mirror to know he looks haunted and hollow, and Peter darts off.

He’ll find her body and bring it for me to burn. Then he can finish me off is the most lucid of his thoughts and the look of horror on Emmett’s face, of shock on Charlotte’s makes him realise he’s said it aloud.

Suddenly she’s limping from the back of the field, tossing Caius’ head onto the fire without ceremony. She’s a mess, with a crack spiralling from the corner of her mouth to her ear. Her eyes are black, and her shirt is torn open. He can’t see why she’s limping but she is, quite obviously. There is something utterly inhuman about her in that moment, like a righteous deity arriving to deal out bloody justice.

As his eyes meet hers, all the steel in her stance melts away and he realises with a shock that she had assumed the worst too. Assumed that he was gone. Assumed that the battle had cost her him.

She slams into him, or he into her, he’s not sure because they were both moving. She smells mostly like ashes and venom and smoke, but she’s a secure weight in his arms, holding so tight to him, as they fall to the grass clinging to the other.

I love you I love you I love you

I thought you were gone

I thought I’d lost you

I’m here

#alice cullen #jasper hale #twilight saga #twilight fic #jalice #my fic: history switch #angst #romantic #drama #ficmas #ficmas22 #twificmas22 #jasper being an awkward gremlin and alice being a feral cat that has adopted jasper

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