"My apologies, Natasha," he says immediately, dipping his head a little. "Force of habit for a lady I'm not particularly acquainted with." But he falls silent again and lets her finish, listening with some interest to the plans she's already made. The experiments they'd performed on him had mostly revolved around his thirst, and they'd only just been starting to test the hardness of his skin when he'd been let loose. They hadn't gotten around to anything else. Even if she knows the results of those tests, she might not know much else.
She likely doesn't know his range of movement extends hundreds of miles. Or that he could run halfway across the country and be back in the same day. Near-starving from the energy he'd expend doing it, admittedly, but it's still doable. Needs must, after all, when you spend your life trying to stay hidden from millions of people. "I don't sleep. Don't need to. But firewood won't be a problem. There's a few downed trees, birches, some miles from here. Easy enough to collect them up, after that little pick-me-up of yours."
He sets the empty mug aside and folds his hands on the table, shoulders still straight, as he considers his next words. "You're right. I do have some measure of self control. But not as much as the rest in my family. I spent a lot of years living like any vampire does, in addition to fighting in the wars. Being...sated...like this, that's a help, but my years as a vegetarian vampire still don't top my years spent otherwise." He glances up then, meeting her eyes as steadily as she can meet his. "I know for a fact you're not afraid of me, and I'm not questioning that. But there will be times when I cannot be around you. Even times when I up and vanish in the middle of a sentence. I'll need to apologize in advance for that, there will not be time in the moment."
He looks down again at his neatly-folded fingers, stone-pale against the dark, scarred wood of the table, and half-smiles. "Being the cause of your decay is not something I want."
"Some miles?" She repeats to him with a raised eyebrow, as if uncertain whether or not he had misspoken, because she doesn't remember him ever being away long enough to travel for miles. Her eyes move down to her food as she finishes it, listening carefully as he continues, an she can't help but crack a small smile as he speaks. Vegetarian vampire. She supposes there's a trend for everything.
She looks back at him when he apologizes ahead of time for leaving abruptly, and she gives a single nod of understanding to convey that he doesn't have to convey beyond that. "I have no reason to be scared of you." She hesitates for a moment, and when she puts her fork down she pushes her plate to the side before leaning back in her chair to look at him directly. "You're far from the scariest thing I've been in the same room with. I've seen mindless monstrosity, that's not you." She pauses for a moment, as if uncertain whether or not she wants to continue, but he's here because of her. Separated from his family, Alice, because of her. She owes him at least some honesty.
"The invasion in New York City, the woman people saw fighting with the Avengers, that was me. I used to have an anonymous public presence but that's not necessarily the case, anymore." She gives a little tilt of her head, as if dismissing it. Dismissing that everything she's built for herself is gone. "Once you fight monsters coming through a portal in the sky and get cornered in a helicarrier with Hulk, your definition of dangerous shifts a little. And that's good to hear." She offers him a half-smile in return before she stands to grab her plate, and then his mug. "You're part of a small group, if that's true. A lot of people want to see me dead, more than usual right now, I'm assuming."
She moves to the sink to clean up, glancing at him over her shoulder. "You've given me no reason to fear you, Jasper. If anything, it's the other way around." She isn't able to say it without a pang of guilt cracking through her wall, and she pushes it back down quickly as she looks back down into the sink. "If I go into town for food, would you prefer to stay here? Is there anything I can get you, books or... something?"
It impresses him a little every time she can meet his gaze so unflinchingly. Even if there were any humans who knew what they were and that they meant no harm...well, it's one thing to say it, another thing entirely to turn off thousands of years of instinct. And yet, here she is, sitting there telling him she's not afraid of him, and meaning it. Really meaning it.
There's a little stirring in him at that, and after a moment he recognizes it as a strengthening of his resolve. He will not, not do anything to bring her to harm. She doesn't fear him, and he doesn't fear her. He's started with less of a footing than that.
He lets her speak and doesn't interrupt, not until she's finished and asked a question. "I'll stay. I'll spend that time fetching those birches back here for you. They're not more'n ten miles out. Won't take long. But I wouldn't say no to something to read." He turns in his seat to keep facing her as she does the washing up. "Pick things you'd enjoy. I have an...eclectic array of interests, after this long. That was you?"
Now she gets an admiring smile as he shifts to sit backward on the chair, resting his crossed arms against the back. "I remember that fight, Emmett wanted to pitch in but it would've taken us too long to get there." It's a shame it would be too dangerous for them to spar, he can still remember admiring that redheaded spitfire in the flashes of news footage that had actually shown her. Naturally most of the coverage had been of Iron Man, Captain America, the Hulk, Thor.
"Oh, I don't know if you want to read what I want to read," she manages to respond with a rare, almost self depreciating tease in her voice. She's getting more comfortable around him and that's strange; she hasn't spent enough time around him to justify that, but it seems that it's a little easier to be comfortable when someone is openly capable of killing her. He can end her, and he hasn't. The way she sees it, they're good.
"And yeah, that was me. Don't worry about it, we had it under control." Barely. She smiles a little down at her dish as she dries it. "So you can imagine that I'm not a stranger to being in the same room with someone stronger than me. ...I'd say that you'd be a great ally in something like that but there's a lot of bloodshed. The smell is thick, even I can pick it up when things get really dirty. Or maybe that's just because I'm the one who's usually bleeding at the end of the day... I'm not a giant suit of armor type of girl." She finishes with a sigh, putting her plate away before turning to lean back against the counter. Instead of approaching the table again Natasha instead folds her arms, watching Jasper with an inquisitive tilt of her head.
"You would know what to do though, wouldn't you, soldier?" It's a nickname she usually reserves for Steve, but it's fitting for him. She can see that. "You've got a touch of military in you. It's buried in there, under all of that proper southern gentleman mess." Another tease in a smile. Genuine this time; pretty, and not in the usual artificial way with her. "You haven't served in a while though, have you?"
Another grin as he dips his head in a nod. "Guilty as charged, ma'am," he says, slipping it in once more as a tease this time as he sits up again, shoulders straight, a military bearing even sitting backward in a chair. "I was a major in the Texas cavalry. I was never formally discharged that I know of, but as the Confederacy lost the war..." A little one-shouldered shrug. He's never been ashamed of his service, and he doesn't plan on starting now.
"Whitlock was my name then, Major Jasper Whitlock. I took the name 'Hale' when Alice and I joined the family in 1950. My adopted sister Rosalie's surname." He smiles wryly, nostalgic for those first fraught months with the family. It had taken him a long time to adjust to being around so many other vampires who had no ill intentions, and even longer for him to stop feeling overprotective of Alice being around so many other vampires who had no ill intentions. "She wasn't too keen to share it at first, but eventually she admitted it would help us blend in if she and I could pose as twins. You didn't meet her, I don't believe, but we have very similar coloring."
Natasha gives him a narrow-eyed smirk, acknowledging the little tease but letting it go for now. There's an undeniable amount of surprise there when he says that he had served in the Confederacy, because she knew he was old but she didn't think he was that old. "Well. If it makes you feel better, I don't think I'd ever been discharged from the KGB." Although it's because she had killed the man who could officially discharge her. Semantics.
"Major Jasper Whitlock," she repeats back to him with playful air, looking both impressed and amused all at once. She takes a few steps forward to grab the other chair, mimicking him in the way that she turns it and sits down to face him. "That's got a nice ring to it, I'll admit." She pauses for a moment before she shrugs a single shoulder, as if having just convinced herself of something silently. "Natalia Romanova." She gives him an almost sheepish smile, brushing her hair behind her ear nervously. "Natasha Romanoff is more Americanized, they said that I would fit in better that way." The smile fades, and her gaze falls for a moment before returning. "I changed it when I joined SHIELD after switching sides. At least, that was the intention."
"Vy russkiy?" he asks immediately, the Texan drawl coming through even thicker in Russian than in English. "I'd wondered a little, hearing that last name of yours when I really learned it, but you never know where people are from these days." He'd taught himself Russian a little later, once he'd moved onto the Russian philosophers sometime in the Seventies. Learning languages was commonplace in the family, but Jasper had always focused on the languages most prominent in philosophy: German, French, Italian, Greek, Latin, Russian.
She isn't making too great an effort to hide what she's feeling from him now. She's opened up, or relaxed herself, and it's easy to look beyond the surface layers. It's been a challenge to reveal that detail, he thinks, it's a vulnerability she's handed him. "Natalia," he says thoughtfully, experimentally, like he's tasting the name. "That actually kinda suits you. Maybe it reminds you of where you're from though." He wouldn't want to start using it if she didn't want it to be used. That would be ungentlemanly.
For a second it looks like Natasha has to comprehend what he'd just done, but that was certainly Russian despite his thick accent, which she certainly did not enjoy more than she should. There's an undeniable little light that brightens her eyes, and her smile only exemplifies it. "Da. Posmotrite na vas, polnyy syurprizov." She sounds just as impressed as she is, and the words come to her with an obvious fluency that's only evident when it's clear how much faster she speaks in Russian than she does in English, to this day. "Again. Working for an American secret agency is a lot harder if you sound like a Russian, it took me months to get rid of my accent." She sounds as if she's speaking of an impossible struggle, as if it's normal for it to take months, and not an entire lifetime.
The way that he says her name catches her off guard an it shows in small ways; a slight twitch at the corner of her eyebrow, a little part of her lips. People don't call her that; in fact, she can't remember the last time she was called Natalia. It sounds nice, though, the way that it flows from his tongue in that lazy drawl, and her sheepish smile returns as she shakes her head slightly. "No," she begins, "Natalia is fine. You can call me that." He doesn't know it's strange that she's allowing it, and nobody else is here to tell him as much. What harm can it do? "You don't have to worry about reminding me where I'm from." She tilts her head. "I don't run from it." Not anymore.
"Did you ever serve, again?" She's surprising herself by asking it, because she isn't doing so to get on his good side. She's asking because she actually wants to know, and isn't that a strange thing? "After the Confederacy dissolved?"
Definitely a natural speaker, that's easy to see, but there isn't a trace of accent when she flips back to English, and that's impressive on its own. Now that they've both slowed down a little, taken a chance to really look at each other, it's almost surprising how much they have in common.
"Natalia, then," he says with a firm little nod. It's better for him anyway, it sits better with him, the little extra layer of formality. It's a part of his nature. And he can certainly identify with running from where you're from, and trying like hell to stop doing it.
He looks thoughtful as he considers how to answer her question. Her genuine interest feels comfortable already. Maybe they will be able to coexist without anything...unfortunate...occurring.
"Not in any human army, but plenty in the Southern Vampire Wars. It was commonplace in the South during the War Between the States and after, armies of newborns created only to fight each other and win territory for their masters. A newborn is much more dangerous than a full grown vampire," and as he speaks, his voice takes on the cadence of a military lecture, "in their first year of existence a newborn vampire is much stronger, until their human blood is leached out of their tissues entirely, but their thirst is almost uncontrollable. Maria turned me so I could use my abilities to control her army. I was her second in command, in charge of training them after she turned them."
His eyes slant away from her in sharp memory of the bewildered fear, over and over, before the hard crack of death. "Training them, and killing them off when she'd decided they'd served their purpose. She could always make more."
She feels an annoyingly pleasant little flutter when he says it again, simply because she likes the way that it sounds on his tongue. She never thought she'd get to enjoy the sound of her own name.
When he begins to educate her he obviously has Natasha's full attention, her arms crossed over the back of the chair and her chin resting on them comfortably as she looks up at him through her lashes. Eyes widen when he uses the phrase 'vampire army' seriously, and she seems wrapped up in his story until he looks away from her suddenly. She knows that look, and although she's admittedly fascinated by exactly what he is and what he's capable of, Natasha doesn't want to push him too far to speak of something that brings him discomfort. Especially one that, it seems, she can understand on a deeper level.
The empathy that she feels for him isn't shielded this time, she's much too wrapped in their conversation with genuine interest for that to happen, but she slowly sits up from where her chin was resting on her hands before giving him a soft frown. "That sounds terrible." She looks away from him as well, and it's with more hesitance this time that she starts speaking. She doesn't know how far she's willing to go with this just yet, but its a bit freeing, not having to worry about who you're speaking to and who they know. Who they report back to.
"I was my own army." Her eyes flicker to his face once more. "Every assassination you heard about in the news before six years ago, that was me back to about '99." When she was fifteen. "And those were the ones that were reported. I didn't know who I was or who was pulling my strings, I just... did as I was told until a Shield agent pulled me to the other side. Clint, he's still - ...he's my best friend now, after what he did for me." She frowns a little, sighing quietly. "It doesn't take away from what happened but I thought that maybe if I did a little bit of good after everything... it doesn't matter now." She shakes her head suddenly, pushing the thought out of her head, and she moves just as abruptly to stand. "Enough." She speaks as if she's speaking for both of them, and she places a kind hand on his shoulder as she passes him to move to her kettle.
"I'm sure we both think about the things that we've done whenever we have a silent moment. It's not necessary to do it while we have the opportunity not to."
He looks back at her when she starts talking, that too-attentive stare. Even going to high school ever day, he doesn't spend enough time truly around humans to remember all the little tells that come so naturally to Carlisle, blinking three times a minute, moving his shoulders as if he's breathing, shifting in his seat. He's a statue, listening to her words and to the flavor of her mood as it shifts from a decidedly acute empathy—she knows the feeling of what he's done somehow, and isn't that curious?—to the hard shell she grows around herself when she's hiding, but it doesn't last this time. It's almost as though she's taken it down herself instead of letting it fully form.
He straightens just a little when she stands, and swallows when she walks close to him. Her hand on his shoulder burns through the jacket. He can't breathe with her so close, doesn't want to risk that, but his head turns to look up at her as if drawn up to her face. "It matters," he says simply, and then he's gone, only a sharp breeze marking his disappearance. The chair hasn't even moved.
It isn't even the fresh air, although that helps cool the burn in his throat. He'd gotten the distinct sense earlier that she'd been a mite skeptical of the location of those birch trees, and he speeds his way through the trees now, to the edge of the creek where he'd found them, uprooted by the erosion of soil until they'd fallen to form a natural bridge over the water. He may not be as strong as Emmett, but he's easily strong enough to rip one tree away from its clinging roots and carry it back through the woods, a little slower now but still back at the house within ten minutes.
He slows when he's almost within sight of it, just for the satisfaction of walking out of the woods with a full-sized birch tree balanced on one shoulder like a rolled up carpet.
The way that he looks at her, without moving or breathing or... anything, it's a little unsettling. It's hard to find a tell on someone who can shut off completely when they decide that it's their turn to listen, but it's something that she can work past. She's going to have to, especially if they're going to be stuck together in this tiny house.
She's actually surprised at how cold his shoulder is when she places her hand on it, as if he's radiating cold instead of simply lacking heat, and her mind immediately goes to inappropriate places about how that must be unpleasant in certain situations which is remarkably unlike her. She chalks it up to the fact that she's stuck in the woods with nothing but a pretty, dead boy and a pretty dead boy to look at, and once she pushes the thought out of her mind she turns to ask him if he wants tea before... he's gone. He did warn her ahead of time, she supposes, so she makes him some anyway, uncertain as to how long it'll take for him to get it whatever chased him off out of his system.
Barely ten minutes passes before she can see him coming closer through the window, and her hands freeze over her tea as her eyes narrow. Is that - is he carrying a tree? "Really?" She isn't asking anybody in particular but she sighs as she moves to the front door, leaving the house so she can see him outside with two mugs in her hands, both filled with tea.
As he approaches she approaches him as well, meeting him half way and staring at the giant tree on his shoulder. Alright. "Fine." She says aloud, eyes narrowing a little as a smile ghosts her lips. It's slight, almost flirtatious in a way where she just naturally is. "I'm almost impressed, Jasper Whitlock. Almost." she hands him the mug in his free hand since he only needs one to carry the tree, and when she continues her voice starts to match the smile she wears. "Except you still have to break it down so it'll fit into the fireplace." Her eyes move to the tree once more, searching it for a moment, and when she looks back at him it's with a playful grin that's almost mischievous. "And, that's an Aspen." She taps his nose with the tip of her finger. "Not a Birch."
Natasha finds herself biting on her bottom lip to try and reel back her smile, and she takes two steps back with her mug in both hands before she turns to head back inside. "You should break that down soon, we're going to want to bring it all inside before tonight." She calls out to him over her shoulder, amusement in her voice. "It's going to get cold, that matters to some of us."
When he takes the mug, he twists his hand carefully to keep from touching her skin. It makes him far too aware of her. It's dangerous, an unnecessary danger. The tea isn't as hot as it could be, she must have made it just after he'd disappeared on her. He's glad now that he'd mentioned sometimes needing to do that before he'd started doing it, because it had needed doing in that moment. She'd been so open to him, hardly a layer of anything separating him from her true emotions, and between that and the unexpected hand on his shoulder...
Well. He'd been planning on fetching back one of these trees anyway.
"Sorry to fall short, in that case," he begins, and then she taps his nose, and everything he'd been lining up in his head disappears.
It most certainly isn't an aspen, it's a paper birch, probably sprung up after a wildfire swept that riverbank clean a decade or so ago, but he doesn't correct her. He isn't certain he can trust himself.
After she's disappeared into the house, he lets the tree fall with a sudden ground-shaking thud and blurs to the porch to carefully set the mug down, then blurs back to the tree and sets on it like it's an enemy. There's a perfectly good axe hanging on the side of the house, above the sparse wood pile, but he doesn't even look at it. Even if it wasn't a soft wood, he'd prefer to do it this way. He isn't sure how long it takes, but the sun is visibly angled by the time he's stacking the torn-apart firewood-sized chunks of birch along the side of the porch.
She's going to keep touching him, and he doesn't know why he isn't warning her off from it.
He turns to go back to the woods, then hesitates. Almost unwillingly, his feet take him to the door and he opens it and leans inside. "How much time would you say you need for something a little bigger than rabbits?"
She waits, wondering if he'll take the bait, but he's a smart boy and he doesn't correct her, either because he knows that she's trying to get a rise out of him or because he still can't get too close to her. He's going to have to get used to it though, isn't he? A part of Natasha knows that he will, and she reminds herself how foolish that is; she doesn't know him. Yet, she's certain that she's safe. After this long, she has a sense in her gut that tells her when she's in danger. This isn't one of those times.
She's sitting on the couch, curled up with a smutty romance novel when he pokes his head in, and she glances up at him before she looks out the window to see the time. "...If we're talking a deer I might be able to get the thing properly skinned before sundown, but that's the biggest. Anything smaller will work."
She spends the day concentrating on their food and keeping the fire going, and by the time night comes Natasha practically collapses into bed. No matter how occupied she keeps herself, though, it doesn't feel right being here. She's kept her body somewhat busy but her mind has gone dull already, she's used to constantly moving, constantly thinking and constantly surviving. It isn't necessary to do that here, she's waiting for the rush of action or the fear of failing a mission and nothing comes. It's just him. Him, their little cabin, and that goddamn owl outside that's keeping her awake.
It's not really the owl's fault. She's restless, she's barely made it a week without being directed by someone else and five of those days were dedicated to making her way to the safe house in the first place. She doesn't like this, floating without a purpose, and it wasn't until her conversation with Jasper earlier that she realized how pointless everything she'd done for Shield really was. Had she ever taken an order based solely on helping people? Was there always an ulterior motive? Will that owl ever shut the hell up?
Not even ten more minutes pass before she's out of bed, and Natasha throws her door open before walking out into the house in her underwear and the thin t shirt that she sleeps in. She ignores Jasper, heading directly for the closet where she keeps her rifle, and the process of loading it and cocking it with a shake of one arm barely takes her a few seconds. "I'm going to kill that owl." She doesn't explain why but she says it with absolute certainty, and Natasha walks out of the house barefoot into the night.
She's back a few seconds later without the sound of a gunshot, and instead she unloads the gun and tosses the rifle back into the closet as the owl continues to hoot, happy to ruin her night. Killing the owl won't help. She can't sleep.
So instead she walks over to the couch and collapses down onto it with a look of frustration, glaring at the table before she finally looks up enough to see him. "What do you even do all night, if you can't sleep?"
The windowsill has already become his usual perch in the house, close enough to the couch to make for easy conversation, far enough away to prevent 'accidental' contact. There's little enough for him to do here, plenty of time to think. Too much time, sometimes, but he's had worse. The sounds of the forest at night are just as arresting as any busy city, fascinating in themselves, and enough of a distraction for now.
He's still sated from the small doe he'd brought down earlier, now skinned and hanging from a tree behind the house thanks to Natasha's handiwork, and for once he isn't tracking a herd or planning a hunt, he can just listen intently, eyes closed. The chittering of small animals, little silences of predators stalking, it all layers up. He's listening, and he's thinking about Alice, a cycle of worrying and reassuring himself that she'd said they'll meet again and he has to trust that, and worrying again that someone's decision might have changed and her vision might have changed and he wouldn't know it, he should find them, but he can't put them in danger again, it's too soon. He doesn't get tired, but it's exhausting, and now he's just putting it as far out of his mind as he can. Unfortunately not very far, but it'll have to do.
Lost as he is in the rhythms of the forest, he's still aware of her in the other room, tossing and turning, huffing a breath, and his eyes open as she stands up, before she even appears. He blinks in surprise but doesn't comment as she loads a gun and disappears outside. He can see her in the darkness, and she doesn't even take aim before turning right back around.
"I take it you're not much of an outdoorsy type," he says dryly, not moving from his comfortable spot at the window. "Back home, we did plenty. Read things, all sorts of things. Wrote, sometimes. Edward writes music. Carlisle writes about medical research. I wrote a paper or two on philosophy, a few years ago. Sometimes we travel, day trips." He shrugs easily. "Whatever you'd do with all the time in the world, that's what we do. ...out here, I've mostly been thinking. And listening."
"The last time I was forced outdoors it was in the frozen Tundra with five other girls and enough supplies for one of us, so no, you can say I'm not a fan." Her reply is more snappish than she means for it to be but she's tired, and she's unsettled. She isn't used to not having a goal or a purpose, the reasons that she has for opening up to Jasper so candidly are the same ones that are tearing her apart inside. She feels useless here. Pathetic. Pointless, as if she's simply wasting space. Despite all of that she still manages to give him an apologetic look, and instead of pushing on she moves to stand and disappear back into her room.
It's the mention of his family that reminds her of it, and when she comes back it's with a cuff that holds a strange crest on it, one that she personally isn't familiar with and that's saying something. "This is yours." She moves to him and holds it out, keeping a decent distance between the two of them because, not only is she stranded in the middle of nowhere, she's stranded with a man who can't stand being around her when she gets too close. These moments with Jasper are the most intimate that Natasha has ever had, just two people with no connection to the outside world. Yet she's certain she's never felt loneliness like this.
"I found it in the lab I got you out of, I forgot to give it to you, I'm sorry." She sets it down on his window sill before she returns to her couch, pulling her bare legs up and hugging her knees close to her chest. Natasha wets her lips, uncertain as to whether she should just leave him be and lie awake in her own room, but before she can think too deeply about it she speaks again. "It's your family, right? The crest?" She searches his face. "I can tell that you wore it a lot."
He makes that connection almost immediately. It isn't a difficult conclusion to make: six girls, supplies enough for one. She's still here. The tundra may have taken the other five, but he knows it didn't.
When she brings him the cuff, he notices how carefully she chooses her distance away from him, forcing him to lean forward with outstretched arm to take it from her, without brushing her fingers. "Thank you kindly," he says automatically, looking at it, rubbing a thumb along the twisting metal edge of the crest. He doesn't put it on again quite yet, isn't sure he ought to, but it's been a part of him for a long time. Even in his thirst, he'd noticed when they'd taken it from him.
He doesn't speak again until it's securely around his right wrist again. It's a promise, he tells himself, a promise to go back home. When it's safe, even if it takes him years, he'll go back to them.
"Carlisle's design," he says with a nod, thumb still tracing along the edge. "Every bit of it. He has quite a knowledge of heraldry. Quite a knowledge of most things, in fact." He smiles, remembering when he and Alice had first shown up at the house. Edward and Emmett had been hunting, it had been only Carlisle and Esme and Rosalie at home. "At first, I didn't know how to relate to him, but he was patient. He's always been patient. Now I consider him as much a father and Esme as much a mother as the others are my siblings."
The enamel is still smooth when he runs a finger over it and finally lets go. "We all have one, somewhere. Carlisle wanted us to be a family, not just a coven. I wore one every day until they took it." He looks over at her, curled up on the couch, still crystal clear to him in the dark. "Thank you, Natalia. It means a lot. To have this again."
She watches him carefully as he puts the cuff back on, and although she can't see in the dark as clearly as he can it's almost hard to notice. Her eyes move with his wrist, watching the way that he stares at the crest like it means something to him, and that stab of envy returns to her under a layer of disheartened despondency. What the hell is he doing here, with her? He has a family to get back to. Carlisle and Esme, Rosalie and Emmett. People that he mentions so easily in conversation that he probably doesn't even realize it. They're a part of him. He doesn't belong here with her.
"You should go back to them." She says it before she can stop herself, and it's only the that she realizes she hasn't wanted him to leave since she's arrived. She likes being around someone that isn't an agent... Natasha likes having a friend that isn't a teammate. She likes the way he says her name, and the way he speaks. She enjoys playing with that little fire in him, but that's no reason to keep him here. Not when he actually has something to go back to, what kind of person would trap someone in a cabin just so they aren't alone? Natasha doesn't want to be that.
"You shouldn't be here, you should just go back to your family." She says it with more purpose now, her throat moving with a hard swallow and her jaw flexing with tension. Her walls are halfway up but nowhere near as well constructed as usual, her dejection seeping through the cracks she leaves, probably because she's too tired. Her eyes move back up to him and her arms tighten around herself, chin resting on her knees.
"You're fast, you all are. They won't find you as long as they don't have me to track you down, and that's obviously not going to happen so. You should go to them."
Does she know, he wonders, how clear she's being with what she's feeling? They're not hitting him with the thunderbolt-suddenness of that first burst of envy that had almost sent him running, but they're right there, swimming through the room, almost visible in their twining intensity. Envy again, and a heavy something that weighs her down, drags down the walls she's half-heartedly reconstructing.
Her loneliness is a tide that catches him and sweeps him out to a sea of it. His fingers tighten dangerously on the wood of the window until it creaks audibly.
"I will," he says slowly, after several moments debating his words. He's watching her too closely again, he can see when she looks at him and he can meet her eyes even in this near-darkness. She hates being seen like this, but she doesn't hate that it's him seeing her like this, and isn't that curious? "But I think it's an inaccuracy to say I shouldn't be here. I can't risk leading anyone back in their direction, and I'll wait as long as I need, to keep that from happening." He lets go of the window and shifts to sit upright, staying where he is for now but more politely, as it were, for conversation.
"I know you're gonna argue," he continues quietly. "I know you think that bringing your organization down the way you have, there's minimal risk in my slipping off, going under the radar. You may well be right." He runs a thumb along the edge of the crest again and folds his fingers and looks up. "But the things I've seen in this...existence...of mine. Are not things I'll allow anywhere near Alice. I can wait."
She hears the creak of wood and her eyes move to his hand, but she can't see it well enough in the dark to tell whether or not he's responsible. Perhaps she's making him uncomfortable again, she can't tell that either when she can't see clearly enough to see his tells, and that's another layer of unsettling that she doesn't want to think about. Speaking to him in the dark like this forces her to have a conversation with Jasper and not with Jasper's reactions. Those are two very different things in Natasha Romanoff's mind.
"I won't argue," she corrects him, eyes moving away to instead stare out of a window on an opposite wall. "You would know better than I would, what the proper reaction is to find your family." It's simply not something she can relate to. The mention of Alice brings another pang of muted longing but it's not as strong this time. She can't really miss something that she never had, and that's what she tells herself. Maybe she's not missing out when it comes to having someone that important. Maybe it's overrated. "Alice." She says her name again aloud, settling into the corner of the couch to half lean/half lie against the arm of it.
"What is she like?" Her eyes move back to Jasper after a moment. "You mentioned her before."
However much of him she can see in the darkness, now there's a smile appearing on his face that's brighter and fonder than any other expression he's had since they'd met. "Alice is everything," he says simply. "My face was her first vision when she woke up after being turned."
He's silent for a few moments, wrestling the waves of his own desolation at being separated from her, at not knowing she's safe. "She's got no memory of being human, none at all. But we know a little." His voice goes flatter, more like that militaristic lecture. "She had visions as a human. Got put away for it. Insane asylum, sometime before she was turned in 1920." He glances up at her, tense anger in the lines of his shoulders. "They put her in there, and they put up a stone in the graveyard, with the same date."
He has to stop, or risk breaking something. Deep breathing doesn't work, it never has. He closes his eyes, brings her face to mind, her smile, the way her hair feathers across her forehead when they run, her golden eyes, the way she fits against him. His Alice. She's alive, she must be. She must be.
To her credit, Natasha doesn't move, she lets him reach the point he needs to reach, to calm down and start speaking again. "Alice saw me, and I kept her waiting almost thirty years before I finally showed up," he says at last, and now that little smile is back, and growing. "Meeting her that day, I felt hope for the first time in a century."
She watches him as he speaks of Alice, barely able to see him in the dark save for the silhouette of his frame as light barely peaks through the window from the blocked moon outside. He's informing her about Alice, yes, but the story is in the way that he speaks, passion and anger and everything in between weaving in and out of his words with a natural flow. She sees more of him, more of Jasper, within these few moments than she has since her arrival here, it's as if the simple mention of Alice lights a sort of life within him that he's void without. The envy is gone, because how can Natasha feel something like that when it obviously makes him so happy?
She's happy for him. She isn't sure if that's supposed to hurt with a constant ache of longing that even she doesn't understand to this day, but she's happy for him.
That's why this is so hard for her, she realizes. "She sounds amazing." Her voice is soft and encouraging, as if thankful that he shared Alice's story with her. It's hard because Natasha has given up on this sort of connection, she realized a long time ago that she'll never be loved or love someone the way that Jasper loves Alice. She can't, she's not a person she's a weapon, and weapons don't decide who they do and don't like. She never had the opportunity to be anything else and she told herself that it was okay, once she got into Shield. The sacrifice was worth it.
Now she's here, with him, with nothing to show for all the efforts she made, and she's realizing just now what she had to give up to make them. Everything. She gave up everything, she's lived a full life and she has nothing to show for it except for a cabin in the woods, one that exists only for her to hide herself away from other people. This is all she has to her name, and when she hears Jasper speak of Alice... that certainly feels like nothing.
"You'll get back to her," she assures him in the same soft, passive tone. "It doesn't sound like your story is over yet. You've been through too much for it to end now."
"She is that," Jasper agrees more softly, looking down at the crest once again. He doesn't wear a wedding band like some of the others, hasn't wanted to fret over damaging it, and Alice doesn't wear a ring herself, but they don't need them. They know.
The ache in Natasha is low and steady, settling in for the duration like a cracked bone that needs time to heal, and she's still curled up on the couch in the chilly front room instead of beneath the layers of blankets on the bed. That's simply not right. Slowly, making more noise than he needs to, Jasper slips off the windowsill and glides to the fireplace, carefully adding a log and poking kindling at the embers. If she isn't going to sleep, she may as well stay warm.
As the flames leap up again and Natasha shifts instinctively toward the little billow of warmth, and incidentally toward him, and he doesn't move away again, it all comes crashing back.
They hadn't had much time, but Alice had told him a lot of things before they'd been separated. She'd told him she'd only seen all of them caught when they all ran together. When he'd decided to stay behind, she'd told him, with tears in her eyes, what needed to be done to hold off the attackers and give them time to escape. They'd been a little oasis of stillness, clinging to each other as their siblings and parents flew past them, blurred with speed, when her eyes had unfocused again.
"You'll meet someone. When we're apart. Someone new. A, a woman, with red hair. Sharp. Angry, but...not always. I don't know who she is, but you love her," and she'd put a finger over his lips as he'd immediately gone to protest it, he'd never love anyone the way he loves her, "you'll love her, and you'll bring her back to us. To both of us." Her glorious eyes had narrowed in confusion and she'd given that little huff she always gets when she can't figure something properly. "I don't...she's still human, but she feeds you, somehow she feeds you and you keep her warm. ...that's all I know, except. I'll love her too." She'd lain both hands on his cheeks, clarity restored even as Jasper's own confusion kept building. "Bring her with you when you come back. I'll wait."
It hadn't been the most pressing issue at the time, and in the weeks of fury and agony that had followed, he'd all but forgotten it. Red hair. Sharp. Angry. She feeds you and his breakfast mug is still sitting on the drainboard from the morning's squirrel blood. You keep her warm and what reason would he have to build a fire but to keep her warm, what reason to drag downed trees across the forest for firewood but to keep her warm?
The force of it knocks him back to sit on the hearth, his back against the hearthstone, the poker falling from his hand as he stares at her red hair, coppery now in the firelight. He shouldn't have any business being around a human, alone, for this long without going for her. She's touched him so many times, and he's only had to run from her once. He's never been as strong as the others, by rights she should be dead already, but she's never feared him, not once, not this woman whose instinct for death is such that he can feel it.
Does she know? Does she know what she is to him? To both of them?
Natasha finds herself so deep in thought that she barely realizes Jasper is moving, her blank stare having returned to the window to stare out into the darkness. Something about hearing it hurts and yet she doesn't wish it to be hers. Hearing Jasper speak of Alice with such tenderness is beautiful to her, and Natasha has already accepted that she's not going to have something like that. She'll never be able to start a family or keep someone close, not when she's always putting her life at risk or on the run, and maybe that's why she wishes nothing but happiness for Jasper and Alice. Happiness, for something that she can't have herself.
It isn't until she starts feeling warmth that she registers what he's doing for her, and it's enough to pull her out of the darkness that her mind is spiraling into so she can instead offering him a tiny but grateful smile. The corners of her mouth barely curl up as she watches him, knowing that this is probably the first time he's started a fire strictly for warmth in much too long, and she's about to thank him when he seems to be struck again like he had been when she first arrived. He drops the poker and he stares at her, and Natasha would think that he's having some sort of issue being around her again if she didn't know that he wouldn't be in the house anymore if he did.
"...Jasper?" She says his name with thinly veiled concern because he's never looked like that before, and she hesitates before standing from her seat on the couch and approaching him, sitting on the hearthstone beside him to soak in the warmth that he's provided. Her green eyes are wide with worry as she studies his face now that she's closer, the light of the fire dancing against one side of her as she faces him.
"...What? What is it, did you hear something or... do you need me to go into the bedroom...?"
He notices her moving closer, of course he does, and the monster chained inside him writhes in impatience, but this isn't the moment to worry about the monster, and for the first time, he can possibly see how Carlisle can have the control he has: focusing so intently on something else that the proximity of a human and her blood just doesn't matter as much.
It's her, it must be. It must be her that Alice meant. There are plenty of women with red hair in the world, but how many of them have fed him in a way that kept them breathing and whole and moving? How many of them has he, with his icy skin and leashed-up monster inside, kept warm?
Which leads to the larger question of how he's ever going to pitch this. The certainty of it has sunk into him, tethered him to her, and he knows leaving her would make him ache in almost the way being apart from Alice makes him ache. But from what he knows of her, her life has been death. Her meaningful connections with people have been fleeting, or built on conditions that she herself sets. She's never known something like this, and worse, she never plans to, and she's made peace with that, of a kind. As much peace as she ever allows herself.
He could still be wrong. He's moving too slowly now, noticeably too slowly, as he reaches out and avoids touching her skin but hooks a lock of her red hair over a finger, and draws it gently along, and lets it fall again and pulls his hand back. "That morning pick-me-up you so kindly provided," and his voice is lower, a little hoarse with bewilderment now, "was that something you were planning on doing often?"
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moodshifter) wrote2017-02-16 01:26 pm
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She likely doesn't know his range of movement extends hundreds of miles. Or that he could run halfway across the country and be back in the same day. Near-starving from the energy he'd expend doing it, admittedly, but it's still doable. Needs must, after all, when you spend your life trying to stay hidden from millions of people. "I don't sleep. Don't need to. But firewood won't be a problem. There's a few downed trees, birches, some miles from here. Easy enough to collect them up, after that little pick-me-up of yours."
He sets the empty mug aside and folds his hands on the table, shoulders still straight, as he considers his next words. "You're right. I do have some measure of self control. But not as much as the rest in my family. I spent a lot of years living like any vampire does, in addition to fighting in the wars. Being...sated...like this, that's a help, but my years as a vegetarian vampire still don't top my years spent otherwise." He glances up then, meeting her eyes as steadily as she can meet his. "I know for a fact you're not afraid of me, and I'm not questioning that. But there will be times when I cannot be around you. Even times when I up and vanish in the middle of a sentence. I'll need to apologize in advance for that, there will not be time in the moment."
He looks down again at his neatly-folded fingers, stone-pale against the dark, scarred wood of the table, and half-smiles. "Being the cause of your decay is not something I want."
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She looks back at him when he apologizes ahead of time for leaving abruptly, and she gives a single nod of understanding to convey that he doesn't have to convey beyond that. "I have no reason to be scared of you." She hesitates for a moment, and when she puts her fork down she pushes her plate to the side before leaning back in her chair to look at him directly. "You're far from the scariest thing I've been in the same room with. I've seen mindless monstrosity, that's not you." She pauses for a moment, as if uncertain whether or not she wants to continue, but he's here because of her. Separated from his family, Alice, because of her. She owes him at least some honesty.
"The invasion in New York City, the woman people saw fighting with the Avengers, that was me. I used to have an anonymous public presence but that's not necessarily the case, anymore." She gives a little tilt of her head, as if dismissing it. Dismissing that everything she's built for herself is gone. "Once you fight monsters coming through a portal in the sky and get cornered in a helicarrier with Hulk, your definition of dangerous shifts a little. And that's good to hear." She offers him a half-smile in return before she stands to grab her plate, and then his mug. "You're part of a small group, if that's true. A lot of people want to see me dead, more than usual right now, I'm assuming."
She moves to the sink to clean up, glancing at him over her shoulder. "You've given me no reason to fear you, Jasper. If anything, it's the other way around." She isn't able to say it without a pang of guilt cracking through her wall, and she pushes it back down quickly as she looks back down into the sink. "If I go into town for food, would you prefer to stay here? Is there anything I can get you, books or... something?"
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There's a little stirring in him at that, and after a moment he recognizes it as a strengthening of his resolve. He will not, not do anything to bring her to harm. She doesn't fear him, and he doesn't fear her. He's started with less of a footing than that.
He lets her speak and doesn't interrupt, not until she's finished and asked a question. "I'll stay. I'll spend that time fetching those birches back here for you. They're not more'n ten miles out. Won't take long. But I wouldn't say no to something to read." He turns in his seat to keep facing her as she does the washing up. "Pick things you'd enjoy. I have an...eclectic array of interests, after this long. That was you?"
Now she gets an admiring smile as he shifts to sit backward on the chair, resting his crossed arms against the back. "I remember that fight, Emmett wanted to pitch in but it would've taken us too long to get there." It's a shame it would be too dangerous for them to spar, he can still remember admiring that redheaded spitfire in the flashes of news footage that had actually shown her. Naturally most of the coverage had been of Iron Man, Captain America, the Hulk, Thor.
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"And yeah, that was me. Don't worry about it, we had it under control." Barely. She smiles a little down at her dish as she dries it. "So you can imagine that I'm not a stranger to being in the same room with someone stronger than me. ...I'd say that you'd be a great ally in something like that but there's a lot of bloodshed. The smell is thick, even I can pick it up when things get really dirty. Or maybe that's just because I'm the one who's usually bleeding at the end of the day... I'm not a giant suit of armor type of girl." She finishes with a sigh, putting her plate away before turning to lean back against the counter. Instead of approaching the table again Natasha instead folds her arms, watching Jasper with an inquisitive tilt of her head.
"You would know what to do though, wouldn't you, soldier?" It's a nickname she usually reserves for Steve, but it's fitting for him. She can see that. "You've got a touch of military in you. It's buried in there, under all of that proper southern gentleman mess." Another tease in a smile. Genuine this time; pretty, and not in the usual artificial way with her. "You haven't served in a while though, have you?"
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"Whitlock was my name then, Major Jasper Whitlock. I took the name 'Hale' when Alice and I joined the family in 1950. My adopted sister Rosalie's surname." He smiles wryly, nostalgic for those first fraught months with the family. It had taken him a long time to adjust to being around so many other vampires who had no ill intentions, and even longer for him to stop feeling overprotective of Alice being around so many other vampires who had no ill intentions. "She wasn't too keen to share it at first, but eventually she admitted it would help us blend in if she and I could pose as twins. You didn't meet her, I don't believe, but we have very similar coloring."
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"Major Jasper Whitlock," she repeats back to him with playful air, looking both impressed and amused all at once. She takes a few steps forward to grab the other chair, mimicking him in the way that she turns it and sits down to face him. "That's got a nice ring to it, I'll admit." She pauses for a moment before she shrugs a single shoulder, as if having just convinced herself of something silently. "Natalia Romanova." She gives him an almost sheepish smile, brushing her hair behind her ear nervously. "Natasha Romanoff is more Americanized, they said that I would fit in better that way." The smile fades, and her gaze falls for a moment before returning. "I changed it when I joined SHIELD after switching sides. At least, that was the intention."
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She isn't making too great an effort to hide what she's feeling from him now. She's opened up, or relaxed herself, and it's easy to look beyond the surface layers. It's been a challenge to reveal that detail, he thinks, it's a vulnerability she's handed him. "Natalia," he says thoughtfully, experimentally, like he's tasting the name. "That actually kinda suits you. Maybe it reminds you of where you're from though." He wouldn't want to start using it if she didn't want it to be used. That would be ungentlemanly.
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The way that he says her name catches her off guard an it shows in small ways; a slight twitch at the corner of her eyebrow, a little part of her lips. People don't call her that; in fact, she can't remember the last time she was called Natalia. It sounds nice, though, the way that it flows from his tongue in that lazy drawl, and her sheepish smile returns as she shakes her head slightly. "No," she begins, "Natalia is fine. You can call me that." He doesn't know it's strange that she's allowing it, and nobody else is here to tell him as much. What harm can it do? "You don't have to worry about reminding me where I'm from." She tilts her head. "I don't run from it." Not anymore.
"Did you ever serve, again?" She's surprising herself by asking it, because she isn't doing so to get on his good side. She's asking because she actually wants to know, and isn't that a strange thing? "After the Confederacy dissolved?"
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"Natalia, then," he says with a firm little nod. It's better for him anyway, it sits better with him, the little extra layer of formality. It's a part of his nature. And he can certainly identify with running from where you're from, and trying like hell to stop doing it.
He looks thoughtful as he considers how to answer her question. Her genuine interest feels comfortable already. Maybe they will be able to coexist without anything...unfortunate...occurring.
"Not in any human army, but plenty in the Southern Vampire Wars. It was commonplace in the South during the War Between the States and after, armies of newborns created only to fight each other and win territory for their masters. A newborn is much more dangerous than a full grown vampire," and as he speaks, his voice takes on the cadence of a military lecture, "in their first year of existence a newborn vampire is much stronger, until their human blood is leached out of their tissues entirely, but their thirst is almost uncontrollable. Maria turned me so I could use my abilities to control her army. I was her second in command, in charge of training them after she turned them."
His eyes slant away from her in sharp memory of the bewildered fear, over and over, before the hard crack of death. "Training them, and killing them off when she'd decided they'd served their purpose. She could always make more."
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When he begins to educate her he obviously has Natasha's full attention, her arms crossed over the back of the chair and her chin resting on them comfortably as she looks up at him through her lashes. Eyes widen when he uses the phrase 'vampire army' seriously, and she seems wrapped up in his story until he looks away from her suddenly. She knows that look, and although she's admittedly fascinated by exactly what he is and what he's capable of, Natasha doesn't want to push him too far to speak of something that brings him discomfort. Especially one that, it seems, she can understand on a deeper level.
The empathy that she feels for him isn't shielded this time, she's much too wrapped in their conversation with genuine interest for that to happen, but she slowly sits up from where her chin was resting on her hands before giving him a soft frown. "That sounds terrible." She looks away from him as well, and it's with more hesitance this time that she starts speaking. She doesn't know how far she's willing to go with this just yet, but its a bit freeing, not having to worry about who you're speaking to and who they know. Who they report back to.
"I was my own army." Her eyes flicker to his face once more. "Every assassination you heard about in the news before six years ago, that was me back to about '99." When she was fifteen. "And those were the ones that were reported. I didn't know who I was or who was pulling my strings, I just... did as I was told until a Shield agent pulled me to the other side. Clint, he's still - ...he's my best friend now, after what he did for me." She frowns a little, sighing quietly. "It doesn't take away from what happened but I thought that maybe if I did a little bit of good after everything... it doesn't matter now." She shakes her head suddenly, pushing the thought out of her head, and she moves just as abruptly to stand. "Enough." She speaks as if she's speaking for both of them, and she places a kind hand on his shoulder as she passes him to move to her kettle.
"I'm sure we both think about the things that we've done whenever we have a silent moment. It's not necessary to do it while we have the opportunity not to."
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He straightens just a little when she stands, and swallows when she walks close to him. Her hand on his shoulder burns through the jacket. He can't breathe with her so close, doesn't want to risk that, but his head turns to look up at her as if drawn up to her face. "It matters," he says simply, and then he's gone, only a sharp breeze marking his disappearance. The chair hasn't even moved.
It isn't even the fresh air, although that helps cool the burn in his throat. He'd gotten the distinct sense earlier that she'd been a mite skeptical of the location of those birch trees, and he speeds his way through the trees now, to the edge of the creek where he'd found them, uprooted by the erosion of soil until they'd fallen to form a natural bridge over the water. He may not be as strong as Emmett, but he's easily strong enough to rip one tree away from its clinging roots and carry it back through the woods, a little slower now but still back at the house within ten minutes.
He slows when he's almost within sight of it, just for the satisfaction of walking out of the woods with a full-sized birch tree balanced on one shoulder like a rolled up carpet.
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She's actually surprised at how cold his shoulder is when she places her hand on it, as if he's radiating cold instead of simply lacking heat, and her mind immediately goes to inappropriate places about how that must be unpleasant in certain situations which is remarkably unlike her. She chalks it up to the fact that she's stuck in the woods with nothing but a pretty, dead boy and a pretty dead boy to look at, and once she pushes the thought out of her mind she turns to ask him if he wants tea before... he's gone. He did warn her ahead of time, she supposes, so she makes him some anyway, uncertain as to how long it'll take for him to get it whatever chased him off out of his system.
Barely ten minutes passes before she can see him coming closer through the window, and her hands freeze over her tea as her eyes narrow. Is that - is he carrying a tree? "Really?" She isn't asking anybody in particular but she sighs as she moves to the front door, leaving the house so she can see him outside with two mugs in her hands, both filled with tea.
As he approaches she approaches him as well, meeting him half way and staring at the giant tree on his shoulder. Alright. "Fine." She says aloud, eyes narrowing a little as a smile ghosts her lips. It's slight, almost flirtatious in a way where she just naturally is. "I'm almost impressed, Jasper Whitlock. Almost." she hands him the mug in his free hand since he only needs one to carry the tree, and when she continues her voice starts to match the smile she wears. "Except you still have to break it down so it'll fit into the fireplace." Her eyes move to the tree once more, searching it for a moment, and when she looks back at him it's with a playful grin that's almost mischievous. "And, that's an Aspen." She taps his nose with the tip of her finger. "Not a Birch."
Natasha finds herself biting on her bottom lip to try and reel back her smile, and she takes two steps back with her mug in both hands before she turns to head back inside. "You should break that down soon, we're going to want to bring it all inside before tonight." She calls out to him over her shoulder, amusement in her voice. "It's going to get cold, that matters to some of us."
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Well. He'd been planning on fetching back one of these trees anyway.
"Sorry to fall short, in that case," he begins, and then she taps his nose, and everything he'd been lining up in his head disappears.
It most certainly isn't an aspen, it's a paper birch, probably sprung up after a wildfire swept that riverbank clean a decade or so ago, but he doesn't correct her. He isn't certain he can trust himself.
After she's disappeared into the house, he lets the tree fall with a sudden ground-shaking thud and blurs to the porch to carefully set the mug down, then blurs back to the tree and sets on it like it's an enemy. There's a perfectly good axe hanging on the side of the house, above the sparse wood pile, but he doesn't even look at it. Even if it wasn't a soft wood, he'd prefer to do it this way. He isn't sure how long it takes, but the sun is visibly angled by the time he's stacking the torn-apart firewood-sized chunks of birch along the side of the porch.
She's going to keep touching him, and he doesn't know why he isn't warning her off from it.
He turns to go back to the woods, then hesitates. Almost unwillingly, his feet take him to the door and he opens it and leans inside. "How much time would you say you need for something a little bigger than rabbits?"
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She's sitting on the couch, curled up with a smutty romance novel when he pokes his head in, and she glances up at him before she looks out the window to see the time. "...If we're talking a deer I might be able to get the thing properly skinned before sundown, but that's the biggest. Anything smaller will work."
She spends the day concentrating on their food and keeping the fire going, and by the time night comes Natasha practically collapses into bed. No matter how occupied she keeps herself, though, it doesn't feel right being here. She's kept her body somewhat busy but her mind has gone dull already, she's used to constantly moving, constantly thinking and constantly surviving. It isn't necessary to do that here, she's waiting for the rush of action or the fear of failing a mission and nothing comes. It's just him. Him, their little cabin, and that goddamn owl outside that's keeping her awake.
It's not really the owl's fault. She's restless, she's barely made it a week without being directed by someone else and five of those days were dedicated to making her way to the safe house in the first place. She doesn't like this, floating without a purpose, and it wasn't until her conversation with Jasper earlier that she realized how pointless everything she'd done for Shield really was. Had she ever taken an order based solely on helping people? Was there always an ulterior motive? Will that owl ever shut the hell up?
Not even ten more minutes pass before she's out of bed, and Natasha throws her door open before walking out into the house in her underwear and the thin t shirt that she sleeps in. She ignores Jasper, heading directly for the closet where she keeps her rifle, and the process of loading it and cocking it with a shake of one arm barely takes her a few seconds. "I'm going to kill that owl." She doesn't explain why but she says it with absolute certainty, and Natasha walks out of the house barefoot into the night.
She's back a few seconds later without the sound of a gunshot, and instead she unloads the gun and tosses the rifle back into the closet as the owl continues to hoot, happy to ruin her night. Killing the owl won't help. She can't sleep.
So instead she walks over to the couch and collapses down onto it with a look of frustration, glaring at the table before she finally looks up enough to see him. "What do you even do all night, if you can't sleep?"
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He's still sated from the small doe he'd brought down earlier, now skinned and hanging from a tree behind the house thanks to Natasha's handiwork, and for once he isn't tracking a herd or planning a hunt, he can just listen intently, eyes closed. The chittering of small animals, little silences of predators stalking, it all layers up. He's listening, and he's thinking about Alice, a cycle of worrying and reassuring himself that she'd said they'll meet again and he has to trust that, and worrying again that someone's decision might have changed and her vision might have changed and he wouldn't know it, he should find them, but he can't put them in danger again, it's too soon. He doesn't get tired, but it's exhausting, and now he's just putting it as far out of his mind as he can. Unfortunately not very far, but it'll have to do.
Lost as he is in the rhythms of the forest, he's still aware of her in the other room, tossing and turning, huffing a breath, and his eyes open as she stands up, before she even appears. He blinks in surprise but doesn't comment as she loads a gun and disappears outside. He can see her in the darkness, and she doesn't even take aim before turning right back around.
"I take it you're not much of an outdoorsy type," he says dryly, not moving from his comfortable spot at the window. "Back home, we did plenty. Read things, all sorts of things. Wrote, sometimes. Edward writes music. Carlisle writes about medical research. I wrote a paper or two on philosophy, a few years ago. Sometimes we travel, day trips." He shrugs easily. "Whatever you'd do with all the time in the world, that's what we do. ...out here, I've mostly been thinking. And listening."
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It's the mention of his family that reminds her of it, and when she comes back it's with a cuff that holds a strange crest on it, one that she personally isn't familiar with and that's saying something. "This is yours." She moves to him and holds it out, keeping a decent distance between the two of them because, not only is she stranded in the middle of nowhere, she's stranded with a man who can't stand being around her when she gets too close. These moments with Jasper are the most intimate that Natasha has ever had, just two people with no connection to the outside world. Yet she's certain she's never felt loneliness like this.
"I found it in the lab I got you out of, I forgot to give it to you, I'm sorry." She sets it down on his window sill before she returns to her couch, pulling her bare legs up and hugging her knees close to her chest. Natasha wets her lips, uncertain as to whether she should just leave him be and lie awake in her own room, but before she can think too deeply about it she speaks again. "It's your family, right? The crest?" She searches his face. "I can tell that you wore it a lot."
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When she brings him the cuff, he notices how carefully she chooses her distance away from him, forcing him to lean forward with outstretched arm to take it from her, without brushing her fingers. "Thank you kindly," he says automatically, looking at it, rubbing a thumb along the twisting metal edge of the crest. He doesn't put it on again quite yet, isn't sure he ought to, but it's been a part of him for a long time. Even in his thirst, he'd noticed when they'd taken it from him.
He doesn't speak again until it's securely around his right wrist again. It's a promise, he tells himself, a promise to go back home. When it's safe, even if it takes him years, he'll go back to them.
"Carlisle's design," he says with a nod, thumb still tracing along the edge. "Every bit of it. He has quite a knowledge of heraldry. Quite a knowledge of most things, in fact." He smiles, remembering when he and Alice had first shown up at the house. Edward and Emmett had been hunting, it had been only Carlisle and Esme and Rosalie at home. "At first, I didn't know how to relate to him, but he was patient. He's always been patient. Now I consider him as much a father and Esme as much a mother as the others are my siblings."
The enamel is still smooth when he runs a finger over it and finally lets go. "We all have one, somewhere. Carlisle wanted us to be a family, not just a coven. I wore one every day until they took it." He looks over at her, curled up on the couch, still crystal clear to him in the dark. "Thank you, Natalia. It means a lot. To have this again."
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"You should go back to them." She says it before she can stop herself, and it's only the that she realizes she hasn't wanted him to leave since she's arrived. She likes being around someone that isn't an agent... Natasha likes having a friend that isn't a teammate. She likes the way he says her name, and the way he speaks. She enjoys playing with that little fire in him, but that's no reason to keep him here. Not when he actually has something to go back to, what kind of person would trap someone in a cabin just so they aren't alone? Natasha doesn't want to be that.
"You shouldn't be here, you should just go back to your family." She says it with more purpose now, her throat moving with a hard swallow and her jaw flexing with tension. Her walls are halfway up but nowhere near as well constructed as usual, her dejection seeping through the cracks she leaves, probably because she's too tired. Her eyes move back up to him and her arms tighten around herself, chin resting on her knees.
"You're fast, you all are. They won't find you as long as they don't have me to track you down, and that's obviously not going to happen so. You should go to them."
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Her loneliness is a tide that catches him and sweeps him out to a sea of it. His fingers tighten dangerously on the wood of the window until it creaks audibly.
"I will," he says slowly, after several moments debating his words. He's watching her too closely again, he can see when she looks at him and he can meet her eyes even in this near-darkness. She hates being seen like this, but she doesn't hate that it's him seeing her like this, and isn't that curious? "But I think it's an inaccuracy to say I shouldn't be here. I can't risk leading anyone back in their direction, and I'll wait as long as I need, to keep that from happening." He lets go of the window and shifts to sit upright, staying where he is for now but more politely, as it were, for conversation.
"I know you're gonna argue," he continues quietly. "I know you think that bringing your organization down the way you have, there's minimal risk in my slipping off, going under the radar. You may well be right." He runs a thumb along the edge of the crest again and folds his fingers and looks up. "But the things I've seen in this...existence...of mine. Are not things I'll allow anywhere near Alice. I can wait."
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"I won't argue," she corrects him, eyes moving away to instead stare out of a window on an opposite wall. "You would know better than I would, what the proper reaction is to find your family." It's simply not something she can relate to. The mention of Alice brings another pang of muted longing but it's not as strong this time. She can't really miss something that she never had, and that's what she tells herself. Maybe she's not missing out when it comes to having someone that important. Maybe it's overrated. "Alice." She says her name again aloud, settling into the corner of the couch to half lean/half lie against the arm of it.
"What is she like?" Her eyes move back to Jasper after a moment. "You mentioned her before."
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He's silent for a few moments, wrestling the waves of his own desolation at being separated from her, at not knowing she's safe. "She's got no memory of being human, none at all. But we know a little." His voice goes flatter, more like that militaristic lecture. "She had visions as a human. Got put away for it. Insane asylum, sometime before she was turned in 1920." He glances up at her, tense anger in the lines of his shoulders. "They put her in there, and they put up a stone in the graveyard, with the same date."
He has to stop, or risk breaking something. Deep breathing doesn't work, it never has. He closes his eyes, brings her face to mind, her smile, the way her hair feathers across her forehead when they run, her golden eyes, the way she fits against him. His Alice. She's alive, she must be. She must be.
To her credit, Natasha doesn't move, she lets him reach the point he needs to reach, to calm down and start speaking again. "Alice saw me, and I kept her waiting almost thirty years before I finally showed up," he says at last, and now that little smile is back, and growing. "Meeting her that day, I felt hope for the first time in a century."
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She's happy for him. She isn't sure if that's supposed to hurt with a constant ache of longing that even she doesn't understand to this day, but she's happy for him.
That's why this is so hard for her, she realizes. "She sounds amazing." Her voice is soft and encouraging, as if thankful that he shared Alice's story with her. It's hard because Natasha has given up on this sort of connection, she realized a long time ago that she'll never be loved or love someone the way that Jasper loves Alice. She can't, she's not a person she's a weapon, and weapons don't decide who they do and don't like. She never had the opportunity to be anything else and she told herself that it was okay, once she got into Shield. The sacrifice was worth it.
Now she's here, with him, with nothing to show for all the efforts she made, and she's realizing just now what she had to give up to make them. Everything. She gave up everything, she's lived a full life and she has nothing to show for it except for a cabin in the woods, one that exists only for her to hide herself away from other people. This is all she has to her name, and when she hears Jasper speak of Alice... that certainly feels like nothing.
"You'll get back to her," she assures him in the same soft, passive tone. "It doesn't sound like your story is over yet. You've been through too much for it to end now."
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The ache in Natasha is low and steady, settling in for the duration like a cracked bone that needs time to heal, and she's still curled up on the couch in the chilly front room instead of beneath the layers of blankets on the bed. That's simply not right. Slowly, making more noise than he needs to, Jasper slips off the windowsill and glides to the fireplace, carefully adding a log and poking kindling at the embers. If she isn't going to sleep, she may as well stay warm.
As the flames leap up again and Natasha shifts instinctively toward the little billow of warmth, and incidentally toward him, and he doesn't move away again, it all comes crashing back.
They hadn't had much time, but Alice had told him a lot of things before they'd been separated. She'd told him she'd only seen all of them caught when they all ran together. When he'd decided to stay behind, she'd told him, with tears in her eyes, what needed to be done to hold off the attackers and give them time to escape. They'd been a little oasis of stillness, clinging to each other as their siblings and parents flew past them, blurred with speed, when her eyes had unfocused again.
"You'll meet someone. When we're apart. Someone new. A, a woman, with red hair. Sharp. Angry, but...not always. I don't know who she is, but you love her," and she'd put a finger over his lips as he'd immediately gone to protest it, he'd never love anyone the way he loves her, "you'll love her, and you'll bring her back to us. To both of us." Her glorious eyes had narrowed in confusion and she'd given that little huff she always gets when she can't figure something properly. "I don't...she's still human, but she feeds you, somehow she feeds you and you keep her warm. ...that's all I know, except. I'll love her too." She'd lain both hands on his cheeks, clarity restored even as Jasper's own confusion kept building. "Bring her with you when you come back. I'll wait."
It hadn't been the most pressing issue at the time, and in the weeks of fury and agony that had followed, he'd all but forgotten it. Red hair. Sharp. Angry. She feeds you and his breakfast mug is still sitting on the drainboard from the morning's squirrel blood. You keep her warm and what reason would he have to build a fire but to keep her warm, what reason to drag downed trees across the forest for firewood but to keep her warm?
The force of it knocks him back to sit on the hearth, his back against the hearthstone, the poker falling from his hand as he stares at her red hair, coppery now in the firelight. He shouldn't have any business being around a human, alone, for this long without going for her. She's touched him so many times, and he's only had to run from her once. He's never been as strong as the others, by rights she should be dead already, but she's never feared him, not once, not this woman whose instinct for death is such that he can feel it.
Does she know? Does she know what she is to him? To both of them?
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It isn't until she starts feeling warmth that she registers what he's doing for her, and it's enough to pull her out of the darkness that her mind is spiraling into so she can instead offering him a tiny but grateful smile. The corners of her mouth barely curl up as she watches him, knowing that this is probably the first time he's started a fire strictly for warmth in much too long, and she's about to thank him when he seems to be struck again like he had been when she first arrived. He drops the poker and he stares at her, and Natasha would think that he's having some sort of issue being around her again if she didn't know that he wouldn't be in the house anymore if he did.
"...Jasper?" She says his name with thinly veiled concern because he's never looked like that before, and she hesitates before standing from her seat on the couch and approaching him, sitting on the hearthstone beside him to soak in the warmth that he's provided. Her green eyes are wide with worry as she studies his face now that she's closer, the light of the fire dancing against one side of her as she faces him.
"...What? What is it, did you hear something or... do you need me to go into the bedroom...?"
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It's her, it must be. It must be her that Alice meant. There are plenty of women with red hair in the world, but how many of them have fed him in a way that kept them breathing and whole and moving? How many of them has he, with his icy skin and leashed-up monster inside, kept warm?
Which leads to the larger question of how he's ever going to pitch this. The certainty of it has sunk into him, tethered him to her, and he knows leaving her would make him ache in almost the way being apart from Alice makes him ache. But from what he knows of her, her life has been death. Her meaningful connections with people have been fleeting, or built on conditions that she herself sets. She's never known something like this, and worse, she never plans to, and she's made peace with that, of a kind. As much peace as she ever allows herself.
He could still be wrong. He's moving too slowly now, noticeably too slowly, as he reaches out and avoids touching her skin but hooks a lock of her red hair over a finger, and draws it gently along, and lets it fall again and pulls his hand back. "That morning pick-me-up you so kindly provided," and his voice is lower, a little hoarse with bewilderment now, "was that something you were planning on doing often?"
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