Fic: Better to have loved

[icmezzo_archive]

Better to have loved

A/N: A little angsty flashfic I wrote awhile back. E/J. Vamps. AU. Thanks to ArcadianMaggie for prereading and TwilightMundi for betaing. And thanks to you for reading and reviewing.

Disclaimer: All copyrights, trademarked items, or recognizable characters, plots, etc., mentioned herein belong to their respective owners. No copying or reproduction of this work is permitted without express authorization.

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Loneliness.

It burns.

It burns my eyelids, my lungs, my stomach, the aching pit that no amount of blood can satisfy. Even that emptiness burns.

Three days of scorching flesh is nothing compared to year upon year ablaze with loneliness.

I've come to know well the burn of missing what I never had, the ache of missing who I've never known. Alive fifty years, alone forever, the world spins around me, cycling and moving through the seasons while I wait, unchanging.

Until I see him.

They enter with the wind on a warm September day. He is broad, blond summer, and she, small winter. But I barely see her at all.

Because the pain of alone that has strangled my heart is replaced in that instant by a new kind of fire—a blaze that sweeps through me, decimating old growth to make room for the new, for him.

But there is something else as well, a different color in the air. Foreign. I taste the emotion: confusion twisted up with passion and swaddled with guilt. The feelings aren't mine. I realize I'm reading them from the mind of the new one, the one who thinks in feelings and who also knows pain. The one who is likewise ablaze.

Our eyes meet.

A feminine gasp startles me. As I witness the small vampire's thoughts, I understand her worry.

She sees him twisted in my embrace against a backdrop of autumn leaves. Having found me, he has no choice. He will leave her; it is crystal clear in her mind.

"We have to go, Jasper, we have to go," she says, pulling his arm back toward the car, and my breath catches in my throat when I realize what she has seen is more than a stray concern on her part. It is my future, our lives. It is my truth she is trying to drive away in a bright blue convertible.

He breaks free from her grasp and walks purposefully across our front lawn instead, his eyes trained on me, ignoring my other family members along his path.

He stops short before me, and reaching out, he offers his hand. "I'm Jasper," he says, his voice deep and graveled, his mind rich and warm.

I take it, and can't seem to let go.

"Edward," I reply, giving him the traditional response instead of telling him who I really am—the one who has waited fifty years for him, the one who has wandered, unsettled, never knowing the reason was him—a blond man with scars who shone like the sun and smelled of summer.

"Jasper!" the small vampire cries behind him and more images—no, visions—filter through her mind. A covert touch. A kiss. A consummation. He will fall further and further from her grasp, all before the first snow falls.

"It can't be," she says, crumpling down to the grass. "It can't."

I hear my sister go to her, even though I cannot turn away from Jasper, my eyes studying the intricacies of his face.

"Edward," he murmurs, pained, though he does not turn around to watch the small vampire heaving in dry sobs on the ground. "Alice...I..."

She stands then, brushing off her knees, and steps back to her car, their car. She holds her head high, determined to reason with the one she arrived with not three minutes prior. "Jasper, please, we can go away from here and everything will be as it was before. Nothing has to change."

She relives the promises he made to her, the forever they'd intended.

Pain floods his features. I hear the guilt that inundates his mind as it mixes and swirls with the horror he feels when he contemplates leaving me to fulfill those promises.

She aches as well, feeling the agonizing loss as her world cracks before her eyes. And her pain somehow becomes his, and the one I waited for is drowning in torment.

I cannot see him in such torture. I have to stop it. I need him happy the way I need blood; my existence depends on it.

He was hers and they were happy. She needs him, it is clear. She is not good at alone.

But I am. God knows I've had enough practice. I ready myself for torture, prepare myself for the hell to come. Squaring my shoulders and setting my jaw, I avert my eyes, unable to meet his. "Go to her."

My words are cold.

I'm lucky I can force them from my lips at all. But I refuse to see him in such agony.

"But..." The words die on his lips.

"Go." I don't look up. I must set him free.

He hesitates, then slowly backs away, toward the car, toward Alice, to his promises and her dreams, to the life they had before she turned down our long stone driveway.

I turn away, choking and wrecked as the car backs quickly out of the driveway. Her whispered assurances echo across our property when she tells him that he made the right choice, the only choice, as the car merges onto the quiet road that will take him out of my reach.

The only thing to do is run. Because I know what's coming. And maybe, somehow, I can outrun it. Run so far, so fast, that the burn can't catch me.

I take off toward the sun, a poor replica of the one who stood before me for a fleeting minute, hand in mine. The one who showed me for just a moment what it was like not to be alone.