I wrote some of this a long time ago and some it just recently and it kind of just melded together accidentally…anyway, I couldn’t really decide if I wanted to post it or not, but here we are, I guess.

Jasper’s my favorite character so this has a lot of thought behind it. :-)

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One of the many things you lose when you’re bitten is the ability to dream. Not just in your sleep, either. As the blood leaves your body, so does the fire of hope that once fueled the dreams you cherished in your former life.

No longer will the dreams of your boyhood contort and writhe within you, screaming to be let loose on the world. They are silenced forever as those teeth sink deeply into your soft flesh and they gush out from you, red and dark with disappointment.

I never thought to regret the loss of dreaming until I met Alice. I never recognized the feeling of regret until I met Alice. I never remembered what it was to love until I met Alice.

Alice, of course, doesn’t have to dream of a future. She already knows it and dances confidently in and out of time, smiling with the secrets she knows about what was to come. I was always content to just let her have her way and rarely gave a thought about the future. I wrapped myself in her happiness and got lost in the feeling.

I spent years this way, just feeling, never dreaming. What could a vampire have to dream about after all? I didn’t question my existence like Rosalie and I didn’t wish to be a parent like Esme, so I couldn’t think of anything I would want to dream about. I had everything I needed in Alice.

Although many things could be pinpointed as a catalyst to the change I felt inside me, I like to credit Bella. She doesn’t know and I won’t tell her until after Edward has changed her. I don’t know if she would understand yet. The idea of infinity is hard to grasp when you still have a heart beating fiercely in your chest. When it sits cold and still in her breast, the slow dawning of the true meaning of infinity will take its place in her brain and never leave her.

In the days after Edward left Forks, I remember passing close to Bella’s house right before the rest of the family left. Edward has petulantly demanded we stay away from her, but I knew he hadn’t meant it. He was sick with fear and grief days before he even told her he was going. I tried to reason with him. I had experienced Bella’s pain at his departure from her for just a few days and that was almost more than I could mitigate with my own power. I couldn’t even imagine what his leaving her for what he promised to be forever would do to her frail frame of emotions.

After that day, I didn’t need to imagine. The intonation of the pain was different from what I thought it would be, but that only made it harder to share. Her palette of feelings was quiet the day I stood on the rim of the woods, looking to her house. I had expected some violent surge of animalistic aching when I came near her, but instead I found a silence that was almost too hard to even identify as a feeling.

I went back to Alice shortly after that and I didn’t need to tell her what I had felt. She knew, she always did. She took my hand sadly, but didn’t say anything. Instead, she led me away from the house and our life in Forks. We arrived in Denali hours later.

Months passed. The entire family was on edge and I could do nothing to ease their tension. Every time Esme heard a phone ring she would jump up in hopes of hearing Edward’s voice telling her he was sorry, but the call never came.

I remember being baffled by his behavior then. I couldn’t figure out why he would sacrifice his own happiness, the only true, pure happiness he had ever felt, I was sure, for a human. No matter how unique Bella was, she was still only mortal and Edward must have known that that would be an issue somewhere down the road.

The explanation came for me much later…when Alice took Bella to Volterra. As soon as the decision was made to buy the plane tickets, Alice had called me. I was staggered by her willingness to head straight into the heart of corruption but she assuaged my worry by telling me her eye would constantly be on the future.

When they returned from Volterra, Edward was changed. His emotions, although drawn from the same dark place, were somehow lighter and leagues away from the pain he had emanated the day he left us all.

That night as Alice and I were still basking the glow of being reunited, I asked her what she thought had changed in him. It surprised me that she didn’t have her customary ready answer. For once, it seemed I had caught her off guard.

“He’s finally learned to look at the world instead of just listen to it probably,” she answered after a moment and smiled softly at me. I fell silent, turning her words over and over in my mind for the next few days.

Edward learning to look at the world, in Alice’s eyes, had opened up venues that most vampires never get to take. I know that I will never even begin to comprehend most of the paths Edward refused, but I did finally understand the one he had chosen.

He had chosen to live the dream that he had cherished ever since that first time Bella had told him she wasn’t afraid of him. I always thought that dreams were something a vampire could never have, but Bella showed us all that it was possible by allowing Edward to fully realize his and one day I would thank her for that.

Now, I could finally allow myself the dreams that been lying inside of me for so long, undisturbed and unwanted. I let myself imagine the possibilities and things that I had yet to discover and in dreaming I found that I came to love Alice all the more. She was the one who took my realization one step further by telling me I had never stopped dreaming. My dreams had been there the whole time; they had not been drained of me all those years ago when I was bitten. I had simply labeled them as wants instead of dreams this whole time, but that had never mattered to Alice. Wants. Needs. Dreams. She fulfilled them for me all the same.

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