The scent comes before the sound. Sugar, iron, adrenaline—every heartbeat in this room running too fast, too warm. The cafeteria feels like a battlefield, all noise and movement and shallow breathing.

He’s been through wars that were quieter.

He keeps still. Doesn’t look. Doesn’t breathe more than he has to. His eyes are black; his throat feels like sandpaper. Alice sits across from him, smiling for the world, pretending not to notice the tremor in his hand or the way he grips the tray like it’s a lifeline.

She calls it control. He knows better. It’s survival.

Maria’s ghost still walks the edges of his mind. Smoke. Blood. The sound of someone calling his name right before the silence. The one he couldn’t save. The one Maria made him end.

The Cullens gave him peace—or something that passes for it. Rules. Restraint. A place to stand still long enough to forget the desert. Alice gave him a future to memorize. But love built on prediction isn’t the same as love built on choice. And he’s starting to feel the difference.

Then the door opens.

The air shifts. The scent that hits him isn’t wrong—it’s familiar. Old. It cuts through the noise and straight into him, clean as a bullet. For a moment he’s nowhere near this century.

The desert folds open behind his eyes. Maria’s camp burning. Tents collapsing under red sky. Her voice curling through the smoke like a promise: “You were born for this, Jasper.”

And he was. For a while. He killed because she asked, because it was simple, because that’s what survival looked like. Every heartbeat he stopped took a little more out of him until there wasn’t anything left to feel.

When he finally left, he didn’t run. He just walked. The screaming stayed behind him, but it never really stopped.

The room snaps back into focus. Light too bright. Air too clean. His hands shake once, then go still again.

He looks up.

And there she is.

Not Maria. Not the ghost. But the rhythm of her emotions hits the same chord—the same calm pulse he remembers from another life. Human, alive, steady. Something in him recognizes her before his mind can catch up.

Alice says something. Edward too. He doesn’t hear it. The room fades down to silence, and for the first time in a century, something inside him shifts.

He doesn’t know what she is. He just knows the world feels different now—lighter, louder, alive.

This—whatever it is—will change him. Maybe it saves him. Maybe it breaks him.

For once, he doesn’t care which.