Copyrighted Kristen Banet All rights reserved.
Reupload from original Facebook post
Spoilers warnings and such. Also, unedited, so very first draft state. Enjoy! (And blame this dark POV on Leigh. Absolutely her idea and I couldn’t pass it up)
Jasper didn’t know what to do with himself. She was here. Sawyer Matthews was in his space for the first time in years. He paced around his room as that thought bombarded his mind. It refused to leave him alone. For the first time since he was eighteen, he knew he could walk out of the room and go see her.
And yet, while it was so much like his life growing up in the orphanage, nothing was the same. He didn’t think he’d changed too much and Zander didn’t know the meaning of the word, but Sawyer
?She was not the girl he’d grown up with. Not in the slightest. Colder. Harder. Her body a testament to violence he didn’t know the source of. She’d always been rough and tumble. He figured nothing would change that aggressive side of her nature, but never had he considered that she would come out looking and feeling like she did.
She used to smile without sarcasm and a bite. Now? He had yet to see her truly happy. Something shadowed over her face, in her dark eyes.
“Jasper?”
He stopped pacing, frowning as Zander walked into his room. “What’s up?”
“Just wanted to check on you. You’ve been pretty quiet today.”
“A lot on my mind,” he answered. He knew that Zander knew. This was something they had talked about already. While Zander could just keep putting one foot in front of the other, Jasper felt stuck. Conflicted. Tied in knots. His best friend would smash through her walls at every opportunity but Jasper was scared about what they would find on the other side.
And she wasn’t the girl they grew up with anymore. Did they still fit together like that?
“Want to play some COD?” Zander stood expectantly in his doorway and Jasper groaned, shaking his head in response.
“No. I think I’m going to pass out. It’s late anyways.” He checked his phone and nearly cursed. It was nearly midnight. Everyone should be asleep at this point. They had early morning work outs. Very early. He was going to need to get up in less than four hours. “You should too.”
“I’m not tired. I was hoping, since you were still awake, we could just pull an all nighter.”
“That’s a terrible idea. Go get some sleep, or try to, Zander.”
It took another minute for Zander to give up and leave him alone. Jasper locked his door and stripped down, slipping into bed, feeling too awake. It took another hour for him to even convince himself to close his eyes. As a last resort, he pulled on his magic to put himself to sleep. The unnatural sleep of dream walking. As long as he didn’t focus on anyone, he would be able to sleep with ease.
And it nearly worked. He kept his magic close, not letting his mind wandering so he didn’t intrude on anyone. He just needed to let his body rest, even when his mind didn’t want to.
Then a cold took over his own dream scape. A cold he knew and yet, was unfamiliar with since he didn’t experience it very often. Just flashes of it. It was the feeling of Sawyer’s magic.
Jasper didn’t understand why he was feeling it for a moment until images began to play his mind that left him disturbed.
Fists and blood. Sawyer on the ground. Axel hitting her. Darkness. So much darkness.
And what she was saying? The flashes he was getting of whatever nightmare she was having?
Stop. Please. I did want you wanted. Please, don’t do this to me.
Small bits of her begging for mercy. Begging for the pain to stop. Pain he could practically feel in bursts as his magic picked up the nightmare from hers. She was leaking her pain and fear so hard that he couldn’t pull away from it, not magically.
He knew it was slowly becoming his own nightmare. She was so strong and her mind was in such a place that he wouldn’t be able to get out if he didn’t do it immediately.
Jasper couldn’t handle it and he also couldn’t go into her mind and stop it. He wouldn’t violate her privacy like that.
Instead, he forced himself awake, gasping for air as he scrambled out of his bed. He barely was able to stand as his stomach turned. He stumbled out of his bedroom and into his shared bathroom with Zander. He gagged over the toilet, but nothing came up.
It felt like it would never end, but it did, sooner than he expected. The pain faded to a bad memory, just another nightmare. The sound of her voice echoed in his head softer and softer.
Now, as he looked at himself in the mirror, he had a feeling he knew what haunted her.
He splashed water on his face. Nightmares weren’t normally true. Most of the time they were a combination of things in the subconscious that haunted the person, all combined into one truly terrible visage.
That was the only way he could explain the fact that he’d caught that it was Axel’s fist hitting her over and over.