[...] 𝐇𝐎𝐖 𝐓𝐑𝐔𝐄 𝐓𝐇𝐀𝐓 𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐒𝐄 𝐕𝐈𝐎𝐋𝐄𝐍𝐓 𝐃𝐄𝐋𝐈𝐆𝐇𝐓𝐒 𝐇𝐀𝐕𝐄 𝐕𝐈𝐎𝐋𝐄𝐍𝐓 𝐄𝐍𝐃𝐒. somewhere in jasper’s unbeating heart, he must have known it would end this way eventually, rue flavored blood smeared across glacial skin and another body at his feet, though he had sworn himself to abstinence the moment he first smelled this human in particular. he dutifully stayed upwind of the scent and managed to behave himself through two blissful weeks of watching and marveling as this person went about his dusks and nights, true to his word of only watching. a fascinating, happy human this boy was ! and the friends that came along with him, the places he went ! such a needed injection of sunshine into an otherwise dull and dim colored life.
for all his idolizing and fawning over this silly slice of life venture, he had been mistaken to hold himself to such a lofty standard. not practiced enough, not human enough to follow the man for simple entertainment as he once did in another life. jasper knew this from trial and error, and yet, he could scarcely help himself when the opportunity to indulge his former humanity had come calling. curiosity and delight had begotten the silent hunt, but hunger had been too close behind, no matter how recently he had fed. a bottomless pit, jasper had become in every way now, at all times yearning and thirsting.
this bad caricature of humanity he so often plays at had been nothing next to the powerful demands of the predator he truly is, and so, he struck as soon as the opportunity presented itself. the boy had been a fighter when his life was on the line , but round for round, the supernatural will win out against the beautiful delicacy and fragility of humans each and every time.
but even a monster is occasionally moved by that loveliness, and in what is left of who he had once been, jasper feels the enormity of the loss of what he had, in his own way, considered a friend. he had grown so fond of his watching excursions, of the jovial life this human had seemed to live, and it is for this reason that the story doesn’t end with the body getting rolled into the river, but begins anew with jasper’s least practical and most ludicrous decision, thus far.
he kneels now in the leaves and bracken underfoot, watching the last hurrah of the human’s pulse beneath the bloodied and tattooed skin of his neck. if he thinks too carefully about his impulses now, he won’t go through with it, but he doesn’t want to be alone again, and so he does very little thinking at all. instead, he moves quickly now, brings his own wrist up to allow elongated canines to pierce the ivory flesh there and draw to the surface a flow of ichor and abomination that he presses to the stranger’s slack mouth. it doesn’t end like this.