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August 19: Jasper, Soft

Happy Thursday! I’m finally getting around to posting some new writing, which I’d planned to do for quite some time. The best laid plans...

Canon-divergent, ~900 words

This was requested by @justbecauseyoubelievesomething for my 600 Followers Celebration. I’m still technically accepting prompts from that, because eh why not. There is a queue. More info on the tag #yay600.

Tag list: @ciewill @dealingdreams @shadowheron2013 @rosethevoid @wonderland-promises @hanav @rycewritestrash @thelittlefanpire @musicnote902 @stonybnatural @earthgay2052 , @bellarkehastakenovermylife , @bellarkewriting, @justbecauseyoubelievesomething @hopskipaway, @alyssawritesss @she-who-the-river-could-not-hold @jasprjordamn.

*

Clarke learns how to knit first, then teaches Jasper, sitting side-by-side with him on his bed. He's still using one of the emergency blankets from the Dropship as his bedspread. The orange color looks shocking and out of place in his little cabin, with its view of dense evergreens dripping with cold late-fall rain beyond the window, and the wood-smell and damp cold seeping up through the floor from the earth.

Yet all of their lives, now, are a strange combination of the present and the past, the earth and the old ship, the ground and the sky. They sit outside by the fire, breathing the clear air from the trees, drinking out of tin cups forged in space. They still use their old tents, sometimes, for travel, or as tarps to cover their most vulnerable possessions from the rain. They moved the water collector that Wells fashioned and the radio systems that Monty and Raven built with them to their new home, and their bags are the makeshift backpacks they formed from old seatbelts and scraps of canvas when they first came down. In the cabins, and outside around the fire pit and between their new-formed streets, are the old, plastic bucket seats they scavenged from the ship. Plastic and metal and wood and earth and tin and flowers. All of it comes from the same place, in the end—some of it just took a detour up into the sky and back.

"Just like we're all Grounders, in a way," Clarke says, as she loops a string of yarn around itself and holds it out to him to see. "We just spent a few generations in space."

"Sounds like Bellamy's line," Jasper answers. He still thinks Clarke will say whatever suits her in the moment, whatever she thinks is most convincing to the person she's speaking to. This isn't distrust but just the clear-eyed view he's trying to take now. He doesn't want to judge but only to see.

"Well maybe he was right." She shrugs. "Back then, we both wanted to win a war, in our own way."

Each of them saying the same thing, in their own way. Each of them claiming that they were better than their enemies. Jasper felt it in him, too, a self-righteousness beneath the fear.

Clarke goes off on diplomatic missions, trading missions now, sometimes is gone for so long that Jasper sets himself to wondering if she'll ever return. She comes back with collections of clay bowls or sets of bows and arrows better than even Bellamy can make, and Jasper wonders what their little village could possibly have to trade for all this treasure. But he doesn't ask. She brings new skills, too, like this one that he's trying to master with his clumsy hands.

“You'll get the hang of it," she says. And then, "Sometimes it feels nice to create something."

He might answer, Instead of destroy, if he were trying to be mean. But caustic answers on his tongue are part of the past he's trying to throw away—the difficulty of clean breaks aside. So he says, "You're a doctor, though. Fixing people's gotta feel pretty good, too, doesn't it?"

Clarke half-smiles, but doesn't look up. "Feels pretty good," she echoes quietly, as a scattering of rain falls outside, perhaps from the sky or perhaps from the leaves of the trees, belated in a strong wind. She turns the needles around and shows him a new row.

For a while, he's truly awful, and all of his stitches look like the gaping holes of fishing nets, like he's heard they use out by the sea. And then abruptly, his fingers understand exactly what to do. The next row is nearly perfect: a line of even stitches that look just like Clarke's, something that resembles fabric, instead of ill-formed knots.

He starts again, and as the fall fades into winter and the nights grow long and cold, he knits himself a new blanket for his bed. The yarn is undyed and still rough, an off-white color like several-day-old snow. Though he's busy with other preparations for the season—collecting rations, fortifying the cabins, chopping extra wood—still he devotes all of his spare hours to the task, out of some deeply held belief that what he will produce in the end will be something undeniably good.

The blanket isn't finished by the first snow or by the second. In the thaw between the second and third, he washes it in the river, and dries it on a rock beneath a sharp, pale winter sun. Then he brings it back to his cabin. The yarn has softened now, feels good against his fingertips and beneath his palms.

He still keeps the old Dropship blanket, too—nothing wrong with some reminders of who he was or where he's been. But the new blanket goes on top. It fits with the cabin well: all of these things he's made with his two hands. That’s the best satisfaction he knows in this life, in the end. When the next snow comes and the temperature drops, he hides under the blanket and listens to the snowflakes hit the window behind his head, a frantic flurry of them, and wraps the blanket tighter around himself, until he goes back to sleep, feeling himself at last safe, and soft, and warm.

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