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Chapter Text

Jasper accepted years ago that happiness wasn’t for him. He had a role to fill and money to make. He put his wants aside. He married a woman he didn’t care about. He treated her kindly. But that only goes so far in a marriage that exchanges money for power.

He was faithful to her until the end, mostly. He slipped one night when he was young. Though the sex was nice, it wasn’t about that. He said goodbye to the life he could have had. A night with a woman who used her mind to think rather than flutter over fashion trends. She was the kind of woman he would have spent his life with, if he had options.

If he had options, he would have been a farmer.

But he didn’t have options. He was to be the one to return them to their former glory, to who they were generations ago, before time and bad decisions lost their financial comfort and the respect their name carried with it.

He tried to be happy. He started a garden at the house. But his wife pulled him away from it. Not to spend time with her, no. She didn’t love him any more than he loved her. She did not hide it as well. She pushed him to spend more hours at work, to earn more money.

The one bright spot had brown curls and wide green eyes. Fay. His daughter taking after her father’s intelligence and her mother’s pragmaticism.

Jasper lived on that one bright spot in his life for the first five years of her life.

Then he dies.

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Dying is painful. But death, death is easy.

It’s life that’s hard.

Death eases everything.

It relieves the weight on his shoulders. First that from his wife, to keep her in the comforts and affluence she knew growing up and was promised would come with their marriage replaced with the lifting knowledge they could have been happy without the material pursuits she pressured him into. Then that from his mother, the duty he had to his family; but it wasn’t his fault they fell and it wasn’t his duty to be why they rose again. And finally, the weight he put on himself. The ingrained belief that to make others happy he had to be miserable.

The weights vanish in death and for the first time ever, he feels peace.

Elysium is ethereal and tranquil. It is the peace and the calm he never had. It is not exuberance it is no more wanting. He can rest unburdened and watch the shifting sky as wishes float between the verdant clouds. He can curl his fingers around cerulean grass as he lays back and listens to the lullaby of the wind. It is timeless comfort he can bask in forever.

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Then he lives.

Chapter Text

His body does not come back to him slowly. It comes back to him all at once.

Every joint stiff. Every muscle atrophied. The light too bright. The smells too strong. The sounds to sharp. The taste of death and chemicals pungent on his tongue.

A gleeful face with eyes hidden behind goggles hangs over him. Hands, her hands grip his arm and squeeze. She lets out a squeal of excitement.

Everything that was right is wrong. No forgotten lullaby whistling through the wind. No warmth permeating to the center of his being. Each ragged breath scratches at his lungs. The tranquility, the peace is gone.

There is a hole inside where they sat and she smiles down at him.

Why is she happy? Did she do this? Is she why he is here and in pain? Is this what she wanted? Why? What did he ever do to her?

She cups his cheek with her hand, a gesture that could be tender if he knew who she was, if he wasn’t in pain, if she isn’t the one who stole away his reprieve. “My angel.” The stranger whispers full of longing.

He opens his mouth to ask, “Why? What have you done? Why did you bring me here? Why do you smile at me like I’m an old friend when I don’t know you?” but all that comes is a loud breath that drags daggers up his throat.

“I couldn’t fix everything, Jasper. You’re back now. That’s what matters. ” She lets out a girlish giggle and pats his head. Tinny soft music starts playing somewhere close. “You won’t have a voice, but you can play the radio.”

Jasper stares at her wide eyed. How does she know who he is? Why is she so happy? He wants to go back. Let him go back!

She busies herself removing wire by painful wire from where they are embedded under his skin. Each reminding him of what he had and lost. What he lost because of her. This crazy woman who is humming along to the song he can’t help but play.

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“My angel.” She keeps calling him that. This woman he does not know keeps talking to him like he’s her salvation.

She dragged him away from his.

She drags him around town, dressing him up, going on a shallow mockery of dates, talking and talking and talking to him like this is something he wants, like this is normal.

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He doesn’t sleep.

He didn’t in Elysium either. He didn’t need to there. He always had a tranquil energy that let him just be.

Now it’s lethargy with no relief. Endless excruciating silence.

Unless she, Annabel, left him playing music.

He can change it some.

He learns to change it more.

Then he can ask by manipulating old songs.

It takes time, but eventually she hears. “The place the when your sorrows end. Why’d you bring me here? Why’d you bring me here again?”

Her face falls.

She grabs an axe.

He wakes up lying on soft sapphire grass and sobs with shaking relief he’s returned to peace but marred with the ghosts of pain under his skin. He didn’t feel this last time he died. Not in Elysium.

Chapter Text

His stay lasts longer this time. It isn’t the same peace. Not with the ghosts of pain lingering under his skin. Dead and haunted.

He isn’t sure if he wants to laugh or cry when he thinks about it.

It’s longer. But it doesn’t last.

Once again, he’s dragged back to a familiar lab, her lab, and a man with her same manic smile standing over him.

The smile switches to a calm scowl. The man removes the wires clinically. Annabel was slower about it, in her own way being tender. The man helps Jasper to a chair and sits across from him. He smiles like a businessman, “Jasper, you’re going to get me the love of my life back.”

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Jasper opens his mouth and a creaking croak leaves his lips. He still can’t speak.

The man’s smile twitches in amusement. “Behave for me, and you’ll get your daughter back.”

The man is Edgar, Jasper learns. He’s Annabel’s son and received his mother’s mania. Jasper’s daughter, Fay, who he last saw when she was three, dated Edgar briefly. Then she left him because he wasn’t there for her like he should have been.

Jasper was never the perfect husband, but he tried to be what his wife needed. He tried until he couldn’t. The same could not be said for her. The same could be said for his daughter. But there is only so much giving of yourself before it is time to leave, at least when there isn’t a prearranged engagement your family’s name is relying on.

Edgar wasn’t there for Fay.

And now, he’s using Jasper to make money in the way that Jasper’s wife always wanted him to. Edgar plays the beneficent innovator, bringing back people’s loved ones (for a modest price). The people of New Albion love him. They praise him for it. Jasper is his showpiece.

The silent showpiece who knows what fraction of a life Edgar is condemning people of the town to. The same object hiring people to ruin the man who “stole his girl.” Through only knowing Edgar, Jasper has no doubts Silof ‘stole’ Fay by treating her well.

But Edgar doesn’t show that side of himself to the customers. To them, he’s the kind inventor who found a way to bring back their loved ones.

Jasper sees it. He can’t say it. He still only has snatches of songs to sing.

He watches a man’s life be ruined.

He watches Edgar prepare to manipulate Fay back to him.

He watches his daughter light up at seeing her father for the first time in over a decade. It hurts to hug her. His joints still press on his nerves as they click into position. He can’t hug her properly, no part of him bends enough for that.

She talks to Jasper as often as she can.

But Edgar gets jealous and makes more and more excuses to drag her away.

Never needing to eat or sleep or move, sometimes months go by and the only thing Jasper does is collect dust.

Moving is too painful. It’s not worth it unless his daughter he never got to know is there.

Years pass.

Things do not get better.

Things only change.

Chapter Text

Jasper is running for mayor.

Like all things in his life and death, this was not a choice he made for himself. It’s something that wields him and affects everyone in his home.

The dead outnumber the living. It scares him. People buy dolls and abandon them when they grow bored with them.

Dolls do not speak.

They can’t.

Jasper wants to scream.

He’s the only one who can make a noise that isn’t breath, but that…isn’t speech. Its piecemeal music drowned out by the silent weeping of children who’ve never known comfort.

His constituents gathered by his grandson.

All to spite his father.

Running a campaign for Jasper, the voiceless thing that is meant to be the voice for the people.

It is a joke to the boy and Jasper is the punchline, not a participant.

But when did he ever get to choose?

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He cannot sleep. He cannot dream.

Music. A lullaby of what he’s lost, what he longs to return to, what broken things never should have been touched let alone harmed.

He can sing to the broken. Tell them of beautiful things. Let them know they will not forever feel lost and broken, that there is contentment, somewhere, for them.

Byron riles up the crowd, promising to uplift the downtrodden.

Jasper steps up with fragments of song, fragments of hope, fragments of Elysium, fragments of the pain of life.

And he sings.

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Snatches of a dream.

Images of the never been.

He longs for blue grass and green skies.

The forgotten.

The pieces of rare kindness.

He wants the dirt soft as a pillow.

It is so far away.

Why can’t he return?

Why is it only the looming and ever-present pain of life?

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The other dolls echo his song across New Albion.

It struck a broken heart.

A broken heart that thought itself too shattered to heal. Maybe it never thought it. Maybe she thought the only release was death.

Others followed.

The dolls are blamed.

It starts as words. It ends in riots.

In flame, Jasper finds his return.

Chapter Text

Byron dragged him back. He wouldn’t let something as meaningless as death separate him from his angel. He was a McAlister after all.

No one felt like breaking the law to bring him back though.

On rare days, Jasper thinks Byron got the better hand. He got a complete ending while Jasper is stuck in a cycle begging chance to change things enough for him to stay in the steadily more painful Elysium he still finds peace in.

Priscilla shuffles the cards again.

His joints, stiff, slow, and pained, cannot handle the task.

Tic tic tic.

Cycling through cards.

Hiding in the house that was never warm to them without each other’s presence.

They talk.

His words creak and crack, but he can manage that now.

Priscilla should move on without him.

Without Byron, she might have a chance at joy in life.

It’s too late for him.

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She calls the police.

She doesn’t leave.

Why doesn’t she leave?

She has a chance at something other than the mess her parents made.

Why doesn’t she leave?

She’s so young.

Why is she giving up her life for a man who’s been a ghost?

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He begs her to leave.

That’s not what he meant by sacrifice.

Not them both.

There’s nothing to gain from that.

That’s not a sacrifice.

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In the afterlife, he wakes with pain in his heart. Not from the bullet, not only. The sky no longer a vibrant green, but the lasting gray of winter. The grass no longer a bright blue, but the color of polluted water.

Jasper is alone here and he weeps.

He never sees anyone else ever again.