if you must mourn, don't do it alone (Jactavia)

Part 1, Chapter 3

Jasper woke before Octavia, strange observation number one. Number two was that she was still naked in bed. The reminder that he had sex wasn't forgotten, because Jasper was pretty sure he even dreamed about it, but it was that Octavia hadn't bothered to put anything back on. She looked so different, devoid of all of her heavy leather. She didn't even have any weapons on her; the nearest was just a hairsbreadth away from her finger tips.

And something in Jasper warmed. He wasn't sure of much of anything but he knew that he liked this. He wanted more of this...whatever this was.

He remembered that they'd come across coconut trees yesterday, but had passed on trying to climb to get fruit since it seemed a storm was coming in. He'd heard from books that coconuts had sweet milk inside of it and even sweeter meat. He grabbed one of Octavia's many knives from her pile on the floor and went out to find the tree.

It wasn't hard to find; the Island itself had been completely combed by them at this point. It did take some exertion to get up the tree though, the knife clenched between his teeth and a pair of boxers the only thing keeping his skin away from the pointy bark. But when he did, the view was great.

He experimentally tried hacking the knife across a stem to get the nearest coconut down. It hardly did anything, other than slipped and nicked across his palm. Jasper hissed, wincing, using his mouth to suck on the coppery liquid and using the thumb of his other hand to put pressure on it.

Damn, that really hurt.

Something dawned on him as he sat there in his tree, the knife dug into the tree. This would be a perfect time to die. Or, it should have been. At the start of all this, when he was so actively looking for 'the right time', this would have been it. He'd been fed, he had a place to sleep that wasn't the ground, and he'd just had sex. If the world was going to end he might as well go while he was ahead, eh?

And there were so many ways he could do it now; stab himself, walk into that water and let himself bleed out and breath in the salty water, fall from this tree...and so many of them would have worked if it weren't for something stronger than anything else he'd felt before holding him back.

Contentedness.

But then he had to wonder, is this as good as it's ever going to get? What if that night with Octavia and everything leading up to it was the highest point he had, and everything else would be shit? What if there was nothing good after today? What if offing himself now would really be the best choice?

He realized he was still nursing his wound, which more clearly than anything else, told him quite a lot. Mostly that maybe he wasn't so sure about dying anymore because-

"Jasper? Jasper!" Octavia's frantic voice nearly made him lose his balance, "Oh thank god there you are!" She seemed completely unhinged, and she wiped tears away from her eyes with the back of her hand.

"O, hey, I'm just-,"

"No, you need to listen to me! I know what you're going to do and I will not let you die, Jasper Jordan!"

Her words sorta took the wind right from him.

"What?"

"The knife, it's gone. And don't tell me that's what you've been waiting for this entire time but you can't. You can't and I'm not going to let you." She said firmly, shaking her head, her whole body shaking.

A whole slew of emotions slammed into Jasper all at once. There was shock that she had been able to guess what he might have done, had all of the things that had happened hadn't. He felt anger for her thinking that's what he was going to do- even if it would have been, weeks ago. He felt angry at himself for getting angry over this. He felt indignation. He felt betrayed, cheated, taunted. He felt it all.