#but i'm really excited to get to eclipse for reasons that remain unspoiled

[goldeneyedgirl]

Ficmas24 Day 8: Damaged Alice

Good evening everyone! Definitely lost track of time and this was later than I was going to upload but alas, here we are.

Today's is Damaged Alice. Fun fact with this: I cannot, for the life of me, find the original post I made for this fic. I have trawled my blog, searched it, manually gone through all my postings and I cannot find it. So I can't even reupload what I've already posted because I don't know what I've posted.

So I've gone in blind. This is for the New Moon-era of the fic, just kind of riffing on both sides. I had a very clear view of Alice finding herself and her history which is a very liberal and broad use of mental healthcare from the 20s, because Meyer is a twit who did zero research. We're going with the idea that Alice's doctors were racing the Italians towards new, innovative treatments for mental health and were testing their theories out on wards of the state.

There's also a lot of little details about Jasper and Alice's relationship here which I am obsessed with and are pretty much the entire reason I started this 'verse. It's the little things, I swear.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it, and I will be catching up on my inbox tomorrow because I need 12 hours of uninterrupted sleep tonight or I might cry (again.) Ahh, the holiday season <3

---

Ithaca is quiet. That’s the best way he can describe it.

Moving is always difficult for Alice; they all blame her visions, but she thrives in routine. He always jokes that it’s not his level of control that keeps him from slipping, it’s that he hates making her move before it’s time. As Esme and Edward always remind the others, Alice needs the security and certainty of her five years in each home.

So the Cullen departure from Forks on Edward’s demand should have been disastrous. Rose and Emmett are leaving for Europe directly, which has been planned for months. Esme already has a house waiting in Ithaca that she’s been looking forward to restoring, so it seems like the best choice - right across the country with new names and stories. They can be there in a day.

Alice is stressed, but not in a bad way. She complains to Edward, that it’s not fair, and that Bella’s going to suffer. That Victoria’s still out there and this isn’t the way to deal with it. He’s hurting Bella worse doing this.

(And he can feel the guilt leaking out of her, that if things were different, Bella wouldn’t have gotten hurt. She still won’t tell him what she saw that night, before it all went sour, but Bella has a dozen stitches up her arm and a wicked bruise across her chest and now they have to leave her behind.)

Edward is grieving and despite an infinite well of affection and patience for Alice, the spike of rage when Alice tells him that he’s making things worse for Bella is enough that Jasper thinks that Edward might slap her and ends the conversation with a look.

“You have to pack, love,” he reminds her and Alice screws up her face and stomps off to her room. Edward grunts his thanks that Jasper has ended the conversation and disappears into the bowels of the house to brood.

Jasper has no illusions about his youngest brother; they will be returning to Forks. It really just depends on how long Edward can play martyr (and if it’s long enough that Bella outgrows him) or how long Victoria hides in the shadows. It’s really easier just to agree and get on with Edward’s dramatic pantomime of star-crossed lovers rather than argue with him.

Alice paces a lot, in-between packing. She hates being micromanaged, so he casually packs his things at the same time, tossing in the items that she almost always forgets but needs. Not to mention the things that she’s going to want when the stress of everything fades, and she can think clearly - there have been a few forgotten phones and more than a few forgotten laptops over the years. And Esme’s practiced at making sure certain things - particular blankets, clothing items, furniture, books - are present at every single house to prevent disaster for all of them, but especially for Alice.

(It’s 1976, and Alice is having a very, very bad day. It’s the worst one he’s ever had to handle on his own. She’s staring unseeing at the corner, trembling. She hasn’t responded to him in any way - not when he called her name, touched her hand, used his gift. Her emotions are churning to the point that he cannot separate them enough to make a difference. And there’s a blanket, an ocean blue one that Esme found at some street vendor in New Hampshire, that helps. They’ve dragged it from place to place for years, Esme carefully re-stitching the fraying edges, adding more panels to the bottom half for reinforcement. But he cannot find it and he has a sinking feeling that it has been left in Montana, tossed carelessly over a chair in his study. Everyone is away and he’s been trusted with Alice alone for the first time, he needs to fix this.)

So, somehow they manage to make it to Ithaca. Somehow, Alice stays calm - she spends the drive in the passenger seat, focused on crocheting a fall poncho that he knows is a way for her to keep her hands busy.

“You wanna talk?” He asks gently.

She shakes her head. “Uh-uh.”

He waits for the breakdown. For the panic attack, and the desperate need to cling to him for a day or two. For blank eyes and days of no words. Especially when they get to Ithaca, and the house is different. It’s a new acquisition, there’s no furniture installed yet.

But nothing.

So he shouldn’t be that shocked when, after three weeks of haunting the mostly-empty house (it’s very, very strange to be alone with Esme and Carlisle. Edward has been a fixture for so long, it’s downright bizarre for there to be only four of them), Alice takes off. There’s a sticky-note on his computer screen that he finds when he gets back from classes.

Going to Mississippi to find myself. Will be back soon. Will be careful. Love you.

(The only upside is that he gets to freak out and calm down before Esme and Carlisle get home, are informed, and he has to talk them out of a panic. All three of them panicking about Alice’s whereabouts at the same time would not have been helpful.)

// She finds herself in an abandoned hospital slated for demolition within months. There’s not much left of it - there was a fire in the 60s that wiped out the main building. Since then, it’s been left to rot, and there’s a lot of legal and media attention on the hundreds of unnamed bodies buried on its grounds.

It doesn’t feel like a place that she wants to be. Esme and Carlisle are always very clear that if she’s uncomfortable, she needs to leave. If she forces herself to stay somewhere, she’ll get upset.

(‘Upset’ is a euphemism for a lot of things. It can mean crying, it can mean biting, it can mean that she’s not going to talk for the rest of the day. Carlisle just tells her that she’s a very sensitive girl, and it’s okay. She’s doing so much better than when she first joined them, and that he’s proud of her. But sometimes it’s hard to believe that when the high school teachers and students are calling her names behind her back, telling her that she’s a burden to the Cullens. So she tries really hard not to get upset.)

Jasper is definitely upset that she went alone. It’s the first time she’s gone alone anywhere. Well, that’s not true. Jasper used to let her go places - once, he pretended they were going to Seattle for a weekend when he let her fly to New York City alone to buy a dress. He said that she could do it by herself and that it was important that she tried, in case he wasn’t around.

(She got upset at that because, frankly, the idea of Jasper not being around is the worst thought ever. He’s been around since she opened her eyes, even if it was just as pictures in her head. The moon might as well fall out of the sky if anything takes Jasper away from her.)

But this is the first time it wasn’t planned out, the first time he hasn’t known exactly where she was going, the first time she hadn’t gone over it with him and her visions to make sure it went smoothly.

It’s definitely the first time she’s been on her own for more than a day in a very long time. Sometimes she thinks that the Cullens forget that she was alone until she found them, and she was okay then.

(She wishes Jasper was here right now.)

The files she would have found at the University Hospital Library were frustratingly incomplete, but the librarian she would have asked would have told her that they ran out of funding to finish digitalizing them, and that a lot of stuff in storage from the old asylum had never even been moved - too expensive.

(And then she would have gotten caught as not being a student of the university, and there would have been a fuss because she might have remembered to bring almost everything she needed but she definitely only has her Forks High student I.D. and a Washington state driver’s license that says she’s under eighteen. It was better just to do that through very monotonous, careful visions and skip the in-person visit.)

There’s an old statue in the middle of the long grass behind a cracked and forgotten fountain, and she’s got an uncomfortable feeling that she’s seen it before, when it was taken care of. Which makes sense. She knows this is where she was before she was changed. She’s even got a short list from the internet of eight different girls that she might have been.

It takes her over an hour to navigate the hospital, because it is upsetting her. It’s dark instead, and everything is broken and rotten and forgotten. It makes her chest feel tight, and like there’s something in the dark she really, really doesn’t want to find.

(There is, but she also has to find it. James is dead and gone, and anything else in the dark she can fight herself. Plus she knows that Esme put a GPS tracker inside her necklace, and Jasper tracks her phone. She can’t get lost again, they made sure of it.)

It’s a room in the basement where she finds what she’s looking for. There’s a good inch of murky, standing water, and for a moment, she’s worried that anything she’s looking for will be destroyed. But maybe she’s lucky.

(‘B’ is at the top of the alphabet, so it s in the top drawer, where the water can’t get to. ‘Mary-Alice Brandon’ is the fourth name on her list, and the second youngest.)

The filing cabinet is rotten, and most of the files are moldy and disintegrating. Only a few of the surviving files are still legible. But she finds it in the end. It is thick and worn, but she takes it up the old stairs to the light, and spreads the pages out.

She is a child in the first photo, a girl with long black braids and wide eyes. She looks haunted and miserable, and is clutching a doll with a death-grip. Little Mary-Alice is so very young. Too young.

There are four more photographs – one of her nude as a child, bruises blooming all over her legs and torso. Then one of her older, clad in a thin hospital gown, with the most frightened eyes Alice has ever seen. Another, when she is closer to when she was changed; her hair is only a little shorter, and the way she looks at the camera is strange and not right.

The final one makes her sick. It makes her stomach twist and she doesn’t want to look at it. But she has to. It’s one that shows hideous black stitches curving along her bald skull, her eyes empty as she slumps in a wheel-chair. She is so thin in the final photograph, her bones jut from her body. There is an ugly scar on her belly and dozens of bruises all over her.

The notes are handwritten and faded, but she deciphers what she can, and they tell a hideous story that leaves her shaking – Mary-Alice Brandon. Born 28th February, 1901. Admitted September 4th 1911. State custody. Schizophrenia. Hysteria. Metrazol program. Electoplexy Protocol. Lobotomy. Hysterectomy.

(Mary-Alice Brandon died on September 4th, 1911. That’s what the internet said - pneumonia. She’s buried in Biloxi, a footnote on a family grave.)

She wants to call Jasper (“I think I was made like this, not born like this. I don’t understand.”) and have him come find her. She could except she’s not sure she can speak without screaming. She’s not even sure if she can stand up and leave.

Breathe in.

(She can’t. She stays there, trembling, all of the night, trying to wrap her head around those photographs. Trying to understand what she’s seeing, and to forget every single thing she knows about old-fashioned medicine.)

Breathe out.

(Oh. This is going to upset Carlisle a lot. Like the book on the Spanish Influenza or that whole magazine article about Rosalie’s disappearance.)

Breathe in.

(She wishes Jasper was here.)

Breathe out.

(Her head hurts so bad.)

Breathe in.

(Jasper made her a recording. He was going to spend a few days with Peter and Charlotte, and she was worried. He put it on her phone. It’s stupid and she shouldn’t need it but it always, always helps. Just Jasper calmly telling her that he loves her, and he’ll see her soon, and everything will be okay. It’s still on her phone, and her headphones are in her bag. He always reminds her to pack them, even though they don’t block everything out because they’re designed for humans. And maybe, maybe, putting them on and pressing play is what she needs. Maybe it feels like she can breathe a little more, even with those photos still spread out in front of her. One step at a time.)

Breathe out.