#mary-alice: i'm allowed to want things again? can't remember anything i ever wanted

[goldeneyedgirl]

Can we get a little snippet of STL pretty pleaseeeeeee. I’m about to go back to college as a 28 yo (obviously nothing wrong with that) but something about knowing this fic started when I was in college the first time is making me super emotional and nostalgic. Super excited for the next chappie!!

Congratulations! I went back to uni at 26 and listen, it's so much better when you're older. I had way more fun and way more perspective about what and how I was learning. I also gave 0 shits about what anyone thought of me by, like, mid-second year.

Also wow, I'm horrified that much time has passed. Academically I know I started in 2017 but goddamn, that's a long time. Just redefining the slow burn in new and weird ways, I guess.

(That makes her squeeze her eyes tight because yes, things would be very different. She can still see those old visions, the very first ones, where Alice Cullen smiles across a sticky Formica table at a wary old vampire, and gets her first kiss ten minutes later in a dark alley. The ones where she doesn’t have any scars, and wears new dresses and shiny shoes, and gets to be bashful when the Major’s hand settles against her back. And she wants that kind of different. Not the kind of different that means the Major wouldn’t know her, wouldn’t be with her. That terrifies her.) // (There was a sense of security in it; those days before he started falling apart. She had a certain amount of confidence in her place and that life back then. Chalk-maps and training, the Major’s gaze like a security blanket around her. That there was some kind of respect there, an understanding between them. That they both understand he was her architect; the blank slate of his needs and desires. Now it’s a terrifying thought, that she was so willing to let him bend her to his will that she went in blind. But that’s her thinking back. She’d do it all the same, a hundred times over. Not out of a altruistic desire to protect him. But because she is selfish and he was hers as much as she was his.)