It really isn't Ficmas without my Angstiest WIP making an appearance.
ATBT is getting an overhaul (some pacing issues) in 2022 so that it can start being posted because this fic was started in 2016 and deserves its moment. So there's a 50/50 chance that something I've already posted makes the final cut.
(AU in which James kept Alice as a prisoner after she was changed, and she travelled with them against her will up until the fateful baseball game. I highly recommend reading the first three parts here. )
Warning: mention of non-graphic sexual abuse and violence.
She knows they wonder about the scars she bears. They aren’t subtle; some are terrible enough that even Bella’s mortal eyes trace them, curious and almost accusing. They want the stories, the explanations, and she isn’t ready to give them. Every single morning is another day without James, and knowing that is the closest she has ever felt to a religion.
And her scars are more than they ever see. She covers as much as she can with her clothing, with the tinted powders that Rosalie gave her – they come away from her skin too quickly, but it helps. She brushes her hair carefully, fingers trailing over the uneven ridges and edges of her skull, where her stone flesh doesn’t quite meet.
That injury, she hides out of shame, out of embarrassment because she doesn’t want them to think she is trying to get more from them. She already has more than she ever deserved. It’s just another part of her that isn’t right, and that list is already so long, that it’s exhausting.
It’s not easy to hide, truly. Before it happened, the visions came to her as easily as breathing. Afterward, they were a little harder. Sometimes, they are too much, and she sinks into oblivion, devoid of any other sense except those strings of future. How many times did James beat her, violate her, trying to bring her out of that fugue before he learned that she is no more than a corpse at those times, a blank slate absorbing all that is to come?
She finds dark spaces to hide when she feels that sense of floating wash over her, that she will drop at any moment. It doesn’t happen as often, now that she feeds regularly, but enough that she worries one of them will find her. Another vulnerability, another burden of her existence upon them.
She wants to trust them so badly. But something always stops her. When tempers run high, she waits for the inevitable blow, for the moment that they are tired of her and cast her out. Her place is always in the corner of the room, with the wall to her back – and, if she’s lucky, a fast exit.
They talk about her, sometimes, in quiet voices she pretends not to hear from the safety of the attic. There is talk of her joining them at the local high school, which terrifies her in so many new ways that she hides in the forest, ready to run, until they accept her refusal to enter that world.
It is Carlisle who works out the plainest of her secrets. In the way she focuses on the photographs in Rosalie’s glossy magazines, how she dismisses the electronics they attempt to show her. How she never claims the remote, or picks up a novel, or shows any interest in learning an instrument. Her terror of the school.
She cannot read nor write, and when Carlisle quietly confronts her, she wishes she could cry. It is obvious they value education, value books and knowledge, but that is a world she does not have the ability to be a part of, another yardstick she cannot measure up to.
Carlisle welcomes her into his office, where he has books and papers spread out. His smile is kind and patient –things she does not believe in but desperately wants to. He is puzzled by how slowly she learns the letters and numbers, how painstakingly she copies the shapes of the characters, and a week later, still resemble a child’s attempts than an adult’s. Compared to the lessons he gave Emmett when he was turned, she takes longer to remember, longer to combine and connect and deduce, and he is curious about that.
He says nothing though, and praises her blocky letters. Esme, too, is effusive in her pride, though she sees the flicker in Esme’s eyes, of confusion and surprise. Her efforts are good, but not good enough for one of their kind. Rosalie raises an eyebrow but says nothing. Emmett goes to hug her and she tenses instinctively, and she sees the hurt in his eyes and nothing she does will ever turn out right.
//
She knows her time is running out when the oblivion of her visions swallows her up watching television with Emmett. She can’t hide forever, and when she comes too, both Jasper and Edward are in the room, watching her carefully.
She saw glass and she saw blood, and she doesn’t know how they fit together just yet, and everyone is talking to her, asking her questions, and it is too much too fast. She darts out, towards the forest, pretending not to have noticed Jasper’s hand reaching out to grab her wrist, and missing.
She returns later, when it is dark. She still cannot reconcile the vision of blood and glass to anything yet, but that just means it isn’t fixed in time and space yet. There are still choices to be made, paths to be walked, to reach that point. She’ll see more the closer she gets, she’s positive.
They are still in the lounge room when she arrives home, talking about her. Worried, serious voices and the time has come; they need their answers, to put her story together in a way that makes sense, out of facts instead of speculation.
“Do you want to know?” she asks, standing in the doorway. They are gathered in a way that looks like they belong in one of Rosalie’s glossy magazines. She is standing there, barefoot and tired. And defiant. “About James?”
She is making them uncomfortable, she knows and she rather likes the power. She is sorry that Bella isn’t here to witness this, to hear the story and understand that this world isn’t for children daydreaming about eternal love and beauty. Luck is a finite resource.
Rosalie is giving her a challenging look, one that is throwing down an invisible gauntlet. Jasper has a blank expression, the one he wears when he is waiting, calculating the risk and reward.
“It would be helpful,” Carlisle says finally, and he has been patient and kind. He allows her to stay with them in exchange for nothing; she is almost positive that he knows what she and Jasper have been up to when they disappear from the house, and he hasn't said anything to either of them, so she won't refuse him.
The words come more easily than she anticipated, truly. She stands there and looks them straight in the eye and tells them what she knows with a soft, but steady voice. Of the nameless warden who watched over her, and decided to change her, to protect her from James. That James got to her first, and the warden only managed to stop James long enough for his venom to take hold in her body.
An act James killed him for. He almost killed her too, but decided to keep her, as a pet. To see how she would turn out. When she woke, he laughed when she told him she didn’t remember anything. He gave her back her name, and set her loose on the asylum, watched her slaughter most of the ward in her bloodlust, and laughed when she started screaming in horror.
How James liked to take everything he wanted from her, and then a little bit more; how he savored her pain and suffering. That the first lesson she had was not to fight back against him. Ever. He had to give her permission to speak and feed and wash, and expected her to express her gratitude for that permission on her back or on her knees. He preferred it when she was reluctant, when he had to hold her down, force her and remind her that there was no one coming to her rescue.
“In 1948, I tried to… I made him angry. I challenged him and I failed. My punishment was to stay in this old shack until he returned for me. I wasn’t allowed to leave, not even to hunt. He told me what he would do if he found out I had disobeyed him, in detail.
“He came back for me ten months later, took what he wanted and left again. He came back for me again in the winter, and I was allowed to travel with them again.”
The inevitable question comes from Edward. “How did you hunt?”
She bites her lip and shows him in her mind, of tearing open rats and small wildlife in rabid desperation. Of hours pacing, rocking as hunger and terror and determination ripped through her. That any tattered remains of humanity are tossed aside, and she is less ashamed of those days than terrified that her mind could bend and snap at any time, with just the right pressure.
Edward recoils from her mind, and shakes his head at Carlisle’s questioning look.
“It’s a nice story,” Rosalie begins sharply, and she pities Rosalie a little because she will always need her pint of blood and pound of flesh for proof, before she trusts and accepts and believes.
So she shows them some, recites the others. She lets her mind fill in the blanks for Edward, to show him imperfect flesh, edges and bumps of hard-won survival.
There is the thick mess of scar tissue rendered in stone flesh on the back of her knee; bites James forced to heal together, to stop her from being able to run fast enough to escape, that left her with the limp and unable to extend her leg properly.
The seam around her ankle, where he snapped it off to keep her in one place, laughing at her panic and pain.
The torn bite mark on the back of her calf from Laurent, trying to take her paltry meal from her.
He had won, and she had gone without.
The ugly burn marks on her thigh, where James was 'experimenting' with cigarettes and naked flames to see how far he could push her, and push their flammable bodies. Carlisle closes his eyes at the uneven but smooth patch of skin, a shade darker than the rest of her, and she wonders if he’s been touched by flames and lived to the tell the tale as well.
The seams around both her wrists, from where he broke her in temper.
More bite marks, on one hip and one wrist, of James marking his property.
Angry scratches around her ribs from a jealous Victoria, and a faint one under her jaw from Laurent for no specific reason.
The angry scar on her shoulder from that last night in the ballet studio that she couldn’t get the venom out of.
The deep, matching bites on the insides of both her thighs - one from when he fed on her as a human, the other to remind her who she belonged to, the same imprint pressed dozens of times into her flesh, overlapping; a warning, a reminder and a tally.
There are uneven lines down her back that have been carved into her skin, keeping count of something that only made sense to him. Her skull is uneven at the back, where he crushed it, and it never healed together properly, her short hair hiding the ridges and edges. Somewhere further south, she is sure chunks of her skull are still scattered; leaving her an incomplete puzzle.
After she finishes, she almost feels bad. Rosalie is folded into Emmett’s side, and Esme looks seconds away from bursting into tears.
Her fingers find the bite on her wrist, and she traces them absently, like a talisman. “He enjoyed the pain. That’s why he did what he did. To me and the others. He liked to hurt Victoria too, but that wasn’t… not as bad. She was allowed to fight back a little. I wasn’t. He liked me to struggle, but he liked it better when I screamed.”
She comes back to herself after that, is intensely aware of them watching her, with expressions of pity and horror on their faces and she thought giving them their answers, her story, would feel better. Would give her some kind of peace.
She wants them to ask the question, the question that feels like it is lit up in lights.
What happened in 1948?
That’s still the wrong question, of course. The correct one is ‘what was supposed to happen in 1948? Why did you try to run in 1948? Why not sooner?
Rosalie leaves abruptly, with Emmett following her, a foreign look upon his face.
No one asks the question.
She is tired in a way that feels heavy and old, and she turns to leave, only for Carlisle to call her back, to offer to examine her crippled knee and her broken skull. They fascinate him in a dreadful way, she can see, and she refuses with a hard voice that is stronger and more definite than she feels.
And then she retreats, leaving them with their hideous truths, the worst of her secrets spread out for their judgment.
don't imagine the sons of horus lining up to donate blood for their dad after davin don't imagine them visiting him scared astartes don't get scared and trying not to be too freaked out but they all think he's dying and he IS and they don't know how to deal with that and astartes don't get scared that's preposterous but they ARE
don't imagine them crowded around his bedside crying not sure what to say but they have to say SOMETHING because he might die but no no no he's a Primarch he's the Warmaster he can't die
did you know there's a thing nurses recommend when you're saying goodbye where you sit at their bedside and lay your head on the sheets and put their hand over your face? don't imagine them doing that
in my mind, horus was one of the primarchs who was the most Dad to his legion he's their DAD please
i ignored my own advice and imagined all these things please help meeeee ;_;;
The question stopped him dead in his tracks. He stood, in their living room, before a shelf with the countless medical books Sakura had accumulated over the years. He stood and didn’t know what to say.
He wanted to do something to take her attention away from him, just long enough so that he could think of a satisfying answer. After an agonizing second, he slid his finger along the books’ spines, as if searching for a particular one or showing interest in what secrets they might hold. But he understood nothing of them, and Sarada was waiting for an answer.
If Sasuke were another and not so wholly tied by his morals, he would’ve lied. He’s had a wonderful childhood, spent it with his brother every day of the week. His father was oh so proud of him. They lived long lives, full of happiness. But that was false, and Sasuke was no liar. Sarada would never hear an untrue word from him.
Still showing his back to her, he sighed, closing his eyes. She might see the slow rise and fall of his shoulders as he breathed. No more than that. His pain would not hurt her more than it must, and this was a promise Sasuke would die for if needed.
Lastly, he turned, making his way to her. “It was lonely,” he said as he sat down next to her.
“In that regard, maybe somewhat similar to yours.”
