To Go Amongst Mad People
Title: Alice, Interrupted
Warning and/or Summary:
Pre-Twilight, Canon: Alice forgot everything. But what was there for her to remember? Perhaps she saw it all coming, but there was nothing she could do. Perhaps she tried to stop it...
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"Open the door! Please, open the door!"
The small metal shutter shot sideways with a bang, revealing a suspicious pair of eyes lit eerily yellow by the flickering lamp. They peered down at the little figure huddled outside, dark cloak wrapped tightly around herself against the unseasonal chill of the wind which ghosted under the arches of the building and set the shadowed trees to swaying.
"Please, let me in," the girl begged again, and the doorkeeper's eyes widened with startled recognition as he scrambled for the locks to open the heavy door.
"Miss Brandon! What are you doing here?"
She swept past him into the austere hallway, heels clicking loudly in the hushed quiet. Here, at this hour, there was no babble of voices, no footsteps hurrying along uncarpeted stairways; many of the nurses had gone home, and the night shift was only just beginning. It was why she had chosen this time to come. "You know perfectly well why I'm here. May I see her?" The girl reached up to unpin her hat where the wind had knocked it slightly askew, allowing dark curls to tumble free over her shoulders.
"Miss Brandon, I don't – "
She regarded him with a single eyebrow slightly raised over brilliantly blue eyes, head cocked to one side.
The doorkeeper sighed, absently scratching his iron-grey beard with one finger. "I thought Mr Brandon said you weren't to come any more."
The girl's laughter was bright, peculiarly out of place in the dark, echoing hallways. "You honestly didn't think that would stop me, did you? You knew I'd come." He didn't reply for a long moment, and the silence stretched out between them. "What? What is it?" Panic flashed across the girl's pretty face. "She's all right, isn't she? What's happened?"
"It's nothing, Miss Brandon! Everything's fine." But he didn't sound convincing, and she tried again.
"Please tell me. What's happened?"
"It's...well, she...she said you'd come," he blurted at last. "She told me."
The girl froze. "She...she said I was coming?" she managed at last in a whisper. "Did she say it would be me, or –" The hopeful words trailed off at the expression on the old man's face. For a second, her face fell; the excitement in those bright blue eyes flickered out like a spent candle even as the doorkeeper hurried to reassure her.
"It's the drugs, Miss Brandon," he explained for the hundredth time. Each visit, there would always be the spark of hope that there would be some recognition, some memory, but every time they were disappointed. "We have to...I'm sorry."
She bowed her head, a little stiffly. "I understand. Would you take me to see her, please?" The finality of her tone made it perfectly clear that, despite her age, she would brook no argument, and the man accepted defeat.
"Of course, Miss Brandon."
Her head held high, the girl followed along the starkly empty corridors in a route which was all too horribly familiar to her. The doors which they passed on either side were locked, labelled with a number on a neat chart pinned below the metal grille, and from some she could just glimpse faces pressed up to the bars, curious to see the stranger walking the halls of their asylum when visiting hours were long over. A few voices called out but she ignored them, keeping close to the heels of the man ahead of her.
Finally, finally, they came to the door at the end of the hallway. As they approached, the girl's footsteps faltered slightly, the change in rhythm making the doorkeeper glance back at her with concern, but her face remained utterly composed. Her gaze was fixed on the door ahead, a door through which a pair of brilliant blue eyes identical to her own were watching.
"I knew you'd come," Alice said.
The doorkeeper stopped, turned to face the visitor with an expression of unease. "Miss Brandon –"
"Leave us." Then, to soften the harshness of words cold from suppressing the emotion which threatened to choke her, the girl added, "Please."
"I'll just be along the hallway," the man told her.
"Thank you," she replied absently, but she had already stepped past him to face the girl on the other side of the cell door. He hesitated a moment before leaving, beating a swift retreat from the oddly omniscient gaze of the inmate.
"I knew you'd come," Alice murmured again, and as she took a slight step back from the door her visitor could see that she was smiling. "I was right. Hello, Cynthia."
Alice's sister sucked in a short, sharp breath of shock, sudden hope sparking alight something in her eyes. "You remember? Oh, Alice –"
"I don't know. What am I supposed to remember?" She frowned, but only moments later her pale brow smoothed out again. "Have you come to visit me before?"
The smile on Cynthia's face froze, faded a little before she forced the corners of her mouth back up. "I always come, Alice. I'm your sister." Her tone dropped. "I...I thought..."
"It's the drugs," Alice replied blithely. "I don't remember anything. Have you seen a tall man – blonde – with red eyes? I think he's looking for me."
"No. No, I haven't."
"Ah. He'll find me one day. I'll just have to wait."
Cynthia paused, clearly uncertain of what to say while her sister stared dreamily into the darkness of her cell with the blue eyes they shared. "Alice...if you don't remember...if you don't know me, how did you know my name? You have to remember something!" she finished desperately.
Alice appeared to consider it a moment. "No," she replied at last. "I know your name because I saw it on your gravestone. Beloved wife and mother, you know."
The younger girl stumbled backwards, horrified, eyes wide in a face which was so pale that it almost appeared to glow white in the darkness. "You – you're –"
"Insane? Of course." Alice ran a hand back through the short, choppy crop of black hair framing her face, grimaced. "You have very pretty hair. Was mine ever that long?"
Still unable to speak, Cynthia nodded dumbly and Alice sighed.
"I thought so. I dreamed I did, and I wasn't sure if it had already happened or not." She glanced back up at her sister, seeming to notice her expression for the first time. "Oh, you're not going to die for a very long time," she reassured her.
Cynthia swallowed twice. Then she licked her lips to moisten them where they had suddenly gone dry. "That's a comfort," she muttered wryly, and was rewarded with a sudden peal of laughter from her sister.
"If I scare you so much, why did you come?" Alice's question was blunt, her eyes fixed on Cynthia's face, but her tone was only mildly curious. "And if it's only to check whether I'm still alive or not, that's okay. You can tell me; I won't remember it." She smiled sunnily. "They'll bring me more drugs in the morning, and everything will go away."
"Don't say it like that," the girl whispered. "It's...it's for the best."
Alice regarded her for several seconds which dragged into hours, her blue eyes – so much older than her sister's, despite the mere handful of years separating their ages – filled with dark, shifting shadows. When she broke the silence at last she was smiling again, but it wasn't quite enough to chase away that darkness. "Of course it is. It's for the best," she repeated, and turned away into the blackness of her cell so that she disappeared from Cynthia's view altogether.
There was another silence.
"I'm sorry," Cynthia called after a few seconds into the dark depths beyond the small barred window in the door.
Alice didn't reply. How could two words from a stranger who said she was a sister make up for her entire life? For what she could and couldn't remember, for the things she couldn't separate between nightmare and reality; for the darkness and pain and helplessness she lived in. How could I'm sorry make all of that better?
"I'm sorry," Cynthia said again. "And I know...I know that it doesn't mean anything, can't even begin...but I am. And one day you'll be better, and you can get out of here, and..." She swallowed back the hot, burning tears which threatened to choke her. "I'll come back," Cynthia promised. She turned in her smart dress, dark hair still tumbling erratically over her shoulders as she held her hat in dainty white fingers. It was the same routine every time, but Alice didn't know that; she flung herself back to the door of her cell, fingers curling desperately around the bars in an attempt to get closer to the outside world which had forsaken her so cruelly.
"Wait!"
Cynthia stopped, looked back, expecting to see her sister's gaze from the peep-hole as she always did, but this time was different. For just a second, she thought that the door was open; that a small wooden box was being carried out by two men, that Alice was dead and –
But then she blinked, and everything was back to normal. The door was closed and locked, and Alice was clinging on to the bars, blue eyes bright. "I forgive you," she smiled. "The next time you come back, I'll be dead, you know."
The younger girl blinked back tears. "I know," she whispered. "I love you, Alice."
"I think I loved you too." It wasn't much, but it was all Alice could offer. As she watched her sister walk away, for a moment there was a curious overlay of a dark haired little girl being dragged away backwards by her father, blue eyes streaming with tears as she screamed.
But it must have just been a dream, because Alice couldn't remember.
***
"Alice! Alice. Come back to me. Alice."
The nagging insistence of his voice snapped her back from her reverie, and Alice blinked slowly as she took in her surroundings. The dark cell was gone; the dim hallway echoing with Cynthia's footsteps was instead replaced by a bright, whitewashed room flooded with afternoon sunlight by the big window overlooking the lawn which stretched out before the institution. It was a world away from the endless shadowed hallways running through the twisting maze of her mind, but the metal bars fixed firmly across the glass reminded her all too solidly exactly where she was.
"Is that all you can remember, Alice?" the doctor asked again, and she turned blue eyes dimmed with hopelessness upon him.
"That's everything, Henry."
The doctor sighed, carefully removing the wire-rimmed spectacles he wore as an affectation and folding them to lie on his desk atop the thick folder neatly labelled with the title Miss M. A. Brandon, Patient 136. "I'm concerned, Alice."
The bitterness in her laugh was enough to make him wince. "About what, Henry? What in particular concerns you? Is it the fact that I have these...these dreams which always seem to come true, or that I can't see exactly what you want me to? Or is it that despite everything I've told you, everything that you are, you still can't believe that what I say might actually be real?"
"That's enough, Alice." His oddly yellow-coloured eyes flashed black for a second, anger temporarily besting him as he shoved his chair violently backwards; it flew into the wall with a force which had one of the wooden legs cracking. The noise seemed to bring the doctor back to his senses, and he stood for a long moment – perfectly, inhumanly still – with his eyes closed as he fought for control. Alice watched in silence, studying the all-too-familiar way in which he appeared to become a statue as his internal struggle continued. Finally, her doctor opened his eyes, but she spoke first.
"I know what I saw before. He's coming, and I don't think you can stop that."
The vampire's eyes flashed again. "I'm strong. I can fight him." He lowered himself carefully into the broken chair, leant forward so that his gaze held hers. "I'm not letting him have you."
One of Alice's small, thin hands sought out his where it rested on the desk, closed around his cold fingers. "I'm not worth dying for, Henry."
"I won't –"
"Yes, you will. I've seen it." She dropped her gaze to their conjoined hands. "I'm not worth trying to save. I mean, what am I really? I'm a freak in an insane asylum."
"More than that. Days like today, without the drugs, there's nothing wrong. Humans fear anything different, Alice, but I'm not human! And you wouldn't be, either, we could –"
"Henry, no." She watched, again, as he closed his eyes in a struggle for control, but this time it was his battle against his own emotions – the tears that could never fall, but showed on his face nonetheless. "I don't want that. I can't have it."
The doctor shook his head from side to side in denial, still unable to meet her eyes. "I can't lose you, Alice," he managed at last in a choked whisper. "I can't."
"But you will." The girl brought her other hand up to join the other, clasping his between both her own. "I've told you what I dream of. I have to wait for Jasper, Henry."
"What if he never comes?" he blurted. "What if this James comes first, if he kills you? What will you be waiting for then?"
Alice didn't reply; she merely watched him with her sad, all-knowing eyes until he looked away, looked down and let the silence stretch between them.
"Put me back in my cell, Henry," she murmured finally. "James will come; if you fight him, he'll kill you. Whatever happens, I'll find Jasper somehow. In this world, in the next, who knows? But there's nothing you can do about this. It will happen."
He didn't say anything as the nurse came to escort Alice back to her cell, barely even looked up as the tiny dark-haired girl hesitated in the doorway. "The next time you see me, I'll be dead, you know," she said.
"Don't be ridiculous, girl. You're perfectly healthy," the nurse snapped.
"He knows what he has to do," Alice replied softly.
Only then did the doctor look up. "Give her the regular dosage, Sister Margaret." He spoke briskly.
"Of course, Doctor."
Alice paid no heed to the journey back to her cell; her mind was already slowly filling with the shadows which heralded the coming of another vision, the darkness trickling in like water being poured slowly into a bowl. Half dazed, she obediently opened her mouth for the drugs the nurse laid on her tongue, swallowed them down. It was only when the heavy door had swung closed behind her that the vision hit.
With horror, she watched helpless as the doctor slipped into her cell as she slept, tilted her head back to drip a curious liquid down her throat; watched as the slow rise and fall of her chest slowed with the drug's effect until she appeared dead. She saw them come with a coffin, carrying her still, pale body through an asylum hushed with news of death.
The picture changed; she was lying on a bed, a flush of colour creeping slowly back into her skin while the doctor stood by, then all she saw were teeth and blood –
Alice jerked upright in her cell with a strangled noise in her throat which was half-scream, half-sob. The doctor had made his decision, and she saw again James's fury at being foiled, saw again the violent, ugly death of the doctor who had cared enough to save her life at any cost.
Mindless, horrified, and utterly helpless, she threw her slight frame against the inside of the locked door, bruising herself in fruitless efforts to make somebody hear, make somebody stop it.
"Open the door! Please, open the door!"
But nobody came; and as Alice slumped down to the floor in exhaustion, uncontrollable sobs shaking her entire body, the drugs finally came into effect and her vision started to drift away.
The horror of her vision, the memory of her vampire doctor's face, even the dark cell itself; they all drifted away into blackness as her mind retreated.
A nagging feeling of wrongness remained, but it must have just been a dream.