A/N Hello my friends! This is an Alice story that I have wanted to tell for awhile now. It is an all human fic set in Biloxi in 1920.
Disclaimer: I do not own Twilight.
APOV (and the man she speaks of is James).
Awake Unto Me
Chapter One: Fall from Heaven
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Beautiful Dreamer …
Awake unto me…
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She had never encountered evil quite like this before.
Evil tends to have a lazy quality, like a bloated animal rolling downhill. Fat. Ugly. Stupid. Somebody wants something and the easiest way to get it is to lie, cheat or steal. The path of least resistance. It takes no effort to become the petty thief, the mugger in the midnight alley, the teenage gang member pulling the trigger in the drive by shooting. No mistakes. No guilt. No effort. It was simple.
Becoming a serial killer or a dictator takes quite a bit more effort.
Oh yes. For that takes planning, skill and a persistent dedication to the ultimate Goal. She could picture in her mind what Lucifer must have looked like before he tumbled down from the heights of heaven. His pupils must have dilated so much as to completely cover his irises. His perfectly black eyes zeroed in on a goal located just behind the left temple of any person he looked at. Even God. She was tired just thinking of the effort involved in keeping eye contact with a shadowy goal just off the left hand of God.
Yes, to achieve a true, demented, worthy of falling from Heaven, snake in the grass, angel of light, demon from hell Evil takes time, effort, planning, and determination. Heaven and Earth weren't built in a day. She would bet the rest of the hair on her head that Old Scratch's fall from grace took more than a day too.
Maybe that was what made true Evil so scary. Socrates used to argue that people only sinned out of ignorance. They didn't know any better. It was easy to do at the time. If they could just learn, then they wouldn't sin. Then they would know better.
And then, for some reason, she could hear the faint, off-key dings of a radio commercial. Yes, and if you just take Socrates' class today the education of your mind will make you a perfect person. No more ignorance! No more pain! All in one easy dialogue.
She didn't really think it worked that way. However much evil on small scale scared her, it was nothing to the Satans of the world. It was the people who sinned purposefully and persistently that scared her the most.
What made this Evil so scary, so worthy of capital letters, was how much effort it took to achieve. After all, the dehumanization of another human being is no easy task. The teenage gang member pulling the trigger in the drive by shooting might have little real connection with his victim. They were only the faceless members of a rival gang. And if he did accidentally hit an innocent bystander, then so be it. That bystander is faceless as well. But to practice a kind of unrelenting cruelty all day – every day – to a victim, looking that victim in the eye … watch her eat, sleep, speak ….
That was a kind of evil altogether different.
What scared her was the goal of that kind of Evil. The black eyes with the dilated pupils were focused on the little people in the periphery of his vision. Like a condensed beam of light, all he wanted to do was make the people small, distorted, easy to manipulate. He tried to make people into Things. Or not Things, but things.
It took just as much concentration and determination to resist becoming a thing. And that was what she was doing. She had a name. She had a soul. She would not become the next faceless victim.
Because there was one thing he had never seen her do. He had never seen her cry.
Please review! Thanks.