Author's Note: Disclaimer: I'm just here in the sandbox. Zoinks.
So, I don't have any excuses prepared for this. It's 3:45am PST and I'm thinking about Bella Swan because I was reminded of her existence approximately three days ago and haven't been able to forget her. I barely remember anything from the books or movies, and I don't plan on rewatching or rereading anytime soon to remedy any errors in characterization, mythos, ect. Consider this a (not so serious) "[CENSORED] you" (treated seriously) to Steph Meyers for wasting so much of my time when I was young, dumb, and impressionable.
Blood sings.
It's not something Alice expected. Maybe it's different for the others. For Edward, Rosalie. Or maybe it's just something vampires don't speak of. She walks down the street at dusk and is forced to recoil at the song of red, red, red being carried through the streets. Humans, ignorant to how she presses her hands over her mouth in shame as her throat dries and belly hollows out suddenly, her fill of the cougar forgotten, as if she's never fed before. Back to the house, back to her family, digging her nails into her palms.
But Alice learns. She learns to convince herself to try to become deaf to it, to that tantalizing aroma, that sweet voice. Animal blood is bitter in the back of her mouth, but she finds out that, given long enough between blood sessions, anything is better than nothing.
And visions dances across her eyes, like starlight on a lake. First Emmett, then Jasper, both of whom become her brothers. Perhaps not in blood, but of blood. They are, after all, learning to grit their teeth and smother themselves as the clock keeps ticking and the world keeps moving forward. She sees blood. Glittering skin. Automobile accidents. The usual. Emmett and Rosalie fall in love, Jasper and Edward really become brothers, like blood mattered and tied them together by a thread. Time and bonds are funny like that. But Alice—
The vision strikes in the dead of winter in 1979. Pale; mousy; brunette; flat. The girl is, for the most part, unremarkable—ordinary, in the way that all humans are—but something catches in not-Alice's chest. Vision-Alice is reaching, reaching, reaching for this girl whose blood sings. An aria of red. Her teeth don't break the skin, but she trembles in the girl's grasp: she could. She could do it. It would be easy, easier than anything. But vision-Alice simply presses closer into that purely human warmth that is soft and all-consuming. And then the vision fades out, leaving her gasping in the rain.
The corner of Edward's mouth turns down, but Alice simply smiles and shakes her head.
Things are fine. Will be fine. There's a girl out there waiting to touch her glittering chest, right over her time-stilled heart.
My best friend, Alice thinks, smiling as her hair dampens and becomes plastered to her throat. My—
Not family. Not like Edward, Rosalie, Emmett, not even Jasper. Her visions whisper of a time approaching when she will have something fragile and red on the inside to herself—that this friendship will be hers before it is anyone else's.
Alice smiles. She's waited this long; what's several more decades, if it means she'll find a hand to hold before she turns it to ice?
There's a gap in her knowing. She knows there will be a before, during, and after to all of this. To meeting this girl whose blood and lips sing to her like a lullaby after so many years of enduring the brittle silence. Undoubtedly, there will be concerns. Complications. Rosalie will a considerable amount of (human) time to warm up to the reality that will come to pass in the coming years. Perhaps there will even be a death. But there's one thing—one last vision. If she could sleep, she would have called it a dream.
Under the sun and a yawning blue sky, Alice is glittering, but she is falling to pieces behind a cracking smile and impossibly watery eyes as the girl from not yet shimmers like starlight and sunbeams on water.
What comes after the after is bliss, Alice knows, and so she will wait forever if she has to, if it means seeing that girl dripping sunlight.