To Go Amongst Mad People
Title: Epilogue
Pairing: Alice/James
Disclaimer: I do not own Twilight, Alice in Wonderland, or Through the Looking Glass. The first line of this story is adapted from dialogue between Alice and the Cheshire Cat in chapter #6 of Alice In Wonderland.
Summary: "I remember, Alice," James said, calling her by her middle name as he always had before. 'Mary' just didn't suit her, or suited her too well for his liking. Mary was a name of innocence and purity, but Alice? Alice was a creature of wonder, of course, only now perhaps too much so. She fancied herself the little girl from the books he had left her with. Something had made his delicious child snap and break since he'd seen her last.
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"I don't want to go among mad people. How do you know I'm mad? I must be, or I wouldn't have come here."
He poured her a cup of tea and smiled as Alice replied with a second quickly recited, altered line from her beloved books. James caught the reference, but didn't care enough to fully understand it. He was disappointed that she had not returned to her old self upon leaving the asylum, but he was pleased that pulling Alice out of the world she'd been living in hadn't caused her to break from reality further. He still wanted her the same way he always had, and that frightened him more than the ramblings of her insanity. Curiosity urged him forward, even though some of the urges he'd expected were still absent. James tilted his head and watched as Alice took a sip from the green china cup. Her lips parted into a wide smile.
"Rose," she whispered. "You remember?"
"Of course I remembered, Alice," James said, calling her by her middle name as he always had before. 'Mary' just didn't suit her, or suited her too well for his liking. Mary was a name of innocence and purity, but Alice? Alice was a creature of wonder, of course, but now perhaps too much so. She fancied herself the little girl from the books he had left her with. Something had made his delicious child snap and break since he'd seen her last. It was as though his Alice, with her chocolate bon-bon eyes, was fractured, stuck between her books and herself. She remembered who he really was, who she had been, but he could see she was truly no longer his. Thinking about the change in her sickened him. His Alice was different, unique, challenging, a true character. What had her family wanted her to be? A simpering, do-nothing, flat, magazine cut-out without a single thought of her own? Surprisingly, it gave him great satisfaction to see that, not only had they failed, but that she had clung to her only remembrance of him as she disappeared.
Although, had he been able to save her from ever breaking, James would have done so without hesitation. He had only left in the first place because he was afraid of doing Alice harm. She was too young then, only ten, and James couldn't keep his hands off of her. He wanted to feel her satin skin on his, trailing his fingers down her arms, stroking her long ebony silk waves, greeting her with an embrace whenever they met. He wanted her so much, so badly, that he found himself unable to think about anything but the blood pumping in her veins, as though there was only one thing abut her that he needed, which was wrong. He'd been alone too long, but not so long that the idea of the proper companionship of man and woman had been obscured in his mind. James knew that he would need all of her, forever, but he could not knowingly take her so young, so undeveloped. He had given her up to secure that future; yet now he was faced with the blood and body he'd craved without the mind that had snared him.
James clenched his teeth. He had left to protect her body, and now that was all he had. He could have loved Alice forever. He would have never tired of hearing her imagined stories, sitting beside her as they read to one another, playing cards, or watching her dance in the sunlight of her mother's garden. Alice had been his perfect companion then, yet he had let her go to satisfy a simple pair of base, primal desires. They could have been brother and sister, like she'd wanted, but he'd denied her that. He swore that he wouldn't do that again. Alice reminded James that he was human, even if he wasn't anymore. If she was gone, then so was he. When she smiled and looked into his eyes, James second guessed his initial assessment that his beloved Alice had been replaced by someone else's construct.
"They're going to look for me," Alice said softly. "I tried to escape before but they always looked for me. They never found your Alice, but they brought me back each time."
"Why did you try to escape?" James asked, hoping to divert Alice away from asking why no one would look for her this time. There was no one left to come.
"Why wouldn't I?" Alice said with a laugh. "They took away our books. I had nothing to stay there for."
Her Alice books. She was mad about not having her books, not about being locked up, and not about the desecration of their future.
"They shut me in a closet and took away our books," Alice reached across the table and patted James's folded hands. He had to sit still, had to be far away from her, or he would take her right then and there on the table. He'd asked Alice what she wanted when they got to the hotel, and she'd asked for tea. Tea she would have, rose-scented tea served in fine china. Mary Alice Brandon was a lady, and James was going to treat her as such. "They tried to take away everything, but I wouldn't let them take Alice. See?"
"I see," James replied to placate her.
"Because you told me you'd come back, and I believed you. No, I wish I believed you, I just knew you would. You kept your promise, that's all that matters. You make sense." Alice finished her tea and smiled. "May I have another?"
James got up from the table and took Alice's cup. Her warm fingertips touched his as she passed him the cup, giggling.
"You're not the rabbit, though you are fast, and white," Alice said, standing to grab James's hand, petting it with her other. "But you're not the hatter either. You've no hat and you're not mad, not like me, not the Hatter, no. Sane. You understand it all, don't you, James? Cat!" Alice shouted as she let go of his hand and stood on her chair. "Cheshire Cat! He has all the answers but he won't explain!"
James walked to the tea cart to fill Alice's cup, asking her politely to sit down again. "I am not a character in your book, Alice. I'm sorry."
"Then we will make you one. Perhaps the Queen of Hearts has a son? Jack of Hearts? Then we can be brother and sister!" James handed Alice her cup and she thanked him, her voice breaking from it's frantic, juvenile tone to do so. She was inside, his Alice, somewhere. "Yes, we will call you the Jack for now. He's rescued Alice, and look? You've rescued me. Does this mean we are going home to our family? Please James? You've found our family?"
Her home was, of course, the first place James had gone for Alice. Now there was not one to go back to. He was prepared to not find her where he had left her, for Alice to have married young or been sent off to school. That would not have hurt James. He would still have killed her family, but it would have been a quick death. He couldn't leave people to follow Alice, whichever Alice it was he had, and he would have her.
"No. I'm sorry, Alice." James said, knowing she would ask about her sister next. Alice had a little sister, had, but she had always spoken of an older sister who was only real to Alice. When James would come see her, she would often scold him and say that her sister would catch them, providing the excuse to sneak off to a private little corner of her garden where they had fairy tea parties with pretend fairy tea. It was real tea once, carried out in a picnic basket, but when Alice decided James could not be real, because he could not drink real tea, she did not go through the bother again. The one curious, perhaps mad, aspect of the little girl James remembered was her insistence that she had an older sister as real as James was. Moreover, Alice was convinced that one day this sister would catch the two of them together. The thought haunted James, and directed all of his plans. It was not enough to have Alice, he had to have her all to himself, have her far away, where no one would recognize her until enough time had passed that no one ever would.
"My sister?" Alice asked, her face crestfallen when James shook his head. "I thought she would be with you. Are we going to find her? Where are we going, then?"
"Tomorrow we are going to travel by train. Have you ever been on a train before, Alice?"
"No. Why does it matter? You'll take me there no matter what I say, won't you? This is just a story I'm in. You're telling it. You tell me which scene comes next. Be careful, though!" she whispered in a shout. "Alice is very perceptive. I knew you weren't the rabbit when you came for me."
James humored her, happy to at least be conversing, even if they were conversing in nonsense. "You did? Then why did you follow?"
"On the other side of the glass, Alice loved you very much. She missed you when you left. James, you could have made them believe her."
"Alice was a little girl when I left. I needed her to grow up."
"I'm always as old as I've always been and as I ever will be. You don't age, either. You're like a character in a book. Every time I read about them they are always the same, just like you. Always the same." Alice winked. "That's why I hid there, so I would be the same as you."
No, James thought. It was bad enough that he'd given her the Alice books, a parting gift, but if he were somehow responsible for her break- no, he couldn't be. He'd left her those particular books because he'd thought she would like them. Alice loved to read, and James thought that books about a girl with her name, who saw another world behind the one she lived in, would be fitting. It was only meant to be a metaphor though; a comfort so that Alice would always remember that the world was more than the mundane, lonely place she knew it to be.
Well, it worked. She hadn't forgotten that. She'd forgotten everything else.
"Yes. I am like a character in a book. I'm always the same and I never age. I had to wait until my Alice was old enough so that I could make her like me."
"A character? Ageless?"
"Yes, Alice, ageless." The concept did not frighten her. Nothing did. "Did my Alice tell you this? When did she go away?"
"When you left. Alice saw you snap the gardener's neck after you drank his blood. She thought you ran away because of the murder. She confessed it for you so you could come back, but nobody believed her. They said it was the seal of her madness."
No.
James stood up from the table.
That had happened a year before he left. He killed the gardener the very day he found Alice, not the day he'd left. James had taken the Brandon's gardener and killed him just the way Alice said, dumping the body behind a hothouse where he'd examined himself in the reflection of the glass, and wiped his mouth. It was then that he'd crossed the Brandon's property and come upon a pale girl with ebony hair engrossed in a book. He walked up behind her with the intent to kill, until she looked back at him and smiled.
"Did you know you'd fall in love with the girl with huge eyes?" she'd said to him softly, shaking her head as she spoke. "I'm sorry. I say things without knowing."
"You do?" James had asked, thinking of another he knew who said things, and knew things he should not know.
"Sometimes. I'm so sorry. Did I startle you, too, sir?"
"James," he'd said, sitting beside Alice on her bench in the rose garden. "And please, do not apologize to me," he'd whispered in her ear. "I think you're right."
She'd smiled as he said that with a wink.
And she was still smiling.
James had to take solace in that and believe, since everything Alice had said had always been true, everything always would be.
"I won't grow up." Alice had said it to him the day he left, and she said it to him again. "I never see that. I never see myself as old. I don't become a mother. I'm always a daughter and sister, never a mother. I'm not real like everyone else, James, because I don't die."
"Alice," James began cautiously. "Are you mad at me? Was my Alice mad?"
"Mad!" she shouted.
"No, not mad. Angry. Are you angry, Alice? Because he left?"
"No. You can't be angry about what happens in a book. Besides, you're going to set Alice free."
James watched as she finished her tea before he allowed himself to take her hand and lead her from the table to the sofa. His only hope was that he could right his wrong and set her free, as Alice predicted. Ration told James that it was just as likely that he would trap her in her madness, but everything about Alice was an indulged whim, a risk. Keeping her alive so long, befriending the lonely child, leaving, returning for her, changing her, it was all a risk. But it all fit. Alice was a chapter of James's life which, nonsensical was it was, made sense.
He sat with her on the velvet sofa and asked his newly-freed girl what she would like to do next. Alice said that she wanted to sit and read with him, but that they couldn't since the doctors stole their books. One small hand cupped James's cheek as she crawled onto his lap. "You don't make sense in my book. You're not a character there. You're not my Jack of Hearts, no. I know you, James," Alice said, turning to sit beside him and lean back against James's chest. "You know I see what you'll do now, I always have, James. I always skip to the back of the book first."
"And you came with me?" James asked, as warmed as his heart could be, holding Alice in his arms just as he'd fantasized, staring below her short cropped hair at her delicate neck. She offered herself to him.
"I thought you were a character in my book, but you're not. We're still in Alice's book. You're the Jabberwocky. I hate this part. Hold me, James?" she asked, turning to look up at him as he swallowed. "I know I have to read the bad parts to finish the book, and I have to finish it so I can start a new one."
She whispered the name again, over and over, as James drank from her, just enough to flood her body with venom. Surprisingly to him, her words were comforting. They were starting a new volume of their lives together, and they had to finish this one gruesome part before everything could be the same between them. It was necessary.
It was also necessary that he eat again. James was forced to leave Alice still slumped on the sofa a day later, covered with a blanket, as he waited for her to wake up. He was so careful and she was so small, it was not enough. After all the work of getting Alice out of the asylum, James was hungry. He couldn't risk her safety just for another snack, and so he locked the hotel room door and headed for the lobby. Just as he had in the rose garden, he was only looking for a simple, easy meal. He saw one, a shabby looking girl in an old fur. She was alone, herself looking for someone she had not yet met.
"Jack?" she asked, as he put his hand on her shoulder and turned her around. He was ready to be brutal, steal away with her and feed without concern the moment she called him that very wrong name, but she looked up at him with such want and longing that James actually noticed her. She had the biggest blue eyes he had ever seen. Gorgeous and frightened.
James held out his hand to her like a gentleman. "James," he introduced himself.
This was how the new book began, not with a litany of mistakes as with Alice, but with their introduction.
"Victoria," the queen with blue glass eyes said in a heavy accent, as she smiled and blushed for the last time. "I don't suppose you wrote the wrong name in your letters, did you? I'm here to meet my husband. Are you him?"
James shook his head. Not yet. Alice was right, James thought, as he recognized the first premonition she'd ever shared with him. He'd known that he would fall in love with the girl with huge eyes, he'd just expected her to be Alice. He was wrong. He and Alice would be always as they had always been and as ever would be, brother, sister, and here was the last character in their book, as real as they were."Do you know this Jack fool who keeps you waiting, alone, and unprotected?"
Victoria shook her head as well. "Nor do I care to."
"Come," he said, waving her forward with his outstretched hand. Her warm grip in his was a firm and quiet agreement. "Let me introduce you to my little sister. She will love you as much as I do."