Disclaimer: I own nothing of the Twilight world, and am not profiting from the writing of this fan fiction.
Dedicated to Alice, my partner in crime and fellow nerd. DFTBA.
Chapter One - Mary Alice
Her name was Mary Alice, she loved the smell of fresh grass and flowers, her favourite time of the day was dawn, and her favourite colour was pink.
It was her mantra, something she would repeat to herself over and over throughout the day so she wouldn't forget who she was. It was easy enough to forget who you were when you were in here, when all you had to focus on was the darkness and the pain of the treatment. It was easy to lose yourself. So she repeated her mantra, whispering it into her flimsy little pillow until she fell asleep dreaming of the daisies her sister had grown in little pots that covered the windowsill in their old bedroom. Her name was Mary Alice, she loved the smell of fresh grass and flowers, her favourite time of the day was dawn, and her favourite colour was pink.
She had grown up in Mississipi, in a small town called Biloxi. Ever a bright and smiling child, she was loved by her family and though they didn't have much in the way of money, Mary Alice and her sister Cynthia wanted for nothing. It was true that she had been an unusual child, prone to day dreaming and giggling to herself seemingly for no reason at all. And she never did have much of a filter, saying the first thing that popped into her mind, whether or not she even had any right to know it. Her grandfather always said chalked it up to her intelligence, said she was too bright, too perceptive for her own good, and that one day she would say something that would get her in trouble. But Mary Alice remembered that he always said it with kindness, smiling down at her, smelling of mint and tobacco and lemons.
As she grew older, Mary Alice's oddities became less endearing and more troublesome. As a child, she needn't bother with a filter because children were known for occasionally saying sudden and inappropriate things. It wasn't until she was older that Mary Alice needed to learn to mind her mouth and her manners, that sometimes people wanted their private life kept private. It wasn't until she was older that Mary Alice needed to learn that it unnerved people that she knew their secrets with stunning accuracy, and that she knew how their secrets would get them in trouble. But just because she needed to learn, didn't mean that she ever did learn, and slowly but surely Mary Alice alienated those around her.
Mary Alice's slow descent from sweet, but unusual child to calculating mistress of the devil began with her sister. Cynthia, a mischievous child who was often caught stealing sweets or little trinkets such as hair ribbons, resented Mary Alice for never joining in the fun. She always seemed to know that Cynthia was going to get caught, and exactly what her punishment would be. At first Cynthia thought she was a tattletale, trying to get her in trouble so she could be the glorious favourite child, and as she grew older she found new words to hurt her sister with. Tattletale, bonehead, grouser gave way to more painful names like changeling, dingbat, floozy, until one day she stumbled on to a fun, new word that would shape the rest of Mary Alice's existence: witch.
Of course just because Cynthia called her a witch didn't mean the others believed her. This was Biloxi, not Salem in the 1700s. Being accused of witchcraft didn't automatically mean the death penalty, not anymore. But as she grew older and her predictions more frequent Cynthia's accusation seemed to stick, until even her own parents were unnerved by her, unnerved by the things she had no right to know, and yet somehow did. Though she stopped sharing her predictions freely when she turned eight years old, they were still the object of town gossip years later. Her only ally, the only person to faithfully stay by her side, was her grandfather.
To Jonathan Brandon, Mary Alice was his little moppet, his bright star. That's not to say that he didn't notice her predictions, her oddities, just that he loved her despite them. They would spend hours each day curled up together in their gardens, watching the birds and telling tales about far away places and maidens being rescued by Southern gentlemen on horseback. Each time Mary Alice would say something odd, he would shush her, tell her to watch her tongue, and they would jump back into the fantasy world they had created that day. Some days they were in medieval England, some days they were in the Old West, and some days they were in a world of their own creation. Her grandfather was the only one who ever called her solely by her middle name, Alice, and he was the embodiment of everything good in her life.
The day she predicted his death was the day her little talent turned on her. Previously, she had always enjoyed having her visions; they were her secret little windows into the lives of people who never seemed to want to play with her anymore. This time was different, and it took away the only person she had left to her. She still remembered that day, even now, when she had almost forgotten everything else about her life in the Before. They were sitting in the garden, under the shade of her favourite maple tree, and her grandfather was telling her of a brave knight that was battling a ferocious beast that preferred the taste of children's blood. It was a terrifying story, but Mary Alice was safe in her grandfather's arms, safe surrounded by his permanent smell of mint, tobacco, and lemons. She had turned to him that day, just as his story was reaching its conclusion and the brave knight was about to spear the beast, her eyes vacant and unseeing. "Your heart will stop tomorrow. Bad things are going to happen, it's going to get dark." And that was when her tears began.
No matter how much he shushed her, or tried to convince her to return to the tale, Mary Alice would not be soothed. Inevitably, in the face of her daughter's distress, Mary Alice's mother found out about that little prediction and angrily banished her to spend the rest of the evening in her room. Ungrateful, she called Mary Alice. Rude. Unspeakably rude to distress her grandfather when he had only ever been kind to her. It did not matter where they sent her though, Mary Alice was inconsolable, convinced that her grandfather would die tomorrow and the world would go dark. Her visions were only wrong on rare occasions, and unfortunately, this was not one such case.
Jonathan Brandon passed away of heart failure April 2nd, 1914, when she was only thirteen years old. Amidst the mourning and heartbreak of her family, it was not forgotten that Mary Alice had predicted his death the previous day and somehow, his death was deemed her fault. The words were sewn onto her soul by a master seamstress; your fault, your fault, your fault. Her predictions were now no longer visions, uncontrollable windows into the future shown to her by the devil, but acts she could physically make happen through her own cruel will. And what an evil creature she must be, to wish death upon the only being to show her any kindness at all.
Her grandfather's passing catapulted her family into action. Mary Alice was no longer a harmless evil, a burden to bear, a stain on the family name; she became the personification of the devil, a practitioner of dark magic, a murderess. And so they sent her away, to the only place where one could dump an unmarried, troublesome girl in the early 1900s for no reason other than superstitious claims: an asylum. And truly, what proof did they need? She had visions. Whether they were real - and by now people long believed they were - or the product of an unstable mind, an asylum would take her regardless. Dumped into a small cell without even a little window, Mary Alice's vision did come to pass, and the world did in fact grow dark.
Darkness became her entire world, and the only time she would see the light was when they frog-marched her to the basement for her treatment, eyes streaming from the unforgiving brightness. That was the only time she ever uttered a sound, and she would scream, a sound so horrible it felt as though her ears were bleeding. With the exception of her treatments, she would sit quietly in a corner of her cell, listless and vacant. Gone were the days of fantasy tales with her grandfather, of watching the birds and learning each of their names. Now she was empty, living in her memories of the past, and worst still - she was forgetting. It was a gradual thing, the forgetting; it started with the name of one of her grandfather's regular characters, then it transcended into the names of her old classmates, until eventually all she had left were snippets of herself and all the things she held dear. So she would sit in her corner and repeat them, over and over, unwilling to forget the things she had left. Her name was Mary Alice, she loved the smell of fresh grass and flowers, her favourite time of the day was dawn, and her favourite colour was pink. She didn't even notice when the typhoid scare came to the asylum, didn't notice when they cut her hair into jagged strips that stuck up around her hair. Mad Mary, they called her. Mad Mary, not bright star, not little moppet.
And so time passed, the darkness and pain and screaming blending together until she was no longer aware of anything. She still had her visions, and she would lose herself in them - she saw Cynthia fall in love with a boy that had been in Mary Alice's class, she saw her mother's passing, her father's remarriage to a tall blonde woman he called 'mouse.' She saw everything, and yet the pain distanced her from it all until she felt nothing, and she felt as though she were watching the lives of strangers unfold. Her life continued in this fashion until one day she saw the arrival of a new doctor at the asylum, one with cold hands and a soft heart. Though his arrival went unheralded by most of the patients and staff, it upended her world and changed everything for her, for one sole reason: he was kind. She didn't know if he was kind to everyone, or if she was a special case, for each patient at the asylum was segregated into their own personal cell, but she came to welcome the hour each day he would spend with her.
At first his kindness went unnoticed; an extra piece of bread here, a thicker blanket there. Sometimes he would simply brush her hair, attempting to tame the wild locks that would stick out helter-skelter around her face. Eventually though, she caught on to his kindess, would see when he was able to visit, and would mentally prepare herself to see him, to ensure she was cognizant and able to listen to him. He would tell her stories, occasionally fictional, but mostly historical, and though she didn't always verbally reply to him at first, slowly Mary Alice taught herself how to speak again. For the first time since her grandfather's passing, Mary Alice had found a friend. She found herself confiding in him, telling him how her family was faring, and, ultimately, of her visions. It took a lot of trust before she gave that up, but he was a doctor at the asylum, and already knew of her sorcery, so what big secret was she really divulging? He didn't seem to care, and his kindness never wavered. He held her after her treatments, when her body would shake uncontrollably and her screams seemed as though they would never stop. He gently wiped the sweat from her brow, would whisper kind words into her ear and she slowly disappeared into herself and became numb, would bring her back from the brink of madness.
The day she died it was at his hand, and she felt as though she were finally being burned at the stake, as her sister so long ago promised her she would be. She had had another vision, and at first it felt as though she had indeed gone insane, or perhaps she had mistaken a vision for a memory of one her grandfather's stories, with the fantastical beasts and knights on horseback, and believed it to be reality. When her fear became too much to bear, she told her good doctor about the demon with the red eyes, the one who was coming to tear out her throat, who would rip her limb from limb and douse the walls with her blood. Tracker, she called him, and she knew he would find her and this would be the end of days. And then her good doctor did something she never thought him capable of: he killed her. He approached her slowly, apologizing profusely, and he threw her into the flames of hell, a million times worse than any treatment. And so Mary Alice lost herself, and she did the only thing she could think of, the only left to her: she repeated what she knew.
My name is Mary Alice, I love the smell of fresh grass and flowers, my favourite time of the day is dawn, and my favourite colour is pink.
AN: This is not a one shot, I'm hoping it's going to be a chapter story that follows Alice until she meets the Cullens. This was an introduction, so it's not all going to be written in this style, and hopefully the rest of the chapters will be longer. I hope you liked it!