Symbiosis
Disclaimer
Stephenie Meyer owns Twilight and its characters. No profit is being made from this story.
1956
"Alice?"
Alice knows exactly what he's going to ask. Don't, Edward.
"But-"
"Just don't, okay?"
It's still unnerving to Edward, having someone else in his head when he's used to being in others', but he doesn't complain. The first thing Alice taught him – by example – was discretion. They are good with secrets, being privy to them nearly every moment of their lives without respite. Leaving things unsaid makes their gifts bearable.
"I worry about you," Edward confesses.
"You don't need to." Alice looks up. She had been sketching, a dark room with a single bed, iron bed frame and crisp white sheets. She smiles at Edward. "I'm happy. I'm safe. I don't feel a need to know about my past, so why would you?"
He glances at her drawing, precisely detailed in places but with the majority cast in profound shadow. "You know that's a lie."
Edward doesn't enquire often, but every few months he decides to ask Alice about her life before. What was her life like as a human? Where did she live? How old was she when she was changed? Who changed her?
She never answers. She never even lets him ask the question.
Edward can see inside of her though. When he decides to ask, her mind is as blank on the subject as his is. This scares him.
He tells himself he's scared for her, that something so bad could have happened to her that her mind, even as a vampire, won't let her remember. Rosalie suffered an ordeal herself, but remembers like the first time she saw Emmett. Edward remembers, too, in diamond-hard detail.
But Alice…
She's a blank sheet of paper, waiting to be sketched in.
There's a subconscious worry that she's already mastered a defence against his talent, and at first he worried that she had something to hide, but he knows that's a trivial concern. He pushes the thought away and concentrates on her hands, snow white and ice cold, smooth as a clear winter's day and more powerful than the vicious storm she saw coming this evening.
They are at an impasse. Edward is watching Alice's hand hover over her drawing, but the pencil is stationary between her fingers.
They are still for a long time. The sun sets. That was the strangest thing about becoming a vampire – the irrelevance of time passing, how it would sometimes hobble past like the old man he would never be, and the rest of the time it would flee with effortless agility like the gazelle he hunted.
Alice's pencil didn't move, not even a tremor, but her lips did when the only light in the room was the glow of the dwindling fire. "Nothing."
"Hmm?"
Alice's word out of nowhere caught Edward by surprise. She answers verbally before he can make sense of the jumble in her head.
"Nothing. I remember nothing of my human life. My first memory is of me, like this, and I saw Jasper's face. And that's it."
The last word is breathy; if they were human, she would sniff, blink back tears. They're not. Alice's fist clenches and the pencil she was grasping snaps, the section inside her palm crumbling to dust. Edward takes the two ends and discards them with perfect, blind aim into the embers of the dying fire. The dust he ignores.
He grips Alice's hand. She grips back with both hands.
"One day, I'll find out for you," he promises.
Notes
Thank you to Kyrene, as ever, and allysue08 for playing middle-of-the-night beta. For Shereebedee, as ever. The next is my favourite so far.
