A/N: I'm sorry. I forgot I hadn't posted this part on Fanfiction. You'll be getting two chapters today then. My bad. This was my contribution to Fandom Against Domestic Violence. It is written about that subject so please remember that.
WARNING: This story contains violence and the after affects of it! If that makes you uncomfortable then please DO NOT READ!
Part One: Alice
I can't tell you what it really is I can only tell you what it feels like
And right now there's a steel knife in my windpipe
It was cold, but Alice didn't care. The chill was a reminder that she was alive. That she had made it out, that she had survived. If what you could call what she was doing surviving. She sank to the ground in the dirty alley and hugged her knees. She was so tired. She knew she needed to keep moving but she didn't think she had the strength. It felt like she'd been running forever, and she didn't know if she'd ever get far enough, if she'd ever put enough distance between herself and the memories.
I can't breathe but I still fight while I can fight
As long as the wrong feels right it's like I'm in flight
It was when it was dark that the memories really took a hold of her. When they nearly took over, clouding each of her senses till the world around her fell into the background leaving her soundly in a past she would much rather forget. She could remember each word, each sound, each excuse like it had just been given. It was like it was freshly imprinted on her brain in a permanent loop that replayed whenever she closed her eyes.
High of a love, drunk from the hate
It's like I'm huffing paint and I love it
The more that I suffer I suffocate
And right before I'm about to drown she resuscitates me
She really hates me and I love it.
She rubbed her hands up and down her jeans as she buried her face in her knees and waited for the onslaught. She'd been able to successfully keep the visions at bay by focusing on getting far enough away, but now that she had stopped, she knew it was only a matter of time. Colors flashed before her eyes. Red, white, green, red, blue, blond, red, red and more red. Then the voices started...
Where are you going?
I'm leaving you.
No you ain't.
Come back.
The shouting clouded all of her other senses. The voices of her mother and father becoming the only thing she could really hear. Her body began to quake as she hears the rattling of the siding mocking the loud timber of his voice. Though she knows he can't possibly have found her here, it still strikes her to her core. She had escaped. She had made it out knowing his secret and she knew it would only be a matter of time before he would start looking for her. Her freedom could only be guaranteed until he realized that she wasn't where she was supposed to be, still in his trap. She was only sixteen for god sake, she shouldn't have to deal with this. She should be worrying about her hair, if she was going make the cheer-leading squad, and if she was going to get asked to the winter formal. Not this. Never this…
We're running right back
Here we go again. It's so insane
All of a sudden, she was right back in the house. The place that had been her and her mother's prison for the last four years. It was a beautiful prison. Perfectly painted siding and beautiful burgundy shutters and a matching door. There was a perfectly manicured lawn that was the envy of all of the neighbors. The family that lived there to others would appear the picture perfect suburban family. A father who owned his own business, a stay at home mother whom everyone coveted her skills in the kitchen, and a daughter that was the perfect student. No one would know by looking that inside that perfect little house, there was a sleeping dragon ready to strike.
Cause when it's going good it's going great
I'm superman with the wind in his back she's Lois Lane
Life in the Brandon house hadn't always been bad. There had been a time when Alice had love and respected her father. She was her daddy's little girl. The apple of his eye, his little princess. She did everything a normal little girl did. She would play dress up and dance in the living room, and sit on her fathers knee as he read her stories from a book of fairytales. It wasn't until Alice turned thirteen that she realized that fairytales didn't exist. That was the first time she saw the bruises on her mother. The first time that she helped her mother clean up the cuts on her arms. The first time she realized that her father wasn't the man that she thought he was.
But when it's bad It's awful I feel so ashamed
I snap who's that dude. I don't even know his name
There were good days. Days when things were almost normal. Days when the promises and the money were abundant. However, those days were becoming fewer and fewer and the longer her father went without work, the louder the arguments were between him and her mother. There were suddenly more days when her mother was too "sick" to leave her room. But the only difference was now Alice was beginning to realize what was making her mother sick in the first place.
I laid hands on her.
I'll never stoop so low again
At first when Alice would see her in the bathroom trying to clean herself up, she would try to make excuses about each injury, but Alice wasn't stupid. She could hear the shouting, could hear the crack of her father's hand striking her mother's face. Eventually her mother stopped trying to hide what was really happening, but never stopped trying to downplay it.
After three years of picking up the pieces, Alice begged her mother to leave, but Alice might as well have been speaking to a brick wall. Her mother just kept telling her about how much it was her fault, about how he didn't really mean it, and how much he really did love her. It only angered Alice more that her mother wasn't fighting back, that she was just taking it, not only without a fight, but willingly taking on the blame for every slap and black eye.
"Momma, please. Don't you see what he's doing to you?" Alice would beg.
"We have no where else to go Alice," her mother would sigh and end the conversation every time. Alice wasn't ready to let it go so easily though. She was so angry that when her father got home from the bar that night, she told him that she knew exactly what was going on and she was going to go to the cops if he didn't stop. That was the first night that he'd hit her.
I guess I don't know my own strength
One night she was doing homework at the kitchen table when she heard the shouts coming from her parents bedroom. She tried to focus on the page in front of her and ignore them. It was only worse when she got involved, but instead of dissipating they only got louder and louder. Then she heard the sound that has haunted her nights every night since. The sound of her mother's cry followed by shattering glass. She ran to the bedroom without thinking. She threw open the door and her father stood there staring in the direction of the shattered window, his face absent of all color.
"Daddy?" She asked in a shaky voice. Her quiet question seemed to shake her father out his trance. He suddenly stormed out of the room pushing her into the wall with enough force to send her elbow through the drywall. "Daddy?" She called after his retreating form. Alice stared after him for only a moment before she remembered what had brought her to this room.
"Momma..." She whispered. There lying beneath the broken window in a pool of her own blood was her mother. In the distance she heard her fathers truck roar to life.
Just gonna stand there and watch me burn
But that's all right because I like the way it hurts
The Ambulance had came, but Alice knew it was already too late to save her mother. Her mother hadn't been strong enough to get away from her father, but Alice wasn't going to make that mistake. So she ran, slipped out the backdoor without the police noticing and she'd been running for days now. She'd been strong enough to get away, but she didn't feel strong right at this moment. Alice had never felt this weak and spent as she sat sobbing in this dirty dingy ally remembering he mother's last moments of life.
Just gonna stand there and hear me cry
But that's alright because I love the way you lie
"Hello?"
She heard a voice from the mouth of the alley call down. She saw the outline of a man coming toward her and her survival instinct kicked in and she ran. It only got her so far. The direction she thought would lead her to freedom, ended up being a short alley that ended in a dead end. The man was following her. She figured that this was it, that she'd only escaped her father to die in an alley from an unknown assailant. She cowered as far as she could in the corner. The brick of the building scraping against her cold skin. Her eyes had adjusted to the dark of the alley and she could see that he was advancing to her with his palms turned to her in a surrender posture.
"It's okay. I won't hurt you. I'm the preacher at the mission. One of the patrons said they heard crying from the alley." He stepped closer and she could see the large silver cross hanging from his neck. She looked up into his blue eyes and saw that they were gentle and soft. Then as he took her in they widened. "Oh my child, what happened?"
Alice couldn't respond. She didn't even know how to answer that question. Just thinking about it brought on another wave of tears and she crumbled with the weight of her grief.
I love the way you lie
I love the way you lie
The preacher reached for her and this time she didn't run from him. He took her in his arms, not even flinching at the fact that she was covered in dried blood and filth from the alley and the others that had been her stops along the way. The kind man held her and whispered to her, trying to comfort her without even really knowing why she was crying. Alice began to feel exhausted and her eyes drooped closed. She vaguely registered that they were moving, that the preacher was carrying her somewhere but she couldn't find it in herself to care as she cried into his shirt and clutched him like he was her lifeline.
She did know when they entered the mission though. It was warm and her cool skin stung from the difference in temperature. "Oh my…" she heard a soft voice exclaim.
"Esme dear…could you draw up a bath please. The poor thing is chilled to the bone. I don't want her to get pneumonia. But not too full my love. I had to give her something to calm her. She's nearly asleep as it is."
That was the last thing Alice heard the preacher say before she drifted into the only restful sleep she'd had in months.
Just gonna stand there and watch me burn
and that's all right because I like the way it hurts
Just gonna stand there and hear me cry
That's alright because I love the way you lie
I love the way you lie