A/N: I am not totally happy with the way this chapter turned out, but it is nice to move away from writing the "Emison fluff" and return to the mystery. Spalison is wicked cool to write for. Let me know how you feel about the chapter by leaving a review, if you please. They warm my heart. Give me your theory on which Alison you think is the real Ali.


Spencer strolls down the dark streets of Rosewood at two in the morning, headed for the DiLaurentis house. All the lights have gone to bed along with their owners, leaving only the eerie clacking of her black suede buckle boots. "I should have worn quieter shoes," she mumbles to herself. The only other soul still fully conscious on Grovewood boulevard is a white Persian cat, who watches Spencer from across the street, occasionally licking himself in between stares. The night is cold and a slight fog hangs in the air. You can still see pretty far into the distance, but eventually the world disappears into the white mist.

The Hastings girl hurries the pace, and rounds the corner to the street she shares with Alison. As she nears the home, she steps a little more cautiously, trying not to let the heels hit the ground with such force, and wake up the Mister and the Misses. Just as Spence is about to turn the front door nob, a flashlight shines in her eyes from the side of the porch. She turns to find Ali starring at her with an unimpressed grimace. The blonde is not wearing her usual flowery and flowing attire, but a practical plain pink t-shirt and gray hoodie, with a sensible pair of jeans.

Ali pulls the hood off her long blonde hair and quips, "You had to wear those boots? You couldn't have worn quieter footwear? I could hear you coming from all the way down the block." She reaches down on the rocking chair and zippers up a small black duffle bag, handing it to Spencer.

"I'm sorry," Spence whines in a voice that is barely a whisper, "I've never done this before. I don't automatically know what shoes to wear for a caper." She unzips the bag Ali gave her, and peaks inside, spotting with the dim porch light shining down on what looks like a small crowbar and a pair of back-up flashlights.

Ali reaches behind the rocking chair and comes back up with a pair of shovels in both hands. "It's not a caper, Spence," Ali corrects in an emotionally tired tone, "We're desecrating someone's grave." The regular self-confidence in her demeanor is no longer present ever since Emily went missing this morning. Playful mastery of the situation has been replaced with annoyed frustration. Alison is no longer this mythical being. She has fallen to earth, so ordinary, so human. No more glowing skin like Moses off the mountaintop. "So, I take it the other girls aren't coming?," Ali asks, fully knowing the answer.

"I just came from Aria's but she was too scared to sneak in the cemetery. She looked like she was about to pee her pants," Spencer tries to defend the other girls, "Hanna wouldn't even answer my texts she's so frightened." The blonde nods her head in disappointed acceptance. "Can you blame them Ali?", Spencer expresses a little too loudly, "I'm not even sure we should do this. I mean, this is highly illegal, like cops, sirens and handcuffs illegal. Can't we just tell the police and have them do this?"

"Are you backing out on me?," Ali snaps at the slightly taller brunette, dropping the shovels to the floor, "Don't wait till we're standing over my sister's grave. If you're gonna run away like a scared little girl, then do it now." Ali ferociously snatches the duffle bag from Spencer's weak grip. "I'll save Em myself," Ali growls, her eyes burning holes into Spencer's, "I guess I was wrong. I really can't count on you guys when it comes down to it." Ali turns on a heel down the porch, but Spencer quickly jumps out in front of her.

"Ali, Ali," Spence shouts, "That's not what I'm saying." She places her hands, palms out, in front of Alison to stop her from leaving, determination in her eyes. "We're all just scared, okay. We're only fifteen for God's sake. We should be worrying about dates to the dance and broken fingernails, not kidnappings. I don't even know how to process this. Can we just take a second?" Spencer runs her hands through her hair in frustration, pushing it back briefly in the shape of a ponytail. But, she picks up the shovels in a show of continued solidarity with the mission at hand.

"You don't think I'm scared too?," Ali says much more softly, "I'm freaking terrified, okay?" She bites her lip trying to hold back the tears that are forming in her eyes. Spencer places a comforting hand on her elbow to physically demonstrate her understanding. "So, yeah, I'm worried about getting in trouble for breaking into a cemetery," Ali shrugs, "But I'm a hell of a lot more scared for Emily. We have to find her." The blonde's eyes are pleading the other girl, now—no more fury, only fear.

Spencer quickly gives Ali's hand a reassuring squeeze, "We're gonna find her. I promise. And things will go back to exactly the way they were before. The five of us against the world. Hastings don't lose. It's biologically predetermined in our blood."

With a sad smile from Alison, the two girls head off down the road, one carrying the shovels, the other the black duffle bag. One car passes them by on an adjacent street, but the town of Rosewood is almost dead at night. Unless Noel Khan is throwing one of his famous parties, most do not stay up past midnight, especially on a school night. And, classes start in only six hours. Great! It looks like Spence and Ali are going to be chugging caffeine to compensate for the lack of sleep. Even if they make it back before four, there is no way any sleep will come after grave robbery. This event will be giving them nightmares for weeks to come.

After a few minutes walking down the twisted roads in peaceful silence, Spencer proffers her voice to ask the one question everyone has been dying to know the answer to, "Why didn't you ever tell us you had a twin sister?" Ali had given the girls the mere fact that she has a secret twin named, Courtney DiLaurentis, and that she was potentially dangerous and that the poor girl was dealing with a whole host of mental problems. No details were mentioned to the three, nor any motivation for why Courtney would want to abduct sweet, innocent Emily. How was Emily connected to this at all?

Alison takes a few more strides without speaking, before she pauses her gait and shyly twists her head to look only at the other girl's shoes. "I thought she was dead," Ali coos resuming slow steps forward, "I loved her, but she was... was... not safe to be around. She suffered from an unstable personality disorder: violent outbursts, sick fantasies." Ali reaches into her front pocket and pulls out a picture in almost perfect condition, giving it over to Spencer. It shows the two twin sisters, not much older than nine, hugging and laughing with bright smiles. "So you know I'm not the crazy one making this whole tale up," Ali comments, "I never told you girls about Court, because she died before we moved here. Before I met the four most important people in my life. Nine to twelve were some of the roughest years of my life, watching her self-destruct like that. It tore our family apart. Mom and Dad were fighting all the time on how to handle it. My Dad wanted her put into Radley Sanitarium for her own safety, but Mom thought that was too harsh a punishment. Dad won out in the end. Mom still thought disconnecting her from her family would only end badly, and the yelling never stopped. I just wanted to forget. I just wanted to forget it all, so I pretended to the world like it never even happened."

"Did it? End badly? How did she... die?", Spencer continues the questions cautiously, heart breaking inside upon learning Ali's tortured and shadowed past. Maybe that is why Alison constantly prevents even her best friends from getting too close? Why Alison has built a castle wall with a moat full of alligators around her true soul and rarely showed the slightest glimmer of weakness.

The brilliant blonde swallows and clears her throat before responding, clearly choked up, "On our, um, twelfth birthday, the staff at Radley granted her a temporary day pass to celebrate at home. She was showing marked improvement and they thought it would be all right. Everything was perfect. It was so good to celebrate our birthday together like we used to when we were kids. She was happy. She was different. I thought that I was finally gonna get my other half back, you know? We were inseparable from birth until my parents sent her away from me. But that night when I went to tell her to come blow out the birthday candles with me, I pushed open the door to our room with this stupid smile beaming across my face, all in dorky anticipation, and I found her collapsed on the floor with an empty bottle of prescription meds."

Spence is lost for words. The vivid details with which Ali recounts her own traumatic childhood is almost too horrible for language to properly convey. She tugs on Ali's arm and gets her to stop walking. Spencer leans in and locks her arms around Alison like she never wants to let go. "I am never gonna yell at you again, or say anything bad ever again," Spencer promises in the heat of the moment.

"It's okay," Ali replies, "It was a long time ago, and I made my peace with it." She withdraws from the pitying arms of the other girl and rolls her eyes, "Or, at least I thought I did."

"But this doesn't make sense, if Courtney killed herself," Spencer critiques, not quite sure how to wrap her brain around this deeply disturbing mess of a life, "Then how is it possible you think she is the one who kidnapped, Emily?" She taps her foot on the asphalt and adds, "Ghosts aren't real and they sure don't abduct people."

"Because I didn't see her die," Ali defends her crazy conspiracy theory, "When we took her to the hospital, she was still barely alive. Her vitals were fading, but when they rushed her into the emergency room, nobody else was allowed in. My parents were so numb to her through all the hell of the last year, that they didn't even go in to see the body. Frankly, they were kind of relieved it was all over. They just spent their energy consoling me." Ali looks up at Spencer with big sad eyes, "She died for them a long time ago."

The brunette studies her like she does not quite believe her. "It's the only possibility, Spence," Alison pleads with her, "It is the only way short of someone taking my DNA and cloning me that Emily could have thought she was running away with me, when I'm standing right in front of you." She motions with her hands to present the corporeality of her body, "I don't wanna believe it any more than you do, but it's the least absurd of all possibilities right now."

"But why Ali?," Spender returns, a little flustered herself, expressing all her emotions through flailing motions, "Why would Courtney even care about Emily? How would she even know about her? Why would she even risk all of this to run away with Em? It doesn't make any sense."

"Courtney suffered from paranoid delusions," Ali defends, imitating an explosion of her brain with both hands, "She pretended to be me all the time to the point where she actually convinced herself that she was the real Alison sometimes. Imagine how you would feel if you were the one twin who had to be locked up for years in the nuthouse. You'd probably identify with your twin also. You'd probably wish that you were the other twin. Who wouldn't, and with her psychoses, which were never fully contained by the antipsychotic drugs by the way, it makes sense." Alison raises her voice again, to the point where a house light turns on at the commotion, "She could have been watching us for the last couple years. She could have been watching our every move. She could have even seen Emily and I making out at the kissing rock or wherever. Without her medication there is no telling what she is capable of."

Spencer takes her hands and gently places them on Ali's shoulders. "Calm down, okay, you're going to wake the whole neighborhood," she soothes.

Ali violently shakes Spencer off of her and shouts back in an even louder voice, "No, you need to start freaking out! As much as I love her, Courtney is a ticking time bomb. And she could really hurt Emily. I mean she could accidentally kill her, Spence." Ali's hands are shaking violently from all the emotional energy coursing through her, "Let's just get to the cemetery, prove that I am not crazy, and then find them before something happens that we can't undo." She storms off toward the cemetery, not looking back, with Spencer in hot pursuit calling after her to no avail.

Alison makes it to the tall, harrowing gates, before Spencer can catch up to her. She places the duffle bag on the pavement and fumbles around inside it before pulling out a small but sturdy pair of bolt cutters. The brunette finally huffs and puffs all the way up the path, bending over to catch her breath. Ali ignores her and after some struggling, manages to break the small lock with the lucky pair of red and black bolt cutters. She peals the lock off the gate and tosses it in the bushes. The entire cemetery is fenced in, so it is either climbing over the twenty foot wall or breaking and entering. The latter seemed much less dangerous. Ali pushes the gates open sending a shrieking whine from the hinges across the dark expanse of land. A gargoyle on the top of a large sepulcher watches the two little girls as they step foot into the abode of the dead.

"My God," Spencer quips sardonically, "All this place needs is a sign, 'Abandon all hope ye who enter.'" Yet, Ali is not paying much attention to what the brunette is babbling. Spence checks her left and her right, and behind every few seconds, as if a monster were ready to spring out at them any moment. Sadly, the only monsters are those who come formed in the Image of God. But, try being perfectly rational in a graveyard at three in the morning."You remember where Courtney is buried?" This earns her a simple nod from the queen bee, who points their way down the path to the right.

As they pass countless tombstones, Spencer mouths the names and dates carved into the rock. Thankfully, most of the inhabitants died at a nice old age. The ones which read "beloved child" she passes over without mumbling the name under her breath. Her boots are even louder here, with the echo reflecting off of the high mausoleums. Ali tries to lighten the mood, and jokes, "Heh… your boots might actually be loud enough to wake the dead. If we find ourselves in the middle of a Resident Evil filmin a few minutes, I'm never gonna let you live it down."

Spencer lets out a pitiless chuckle, "You're such a boot bully."

Alison freezes in her tracks and Spencer stops short, coming up right beside her. "It's right over here," Ali points reminiscent of the Ghost of Christmas Future, "If I remember correctly. I haven't visited in a couple years. I guess that makes me a terrible sister, huh, but it was so much easier to leave the past buried, no pun intended." It is almost as if the tombstone rises up out of the ground to greet Spencer in a total Alfred Hitchcock effect. "Well, I guess there's only one thing left to do," Ali announces. She takes one of the shovels from the Hastings, making a hasty sign of the cross, before breaking ground.

Spencer takes a deep breath before plunging her shovel into the wet earth. Load after load of dirt is scooped out lowly but surely by the two girls, trying not to get caked in dirt themselves. "What do we do if we open this up and your sister's body is in there?," Spencer muses equally to Ali as to herself.

"Well, then we will have broken into and defiled my sister's grave for nothing and have to live with that decision for the rest of our lives," Ali retorts, throwing a heap of earth a little too close to Spence, "But it'll also mean we have no freakin' idea what happened to Emily, where she could possibly be. We'll have nothing to find her with."

"And what if you're right," Spence finishing asking the other side of the question, "What if there's no body in the casket?"

"Then, my sister is alive," Ali says terribly matter of factly, resting her elbow on the shovel handle, and taking a brief respite from the manual labor of digging with this petite shovel, "And she has our Emily." Spencer keeps on digging, glancing up periodically to let Alison know she is still keeping her attention. "Look," Ali says as if casually confessing her sins to a priest over coffee, "I know I'm a bitch most of the time. I am so far from the perfect friend to you girls. But I want you to know, that if it came down to it, I'd choose you over her." Spencer ceases the sacrilegious activity and stands up to search Ali's soul through her wobbly pupils. "I'm not going to let her take all of you away from me one at a time," Alison continues, "I am not going to let her hurt the one girl I… the one girl I've ever been crazy about. I love Court, but if she hurts you girls, I will do whatever it takes, even if it means…", she trails off not wanting to admit she might be forced to put down her own sister if she became uncontrollably violent.

Alison takes up the shovel one more time and strikes it into the ground. She hits something solid. The two girls look at each other in disbelief. "Are we really gonna do this?," Spence questions one last time, "No going back, I guess." Ali bravely goes first, jumping the step down into the hole. Spencer hesitates, but then skips down next to Alison, helping her to clear off some of the dirt still on top of the casket. She stands back as Ali takes the crowbar and begins prying the lid open.

Something snaps and Ali begins clawing at the edge. With a series of grunts, Ali forces the lip up, pulling it back as she stands. Spencer gasps in horror at the sight. There is nothing in the casket except an envelop with the names "Spencer Hastings" and "Alison DiLaurentis" scribbled on the back. The girls exchange a panicked glance, before Ali bends over to pick up the card. She undoes the old-timey sealing wax and removes the card inside. In blood red letters it reads: "Sorry, Courtney's not here. Oh, where oh where has my little Court gone, oh where, oh where can she be? — Kisses, 'A'".

"Oh my God," Ali exclaims dropping the note to the empty tomb. Spencer protests for more with her shifting eyes, clearly not making the connection. "Courtney's 'A'," she explains but still detects the bewilderment on the brunette 's wrinkled brow, "I have been getting threatening notes ever since last years' Halloween. I brushed it off back then and I didn't tell you girls the truth, because I didn't wanna scare you over nothing. But, they were all signed 'A'". Alison shakes Spencer by the shoulders trying to physically force the words to sink in." The blonde twirls around, palms pressed to her forehead collecting all the thoughts rushing though her head. "She's been planning this all along," Ali continues ranting, "It all makes sense now. She was always jealous of you guys whenever I would come to visit and show her the pictures. She tried to scare me away with all these threats so she could replace me, steal my life, but it never worked. So she settled for taking Emily away in the only way she knew how."

The deafening sound of a flashing bulb from one of those postwar cameras reverberates across the night air. Then, the sound of a film reel comes into focus. The girls look too and fro around the cemetery in panic, and their eyes finally fixate on the projected image beginning to form on the side of one of the large mausoleums. The movie is still a dark, blurred image, but the giggles of children can distinctly be heard. The picture finally becomes intelligible as two girls hold each other's hands, smiling for the camera. "Happy birthday, Court," the one blonde says to the other, giving her a big kiss on the cheek. Spencer covers her mouth in shock. "We'll always be best friends," the young Ali affirms. The two of them chant the mantra together, "Sisters by chance, friends by choice."

Beep. Beep. Both Spencer and Alison's phones cry out. They shyly reach into their pockets to check the new text messages. They read them aloud in unison, "Play hide and seek with me, bitches. Come and find Em and me, or I will mutilate her. — 'A'". A picture is attached to the text, but Spencer is frozen in place, too afraid to open it. Ali summons the courage and hits the button. Both hold each other tight when the image loads, showing a picture of Courtney with her arm wrapped around Emily's shoulder. The girls look totally blissful and without the sinister subtext, it would be a perfectly darling selfie. "Oh my God," Spencer whispers to the darkness, "She definitely has her."

A popping sound booms from the distance and two canisters of teargas land at their feet. The white smoke quickly envelops them down inside the grave. Spencer adroitly drops to her knees to recover the note to keep as evidence, feeling inside with her hand. "Cover your mouth," Alison orders, tugging on Spencer's hand and lifting her up out of the open grave. The smoke burns their eyes and invades their lungs despite the attempt to protect them by pulling their shirts over their mouths. Spencer trips on a rock, but Ali turns back for her, lifting her back to her wobbly feet, shouting, "Come on." The two girls run as fast as they can out of the cemetery not bothering to pick up any of the tools left at the scene of the crime.

Once outside the gates, Spencer and Alison topple to the ground trying to catch their breath, even though each inhalation burns their lungs. "I can't believe Courtney is doing this to me," Ali cries, feebly swatting at the ground, finally allowing herself to fall apart, "How could she?" Spencer wraps herself around the blonde making sure she is not injured. In a much more mousey and timid voice, Ali continues, "this… this… she's going out of her way to hurt me this time, and I can't. Why is she doing this?" There are no answers the brunette could possibly give, so she settles for rocking the Dilaurentis back and forth. "It's like she wants to punish me for having you four in my life," Ali says sending chills across the other girl's skin.

Spencer grabs Ali's hand and pulls her into an erect posture. "We can't stay here," she declares, frantically eying all directions, "We can figure it out in a much safer place." Another smaller side gate creeks open, seemingly on its own. "Let's just say I believe you a hundred percent now," Spencer confesses, as a human-shaped shadow moves on the pavement, "We gotta go, now!" She drags Ali along with her, until they are both sprinting down the road, back towards home, as fast as they can manage together.