Flashback: Mystic Falls, Virginia. 1864.
"Papa, where are you going?" Alice was smiling as she ran down the stairs, skirts flying and dark curls trailing in her wake. "Can I come with you?"
"Only to the Fell's, my little angel. Only business. It would bore you." Giuseppe Salvatore smiled fondly at his daughter but his face was still taunt and his grip on his walking stick stiff. Stefan was behind their father, obediently waiting to leave. Alice knew exactly what was happening. They were going to the Fell's to talk about vampires and how to kill them. How to kill Pearl and Henry and Katherine and, well, her.
"But why is Stefan allowed to go with you. I want to come."
"Another time, my angel. Come, Stefan."
Stefan was watching his sister with condescending kindness. She could feel his thoughts, the simple "oh, Alice, how little you know," that was so obvious to her.
Perhaps it was a testament to how well she knew her brother, or how drastically her capability to perceive little details had changed. Alice had always been perceptive— to survive as she did in society in Mystic Falls one had to be extraordinarily perceptive— but the keen sense that came with being a vampire only aided this. And now she knew that no one in her family had any suspicions of her true nature or quite how far the vampires reach had spread in their little town. She also knew this was her only chance to attain any information she could need before Katherine could get her claws on it.
"Please, Papa," she begged, sliding between him and Stefan as the exited the front door. She caught the stiff fabric of the sleeve of her father's finely cut jacket and clung to it. "Please, I want to come, and I'm so dreadfully bored with Miss Katherine so often indisposed."
"I've already told my answer, my darling girl. Go find Damon and ask him to entertain you. The boy isn't good for much else."
Alice ignored the flare of her temper not only at her father's cruel words but also the mention of her brother. Damon was the reason Katherine happened to be too busy to teach her new fledgling the tricks of the trade.
"But, Papa-"
"Enough, Allessandria. My decision is final, and your insolence will not continue. Come, Stefan."
Stefan spared her another pitying glance before following. Alice wondered if he knew that the faint spots of blood on his neck were entirely visible under the high, starched collar he'd so desperately used to covered it.
"Idiot," she grumbled to herself, stomping up the stairs to find her latest book, "He's going to get us all killed, himself included."
Inspired by the Stefan Diaries.
Just some 19th Century Alice to tide you all over.