interlude


It's a scary thing to watch someone spiral, Alice thinks as she walks by Ella's dorm room. Ella is currently standing in the middle of the room and - very much against Red Lily Hall rules - using magic to clean her room, purging nearly a whole month of dirt and darkness with easy twirls of her sleeve-covered wrists.

So different than before.

Alice is still perturbed by the fantastic memory - that night when she felt the banshee scream bubbling in her throat, the whispers chanting a lost girl's name, the tears in her mother's eyes when they both realized that Carlisle knew what was about to happen -

And then, the scream simply stopped. The urge to pierce the veil with her voice vanished. And the whispers - the whispers were silent.

Unnatural, she thought. But then she'd seen Ella, blood-stained beneath bronze skin with eyes of the palest grey, just hints of green and blue and flecked with brilliant, molten silver. Eyes that are much different now than they were before. Eyes that are narrowed by internal horrors, unless the irises are bleeding silver with a flux of magic, glowing strangely in the set of that angry face. Eyes that only suggested other changes Ella withstood after surviving the hag.

Haunted, she decided later once it became very clear that Ella wasn't coping well. Not even a little bit. Not even trying to cope well, it seemed.

And Alice doesn't know everything that's happened to Ella; it's not like Ella is chatty about her past or that Carlisle knows everything about what happened to her in the foster system. Alice can't know and she doesn't want to know. There is a difference, however, between being willfully ignorant and being obtuse and Alice, for the most part, is neither. She's curious, a finder of facts, a journalism major. It isn't as if it is difficult to search the right data bases and figure out that Ella's downward spiral isn't all that strange for foster kids - the part that is strange, however, is just how rapid the decline is. How completely Ella falls into a bottle, chases a high, lingers in the wickedness of her experience.

Alice becomes concerned.

Not because she's the Resident Advisor for Red Lily Hall. Not because Ella is important to Carlisle, like she led Ella to believe. Not even because Alice has a heart of gold. Alice would not admit it to anyone, but she had been worried for Ella - because as a banshee, she could sense how close Ella was tottering toward an early death - or rather, a second death.

It had been very disturbing to see Ella isolate herself and then turn to self-medication. A red flag, a cry for help if ever there was one - and much to her consternation, after it became apparent that Ella was pushing everyone else away, it fell to Alice to break through that impenetrable wall. Easier said than done. She hadn't been sure that anything she said broke through until her mother called in the middle of the night and asked that Alice retrieve some of Ella's belongings to be brought to Carlisle's house while Ella recuperated (which was her mother's kind way of implying work through withdrawal).

She hadn't been lying when she called Ella pathetic, or when she said she pitied the other girl. It was pathetic that someone so strong - and Ella is strong, probably stronger than Alice can comprehend - fall so low. To allow themselves to fall so low.

If Ella, who had been through hell and back, could sink, then what would become of Alice once her banshee gifts finally reached maturity?

Because Alice is - soft. She isn't eat-nails-for-breakfast hard like Ella. She simply doesn't think herself capable of pulling through even a tenth of the hand that has been dealt to the other girl. If Ella can't deal, then the chances are that Alice won't be able to deal, either.

The truth is that the whispers following her each day - heard only in her mind, the voices beyond the veil - are unimaginably challenging, both to listen to and tune out and comprehend. They never stop, the noise is always bee-buzz quiet, an ebb and flow followed by varying levels of urgency and then Alice will look down and cringe at the automatic writing or wonder at how she has gotten to a place without even realizing it. And that is…not okay with Alice.

Not at all. Because the whispers, the automatic writing, the physical scrying? That's all just the beginning and already Alice's gifts have outstripped her mother's. Alice is more accurate. Alice is more in-tuned. Alice is that much closer to losing her mind as her carefully controlled world doesn't contort itself just so.

Alice reaches her room and closes the door quietly behind her. Everything is in order, everything in it's place in a room of varying shades of white. Alice's favorite color - and the color symbolizing The White Lady, one of the eldest of Alice's banshee ancestors, and who Alice is almost certain she hears the loudest when the whispers reach a crescendo.

At the moment, the white of her room is blurring before her eyes as she loses focus, her maintained control finally slipping in the safety of her room. She shivers at the cold blowing across her neck, a pinprick of awareness stretching her ear drums -

Cousins play two by two on the shore, the whispers say. And on the shore one by one the cousins slay.

Alice slides onto her bottom, curling closer to her knees, counting her breaths as they grow heavy - weighed down, almost too hard to move. She feels like she's drowning, the phantom sensation of water lapping at her skin, and being pulled down, and gasping for air only to find water -

Cousins play two by two on the shore. And on the shore one by one the cousins slay.

Only one cousin swims to reach the day.


A/N: A bit of insight and a bit of foreshadowing.

On another note, mental illness is such a unique thing; nobody experiences anything quite the same as another. It's easy to say that a person with a mental illness should do this or that or just get over it or do the normal thing or whatever - but the thing is that mental illness is decidedly abnormal. I don't think that there was any "right" way for Ella to cope with what happened to her. This is the direction I decided to write her for various reasons and if you were uncomfortable with it or disagreed with it - then I think goal reached. It's a difficult perspective to get into the headspace for, so.

Also, thank you to a certain reviewer for all the lovely reviews.

As always, be brutally honest. I can take it.

~cupcakeriot