There is desperation in her, burning and violent. The sad kind, that makes her joints ache and burn; the kind that makes her feel stretched and violent. So, so violent. She could kill someone. She feels like the fangs at her neck are growing everywhere on her body like an infection.
She could bite the world off in one clean clench of her jaws.
"You will live, love." Says a voice. All her body is on fire; she is burning too hot and too quick. Something is wrong. The malevolent sort of wrong that steals infants from the arms of their mothers in the middle of the night and steals pretty girls out of darkened streets at night. It smells heavy, like death and magnolias. How desperately she prays to the unspoken thing above her that she wrestles with for her life. What life? What has she lived? All that she is can be summed in the sensation of fire; so hot it's cold.
"Oh Alice," in the midst of the flames, she opens her eyes to the lure of the low southern voice. An angel, a blond angel scarred and broken, has crawled into her grave with her. She wants to reach out and pet his hair, for his grief is as potent to her as anything she feels, but she cannot move. He presses his cold face to her chest, where no breath enters. Shudders wrack his scarred body, his cheeks cut from slabs of moonstone and too clear, too translucent, too jagged and broken. "Oh Alice," he whispers, no tears on his monstrously beautiful face. "I wish I didn't want this."
She dies.
Alice is very cold, and very stiff. She fells kind of like she was shoved through a blender with the top off and splattered everywhere.
She groans.
"Hello?" Calls a soft male voice, and she squishes her sleepy face together. Her mouth is filled with sand; her whole body has been laying in a desert for days and she's been covered in the shifting sand dunes by rough winds.
"Hurgh," She groans again. "Ugh." It's the only thing she can do right now.
"Water?" Kindly asks the man. Nothing has ever sounded better to her.
"Ahh."
The cool drink seems like the elixir of life; in moments, she can taste that she hasn't brushed her teeth in way too long—wow, she hadn't even realized she couldn't taste for a minute there—and smell the antiseptic smells of a hospital. The lids of her eyes still won't lift, not for lack of trying. She's wrinkling her face up like a prune trying.
"I'm Dr. Cullen, and you're in the hospital." Well duh, she can smell the overpowering, chemically clean, place even in her semi-functional state.
"Hi." She grunts out. Her chest feels heavy and oddly empty. It takes too much air for her to say such a simple thing—she's actually winded. Her inhale sounds like a rusty truck backfiring, and she promptly hacks out all the burning sand.
The coughing continues, and she jolts upright. Her eyes water as if to quench the fire in every other part of her. The water pushes them open in a harsh world of white and fluorescent lights. There is no sand coming out of her. There is nothing coming out of her, she can't get in a gasping breath before another hack tears through her. A cold, hard something hits her on the back.
Once, twice, it hits her just as she begins a fit and pushes the air out faster.
Stars swim in her eyes.
Cold hands tip her back onto the bed. Her mouth is held open.
She hopes silently that no-one ever has to have their mouth held open while they're coughing, because it just feels like she's gagging and choking all at the same time. Then one hand is pinning her jaw open and the other is shoving something down her throat. It is worse than choking with her mouth open.
The tube—because it it's either a tube or someone is shoving a cold iron rod into her—reaches a deep part of her chest. She falls entirely still.
She does not breathe.
And then, just when her vision is gone and she can no longer taste the staleness of her mouth, air rushes into her lungs like inhaling in the middle of a snow storm. So cold, but the kind of internal cleanse that can only be found in sub-zero climates.
Alice lays there for a long time, swallowing every few moments to get a sense of her new tube.
"Are you feeling better?" Asks the doctor after a long time.
"Yes." Her voice is thinned. The tube takes up space where she would normally be able to produce sound.
"I'm Carlisle Cullen, your doctor." What an old-fashioned name.
"Okay." She is fine with that. Doctors are good. Hospitals are fairly bad, but right now she's looking for positives. Reasonable thought is coming back to her in spits and spasms, like she's seizing her way back to the land of the living. Right now, she is pushing aside some vague looming fear in favour of not thinking too much. There is a thunderstorm of panic lurking in the back of her head, but it's mushed between her head and the plastic-y hospital sheets, safely pushed out of the way. She is curious though, about where she is. And why she hurts so much. "Where am I?"
"You're in the Port Angeles Hospital." Calmly answers Dr. Cullen.
She nods. None of those words mean anything to her.
Before she can ask, Dr. Cullen is filling her in. "You're in rough shape. You've been out for two days—please don't worry, that was medical sedatives—and are currently waking up from a heavy dose of anaesthesia. Are you in any pain?"
"I can't really feel my legs. Or arms." Her voice is high and very thin.
"Loss of kinaesthetic sense is completely normal." He reassures her, and she nods like she knows what 'kinaesthetic sense' is.
"I have a few questions," he begins, and then hesitates. She looks at him for the first time, and gasps. He's beautiful, like he stepped out of a rococo painting and into the white light of the hospital. His skin is white and perfectly smooth, his eyes are golden like warm liquid honey, and his hair is golden too, just a shade fairer than his eyes. "what is your name?"
A marble statue missing an arm, broken clean at the shoulder. "Alice!" he shouts, and springs to life to run to her.
Thankfully the tube is breathing for her, because she is utterly entranced by the doctor's face and forgot to inhale. "A-Alice." She stutters out.
"Alright Alice, what is your surname?" That's odd, she can't remember. When she thinks, her head just echoes back 'Alice' over and over.
"I don't think I know." The thundercloud is coming closer.
She sits up, and it leaps from its confines to swarm around her head.
She cannot remember anything.
There is nothing in her head, nothing like a big black void staring at her from the screen of a dead TV. She is utterly alone in this hospital bed. She cannot place a single bit of her life; there is no spark of family and no scenes of her at school—she feels like she's about that age—and wow, she doesn't even know how old she is! This is very bad, but oddly, she is feeling very different. Very… away from herself. As if she floated up and away from her body, up into the ceiling where she's hanging out with the ghosts that live there. Her and the ghosts.
She could be a ghost right now. Maybe she died and this is what the afterlife looks like—no Heaven, no Hell, just the angel of the doctor and infinite hospital beds. Dr. Cullen is definitely an angel with his infinite beauty and utterly white skin. He's like the marble statues of biblical scenes.
Suddenly, everything is black
Her, sitting on the floor of a big room, reading a book of pictures. Someone tall and cold is sitting next to her. His voice rumbles in her ear, indistinct but warm. His hand slides into the curve of her back and pulls her into him. She giggles, the sound high and pure like the tinkling of a bell. She tips off her knees and into the lap of the cross-legged man, who she looks up at with a glowing heart and pure adoration. He is carved from vein-less marble. Perfectly white and blond, chin-length curls reaching for her face below his. He is scarred like the side of a mountain; scarring like chips in stone running all over his face, his strong jaw, his furrowed brow, running down the tendons in his neck. He is roughhewn. His lips are like crushed roses.
She is in love.
There is sunlight streaming through a big glass wall behind her. Alice reaches up to tuck the curtain of blond waves behind his ear, and he gives her the slightest of smiles. Then he falls utterly still.
His skin (if you could even call it a weak word like skin) is illuminated like a diamond. Broken and cracked over each and every scar, like looking dead on into the sea of faucets in the centre of a well-cut diamond, the perfect centrepiece of a wedding ring. She longs to reach out and sooth them all, run her fingers down the side of his strong face and ease the creases from his forehead, wash the scars and their stories away with the pads of her fingers.
There's a ring on her finger. She can feel it, cold like the man that holds her, so gently, hands sliding up under her back to lift her, up, up, up to meet him—so close to his lips…
Alice blinks back into the hospital.
"Dr. Cullen," She says very seriously. "I think I just had a vision."
Alice is promptly hooked up to an EKG and then promptly declared sane. Dr. Cullen doesn't seem too worried about her, and if she could form proper sentences around him she'd voice her concern. She mumbles a lot about her head and arms and everything hurting, but he thinks she's fine. At least her mind is fine.
She sees the blond angel around every corner. He haunts her like a ghost, like her own personal demon. He watches her when she sleeps and talks, small fragments that she never remembers for long enough, when her visions come. All alone in the white, she clings to him for the colour in his amber eyes. It might be the hospital making her insane, but it could very well be the look in his eyes as he cried out her name.
Dr. Cullen comes in to visit her every night, taking little ten minute breaks from his never-ending stream of patients in the ER. She asks him once why he works here.
"I can help people," he responds, smiling up at her from over his clipboard. "I'd live here, if I could." His voice is tinged with regret.
"You seem to." Alice replies, fiddling with the edge of the blanket. "This blanket, it's…" but she trails off in the middle of her sentence, words lost to her. The sensation is unpleasant, the blanket rough, but she cannot describe what it does to her skin. The word is misty in her head, something like irritating or unkind. "It's rough, it makes my skin red. What's the word for that?" She looks at Dr. Cullen with wide eyes.
"Irritating?" He offers, but she shakes her head.
"No, not quite." Alice shakes her head, trying to dislodge the fog. "Ugh, I know you said my brain is fine, but I don't feel very 'fine'."
Dr. Cullen gently sets down his clipboard on the foot of her bed, and joins her on the bed, sitting next to her. "It's not uncommon to feel lost and confused, Alice. I'm genuinely surprised that you are doing as well as you are—it's remarkable that you're not more troubled."
She shoots him an unimpressed look. "Thanks, Dr. Cullen."
He sighs, and reaches out to tap one of the worse scabs on the side of her neck. "Alice, you are a very strong young lady." Her back stiffens, and she fades from the present.
"You… are trying to fight me?" Her blond angel questions, brows furrowed in the half-light of dawn in the living room with the big glass wall. They dragged in a couch from another room to fill the usually open space, a big and cushiony thing that she is currently perched perilously on the arm of. She teeters when she sticks her arm to wave a rolled-up magazine at him.
"On guard!" Alice shouts gleefully.
She blinks, and he is right in front of her, smirking. "Oh really, Alice?" He drawls, looking down at her with a predatory expression. She breaths deeply, but it only serves to fill her mind with the heady scent of magnolias and gunpowder, gunmetal. She sways even further.
"What was I doing?" She blinks up at him, thoughts completely scattered. He sweeps her off her feet in one instantaneous movement, his inhuman grace and strength lending him the effortless power to seduce her. Pressed into his neck like this, she wishes she would lean up and bite him, nibble on that delicious marble line, make her own mark on his marble skin. Instead, she smiles and kisses him softly. He pulls her into his chest, trotting off to the kitchen and rocking her slightly the whole way. Staying up the whole night is taking its toll—her eyes are sleepy, her former quest to fight him now diverted by her mission to stave off sleeping.
"Stop it." Alice swats his chest. "Don't make me sleepy." The delirium of tiredness increases, and she whacks him harder. "Ow." Hitting the marble man, very smart of her.
"You'll regret it later if you don't rest now." He warns.
"I like watching you when the sun comes up." She mutters, not ashamed in the least. "You glitter."
He tenses, hard skin becoming ridged with tendons tense. "It's not natural." In his anger, he accidentally lets the wave of sleepiness he's been pressing on her go.
Her brow furrows. "So?"
Jasper chucks and sets her on the counter of the kitchen, cool marble against the bare skin of her legs below her shorts. It makes goose bumps appear on her arms. Her hold, arms around her neck in such a natural way she had forgotten they were even there, tightens. She likes being held. "The counter is cold." She whispers.
"Not me?" He asks, beginning to extract himself from her grip.
"No." She pulls him in, and for all his strength, he is powerless against the warmth of her leg, brushing up against his waist and her hand running down the side of his face. The love (and lust) that she radiates must be making him dizzy, slowing his reactions. "You were next to me on the sofa; you're warm," her hand pulls under his jaw and urges him down to her level so the next words are muttered a hairsbreadth from his perfect rosy lips. "just like me." He grins, and it pulls up the corners of her mouth in tandem with his.
"I used to be strong." he breaths out. "Stupid."
"Alice? Alice, are you alright?" She shakes off the moment with a wave of her hand.
"Yes, fine. Dizzy. Can I have some water?"
"Of course," he says, already pressing the glass into her hands. It's real glass.
"This is glass?" She glances at him curiously. "I thought the hospital only had paper cups?"
He ducks his head. "I brought it in." Alice twists the glass in her hand, admiring the cut of the crystal and the rainbows it cast on her hand. "It looks like you'll be with us for a while, and you should feel welcome."
Her eyes are a little misty. "Thanks, Dr. Cullen. It's really pretty."
"My wife, Esme, picked them out." He chuckles. "It was her idea, to bring you a piece of home."
"She sounds lovely." She says wistfully. It must be nice to be in love like that. Not like her and her blond; though he held her so close, he is always just at the edge of her reality in the here and now.
"She is. I'll have to tell her you like the crystal." Alice tips the rest of the glass back, downing the water in one gulp. "Are you feeling better? Dizziness passed?"
Alice nods. "It's funny, I keep having these visions. I think it might be my life before—there's this blond man, he's so handsome, and we're so in love." The loneliness is tangible in her words. "Every time it happens, I wish it would stay. I wish I lived there, I wish I was there now."
Dr. Cullen's face is creased with lines of worry, carved into his perfect skin and rococo face. She looks back at the wall in front of her, not seeing it. "His name is Jasper. If I did run away, I was a fool." Even as her lips form the words, Alice knows there's no way she could ever leave such a place. "I just had this lovely dream—he carried me through a gorgeous house, with a whole wall made of glass." She waves her hands in front of her, like the reflections on the glass of the wall. "I told him I was going to fight him—but I wasn't, not really—and he just laughed and picked me up. His skin glitters in the sun." She frowns, not making sense of that one odd and unnatural detail. "I wanted to watch it when the sun came up."
"Alice." Dr. Cullen says, breaking her reverie. He had gone so still beside her that she had forgotten him entirely. "What did the house look like?"
She loses herself, just for a moment. Imagining that the blue cotton sheets around her are the waters of the great wide seas, and her and her angel are sailing away. Somewhere safe and warm, where the sun always shines. The sun never comes through her window in the hospital. If she didn't like her room, which housed all the little things that she'd grown friendly with (the crack in the wall that she swore spread every day, the chip on one floor tile, the nurses' schedule she's memorized) and she didn't want to start over again. In a strange room, where she had no memories.
Of all the things that her vision might tell him, she doubted that the colour of the floors would be important. "It was all light, the floors done in cherry or walnut." Her lips curl into a smile. "We dragged a big leather couch to the glass wall. It was so perfect I didn't want to go to sleep—so he used some sort of magic, or powers, or something, to make me tired." She looks at Dr. Cullen and smiles sardonically. "Crazy, isn't it."
The expression on his face stops her. He looks… scared. "Alice, I'm sorry." And he stands, a little too quickly. Like her love, in her vision. "I need to… file my papers, I'll be back tomorrow."
He is gone from the room before she can say a word. Did she do something wrong? Dr. Cullen had just declared her sane, and sound; was this vision, the magic and the strange powers of her handsome man so strange to him? Had something she said been wrong? Been too much, to odd, for him to handle? He hadn't even taken the paper he needed—the brown clipboard looks at her accusingly from the foot of her bed.
Alice pulls her knees to her chest and wraps her arms around herself.
"You left your clipboard." She tells the empty doorway.
Dr. Cullen makes himself rather scarce after that, at least for a few days. Alice, the potent combination of bored and lonely that only leads to bad decisions, takes to hiding around the hospital to avoid the endless sea of painkillers and pills that she is given. For someone supposedly healing, she takes enough pills to make her feel like she's still on the verge of death.
Naturally, she ends up hearing some things she'd rather not, in hindsight, be privy to.
She's in a janitor's closet, hiding from her daily dose of painkillers, when she sees him. Dr. Cullen is talking on his phone, a sleek silver thing, save for the case proudly printed with a photo of his family. She can make out four tall men—two blonds, a redhead, and a brunet, with a slightly shorter blond girl and a tiny light brunette, who Alice would bet is Dr. Cullen's wife. She, and the blond man she guesses is the doctor himself, are in the centre of the photo. Alice tries not to be jealous, really, but it wells up in her regardless.
"Esme, love." The doctor says with relief when she answers the phone. He is pacing—something that humanizes him, for Alice has never seen him falter or be bothered. "Is Jasper there?"
Esme responds, but the sound is lost to her.
"Good, please try to keep him at the house. I worry, love—she knows things, things that she shouldn't know. Edward would have known, had he left in the last few years?" He wrinkles his face. "Right, of course, we'd all know. She can't be older than sixteen, and the memories seem… romantic. It would have been recent." He nods, and a long pause follows. "Of course. He avoids the hospital, but Edward said that he was thinking of here often, like something was calling to him. He said that Jasper was contemplating some sort of 'pull' to here," Dr. Cullen looks very, very, pained. He breaths deeply. "Esme, it was different for us."
Alice sticks her head a little further out into the hall, desperate to here Esme's response. Jasper, the name of her love. The man who gave her the name she bears, who gave her everything that she has now. She understands it could mean nothing—the thought stings her deep in her heart, a place she tries to guard to no avail—but she wishes, how she wishes, that her Jasper was close.
"Just… be careful. You know that he is not as well practiced as we are." Damnit, she missed something! The doctor is smiling now, like his worries are all gone. "I love you, I cannot wait to be home." Then, he ends the call and heads down the hall. Just when he rounds the corner and evades her line of sight, Alice sprints back to her room.
Just what is the doctor keeping from her?