THE REMNANTS

Chapter 3: Alice

Alice, more than anyone else, knew how flexible the future could be. Seemingly insignificant moments, decisions, and chance encounters could spark new infinite branching possibilities for future events. While she could see a multiplicity of conceivable futures at once, she was not omniscient nor omnipresent. She could not keep track of everyone's futures simultaneously and so she chose who she watched at particular moments, like tuning into a radio station. While she could access any station at a given time, she still had to tune into only one at a time to clearly hear the song.

On that day, she was focused entirely on Jasper. As her mate, she felt more acutely his struggles with their chosen life and wished to support him in every possible way. Her deepest fear remained, haunting her despite how much her words assured Jasper otherwise. At any time, he could change his mind and she would be placed in the impossible situation of having to choose between her family, her morals, and her mate. She fought with all the tools at her disposal to prevent that possibility from becoming a reality.

Yet, sometimes, that meant she missed other threats due to her tunnel vision. She never dreamed she would find herself in the impossible situation of having to choose between her family, her morals, and her favorite brother.

This day, more than any others, showed her how quickly she could miss a life-altering change in circumstances. As she walked towards the Volvo and saw her siblings leaning against the silver sides of the vehicle, staring at her, she knew something was amiss. Edward was supposed to be here. She'd seen it. She flashed through a myriad of futures in her mind to pursue what had changed.

Then she found him…following a high school student to her house…and into the forest behind the house…and to a cave with decidedly predatory intent. She didn't want to look any farther but her sight took hold of her as if she were the horse and her vision the reigns and it pulled her ahead, into the swirling and ever-changing mists of the distant future.

She could see it. Two visions of two possible futures for Edward. In the first, the Swan girl gazed at Edward with red eyes and a smiling face, her arm enfolded over a golden-eyed Edward's shoulders. In the second, Edward's arm enfolded her corpse, his red eyes and blood-stained smile, gazing at her lifeless body.

No matter how she twisted or interfered, the vision stayed the same. Even if they managed to catch him now, it would be too late, and Edward would not be in a state of mind to hear them. He would not be in a state of mind to hear anything at all. So, she told her siblings to go home.

She paced the length and breadth of her and Jasper's bedroom, inhaling deeply and hoping that the smell of pine drifting in through the open balcony would ground her in the present, keep her from worrying. But she still worried as the hours passed. She kept careful watch over her brother through her visions, but there was little else she could do.

It wasn't normal. Their kind, without decapitation, they physically could not fall into unconsciousness; yet Edward lay in an unseeing trance, entirely exposed to possible attack. Their kind's most basic self-protective instincts kept them from revealing vulnerability ever, especially when they hunted and allowed their predatory instincts to dominate. It was unlike anything she'd ever seen and contrary to his most basic wiring. She worried over what it meant.

It was months before they heard from him or saw him again.

She never told the others about the girl. She saw they would have gained more gossip and suspicion through suddenly leaving town than they did by staying. Instead, she forged a suicide note and left it in the Swan girl's truck. She cleaned all traces of the girl from the forest: her footprints in the deep mud, the fallen bracelet on a tree branch, the backpack on the forest floor, and the torn, bloody shirt in the cave. Her scent was wiped from the forest as efficiently as all memories of her short tenure at Forks High was by her classmates. Alice let the family remain ignorant and believe the same story as everybody else.

Carlisle told the school Edward had moved to stay with a family member in Canada to complete his schooling there. To make the story more believable, Alice picked up his transcripts and cleaned out his locker. It was with solemn, drawn faces that the Cullens and the Hales sat at lunch at their favored table in the cafeteria. Gossip flew, but none connected Edward directly to Bella's death, as she had seen.

She wanted to seek him out. Without her confidant, her partner in eccentricity, the other guardian of the family, she felt alone and exposed. She missed him. As she sifted through visions of the future, she saw it was not time to seek him out. He was hostile, angry, confused, distracted, upset, but never willing to engage in genuine conversation with her, or anyone. She kept waiting.

oooooo

The family breathed a collective sigh of relief when he came home, all on his own. The sigh of relief was short-lived as it quickly became apparent that he was not the same as when he left. He was never the same again.

Alice's short-term visions fluctuated rapidly. Some days he spent curled in a ball in the corner of his room, rocking himself, eyes glazed and lost to the present. Or he spent his days plotting. The different threads of his plans sifted through her visions like mists on a damp winter morning. Sometimes they materialized into a form so thick and dense she could see them and nothing else and sometimes they evaporated until she could barely capture a hint of what they were.

Much to her surprise and confusion, her long-term vision stayed the same. Edward had a choice to make over who he would become and the Swan girl, despite her death, remained the catalyst of his metamorphosis.

She tried to talk to him. Again and again, he pulled down a false front like curtains over a theater stage and refused to engage, refused to answer her questions, and refused to admit to the roiling tempest within his breast. He would not even admit his emotions to Jasper, who felt them all whether he wished to or not.

It was as if something about the unique genetic makeup of the girl had infected him, forever shifting something in the chemical makeup of his own mind and body. She knew their kind, once the mating bond had been initiated, underwent the most drastic transformation of their post-human lives. While not unheard of, it was still rare to develop mating bonds with humans. All she could figure was that by consuming his own mate, Edward had somehow warped or distorted the mating bond. He was undeniably bound to her, body and soul, but instead of completing him, as it was meant to do, the bond ravaged him. It spread through him like gangrene, devouring everything healthy in its path and leaving a trail of dead, lifeless, infected remnants.

She would not let go of hope. As long as the two visions remained, he could be redeemed. He could still come back to them and be her brother again, the Edward she had known and loved for so many years. He was still in there somewhere and with enough hope, enough love, and enough patience, he would come back to them.

ooooo

As the decades passed, she kept his secrets to herself. She never spoke of his purchase of the Swan house in Forks after Chief Swan followed his daughter into death. She saw but never told how he obsessively looked at photographs of the woman he had killed every night while alone. When she noticed how all his courses of study, research, and university programs had a common (and ethically questionable) thread, she kept it to herself. She never told them about the plot of desert land or the construction of a massive underground bunker he initiated on it.

When he left, sixty years after that day in Forks, she was barraged with an entire arsenal of secrets she now had to guard. This was another weight for her to bear; a weight she and Edward used to bear together. She fought against the visions with all she could, hating her gift all the more for what it forced her to witness, but it was as effective as fighting to keep sand from stirring during a windstorm. The visions came, whether she wished them to or not, and she saw it all. The long-term vision remained the same, even as she watched his moral compass disintegrate and he threw himself headlong into his own destruction.

She made her choice. She could choose to intervene and then one member of her family would inevitably die. She could choose to hold her tongue and watch as the corpses mounted. Both choices would lead to death and she loved her family more than anything else. She decided to preserve their lives.

The regret and guilt she carried on her shoulders weighed her small frame down more than an anvil on a Yorkshire terrier. Could she fix it? Could she do something, say something that would bring him back? Stop all this? If she had done something differently that one day, would it have come to this? Unfortunately, her gift only worked forward, and not backward.

Jasper could feel her struggle, but he loved and respected her enough not to pry. He simply took her into his arms on her particularly heavy days and crashed waves of his calm and love over her to soothe her aching heart.

Ooooooooo

It was a quiet day in the fall of 2176 when her vision shattered in half. She stumbled down the stairs and headlong into the wall when it came to her. The entire family, surprised by the uncharacteristic lack of grace, came running to surround her. She sank to the floor, her head in her hands, shaking her head back and forth.

"No, no, no. Half is gone," she whispered. "He made his choice."

None of the rest could interpret her cryptic remarks, but Jasper was savvy enough to guess. He placed his arms around her shoulders and kissed the top of her head.

For over a hundred years, Edward still had a choice. She could never tell what caused the seismic shift, only that the path Edward now walked on was set in concrete and could no longer change.

He became harder to see after that. When she could see him, he paced endlessly. He neither bathed nor changed his well-worn, threadbare clothes nor bothered to clean his bunker. He stopped research and reading. He drained the remainder of his bank account without noticing it. His fingers did not touch the ivory keys of his piano nor did he seek the refuge of music. He spent long nights huddled in corners of rooms in a tight ball, rocking himself as if he were both mother and crying babe. His hands shook uncontrollably and that he talked consistently in incoherent babble to himself as he rocked.

She knew why, though she doubted he did. In the same way a human could never exist entirely on carrots, or steak, or chocolate, so their kind was never meant to subsist on only a single type of sustenance. It didn't matter how many carrots were eaten, how full one felt, or how many nutrients the food contained, variety was required for health. Edward's long reliance on not only a single blood type, but the blood of a single individual left, him so badly malnourished it was little wonder his body and brain were disintegrating like cardboard in rain. A further complication of his self-imposed monophagy was his single food source left him in a state of unnatural intoxication, weakened instead of strengthened, and it was slowly poisoning him from the inside out.

His long years of sedentary seclusion underground didn't help matters. Without using his physical and mental gifts, they atrophied, though she didn't think he knew how truly fragile he had become. She could see it in the nearly translucent tone his skin had taken on, the fine fissures lining his chest and back, and the way his movements now lacked their previous athletic grace. He was the last remnants of winter's ice on a lake, slowly ebbing away and ready to crack under the lightest pressure.

Then he disappeared from her visions entirely. She couldn't see him. For weeks, she couldn't see him. She panicked, got herself on a plane, and traversed the globe to find him.

Oooooooooooo

She spoke to him as she approached the fortress to warn him of her approach. She still couldn't see him enough to know what circumstances she would find him in. The building before her was a far cry from the one she had seen in her initial visions. Now half buried in sand and lacking in many basic repairs, this was no longer the gleaming, pristine fortress it had been in past decades. This was the crumbling mansion of the last of a great house, as ready for dismantling as its master.

Her vision worked well enough to guide her through hacking his security system. It was the smell that first caught her attention. The halls reeked of old blood, rotting organic matter, and stagnant air. It screamed "dungeon" more than "temple" and her heart sank. She entered into the first lab. Rows of glass, water-filled tanks reflected the bright fluorescent lights that remained functional. Rows of steel medical beds were roughly made with stained sheets. She had seen this room more times than she could count in her visions (and been forced to see exactly what he used it for). This time, however, it lacked the professional air, the cleanliness, the obsessive order which normally characterized Edward's spaces. She called for him but received no answer.

She checked his bedroom and had to push to force it to open, as if it had been closed for so long the door was sealed shut. Within, she saw an unmade bed, dirty clothes and abandoned papers and books strewn across a floor so thick in sand and dirt that she could write her name in it. She didn't need to. She could see the scrawling made on the floor by another finger with a single name written over it. Again and again and again.

She grit her teeth and went to the second lab, the one she much preferred never to see in person. The metal doors were bolted from the inside and it took her considerable effort to pry the doors open from the hinges. When she threw the dismantled door to the tiled floor with a loud bang, she cursed as the air from within the room overpowered her. She pulled her scarf over her mouth and squinted her eyes in response.

She gasped when she finally found her brother. He lay motionless on the filthy floor of the lab, red eyes and blood-stained smile were both directed at the bloated corpse within his arms.

"The vision," she said in an incredulous voice. "This is it."

The picture he painted where he lay gave an eerie illustration of the old Arab tale she read once. A prince, so intoxicated on the night he wed, could not differentiate between his living bride and a corpse or between his palace and a cemetery.

He must truly have given himself over to madness, she thought to herself, as she took in the number of bodies that lay strewn around the motionless figure of her brother. He neither noticed her entrance nor made a single movement as she watched him. She tentatively placed a finger on his arm. He didn't react. She only then realized the fractured state of his body.

"Oh, Edward," she said. "What has become of you? Why did you choose this end and refuse all the others?"

Maybe he could come to his senses again someday and his body could heal, but Alice didn't want to see anymore. The man sprawled on the floor before her truly was no longer her Edward. He was someone else, something else, and her heart broke as she released her last remaining tendrils of hope.

Edward had made his choice, now it was Alice's turn. She'd avoided it so long, but she couldn't anymore.

Afterwards, her only regret was that she hadn't done it sooner.

ooooooo

Author's Notes: First off, I've been floored by the reviews, favs and follows this has received. Thanks so much for your response! It really made my week!

Next, you know how I said this story was entirely written? Yeah. I thought it was too. A few chapters decided they wanted to be written which then meant the following chapters had to be reworked to reflect the new creations. It is still (pretty much) written, but a bit longer than I originally thought. I'm guessing we'll be up to eight chapters by the time it's all posted. Hope you enjoy!

The Arab tale mentioned comes from the Encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity...or at least as much of it as Wikipedia would give me.