Title: Origins: Living in my Future

Author: MarieCarro

Beta: Alice's White Rabbit

Pre-reader: BitterHarpy

Genre: Supernatural/Mystery

Rating: NC-17

Summary: Mary Alice Brandon had always been different. She seemed to know things that had yet to happen, and the people in town avoided her at all costs. But the cries of "Witch" or whispers of "Changeling" wasn't her biggest concern. Someone much closer to her than the townsfolk couldn't accept her differences, and it put her in life-threatening danger.

Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.


CHAPTER 7

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 23rdWEDNESDAY, JUNE 30th 1920

The mattress under me was moving as if I were floating on top of a calm but wavy sea. My sight was blurry as my body slowly returned to a conscious state, but the sharp light streaming in from the window cut into my eyes, and I had to close them again.

My tongue felt thick and my throat was painfully dry, but while I was desperate for a glass of water, something much more pressing pushed the thirst to the back of my mind.

I was bursting, but my limbs were too heavy for me to find the bedpan and relieve myself. I hadn't wet the bed since I was a small child, but if I waited any longer, that's what would happen.

With a heave, I tried to sit up but immediately fell back against my pillow when a slicing pain cut through my abdomen with such an intensity my breath escaped me.

No memory came to me that explained the pain, and I began to wonder if I might still be dreaming. My hand traced down the mattress until I found the small hole in the fabric where I'd tucked the small piece of paper Micah had given me. Whenever I was dreaming unpleasant dreams, I was never able to find the paper, but as my fingers now grazed it, I knew I was awake.

As regularly as I could in order to imprint it into my muscle memory, I brought the paper out and read it to myself.

"My name is Mary Alice Brandon. I was born on September 22nd 1901 in Biloxi, Mississippi. I have a little sister named Cynthia Pearl Brandon. My mother, Lillian, was murdered on my father's orders. I am not insane." I folded it again but held it tightly in my fist as I repeated it again and again. "I am not insane. My visions are real. I'm not insane."

Inserting it back into the mattress, I then turned onto my side and tucked my knees up to my chest in the hope of relieving the pain simmering just under the surface.

Why was I hurting? What had happened that I'd forgotten about?

The dosage of pills the patients were given daily made it difficult to focus, and I often found myself staring out into the empty air. Sometimes when that happened, I couldn't control what I was saying, and I had accidentally blurted out a couple of predictions. When I did, several nurses always looked at me funnily as if they couldn't comprehend how I knew what I knew.

Once again, I attempted to sit up, and this time, although with great difficulty, I managed to straighten up into a sitting position, but my head felt abnormally heavy, and I almost fell forward.

The door to my cell—which I'd started to call it as the hospital wasn't much better than what I imagined a prison to be—was opened, and Nurse Gibson stood in the doorway.

"Oh, you're awake! Perfect! We need to get you to an examination room to make sure the surgery went without faults," she said and gestured for the leery orderly—who I'd come to learn was named Walter—to assist me to my feet.

I was so distracted by having his wandering hands around my waist that I almost instantly forgot what Nurse Gibson had said.

Surgery. I finally remembered, and a lump formed in my throat. It was done. The actions of monsters had now made sure I would never be able to have children, which in turn meant another reason for all men to avoid courting me.

If they could get past my history as an asylum patient that is, but that would also be a best-case scenario if I happened to be fortunate enough to be released.

According to Micah, that was a distant dream I'd do best to forget, but I couldn't give up hope just yet. The second I did that, I could just as well bury myself in the ground outside the hospital and stop living.

As I stumbled onto my feet, I noticed a stain of blood on my sheets, and my tears started to fall freely down my cheeks. Another thing to add on the ever-growing list of things that were wrong with me.

In a daze, trapped inside a mind that couldn't focus or concentrate, I walked with Nurse Gibson and Walter the orderly toward one of the examination rooms. A doctor was in there—one I was certain I hadn't met before—but he greeted me as if we had, which only made me feel a bit paranoid.

I wasn't completely sure how long I'd been at the hospital. The days and nights had eventually started to float together more and more, and if anyone asked me what day of the week it was, I wouldn't be able to answer. I didn't believe I'd been there for a very long time as of yet. So the fact that the treatments Micah had warned me about my first day, and how they made you forget, were already affecting me to such a high degree scared me.

Before I even realized it, the examination was done, and Walter pulled me up on my feet again. I tried to glare at him as I despised his rough handling, but I didn't have the energy, and when I met his inhumanly vile eyes, a much more disturbing image replaced the one in front of me.

It was clearly Walter, but his face was twisted in a grimace that made me nauseous when I understood what he was doing. He was panting and sweating as he rocked back and forth aggressively. I was seeing it from the perspective of the one under him, and that usually only meant one thing.

When I flinched back from him, I took him by surprise because he dropped me, and my balance was so far off that I ended up on the floor. Pain radiated from my hip, which had broken my fall.

"Please, don't touch me," I whispered and tried to crawl away from him as he bent down to grab a new hold of me. "Please, please, don't—"

"Miss Brandon, get up from the floor right now," Nurse Gibson ordered sternly.

Walter was close enough to talk so that only I could hear him. "I haven't touched you … yet."

I shuddered and clenched my eyes shut, but it didn't remove the slimy feeling I got when he got a proper hold on me and forced me up on my feet. When he turned me to face Nurse Gibson, I took a chance. It was a desperate attempt, but I couldn't keep quiet.

"He's goin' to violate me," I told her as steadily as I could. "Please, I don't want him to touch me. I saw what he's goin' to do to me. Help me, please!"

She looked at me for a long moment without saying anything, and for a short moment, I allowed myself to hope she believed me. I could even feel Walter tense up next to me, his hand on my arm tightening.

"Go fetch Dr. Wright," she told Walter. "We're gonna have to try something stronger with this one. Tell him I'm taking her to room seventeen."

Once Walter had disappeared, she grabbed me herself and led me toward another room located around the corner of a corridor I'd never been led down before. The door she stopped in front of had a sign that read Authorized Personnel Only, and it had more than one lock on it.

Inside the room, there was an examination bed, just as in the others, but next to it stood a machine I couldn't identify. It had buttons and dials and long cords going out from it. One of those cords was connected to a strange metal contraption with two large, white, fluffy balls attached to it.

"What is this?" I asked weakly as Nurse Gibson led me over to the bed and had me lie down on it.

"It's a new treatment we're testing," she said but didn't go into further detail as she started to wrap leather straps around my wrists and ankles, as well as a larger one across my chest.

"What does it do?"

She ignored me, and then Dr. Wright entered the room.

"Ah, Miss Brandon, I hear you're being a little difficult," he said, a pipe stuck through his lips in the corner of his mouth.

Instead of answering him, I turned my head to look out the one lonely window. Dr. Wright was the one I hated the most out of all the staff—although Walter shared the spot with him now—and I had vowed to myself not to speak to him again because all he did was twist my words.

Dr. Wright sighed almost as if he were disappointed, and then walked toward the window to tap out his pipe. Then he approached Nurse Gibson and said something to her that was too quiet for me to pick up. I hated when I was being whispered about because there was no doubt in my mind it was about me. It reminded me of the people back home who talked about me behind my back.

"Right, Miss Brandon," Dr. Wright said and sat down in a chair next to the bed with my folder in his hands and a pencil at the ready. "This is a machine that will conduct electric shocks through your body and, hopefully, rid you of your delusions."

"What?" I said and raised my head from the mattress to stare at Dr. Wright, fear gripping me as his words registered. They were going to attempt to shock my visions out of me. "No, I don't—"

"Don't worry yourself, Miss Brandon. It's all perfectly fine," he said, talking over me again as he always did. "It's for your own health."

Nurse Gibson forced my head back down on the bed and smeared something funny smelling on my temples before ordering me to open up my mouth so she could stick a wooden plug between my teeth.

"What's that for?" I asked before she shoved it in.

"It's to prevent you from biting off your tongue," she replied frigidly.

I started to breathe rapidly through my nose as my heart thundered in my chest and behind my ears. Sweat was breaking out on my forehead and in the pits of my arms, and a whimper escaped me when I saw Nurse Gibson grab the metal contraption and place each white, fuzzy ball against my temples.

Dr. Wright was visible to me from the corner of my eye, and I saw when he gave Nurse Gibson one small nod. Then a jolt shot through me, causing my entire body to stiffen up like a plank, and I had no control of my limbs whatsoever. Then small spasms started to rapidly build up, and my jaw was clenched so tight I was certain my teeth would leave marks in the wood plug.

The room faded away. The sensations in my body started to fade away, and I was numb. I was floating or maybe flying in a thick, dark fog, searching for something or someone. Or maybe they were searching for me.

Jarring images of red eyes and dismembered bodies blinked like lightning bolts, and then I was falling through the air. More images blurred past me, but they disappeared too quickly for me to identify them. All I knew was that each one left me feeling uneasy and terrified for my life.

{=LMF=}

I was standing in line for something. There were other women around me, and some of them looked equally as confused as I felt while others were hunched in on themselves as if trying to hide.

It took a minute for me to remember that they were patients. Patients like me at a hospital. An asylum.

There was no memory that came to me how I'd gotten to stand where I was. The last tangible thing I knew I'd done was eat my breakfast … but was that this morning, or was it yesterday?

"Next!" someone shouted down the corridor, and I turned toward the sound, my movements as if I were moving through thick molasses and not regular air.

What was I standing in line for?

Two men in white clothes—orderlies!—paced up and down the corridor to make sure everyone behaved, and whenever they walked closer to me, I automatically cowered back. Something about them scared me, but I didn't know what.

Then I heard them talking.

"Has Walter called in sick? I haven't seen him since the day before yesterday when he clocked in for the night shift."

"No idea. But knowing him, he's probably at home with his latest strumpet. How women flock around him is beyond my comprehension."

That name—Walter—caused bile to rise in my throat, and I had the instant urge to wash myself, but if anyone asked me why, I wouldn't be able to tell, although I did see flashes of a man moaning before collapsing over me.

"Next! … Next!"

I was pushed into a room with just a chair and a nurse holding a large pair of scissors in her hand. On the floor, there was hair everywhere of every color, and when I passed the woman who'd been in the room before me, I saw that her blonde hair had been cut almost to her scalp.

Looking down at the tangled tresses of my long black hair, I wanted to scream out in protest, but no sound would leave me. I did dig my heels into the floor when they tried to lead me to the chair.

"It's no use fighting," the man grunted. "Everyone's gotta do it."

"W-w-why?" I got out.

"There's been an outbreak of typhoid in the hospital," he explained and plopped me down on the chair. "You'll lose your hair anyway, but this way it won't be just a patch missing."

The nurse took a large chunk of my hair and immediately started cutting through it, and as it fell to the floor, I couldn't hold in my tears.

{=LMF=}

Tremors rocked through me, and I was looking at my shaking hands, trying to control the involuntary actions of my body and make it stop, but it was in vain.

My body wasn't listening to me, just as my heart didn't care to calm down the thundering in my chest, and my head continued to pound every day as if something tried to break out of it.

It was strange, though. The more I appeared to forget about my day-to-day life at the asylum, the more strange images and glimpses of the future I had, and they came more frequently.

I didn't remember names most of the time anymore, and I couldn't tell what day it was, and I constantly lost track of time, but I still knew I had visions. Visions that most often warned me of bad things but had also started to become a refuge because some of the glimpses made me feel happy and almost hopeful, as strange as it sounded.

I also knew I was regularly treated with shocks but not because I remembered them. My visitor was the one who told me about them because, apparently, my memory was always more scrambled right after I'd received them according to him.

"How are you feeling, Alice?" he asked, and I lifted my head and looked at the man I knew I could trust despite the disconcerting feeling emitting from his body and sometimes terrifying eyes. "You've been staring at your hands for twenty minutes," he continued when I didn't answer.

They changed at times. His eyes. They appeared darker, almost black, but it wasn't always easy to tell because he only visited me at night. And when he did, the woman I shared a room with always cowered in the corner as if she were afraid of him.

I didn't understand why. He was the nicest person here. Although, I did forget his name most of the time.

"I've forgotten again," I said, and he knew what I was referring to because it wasn't the first time.

"My name is Micah. And you can trust me, sweet Alice."

I smiled. At least, I hoped it was a smile. My facial muscles didn't always obey my intent. "I know," I said. "No matter what I forget, I always know I can trust you."

"Good." He looked at a crumbled piece of paper on the floor and picked it up. "Are you still using this to remember?"

I looked at the note and read the scraggly text. A list of things that were supposed to mean something to me because it had my name on it, and it mentioned my parents' names and a little sister, but I couldn't conjure up any memories of them. Not any clear ones anyway.

"I know what it says, but I don't know who they are. It makes me sad," I said honestly, and the note disappeared from my sight so fast I started questioning if it were ever there or if I imagined it. "Where did it go?"

"Where did what go?" Micah asked, and then put his hand in the pocket of his trousers to grab something and hide it behind his back. "Do you want to play a game?" He searched out eye contact with me. "What's in my hand?"

Almost before he'd finished his question, I saw the moment in my mind when he revealed his hand and the beautifully multicolored rock. Iridescently blue with silver streaks.

"It's a rock. Blue and silver. Mostly blue."

He chuckled in delight, and my vision played out in front of me. "You're getting stronger. Your visions are more detailed."

"They are?" I asked, confused by his comment. I couldn't remember a time when they weren't detailed.

"Yes," he replied proudly. "A month ago, you could see the object but not the color."

"A month?" I clenched my eyes shut as an onslaught of jumbled up memories assaulted me, and I had to rub my temples. "Was that when I was brought here?"

His expression turned sad, his smile falling. "No, you've been here longer than that?"

"How long?"

"Four months."

"Oh." I sighed and reached up to scratch an itch on my neck, but when I felt the short ends of my hair, I panicked. "When was my hair cut?" My hair was very important to me because it reminded me of someone, although I wasn't certain whom. But now it was gone, and it left me feeling naked.

Micah barely reacted toward my mood swings. Maybe they were common and he was used to them. I didn't know.

"There was an outbreak of typhoid in the hospital three months ago. They cut all the patients' hair."

"So does that mean that man quit?"

"What man?" For the first time that night, Micah appeared confused by my question.

"The man who never came to work," I said. I didn't know why the subject of cutting my hair made me think of a man I couldn't remember. "I heard the other staff talkin' about him. His name made me uncomfortable."

A strange sound akin to an animal growling caused me to look around the room in search of the source. The woman on the other bed whimpered in fear, and I turned to Micah to ask if he knew what that sound was, but what I saw caused me to lose my words.

I'd never seen his eyes that dark before, and the expression on his face was as close to murderous as I would expect such an expression to look. His upper lip was curled away from his perfectly white and straight, gleaming teeth. The sight of them made my heart skip a beat for some reason. His hands were tightened into fists, and he looked seconds away from pouncing on something.

Maybe I should have been scared of a man looking like he was about to kill me, but I wasn't. I still felt I could trust him, and I leaned closer in concern. "Are you okay?"

"Don't make me think of that low-life," he said darkly. "He deserved what he got for what he did to you."

"Who?" I asked, really concerned now. "And what did he do?"

"You've been blessed not to remember that," he continued without giving an explanation. He was glaring into the empty air as if he was lost in his thoughts. "I wish I could forget that night. How you reeked of him, of his sweat and seed. What he stole from you was an inexcusable crime, and all I wish is that I'd killed him sooner so he'd never done it."

Tears flooded my eyes, and I was scared but not of Micah. I scooted closer to him and placed my hands on his arm. "Who? Who did you kill?"

Micah shut his eyes and took a couple of deep breaths until he unclenched his hands. When he opened his eyes again, they weren't as dark. "I won't make you relive it. Forgive me for not telling you."

Naturally, I still wanted to know what he was talking about, but if it caused him such distress and anger, I didn't want to push him. "I forgive you."

He placed his large hand on my cheek and wiped away my tears with his thumb, and it was positively ice cold. The sensation made me gasp, but he didn't react. "Your heart is too pure for this world, Alice. How I wish everything was different." With a strange sort of longing, he looked into my eyes before he stood up and went for the door. "I'll see you tomorrow night, sweet Alice. Be safe until then." And he left.


A/N:

Historical notes: ECT wasn't an official treatment until 1938 and it was first conducted by Italian psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti. However, there are heavy speculation that before it was official, they did experiment on patients, especially those they were certain would never be released from the hospitals.

Considering Stephanie Meyer's history with research, I don't know if this gap between when Alice was at the asylum and the year when the treatment was introduced to the public was deliberate or not.

I decided to make it so that the treatments Alice received were the experimental ones, and it would actually explain why her memory loss was so severe as she could have very well received voltage much too high.