A/N:
Last chapter before the epilogue!
Title: Origins: Living in my Future
Author: MarieCarro
Beta: Alice's White Rabbit
Pre-reader: BitterHarpy and brierlynn03
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 36
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 16th 2005 – FRIDAY, JANUARY 16th 2006
There were so many things happening at once.
Carlisle was assessing Bella's multiple injuries, Edward was desperately begging over her broken shape for her to show signs of life, and Emmett and Jasper were busy at work with gathering the torn pieces of James into separate garbage bags so they could burn him.
I wanted to help Bella, but there was so much blood, and I was running out of air. My mind was still swirling with a flurry of visions caused by every swift decision made by everyone in the room, and it was difficult to focus on just the good outcomes. There were too many of the unthinkable ones weaved in with the others.
A small red dot caught the corner of my eye, and I noticed the small handheld camera carefully placed in the corner to record everything. As I walked over to it, I saw the contents of it through a vision of Edward watching the video and the tracker taunting him as he tortured Bella and slowly broke her body.
But there was something else on the video. Something before the torture.
The tracker stepped closer to Bella with a predatory smile. "Before we begin, I would just like to rub it in, just a little bit. The answer was there all along, and I was so afraid Edward would see that and ruin my fun. It happened once, oh, ages ago. The one and only time my prey escaped me."
He reached out and sniffed a lock of Bella's hair.
"You see, the vampire who was so stupidly fond of this little victim made the choice that your Edward was too weak to make. When the old one knew I was after his little friend, he stole her from the asylum where he worked—I never will understand the obsession some vampires seem to form with you humans—and as soon as he freed her, he made her safe.
"She didn't even seem to notice the pain, poor little creature. She'd been stuck in that black hole of a cell for so long. A hundred years earlier and she would have been burned at the stake for her visions. In the nineteen-twenties, it was the asylum and the shock treatments.
"When she opened her eyes, strong with her fresh youth, it was like she'd never seen the sun before. The old vampire made her a strong new vampire, and there was no reason for me to touch her then." He sighed. "I destroyed the old one in vengeance."
Bella breathed out my name, and a shock of agony shot through me.
The tracker knew me.
He was the reason I'd woken up alone. My creator hadn't abandoned me for a hit of sadistic enjoyment as Jasper and I had theorized. James had killed him because he'd saved me from him.
And I couldn't even remember who he'd been. Not even his name. James' monologue hadn't miraculously cured my amnesia, but I finally had my suspicion confirmed.
I had been at a hospital. An asylum where I'd been given shock treatments—at least, according to James—and that could be the reason why my memory had been wiped.
But were my visions the only reason I'd been there?
Apparently, I'd had them even as a human, but there was no way to tell how they'd manifested then.
There were so many questions I still had that I wanted answered, but all of that had to wait. Bella was our priority now.
I reached for the camera and shut it off.
{=LMF=}
The old archives of the Mississippi State Insane Hospital had been converted into microfiche, and it had already taken me hours and reading through hundreds of articles to just find something that connected me to the place.
It felt as if I knew less about my past than I did before, and finding anything about a girl bearing a very common name being admitted to the asylum—assuming I'd been admitted to the state hospital—felt improbable.
My visions didn't help because I hadn't made the decision to look in the right place—wherever that might be.
I didn't possess enough information to really narrow down my search either. My name wasn't reliable because I couldn't be certain that even was my birth name. I didn't know my physical age, or the year I was admitted to the hospital. James claimed I'd been there so long I'd practically been catatonic, so I wanted to assume I'd been there for years, but if I'd received ECT—a treatment that wasn't officially recognized in medicine until 1938—there was no way of knowing how much the experimental voltage had affected me.
All I really had was the year I'd gotten out—1920—but I only had to look once at the tragedies surrounding the handling of patients back then to know there wouldn't be anything reported about a girl missing from an asylum.
But then, there it was.
Name: Brandon, Mary Alice
Date of Admission: February 15th 1920
Age: 18
Date of Birth: September 22nd 1901
Birthplace: Biloxi, Harrison County, MI
Hair Color: Dark Brown/Black
Eye Color: Dark Brown
Height: 4'10
Weight: 86 Ibs
Disorder: II. 11. Delusional Insanity, a. Systematized
Manifestations of disorder: Compartmentalizing, lack of empathy, predisposition for sexual promiscuity, paranoia, compulsively lying, can't differentiate between delusion and reality. Symptoms may be genetic but were most likely caused by birth mother's death. Claims to have visions of the future. Believes her father wants her dead.
Reading about my past self without having a single memory about any of it was surreal and naturally felt as if I were reading about someone else, but there was no use in denying it.
I fit in perfectly with the description. The young girl they had thrown into an asylum because she had a gift was definitely me, and it infuriated me to read how they'd analyzed her "disorder". But it gave me a direction to go in. I now had a full name, a date of birth, and birthplace. It was leaps and bounds more than I'd had before.
There was another document belonging to my admittance form, and I was very apprehensive of opening it since I thought it would be record keeping of the "treatments" I'd been given, but what I found was so much worse.
I stood up and quickly stashed the microfiche in my bag, then left the archives.
A couple days later when I'd returned to the family's new home in Ithaca, I showed Jasper what I'd found.
"They sterilized me," I said, barely comprehending the dark and cruel injustice of the world I'd once occupied. "I know it doesn't really matter in the end because of what we are, but the fact that they did that—forced it on me because of my visions—is so violating!"
Jasper immediately wrapped his arms around me and soothingly stroked my hair. "I'm so sorry, darlin'. I was afraid these were the types of things you'd find when you started diggin'." He kissed the top of my head and tightened our embrace. "Did you find anythin' else?"
I sighed. "Only a few announcements in the local paper. My birth, my little sister's birth, my mother's death, my father remarrying a woman named Anna-Marie, and my death. There was also a longer article … about my father's murder." I showed Jasper the downloaded file on the computer, and he quickly read through it.
"He was drowned in the Harlem River?" he asked in shock, then chuckled in astonishment. "Insider pearl tradin' and a gamblin' addiction. Sounds to me as if you're the daughter of a crook."
"Probably. Which doesn't really surprise me considering where he sent me." Edgar Brandon was only a name on a piece of paper, and I didn't have any particular feelings about his death or apparent criminal ways. All I knew was that he had sent me to an asylum two counties away from where we'd lived at the time, and that screamed of dishonest deals to me. "He clearly wanted to rid himself of me. My death date and date of admission to the hospital are the same."
Jasper leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. "Now, I'm curious. I wonder what you were about to uncover that caused him to act so drastically."
I sat down on his lap and snuggled my face into his neck to comfort myself. "It's something I'll never know. But perhaps it's better that way. I lived my life without knowing before, so there's no real loss there." I reached for the microfiche of my admission record and stared at it for a moment. "It is nice to finally know some of these personal details though."
"It is," Jasper agreed and smiled. "Did you know you're physically almost a year older than me?"
"What?"
He nodded. "I was born on July 5th in 1844. I didn't know it then because the days had all started to blend together, but I've looked into the recorded dates of the significant battles of the war, and I'd quite recently turned eighteen when we evacuated Galveston."
I turned in his lap so that we were facing each other, and my legs dangled on either side of him. "And here I always thought you were the older one." I touched my nose to his and giggled.
But my joy was short-lived when an uninvited vision flashed before my eyes and caused me to physically recoil.
Jasper's smile fell, and he looked at me with concern. "What's wrong?"
I groaned and climbed off his lap, my face buried in my hands. "I can't stop them," I said and walked across the room to stare out the window at the wooded area surrounding our house. "We're too connected for me to not see."
"Bella?" Jasper asked and followed me to the window. He placed his hands on my shoulders to give me a stronger dose of calm, but it didn't help the way it usually did.
"Edward knows I can't always control my visions. He knows I see the futures of the people I care the most about. I can't stop them, no matter what he says." I turned my head to look at my mate. "I miss her so much. She was like a new sister to me. She was supposed to be a part of our family."
"I'm sorry," he said, and I felt his instant shift into guilt. He still blamed himself for Bella's disastrous birthday, and Edward's avoidance of the entire family since we left Forks hadn't exactly helped.
"Please, stop apologizing," I begged and grabbed his arms to wrap them around myself. "It wasn't your fault. We were all caught off guard. And Edward didn't have to react like ..." I searched for a good analogy but came up empty.
"Like Edward?" Jasper finished for me, and I sighed.
"Yeah. Like Edward."
"What exactly do you see?"
"Just her," I said softly. "She's not looking good, Jazz. And I wish I could tell him that, but he'll just yell at me and accuse me of interfering in her life."
Jasper's hold on me tightened. "If only there was somethin' I could do to make you happy again, but Bella's future with us isn't for us to decide."
I knew what he meant, but there was still something in the way he phrased the words that I didn't like, and I stepped out of our embrace. "It shouldn't be anyone else's decision but Bella's. It's not fair to any of us what Edward's doing, and yet, we still let him do it."
I walked back toward the table and pulled a notepad out of my bag. Then, I started to sketch what I'd seen, and soon, Bella's gaunt, lifeless eyes stared back at me. I slid the notepad down the table for Jasper to see.
"That isn't the face of a thriving person who's moved on with their life."
"Darlin', we don't know what's goin' on in Forks," he said, but he wasn't fooling me. His reaction to Bella's appearance was the same as mine.
"It's been four months. She should've at least started to heal by now, but she looks closer to death now than at that studio in Phoenix."
Jasper dropped the pad and approached me again. "Listen, Alice, I understand that you're worried about her, and I know you love her like a sister. But Bella's human, and when she was brought into our lives, we all knew there were high chances of complications. Edward's not wrong when he says she'll have a much safer life away from us."
"Yeah?" I asked and pointed at the drawing. "Tell that to her."
A/N:
I wholeheartedly believe that Alice had visions of Bella and that was why she was so quick to head to Forks as soon as she thought Bella was dead. She'd already seen the damage done and she knew Charlie had lived with seeing his only daughter and child waste away before his eyes.
While she definitely did as Edward told her and didn't actively look, some visions most definitely slipped through.
Also, I really really really wanted to go into detail about Edgar's death and give Alice some justice even though she has no idea who he is at this point, but then I realized there wouldn't have been a lot to find. Let's just say, in my head, he tried pulling a bad deal on the wrong kind of people in New York, and they retaliated by having him "sleep with the fishes" you know ;)
The epilogue is up next and that one will take place after the events of Breaking Dawn :)
Until tomorrow,
Stay Awesome!
