(no subject)
The video camera is loose in her hands as she sits in the corner of the waiting room of the hospital. She's numb from head to toe and in retrospect it's lucky she does not need to breathe because at this moment, she cannot.
She glances up, at the sound of voices in the hall. She can hear her family with Bella, talking to her in the room down the hall. Alice slipped out for just a moment, she promised. It hadn't taken her long to watch the video.
To watch James taunt Bella. To watch him recount another hunt he'd done. To hear him lay out her entire death -- not Bella's, but Alice's. He'd hunted her, tried to feed on her. He was the reason she'd woken up alone.
He'd killed the only person who had tried to help her when she was a human.
"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."
The words ran like a mantra though her head, over and over again, nonstop, constant. A cell, an asylum, shock treatments. It made sense why she couldn't remember her human life---
It hurt more than she had ever known.
It was like someone was ripping something out of her -- as if all the pain she hadn't felt when she had been changed was coming now, hard and fast.
She stands quickly, one hand clenched, the other careful not to crush the camera. She sets it down in the chair she vacates and steps lightly out to the hallway and down it as fast as she can while still appearing human. She's hyperventilating needlessly and she knows Edward and Jasper can see--feel--what's happening to her and she just needs...to be out of here now.
There's a bench under the shade of a tree and she blindly finds it, sits in it, curls her arms around her legs. Gives in to emotion.
It just...hurts.
She glances up, at the sound of voices in the hall. She can hear her family with Bella, talking to her in the room down the hall. Alice slipped out for just a moment, she promised. It hadn't taken her long to watch the video.
To watch James taunt Bella. To watch him recount another hunt he'd done. To hear him lay out her entire death -- not Bella's, but Alice's. He'd hunted her, tried to feed on her. He was the reason she'd woken up alone.
He'd killed the only person who had tried to help her when she was a human.
"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."
The words ran like a mantra though her head, over and over again, nonstop, constant. A cell, an asylum, shock treatments. It made sense why she couldn't remember her human life---
It hurt more than she had ever known.
It was like someone was ripping something out of her -- as if all the pain she hadn't felt when she had been changed was coming now, hard and fast.
She stands quickly, one hand clenched, the other careful not to crush the camera. She sets it down in the chair she vacates and steps lightly out to the hallway and down it as fast as she can while still appearing human. She's hyperventilating needlessly and she knows Edward and Jasper can see--feel--what's happening to her and she just needs...to be out of here now.
There's a bench under the shade of a tree and she blindly finds it, sits in it, curls her arms around her legs. Gives in to emotion.
It just...hurts.