Spitefic: Alice's Gift

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

Title: Alice's Gift
Author: gehayi
Fandom(s): New Moon
Rating: R
Word Count: 2,127
Summary: What would have happened if Alice had changed Bella on the plane.
Chapter Inspiration: Chapter 19 – Race
Author’s Note: sashocirrione wanted a fic in which all of Bella's inane imaginings—like being turned on the plane—came true. I ended up writing four linked fics instead.


CHAPTER 1 -- ALICE'S GIFT

"Shh," she cautions. The attendant is looking in our direction again. "Try to be reasonable," she whispers. "We don't have enough time. We have to get into Volterra tomorrow. You'd be writhing in pain for days." She makes a face. "And I don't think the other passengers would react well."

I bite my lip. "If you don't do it now, you'll change your mind."

"You know, you're right," she says thoughtfully. "Why not? It's not like you aren't going to be a vampire eventually. I might as well make it now, so that you'll shut up about it."

I feel a flicker of annoyance that Alice is giving me vampirism like you'd give a spoiled child candy to go to bed, but then she leans toward me and bit my neck.

I don't know why, but, despite Edward's and Alice's warnings, I'd imagined becoming a vampire to be almost mystical, with me flowing naturally from mortality to a higher state. Something serene, graceful, beautiful. An ascension of sorts.

Alice's teeth feel like a bear trap ripping my neck open.

I try to scream, but I can't. I can't. I can barely breathe. Every breath feels like I'm choking.

I try to push Alice away, but it's like trying to push a mountain. And her eyes—they aren't gold anymore. They're red. Bright red. And I realize that Alice is feeding on me.

"Hush, Bella," she murmurs, her stone lips scraping my skin raw as she tries to speak with a mouthful of blood. "I have to drain you completely or it won't work."

"Can't...breathe..." I gasp, and the effort it takes to even think those words, let alone speak them, chills me down to the bone.

"Oh, for Christ's sake," I hear a passenger mutter from far, far away. "Can't you two wait a few hours till you can get a room?"

"Or until someone can film you two going at it, and put it on YouTube," someone replies, and I want to be angry at him and the other guy for snickering over that, but the bear trap is still in my neck and it feels like it's hit bone.

Cold. So cold. Am I shivering? I think I'm shivering.

"Oh, my God, there's blood all over her!" I hear someone yell. "Someone help me--"

And then there's the thud of something stonelike hitting soft, and it isn't until I try to look in the direction of the noise that I realize I can't see any longer. I'm not seeing darkness or whiteness or fog—I'm just not seeing. There's no colors or shades of light because I can't see any.

And that's also when I realize that my ears are filled with white noise and that the other noises in the world are fading away with every passing second, and it's almost impossible to think, and I think I hear someone saying about trauma-induced seizures and someone else saying that I need to be stabilized. I hear the words, but they don't make any sense.

And then something nauseatingly bitter fills my mouth and the bear trap wound on my neck and it hurts it hurts it hurtshurtshurts and the pain the oh god pain the ohgodohgodohgod stoppleasestop pain taking me apart taking me over, thevenom thevenom the venom will live, not me, no more me.

No more me.

No more--

***

CHAPTER 2 -- AFTERWARDS

Alice felt the second that Bella's soul died.

She didn't regret it, because she couldn't. Humans became soulless when they became vampires. There was no more room for regret or remorse or compassion. Those were human virtues. Prey virtues.

And, of course, Bella would never feel love again. Vampires didn't. They felt lust, curiosity and the urge to dominate. Fortunately, Bella hadn't understood what love was when she was a human, so most likely she wouldn't notice the difference.

This was the reason that vampires said that they couldn't remember their lives as humans. They could, and easily. Vampires had excellent memories. What they couldn't do was put the memories into an emotional context. A child vampire would remember her favorite doll, but would have no feelings for it, because now it was just a thing. Vampire teens could argue about superheroes—might even use the same arguments they'd used when they were alive—but that was just something to pass the time. When you were facing an eternity without love or friendship, you needed hobbies. Things that filled the endless hours. Or things that you'd wanted but had never had.

Bella would make a good eternal companion, Alice thought. She wasn't particularly bright, she was pretty enough to play dress-up with, and she was obedient. Alice intended to have a lot of fun with her...provided that they got off the plane.

Because right now, the humans were being difficult.

Three flight attendants were holding Alice—not that she couldn't break their hold in a minute—and two more were tending to Bella, trying to pour more blood into her body and restore a life that had already been lost. They were also trying to inject her with a sedative-painkiller to prevent her thrashing about in agony. It wasn't working. She'd already cracked two windows and left sizable dents on the floor, thanks to her convulsions.

The humans weren't doing anything to save the man she'd punched, who was now slumped against the wall, his hands, slippery with blood, clasped tightly over the gaping wound in his abdomen. A few feet of his intestines had slithered past his grip. Alice supposed she should be pretending to care, but all she could think about was how good his blood smelled. Not as good as Bella's blood—Bella's blood had been intoxicating, and for a moment she was sorry that she'd killed Bella before Bella could breed more humans with that sweet, succulent flavor—but still blood, and still delicious.

She licked her lips, and received a disgusted glare from one of the flight attendants in return. Humans. No appreciation for the finer things. Well, she could play along—at least until the plane landed. Maybe she could convince the humans that she had had a bad reaction to a drug. It happened. She wouldn't even be guilty of anything then. If everything went well, she would be out long before Bella stopped writhing in pain and woke up as a vampire.


***

CHAPTER 3 -- ALICE IN SUPERMAX

The humans didn't buy it. They just looked at her as if they knew she thought they were idiots. Then they threw her in jail.

She escaped--for about five minutes. Then a human had tackled her, and she'd landed headfirst on the parking lot asphalt. She now had a broken head. Literally. Part of her head had cracked when she landed, and when she moved later, it just...fell off.

Which was when one of the humans had crept up behind her and gassed her with some kind of ultra-sedative.

She'd woken up somewhere secret and underground. There were no windows. No doors. Just a large case of a room with impossibly dense and thick walls that looked as if they were made of glass but that clearly had some kind of metal mixed in. The ceiling and floor were the same.

There was no furniture. Just herself, a phosphorescent green jumpsuit, enough shackles and chains to weigh down Marley's ghost, and a straitjacket. And cameras. And auditory monitors. And movement sensors. The humans watched her from a distance—but their machines were everywhere. If she raced out of here at two hundred miles per hour, the machines would still be able to track her—and predict her probable destination.

Even if she got free of the straitjacket and shackles—which she hadn't yet—there was the problem of food. The humans weren't feeding her. They didn't seem to think there was any point in feeding a girl of living stone. And no matter how often she swore she was a vampire, they didn't believe her. Mutant, afflicted with a rare disease that drove people to madness, even alien—they could believe that. But not a vampire. She didn't have anything in common with the vampire legends, after all.

And they kept testing her. That was the worst part. Poison gas. No air. Bullets. Sonic weaponry. Laser weaponry.

They had learned that there were a few hundred ways that a vampire could die. They hadn't found a way to make her stay dead.

But they would eventually. They had her. They probably had Bella. And both of them would die slowly...though they'd probably go insane from hunger first.

She almost envied Edward. He had to be dead by now.

She hoped that Aro had made it quick.

***

CHAPTER 4 -- FOREVER MY LOVE

Edward wished that Aro had killed him. It would have made things easier.

He'd been running for—weeks? Months? He'd lost track. Ever since Aro had let him go.

"I'm hardly going to kill you for such a pathetic attempt at suicide," Aro had said, tittering. "It's not as if the humans know what sparkling means; we've made sure of that. The most any of the tourists thought was that you'd overdone the body glitter. Well, that and that you were in dire need of a sun lamp. There's pale, my dear, and then there's 'huddles in mother's basement at all hours.' Do learn the difference."

He'd begged Aro to kill him.

"Bella's dead," he'd told him.

"Well? You never loved her anyway."

With Aro, he could be more honest than he'd been with his family. "I'm tired of this existence. I want to die."

"Do you." Aro had given him a feral look. "Well, let's see. There's someone who's desperate to catch up with you. Now, if you really want to die, you'll let her do so. If you're not—well, we should see tomorrow. You'll get her first note then."

He'd waited. And he'd received the note.

It was in code. Hearts drawn twenty-six different ways. It looked sweet.

It had begun: Edward, my angel, I miss having your golden eyes gazing at me. I can't wait to see you again and rip them out of your skull. I'll keep them in a jar next to my bed, and when I lie down and pretend to sleep, they'll watch me, just like you always did? Won't that be lovely, darling?

Bella had gone on like that for twenty-four pages.

The terrible thing was that she wasn't threatening him. Not consciously. The pain and the blood-hunger had driven Bella insane. He'd run into her twice, and he no longer had any doubts. The first time, she'd talked about kissing him until she sucked the tongue of his mouth. "I already know everything that's in your heart, beloved," she'd said sweetly. "Really, you don't need to speak. Not. Ever. Again."

He'd thought that she was creepy, but he'd still believed that she was speaking metaphorically...until the second time.

The second time, he'd been trying to relax in a movie theatre. She'd crept up next to him in the dark and had started whispering to him that the sparkling in vampire flesh came from stars, and that she was going to carve constellations out of his body and hang them from the Duomo ceiling so that everyone could see his sparkling beauty forever and ever.

He hadn't taken her seriously until she'd used a diamond-edged knife to cut off his right hand.

He'd fought her. He was good at fighting. But, he'd learned, he wasn't good at fighting other vampires. And Bella enjoyed fighting him. She especially enjoyed fighting him and then cutting off bits and eating them. She called it "joining" or "becoming one with you, darling." In some way, cannibalism had become her substitute for sex.

He was down one hand and one foot, and he knew that she wanted his eyes and his—er, member, though she called it something quite different—as toys.

Hers to play with. Hers to destroy.

He'd never known how much he wanted to remain whole until, suddenly, he wasn't.

It didn't matter how much he ran, either. She was always right behind him, baffled by his behavior, but willing to let him play. On a leash, of course. But if he wanted to run for a while, that was fine.

Because—and this was the part that made him want to scream without stopping--he couldn't run away from her. Not forever.

After all, she believed that that they were destined to be together for all time.

So how could Bella--his 'true love'--ever give up, even if he himself was the obstacle?

Comments

[lachrimtov.livejournal.com]

Brrr! And do I detect a Romeo and Juliet reference, "cutting pieces of him to stick in the sky"?
Anyway, this is good- I think Aro would (as played by Michael Sheen especially) completely blow off the "death by sparkle" gambit...for god's sake, Europe is littered with street performers who've painted themselves in gold or silver to perform as 'living statues'. That really irritated me in New Moon, as there are all types of street theater where vampire traits would not attract undue attention.

[melissatreglia]

Oh, my dear, how wicked of you! Sadistic-batshit-insane-vampire!Bella is a real treat.