Alice Cullen had a vision once before moving to Forks. She had been quiet about it, biting her tongue and keeping her mind as blank as the space between a pause and the dubious start of a phoneme parting lips and caressing the back of a throat. She didn't talk about the intense intention hidden in the heavy persuasion of a whispering voice calling her in the dark, in the morning, in the middle of the night or the month; but she promised she wouldn't, and she didn't say a word, yet she was sure even a black widow spider made less sound than she when its fangs broke skins in two circular points before it crawled away.
The first time she saw it, it was hard to understand. The forms, the colors, the sounds, the stench. Everything was a wormhole linked to the same connections in time-space continuum, to the thought of not knowing what her unconscious wanted, knowing that she had it at some moment and that she wanted it back.
The second time she saw it, it was easier to identify those feelings weren't hers, but from someone else. She was a reincarnation, an euphemism, a watcher peeking through a lens, peeling off the flesh of another self in order to acknowledge her own under it layers of muscle and tissue and veins and arteries and bones. She was there as she was not, but all she could care about even at that moment were the pair of black moons in replacement of eyes and a chin tilted upwards to the infinite sky, looking thoroughly something that was missing. It was a girl, lost and crying; a woman, in a truce for peace and born for soul crushing devotion; a type of star that held an unchanging fate, a type of fallen comet meant to be buried in a field behind a family house and dug up the next morning, only to recover embers of its own beautiful life, all covered in dirt from that Earth.
The third time she saw it, she put her a name and a face. Then, she met Genevieve Cherry, oh so eerie and so wary, and although she was an incomplete future, she found her looking right into her eyes. Deep brown with specks of green, she mouthed soundless words until she realized Alice couldn't hear, could barely decipher what her lips were saying and why her body trembled the more she spoke and the more Forks became darker. She shook, lightly at first before the goosebumps that struck her were sudden like an electric current turning on and off, as it was evident time was passing there as it did behind Alice's opened eyes.
Sometimes they were together, a hand away from touching, but other times they were the same person. Alice was Alice, Alice was Genevieve, Genevieve was Genevieve. The only constant was the moon, up in the clear sky full of twinkling dots, glowing feverishly over their heads.
When it happened, Alice was aware she couldn't do anything to help, because what was in front of her wasn't real. It was supposed to be, but it wasn't. The clothes were different and the hair was slightly longer, the way she launched forward and into the body of water to pull Genevieve to the muddy soils was uncharacteristic of her, and still, watching every second of it, she swore she could recognize her sister in any state and place in the world, even there in her mind blurring her vision with the gut wrenching screech abandoning her lips.
Carlisle had once told Alice that Rosalie just needed time to heal. It was as necessary as giving her the right to choose to hunt the men that hurt her back in the past and to let her open herself to each of the Cullen, to call them her family. But, tracing her figure wet and red eyed, she knew time was never going to be sufficient to mend her soul how it should have, it wasn't going to work no matter how hard her teeth sunk into the flesh she held close to her chest, it wasn't going to get her out of that loop of biting and biting and biting because Genevieve wasn't meant to emit a sound, but to let her take on her sins, eat them off her in crimson lines that disappeared under her shirt and her hair.
They were three creatures, one real and two projections, each under the hand of a goddess. Genevieve had stopped being Genevieve, Rosalie was crying desperately, Alice was sitting on her heels a few steps away, close enough to read every detail at her reach and far enough to be mourning a life she hadn't met yet. It was raining and she was losing her blood as she had lost her mind and essence in a cold place, a lagoon where the depth wasn't right and its lonely want pleaded the body of her lover to be returned where it belonged. The earth called: the trees, the wind, the storm. Time wasn't linear, but it respected, somehow, the stops in the curves charged with love, death and a reborn living heart, a gasp of air and the first colors captured by eyes.
Genevieve Cherry found her last curve on the last day of March. Alice knew she was waiting for the road to be opened even before they could link gazes and she started babbling to her, like a kid telling a story filled of wonders and magic; she knew even before she could see her face; she knew even before Rosalie Hale ran into the forest the moment she felt something was entirely wrong. Genevieve, who hoped Rosalie didn't notice how she looked at her, how she breathed her, and hoped she didn't suspect the innocent touch of her embrace to feel her close, had been awaiting March ever since the start. Though she wasn't looking forward to it, with every step she took and every minute that guided her there in the darkest night, she always kept her head turned and her hand stretched back, looking for the break that could pull her out of that dreamy state of water and the loss of air and her childhood friend's hum driving her to where the satellite of Earth remained at rest for her to finally understand.
And she did, before Alice could. She saw her face morph from concern and fear to peace and, at the end, nothing but the void of the memory of a twitch of an eyebrow or her lips pulling upwards in a cheeky smile. She was there and she wasn't, but in all timelines, Rosalie Hale would be tied to her, every full and crescent moon, like a devotee who didn't miss any prayer of the week if it meant tasting her name once again.
"Watch for the moon," Alice whispered, long after she promised to not talk the first time it occurred, teary eyed and only looking at Rosalie when the trance was over and the rest of the Cullens gave her some space to rest her back on Jasper's chest and her trembling hands up close to her chin, "Will you?" She pleaded her sister, so softly, so heartbreakingly hopeless Rosalie had to say yes, even if she didn't know what her eyes had seen.
The day before they moved to Forks, Alice glanced at the night. The moon, who was too far away to notice her sorrow mix with anger, did not fight. Because it attacked no one, it didn't worry or tried to crush others. The moon only kept to its course, but by its very nature, it gently influenced the ones she cared most about when they were close to their final stop.
There wasn't a fourth time.
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O' LADY MOON, rosalie hale
FanfictionTHE ILLUSION IS IN OUR EYES. . . ˗ˏˋ Native American tribes used to tell lots of stories. There were legends about a great spirit they heard in every wind, saw in every cloud and feared in every sound as well as there were rumors of imaginary creatu...
