Dedication: To one of my favorite people, jessypt. My girl loves angst just as much as I do, and I love her even though she "made" me write Alice/Charlie. (Did she not understand how much she traumatized me by making me write Carlisle/Bella...ffs). Happy birthday, lovely.

A/N and Disclaimers: I am pretty sure if I was SM, I'd be fainting at the pairing alone. Holy hell. But then again, Charlie always did like Alice, didn't he? Heh. Anyway. This story is a bit heavy. As always, I don't do warnings, so if you have a question, please ask. I'll be happy to answer.

Prologue:

"My life is Springer worthy. Springer-esque sounds fancier, doesn't it?

"I witnessed my father murder my mother when I was three years old, a fact I repressed until I was eleven. My stepmother resented me. When I started to remember, I was so confused. She told me I was being insane, and my father, not wanting to get caught, let her believe it. Then he started to beat me, telling me I was crazy and I needed to keep my mouth shut.

"I believed them. For a long time, I believed them."

"When I was thirteen, my father left bruises on me that I couldn't hide. They took me away, and put me in foster care.

"The Cullens were good to me. Loving. Caring. They had two biological kids and two kids other people had fucked up. They were too good for me, but that didn't matter to them. Such good people. I wanted to be better for them. I wish I could have been.

"So there I was with Emmett and Edward Cullen and Jasper. Jasper Whitlock. My foster brother. Just as fucked up as I was, stuck in this idyllic little family who couldn't help the way they reminded us how well adjusted we weren't. Of course we fell in love. I married him the minute, the minute, I turned eighteen, and when we went to school, the idiot kids called us disgusting because it was incest. We didn't care. We were in love, and life was going to be better.

"And now, I'm twenty-two, and a widow."

Alice Whitlock looked up at him, her eyes wide and lost. "I'm twenty-two, and my biography would be as thick as the last Harry Potter book. I'm just…" She waved her hands in the air helplessly. "What do I do now?"

Charlie Swan watched as the young woman wandered away as if in a daze, his tongue still tied. Charlie didn't even know what to say when his eighteen-year-old daughter Bella was upset over a failed test. There they were, standing at her husband's early grave.

What was he supposed to say to any of that?

Bella came up to him and looped her arm through his. "Dad, can Alice stay with us for a while?"

Charlie cleared his throat, blinking down at his daughter. "What's wrong with Carlisle and Esme?"

"They're taking it hard. They loved him, too. She just… she's having a hard time being there. She can stay with me in my room. Is that okay?"

Charlie looked back to where the raven-haired woman was looking out toward the horizon, not really seeing anything. "Yeah, Bell," he said. "She can stay."

If it was the only thing he could do, he was damn sure going to do it.

A/N: I don't think this is going to be very long (don't I always say that). Many thanks to barburella and songster for stepping outside their comfort zones, and of course to jessypt since I asked her to beta her own fic. Hehehe