Death

I was dead. There was nothing more mind-blowing, more absolutely horrifying than realizing my life was completely and utterly over. There would be no high school graduation, no college, and no future for me. Well, crap.

I thought all of this over as I looked down at my dead, lifeless body and tried to come up with some sort of plan of what I was going to do next. So I was dead. Now what?

Well, it's not like my options were exactly poking me in the eye with their obviousness at the moment.

I couldn't stop staring at my body. I knew it was bad, that it was too scarred and cut up and just plain wrong to be mine, but it was. The brown hair with its own idea of curls and the slight spray of freckles across the bridge of my nose were too obviously mine. Not to mention the small, thin build and the distinct scar of crosses that were burned into my palms when I was still really young by a crazy priest who thought I was cursed. It was so long ago they didn't bother me at all anymore, but it still looked kind of like it should. The eyes were closed, thank goodness, but I knew what color they would be. A crisp steel blue that many of my old friends had said made them feel like I was looking into their Souls.

That thought almost made me laugh, considering.

Considering I was dead.

I shook my head firmly, knowing thoughts like that weren't good ones. I needed to get past that. I knew it already, was completely well-aware of it, and I didn't need to keep thinking about it like it was the end of everything. Even though it kind of was…

Okay, change of thought. Why did I die?

The old guy who had done the autopsy on my body that I was not able to watch had said it was due to a stab wound in my side that made me bleed out. He said there were multiple stab wounds on me, many more than what would've taken to kill me, and that it looked to be a murder of passion.

So I had been murdered.

He also said that I had been cut and bruised up quite a bit over a long amount of time and then allowed to heal, something that he said might have meant I had been held hostage somewhere by someone for a very long time.

That was bad. I didn't remember any of it, not a single moment of torture or pain, but it was obvious from the state of my body that it had happened. A 16-year-old girl didn't just trip on a street curb and end up looking like that.

I took a few deep breaths and turned away from my body, trying to think rationally for a few seconds. If I couldn't remember being tortured and killed, what could I remember?

My name, of course. It was-

Was-

Emma Steele. That's it! Okay, that's a pretty good start. Names are important.

Now, I was an only child. Or did I have a brother? No, I was an only child. I'm pretty sure. No parents or at least no memory at all of having them.

So I was alone. I wasn't quite sure how that made me feel. Glad, I guess, that no one else but me was hurt. Disappointed, of course, because that meant no one was going to come and say they knew who I was so I could at least get buried with a name on my headstone.

See, once you die, the things you want tend to be extremely miniscule compared to the things you wanted when you were alive. I mean, it's not like I'll be able to use a new pair of sneakers now that I'm deceased. And a decent pair of gloves seems pretty useless now that nothing really touches me anymore. Well, I haven't actually got up the nerve to try to touch something yet, but that's not important right now. It could be later, but not now. What was important right now was figuring out what to do now that I was dead. I had obviously not planned out anything before leaving my body forever, and I had no real idea where I even was.

Yeah, the old guy who had dissected my body made me think I was in the morgue, but other than that I was stuck with some pretty limited info. He had a normal accent from my area, so I wasn't in some sort of foreign country or something.

I was dead. I was completely and totally a ghost. No one could see me or hear me, and I was still stuck on the issue of if they could feel me if I walked through them. Which I was not about to try doing. Not now. Not yet. Not so soon after… whatever the Hell had happened to me.

I had grown so used to the old guy who had dissected me earlier that I had pretty much just blocked out that he was there in the room with me. I could hear his breathing and the sound of rustling papers as he sifted through paperwork, but other than that he didn't make any other sounds. I had learned that he had a sweet habit of reading information aloud to himself, but a lot of what he said I didn't understand. Only "stab wounds", "tortured", and "terribly painful". I had died in a worst state then I could have ever imagined.

I hadn't moved from my body's side in a long time. I just couldn't bear leaving its side. I had no idea what they were going to do with it, and the fact that it had been mine for 16 years made me not want to see them just throw it out like trash.

"I'm so sorry. Your last moments of life must have been terrible." the old man who had cut me up and taken out my insides murmured, gazing down at my bruised and broken face sadly. Then he reached down and pulled the white sheet that had been covering me up like a blanket up over my head. I watched him numbly as he went over to the only door in the room and opened it, two rather buff men in matching uniforms coming in. They headed straight for my body and picked it up, taking it out of the room without a word as if they had done it dozens of times. They probably had.

Watching them take my body away from me snapped me out of my numb self-pity, and I screamed and tried to get them to stop. To put me down, to uncover my face again. I couldn't lose my body. Not like this. Not so soon after leaving it. They couldn't hear me, though. They couldn't see me, either. I screamed and jumped around in front of them, then crying and crawling after them, begging them to put my body down again.

I didn't pay any attention to where I was, just that they were taking my body out of the safe warmth of the building wherever this was and out into the bitter cold. I shuddered as the crisp breeze tugged at me, wrapping my arms around myself as I followed the two men closely as they took my body and put it into the back of a dark car with tinted windows.

Then they got in, started the car up, and were gone. I didn't follow. I couldn't.

I was all alone and freezing, the cold digging through me with fingers of ice that made me shiver and cry softly there on the sidewalk. Snow, as soft as baby duck feathers, pooled around my bare feet and clung to my hair and skin as if I was still alive. I didn't care, though. I was all alone now.

Author's Notes: Yeah, I know this is silly to post since I need to start up on the next chapters of my other stories, but I couldn't get this out of my head to save my life... terrible pun...

If you have read the first few chapters posted of my other stories here on FF, then you'll notice the main character's name is the same. Yeah, it's my favorite name for a heroine ever. I'll probably end up naming my first daughter Emma just because.

I don't own anything mentioned anywhere in the story, and if you think I do then please notify me so I can double-check and possibly make some changes.