Authoress's Note: I wrote this in entrance to a competition (in which it didn't get anything). It's lightly based off of Twilight, but can be considered AU in the sense that Alice actually remembers parts and pieces of her human life and what happened to her.
Bitten
Darkness was my entire world before my life became my existence.
And yet when I recalled the darkness, the only color that came to mind was not black, but white. It surrounded me in a never-ending universe—above me, below me, and all around me.
I could remember the terrible feeling of hopelessness that would interrupt my terrified screaming when they would inject liquid sleep into my bloodstream. Wounds made me nauseous, for I could smell the rusty, salty aroma of my blood.
What the man had looked like evaded my mind, even more so when I strained to think about it. I wasn't used to thinking overly much, but I knew in the back of my unaccustomed brain that he had been unearthly beautiful.
The one feature I seemed to have memorized was the crazed look in his dark red eyes before the pain began.
The pain was excruciating, starting from a point near my jugular and spreading throughout my body like white-hot needles poking at my nerves.
If I had had any perception of time, I would have said the pain seemed to last for years.
Then it ended.
I felt like a wild animal, demented and bloodthirsty. I wasn't hungry, but I was thirsty, and some sort of strange-tasting liquid pooled in my mouth at the scent of my caretakers.
At first, I didn't understand why I would attack them—humans, for I wasn't one anymore—but then I began to understand.
I don't sleep in a coffin, for I am not able to sleep at all. My skin doesn't burn in the sun, but sparkles, like thousands of glittering diamonds are embedded in the surface. Garlic doesn't kill me; it only disgusts me. And the stories they spread about wooden stakes and holy water are just that—stories.
The thing most difficult to understand about my kind is that we don't have to have blood red eyes—my own are that of liquid butterscotch from an eternity of drinking the blood of animals.
Don't you see? Don't you see what I am? What has become of me? I used to think I was a monster, but my perceptions have changed. I am not a monster, for I do not cause intentional pain. Yet I am not completely harmless to those weak ones who reside around me.
Legend can never come close to the real thing, and the real thing is much more horrifying and intricate for your pitiful human mind to comprehend.
My name is Alice, and I am a vampire.