"This martyrs cross gets too heavy to exist
And we feel the loss of the lives
I left to risk."
-'Nobody's Hero' by Black Veil Brides
XXX
You never got used to the taste of blood, especially your own. Mother had told you once years ago that you were a diamond, before the coffin, before Ell, before you knew that what she was teaching you was the complete opposite of what you would wind up thinking was right. A precious diamond that could cut through flesh but never bone, not unless you wanted to face the consequences of turning strength into dust.
You were a countess, a diamond, an eternal eighteen year old girl from the seventeenth century. Some would say you could've been written into fairy tales, you had it so good, but what they didn't know was the flame that mother had lit inside you, whispering lies to hold you over until your next feeding, until the next girl you were to bed. They didn't know of the nightmares that burrowed into the back of your head, chiseled into your bone structure, etched behind closed eyelids. They didn't know that your own hands had been the cause of your biggest fear, the death of a loved one.
When you were turned, Mother told you she took down the person who had killed your family. She failed to tell you that she was that person. You trusted her, and in return you were given a fate worse than death, a live burial where all you could do was choke down the poisoned blood and await a death that never came. Hissing between grounded teeth as the sinews in your hands became your skin as you clawed your way out of that box. The box you swore you would never put yourself back into.
You tried to run because you hated yourself and somewhere deep down you were still naive enough to think that you had a chance. She found you though, and after given an ultimatum that would ensure you were to be placed back into a coffin all too similar to the one you had lived just over half a century in, you followed her back to Silas with your figurative tail between your legs. She refused to see you in your most primal form. She wanted to still believe that you were this untouched, polished thing that would do as she said, but that time had been long over by the time you had reunited. She no longer wanted a daughter, she never had. She wanted a puppet, one she could pull and lead the strings to a finish line that she hadn't even written out yet.
You hated it. You hated yourself, what you had allowed yourself to become out of fear, out of loyalty. Sometimes you think you were mistaken for a cat, that you should have been a dog, because cats know when they're being abused and don't forgive. You never forgave her, but you leveled with her. Sometimes you think that's worse.
You hated her, what she made you do. You hated William, the baby vamp she had turned during your stay in the Earth's soil. You were filled with so much hate that you had no where to store it, no one to confide in. Mother was everywhere, and after a few mixups, you had learned to keep your mouth shut and to just bottle it up and shove it down, deep in your chest next to a heart that had stopped beating long ago, that now only served it's purpose as a ticking time bomb that had run out.
When you first met Laura you couldn't believe what Mother had done. She knew what Ell had meant to you, and found someone who turned out to be the complete opposite. She knew you would fall for her, after all, that was the plan she had later told you right before Laura had pushed that boulder over top of her. You couldn't believe that you had to jump in after her. You just hoped that where ever it was you ended up, it would be as far away from her as possible, even if you had to burn in hell for it. Purgatory would be worse, and you knew that's where she would be condemned to.
When you saw Ell you couldn't believe your eyes, and for a split second you wanted to think that you could erase every moment you had spend alive breathing the air she couldn't, you suddenly loved her again, you wanted to be with her. But then Laura screamed your name as you pushed her away from the light and you suddenly no longer cared about yourself or what happened to you. You didn't care whether or not you survived this mess. All you cared about was making sure Laura survived, that her and her friends would make it out of there with a pair of lungs that worked, and eyes that blinked. You wanted them to live a life that had been taken from you. You wanted them to grow old, get married, have children. You wanted them to have everything that every other human had been granted since this planet came to be. You didn't care whether or not you got to live to see it. Laura didn't love you anyways, not in the way you loved her.
You had given Laura one final look, one that said 'don't even think about it' and turned, jumping right into what could've been a bottomless pit for all you knew, and drove that damned burning sword right into the center of the light. You figured it was your fate, to be swallowed by light. Born into darkness it only seemed fitting for you to go out in a blinding brightness. Falling in right after mother and William. After Ell. It was all a little bit too fairy tale, the villain died. You couldn't decide whether or not you were the villain or not, you guessed that if you somehow managed to finally die you would get your answer.
But then you woke up, choking on your own blood, but alive.