Disclaimer: Same as chapter 1.
Note: Sorry this is short, but here's a little something you asked for with Winter. I wasn't planning on writing about Winter again, I don't think, at least not to this extent, so I hope it's satisfying and as good as I think it is.
Chapter 40: Winter's Punishment
Winter stood in front of the mirror, looking over her reflection. She looked terrible, that was for sure. Her eyes had the darkest circles underneath them due to her lack of sleep, she had never seen circles as dark as the ones in the mirror at that moment. Her hair was a tangled mess and she barely had the energy to push through it. Her cheeks were slightly sunken from her loss of appetite, which was also the cause of her weight loss.
She dealt with many different emotions when she woke up every morning. The first one was the guilt, which had been there since she had gotten into a fight with Rian. Guilt that she had pushed her, and guilt over the fact that now she knew that Rian had never lied to her, except maybe keeping the secret that vampires were real (although she didn't blame her for that).
Then after she pushed the guilt down into its little box, she felt an overwhelming fear. The Cullen hadn't told her much, just that they stopped the venom from reaching her heart and that she should live out the rest of her life as a human. But with the little information, she was left to her imagination and the myths that surrounded vampires. One thing was for sure, she was helpless when Eirik had bitten her. He had appeared out of nowhere, so vampires had speed. She couldn't budge the man an inch when he held her, so they also had incredible strength. And if she were ever bitten again she would either die from the blood loss or be changed into a vampire. That was not something she wanted to live with, being a vampire. So the fear was hard to deal with. It would pop up randomly throughout her day as well. It caused her to lose interest in the human relationships around her. Her friends now seemed so petty and annoying. Her homework didn't seem to matter anymore. She was walking down a very dark path of depression and fear since that night at the Cullen's house.
Then after all the guilt and fear was safely locked away in their boxes, confusion would set it. All the questions of how the Cullen's lived, why Rian was not scared of them, and a million of other questions would pop up. The biggest question of all was of Rian's pregnancy. When she had first saw Rian that day she had a brief moment to wonder about how big Rian had gotten over such a short amount of time. But over the last few days, or weeks, Winter wasn't sure how much time had actually passed (the days all seemed to blur together), she realized that the half vampire baby was growing much quicker than a normal human baby. The thought of the half vampire child made Winter sick, it was an abomination.
So Winter walked through her days at school half absent, her mind elsewhere as the lessons continued. Her friends had quickly lost interest in her once she became less interested in them (that and Winter's disheveled appearance at school was the cause of their abandonment). In the back of her mind, she thought this was a just punishment for her, she was slowly falling into the insanity that had plagued Rian for so many years and all because of Winter's own inability to empathize and understand Rian's predicament.
Day by day, month by month; Winter's appearance and sanity took a turn for the worse. She wasn't surprised when her mind finally broke, shattered, as Rian's had over and over; and she found herself sitting in a hospital room. Her life was never the same, she was never the same.
Her thoughts were consumed with vampires, she could no long find joy in the people around her, in dating, in art, in movies, in anything she had loved before. She was forgetting who she was and why she was that way before. All that mattered was the vampires that was now haunting her. It was too late to see the irony in her situation, it was too late to see that this could all have been avoided, it was too late to change anything about where her life was heading. All she could do now was sit in her room, eating whatever was served to her, dressing in the same white gown day after day, listening to her neighbor's sane ramblings and screams, and screaming about vampires to everyone she saw.