A/N: I went back to add this because the further I get, the more necessary I feel it is.
First, I have no idea how long this will be - I'm simply writing as it comes to me.
Second, a disclaimer. There is no Jacob in this, no crazy plot twists, no time travel. Plainly, there may be cliffhangers, but you will never open the next chapter and "Everything was just a dream." I have no idea how often this will update. Truthfully, the first three chapters were wrote within a few hours of each other and each update will be posted as I write it, as well.
And lastly, thank you for reading. I will appreciate any and all reviews, but please remember I am not a professional, just a mom with some spare time and too many vivid dreams. Constructive criticism is welcomed. Hate is not. If you don't like it, please just move along.
With that said, let's get to it.
You'll see me in hindsight
Tangled up with you all night
Burning it down
Someday when you leave me
I bet these memories
Follow you around
DEC. 2106
Over a century and I still remember the feeling of burning, like being flung chest-first into a brick fire oven. Dry heat, excruciating at first and becoming somehow impossibly even hotter and hotter as time wore on. My heart, beating harder as if trying to outpace its inevitable demise. My skin feeling as though it was being scorched away but somehow leaving beautiful granite in its place. The startling realization when the flames began to cool - from my fingers, toes, wrists, ankles, elbows, knees, feeling it pull inward to concentrate on that doomed infernal heart. When how, after my heart was consumed and it had deigned to beat its last beat, the absence of pain and heat was barely all I could comprehend.
I remembered, some hazy grey human memory, that it did no good to scream, so I didn't. Another just a grainy impression of a man lying in a sewer as he burned, so I hid. I still wondered what had compelled me to give credence to, let alone obey, these vague impressions, but it became clear the longer I was in this new world I had done a great thing.
I was startled out of my reverie when Amelia, a notoriously studious and friendly girl, kicked my chair. She must have noticed me staring blankly out the window and thought I missed Mr. Danwood's question, although she didn't know that my spacious brain had kept tabs on both his lecture and subsequent inquisition separate from my macabre musings. I gave the answer he was waiting for, "November 9th, 1989," - the fall of the Berlin Wall, also called Mauerfall - and promptly went back my thoughts.
In reality the memory I was obsessing over prior had little to do with some masochistic gratification but more to do with what had come after. The fact that I was a newborn vampire with no idea who had turned me. That I had no idea what my own name was or who I had been in my last life. Bigger still, the reason I was going through the charade of high school in the first place - there was a gaping, gnawing hole in my chest, the pain of it absolutely staggering, like there was a literal piece of me missing, making my eyes itch and burn with tears that were impossible to shed. I did not know a great many things when I opened my eyes the day I stopped burning, but I knew this - I had loved someone, hugely, with every fiber of my being. And every time I ran by Forks High School the wound in my chest turned from a hole into a chasm, too vast to even see across let alone comprehend.