What we do in the shadows

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Chapter 1

BPOV

I am just so thirsty. It feels like I crawled for hours in the middle of the desert under a very punishing sun without a bottle of water.

But there is no sun where I am. Everything is pitch black, I can't even see my own hands or make sense of my surroundings.

No light means no way of measuring the passing of time.

Have I been here for days? For weeks? And where the hell is here.

These are the questions that keep running in my mind. I dropped the why a long time ago. This situation seems so awful that there are only two reasons that could justify it. Either I have done terrible things I have forgotten but that explain this detention, either I have gone mad and am currently stuck in a corner of my rotten brain.

I try desperately to lick for the 100 time the damp wall that supports my tired body. But it's not enough. It helped me in the beginning and it is not unusual that some drops of water happen to flow slowly along the wall from an unidentified ceiling above my head. But I need so much more.

There is no sound in my personal hell appart from my breathing and the occasional hesitant stretching of my legs and arms. But it hasn't always been like that.

My first conscient memory of my incarceration had been the sound of the powerful roar and rampage of a raging animal apparently stuck in the same room. I had heard the creature pull on some chains and somewhere in my terror I had known that if it had managed to get free it would have jumped on me and torn me appart. And it had gone on for what seemed like eternity to me. But at some point, the animal had progressively lost energy and finally, the sounds had stopped. I had guessed it was dead, and I have been pretty sure that, at some point, I would have welcomed the same fate.

I am now still desperate to stay alive and to protect my brain from total dementia. In order to do so, I keep trying to retrace my last conscient actions outside of my prison. I remember driving my truck after my first day of work in Fork's diner. I remember feeling overwhelmed by all of these sudden changes. I just moved to this small town to take care of Charlie, my dad. Charlie is recovering from a heart attack and even if we have kind of got out of touch these last years, I left New York in a blink of an eye when I learned that the doctors recommended extra vigilance in the months to come. I kissed goodbye my history of art phd, at least for now, and took the first plane in order too help him.

It seemed like the right think to do, I had felt guilty lately for my lack of relationship with my dad. Growing up I realized that I had probably left my mother Renée plant false ideas in my head about my Dad. Lies that only made her look like a victim and him like a manipulative narcissist. Years of leaving with my mom had helped me realize that she was the shallow individualist cold one. But I had felt ashamed of my quick rejection of my father, even if I was only nine when they got a divorce and she took me away from this town. My guilt had kept me from contacting him, and when I had finally cut ties with my mother, I had abandoned the concept of family. So when I finally heard from Charlie it seemed like the occasion to finally make amend. Little I had known that I would ironically be offered so much free time alone in the dark to atone.

I was thinking of my dad when I was driving on the damp road back to his home the last time I saw the light of day. I knew that I needed to broach at some point the reason of my long years of silence. But I was struggling with how. I didn't want to cause him a stroke with an emotional conversation. Yet the elephant in the room was as uncomfortable to him as to me, and I was determined to help ease my Dad's pain. Thinking of that didn't prevent me from checking attentively the road, I had always been a safe driver. So when my car collided with an undetermined mass I clearly didn't see it coming.

The last distinct memory I have after my car flipped over, is a mass of coppery hair falling on dark crazy eyes.

I don't have a beta so all mistakes are mine. Plus, english is not my native language, which means my friends that if you want to follow Bella on the path I imagined for her, your eyes are probably going to suffer a little bit along the way…My sincere apologies to the language of Whitman and Keats, and to you potential readers.