Libra's Symphony (Alec Volturi x OC)

Awakening

The pain was blinding. I never thought I would ever be in such excruciating pain for so goddamn long in my whole life, not even in the few times when I contemplated giving birth somewhere in the future. That pain was something my imagination could never come up with, it was more than just intense – it was also unrelenting. I could feel Alec carrying me and touching me, I could hear him speaking, I could even see him, but I couldn't comprehend or process anything past that pain. Everything else was pushed back, nothing but a faint echo in the background of the deafening noise of those flames licking me from inside out.

I think I begged him. I think I promised him that I would do anything he wanted, no matter how horrid and deranged it was, as long as he at least lessened the pain. It didn't even have to disappear, I just wanted a little less of it so I could at least understand my own thoughts.

He mumbled something, or maybe he yelled it; I wouldn't know. The pain never stopped or diminished, he never made it better. He chose to let it take me, knowing exactly how horrific and maddening it was. He simply stayed with me through it all, watching as I suffered.

It is really incredible how we can get used to the most awful of situations with time. When that pain first hit me my entire world was swallowed completely and nothing else existed for me. Time seemed to stand still as I felt like the pain would never go away and nothing was happening outside of my own body, the whole planet just vanishing from my perception as my senses were abducted by the fire. With time, however, I started to get used to it in the strangest of ways. It was still a hell pit where I had been thrown into but I could see and feel through it, if only just a little bit. I started to catch glimpses of Alec's eyes boring into mine, I could hear his voice and other people's voices a little clearer even if I couldn't make out all of their words. But that small piece of reality was still unreliable as my brain threw up all sorts of odd, random memories into it. I couldn't completely trust what I could see or hear since a part of it was very obviously made up of hallucinations.

The most insistent of them was that of a goat floating in the middle of the dark room to which Alec took me. I saw him with various different people over the course of an unknown period of time and that goat would flash in and out of the scene, always floating in the air. For a while I had no idea why it would appear and it would do nothing. It just stood there, floating and staring at me, giving me a foreboding sense of dread.

Eventually the sight of the goat would follow a weird sound that seemed to come from everywhere. It was a familiar sound, one that I knew I had heard before many times, and that almost sounded like music. But there was no instrument anywhere in the room, there was just Alec and many different vampires that would come and go, some that I had met and some that I hadn't. And that awful flying goat.

"This is the end of day two." Alec said at some point and I felt overjoyed that I understood him.

I realised then that I could understand him better because I was no longer screaming. I never even noticed that I had stopped. When I tried to answer him my throat burnt and I wasn't sure that any words came out, but he told me what I wanted to know so I must have managed to spit something out.

"Probably tomorrow."

I wanted to beg him to make the pain stop again but as soon as I thought of it the weird sound that preceded the appearance of the goat reached my ears. He talked about the sound instead.

"No, I don't hear it."

I looked over his shoulder and there it was, the goat was watching me again as I thrashed and turned on the ground.

What does it want? Where did it come from?

"There is no goat, love. You're imagining it."

But it was right there. I was looking at it as he spoke and it was looking right back at me, with its demonic red eyes and its feet a few centimetres above the ground, swaying like a flag in the wind. It was waiting, preparing itself to get me. I had to leave the room, outrun it somehow.