The Crash: Book Two - Heart on Fire

Chapter One: Rest In Peace, Isabella Swan

Bella

"It's creeping in, it's gonna get me by the end of the night - I'm sinking deeper, still I'm reaching for the end of the light - Burning in the lava - You can't go and pray this type of pain away - Don't bother me, my misery - It's holding me - Won't let me speak"

~ Demons - Hayley Kiyoko

Monday, September 12, 2005 - Wednesday, September 14, 2005

The anesthesiologist made me count down from one hundred, and this time it felt like a countdown to death. I knew something was about to change, and I had no real idea what was about to happen. In theory, I was about to become a vampire. Yet that possibility felt strange and alien and more than a little bizarre. Yet I found myself obsessed with the possibilities of this new life as I felt my eyelids growing heavier.

"Everything will be fine Bella." Carlisle said from behind a surgical mask, his friendly eyes giving me comfort as I fell into unconsciousness. I quickly slipped into what I called the void, a state where I was not quite perfectly asleep, but nowhere near conscious. I had a sliver of awareness that kept my mind going. Turning my life from the last year over and over, again and again as whatever was going to happen to me, well, happened. I had experienced this void all too often since the crash, and I was overjoyed that this was going to be the last time I would ever experience the unsettling sensation.

This change held the promise and the peril of hope for the future, and for the first time I felt as though I actually had a future. Unfortunately, that future also held a bunch of dark unknown secrets. My part in the surgery should've felt the same, I mean Carlisle had to do all the hard work. Yet, this time I felt like I was plunging headfirst into an endless abyss.

In a lot of ways I had grown close to pain. A constant reminder of both my mortality and frailty. I could barely remember what it felt like to walk, run, or even breathe without effort. After a year of thinking I understood the sensation, perhaps even grown used to it, I was deluded into believing I had a full grasp on what it could mean. I was proved utterly wrong, as I discovered the abyss wasn't endless when I landed in a lake of fire.

This new pain was the kind of agony I imagined being burnt at the stake would feel like, or falling into lava. Except it wasn't fleeting, as the flames rocked up and down my torso with wave after endless wave. I was already outside of time, and after a while the very concept of time lost all meaning, as the world I had once known faded away. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was faintly aware of people nearby, but they didn't matter, because in my new reality there was nothing but the flames.

I reasoned that there must've been something moving through my veins like a thousand snakes covered in razor blades, slicing everything they touched. Inching forward with every beat of my heart. A heart which I thought I knew, but realized I had never truly felt it beat before. Except my heart wasn't beating in the familiar rhythm, it was as if each beat was distended for hours.

I tried to remember my life before, but this experience was more visceral and intense than anything I had ever experienced. I had been used to pain, right? The crash. My time in that cursed wheelchair. My friends, which were practically family... Alice, Emmett, Angela... Carlisle and Esme who felt like the parents I always wanted. Edward my boyfriend, god I should've broken up with him before all of this. Rosalie... why did I feel so conflicted about her, and why didn't she want me? Would I even fit into their family? Would ending things with Edward cause too much strife? Would I be the cause for Rose ending her marriage?

As my thoughts began to spiral, things drifted towards my home life. Mom and dad... Charlie... Oh god what had I done to him? The glimmer of memory I had regained felt amazing, yet in the same instant those fleeting threads to my past were yanked away by the superheated acid coursing through my body. A part of me knew I should have been screaming and writhing, twisting from the agony. Yet for some reason I was motionless, unable to even move my arms. This new kind of paralysis terrified me more than the fires, what if it were permanent?