Renewal [Emmett Cullen] (1)

[24- Transformation]

I didn't hear anything for a long time. Everything went still. I was pretty sure I was about to die, if I wasn't dead already. I wasn't familiar with death and how long my mind would be active for, since time didn't seem to pass normally.

My world felt calmer than it had been since my accident. I was confident that this must be the end. The end to Eleanor Parks. I never got to say goodbye. Goodbye to my parents, goodbye to Emmett. I thought my life would amount to more than this but I was wrong.

I would never know if Emmett and I would have a future together. I spent many sleepless nights wondering if we would become something more than just friends. Hopefully he would find someone and be happy. That's all we wanted for one another, to be happy but I thought that we would mean us being together. It was this unspoken thing. Around Emmett, I could be myself completely. When we were together, there was no pressure to act a certain way or say a certain thing. We joked around, we laughed. I'll never get to tell him how much he meant to me.

Suddenly, I felt the lush tearing of my skin, something sharper than knives ripped through me. I knew immediately what was happening. Emmett was trying to save me. I guess this wasn't the end, I wasn't dead quite yet. He had mentioned earlier that if it stayed in the human body, vampire venom could overcome extensive injuries. Maybe I would live again.

The pain was bewildering. Exactly that—I was bewildered. I couldn't understand, couldn't make sense of what was happening.

I howled in agony, unsure if anyone or anything could hear me. I wanted to kick and thrash around, like how people slap mosquito bites to relieve the pain. My body tried to reject the pain, and I was sucked again and again into a blackness that cut out whole seconds or maybe even minutes of the torture. I've been hit in the head with a basketball and compared to this, that was like falling onto a pile of pillows. This was like I was being sawed in half, hit by a bus, punched by a prize fighter, trampled by bulls, and submerged in acid, all at the same time.

Reality was feeling my body twist and flip when I couldn't possibly move because of the pain. I wanted someone to kill me, anything to relieve the pain. I tried to scream it but the words couldn't come out, only howls and shrills.

All I wanted was to die. To never have been born. The whole of my existence did not outweigh this pain. Wasn't worth living through it for one more heartbeat. Let me die, let me die, let me die.

The fire made it like a sensory deprivation chamber; I couldn't feel anything but pain. And, for a never-ending space, that was all there was. Just the fiery torture, and my overwhelming screeching of pain, pleading for death to come. Nothing else, not even time. So that made it infinite, with no beginning and no end. One infinite moment of pain.

The endless burn raged on. It could have been seconds or days, weeks or years, but, eventually, time came to mean something again. The burning only got more and never less, but I was adapting. It was all I could feel, but not all I could think about.

Three things happened together, grew from each other so that I didn't know which came first: time restarted, the pain faded, and I got stronger.

I could feel the control of my body come back to me in increments, and those increments were my first markers of the time passing. I knew it when I was able to twist my fingers into fists. I knew it, but I did not act on it. Though the fire did not decrease one tiny degree—in fact, I began to develop a new capacity for experiencing it, a new sensitivity to appreciate, separately, each blistering tongue of flame that licked through my veins—I discovered that I could think around it.

Slowly, my screaming died down. The pain wasn't so much as gone, rather manageable. Slowly my mind could occupy other thoughts than the agony. I could remember that, though it felt impossible now, there was something that might be worth the torture.

My mind was cataloguing the fire, experiencing it in new ways. It was amazing how each inch of my skin, each millimeter, was so distinct. It was like I could feel all my cells burning individually. I could feel the difference between the pain in the walls of my lungs, and the way the fire felt in the soles of my hands, inside my eyeballs, and down my spine.

My heart took off, beating like helicopter blades. It was like a chainsaw grinding through my ribs. The fire flared up in the center of my chest, sucking the last remnants of the flames from the rest of my body to fuel the most scorching blaze yet. The pain was enough to stun me, to break through my iron grip on the stake. My back arched, bowed as if the fire was dragging me upward by my heart.
I allowed no other piece of my body to break rank as my torso slumped back to the table.

The core of the fire seemed to be centered around my sprinting heart. It was sucking the flames in from my hands and my ankles, leaving them pain-free, but multiplying the heat and pain in my heart.

The fire constricted, concentrating inside that one remaining human organ with a final, unbearable surge. The surge was answered by a deep, hollow-sounding thud. My heart stuttered twice, and then thudded quietly again just once more.

Then, there was no sound. No breathing. Not even mine.For a second, all I could process was the absence of pain. The dull, dry afterburn in my throat was easy to ignore, because every other part of me felt amazing.

I opened my eyes and stared up in wonder.