Starless Night (A Twilight/Stranger Things Fan Fiction)

Chapter 3: The Upside Down

When I woke, the first thing I was aware of was not the pain in my leg, but the pain in my chest.

I'd known, from the moment Edward began speaking, that this was how it was going to be. That when his words hit me, really hit me, I would feel more pain than I had ever felt in my life, be so overcome by how deeply the emptiness of his absence ached that I wouldn't know how to think, or move, or breathe.

But after that creature showed up, perfectly timed and perfectly poised to attack, I at least thought that the pain would be over. That I was going to die before I could really process the pain, and so I wouldn't feel it much longer.

Apparently, I'd been wrong.

I struggled to open my eyes. I couldn't find the muscles required for that, or the ones required for sitting up. I was dimly aware of a soreness in my leg, but to my surprise, even that pain was dull in comparison with the one in my chest, the one that felt like a gaping hole where my heart and parts of my lungs had been.

I lay there for a while, wondering if, perhaps, I was dead after all, and death wasn't the relief I'd assumed it was. It took a while for the realization to come.

The pain in my leg was getting worse.

Now, rather than a dull ache, it was a throbbing, pounding feeling, similar to the way that my leg had felt when James had broken it, except it was as though the pain had leaked out of the inside of my leg and coated my skin. The entirety of my calf seemed to burn like someone had set it in hot coals.

The pain left my mind blurry; I could barely think through it. Finally, I found the will to open my eyes and sit up, but this only increased the pain. I heard myself cry out as if from a significant distance away.

Blinking through tears, I finally managed to pull my eyes open and look around. At first, through the tears, I saw nothing but gray, and thought surely, I must be dead, if I was in an empty gray void.

But after a few moments, and a lot of blinking, the world cleared away. The tears slipped down my cheeks and my vision cleared, and I could see.

And what I could see... didn't look real.

I expected, first, to see the inside of that tree, but this wasn't the inside of a tree at all. It... actually looked a lot like Forks. But it was obvious I wasn't in Forks at all.

The air was filled with soft white flakes. They looked like snow to me, at first, but when I saw the flakes that had settled on my skin, I realized they were probably something more like ashes. It occurred to me quickly that I was in my Spanish classroom at Forks high school, but that the walls, the floor, all of it... looked different.

I touched my fingertips to the floor. It clung to my fingertips, membranous and sticky, like kids' hands covered in wet glue. I pulled them away, and the sticky substance came away with my hands. I tried to wipe it off on my shirt until, looking at my shirt, I realized I was also covered in the stuff.

I glanced around, my heart picking up its pace in confusion. Then I saw my leg.

My leg, which should've been adorned only by my bloodied, torn pant leg, was covered in gauze. I smelled alcohol and realized why it felt like it was burning.

Someone had... poured alcohol on my wounds. To... disinfect them?

I tried to stand, but the agony in my leg flared, and I fell again, a horrible sound of pain wrenching up my throat. I realized my throat hurt. As if I had been screaming.

The panic was just beginning to claw up my already-sore throat when I felt a hand over my mouth.

"Hey, Bella, it's me. It's just me," a voice in my ear soothed. It took a long moment to rein back in the panic that had threatened to take me over, and then I realized I recognized that smooth, soft voice.