Starless Night (A Twilight/Stranger Things Fan Fiction)

Chapter 15: Numb

(Trigger warning for non-graphic depiction of sexual assault and its aftermath.)

It's hours later that Eugene hauls me back to the narrow hallway and plunges the needles back into my arms. His expression doesn't change when I cry out at the pain. My arms—covered in bruises the shape of his fingers—ache in protest at the needles.

He smiles at me one last time before he disappears back through the doorway and closes the door behind him. I don't realize, until the utter quiet of the hallway takes over, that the awful wrenching sound is coming from me—sobs ripping and gasping up my throat.

Even despite the manacles swinging from his wrists, Ian reaches across the distance between us. "Bella," he says. "What happened?"

I looked up and met his eyes, but I couldn't find the strength to say the words. All my reserves were empty. I flinched away from his hands, and he lowered them, watching me like he wanted to do something or say something that would help, but couldn't come up with anything. Probably just as well. I really doubted there was anything anyone here could do for me.

I realized how obnoxious, how annoying, the loud sobs tearing up my throat probably were to all these people. So I began to try to swallow them, to contain them. I managed to stop making so much noise, but the tears dripping down my chin wouldn't cease. It was good enough, though.

Still, Ian hadn't given up.

"I saw Eugene take you away," he said. His voice was very gentle. "I'm so sorry, Bella."

I fought to bring my eyes up to his, and nodded my thanks. He didn't smile back. He looked really, truly sorry.

The woman beside me, a woman with gray threading her dark hair and too many worry lines in her milk chocolate colored skin, reached for my hand and squeezed it. She didn't say anything, but I saw tears in her eyes too, and I wondered, with an awful sense of horror, how many other women in this room Eugene had raped.

And that—just thinking that word—broke my composure. I fought with myself, but I couldn't manage to stop the sound that came up my throat. It was like a warped scream; I heard it distantly, and I'd never heard any sound so full of pain. I'd never felt so completely exposed, so completely deprived of control. I would have given anything to be numb, but numbness had abandoned me.

I was a slave, and my blood was food for vampires and my body was theirs to toy with, too.

I was alone, and no one was coming for me.

Finally, I found the numb distance I was looking for.

I spent the long days with my eyes closed, dozing, though I rarely slept deeply. I dreaded deep sleep, and the nightmares it brought.

My nightmares were always awful in a particular way—because they were the only place Edward came to me now. I chased him in my dreams, down the strange, empty streets of a city with a red sky, but he never seemed to hear me scream his name; his back was turned to me, always turned. And then Eugene would come, his red eyes blazing like flames, a hundred times more vivid than Edward's receding silhouette, and drag me away. Edward always turned to me then, at the last moment—but then he would disappear in the haze of red clouds on the horizon, and the dream would change, and I would find myself in Eugene's room again and re-live the most horrible day of my life.

Somehow, though, when I woke, I managed to bury it all. I lived in a daze, barely perceiving anything that happened around me—but the numbness was safe, so I stayed tucked inside of it, the only blanket left in the world.

At first, Eugene didn't take me again. I always noticed his red eyes, a jolt of adrenaline that always woke me momentarily from my stupor.

I didn't even know how much time had passed when, one day, he took me again.

This time, I managed to float somewhere outside of my body while he took what he wanted. It was no less awful, but it was somehow... a more distant awfulness, as if I was watching someone else be raped.

For a while after that second time, he left me alone again—but it wasn't long until he sought me out. And eventually, after the third time, the fourth, the fifth, he began to seek me out more often. He began to take me away every day.

I could feel myself... changing, under the surface of the numb, protecting blanket. Beneath all the layers of haze, I knew that the Bella I'd once been was screaming, drowning, dying. The girl who could let herself be touched by Edward and like it, who could be kissed by him and like it, who wanted to give all of herself to him someday.

Eugene had taken all of those things away from her.

It wasn't just that. I knew, also, that my body was changing. I caught my reflection in the marble floor of Eugene's floor one day and for one awful, terrifying second, I woke from my haze again.

The girl in the mirror was... so gaunt. So frail. Skinny and bony and pale as bone, and so, so covered in bruises. They painted her skin—blue and purple and green.

But it didn't matter to me what that Bella was going through. I couldn't look at it. If I looked at it, the ice beneath me would break and I'd fall into the water, and I knew it was too deep and too powerful to swim to the surface of. I knew if I looked it would drag me under.

So I didn't look.