Starless Night (A Twilight/Stranger Things Fan Fiction)

Chapter 17: A Gazelle In Alaska

I searched, and searched, and searched.

As time passed, I could feel the hunger wearing away at me, wearing at my strength. I was beginning to worry in earnest when, one day, I caught a scent that I was certain had once been unappetizing—the scent of deer blood.

I tracked it for a few miles and then found one of the creatures—the same kind that had killed Esme and taken Bella from me—kneeling over the prone shape of a deer. Near that, I saw a tree, much like the one Bella had been dragged through into this realm, which had had its bark stripped away and had gray slime dripping from the huge knot in its trunk.

I wrestled the creature for a few moments, then managed to snap its neck and throw it against a tree. It was still after that.

I sniffed carefully at the deer's blood, checking to make sure the creature hadn't left behind some kind of venom—but I didn't bother to check thoroughly. I was too thirsty, and deer blood had never smelled so good. I drained the deer of the rest of its blood quickly, and when I had finished that, I felt stronger than I had in weeks.

After that, I didn't even notice my thirst. It was still there—to quench it now, I was sure I would probably have to drain ten mountain lions—but it didn't matter. I'd always been the strongest at restraint after Carlisle, but I'd never been as committed to it as he, until Bella. I was grateful now, in this moment, that Bella's blood had tempted me so. She had been building my restraint, my willpower, all the time that I was spending time with her.

Still, after that—with a clearer head—it occurred to me how very few places I had left on my list. I had truly scoured the Earth—I'd seen more of it in its broken state now, I was sure, than I'd ever seen of the version I'd spent most of my life in.

And as I realized that I didn't have many more places to look, I began to panic, really and truly.

It would be best, I thought, to go back to Alice and Jasper and Emmett and Rosalie. Regroup. But I couldn't stand the idea of going somewhere where I could not make any forward progress. So, the next place to go—the best place to go—would be wherever my family had been in the seventies, since I supposed if we didn't have to move around anymore, our home from the time would be intact.

And... though I was afraid to know what I would find there... I wanted to know what had become of my family in this world.

I wondered wryly as I ran—to Alaska, since that was where our family had settled in the seventies—whether I would find myself there, in the literal sense. I gave little thought to whether my family was still alive in this version of the world—it seemed very possible that they were not, since I hadn't met a single other vampire in all of my searches, and I suspected it was because the Volturi had somehow taken out the rest of the world's vampire population when the food source became more limited, in order to eliminate the... competition, as it were. But on the off chance my family and I were still alive in this world...

All I knew for certain was that the version of me that existed in this world would surely be a very different person.

The odds were low—next to nothing—that Bella would have ever existed in this world, much less that the alternate version of myself would have known her or, conversely, been able to restrain himself from killing her. This caused me pain to think about, but it was true: most likely, if the version of me that existed in this world had ever come in proximity with the version of Bella that existed in this world, he had killed her and been none the wiser to the great, great loss he'd suffered. It seemed likely that if I did meet myself here, in this alternate world, he would be the arrogant man I'd been before Bella, jaded and bored with the world, even as changed as this world was from the one I knew.