I don't remember dying.
There was no dramatic final breath. No flashing lights or desperate pleas. No warm hand clasped in mine as I slipped into the dark. Just… stillness.
And then, light.
It came not like a sunrise, gentle and golden, but sudden piercing through the backs of my eyelids with a cold clarity that shouldn't belong to a newborn. How do I know I'm a newborn? I read far too many fan fiction not to realize that much. The giant hands enveloping me, the feeling of weakness and fragility that came with my new body. I felt as if I was weightless and heavy at once, floating in silence that buzzed with invisible tension. My body itched not like skin itches, but like existence itself was too tight, like me my being was trapped in some small narrow jar. My instincts were all haywire and my emotions were too volatile.
Finally, I was able to open my eyes which was not normal for a newborn. I didn't cry when I opened my eyes.
Maybe I was too stunned by what I saw.
Faces. Beautiful, terrifyingly beautiful. Sculpted in alabaster, so pale and smooth they almost didn't look human. Their eyes… not quite red, but tinged with the faded memory of it. Faint bruises beneath the lashes, the kind you get from long sleepless nights except their gazes never wavered. They were still. Inhumanly still.
The male was holding me, my new father, maybe. He smelled like snow and cedar bark, cold and earthy. His arms were strong, unmoving. I wasn't jostled or bounced like a real baby. He just held me, as if afraid his strength might crush me. His body hard and cold, unnaturally so.
And then she spoke. My mother, this time I instantly knew it was her.
Her voice was the first warmth I felt in this new world. It was soft, lilting, and sad in a way that made my chest ache. I didn't understand the words, but the tone… the tone curled around my reborn soul like a lullaby I never wanted to forget.
"Honey his eyes," she whispered, voice trembling. "They're so alive, so awake, so intelligent."
"Yes." My father nodded his eyes not leaving me.
I didn't know what they meant. I didn't know who I was.
But I knew… something wasn't right. There were too many things that felt wrong here but before I could think I felt drowsy and fell asleep.
Days passed. Maybe weeks. Time is strange when your brain is ahead of your body, an adult trapped in an infantile body trying to fight the eternal drowsiness.
But it was fuitile, my struggle to stay awake was inevitable. My attempt to stop myself from sleeping useless.
And even the time I was awake I could only stare at the never changing wooden ceiling. I couldn't speak, but I understood things I shouldn't. Language came easily, perhaps too easily. Like it was already there, just buried in static. English something I already knew, but it was spoken very little.
Most they spoke was spanish and maybe a little bit of Greek. I recognized them both when my parents switched between them, thinking I wouldn't notice.
But I did.
My body was a contradiction. Small, infantile… but powerful. Too strong. My tiny fingers left indents in the wooden crib rail one morning. My vision sharpened with unnatural clarity. I could see the soft flecks in the iris of my mother's eyes from across the room. I could hear snowflakes land on the roof.
It scared me, not my powers they were part of it but what scared me mostly was them.
It wasn't because they were cruel, never that. My parents were kind and gentle. They smiled often and spoke to me like they knew I could understand, to them I was a miracle which they repeated many times, the first word I learned. But something about them felt… wrong. Their skin was cold. Their breath never fogged up the windows. I never heard their hearts beat despite enhanced hearing.
And when I stared too long into my father's eyes, I saw hunger he thought he'd hidden.
Then I remember a foggy memory from my past life.
A memory of watching a movie with my sister. It was about a creepy hundred-year-old vampire falling in love with a human teenager.
Twilight.
The memory hit like a brick through stained glass. The Cullens. Forks. The Volturi. I started remembering the details of the movie although it wasn't perfect since it's been more than a decade I watched those movies
My heart- my real heart slammed in my chest. Was this a dream? A curse? A joke from some higher power? A badly written Fanfiction?
I had an existential crisis and why would I not? It's scary to think you are just an imagination of someone writing a story to entertain people who are just looking to pass some time.
But then I forced myself out of denial. I looked at my own hand- pale, long-fingered, almost too elegant for a baby, I felt the warm blood running underneath it. I turn to the reflection in the mirror: golden eyes, like sunlight through honey that shine with intelligence too much for a toddler. I then looked at my parents lying nearby on the sofa holding each other, a warm fuzzy feeling lit in my chest that gave me some assurance that it wasn't all fake.
No matter how crazy it may sound I was truly reborn.
And I wasn't just reborn
I was reborn in a world that was just mere a fantasy in my previous world.