They say death is peaceful.
A soft release.
A gentle closing of the eyes.
That's a lie.
Death came for me suddenly, without warning, without comfort. One moment, I was clutching my chest in the middle of my room, heart pounding erratically—too fast, too slow—too wrong. The next, there was only silence.
I didn't scream.
I couldn't.
My lungs were gone. My body was gone.
There was only... me.
No sound. No light. No sense of time.
And then I realized:
I was still aware.
That was the first terrifying truth.
I existed in a place beyond all reason, where up and down, time and distance meant nothing. It wasn't black or empty—it was wrong. An endless sea of chaotic, pulsing, living something. The energy around me was so vast, so consuming, it felt like standing in the middle of a collapsing galaxy, stripped of everything except the raw awareness of being.
I shouldn't be here.
No soul should.
This place wasn't death. It wasn't the afterlife.
It was something older.
Colder.
The Void.
I didn't know what it was called at the time. I just knew that every second I remained, the energy around me grew more aggressive—tearing, clawing, trying to strip me away. Not my body. My very essence. My soul.
It was trying to break me down to nothing. To unravel me and scatter me back into whatever chaotic storm it had come from.
I held on.
At first, I held on through confusion and fear, then desperation, and finally… stubbornness. I had no name, no voice, no anchor—but I refused to let go.
Memories clung to me like threads in a hurricane. Faint echoes of a hospital bed. My sister laughing beside me. My parents arguing in the kitchen. Watching Supernatural late into the night and complaining about the spin-off.
"The original was better," I'd mutter, even as I hit 'next episode.'
Those memories became my armor.
They became me.
But even they began to fade.
My name was the first thing to go.
I knew I had one. I knew it once held weight. But in the face of eternity, it melted like paper in a storm. I reached for it—but all I found was static.
Still, I held on.
What did it matter, anyway? A name? Names were only important in places with people. Here, in this place where no soul should be, all that mattered was that I remembered. That I endured.
And endure I did.
At some point, the Void stopped trying to break me.
It changed tactics.
It began to pour into me.
I didn't mean for it to happen. I didn't want it. But the truth was, my defenses—my human soul—weren't enough. My shell cracked. The Void seeped in.
And my soul... adapted.
It had to.
Survival was instinctive.
Automatic.
The raw, boundless energy didn't just fill me. It changed me.
I remembered something from Supernatural then—one of those lore-heavy episodes where Death or Chuck or Castiel went on about how powerful the soul was. How a human soul could power weapons, shift fates, even blind angels.
"A soul is one of the most powerful forces in existence."
And mine?
Mine had just become something more.
No longer just human.
Not divine. Not demonic.
Something new.
My soul, once fragile, became a vessel. A living forge. It no longer fought the Void. It consumed it—absorbed the chaos and rewrote itself around it. Not by choice. Not by design. But because that was the only way to survive.
It felt like being rewritten from the inside out.
But I never lost me.
I clung to what mattered. The things that gave me shape.
My sister's voice. My mother's perfume. The thrill of magic and monster lore. Dean Winchester's cocky smirk. Sam's quiet, thoughtful strength. The Winchester boys saving people and hunting things like a religion. The first time I saw Bela Talbot on screen and said—
"She deserved better."
That thought stayed with me. Carved into the core of what I was becoming.
And then it happened.
A pull.
Not from the Void. From outside.
At first, it was a gentle tug—like the tide receding—but it became a current I couldn't resist. The Void screamed in its own way, trying to keep me. It clawed at me one last time, but my soul was no longer weak.
I was stronger.
Stronger than whatever wanted me to stay lost in that abyss.
And so, I fell.
Through space. Through light.
Through existence itself.
The womb was warm. Cramped. Alive.
A heartbeat thudded in my ears—not mine, but near. The walls pulsed around me. Limbs not quite mine twitched without coordination. I felt... contained.
Human.
I had been reborn.
It was strange, existing like that. I couldn't see. Couldn't speak. But I could think. More than any fetus should. I knew what this was. I knew what this meant.
Reincarnation.
But into who?
At first, I assumed I was someone new.
My memories of the Void were intact—though scattered like shards of glass. My memories of my old life were there too, minus the details like names, dates, or the exact shape of my face. But I remembered me. My obsessions. My stubbornness. My love of magic and stories and quiet power.
"I am not just human anymore," I thought, or rather was—thoughts were feelings here. Pulses of awareness echoing through embryonic neurons.
I could feel the power still within me. Not dormant—waiting.
But then came the moment that changed everything.
The world shifted.
A contraction. Light. Sound.
Birth.
The process was horrible. Disorienting. Like being crushed through a meat grinder and yanked into freezing light.
I screamed, not because I needed air but because I could.
Because for the first time in what felt like eternity—
I had lungs.
The voices came next.
Accents.
British.
That narrowed it down. But not much.
"She's beautiful," someone said—female, tired, but amused.
"She looks like you," said a male voice—smooth, hollow, wrong.
"Let's call her... Abigail."
The name hit me like a bolt of lightning.
Not because it was mine.
Because I knew it.
Abigail Talbot. Bela Talbot.
That's who I am now.
Not as an observer.
As her.
The irony was sick.
Of all the people in the Supernatural universe to be reborn as—why her?
The girl sold to Hell at fifteen to kill her abusive parents. The one who flirted with death like it was a game. The one who died screaming as hellhounds ripped her apart. Cold. Clever. Tragic.
"She deserved better."
And now… she would get it.
Because I wasn't her.
Not really.
And I was no longer just human.
That night, in my pristine nursery, I stared at the mobile hanging above me and said nothing.
The nanny sang some lullaby off-key.
My biological parents were nowhere to be found.
Good.
They wouldn't be around long.
I could feel it again. The Void, coiled in my soul like a snake in hibernation. Waiting for a trigger. A need. A push.
I wasn't ready yet. Not even close.
But one day, I would be.
One day, I'd be more than the girl who made a deal to survive.
I'd be the girl who never had to.
Let the world turn.
Let the monsters come.
Let the angels whisper and the demons plot.
This is not Bela Talbot's story anymore.
It's mine.
And I have no intention of losing.