Summary: Challenge piece from Sunny. Prompt given "Hunger Games," with no relation or knowledge of either canons, but a mutual love of vampires, werewolves, and the urges that underlie all peoples, fictive and not. The breakdown: Part I will be about the obvious hunger of the vampire, and part two will be about the not-always-obvious hunger of the person in question.
Spoilers: All of canon. There will be one for each Cullen in order by arrival. At least the first five are done. And it will be complete by early next week. I'll place them up one a day until it completes.
The Compassionate Doctor
I. Carlisle came into this world a blur of pain and hunger, alone and abandoned.
Maker-less. Directionless. A jangle of child-like impulses, louder than everything except passing heartbeats, and, somehow, without much memory of the life before him, he clung to the last ghost of humanity instead of evicting it from himself like the aberrant wisp of a dream listing through to wakefulness.
As much as he longed to rend and eviscerate, to tear into the people passing him, still the thoughts of their deaths, of not having the right, plagued even his momentary fantasies. He struggled against the darkness within him, driven by demons beating within his own breast where his heart no longer did.
He wanted always to help others. His coda, his drive. From herbs in packets to the first printed books. But this was desire he pressed into, drive and goal and being. Not hunger. Blood passed as a longing, a little fainter with each passing decade. Never not consistent, but less forceful.
Even in Volterra, where a bacchanal of blood welcomed every day.
Hunger was not with him there. Awareness, and want, but not hunger.
~||x||~
II. Indeed, Hunger, itself, would not strike him down until nearly two centuries later.
Two centuries that would press him past torture, and revolution, into a world of starvation not so unknown, but tiring with the ever-present turn of time. And it would be the only time it would ever hit him as hard or as suddenly, without preparation or contemplation toward all the possible futures.
When he dipped his head down, biting into fevered flesh, asking God and a too beautiful boy-child to forgive him. Reveling in the taste of blood for the first time as, promise be damned, a small part of what was left of his soul demanded, against all good intentions toward that human world, and gave into the savage, shattering need to finally not be alone any longer.
The act, and rebellion, that would open the door to everything else that would happen.
~||x||~
Next: The Golden Boy