I have a new beta for my challenge and contest writings! Welcome Viola Cornuta. No, V and I have not broken up; she's my Inc., DC's, RWaC go-to gal.
Disclaimer: SM owns all the people I write about. She does. Fucking awesome owner of Twi, that is SM. Me, I'm a lowly schmuck.
~~So, I lied. This is Plea. I though y'all needed a break from my ridiculousness for a bit. So, let's get back to canon, Rie-style.~~
The Twilight Twenty-Five
Prompt: 13. Plea
Pen name: goldenmeadow
Pairing: Carlisle/Elizabeth Masen
Rating: T
Plea
Circa 1918
Chicago, Illinois
Carlisle
I took another turn through the infirmary; the gas lights dimmed and then flickered back to cast a wash of muted orange gloam and the smell of burning fuel about the long room.
One by one, the cots had emptied. Influenza was a miasmic disease, which culled through the population in complete socialist disregard to race, stature, religion, wealth.
In this country, they were all equals. And uniformly unequivocally bound to the rampage of a malicious malaise that stampeded from scullery maid to houseboy to heiress to master of the house, master at arms to brothel owner.
I alone was safe.
I would forever be untouched by ailment, apart from the thirst for human blood that gripped my throat in its tight unrelenting chokehold, a visceral no less viral clutch upon my innards, which, though they did not move, still felt the pain of want.
Carnage came in many forms. And I'd personally viewed, front row and center, most of them in my very long time on this earth.
I'd had my share just as much as this rapacious illness.
I begged the doctors and nurses, those who were far too young to die, those who had families to return home to, to leave me to this work.
Of humility and pride and ethic, they all declined, stating it was below my station to clean out slop pans, or I would be incapable of seeing to everyone.
Little did they know. As the nights wore on, I became more and more restless while my colleagues became infinitely more exhausted by the strain. Letting them doze where they were sitting and oftentimes even standing, I gave pace to my speed to clean, coddle, swab, swaddle and comfort.
I smiled pleasantly as my comrades awoke to the pristine state of the ward, congratulating each other on making it through one more night that had been filled with death and groaning and vomit and diarrhea unbeknownst to them.
It was the least I could do while they continued to negligently endanger themselves.
The cots – I couldn't imagine those creaking rusty iron bedsteads to be comfortable to the hale and healthy, let alone the infirm -- spilled their contents, lifeless corpses, to the morgue whose employees worked overtime to process and dis-house the bodies that had melted like from the sickening workings of Typhoid Mary.
The cost of this ruinous riotous revilement was too high.
Pretending an air of calm I really did not feel, I inspected charts, took temperatures and listened to final confessions as if I were a man of the cloth as my shoes clicked over the tiles that needed mopping of discharge once again.
This was my just due, to surround myself in blood, the very thing that sustained me, while continuing to deny it. My own personal horsehair vest, like scratchy wool upon my skin, splintery parchment scraping my throat.
Sometimes I wanted to touch it with my mouth as it flowed from cuts, wounds, open sores. My lips pursed, my tongue longed to reach out, the empty grotto of my chest clenched in ache. Overriding it all was the pure tyranny I had witnessed, some of it at my own hands. Just once, just at the beginning of this eternal life.
Although not quite born into the Middle Ages, the fear of the preternatural still abounded. The supernatural had surrounded us. Reformation, Humanism and Renaissance were all to follow, but while I was a boy, I lived in the mongering fear of things that went bump in the night; fantastical creatures who would not be explained away with the rising of the sun.
Doing my father's bidding, a strict Anglican vicar whose goal was to persecute and destroy all who worked against his heavenly deity, I pursued those we assumed to be witches – though now I wondered at their true nature – and vampires, whose ashen rust ran coagulated in my veins now.
I had to find a reason for this hideous existence.
To turn a disability into a gift.
I would not be a gruesome beast!
In my first days, having eaten my tongue off to quiet my screams while flames burst from within the marrow of my bones, eating through layers of tissue, scorching my sight in vermillion, causing me to shake and needing to shriek, I did nothing but roll, silently, in agony.
Wakening, I burned yet more.
A deep pull of air, which neither satisfied me nor filled the fixed location of my resolute lungs, brought a heady scent into my nose. It intoxicated me so much more than wine of Jesus' body.
Hunkering low on my haunches, I slithered towards that smell.
It was a woman whose beauty was only defined by the vision of blood racing just beneath the nothing of her skin.
Lips curling, throat curdling, growl hurtling, I pounced and drove the spikes of my teeth into her neck, first, and then her upheaved breasts and softened thighs beneath manifold taffeta skirts!
Satiated, disgusted, replete and vile, I shoved her away with one hand to her boot-clad ankles and clasped her to me by her lax shoulders. Upon my knees, discovering though I smoldered with weeping, I could not call forth tears. I held this unnamed lass and sought to throw her aside all at the same time.
Thus was the dual nature of my being; forever at war.
She was the first I took. She was the last.
I was horrifyingly full up over the next several days. A stuffed-to-my-gullet feeling that sickened me. When, finally, hunger twisted my gut again, I breathed through my mouth, or did not breathe at all. Wandering the park near my father's church, a flash of white and brown and flesh cavorted beneath a copse of trees.
Deer.
Opening my olfactory senses, inhaling deeply, I imbibed their musky odor and found it not lacking!
Days passed into months into years. I never aged, never salivated but for toxin that I could feel coating my perfect teeth. I never urinated nor did I sleep.
I never came across the vampires who had sired me.
In need of diversion, I took to medicine school. Ever the self-torturer, I thought it the best way to inure myself against human blood.
Shockingly, it worked. Surprisingly, I had an aptitude for physiognomy.
Though the ticking of time stood still for me, it moved its second hand forward for others. My father died. Having laid him to rest, I moved on.
In Italy I came across my first coven of vampires. Though more civilized than what I had known, attempting to govern their own, collecting art, keeping citizens alive – if only to do their bidding – they were still bloodthirsty. These Volturi and I had an agreement for a time. They would shelter me and encourage me in my studies, and I would turn a blind eye to their cruel killing of the populace.
Another century, certain friendships were made. But my dedication to the breathing ones was mocked and I had rather be around them than my own.
In a first class cabin, as befitting one of the chosen Volturi disciples, I forged to the New World where wars erupted through pioneering spirit and claim-staking of precious land.
Meeting up with men and women of my inglorious kind, I was always cordial, quiet, and bracing ahead. Not judging them their tastes for the blood I would not allow myself, I looked for my own consignment in this being that would be mine for a very long time.
Trying to find acceptance in this territory that was yet to be settled. I could either be a creeping thing of lore or a part of society that walked about in the day lit hours, made a living, got on with life.
Hubris was mine. I did not want to wear the brand of vilification.
My time in Chicago was coming to an end. Soon I would move on, take up residence elsewhere, work, make no friends, hold myself apart and hie away from embraces, touches, invitations.
Nearly immune to the fragrant scope of blood, not deigning to partake of the infusion that was both beautifully enchanting and pestilent in its putrefaction, I doctored wherever I was accepted.
A sharp rattling wet thick cough broke my reverie and reminded me that I was not, in fact, alone this night.
A chair raked across the tiles somewhere down the room and a curtain was parted as another body was wheeled out.
Following the sound of sputum, I found a young lady half keeled over with the back of her skeletal hand pressed to her mouth in an attempt to keep the foaming expectorant within. Grabbing a tin kidney-shaped basin, I ran to her and wrenched her hand aside, with all the gentleness that I had learned, and enabled her to rid her mouth of the effluvia inside.
Lowering her back to the bed, I placed the bowl aside and out of vision.
The smell of antiseptic expunged any last smell of her vomit.
Her hands clasped to her chest, she grappled with the sheet and met my eyes obliquely. Her own were like the dales and glens of my fatherland.
And queerly clear for all the calamitous epidemic that made piecemeal of her organs.
The tall clock tower of the bank that rested against our hospital took on its loud toll, denoting midnight.
In a crackling whisper, like wax paper, she said, "My husband is dead." It was not a question, but a statement.
I nodded and held her fragile wilting hand in both of my own, cooling the spiking temperature of her body.
Ever more focused, those orbs sharpened upon me. I could never have expected her next words, choked on bile as they were, "Please, I beg you, Doctor Cullen, save my son! He is my only child, he's not meant to die. Not now. Not ever."
Shaken and scared she had seen me as I was not meant to appear, I brooked indifference, released her hand and settled back down onto the mattress that was not even dented beneath her wasted form.
I should have just sped out of this domicile of death and never looked back!
Instead I dropped my head to my hands and hated my next words, because she knew! Platitudes would not do here. Utterances never before spoken found the crux of my straightened lips as I all but barked out, "But is he ready for my kind of death?"
Catastrophic hope pounded me with her next weakening pronunciation, "Yes!"
I growled and cornered this Elizabeth Masen back onto her cot, the hardened coral isotopes of my eyes unjust, "How do you know this, Madame?"
I had no thought for my own safety. I would willingly give up my life, my punctured being at the drop of a coin; but for one to know these things was unfathomable. And to ask me to murder, maim, sire her only child was unmentionable. I all but gagged on the odd human reflex that pushed venom like choler up into my mouth. Not out of hunger, but out of hurt.
Showing not one sliver of self-preservation, Miss Elizabeth did not shrink beneath my rage; a thing I generally replaced with compassion.
Relenting, hiding my eyes, loosening my muscles, becoming the genteel doctor again, in search of answers, I listened as her breathy beaten voice carried on so succinctly, "I can see into your mind. I read your compassion. I hear your silenced words," the simplicity and purity of her smile smote me. "You should talk more often, out loud. Edward will need that."
Newly grasping her hand, a flighty pale thing that grappled with death's fast approaching scythe borne by a black winged carriage and the lashing of night-dark steeds, I was shaken.
Skin and bones, kneeling at death's door, she entreated. Sallow, an invalid, leaking life force, all I saw of this woman, the might of her encapsulated in my precise eyes, was a mother. Impaired by the trappings of maternal instinct to keep her own alive even while she succumbed to the wasting disease. A glorious person. A mother. Paternal impulses were something I had never understood.
She was so sure.
The flicker of my pulse that was only a stopped watch of a thing increased in speed as Elizabeth Masen's slowed to a near halt. A doctor, a savior, I had never desired to sire another, to make one of my own kind. Solely alone for two hundred and fifty-five years, I had been solitary but capable.
And now I yearned for more than I'd ever thought possible.
Acquiescing, I filled a glass syringe. I could stand her fight, her misery, her just-love, her beseeching no more. I would answer her call, if she would give me this in return, and allow me to ease her ceaseless pain with the knowledge her son would continue with some semblance of life. Disinfectant and decadent drops of morphine created a cloying mist as I surpassed the usual calming dose with words of solace and gratitude and a confidence I didn't quite feel any longer.
Wavering light filtering through an ampoule and dimming from ivy brilliance to deadened moss, Elizabeth's eyes extinguished with her final respirations. Her serene smile turning to rigor extended from beyond the grave.
The lights blinkered out again, for good. This dense darkness on a night so portentous was nothing more than appropriate. I reached for a candle, hearing the faint lapsed canticles sung in my father's parish church in days of yore. My only guide to the young man who was about to meet his grim reaper was song ages old and Christian, and an orange-yellow flame that elongated and rippled in front of me. I perched on a hard chair at his bedside and affected a soothing tone as I stole a cool cloth across his sweaty brow, "Edward Anthony Masen, your mother, Mrs. Elizabeth Masen, wanted you to have this.
Even in feverish delirium, his eyes were bright and of forests, just like his mother's, when he turned them to me. The ague that racked his body was nothing compared to the simple unholy paroxysm of grief the seized him. Agitation chilled over his form, a boy on the cusp of manhood. Would I bring his end? Could I save him for something more. Was there more?
I felt the loneliness of all my years spread its complaint over my legs, my arms, my trembling hands as I placed his mother's wedding ring in his palm and folded his clammy fingers over this last possession.
Understanding and sympathy and desperation to belong to another, to replicate that thing which was every human being's right, parenthood, solidified me. I crossed myself, whispering, "Forgive me Father, for I am about to sin."
Though I did not want to read his fear that ran like spilled ink across the meadow of his eyes, I kept his sight as I leant down, showing him my teeth while I yet calmed his skin with my touch. Comprehension was faster than my supernatural haste as it landed, a written edict, across his visage. A rarity in the one instance, perplexingly stunning to see twice in one family, Edward had his mother's gift to see within the thoughts of others.
His blood so hot and pure tasted of innocence and torment, fatigue and fight. Working more quickly to make him a vampire than I ever had to save a human life in surgery, I was relieved to take my leave of his innards. There was no struggle, no desire to linger and feast. Consumed, instantly enraptured with singular devotion, civility, fatherly emotion, the fates had handed me something irreplaceable!
A son!
Sudden realization illuminated me, taking over the vaporizing traces of Edward's taste. I knew that which I had always hoped to be true, that souls did live on after demise and passed from one being to another. The flash of his blood into my veins was replete with juicy promise of a future for Edward that was meant to be! Not now, not even soon, but eventually, he was going to know love like no other.
There was grander significance to this monster whose skin I inhabited!
Through my past, Elizabeth's death, and Edward's future, I was rebirthed.
~~Do you have chills?~~
I thank y'all that are reading and reviewing especially while I am posting like a madwoman. It does my wee tot-sized Alice heart ridiculously proud!
We'll do Touch next, and you will laugh out loud.
Cheers, Rie~
