Chapter Text
In a way, it’s Caius’ fault the world ends.
He wouldn’t think himself the one to blame, what with Aro’s propensity to flock after pretty, blond, greco-art-faced men driving him to ill-advised decisions. But, well.
That’s all Aro, mooning, bitching and moaning after one Carlisle Cullen for nine years, before Aro would even admit out loud every one of his seduction attempts having failed. The problem with Aro was that Cullen was a virgin and the son of an Anglican pastor. What was Aro thinking, seriously?
No, Caius would say it is exactly Carlisle’s fault that the world ends.
Carlisle, with his eccentricities and repulsive animal diet. Carlisle who, inexplicably, could regress Aro into a bumbling youthling with a schoolgirl crush, who has all but rearranged his amoral compass to fit Carlisle’s opinions. Because, if anything upset Carlisle, then that couldn’t possibly be something Aro would ever endorse.
They let Carlisle eat sewer rats during his stay in Volterra instead of force-feeding him a nice, ripe human, twice a week, after all.
Aro has been entertaining Carlisle’s starvation and madness for years.
Carlisle, therefore, has all the blame to carry for the predicament of the millennium. The predicament of whole fucking age of humankind possibly ending, even.
Carlisle is, indeed, worshippable.
He is lovely and pretty and annoyingly kind. He is ridiculously infallible in everyone’s eyes. The best friend of too many vampires that each hate each other and would rip each other to shreds for upsetting The Carlisle Cullen: the nauseatingly empathetic, yellow-eyed, virginal, puritan heartthrob Adonis, with his ability to see the good intentions in every wrong made. To see the kindness in every monster.
All Aro sees, however, is that Caius was the one who dumped Carlisle into a village of god-fearing humans. Carlisle didn’t choose to be there. It was mean, grumpy Caius who set his damn kindness loose upon the populace.
That’s when the worshiping started.
“He has a gift, maledetto stronzo.”
Caius snorts at the softball insult. Even Aro’s insults have been severely dulled from their sharp edge. Again, Carlisle’s doing, somehow. Caius would bet.
“I don’t see how tricking a village of humans into thinking he’s a Jesus-figure reborn is a gift, Aro. Humans have believed in flying meatball gods before.”
Aro pinches his fingers onto his forehead. They’ve been at this conversation for twenty minutes already. Caius is getting ready to maul someone too, actually. This is the longest they’ve spoken in eight-hundred years. Because of Carlisle fucking Cullen.
“He has a gift,” Aro repeats, like Caius is purposely daft, or hard of hearing, “an unassuming, inoffensive gift.”
“To be a pain in my ass?”
“To provoke goodness in the hearts of every being that meets him.”
Now it’s Caius’ turn to pinch his face. Wondering if it won’t be better to rip his own head off to avoid this endless back and forth.
“If that were true, wouldn’t I despite him a little less?”
Now, it’s Aro’s turn to throw his hands up in the air, giving up. “Have you never wondered why everyone in Volterra came to adore him within a month of his stay, even just a little bit?! How no human in our city fears him, nor flinches in his presence? They trust him, casually, with their lives and with the lives of their children. As kind and pretty as dear Carlisle is, and he is truly gorgeous beyond comparison—”
Caius disagrees. Aro is biased.
“—nothing should pass over a human’s instinctual fear for vampires. It’s subconscious. Written into their mind-chemistry. And yet they genuinely trust him!”
This is the third time Aro argues about Carlisle’s supposed gift. The power to make everyone in the world be nice to him.
Everyone, except, Caius.
Caius cups a hand over his mouth, holding back the loudest cackle of his life. As he stares at the congregation of people walking up to an unconscious, weakened Carlisle, to offer him the “blood of Christ”—hilariously, literally, human blood slit from a vein and poured into copper wine goblets—so that this pious, holy angel fallen from the sky could wake the fuck back up.
Caius really shouldn’t have pushed him off the church pinnacle on a rainy night. Carlisle just needed a little physical urging to get his feeding on. That’d been Caius’ reason.
That Carlisle had been staving off blood for a couple of weeks too, not-so-secretly testing how long a vampire could go without feeding, on any kind of blood, was on Carlisle’s own self. It had made his irises such black pits. And he’d wobbled. The town had been gathered for some Christian ceremony. As small towns tend to do in Italy.
Caius thought it be funny. If some humans saw what they could only interpret as some lunatic suicide act, run up to this frail-but-trustworthy vampire, and so meet their own end.
He was only helping Carlisle discover that human blood is not all that bad, and that feeding on them isn’t a moral act at all—they’re vampires, it’s like telling a lion that grass was much more favorable to the palette than gazelle face. Humans are delicious, but the sewer rats. The sewer rats would surely not mind being eaten from their miserable, filthy plague-spreading lives. Surely, eating sewer rats was the better alternative.
And then Carlisle had refused the matter, Caius had kicked him, and Carlisle had done the unprecedented equivalent of passing out.
And then the twilight stretched into dawnlight. And there had been no hiding that Carlisle was very much not human to the human onlookers.
Except.
Except humans hadn’t done the headless-chicken run sprint, giving Caius an excuse to go snacking between scheduled Volturi meals. Whether Carlisle succumbed to his true nature or not, it would mean Caius got a snack too, but now, that’s been denied him too. Absolutely pitiful.
No, the humans had literally thought an angel had fallen from the heavens, and they needed to nurse their holy pet-creature back to health.
Aro had a point, sure. The humans shouldn’t have wanted to. They should have taken one look at Carlisle, vampire, natural predator, and bolted. They should have screamed.
Things would certainly have been easier.
Beside him, Aro groans. He’s also noticed the cute little blood goblets in front of Carlisle’s gazebo-bed. (Instinctually, they know a being like Carlisle craves and requires blood. See, the whole town of humans is broken now because of Carlisle’s inability to act like a good vampire.)
“Caius. Why didn’t you get him out during the night,” Aro grits through stone-creaking teeth.
“Well, it had been funny for the first twelve hours.”
Carlisle had woken up in a daze. Unnatural, a vampire should never be so affected by starvation and a little bump of the head.
But he had been.
And he’d refused the blood.
And continued refusing the blood, while attempting to wrestle control of his own limbs to get out of sight.
This, is why it had taken Caius hours to do anything at all. It had been incredibly funny. Humans can be such adorable food. Carlisle had spoken so clumsily to keep the humans convinced he really was an angel and not a devil. To keep the secret Caius’, Aro’s, and Marcus’ whole world is based on.
The secret that vampires exist on a separate socialsphere to human society can survive this.
Oh, Carlisle had technically failed that at step one, when the humans had seen how his skin changed to artful marble beauty in the sunlight. But it had taken Caius’ pushing him off a church rooftop for him to be revealed, so.
Again, a point to Aro’s argument that it’s really Caius’ fault.
“Caius, please,” Aro starts, all at once exasperated and done with the meaningless back and forth. Finally, they can move on.
Aro stretches his hand out for Caius to take.
He’s so charitable like that. Waiting for the other person to allow him total recollection of their thoughts and memories.
But Caius refuses.
That, above all, shocks Aro.
“...What do you intend to do about this?” Aro tilts his head in a bird-like way. Two-thousand-odd years in his acquaintance, and Caius knows that it’s his acceptance for the mental privacy—for as long as it will last until the next time Caius offers his own mind to be rifled through because it’s more convenient than verbal conversation—
—a pointless, meandering conversation like this one—
—and Caius knows what Aro is really asking.
It’s not what Caius intends, but what he intends for the ends to be.
The end of his means for bullying Carlisle.
Yes, it is, truly, Caius’ fault the world ends.
Because Caius looks at the cute little humans worshiping a hobbling, lead-footed Carlisle, who even starving, even weak, never succumbs to the delicious-smelling goblets of pretend-Christ’s blood waggled in under his nose. And Caius’ rage flares like a bonfire fed full of kindling.
And the rage becomes acute wariness.
And the wariness becomes a vague, shapely idea.
“I will not interrupt these proceedings,” Caius says by way of explanation. He looks pointedly at Aro, confuddled with his own despair for his poor unseducable lover acting the literal horse-led-to-water-but-won’t-drink-from-the-body proverb.
Carlisle has a gift, Aro says.
To provoke goodness.
How ridiculous. Caius has never been crueler.
In a way, this is all Aro’s fault. For allowing Carslile Cullen into Volterra’s inner vampiric circle, and allowing Caius to meet him in the first place.
The bump had knocked Carlisle quite off-balance.
He hadn’t been able to stand on his own feet.
Which meant something spectacular, as the humans of the small Italian village tried to lift him in help.
“Dio mio...è una garguglia sacra.”
He’d heard the odd misnomer. Sacred gargoyle. And then he’d twitched, and the humans had startled to a stop in their deadlift.
They’d startled, but they hadn’t run.
He really would have preferred it if they ran.
“Eh...non avere paura?”
In hindsight, the worst choice of words. Do not be afraid. Like angelic Gabriel bringing divine news of the birth of God’s son, they shuddered and cowered, and in the next instant, their eyes had grown to revering saucers.
He’d been too tired and hungry at this point, forcing all his concentration into not tearing the neck of the kind young woman gently stretching him upon a wooden palette.
The rain made the work harder than it ought to be. It soaked through his clothes and boots. Made the wood warp under his weight. Not that he was particularly heavy, but his body was hard. Marble, unyielding. The wood warped and bent, but thankfully didn’t snap.
And that was, he supposed a small mercy of his embarrassment.
“I’m sorry,” he’d tried in soft, accented Italian, “forgive the fright. Please, you don’t need to do this for me.”
The human group, made up of that young lady, three strong boys and what Carlisle could only assume to be a father, if not a paternal figure then the one of most authority in their group, had not listened.
Or, well. They had listened to him. They’d just also elected to ignore him and put him under the octagonal gazebo roof of their vassal lord’s home.
Carlisle had honestly been a little out of his wits to think of a way to flee. Had completely forgotten that Caius had been the one to trip him off, with a joke about his venom-drooling maw staring at the far-lit congregation of humans.
(Which wasn’t even true, Carlisle did not drool, and he had not been staring hungrily. He’d only been, reminiscing. About the days he could still recall, of his human life, in a similar human town, celebrating a similar human holiday.
Community did not come easy to vampires. Though, Carlisle still has a hard time with the idea of covens, it just, doesn’t ring the same to him as being known in the human way. Being known as the pastor’s son, and the harvest-time helper.
But the point is not that. The point is, Carlisle had not been drooling venom.)
Carlisle had indeed forgotten so badly about the fact that he hadn’t been alone wandering the underbelly of the town, like back in London, with only his own skills to depend on, that he’d totally overlooked whisper-shouting for Caius.
When the sun had risen, and his wits reshaped, Carlisle thought, oh, how embarrassing would it have been to have called out to Caius at all.
Caius would have laughed.
And so, here he is now. Under the shadow of a gazebo, in a vassal lord’s yard.
“Holy One,” the youngest of the men calls, seeing him rise from the wood palette to ineffectually stand up, “Holy One, you are weak and starved.”
Carlisle grimaces.
Yeah, even the humans can notice that, huh.
“Um, don’t worry. It’s just, been a very long night.” More like a very long month. He still can’t believe Aro sent him on a little bonding trip-doubled-as-a-cultural-learning-experience with Caius.
Caius who hates him.
Carlisle had been so thrilled to the idea, upon presentation. So enamored with seeing the beautiful countryside with a worthwhile guide. He’d expected Aro to offer himself the tour. They’d grown quite close, after all.
Since realizing that kissing Aro daily had not, in fact, been a thing just-friends do. And he’d very obliviously entered a relationship beyond his comprehension and experience. Oh, men could love each other. He wasn’t challenging the notion. No, it’d been because he’d never had a close friend or a lover, or in a foreign country, or completely out of his element thrust into the vampire world to pick apart any social rules.
How was he to know what a kiss really meant? It’d been nice, Carlisle had thought. He’d enjoyed it, and that was all he’d really cared to think about before doing it again.
He grimaces at the recent memory of the tenth time—in as many days—that Aro told him, “I am seducing you.”
Carlisle genuinely thought he’d meant, seducing, as in, showing him more of what being a vampire was like.
Seducing not as in, seducing.
He gets why Caius had pushed him off the church, really. Doesn’t blame him at all. Carlisle had just mentioned to Caius too, that for as much as Carlisle was enjoying the local venison variety, he couldn’t wait to return to Aro’s library of parchments.
Yes, and Aro had sent them together on a bonding adventure through the Tuscan countryside.
It was all Aro’s fault he was being sequestered by well-intentioned humans.
“Martina, come here! The Holy One needs of you.”
“Excuse me?” Carlisle peeps when the young lady—girl, actually, now that his eyes lay on the baby fat features of her face—approaches him.
When she kneels with a deep bow that makes her forehead touch the gazebo floor, Carlisle splutters.
“That’s, really not necessary. Really. Please get up.”
She does, solemn-faced. Not a word spills from her lips, rather, she pulls the sleeves of her green dress back, so as to expose her sun-kissed tanned skin.
He splutters again, half expecting her to start undressing completely. He’s not yet sure what The Holy One needs of you is supposed to mean.
The bowl in her bag and the surprisingly large knife do deter the idea.
They must be a family—he’d caught with his enhanced hearing the affectionate fratelli and sorella being referenced in the distance—of butchers or cattlers, come home early from yesterday’s celebrations.
Unfortunate enough to stumble upon him the previous night.
Maybe she intends to practice the family craft, and they will only fetch him an animal to eat from. That’d be great. Fantastic to soften his quiet, hungry agony, and also horrendously embarrassing. He could just hear Caius. Are you so weak that you need a human fetching your meals for you now?
“Well, I am hungry. But I only need a small animal, there’s no need to sacrifice any of your cattle for me.” Carlisle spies around for the other brothers hanging back to be carrying game. But, he doesn’t see any such hunted animals. He would have smelled it.
Carlisle considers the knife in the girl’s grip. Laying flat on her hand as if offered. But Carlisle does not take it. Can barely move without ignoring the deep tremble in his spine, put there by bone-deep hunger.
The girl, inexplicably, nods.
She seems to want to convey something wordlessly. It’s lost on him.
The brother beside her kneels, too, however. His own expression is of awe.
“Holy One. It pains us to see you so debilitated. Surely, you can see into our hearts and know the truth in our soul.” The young man then goes on a tangent, saying prayer and a Rosary’s Ave Maria. A fervent glow glosses his eyes. “Martina, my dearest sister. She is the purest of us. Unmarried, and untouched by sin. Miraculously sent by the Lord. Her virtue would surely help to restore your strength.”
And just like that, the girl cuts her arteria radialis open.
The knife runs so smoothly on the outside of her wrist. It startles Carlisle to watch. How she does it without flinching. With a dutiful expression on her face, and as her other brothers helped to staunch the blood flowing liberally into a poor man’s cup.
Then, when enough blood has been measured for the cup, the girl bandages herself up and offers it.
“Uh, no thank you?”
She still nudges the bowl of red under his hands, almost afraid to touch him physically. Not, fearful of him, Carlisle discerns from the placid, pleading look in her eyes, but fearful for him.
As if refusing her blood would deem her impure and unworthy.
“Uh,” now Carlisle is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Or, a gazebo and a gaggle of religious humans.
He tentatively grabs the cup. It takes quite a lot of energy to move. Like he’s slowly freezing from the inside. Petrifying with no blood flowing between limbs. Or stomach?
There’s a lot about vampire anatomy that Carlisle doesn’t know, and no one seems to have a straight answer either. Not even Aro.
“Thank you...”
His voice drifts off uncertainty, and in a panic, realizing he actually has to accept this poor girl’s blood or else the whole family will have a faith conniption.
So, Carlisle does what he thinks is only appropriate.
He pours the blood over his face.
His lips are like melted iron, welding shut as he feels, hyper aware, the path of blood on his face. Warm, like a slap. Or perhaps, like a punch.
Like Caius pushing him off the church roof.
The blood drips down his chin.
It collects over his collarbones and seeps down his chest. It should look horrific. A vampire coating himself in blood, mouth hammered shut, eyes closed, not even twitching with an inhale.
Everything feels, a lot.
For a lost moment of time, Carlisle simply exists with a drying, congealing patch of blood on his face.
He supposes, later, when the sun is setting and he can finally open his eyes, and the dried blood flakes off with his blinking, that the humans had spoken to him.
Or that they’d fled.
Well, if a mob of frightened humans shows up any time soon, Carlisle just hopes they won’t bring burning pitchforks to kill the blood-anointed demon.
The mob does eventually show up, too.
At sundown, when the human family of butchers shows their faces again.
And a sizable group of humans also in tow.
Oh. Oh, shit. They’re definitely coming straight to him.
And they do have burning pitchforks. Oh shit.
He attempts to sit up, but by now, the effort to have stayed stone-frozen, had the secondary effect of exhausting his already weakened frame. He can’t stand on his own strength. Can’t crawl. Can barely sit up from his forward lean, hunched over the bloodied cup of the morning draw like a beggar asking for alms.
He’s going to die.
In the private moment between the mob’s arrival, Carlisle comes to accept his fate.
It is inevitable. He is a vampire, an unnatural, predatory dead-thing. No, he’s not even a dead-thing. Those who are alive deserve to be named in death still. What Carlisle is, is deathless. A thing that exists. Death does not come for him now. Death already came for him. To a vampire, the next natural step is oblivion. Burning would not be death. It would be destruction. Like the burning of a house. The house is no more offended for being burned down, for it is only a thing.
He is, too, only a thing now, which lives among thing-beings.
The mob arrives at his gazebo-grave. Funny that he’s still lying on a wood palette. Perfect kindling for the coming fire.
It’s so regrettable that he’d gone out into the world again on Aro da Volterra’s wish, only to be destroyed.
The man leading the mob, an elderly man of rich rags—probably the vassal lord of the village—steps forward. The final rays of summer evening light touch Carlisle’s skin, showing for the crowd that he is not human.
That ought to do it for his sentence.
Carlisle closes his eyes.
“Holy One...”
That, isn’t what he’d expected.
When he opens his eyes again, total consternation twisting in his face, the vassal lord has set the blazing fire in his hand in the hand of the young man who had come to fetch him. The butcher’s son, of Carlisle’s embarrassing morning.
“Holy One,” the lord repeats again. He kneels at the lower step of the gazebo. “You grace us with such divinity. Would the most skilled artists ever grasp the beauty deserving the Lord’s holiest of creatures?”
Carlisle blinks.
If he was still human, he’d be blushing. Even starving as he is.
Aro had said something similar in meeting him and taking his hand to know every thought Carlisle has ever had.
I expect to have a most difficult time commissioning an artist to capture your likeness.
Carlisle really should have known he was being flirted at a long, long time ago.
But, cultural differences. And what is kissing, really, if not a physical demonstration of fondness?
He can perfectly envision Caius kicking him off the top of the great Duomo di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence for that thought.
“Come again?”
The fact that Carlisle is so befuddled, that he says it in English, should show what happens next.
The humans start to form a line.
They’ve been doing this for a week now.
Caius shakes his head in utter amazement as humans willingly file after a gazebo and offer a cup of their blood out for Carlisle. It’s what keeps Caius from feasting on the whole plaza that first day, watching as a mob of humans come skittering to Carlisle’s prone form.
Oh, Caius had been watching of course. Waiting for the moment Carlisle admitted he needed a little bit of rescuing.
He had watched the morning exchange with such stunned amusement. As Carlisle preferred to waste a good woman’s bloodletting over his clothes rather than drink it. What did it matter that it was human blood? It was free! Freshly squeezed from the source, like lemons!
Caius really didn’t know what went inside Carlisle’s blond little head, refusing free human blood. He’d acquired it fairly, with no human bit or mangled. Isn’t that his whole, thing? That he doesn’t eat humans because he can’t stomach being a killer?
(Not that it even applies. Vampires are so far removed from humanity, it doesn't matter that vampires are made from the human cattle. Doesn’t matter that the humans are conscious, sentient little beasts. Humans are their food. They are different species.
What attachment does Carlisle owe them in his vampiric life?
This is why Caius still bears an unspoken-hateful grudge to Constantine and the Domino effect he’d caused upon all of Europe’s covens, ratifying a religion where demons and the child of God both gave blood-consumption a whole new metaphorical meaning.
A pain in his ass with all these newborn theologies.
Or, had Caius gotten it all wrong? Did Carlisle just, refuse blood out of principle?
Somehow, that’s worse than the usual theonomic reasons.)
Really, Carlisle should have sucked every drop out of the bowl, and gotten out of this mess on his own hours into the first night.
And then there’d been a mob.
And they had fire at hand.
And Caius had been looking forward to the countryside cleansing. He rarely got to do a little war-mongering in the peaceful years of last millennium.
That Carlisle would be the one to finally grant him the gift of casual, justified murder was just a delightful coincidence.
But the humans hadn’t bounded out to strike down their visiting demon-creature. No.
They’d done just as the human girl of the morning had done, and bowed each to lay eucharist benediction.
That’s what his ears caught anyway.
“Holy One,” Caius’ wide-eyed boggling had almost sent him gracelessly toppling from his perch above the structured tower nearby, “blessed be our days in the Lord’s glory. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua,” the old, tuberculosis-afflicted, human started reciting.
They should be thanking a lord for Carlisle’s pretty martyrous face, alright. Just not a Christian one.
Aro would love his cut of the praise recognized.
The bloodletting had restarted en masse. When it had, Caius really did have reason to keep his distance. The smell of blood in the air was intoxicating. Carlisle really had to be so weakened in body and by insanity from his own diet-denial to be withstanding it wrist-to-nose.
Then, seeing Carlisle’s desperately lost expression from his distance, Caius had been fully prepared to hear Carlisle begging for assistance, while the blood dried up and he could stand to be a damsel.
But then, Carlisle hadn’t actually begged.
He’d stood the test of blood. Again the next day, without asking Caius (who Carlisle must know to be hanging around, observing very avidly for any hint that he’s giving away the existence of vampires: breaking of the law of secrecy) for his help. And again, the next day.
And again.
Until a week had passed, somehow, and Caius still hadn’t gotten around to helping Carlisle out of his predicament.
It should have probably crossed his mind that a week is a long enough time out of schedule for some of their coven to grow concerned, panicked even, that one of its leaders had not returned from what was supposed to be a simple, quirky adventure, a bad trick to force Caius into bonding with Carlisle.
Yet, Aro’s arrival, singularly shadowed by his ever-present protector, Renata, at his heel, still surprised him.
And so, here they both are, turning their noses politely away from the worshiping crowd of cattle.
“He has a gift,” Aro says.
They’ve had this conversation already. Caius is getting increasingly tired of it.
“He provokes the goodness in everyone he meets. The humans cannot help but see his weakened, supernatural self and assume him a holy creature God-sent to their town so small and unimportant, that it doesn’t bear a name in our maps.”
“Just because he’s your type and he carries a guilt complex over food doesn’t mean he’s got a gift.”
“I’ve seen all of his thoughts, Caius, and Marcus has seen all of his relationships. They always grow from passive awareness to lighthearted fondness to trust very quickly. Too easily.”
“He’s a pretty goose,” Caius says, by way of explaining the obvious.
Then, just before Aro can test if strangling his vampire brother-and-coven-co-leader would be the next best course of action, Carlisle collapses onto the palette and breaks it.
And the humans erupt into a frantic buzz.
The sky is actually violet.
Carlisle thought this to be a grand revelation, once.
The first time his eyes, transmuted and crystallized, had looked upon the sky, he’d seen the bluish-violet glow in total nighttime, and thought, wow, how have I never noticed?
He hadn’t noticed because the frequency at which human eyes could perceive the visible spectrum of light was incomplete. But a vampire isn’t simply an enhanced collection of senses. It is, fundamentally, a whole different set of senses.
His sense of smell is divided in such a way that he can tell dirt from mud. He can tell dog smell from vampire-that-touched-a-dog smell.
Blood is very much like that. Another sense.
It’s how Carlisle reasons he can ignore it so well to other vampires. He simply has that sense dimmed. Like scented aromas in a windowless room. He is consciously aware of the scents, but he can also politely ignore them by, for example, breathing through his mouth.
Of course, that’s explaining it like a human to a vampire.
And he is a vampire. He is bound by these senses.
Which is why the smell of blood, which sings around him daily now—which is inextricably connected to his sense of taste, inextricably connected to his sense of hunger—eventually overwhelms him.
Only, instead of overwhelming in the tearing-a-path-of-destruction-in-his-wake way, as vampires often do, it overwhelms him physically.
He’s weak. He wants to eat. He wants to sleep— which, is not something he has ever wanted to or even could do since turning. Carlisle has been nursing a growing headache for a week now, and now, when the sky is shining that brilliant, vibrant violet, Carlisle’s vampiric body has seemingly given up on him.
(If there were ancient vampires still among them, ancient before Aro’s time, they would have told him this is where the myth of the vampire’s day-cycle-sleep came from.
Before the wars that preceded peace in his time, there were true wars. Vampires did not decimate humans to extinction, only because they’d been so focused on fighting each other, on claiming territories, that the occasional fall of a civilization was merely an accident of involvement.
Back then, the old vampires punished their own kind with eternity itself. They knew their own strength and immortality to be their greatest, cruelest flaw. So they would take their enemies, enact some long forgotten rules of war, and torn up those vampires to pieces, burying them far under the earth so that it would take ages for the body to reassemble, and ages more to uncover itself from the dirt, until so much time had passed, that the body and mind, starving, simply, stopped.
They were things. Dead-things. Their body, without nourishment, would stop moving. Like an object devoid of will. Yet they would exist on, petrifying completely, perhaps. No one alive knows otherwise.
Not even Aro, who has seen the thoughts and minds of vampires older than himself. If an old, buried, petrified vampire were to be one day unburied, it was anyone’s guess as to what that would actually entail.
But regardless,)
Carlisle collapses, and seemingly every thought blanks out of his mind. Like in deep sleep.
And the sky is a vibrant violet.
It lasts an hour. It lasts a year. He exists, and existence has no concept of time. But, in the time he exists, the humans of the village gather around his prone form, and take matters into their own hands.
The girl, Martina, had been a miracle.
That is a truth she carried in her heart, everywhere. Her mother, young-yet-old by the time she’d been pregnant with her, had already given birth to three strong boys. Each stronger than the last. When Martina had been conceived, her mother had trouble even rising from bed, afflicted by some strange malady, unseen and unknown by the doctors of her time.
Martina, it seemed, would never be born.
And yet, her mother refused to die.
It was as if it had taken all that was left of her mother’s withering body, to carry her to term. To have Martina pushed into the world, to have her live past her first breaths in the world.
And then, seeing her duty done, her mother had promptly passed away.
Martina had been a miracle, yes. Everyone would not say it is because of her mother (though, Martina would add that to the miracles of her life), but because she had died and come back heaven-sent.
Martina had drowned, at the age of ten. In the waters of the Arno, which ran both through beautiful Firenze and her small, unassuming town of a hundred inhabitants. She had fallen into the river, drifted too far from the shore where her family had been washing away bloodied butcher garbs, and slowly drowned among river algae and fish.
And then an angel had pulled her out of the water, and all the water clogging her lungs vomited out of her.
The way she remembers it, it had been like a dream.
The angel had been beautiful, and terrifying in her vision. As all holy creatures were beautiful and terrifying. Hauntingly pale, red-eyed like eucharist wine, and dark of hair.
With another angel at their side, to beset its divine terror-ful will.
She had been drowning, so her memory is faulty, but Martina swears the holy being had spoken in the forbidden words that father shouted when he’d cut his first finger off.
“Cazzo di merda, what is this thing doing here?”
“What, you gonna look a gift-snack in the mouth?”
“Oh. Oh no, I am not starving enough to risk accidentally turning an immortal child. The Volturri would spread my ashes across the four winds. No! Cazzo! I’m putting it back!”
The holy angel had, apparently, plucked her from the water, and set her back into a miraculous raft. She’d floated a little further down, slowly with the help of the low-tide current.
When the priest of the next town over had found her in his own evening laundry wash, they had beheld her a miraculous child indeed.
She understood her gift.
She must live, for a grand purpose.
And then came the Holy One.
So gentle-voiced, and soft-eyed, and still trembling with inexplicable weakness, like her mother. Martina is the first to move when he falls as if dying.
As if dead.
This. This is her miracle awaiting. This is why she’d live to take her first breath, and second, and third.
And again, from the river, from the drowning that was not destined for her.
She will be here to return a miracle.
As the people around her crowd and panic, she alone moves forward from the throng, with her father’s whetted butchering knife. She foregoes the cups and the gathered goblets—they hadn’t worked, hadn’t been working at all—and takes the blade upon her arm.
And without hesitation, slits the veins from wrist to joint, to pour past the Michelangelo’s lips herself. Returning the miracle of life.
This, she knows, will kill her.
Martina hears the gasps of her brothers and father, trying to drag her back. To save her life in their hands once again.
She closes her eyes. Stands strong, her fist around the cold, hard skin of the angel. They manage to tear her off after much struggling, but by then, only because she’d bled through her dress, through the gazebo wood. She is weak from the bloodloss.
They could tear her away only after her duty had been fulfilled.
Aro freezes.
He faintly registers Caius freezing too beside him. Watching the pantomime of a little-too-enthusiastic cult go full on suicide-pact.
A human girl has just died bleeding all over Carlisle.
(Oh, it made a beautiful sight, surely. A human dying from devotion is nothing special, but dying for a vampire, now that’s just genial.
Carlisle would certainly hate himself for it, which is what keeps Aro from cheering with bravada claps like at an opera house final bow.)
Aro hears the faint heartbeat fade, just as well as another man, and a third younger fellow, all seemingly join in on the suicidal ritualing. There is certainly a catacomb silence in the crowd, as a serious hush—perhaps reverent, perhaps fanatic—settles in.
In total, three human people bleed out on Carlisle’s new makeshift blood-pond.
Aro so desperately wants to intervene in some way, but, all the blood. It’s euphoric. He’s not sure how Caius could stand where he does, with his maroon-eyes taking in everything, scenting it in the wind.
“They’s so fucking stupid, Aro.”
Yes, he would definitely have Caius’ thoughts on this later. Right now, they have a rapidly escalating situation.
Very rapidly, actually, as Carlisle appears to wake up.
Carlisle is all at once, here.
He had been in a state of sorts an existence ago. And then, ripped back into feeling and sensation and blood.
He’d never tasted human blood, but he knows, immediately, what has just happened. Even before he opens his eyes and sees the gargantuan mess laid before him.
There is a dead girl in his arms. Two of her brothers accompany her in the self-imposed sacrifice.
He feels, very suddenly, the eyes of every human in the town that had gathered with their dinky goblets.
He feels, almost as suddenly, every one of their heartbeats, all one-hundred-and-six of them, in staccato rhythm.
He feels, thirdly as suddenly, as Aro and Caius are watching from the high, shadowed pinnacle of the vassal lord’s home.
Carlisle doesn’t stand up. He knows that if he moves right now, something will happen. Either his control will fail him and he’ll go on a feasting spree, or he’ll break everything with a touch of his pinky.
Like a newborn fowl, kicking and stumbling its legs, accidentally destroying a stone fence, or something much worse.
“Holy One,” a few people in the crowd say.
(He is getting real tired of that one, a vague, annoyed part of him says. It’s mostly quiet, though, like petulance at still being sequestered against his will.)
“Step aside for me, please,” Carlisle speaks, the words grating smoothly out of his mouth. Echoing like clashing steel down a barrel vault aisle.
At his polite request, people fall over themselves trying to both bow, and obey. “He is restored...Martina’s miracle...! Her blood was truly holy and Christian...”
Carlisle wants to cringe so badly, but he is also awkwardly standing up, moving one foot at a time with absolutely careful attention.
The sun is just about to set anyway. Great! He can hobble away in shame—extremely horrific, growing shame—so the deaths of three innocents can properly send him into another catatonic state.
They erect a martyrdom site to Santa Martina del Sangue, whose holy site, reconstructed from a blood-scrubbed gazebo into a statue-fountain with a walk-in shrine, is said to bleed red in the summer’s hottest days.
The town contains a long worship to La garguglia sacra. It means absolutely bupkis to anyone who crosses by the town, but it certainly means a lot to the townspeople, having claimed their own, beautiful miracle.
And if all the churches in the town have paintings of Martina’s martyrdom and a blond angel’s sup of the Blood of Christ that flowed from her veins, well, there are weirder worships. Like the flying meatball.
Caius thinks it is funny.
Aro, very loudly, scorns his dark joy.
“You risked the secret coming out, to watch Carlisle squirm uncomfortably at free-sponsored blood?” Aro really should get his teeth checked, if he’s going to keep grinding them like that. They’ll whither to dust. “You couldn’t have snatched him after a day’s embarrassment and told us all about it instead, Caius?”
“Ah, but then we wouldn’t have him finally give up his thrice-cursed diet.”
It’s been a win-win situation. Caius got a good laugh that he will fondly recall on his bad days for millennia, and Carlisle got common sense knocked back into him.
“Caius!”
By this fifth-counted argument, Caius has already started drifting into what plans should he concoct to bully even more reason into Carlisle. “What?”
“He’s miserable!”
“So?”
“I can’t believe you.”
“You’ve believed me capable of worse. I only bullied him a little, and it was deserved. He’ll get over it.”
Aro’s gaping stare only puts a bigger, merrier skip in Caius’ step down the echoing halls. His job is done.
This is, ultimately, where Caius forgets an absolute law of nature, that the adage all actions have consequences also applies to him, and he simply shrugs back into the shadows of the castle to perch in his throne chair for an hour or two.
He forgets, until the consequences apply to him.