921 Guns
Prologue I: Normal
But am I here? It's kind of hard to tell I do a good impression of myself
But what's normal now anyhow?
-"Normal" by Porcupine Tree"All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true."-Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughter House-Five
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."-Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
What is the worst of woes that wait on age?
What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow?
To view each loved one blotted from life's page,
And be alone on earth, as I am now.-Lord Byron, Childe Harold
I dreamed a dream in time gone by
When hope was high
And life worth living-"I Dreamed a Dream" Fantine, Les Miserables
10.3.93
"Your kidding."
Carlisle stopped believing in the concept of normal many years ago. It was an indefinable term that had long lost it's meaning as man kind continued to branch out and lose touch with their own societies. Normal was an idealist dream; when normal stopped being relative, Carlisle believed, only then would man truly be equal. Until then, he did not believe in normal; he believed in the common, he believed in the majority and the minority, and found the ideal of either applying to himself incredibly far-fetched.
But this is ridiculous.
Just..."Impossible," he said, shaking his head and staring out the window at the blood red sky. "Simply impossible."
"Carlisle," Esme whispered, meeting him beside the window pane and placing a gentle hand on the small of his back. "It's true. I can feel it."
"Esme, do you have..." he faltered with the words, struggling to keep his voice at a reasonable level, fearing the rusted probes not-so-discreetly crawling the barren grounds around the small cottage. "...any idea what this means?"
"Of course I do," she whispered harshly, glancing once again outside. Since the vampiric virus began it's rise (..all those years ago...), every vampire family was closely monitored, kept separate from those unaffected. Small ghettos had formed all throughout rural America and Europe, and only those naturally immune could so much as glance at them. Even they had to be persuaded, as someone had to deliver the monthly blood supply.
Carlisle remembered when the Great White had burst throughout the land, uprooting trees and sending all those in it's path flying into the mist, never to be seen again. He remembered the terrible sickness, the famine, the drought. The sub zero winters and the post hundred summers the next day. And, most of all, he remembered the sky, as it faded from the blinding white and into the deep, dark red.
And then the sickness had turned into something else. And that's when life had frozen.
Damn it all, he would not allow a child into this world.
"Carlisle," she said again, "I know the risks, I know-"
"-that it's utterly impossible?" he cried, letting his fist fly into the window pane. Splinters of soggy wood bounced off his marble, alabaster skin.
Her eyes visibly dried, their kind's equivalent to tears, and she seemed to shake. "Please," she said quietly. "Remember when we were young? How we wanted this? We talked about it, about children and a family and a life-"
"That was before, Esme," he said impatiently. "That was when things were normal."
She pressed a palm to her stomach. A sudden longing distorted her unnaturally lovely features, and her face seemed to melt in grief. "Why can't it be normal?" she said. "I'm sure it's happened. It's been fifty years, I'm sure we're not the first-"
"I'm sure we're not," Carlisle said harshly. "And I'm sure we won't be the first to be burned, either."
A thick breath caught in her throat and, once again, her eyes gazed at the probe, jerking in it's movements as the rust stiffened it's joints. That didn't effect it's hearing, though.
Carlisle instantly regretted his words as he looked at his wife, the innocence that he had fallen in love with rising again. The fear, the want, the longing. The desperation.
"Love," he said, wrapping his arms around her as her body racked with silent sobs. "We hardly have enough blood as it is...we don't even know if it's legal," he sighed. "Do you really want to raise a child like this?"
He felt her turn her head against his chest, catching a whiff of the ashen scent of her hair. "Yes," she said, her voice muffled. "He'll be normal...just like we were."
TBC