Blood Moon [a Twilight Saga FanFiction]

Selfish

"LIZZY!" Lucy cheered and grinned. "I knew it! I just knew it!"
     "Shh," I said. "You're the only one who knows, everybody else thinks I'm dead. We need to keep it that way."
     "I know."
     She finally looked at Igor and her smile grew and the familiar spark of joy shined in her sunken eyes.
     "What's in the box, Lu?" Igor repeated my question.
     Lucy turned to take the box off her bedside and rest it in her lap. She stared at it with a look of intense focus, before she softly smiled.
     "A grey candle," she answered. "and a yellow daisy."
     I could only smile as she opened it, and sure enough, we had boxed for her a grey candle and a yellow daisy.
     "Lucy," I said softly and she looked back to me. "You wanted to talk?"
    "Well, yeah," Lucy mumbled and put the candle and the flower back in the box before turning to fully face us. "Ask you questions, really."
     "Ask away," Igor said softly.
     "What's it like?" she asked, looking at him. "Being dead?"
     I had a fleeting moment of hope that she meant my faking my death for the people of Nanaimo, but she asked the question looking straight to Igor.
      "We wouldn't know. We are the few who have been forced to skip that step of humanity," he answered.
     "Well, what's it like for your kind?"
     This was getting scarily close to exactly why I thought she asked us here. I prayed it would steer clear of the topic.
     "Some nights and days were like sleeping," I answered. "When there was nothing to do, all you could do was sit, watch the skies, and think. Drown yourself in your own head just for something to do. It turns into more of a dream when you find a hobby to help you pass time. For me it was my art, for Igor, it was mental health. Without those hobbies, we would have started going insane."
     "Is it hard? Resisting the blood?" she asked, looking back to her hands in her lap.
     "In the beginning? Very," Igor answered. "Miss Elizabeth is different to everyone else though, she's never tasted human blood. All she gets now is a soft tickle in her throat when she's near it."
     "What about you?" she asked him.
     "Painful. Every day."
     "Painful?"
     "Imagine a white-hot iron down your throat," I added for him. I stole the explanation from Edward's past.
    "Oh."
     "We do it because the alternative is unthinkable, and I've lived that alternative," Igor continued.
     "We never wanted to be monsters, Lucy," I added. "Never wanted this life. So we keep them safe. We push through the pain and we keep them safe."
     "Igor?" Lucy muttered. "What was it like for you? Before you had Lizzy?"
     "Dark," he chuckled. "I was changed out of a want for revenge and stayed because I thought I owed the men who made me what I am. After all, they had supported me through a lot. But I never liked to fight, not unless I really had to, and they had made me for an army to get back their crowns. I didn't know any other way. Didn't think it was possible.
     "I found some friends in the army, we were close and they told me that they were afraid. The last couple that had admitted their relationship to Stefan and Vladimir had burnt, and they were afraid that would happen to them. So I helped them escape, and I left with them," Igor continued. "The loneliness was... overwhelming. Nothing I tried to do, no matter how many people I surrounded myself with, the loneliness wouldn't go away and I began spiralling into my own little depression.
     "Marius and Rachelle, my friends, they tried to help. But when you're alone, old, and around a couple all the time, it takes a toll. So eventually I left them as well and just wondered alone.
     "There were a few bright moments," he muttered, with a soft smirk. "But none of them began until I met a certain woman that changed my world forever."
     "Lizzy came as your beacon of light in your darkness," Lucy smirked at us.
     "She did more than that," Igor said. His arm going around my waist and kissing my head. "She found me, with a whole new life in her hands, ready for me to take it. I was greedy, so I did."
     "I'm glad you did," I responded with a chuckle before I kissed him back.
     "What's it like? To become one of you?" Lucy asked.
     There it was, the golden question.
     "Nothing is more painful," Igor said, he had kept his eyes on me. "You're burning, with no way to put it out, no way for relief. Everyone wishes they were dead throughout the entirety of it."
    "And endless hellfire that eats you whole? Sounds like cancer," Lucy said and laughed. "You know before she quit? Anne told me what it was like for her. How she jumped?"

     Looks like Igor and I aren't the only ones to blame. I thought, trying to keep myself composed.
     "She should have been dead," Lucy continued. "And she would have been if Carson hadn't saved her. I wondered... I've been in burning pain my whole life. That has got to be nothing-"
     "That's something you need to be discussing with Doctor Cu-"
     "But you're my Doctor!" Lucy yelled.
     "Not anymore," I argued. "I am not the local vampire doctor of this area. This topic is not for discussion, Lucy."
     "I'm dying anyway!" She retaliated. "Don't think I don't know, they don't expect me to live past my next surgery. Even if you were still my doctor it wouldn't change the fact that I've messed with death too many times and this time will be my last!"
     "That is how it should be," I urged. "All of us should be in the ground, decaying. None of us deserves having to feel the heat of the thirst every day of our existence-"
     "But I don't want to die, Lizzy!" Lucy yelled through her fresh tears. "I don't want to! I've never had the chance to do so much! I've never seen the world like I want to! I've never watched a 15+ movie, I've never-"
     "This isn't for discussion-"
     "I have nothing to lose!" she continued fighting. "Lizzy, you two are the only family I've had for years! Please! Please let me keep that!"
     "Lucy," I said. "Stop."
     "No. You need to see that I have no other way! It's this half-death or death! And I don't want to die! I'm... I can't... I can't be without the only family I've ever known!"
     "I... I can't... I don't..."
     "I can," Igor said calmly. "I've changed someone before, I can do it."
     "No. Lizzy is my doctor, she is my mum! She will save me the only way she can."
     She wanted me... she...
     The thought flew through my head. I had never bitten a human before, had never even changed anyone as my brother did. My lips had never touched a human, to bite to change or kill. Never. And the thought that the first would be Lucy? Sweet, pure, innocent, human, young, Lucy!
     "Lucy, please. I can't. I've never done it before. I wouldn't know-"
     "You love me. You'll be fine."
     "You're asking me to kill you?"
     "I'm asking you to save me."
     Igor kissed my temple before approaching her slowly, I watched him as he knelt beside her and took her hands.
     "You need to be one hundred percent sure on this, Lucy," he whispered.
     "You're agreeing to this?" I said.
     "I'm one-thousand percent sure that I want to be a part of your family," Lucy answered looking straight at Igor. "You guys taught me so much more than anyone ever could about why we stay alive. Which is ironic, considering."
     Igor chuckled. "Considering," Igor repeated.
     I felt like I should have been fuming. How could Igor actually agree to this? To so willingly give up Lucy's life, to damn her to an endless night? A soulless eternity? Nothing after, nothing following. To be forever stuck at fifteen. She'd get better, that's for sure. Cancer wouldn't be a problem anymore.
     Had anyone who was a cancer victim become a vampire mid-treatment?  There were no hair follicles in her head so she'd be bald forever, not something any fifteen-year-old wants... which is apparently something Igor had already thought about because he brought it up with her.
     "Wigs and makeup were invented for a reason," Lucy argued.
     And how would her cancer affect her immortality?
     "We won't know what to expect," Igor stated. "No cancer victim has ever become... one of us, to my knowledge. We don't know how your body will handle the change."
      "What can happen?" Lucy asked.
     "If your heart is too weak, it can give out and you won't survive."
     "So my choices are, die in this surgery, or risk the potential of dying sometime in the next week due to my heart giving out, but if I make it through, I won't die until some point down the line to fire?" Lucy asked.
     Igor shrugged but I could see in the reflection of Lucy's eyes that he was smirking. I should have been angrier at him. Why couldn't I be angry at him?
     "Are you sure you want Liz to do it, though? You don't want someone more qualified? More experienced?" Igor asked.
     Did he not think me capable of stopping? Of course, I was terrified of it myself. The second her blood will touch my lips I have no idea what to expect, all I have to work with are memories from his past, Carlisle's and Edward's. 
     "I know she can do it," Lucy whispered, leaning into Igor. "She won't kill me."
     "Oh, I know that," Igor whispered back. "I have no doubt in my mind that she's strong enough for it. I just don't think she knows it."
     "I can hear you, you know," I growled. I pulled Igor back towards me, almost making him stumble. "Why are you going through with this?"
     "Don't you want a daughter?" Igor threw at me, so quiet and so quick that if Lucy heard anything it would be nothing but a hum. His response threw me off guard. "The Cullens, are happy, they have a family. Is it so bad that I want that, too?"
     "That's selfish," I argued. "To change her for our personal gain-"
     "Is it selfish if she's accepted it? Asked for it even?" Igor asked. Then he leant closer to me and I heard Lucy chuckle as he breathed into my ear sending all the wrong signals through my body in the circumstances. "Than, Miss Elizabeth, for the first time in your long life. Be selfish."