Diamond Legacies: Part 1

Part 1 

Ivana 

“Mickey mouse!” I called into the house I shared with my best friend Micah Cullen. I've known him since a child and would always wind him up by calling him Mickey Mouse. It has since been turned into an endearment.

“Garden,” I heard his voice and made my way through our house to the back where he was sitting on the porch swing with a medical book in his hand. Micah was a surgeon, in the 23rd century it was a very different job to the 21st. Whilst mostly machines and precision robots had taken over the job of surgeons, they couldn’t do some of the most important procedures and we still needed surgeons for when machines went wrong or to oversee. Whilst not only did technology and our understanding of the human body grow over the years, so did viruses and diseases and cancers. Medicine was a never ending battle fighting with evolution. Sometimes surgeries just needed a human touch. Most hospitals had a small team of designated specialized doctors which were now classed as surgeons, they are rarer than they were in the 21st century but twice as important. Micah was one of these doctors, and i was training to be one. Micah took it very seriously and was a natural, especially being trained under his father. I went into medicine a few years after he finished his doctorates and now both work at a hospital in Chicago. We were here for the Volturi and the fact most of our family were here too. Both mine and Micah's abilities proved quite useful to my sisters in running the Volturi so we were happy to be on hand when needed.

“My parents are coming over,” I informed him sitting next to him on the swing. I noticed he was reading a really old book, since books haven’t been printed in the last 100 years I knew it was something his father Carlisle must have given him. Carlisle and Esme only lived down the road, with Micah being their only true born son they liked to be around him more than most. It was sweet, and I had become very close to my best friends parents. They were easy to love. My parents on the other hand were across the city, closer to the Volturi but still visited often. My father rang me every night to stay up to date with my life and I had a very close relationship with each of them. My mother took a less direct approach, whilst my sisters were telepathically linked to my mother, I was not. However I was linked with them. Giving my mother a inkling into my life without the need of a phone call. I knew she wasn’t intrusive, it wasn’t like it was behind my back. I knew whatever I told my sisters was most likely going to be seen by my mother but it was something I was used to from birth. The three of them went through a lot and I couldn’t blame them for the link they had formed over decades and decades of reliance on each other to even survive.

I did adore my sisters though. From my earliest memory I would ask my parents when I could go and see Lidiya and Anelie. Even with our telepathy I much preferred being with them and being in their life than just experiencing it in our joint mind. My sisters were centuries old, both them and my siblings through the Luna Bambini had since mastered the art of our linked telepathy. The only way I could describe it is a room in our minds. Back when my sisters were young they shared everything they thought or experienced, my older sisters and Holly and Avia Cullen were inseparable because of this fact. They grew up in each other’s minds not being able to limit anything they project. However, with the addition of Teddy Cullen, things changed. He has the hereditary ability of telepathy from his father and grandfather however with the combination of the inherent telepathy of our species he was able to adjust it. He could start to chose what he showed and what he didn’t. He created the room in the joint mind and was able to separate his own experiences to those he wished to share in the joint mind. In doing this his sisters were able to limit their link too. Thus, creating the ‘room’ in our heads. It sort of worked one way. Who ever wanted to share something, the others would see but they wouldn’t have to reply or reveal their thoughts until they chose to enter the room too, thus entering the joint mind. This helped immensely when Jonathan Butler met my sisters. Before meeting they had no idea he existed and the second they did meet he was assimilated into the telepathy network for our generation of Luna Bambini’s. Luckily with Teddy’s work on the ‘room’ he could choose not to share much about his life or who he was, and even now, being a Cullen himself he still doesn’t involve himself with the joint mind unless needed. Teddy, Holly and Avia on the other hand are extremely present and use the joint mind often to keep in contact with my older sisters. Something that as a child I admired and idolised. Their relationship was true siblings and even if Holly, Avia and Teddy shared different blood we were linked as family, something that extended to me the second I was born and was easy to accept with our parents so close too. 

Although I felt like those I shared my mind with were my family, I was also born way out of time. Teddy was the youngest except for me and he still had a hundred years on my age. My sisters were even older and the four of them held a special relationship. Something I couldn’t even hope to fully be a part of or understand for another several hundred years. This made me gravitate towards Micah Cullen as a friend. He was like me, 2nd generations of our families but born hundreds of years apart from the others in our generation. His siblings were centuries old vampires with lives and families of their own. He didn’t even share anything in common with them being they were adopted by his parents and he wasn’t. It didn’t mean he didn’t love them any less but he was an entirely different person to everyone in the Cullen dynasty. We were both born in the diamond age of humanity. Neither of us had experienced the hardships and the near collapse of the human race and destruction of the planet. We had been born on the other side of it. Neither of us had seen a day of pollution in our lives, trees were more populace than people and technology was in its prime. As much as we read about it and watched the archive footage of the past two hundred years we couldn’t relate and we certainly didn’t emphasis with it like the rest of our immortal family members could. I met Micah as a child and something about him just fascinated me and the feeling was mutual. With Micah's ability he always told me that my soul was captivating to him, that it was infectious and he just loved being around it. This worked well for me since I wanted to be around him too. After I reached about nine, and nearly fully grown we became inseparable and I've never spent a day a part from him since. We’ve both done medical school and countless degrees and decided to go back to Chicago nearly six years ago now where we’ve been living our life ever since.

I loved splitting my time at the hospital and at the Volturi. Micah preferred the hospital but he still saved one of his days off and any night times needed for the Volturi. Where as I was more fifty fifty. I enjoyed both too much to give up the other.

The hospital was ran by Carlisle. It was one of the many he had built in the Cullen name six decades ago. Back then it was to target the shocking healthcare rules in affect in the United States. It was under a tier system and if you didn’t have good enough insurance you would be treated last, even if that meant you were dying. Carlisle started to build hospitals around the country that were self-funded and treated patients on an emergent basis, and more importantly, for free. As endless as the Cullen wealth is, he couldn’t sustain the entire country of the United States with the hospitals indefinitely and so he started to introduce a monthly membership fee, a flatline amount each family would pay into the hospital and in return they could receive any treatment they needed. The system worked and Carlisle had single-handedly, with help from a few other medically trained Cullen’s developed a national health service for the entire country for next to nothing. Insurance companies went broke and he contributed to one of the major national changes in the history of the United States.

Since then most hospitals were on this system. There were the select few that abused the system and charged a ridiculous fee but they were going to lose out in the long run, where as in the mean time Carlisle actually started to make profit, something he never intended to happen. This money went into even more up to date technology and training of his staff. He had an empire, an empire in which Micah was the heir to.

This meant that our job was very interesting. Or well his was and I just got to experience it on the side. The Cullen name wasn’t just famous in the supernatural world now but also the human world. It would go down in history as the family that saved millions of lives and that meant that those in the healthcare profession had to be careful. Carlisle was currently parading as the grandson of the original Carlisle Cullen, and Micah his son. People worshiped at their feet. Humans fought for a place at the hospital we worked at just to catch a glimpse and get to work along side them.

I had a more laid-back life at the hospital, I didn’t carry the Cullen name but most knew that Micah was my best friend and that Carlisle was my uncle. It was easier to pass through the halls when ‘Dr Balev’ was called rather than ‘Dr Cullen’. Most of the regulars at the hospital had got used to it the past few years but the occasional visitor or new residents would get excited. It was mostly the patients that made a big deal about it.

I managed to live a pretty normal life. I had boyfriends and girlfriends come and go. I was far more into the dating scene than Micah was. I lived one day at a time where as he brooded half the time because people were jackasses (as he likes to remind me). I was currently in a relationship with a doctor at the hospital although it wasn’t public since he was actually married and had a family. It was only sex but I knew Micah didn’t approve. I wasn’t the one cheating on my wife and he would find someone else if it wasn’t me. Micah tried to stay out of my relationships the best he could but I knew from the look of his face when ever he met my new suitor whether he approved or not. Sometimes having a best friend with his kind of power was a kill joy. I had gone off the idea of relationships for a while. My last one was ruined by Micah and his interfering and so I opted for a less string attached relationship this time. Micah was the only one that knew who the guy was and he would never tell a soul anyway.

“Harvey Leon was asking for you before,” Micah said not looking up from his old book. “Said it was for an opportunity in neurology for the most gifted resident,” he said with a mocking tone.

“Hey... he has been promising me this case of an expanding glioblastoma that’s wrapped around every area of a kid’s brain. He thinks he can get it out.” I defended myself. Our entire relationship wasn't about sex, I liked the man, he was actually a really nice guy and he was good at his job.

“He knows that case is under Carlisle. He’s the only person in the world that’s ever removed a tumour like that, the kid came across the world to see Carlisle.” Micah said nonchalantly.

“Maybe one day you’ll grow up to be like your daddy hey?” I joked, nudging his arm. He turned to look at me, narrowing his eyes slightly. I laughed and my smile was infectious to him. He involuntarily smiled back. Like always. Just in time for my parents to come knocking at the front door.

“Go entertain your parents. You have a three-day shift starting tomorrow right?” he asked.

“Don’t remind me,” I groaned as I stood to show my parents into our house. This was my calm before the storm.

End of Part 1