Carlisle's POV
I didn't want to. I had promised myself that when I started medical training that I would never get attached. Never get to close to the patient. Especially in times like this when life was so fragile. Perfectly fine the day. The next: death. Thinking about this one day: at home. The hardest time of the day. So many souls that were dying just due to the fact that there weren't enough eyes, enough hands to help. So many already in the morgue that didn't have to be there. That with just a few more hands, could have had a chance at life. And I had to sit in the dark for eight hours, pretending to sleep.
In my first beliefs, it was nothing more than pity for the newly widowed woman, and the fatherless boy. But when the ward came to realize that they weren't going to make it, it is only now that I realize that it was a deeper connection of looking into the boy who I now know has the same name as his father. Edward Anthony.
It was yet another frozen Chicago morning in mid-February that I walked into the hospital intensive care unit, to be rushed upon by Marilee, the also widowed nurse, that was the only left that hadn't taken ill. "Elizabeth Masen and the boy..." She began, her voice strained as though she feared my still delayed reaction.
I didn't wait for her to continue before I rushed to the final door at the end of the hall, a single room, crowded with cots, but I knew the ones in which I was in search for, for I had been there so many times in the past weeks. I slow to a slightly more human pace as I enter the small, claustrophobic little room. The air as heavy with the scent of sickness, many of those whom had begun to treat those early patients had come down with the Influenza ended out ill with it as well in this room. My thoughts of the past ended abruptly when I came to the cots of Mrs. Masen and her teenage son. Fate had been cruel to them both with the loss of a husband and a father in the first strain of it, but it was clear now that Elizabeth had only hours left of her life, if even that. Her fever had raged out of control for days now, many had given out on the poor Cullen widow and her son.
I had worked diligently until the end is what I had promised myself, and it looked now, that the end had finally come for this poor boy and is mother.
I knelt slowly by the mother's cot, her green eyes fluttering open weakly, I took her hand soundlessly, surprised when she didn't pull back. "Save him..." She whispered hoarsely. The pressure in her grip causing to me to doubt my own judgment on her health momentarily.
"I...I...I'll do everything that I can Ma'am." I promised slowly. Looking the woman in the eyes as she opened her mouth again. The determination in her eyes once more, shocking me.
"The others have done everything that they can. You must do everything in your power." She whispered stubbornly.
I nearly took a step back as I looked at this woman, never before had anyone said that to me, never before had someone sounded so much like they new exactly what I was. "I...I will Mrs. Masen, I promise." I murmured as he breath caught in her throat momentarily, before letting it out slowly for the last time in this life... I don't know whether it was his mother's dying wish, or the helpless look that Edward held on his face at the moment I looked over to him after his mother died, but I took Mrs. Masen down to the morgue quickly, before slipping back upstairs into that little room. My shift was supposedly over, but I wasn't leaving alone tonight...