lifetimeprelude | January 1921.

Carlisle is with his patient now - young man, late thirties, poor circulation and damaged lung. Starting to get nervous.

Carlisle himself is all smiles but he doesn't sugarcoat things - it is a dangerous surgery, and long. But he's confident and it shows.

A boy comes to their door, and Edward catches his thoughts before the teacher even gets told. All the classes meeting toward, twelve in total with lectures and labs and privates, were placed into a draw for the surgery of the day.

It's not less irregular than other days -- except for it being dangerous and new and worth watching. Edward hadn't been all that interested, since he'd been getting the bird's eye view of it regardless of where he was during the day.

This doesn't stop him from looking just enough smug when he takes a chair on the middle row in the observation area an hour later.

"Did you see Edward's in observation for this?" one of the nurses chimes in as Carlisle is scrubbing his hands and forearms vigorously.

He almost drops his soap out of excitement.

Hello, Edward.

There's a snort, Edward rubs through the back of his hand, following it with a--

"No thank you. I'm fine," offered through the shake of head when the student next to him offers a handkerchief taking the noise in a completely opposite way.

Surgery is a slow progression and some may be surprised to see the patient as one of the only people in the surgical theater at the outset. The anasthesiologist puts the patient under and the team follows, all business. Perhaps Carlisle most of all - his head is filled to the brim of what comes first, in what order things have to happen, potential warning signs. They all jostle for position until Carlisle calls for a scalpel and he gets to work setting blade to flesh with an exhale.

Jostle is a good word. It's what all the people beside him do. Shift, shiver, strain, jostle, trying to quiet as church mice find the right positions from their chairs to watch the most they can of what they've been given.

He wonders how much good it does them when they can't see what he can. Even without Carlisle or his team, his eyes he sees more intricate details that they do. His sense are better.

Especially the one he's already trying his best to ignore.

The first hour comes and goes almost too smoothly. A nurse tells a joke; Carlisle chuckles along with the others and it breaks the silence for a minute or so.

He calls for saline to flush out the field of vision. Carlisle receives it, along with a quizzical look from a nurse.

Looks fine to me, she thinks.

Edward's brow furrowed slightly.

Not noticeably to anyone near him. It's look like tension and strain to try and see same as anyone near him, though it is the first time he's leaned forward as though intently studying anything. They've learned rather well to keep their thoughts on his oddness mostly to themselves.

No matter what they say, he still manages.

What Edward is interested in though is the difference of images he's getting, and how easily he can compare in their multiple overlaps. He's milliseconds from a question.

The saline did nothing. Something is happening.

Carlisle blinks once, twice. Nothing out of the ordinary, but his slower pace does give another attending pause. "Is everything alright, Dr. Cullen?"

Cover. The patient is open on the table. Hide the alarm raising in your throat when you realize that the person speaking to you has gone fuzzy and gray like a newsprint photograph.

A beaming smile. "Want to finish for me?"

"Say yes."

It's almost instantaneous how much all of this matters almost nothing to him, when Carlisle is still thinking about the open body on the table, and Edward thoughts are solely oriented to Carlisle himself.

There really are no other options unless Carlisle intends to use his eyes, and Edward really really is for the option where they are not surrounded by thirty people anymore.

"What? No, I couldn't possibly -- "

"Yes you can, now come over here." It's far more authoritative than Carlisle ever sounds normally and it's attracting attention but Carlisle can't care about that now. There's no time. "This is a teaching hospital after all. You'll be fine."

He can apologize later when the shades of gray stop coalescing into just shadows of each other.

The other attending steps into the task at hand and Carlisle moves back, stripping off his gloves and slamming out of the operating room with what looks to be a distinct agenda of escape.

He needs -- He can't. He watches his face swim into view of half dozen people near him, glancing over, checking to make sure or figure out what they should think, as though Edward will have that clue irregardless of the fact he hasn't been in the other room any more than them.

He's trying to count. Trying to get to two minutes.

He's not even seeing the table. Twenty seconds. Thirty.

Attention is turning, in shaky waves, toward the man who took Carlisle's place, while Edward really can't care much at all for it. Fifty seconds. If he was human he might move, but he's more still now than when he first started smelling the blood.

A minute twenty.

Carlisle is stopping in an empty patient room. Forty.

Fifty-two.

He stood up, gathering momentarily the attention of the those closest and longest only his teacher, from whom he mouthed the word 'bathroom' and endured the followup mental probing question of how he would ever handle care if his stomach stayed this weak.

He didn't care.

Once the door shut he was blur, stopping only where Carlisle was. The door opened and closed in milliseconds, and Edward right behind him. "Carlisle?"

Carlisle puts a shaky hand up in front of him when he turns toward the voice, Edward's form a mere outline - true black against the lighter pallor of the empty room.

"I don't -- can't see."

He could say I know but that wouldn't be helpful at all, in fact it might only sound higher than normal. Edward caught the hand reaching out, coming closer, only to stop stock still.

"Your eyes are--" Edward's other hand captured Carlisle's chin. Tilted his face to each side in a manner that bereft softness for more severity.

"They feel different but I can't tell what's going on."

This has never happened to me before I don't know what it is

Edward was trying, willing himself not to sound entirely disbelieving, trying to reign in the panic that surged at the edges, even as he said. His grip on Carlisle's chin softening as he did though.

"They're clouded. In anyone else," anyone not them, anyone who could age and die and have ailments of any kind, "likely cataracts." At least. "There's nothing else wrong?"

Nothing he'd missed?

Carlisle is losing focus on what to try and deal with first, but at least Edward's question is a direct one.

"Not yet?"

"This way." Edward moved him back, toward a chair.

There's some sympathy in the not wanting to usher him back on to the bed much closer. That's just -- it would be too much for the clinging stillness he's trying not to let slip through his fingers like sand.

It really isn't possible or probably, but it's happening.

"I didn't see anything out of the ordinary when it started."

"What would either of us have looked for?" Carlisle returns plaintively.

I can barely make you out.

Edward doesn't let go of his hand. There is no shushing, at least not outside of his head. "I'm here." He wouldn't be anywhere else. He isn't sure what he should be doing next even, what he is now.

There isn't even a tool in this facility, this entire city, that could give them even the equivalent of a paper cut. Or at least so he had believed until five minutes ago.

"There must have been something." The frustration is tempering the rush of those ones. It couldn't logically happen just randomly. At least for all he knew, all he'd ever assumed and seen from Carlisle.

We have to get out of here.

Before anything worse happens.

"Will you go make your excuses? And mine. Please?"

Edward stood up, only to stop when it would require the release of Carlisle's hand. The movement of hundredth of a second, came more like instinct than choice, reaching out to touch Carlisle's hair and his temple.

If there were words with it they never happened.

It was simple, direct still, at getting directive. "Of course." Which got added between to door opening and closing, "Only a few minutes."

Which was the truth of it, too. It was more than easy to get himself out of it. He could pull of looking horrendously dragged under by the surgery, and he could say Carlisle had found him and was taking him back home. It was all believable. They nurse staff had seen enough reason to believe both ends of it.

Edward.

Carlisle clutches at his own hands in keeping himself from snapping the arms of the chair until Edward gets back to him.

It's all black.

He doesn't have to breathe. He doesn't have any space in his head for anything else (even as the endless pour of always continues to shift and sift and fill, in and out, endless).

The desperate confusion at the edges of his eyes and hands, the nearly stricken too-fastness of his movements, all lend such realism to the countless lies. Rage is so close in a blinding second place.

Edward slipped back into the room, back to Carlisle, placing a hand at outside edge of his shoulder to announce what sight couldn't and sound would have already. "It's done." He took Carlisle's hand, unable to avoid catching his eyes, when he was helping him to stand back up.

Carlisle wants to be defensive and flinch back and go 'I can at least still stand on my own' but there's no reason.

And he has no clue what will happen next.

I remember the way, just...don't let me run into things, and he sounds so helpless in his own mind that a bitter taste rises in Carlisle's throat at it.

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