The sick boy is arrestingly beautiful, which is to say that Carlisle stops walking when he sees him. He has long, chestnut brown hair that frames a pale face with full lips tinged blue from lack of air. Carlisle tries his best not to eroticize illness--he has seen the harms such trends enact, the problem repeating over the endless centuries--but the boy makes this a difficult proposition. He is special, somehow, this one, and Carlisle thinks perhaps he would make a good companion. 

Beau is unconscious. His illness has progressed terrifyingly quickly, and in the sea of weak heartbeats Carlisle can barely pick his out. 

Next to him, a woman seems to notice Carlisle's gaze. She has similar hair, and seems similarly ill. This is the boy's mother. She's holding her son's hand, her wide, desperate eyes wet with tears.

She sits up with surprising strength. Carlisle is startled, more than he wants to admit, as she grabs his hand with surprising strength and looks into his amber eyes with an intensity that is only possible because she is burning through the very last of his strength to speak to him. 

"Save her," she says. 

Carlisle realizes she's talking about her son. Carlisle sees him as what he is--a gorgeous boy, the sort to tempt better Christians to sin--and she sees him as what she has always known. He does not blame this dying woman for not realizing her mistake. 

He is also not sure she understands what exactly she is asking, but it's too late. She falls back onto her cot, and now Carlisle has the permission needed to soothe his better angels and do what he wants. Perhaps she only meant do his best as a doctor. Perhaps she knows what he is. 

It does not matter. He makes excuses he does not remember and picks the chestnut-haired boy in his arms, marveling at how well-suited he seems for the position. 

Perhaps he says the boy is family, and he would rather care for him in the comfort of his own home. This is not strictly a lie. It is also not true. 

Yet.

Beau is not quite as unconscious as he might seem. He doesn't exactly struggle against Carlisle's grip, but he's not perfectly still either. He's fighting something, anyway, though it may just be his own dying body. 

He's aware of impossibly cold arms and a burning amber gaze that he feels even though he is aware of little else. He has the sense that he is being moved from one place to another, that something is being done with his body that he can do nothing about. 

He is perfectly helpless. he does not have enough energy inside him to have a problem with this. 

Carlisle makes his way back to his home. Running at top speed is a silly way to get around in an era with increasing motorized transport, but for now those are for sick people and he just wants to get home. 

He feels a small amount of guilt for the sick he is leaving unattended, but he does not have the time or the care to cure them, and so he is allowed to prioritize this one particular patient. 

He will be saving Beau--this is the name he has selected in his head, to be clear, whatever other name he has does not matter--but he will be killing him at the same time, and he knows from painful experience that there are those in his shadow-world that would happily kill him if he chose to, for example, turn a gymnasium's worth of influenza victims out of mis-placed compassion. 

Beau--who is, grudgingly, named Bella for now, because for all of Carlisle's sins at least he's right that the boy he has become obsessed with is not the girl close to eighteen that he appears to be--is aware enough to know that he has been placed somewhere soft after an extended period of movement. 

The pain in his body is intense. He is sick, so very sick, and he just wants the hurting to stop. It's more than he can stand, the pain, and some small sad part of him wants to die to escape it. He would do anything to escape... this. 

This could be taken as permission for what Carlisle is about to do. 

It isn't, really.

Carlisle lays Beau out on the bed and smiles to himself. He has never turned someone before, but he has witnessed turnings before, among the Volturi especially, and he knows the methods well enough. 

Were he someone else, he imagines that he would take this moment to gaze at Beau and take in his last moments of humanity. But he can hear the boy's heartbeat slowing, and he knows that if he waits too long that there will be nothing left to turn. 

He bites open Beau's clothes with his teeth and bites him just above the heart. He knows that transformation will hurt, and he wants to reduce that agony as much as possible. In a kinder world, he would not hurt Beau at all. 

He pulls away, satisfied that he has injected sufficient venom into Beau's body, and he waits. 

He is an ageless, sleepless thing. He will wait as long as Beau needs him to. 

The pain in Beau's body is the sort of indescribable that means his mind gives up on it immediately. 

It is worse than the pain from his fever, which never went away and only got worse, but it is also all encompassing. There is no room to think around the pain, only red-hot fire licking through every cell in his body, every last inch of flesh scourged from the inside out. 

Just outside the flames is the realization that his body is changing irrevocably, in ways that feel almost good. This does not make the pain okay, it does not make it no longer pain, but it's like a switch flips and suddenly he has gone from fear to anticipation. 

He does not understand why he hurts, or what will come, but he understands that he has been forced across a precipice and nothing will ever be the same again, him especially. 

When he awakens with a start and opens eyes are scarlet as the blood turning sour in his veins, he sees the doctor from the flu ward smiling down at him. 

"Hello, Beau," the doctor says. "My name is Carlisle. Welcome to your new life."

Carlisle cannot believe his luck. He has succeeded, better than he could have ever dreamed, Beau lying languid beneath him. 

He does not want to be frightening. He is not sure he has any other choice, that there is a shape to this that is not frightening. 

Beau tries to flinch back away, but this only drives his body further into the bed, and he can feel the changes have already occurred. 

"Who is Beau?" 

This is the first time it has occurred to Carlistle that Beau would not know the name he has only used in his head.

Oops.

"You."