death (cw: guns, violence, blood, assisted suicide)

[fieldhospital]

For a few minutes, he doesn’t realize that he’s been hit. The world silently tilts and shifts. The only sound is the deafening ringing in his ears. He can taste the acrid gunpowder fogging the air – there’s dirt in his mouth, too. On his teeth. He tries to sit up only to fall backwards before he’s even remotely upright – it’s the first he’s aware that something’s wrong. He fumbles along the front of his coat with one hand – stops when his fingertips trip over a hole ripped into the fabric. Into him. Oh, God, I’m shot. Oh Jesus. The fumbling takes on a frantic pace. More craters punched into the fabric over his chest and abdomen. The frayed wool at their edges is warm and soggy. Blood. As if a switch has been flipped, the abrupt realization sends all of the heretofore mysteriously absent pain crashing down upon him. This is what he imagined being shot would feel like. This is what he’s seen a hundred other men die of. It might be superficial, he tells himself. Might be superficial. Elisha tries to unbutton the double lines of buttons one by one, tries to look if only to confirm what he already knows, the death sentence he’s been dealt in the blink of an eye. I’m going to die. His hand misses the buttons. The watery blur of the chaos begins to return to his ears. I’m going to die. This isn’t happening. It can’t be happening. And now the nurse who had been walking astride him leans over him, bleeding from the temple and the ear and one corner of her bottom lip. She unbuttons his frock coat and pushes his shirt up to his armpits, reveals a glistening expanse of vivid red blood from what he can see when he tries to lift his head. Already the flies are coming; he can feel their legs on his skin despite the deafening roar of the pain frying every neural circuit in his body. His lungs won’t fill with enough air. She’s saying something about getting a chaplain. He’d laugh if he could breathe, if he was capable of the coherent thought necessary for a sense of humor. “Chaplain won’t do anything. Kill me. Don’t let me die like this.” He has to pause to heave another breath. “I don’t want to die like this.” Not this slowly. Not dragged back by a litter crew to die of fever. Of pain. He’d be dead already if any of the wounds were directly fatal. “Kill you—I can’t kill you.” The unbearable Georgia sun glints at him from the tears welling in her eyes. He’s crying too. Like a child. Like his patients. “Doctor, you know I can’t kill you.” “Yes you can! God will forgive you!” He dimly recognizes that the American legal system won't. That she'll hang for this if it's discovered. Elisha can't find it in himself to care. The only thing in the universe that matters is the pain and trying not to scream bloody murder and ending this before someone finds them so that he doesn't spend the next ten hours slowly dying. “If you have any respect for me left, you'll end it. Or I will. Don't let them send me back to my mother like this. Please. Let her believe I was shot. Not that I killed myself.” The woman chokes back a strangled sob. With effort, he opens the holster, cocks the hammer of his revolver, holds it out. Elisha watches the barrel shake with the movement of his arm. “All you have to do is pull the trigger. Put it between my eyes, pull the trigger, put it back, close the holster, leave. They'll think it was a sharpshooter. Out to get an officer. I'm a good target.” She stares at him, wordless, bloody lip trembling. “Tabby. Please. Don't let me die like this.” She presses the muzzle to his forehead with one hand, covers her mouth with the other, shoulders hunched and shaking. He closes his eyes. The pain ends.