Page 5 of Good Intentions

Back at the clinic, we would work together to patch them up, or we would set their soul free. We were no place for suffering. But already, my little clinic was cramped with people. I was never meant to be a hospital. I was a last ditch plea for a miracle. After that I sent them on their way to the human hospital.

But it is gone now.

Despite the head injury, and losing two of his senses, her lover, Bray, didn’t sit around and feel sorry for himself. He learned to navigate the clinic with a broom handle. He sat by patients and sterilized instruments. It was only because I could see into his very soul that I knew he was grieving. He kept his mood light for Nora, but he wasn’t fooling either of us. He was mourning the man he’d been before, and late at night, when he thought we were asleep, he would cry softly, hissing as the tears hit his healing wounds.

Those nights, I tried to soothe him without showing him what I really am. I tried to take some of his hurt, but it was his to feel. I couldn’t take it all. Like a physical wound, it needed to scab over and heal itself.

Tonight, the feel of his distress was hammering at my senses. Someone was moaning from the makeshift bed pallets in the corner, and I waved a hand, easing some of the pain. We were out of morphine, and I had to be careful about taking away their pain in case I let on what I was to my new coworkers.

The patient’s pained whine eventually tapered off as they fell into a deep sleep. Every day should be better than the last. They just had to survive. The silencing of the moans just brought Bray’s wracking breaths into focus. He climbed out of the bed–my bed once upon a time–so he didn’t wake Nora. He stumbled blindly through the clinic, and my heart broke for this human.

I appeared in front of him, and he ran right into my chest. He hissed back a sob, pulling away. “I’m sorry–”

I lifted my hand to the back of his head and pressed his cheek to my shoulder. He was a tall man, but I was an Archangel. I hugged him tightly to my chest, squeezing him like I could help him hold himself together.

He was stiff for a moment, then turned his face into my chest and cried. He clung to my shirt and muffled his sobs on my flesh. I held him as he healed, safe in a place where he didn’t have to be strong. Not for Nora, or the patients he soothed in daylight hours. He didn’t have to be strong for me.

I eased us both gently to the ground, not letting him go. I turned so I could continue to hold him, without him hurting any of his still healing wounds. After an unknown amount of time, he pulled back. His sobs were now just light catches of breath, and his tears were drying on his cheeks. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice rough.

I shook my head, brushing away the last of the tears from his high cheekbones. “There is nothing to be sorry for; you must feel the loss before you can heal from it.”

He nodded, and leaned back against the wall beside me. I missed his warmth. The connection. When was the last time I held someone?

“She thinks you're an angel, you know.” Bray’s voice was soft. “Not in the figurative sense. In the literal sense. She hates that she believes it too; like believing you’re divine means she’s succumbed to the PTSD of this never ending war.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised. Nora was nothing if not a keen mind. “And what do you believe?”

Bray huffed a bitter sound. “I don’t know. Seeing is believing, right?” He waved a hand at his face, at the bandages that were soaked through by his tears. We’d have to change those. “But she says you don’t eat. And I know you rarely sleep. She says you're beautiful too. Too beautiful to exist in this hell.” He shook his head. “It can’t be true, though. Because what angel could stand in this place and do nothing?”

What angel indeed?

The human, Nora, was a skilled surgeon. “Were you born in this city?” I asked lightly as I assisted. Me. Assisting. A humbling experience in itself. I knew that her lover, Bray, was not. He had a soft British accent, like he hadn’t returned to his homeland in a long time, but it was there.

She shook her head, her concentration never wavering. The patient on the table needed to have the limb removed, and we really did not have enough ether to keep him under. I was filling the gaps, but she did not need to do that.

“No. But a country not unlike this one. Or the one before it. We are all born from these conflicts, even in times of peace.”

I nodded, because I’d seen it myself. The wounds of the ancestors that seemed to attach to an entire family line. Become coded in their DNA. “And what of you, Ruhan?”

The human name I gave the people I tended settled weird on her lips. She didn’t believe that was my real name. Bray, perhaps, was correct in that she had suspicions of my nature. I smiled softly at her; the expression still felt odd on my face. So many years walking the mortal plane, and so few reasons to smile.

“I am also not from this area, but feel like I’ve been shaped by its conflicts.”

She paused in her work, looking up at me with flashing brown eyes. They were an odd shade, like that of a tiger's eye. I could see she wanted to press, to ask more questions, but she returned to her task.

We were silent as we finished up, and the man in front of us looked rough. I would do what I could, but it would be a miracle if he survived. A miracle I couldn’t provide. We stripped off our gloves and threw them in a box in the corner that we used as trash. Eventually I would take it out and “dispose” of it, which usually just meant that I eviscerated it from being.

I couldn’t do that with my new watchers.

Bray sat in the corner, and I could sense his frustration. I wondered if I could repair his sight, but the organs of his eyes were obliterated. I could have restored them if I’d been alone and willing to defy the plan, but I wouldn’t have at that moment. I didn’t know them then.

Now? I might have. He was strong and brave. Noble. He deserved to live out his purpose.

Sighing, I sat down. Who was I to decide what his purpose was, just because I found him intriguing?

He’d taken to cooking small meals for us all, and for our patients. There had been a few mishaps early on, but he’d persevered in the way only a person who’d been stitching up bodies in a warzone could; with determination to forget the things you couldn’t change and forge ahead.

It helped that the food choices didn’t really vary. We had a small collection of MREs that we’d retrieved from an abandoned barracks. Some canned beans and lentils that he made into a soup with parboiled rice. All of it was done on a tiny little stovetop that ran off the generator. It was a dump and eat kind of thing, but it made him feel useful.