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Shura stood at my side, the gun in his hand leveled at the door we had just come from, and his gaze skittering back and forth between the entrances and the power struggle we were witnessing.
“I—” whatever Dmitry had been about to say was cut short, bullets breaking through the space before the doors burst open.
A wet gurgle followed, my eyes flashing to Dmitry with harrowing worry despite my body being forced forward—again by Shura’s large hand. I stumbled forward at a hunched angle as Dmitry spun on the spot, lifted his gun and aimed it at the bodies coming in through the back.
I half crawled my way towards the sound I had heard, my ears ringing and my mind a warzone rivaling even that which raged around me. Nothing made sense, not my life, not the situation we had found ourselves in, and certainly not the man lying on the floor in front of me.
Papa Koalistia. How many times since finding out about him and my mother had I wished to see him as he was now? Blood gushed out of the wound on his shoulder, his frail body twisted in an odd position.
Guns went off around us, voices raised in anger and in insult, but all I could see was Papa Koalistia. I didn’t have time to consider what I wanted or what was going on; I didn’t pause before pushing my palms down into the weeping wound in his shoulder, trying to compress it and stop the bleeding.
I had wished for him dead, and now a real possibility, I was unable to allow it to happen. I wouldn’t kill him myself, nor would I sit passively by while I could stop it from happening. It had nothing to do with him being Dmitry’s father like I might have assumed, and everything to do with him just being a living, breathing human.
“Don’t die on me,” I told him between clenched teeth, surprised to find tears pouring down my cheeks. The salty water splashed off Papa Koalistia’s contorted features. His face was paling and his eyes widening.
His body started to twitch, his teeth grinding together. A groan worked out of his lips.He was having a heart attack. I didn’t need anyone to tell me what was happening, having witnessed the signs firsthand before. My throat seemed to close around each sob, and the tears poured thick and fast down my face.
He was dying.
His eyes rolled into the back of his head, his body convulsing in a way that forced me to throw my hands off of him, sitting back on my haunches as I stared at the expiring man in front of me. I felt as if I were hovering between reality and something else, only dimly aware of what was going on around me.
I could still hear the bullets, I could still see Papa Koalistia, and I was forced to a breaking point. My tears were hot, liquid trails of fire down my face, the guilt gnawing at me.
I didn’t have what it took to kill someone. It was a harsh sort of reality, settling within me solidly.I was okay with that, too. I had gone to school to be a social worker, to make a change in the world, and snuffing the life out of someone was the antithesis of that.
It was only once the gunfire around me died out that I reached forward, gently closing the lids of the man who I had come to hate. “If you are born to be drowned then you will never hang,” I muttered, unable to bring myself even then to pray over his body.
Papa Koalistia was dead.
