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Pain
by faust
The pain set in exactly two seconds after the impact. Even though he had felt how the bullet had broken through his skin, had dug a tunnel through muscles, had severed bone from bone and then, finally, had pierced a vital organ, Joe had somehow hoped he would be spared.
For two seconds.
Two seconds of hovering in that borderland between triumph and despair.
Then the pain had brought him back to reality, and he had known, instantly, that he wasn't going to make it. And while immeasurable agony spread from a point just below his ribcage through his whole body, into shoulders, arms, hands, fingertips; hips, legs. toes; into his scalp, into the tips of his hairs even, Joe experienced a most peculiar sensation also: complete contentment.
The ground below him was warm, and nearly soft. He felt grass beneath his fingertips, and a soft breeze on his face. The sky above him was blue, as blue as only the sky above the Ponderosa could be, blue as the eyes of his brother.
Blue as the eyes of his brother, who was going to marry Susanne tomorrow. Beautiful, soft, kind Susanne, who would have been a widow even before she got married, if Joe had not leaped into the line of the bullet to save his blue-eyed brother.
Hoss and Susanna, an amazing pair. They would have children now, half a dozen or more, and maybe they would name one of them Joseph.
Joe smiled.
And then the pain ebbed away.
***fin***
