Notes: Written for the Dark Fest to the prompt "The good thing about being in pain is at least you know you're still alive."
I kept trying to find a one-word synonym for "death throes" but couldn't. "Agonia" is the Greek word for and the root/origin of the word "agony." In Russian (original source language) it means "death throes."
The one good thing about being in pain is that he knows he's still alive.
It's not a very comforting thought, or rather feeling, for he is not quite capable of coherent thought, as life has been reduced to a small pinpoint of painful light somewhere in the periphery of his vision, sliding from side to side like a pendulum. He cannot remember what life was like before this and he cannot imagine what it may be like again. Something awful had happened to him he does not remember that either.
The light changes colors, blurring around the edges. Sometimes it is red, like bright, hot blood. He shrinks away from that color, it reminds him of more pain and the heat in his temples rises to a burning. Sometimes the light is orange or yellow, soft and flickering. In it, he can see other shapes which shift without actual meaning and seem to be incorporeal ghosts and shadows of objects and people, things he used to be able to identify by name.
Other times, the light shifts to a pinprick and burns his eyes, gauging at them with a needle. He cries out and is instantly socked in freezing water which starts at his forehead and drowns him slowly, making him sink head-firsts into a dark and empty place where only the pain exists.
Sometimes, it is easier to be in the dark then in the light which tires him until he can hardly pull enough strength together to remember to breathe. But it's a scary place – the dark. He wants to hide from it like he hid under the covers as a child but he cannot move. The pain does what it pleases to him and he cannot escape it to take any control of his own body.
Yet, he has to still be alive because there cannot possibly be something like this after death. And if there is, if this is hell, then where is the Devil and the forks and the spitting flames. No, he is alive, but life has lost all comprehensive meaning and feeling.
The pain morphs – sometimes it is liquid fire that he stands in and it eats at his body slowly, rising like a flooding pool of acid. Then it shifts and becomes ice which never melts and it sends stinging shivers over his body and he attempts to curl in on himself only to be stabbed by many knives in the sides and the thighs and the chest.
Breathing is painful so he tries to not breathe too much. Not breathing also hurts so he takes pained, shallow breaths that wheeze through his throat and make him cough.
He can still smell and taste blood, can still hear the rumbling and roaring of the canons. The surgeon's blade, the first slash of agony that starts below and works its way up into his abdomen and his chest and his head. These are all but strange blurs which his mind is too tired to name but he knows, instinctively that they are bad and pulls away from them.
His breathing catches, the pain roars in his ears and clamps down with iron jaws. The water rises.
No. No, no, no! No…
The doctor looks up from the wounded officer thrust almost forcefully into his care and regards the young man – Dolokhov? Was that the name he gave? – who lingers at the back of the room with a tired look. He'd refused to leave and hovers annoyingly in the shadows. "I'm afraid I cannot give you any good news," he says, straightening and closing his briefcase.
Dolokhov's expression remains a pained sort of stoic. "I was going to take him out of Moscow, see if I could put him up with one of the evacuees. Is it too dangerous to move him at this time?"
The doctor sighs and rubs his forehead. "Not so much dangerous as pointless."
"What do you mean?"
"He won't last the night."