Bring On the Evening Hours
"'Not only are there no happy endings,' she told him, 'there aren't even any endings.'"-Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Dying is strangely painless. He can taste the blood in the back of his throat, and shattered pieces of ribs digging deep into his lungs with each struggling breath, but there's an odd sense of being disconnected from it.
Tommy's face swims above him, small hand reaching toward the worst of the hemorrhages, and he gathers enough strength to push a single word through his lips.
"Don't." Enough to make the boy stop. Enough to not let him take his death and trade his own life instead.
His vision is swimming, growing fainter with the shallowness of the wet breaths he drags through his lungs, but his eyes follow Tommy's to the blood against the glass, the letters slowly forming the words.
GOD IS NOW HERE.
He wants to live. It's a selfish, burning thing, rising with the fluid in his lungs, and he fights it as much as he fights the drowning, as each breath becomes shorter, his heartbeat struggling to pump whatever blood is still inside his veins.
He doesn't speak this time when Tommy reaches for him.
Later, he'll tell himself he was too weak, too close to death, to stop the child. Later he'll replay the scene over and over in his mind, to lift the guilt in one hand and the grief in the other and see which one tips the scales.
Tommy is a frail, fragile child, and Paul is so broken, so damaged. There's not enough healing in Tommy's body to repair it all, but the warmth, the sensation, flows upwards and out, finding its way steadily to the worst of the injuries, knitting shattered bone, fusing torn organs, rushing a fresh flow of blood to a fading heart. He can feel the life start to run back through his body, a thud of a pulse in his ears. The next breath is raw, a gasp that leaves him choking on the sudden pain, the agony.
This, then is how it feels to receive a miracle. And wonder if you deserve it.
Life narrows down to pieces, fragments of time, after that. The wail of the ambulance bleeds into the sobs of Tommy's mother as she rocks him, the boy's eyes staring up toward the words, the letters indistinct as the blood continues to run. Hands lift Paul onto a stretcher, taking him away, one reaching out to brace the glass still embedded in the side of his face.
"The boy." He tries to reach. "Help him."
And then the ambulance doors close.
Later, when he's close to death again, and face to face with a ghost, Tommy tells him why he saved him, of the something that told him to. His breath catches in his lungs, healed and not scarred, a miracle, the doctors said, but he says the words, the question he's wondered all along.
"Something good?"
And Tommy doesn't answer.