Author's Note: This is a quick fic I whipped up for someone on Tumblr, whose name just so happens to be Kenzie. There should be a sequel soon.
She kept her hands on him for as long as she could. As long as she could bear the slick and squelch of the man's intestines under her fingers and palms. She was a nurse. This was what she had been trained for. But there was no training for a man's life slipping away from him…from you, who had tried with tourniquets and iodine and plasma to save him. She wasn't even able to catch the man's name before a passing medic ripped his dog tags from around his neck and carried them off.
"Damnit!" Kenzie swore, wiping her brow with the back of her arm, just below her wrist covered in blood. "Damnit!" The man had shuddered once before going completely still and she couldn't bear to look at him anymore. His eyes stared without seeing at the ceiling of the aid station and Kenzie closed his eyelids with crimson-coated fingertips that were steadily drying in the stale air.
With a sigh, the woman retrieved her handkerchief from her dress pocket and walked outside, beginning to scrub hastily at her hands. She would get most of it off, she knew, but she also knew that there would always be a slight tint of copper to her skin that would stay. It would stay until this war was over and she was free of dying men and broken promises. She had signed up for this, but then she hadn't. She had signed up to save lives, not to try and fail. Not to hold a man's life in her grasp only for it to slip away from her at the last second.
"Welcome to the real world, right?" Kenzie muttered to herself, rubbing her skin raw with the handkerchief.
"The real world, huh?" A voice from her left. "I'm from there, y'know."
Kenzie's head moved so fast she thought she might get whiplash. She didn't pretend that she was more paranoid than the men who were out on the front line, but the aid station was close enough to the battle that the explosions kept her up at night as much as they did anyone else, making her jump in her skin before she was called out of her cot to close a hole in a soldier's leg or abdomen or wherever. Another soldier stood there, puffing on a cigarette and smirking at her. "…are you injured?" She asked. Deep down, in the parts of her that she had nearly left back in the States, something registered that this man was very handsome. Normally they all went by in a blur of bloody faces and broken jaws. It was weird to see a soldier standing in one piece in front of her, with seemingly nothing wrong with him.
"Oh, only hurtin' from a broken heart." The man clutched at his chest where his heart was located (Kenzie thought she could hear it thumpthumpthumping strongly against the man's ribcage). "Because you are the prettiest thing I've seen since jumpin' in Normandy. You got a name, sweetheart?"
Kenzie blinked, her hands stilled. "…I don't suppose you see many pretty things."
"No, but…" The man took a step closer, tugging hard on the cigarette in his mouth. "…if I did, I think you'd be the prettiest."
Kenzie thought the smirk on the man's face must have been permanently etched there. She reached up with nimble, bloody fingers and plucked the cigarette from his mouth, flicking it to the ground and grinding it out with the heel of her boot. "My name's Kenzie. Smoking kills."
"So the pack o' Luckies tells me." The man's brown eyes trained on Kenzie's fingers still suspended in air in front of him. "I'm George."
"George…" Kenzie placed her hand on George's chest, hooking her fingers over his shoulder and squeezing so that she felt the faint pounding of his heart through his olive drab jacket. She breathed out. "…doesn't feel like you've got a broken heart."
"Not now." George, a small smile still on his face, laced his hand with hers, brushing some of the blood from it with his thumb. The woman watched as a red droplet soared to the ground and splattered there. Then she looked back at George's face and his deep, chocolate eyes. Hidden there was something Kenzie was glad to see. A jovialness that most soldiers didn't have, weren't allowed to have lest it betray them to death.
"How long're you here?" Kenzie found herself asking.
"Company moves out again in two days."
Kenzie simply nodded and leaned forward, giving George a chaste kiss on the cheek. Two days was longer than what she had with most soldiers, who lasted fifteen minutes under her hands and beneath the too-sharp edges of shrapnel embedded in their bellies.
End.
