BEN
"Adam?" Ben didn't even hear his own voice when he fell to his knees next to the small bed. His eyes were fixed on the face in front of him, but all he could do was stare at his son's once handsome features that were now sunken and pale, lips bloodless and cracked. Still, it undeniably was the face of his son and Ben wasn't going to complain.
Again he called his son's name, but Adam merely shivered. He lay on his side, utterly still, black sweat-soaked curls clinging to his head. His hands, clutching the thin blanket to his chest, were shaking, and just as Ben watched, Adam's body tensed in a sudden convulsion. Not waking up he turned his head to the side and moaned softly, then grimaced when a dry cough ripped through his body.
Ben reached out his own trembling hand and softly laid it on Adam's, enclosing the frail limb with his warm one. He could feel the constant tremors that ran through the weak body in front of him and unconsciously tightened his grip, the strength in his fingers, so unlike the other, a promise, reassurance.
"Adam," he tried to whisper, but the words stuck in his throat. With his hand he brushed Adam's cheek instead, touched the hot feverish skin that was drawn tight over the bold planes of jaw and cheek bones, held the head of his beloved son and felt the tingle of the curls on his palm, the rough stubble of the beard that scratched his skin.
His hand travelled over thin shoulders then, but Adam didn't move at all. Ben felt the heat rise from the blankets and wrinkled his nose when he smelt the faint smell of gangrene and infection rise from the sheets, but Adam's long fingers, thin as the hand of a skeleton, were cold as ice. They gripped the thin blanket as if their hold was the only thing that kept Adam from slipping away, his only grip on a reality that was painful and cold. Ben took a deep breath, then laid his hand once more on Adam's forehead.
"I'm here, Son. I'm here now. Don't you dare give up on me." Desperately he willed Adam to open his eyes and acknowledge his presence, but his son neither moved, nor did the long black lashes flutter.
Wearily Ben closed his eyes for a second, then turned to get up, but a voice near his shoulder forestalled him.
"Excuse me, Sir?"
Surprised he lifted his head. A nurse stood in front of him, eyebrows raised in her grim face, hands on her hips.
"This man needs quiet."
Before he could say anything, she had already moved forward to take his arm and guide him outside, but then his mind finally registered and he shook himself free.
"I'm Ben Cartwright," he answered, meeting her eyes square on, but even so he could tell she was not overly impressed. Still, her stance relaxed just a fraction as she acknowledged him.
"Mr. Cartwright." As her gaze wandered over the bed and Adam's weak frame, checking, confirming, her features softened, however. "I didn't know who you were." Then she looked at Ben again, taking in the dust-covered clothes and slumped shoulders, the fatigue in his eyes.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Cartwright. I'm Sister Carole and … "
Ben swallowed. "My son?"
Once more her eyes moved over him, critically judging, comparing, but whatever she had seen must have spoken in his favour because she gently touched Ben's arm.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Cartwright," she said.
Alarmed, Ben could see her eyes fill with sympathy, and it took all of his self-restraint not to grab her arm and shake her in horror.
"Please, Ma'am ", he beseeched her, "I need to know how he is and what happened to him."
She sighed deeply, obviously pondering what she should tell him, and Ben let his eyes plead for him. "Tell me."
Quietly she nodded. "Outside."
XXX
She led him to her office, a small room that was fitted only with a desk and chairs. Subconsciously he wondered how many family member had been told of the death of their fathers, husbands, sons, brothers in here, then sighed and sat down, rubbing a hand over his face before he raised his eyes to hers.
"Mr. Cartwright, I don't know what …", she began, but Ben held up a hand, interrupting her at once.
"Please, ma'am … ", he squinted, barely holding his impatience in check. "I have been travelling for the last three weeks just to get here and see my son. I just want to know what happened to him, how he is and when he'll recover." He saw that she opened her mouth to protest, but he forestalled her, and his voice made it clear that he indeed thought in terms of "when" and not "if".
"Tell me."
For a second the nurse didn't answer, and when she looked up, her eyes were bright in her washed out face.
"Mr. Cartwright, I don't know whether you expect a miracle, but …"
Ben could taste blood in his mouth where he had bitten the inside of his cheeks trying to hold himself back, but impatience and the desperate need to know easily overruled politeness. "Just tell me!" His voice was like ice now, and Carole succumbed.
"He took two bullets, one in his side, one in his leg, and lost a lot of blood. The wound in the leg got infected. The one in his side is clean, but it doesn't heal as fast as it could because he is weak from blood loss and the infection that set in."
Ben was quiet when she had finished, trying to absorb what she had said.
"Why didn't you…?" He muttered, hardly able to finish a thought from the hundreds that raced through his mind.
"I don't know what you think we are doing here, Mr. Cartwright." Her voice had a definite edge, but she tried to remain calm. "The doctors tried as much they dared. We clean the leg wound every day, lance the abscess, drain the pus, wash the wound, but it doesn't help. There's nothing we can do. He is getting weaker with the fever that burns his body." She cast Ben a sympathetic glance.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Cartwright. I wish I had better news for you."
Ben was quiet. His mind tried to absorb the things she had just told him, tried to filter them, organise them, but they just went on whirling around in his head. Finally he looked up at her and tried to find his voice.
"Thank you, ma'am", he said.
XXX
Deep in thought he wandered back into the ward. Again he let his eyes sweep over the rows of beds where the other soldiers lay, saw the endless white of the bandages and blankets. He shivered, and not only because of the cold.
Sighing softly, he sat down on Adam's bed, and gently touched his son's shoulder, needing the physical contact to remind him of what he hadn't yet lost.
Then he closed his eyes, suddenly beyond weary, and tried to think of all the things that had to be done. He needed to send a wire to Hoss and Joe, find a hotel room …
There was a low , embarrassed cough behind him, startling him from his thoughts. Another young nurse stood in front of him, holding a bowl of water. She smiled shyly as Ben stood respectfully.
"I'm sorry, sir, but it's time to wash him."
She moved to Adam's side, but Ben took the bowl from her. Meeting her protesting eyes, he tried to assure her.
"Please, ma'am", he said softly, "he's my son. I'd like to do it myself."
XXXXX
ADAM
There was pain. There wasn't anything else.
It was pain that ran through his body like molten lead, pain that ripped through his body and tore sinew and muscles, pain that his world consisted of. White-hot clumps of agony scythed through flesh and mind and left faint echoes of lightening before they struck, again and again, leaving him weak, vulnerable, shivering on the white sheets, waiting.
There wasn't anything else.
Sometimes, for a few precious heartbeats, the pain would collect in his leg, would allow him a moment to breathe and gather his mind before it returned to send exploding shafts of pain along his spine and through his chest. On bad days the wound left him writhing on his cot until he passed out, gladly exchanging the whiteness of the sickroom for the darkness of his nightmares.
He hadn't decided yet what was worse.
Pain left him choking, trembling with fear like a child when he was awake. Darkness sat on his chest and sucked out the marrow of his life until his limbs turned into lucent vessels of smoke.
In the darkness he moved over battlefields, moved, half-blinded, through suffocating clouds of gunpowder, over ground covered with torn bodies not yet dead that silently cried for their mothers, for beloved that had been left behind in another life.
Cannons shook protesting, groaning earth and sent crowds of ravens into the sky to watch over their feast. Soldiers ran past his ghostly shadow, hurrying along the ever-moving front line, back and forth in an ongoing scarlet tide, their number decreasing whenever more corpses joined their comrades on the ground, bodies and faces torn, lost to the past and the part of him that still had had hope. Mist rose from the saturated ground, lifting the ghastly tune of marching boots to the sky. Watching, he shivered.
In the darkness, his hair was frozen to the ground and he couldn't lift his head, until smaller, softer hands on his cheeks told him not to worry and made him lie down in the cold. Every once in a while blurred faces appeared at the edges of his consciousness, distorted images of dirty men, bringing voices into his vacant world, so many voices. MacKenzie was there, and Hutten, and others he didn't recognize but he let the sound of their voices lull him into oblivion and dulled pain, swinging softly on the excruciating tide that now seemed to rule his life.
There was another face, though, another voice, one that forced itself rudely through the pain and ordered him from the battlefield, and because, just because, he wanted to see that face again, he wondered whether he should not to give up living just yet.
