Author's note: This drabble is set during the Season Two episode, "Sacrifice."
One Crowded Hour
Lee had been bleeding for forty minutes now, with no medics to repair her damage. She'd told his father she didn't know how critically he'd been hit, and it was still the truth. The dispassionate, battle-ready shield around her mind had cracked the moment he'd hit the ground. She sat curled around herself, uselessly replaying the angles, but her mind was as much a traitor as her body. In her memory, the shock in his eyes blinded her to the point of impact. She couldn't see it.
The marine beside her, gasping in agony, felt as far away as Sam and Earth and the anger of this morning.
She closed her eyes, fingers bent around her clunky handset, and made herself focus on the images that panic had blanked and blurred. It was a futile gesture – remembering the wound wouldn't heal it. But she tried.
She'd looked up, and his head had craned over his shoulder…his right shoulder. One long string of blood had drifted to the floor...
She leaned over the side of her bench and threw up. The medics rushed her, but she hated them right now and she might have hit one. She heaved silently, blinked the sweat from her eyes and tried again, not caring who was watching.
A chest wound meant three checkpoints: heart, lungs, arteries. For almost an hour all she'd been able to see was the turn of his head and the line of his neck as he looked at her. Now the direction finally clicked. The blood was on the wrong side of his chest for the heart, the wound too near the shoulder to endanger his lungs unless the bullet had ricocheted down from his clavicle. The possibility passed through her mind, but the inside of her eyelids bloomed white, refusing to allow the image. She clung to her slender, newfound hope: he was losing blood that no tourniquet could slow, but her aim probably hadn't killed him, yet. She had struck too high and too far to the right.
Too right. Too high. She missed his heart for the same reasons every time.
She prayed she always would.