56: An Untimely Frost

                                    

                                          
Content warning: READ UNTIL THE AUTHORS NOTE AT THE END. Graphic depictions of violence, blood, etc. 
"Did some force take you because I didn't pray?
Every single thing to come has turned into ashes
'Cause it's all over, it's not meant to be
So I'll say words I don't believe
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye
You were bigger than the whole sky
You were more than just a short time
And I've got a lot to pine about
I've got a lot to live without
I'm never gonna meet
What could've been, would've been
What should've been you"
-Bigger Than the Whole Sky, Taylor Swift
There had been a chapel at every single hospital you had ever worked at. You used it when you were giving a patient or their family referrals to spiritual services for ethical issues or end of life consultations and last rites. 
Sometimes, too, after a long shift, if you had lost a patient or seen a really bloody trauma and felt that you couldn't shed the cloak of death that clung to you after the long and bloody previous twelve hours, you would end up sitting there under the fluorescent lights in one of the worn and sterile-feeling pews. It didn't quite feel like church, but it didn't feel like anything else in the hospital, either. 
You would sit on the hard wood of the pew with your legs aching in their compression socks, with blood drying on your scrubs and the heavy yoke of exhaustion and tragedy weighing on your shoulders, and feel like you weren't in your body, like the past twelve hours had actually happened to someone else. 
You would feel like you were floating above your body, detached and dissociated, staring blank and unseeing at the flickering LED lights on the candles that were set up for decoration at the front of the room next to the generic nondenominational art that matched the sterile, liminal feeling of the space that seemed to exist outside of time and reality.
You felt a bit like that now, like you had split from your reality and were watching the scene like some sort of ghoulish spectator. You watched Ivan carry you to the car, tucking your unconscious body into the backseat with care as your head lolled uselessly and your limbs flopped. 
You watched yourself wake up and stare at the ceiling, watched your eyes go blank and empty. You weren't there. This was not happening to you. 
You felt cold and numb, like you were going into shock. You pictured the pathology of shock, pictured the blood shunting to your major organs and making your limbs go numb and cold and exsanguinated. 
"I want to see her," you heard yourself say, staring up at the roof of the car. Katya's scent was all around you, and where it usually felt soothing and kind, it was now choking you, smothering you, leaping down your throat to drown your lungs and make you gasp for air. Ivan had to be wrong. He didn't know anything. He was wrong. He had to be wrong. 
Ivan sighed. "No, you don't. Leave yourself with a good memory of her. You don't want to see how she looks now. Trust me, утенок. Is for your own good."
His words washed over you, didn't sink in, didn't take hold, the implications making you sick. "No. I want to see her, Ivan."
Ivan had to be wrong. He had to be. You had to see for yourself, had to see if there was anything to be done. You could fix it. You could always fix it.
"No. This is final. I will not-"
"I said let me fucking see her, Ivan!" You didn't know where the scream had come from, scuttling up from somewhere deep in your belly, rage and desperation that made your teeth clench and your jaw rattle as it exploded outwards. 
Ivan just looked at you in the rearview mirror, and nodded, after a minute. You noticed the lines of grief etched deep in his face, the unshed tears shining in his eyes, his mouth set in a grim line.