F A N F I C T I O N > M I S C . F A N D O M S
When You Get Home by Amberina
It's an almost everyday occurrence. Someone is brought in with a gunshot wound to the head. There's nothing quite like the horror you experience when you recognize the face that's caked with blood.
Your whole world slows down. Everything around you swirls, the colors fade and become muted shades of grey - except the blood; the blood stays vivid. Your breath catches in your throat, and you fight the urge to show emotion.
In med school, they taught you to remain impartial. One of the hardest skills doctors learn is to not care about your patients on a personal level. To see them as a patient, and not as a person. When you already know someone as a person - whether it's a friend, a lover, a family member, or just a casual acquaintance - it's nearly impossible to maintain this impartiality.
You can hear your own heartbeat in your ears. For a split second, that's all you can hear. All the other voices around you, they combine into a hushed noise that sounds remarkably like chanting, until it the volume goes down and it's just your heart.
And then everything goes back to normal, and though it felt like hours, in reality it was only a total of three seconds. You tell the other doctors to stop, because you know the man lying there, and you know this is what he wanted. They protest, but quickly realize that you know him. They do as you ask.
You sleep walk through the rest of the evening; no one else notices, but you can hardly think straight. Finally, you leave the hospital and you go home.
When you get home, you cry.