Wait For Me || John "Soap" MacTavish x OC (Call Of Duty)

44. Rockstar

DISCLAIMER: This chapter describes medical procedures. 
However, for plot and pacing purposes, they are partly fictionalized and, therefore, intentionally not entirely accurate.

Yael tried with every fibre of her being to ignore the way, with each slight jolt of the military ambulance, a fresh trickle of blood breached the barrier of the dressing. Of the surgical forceps buried in raw flesh.

Her heart hammering erratically behind her breastbone, she watched helplessly as life ebbed away, slipping from her iron grip. Flowing slowly down the side of his broad chest, dripping onto the floor of the vehicle, right beside her boots.

Time had become a long, endless monologue with herself. 

A fierce, raging prayer to anything that could keep him alive. Whether it was her fingers or something she had never relied on before then.

Her brain worked feverishly, torn between the instinctive relief of an operating theatre and the awareness of the nightmare that would follow. 

Her fingers numb with tension and her ears deaf to anything but the weak, but steady, beep of the monitor to her immediate left. 

She listened to it, more than watched it, too terrified to meet the pale and lifeless features of the man abandoned on the tactical stretcher.

She sensed it instinctively, with a gasp of air that seized her stomach and sent a shiver down her spine, an out-of-place movement of his chest, then the alarm saturated the dense air of the cabin with a trill that bounced around her skull at a hundred decibels.

The medic at MacTavish's head stiffened visibly, dark eyes darting to hers through the dark hole of his balaclava. 

"He's not breathing, we're losing his pulse," he warned in a bark that tightened her jaw, preventing air from escaping, while the rhythm of the monitor became erratic, confused.

Yael wanted to explode in the curse that had risen to her lips, instead, she chewed her fear into a glacial, atrocious silence. Her irises fixed on Johnny's still sternum.

She had to think fast, cut out the unnecessary. Every fraction of a second wasted was a useless contraction of the heart that took him further away from her.

When her fingers slipped, once again, blindly into the bullet's entry wound, time seemed to slow down, stretching out endlessly in the familiar and sickening sensation of the warmth of internal organs. 

It's not the heart. 

Her brain was screaming, she just had to trust it. 

It's not the heart.

Then, without warning, the monitor's whistle became sharp, prolonged. No one moved a muscle, despite the ambulance jolting them at breakneck speed through the busy and anonymous streets of Folkestone. 

"He's in arrest," the medical team operative stated through gritted teeth, a pedantry that almost made her snap.

Instead, the doctor remained silent, stunned, her hand moving away from the wound. 

"I'm starting compressions, Lieutenant."

Yael watched him move to Johnny's right, beginning chest compressions as she had seen and done in her life more times than she cared to remember. 

For a terrible instant, it seemed absurd, impossible, almost grotesque, the way Soap's now silent chest bent under the medic's pushes. 

It's not the heart.