A Day's Delay (LizQuen One-shot)

A Day's Delay

Disclaimer: This piece is a fan fiction. While events, names, and places may depict reality, none of them must be construed true unless grounded upon factual evidence. Trigger warnings: blood, death, gore.

***

Enrique is dying.

What could have been a low groan morphs into morbid laughter as it passes through his throat. Something sticky dribbles down his chin—blood or saliva he's unsure, perhaps a mix—, at first warm then freezing as it touches with skin and wind. There's a ringing in his ears, a high-pitched static more painful and much more distracting than the wound he's nursing, and in an attempt to will it away, he clenches his teeth.

Only to wince as a distinctive crack echoes in the heavy air, a tooth tumbling out as he spits crimson onto the dark pavement.

Another sound makes it past his throat, guttural, choked. He hacks a breath, and fresh liquid trickles from his mouth down his neck, soaking into his shirt. Laughter bubbles once again in his chest; this is apparently how he's going to die.

Only that it's not.

Not yet. Not this way.

Fingers numb, he reaches for his pocket knife. The blade weakly glints as he unsheathes it, as though for empathy given its soon-to-be arduous task, and Enrique pulls out a lighter. Biting into the fabric of the jacket he'd shrugged off earlier, Enrique watches as the blade he holds up to the flame glows, red slowly slithering up the metal, not quite touching the hilt.

This is it.

Hand shaking, fearful but resolute, he brings the still smoking blade to his arm, and promptly clamps down on the jacket to hold back a scream of anguish.

Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit!

His legs kick at the wall as every nerve in his body plead for release from the searing pain. His nails dig painfully into his palm, certain to leave crescent-shaped scars. The back of Enrique's eyelids bleed white when he shuts them tight, and he bites down harder, repressing the urge to cry as pain shoots up his skull from the teeth wound anew.

He doesn't know how long it lasts, a minute or longer maybe. He must have passed out, must have dreamt the pain away. But when he lifts the blade and cracks the neck he's strained from throwing back, the wound is closed. On his arm is a dark, cumbersome reminder of the bullet still buried in the flesh.

Enrique relinquishes his jacket and gulps lungfuls of air, parched from the agonizing cauterization. How pathetic, he muses, enduring this deathly pain to borrow another day of life. Maybe.

Because maybe he'll die from infection or from the wound reopening when the bullet decides to budge. But for now it will do. At least the bleeding has stopped. At least he's bought himself time to finish what he must.

Enrique stays slumped in the alleyway for a moment, regrouping. His car is still blocks away. He could've made a run for it, but a dizzy spell had his legs turned into jelly and him stumbling facefirst before he could brace himself.

That earned him nothing but a lost tooth and a cut lip.

He blinks away not-tears; Enrique doesn't cry. A certain kind of heaviness has settled into his limbs, the type that lulls him to sleep after shifts. The type that rigs at the back of his head, telling him that if he didn't get up now, he'd be snoring in record time.

What a comforting idea. Sleep. An eternal slumber, maybe.

Enrique trembles. Not yet, he shouldn't be thinking that. There's still work to be done...