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(I have absolutely no idea. We'll see what comes of my random typing. Wow...this turned out to be...rather sad.)

I knelt beside my friend where he had fallen. God damned soldiers with their god damned guns. I bit my lips, letting my teeth sink into the flesh, and I ran my cold hands through his wet hair. The rain was falling heavily and the sky was an oppressive gray. And the concrete was gray and shining, and my eyes were just the same, but his blood. It ran in watery streams steadily from his body, the vivid red clashing with the watery, washedout world around. Only the sound of his ragged breathing was reaching my ears; not the shots around me, the screams of men dying, my other friend's voices and footsteps as they ran to help him. But not me, I couldn't help. Only paralyzed, transfixed, muted, capable of nothing but staring. I couldn't even find where my tears had all gone.
* * *
The next day, I sat in our makeshift hospital, relying on our young and inexperienced minds to keep our injured friends alive. I'd spent the last 12 hours drifting in and out of sleep, rising occasionally to vomit in attempts to relieve the burning fear. I settled myself back into the chair, my shaking arms and legs barely capable of holding my weight for longer than a minute or so. A big hand rested on my right shoulder, and I looked up. One of my closest friends hovered above me, looking down on me and looking down on him. Another hand on my other shoulder. I turned to look at her, and saw the tears in her eyes. She wept for my sadness as much as she did his pain, and found my own tears. They flooded from my eyes, cascading down my face, but all totally silent. Shutting my blood-shot eyes, I rested my head on my arms on the bedside next to his still arm.

He was not allowed to die, as long as I stayed there. In the darkness of night and my own dreams, when I questioned everything and yet took it all for what it was, I doubted. I doubted myself and my abilities, his will to live, the strength of the people I was with. And yet I knew I had done everything I could to put myself between him and that bullet; no one is that fast. I knew he couldn't let himself die. The smallest fleck of consciousness in his mind would tell him that he was afraid to die, and he would fight to recover with everything he had. I knew that I would not be forsaken or forgotten and left alone to fight in a world dying under the fatal grip of darkness and violence. I shook my head, the effort of that small movement straining my tired mind and muscles. Do not think these things. Think only of him when he wakes up again.