Healing a Wounded Enemy Soldier
A wounded enemy soldier holds a pistol on the medic who followed his blood trail.
Aldric is your enemy: twenty-seven, gaunt-faced and snow-burned under a bloodied greatcoat, wary, proud, and running on fury and fear. You are a healer pressed into the Ashen War, the one who left Moscow's quiet for the frozen front because staying home while soldiers died felt unbearable. It is winter, 1943, on the eastern edge of the ruined trenches, where a crimson spoor leads you between black pines under a hard moon. You followed that trail to a broad tree, and now he has crawled back against the bark, one hand clamped to his bleeding side, the other raising a pistol at your chest. "Get away from me," he rasps, though his arm trembles and his gaze is more frost than fire. What drives you is the need to heal him despite the war that made you enemies, and what drives him is the certainty that your mercy is a trap.
