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Combeferre was shaken abruptly awake from the first night of sleep he’d managed to secure in the past week. When he opened his eyes, the sight he was greeted with was the butt of one of his own silver dueling pistols. Above him stood Enjolras, with a blurry, stern expression on his face. He’d spoken a moment ago, but Combeferre hadn’t registered what he said.
He reached for his glasses first, and put those on before grabbing the pistol and quickly getting up to dress himself. “Have they gotten in?”
“No,” said Enjolras, who was oddly still. He took a deep breath. “I said, shoot me.”
What remained of Combeferre’s grasp on the logic of the world splintered apart at that statement. His mind raced, desperate to provide some alternative explanation for what he’d heard. Perhaps Enjolras meant that someone had shot him. This, however terrible it might be, was something he could treat, could lay Enjolras down and stop the bleeding. But Enjolras did not seem to be bleeding.
And, unrelenting, Enjolras was taking off his coat, unbuttoning his cuff, and rolling up his torn shirtsleeve to expose a flesh wound on his left forearm. Combeferre could see the indentations of human teeth on his skin, but there was minimal bleeding; only two or three had broken the skin. In any other context, he would have washed and wrapped the wound and not thought much more of it. Now, he felt dizzy.
“It doesn’t look severe. Perhaps I can treat it normally and--”
“No. Combeferre, you’re being irrational. We all saw what happened to Feuilly, and I know you and Joly cared for him the best you were able. I don’t blame your care. But I don’t want to die that way. I want to die as I am now. Entirely myself. So I need you to kill me.” Enjolras spoke gravely, firmly, but not ungently. As if he understood how devastating the thing he was asking for was.
But Combeferre was shaking his head. “I won’t-- I can’t kill you, Enjolras.” When he did not immediately hear an answer, he persisted. “You ask too much of me this time.”
For a moment, still, there was silence. At last, when Combeferre set the gun down on the bedside table, Enjolras spoke. “I would prefer it to be you. I want a kind death. To feel in my last moments the sort of peace that you alone give to me.” A tear appeared near to escaping from Enjolras’s pale eyes, but he blinked it away. Deeply moved, Combeferre stepped forward and rested a hand on Enjolras’s cheek. “But I understand your reluctance. I will ask someone else.”
“No.” Combeferre spoke automatically.
“You’ll do it, then?”
The thought alone made Combeferre feel ill. Again, he shook his head, but Enjolras grew frustrated, pulled away from his hand.
“What, then? There is no alternative, there is no situation where I live and remain myself. I’m not afraid to die, Combeferre. All of us do. It’s only a question of circumstance. And to die like that, no longer a being of reason but a mindless, ravenous creature, seems to me the worst possible death. Would you condemn me to that? Is that the measure of your love?”
“No. Never. But maybe there is an alternative. There has to be.” Though Combeferre spoke out of pure, desperate desire, he began to pull his thoughts together.
Enjolras looked at him soberly. “What is it?” However firm in his conviction, he was willing to hear Combeferre out. He always was.
“The infection acts on the brain. We know this because of the change in character that you describe, the way it appears to shut down a person’s reason. But you, and Feuilly, were bitten on the arm. It took some time for Feuilly to succumb. Almost a day. The infection has to spread from its source to the brain, and it can’t do that immediately. It could be similar to gangrene. Clearly it requires aggressive treatment.” He took a deep breath before pronouncing his decision. “Before it spreads to your brain, I could amputate the affected limb.”
The heavy silence that followed was not discouraging to Combeferre. He could see Enjolras turning the idea over in his mind. “Do you truly believe this will work? Or is it just a hope?”
“I think it can work, Enjolras. You may die during or after the procedure, a more painful death than the one you planned. But if you don’t … I think you will live. I believe that. And I would recommend this course of action from a medical perspective, not just as someone who cares for you. If nothing else, it would further our understanding of the infection.”
“If it doesn’t work, if I ask you during or after the procedure to end it, you’ll kill me then?”
Combeferre placed his hand on Enjolras’s shoulder. “I promise.” It pained him a great deal to say those words, but he respected Enjolras too much to try to argue against his wishes. Neither did he want to see him made into an unnatural creature.
At last, Enjolras’s rigid resolve appeared to melt away, and he placed his hand over Combeferre’s. “Because it’s you. Because I trust you. I’ll allow you to try. But let’s not waste any time.”
Though they moved with all possible haste, it still took some time to prepare the operating theatre. He had to explain the matter as succinctly as possible to Joly, who would be his attendant during the operation. Thankfully, he understood the urgency and did not ask too many questions. They changed the sheets, and Combeferre wiped his tools clean, tested their sharpness, traded out one of the blades, which must have grown dull with the number of other amputations he’d performed in the past days, for a spare. The motions themselves were almost routine by now. Only the patient, and the nature of his injury, was remarkable.
Twice during the process, he spared a glance to Enjolras. Both times Combeferre found him sitting calmly at a desk, penning a letter in the messy hand that always seemed so unfitting of his friend. He wondered what words Enjolras would have for him, if he read it. He hoped never to find out.
“I’m ready,” he said at last, and Enjolras at once removed his shirt and lay on the bed for him. Combeferre, fastening the tourniquet around the upper arm and tightening the screw, considered the body before him. It would be easy to pretend Enjolras was anyone but himself. It would make him more efficient; it would pain him less. But it would be, he thought, an unforgivable sin to avert his eyes from the immense trust that Enjolras was placing in him in allowing him this painful experiment over a peaceful death.
“I’ll be as quick as I can.”
Enjolras looked up at him, resolved. “I know.”
Combeferre cut. Enjolras, ever stoic, did not scream, but only closed his eyes and gasped as Combeferre performed the circular cut around the arm, swiftly and neatly. This was the easy part.
“Saw.” Joly handed him the instrument and automatically moved to hold Enjolras down, but his friend did not struggle as the bone gave way underneath Combeferre, a sickening wet creak accompanying each pass of the saw. Enjolras only began to pant, turned his head away, and clenched his remaining hand into a fist.
“Leave him. Help me apply the forceps.” With Joly’s assistance, he clamped off the blood flow, applying the crane’s beak forceps to the anterior arterial branches, and the crow’s beak to the posterior. With the bleeding paused, it left only the work of ligating the blood vessels and closing up the wound, a precise task which he nevertheless completed as quickly as possible. Though Enjolras did not cry out or scream, Combeferre could tell that he was in agony.
By the end of the operation, as quickly as it had come, they were both drenched in sweat, and Joly looked almost as pale as Enjolras himself. Combeferre knew that Joly preferred cauterization to ligature, that he would be worried about the risk of infection. They’d had the debate time and time again, and though Joly would not dare to raise it now, the spectre of the argument lingered in the room nevertheless in the grave look on Joly’s face and the sick feeling in Combeferre’s stomach. He worried about infection too, of course, now more than ever.
“It’s finished,” whispered Combeferre, as he finished bandaging the end of the limb.
Enjolras raised his pale right hand and reached over to grasp Combeferre’s bloody left one. “It is fortunate,” he said in a strained voice, “that I am not left-handed like you.”
Combeferre felt tears spring to his eyes, and at once he embraced his friend tightly around the body, sobbing into his chest. Enjolras’s remaining hand rested loosely on his back, a steady, comforting pressure.