Cruelest Mercy

A Oneshot by Anomalous Anonymous

She’ll be eighteen in two days, her mother tells you, tears running down her face in streams of crystal salt. Her daughter lies on the bed before you both, her last breaths trickling out into the air.

You bow your head.

“I'm sorry,” is what you breathe, but it’s not for her mother—it’s for the beautiful girl lying before you, the girl whose beauty you can still see through he torn skin (delicate, fragile, breakable) and the blood (the blood that doesn’t bother you anymore) and the dirt-turned-mud (stained red by the blood) all over her body.

Car accidents are your least favorites.

Not that you have a favorite, of course, but car accidents affect anyone and everyone and the sheer wastefulness of it all nearly makes you sick. It’s such a waste, such a pity.

Her final breaths are wheezing out in the air of the room, rent with beeps and drips and trickles but inside your mind—inside your mind all you hear is the mantra it’s such a waste over and over and over and over until you want to scream (but you don’t—you’re nothing if not controlled).

It’s so hard, so unbelievably difficult to listen to her die, to watch her life slide away from you when you have an answer, a—you almost say solution before you catch yourself and your thoughts are off again. Is it really a solution? Is being undead better than death itself? Is your tortured existence some sort of hell all by itself? And your family’s arguments ring in your ears.

Esme, dear, sweet, beautiful Esme, your wife, your lovely wife, she does not argue against you. You know she’s thankful for you, that she wouldn’t have it any other way, but you know there are days when she wants (more than anything) to be with her baby again (and you’ve ripped that away from her).

And then Edward, your first companion, more your son than (really) any of the others, Edward believes that you’re too merciful. (But are you merciful?) Let them die, Edward says—Edward is a Darwinist in the truest sense of the word (the strong will survive, it’s the natural order of things and we interrupt it).

You quench the other voices—there is work to be attended to.

Not that you could do anything for this beautiful creature whose life is trickling away by the moment. Her parents are standing around you, there are nurses… you could not ‘save’ her even if you found the right answer.

And perhaps that right answer doesn’t exist; perhaps it’s all based on opinion. You cannot waste—it goes against your very nature. Nor can you justify ‘killing the innocents’ as Rosalie says. You find yourself at an impasse.

You quench that thought, too, because the machines have just gone haywire and this beautiful girl is fading fast. You escort the family from the room and watch as she slowly slips away.

You count her heartbeats until there are no more to count and just as the last one begins to fade, you reconsider.

Is it mercy when you flood her with venom, taking away whatever after life there is? Or is it cruelty of the truest kind?

But then her heart thuds to a stop, the machines fall silent, and all is still. You wonder for a moment before you pull the sheet up over her head and call the family back in.

Fifteen years later, as your forever-seventeen year old son speaks of a girl with chocolate eyes, you are faced with the same questions.

This time, you get different answers.

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