Crofton said, his voice raspy. "Like you said." Dougal looked at the tray, then up at Crofton's face. The younger man's eyes were bloodshot. The anger had burned off leaving only the charred brittle reality of what was happening in this room. Dougal reached out and took one of the cups. "Thank you." Crofton stood awkwardly for a moment not knowing what to do with his hands. He finally walked over to the leather sofa, the same one he had thrown his gym bag on hours ago, and sank heavily into the cushions. He gripped his coffee cup with both hands staring down at the dark liquid. "I didn't go to the cafeteria." Crofton admitted softly. "I walked around the block three times. It's freezing out there." "Cold air helps clear the adrenaline." Dougal noted, taking a sip of the coffee. It was burnt, bitter, and entirely perfect. Crofton let out a short, dry breath that wasn't quite a laugh. "My shoulder's throbbing. I think you bruised the bone." "Just the nerve. It'll ache for a day, then it'll be fine." Dougal said. He didn't offer an apology. It wasn't required. They sat in silence for a long time. The only sound was the rhythmic hiss of the oxygen concentrator and the slow, erratic beep of Raphael Gibson's heart monitor.
The gap between the beeps was widening. "He's not waking up again, is he?" Crofton asked. He didn't look up from his cup. "His organs are failing." Dougal answered, keeping his tone grounded and factual. No false hope, no soft pedaling. "The morphine is keeping the pain away, but the body is shutting down its non-essential functions. Consciousness is one of the first things to go." Crofton's shoulders hitched. He took a shaky breath. "He built his first company when he was my age. Started with nothing, bought a failing strip mall, and turned it into an empire. He used to point at the skyline from his office and tell me exactly which buildings he owned, which ones he was going to buy, and which ones he was going to demolish." Crofton looked up, looking at the panoramic window at the glittering city. "I don't know anything about real estate. I don't know how to leverage assets. I just know how to hit things. I spent my whole life trying to be tough, thinking maybe he'd respect a fighter, but he didn't. He just thought I was a meathead, a disappointment." "Empires are just concrete and glass, Crofton." Dougal said quietly. "They all crumble eventually. Every titan of industry, every billionaire, every general, they all end up in a bed like that one, wearing the same hospital gown as the guy who sweeps their floors." Crofton looked at his father.
The man who had terrorized boardrooms looked incredibly small beneath the thin white blanket. "Hey, how do you do this?" Crofton asked, turning back to Dougal. The question was raw, stripped of all pretense. "How do you sit in a room with a dying man and just watch the clock? Doesn't it mess with your head? Doesn't it make you feel useless?" Dougal set his coffee down. He looked at his hands, calloused and thick. He thought of the Helmand province. He thought of the smell of cordite and copper, the chaotic screaming over the radio, the frantic, desperate pressure applied to wounds that would never close. He thought of the profound, crushing uselessness of watching a brother bleed out in the dust because a medevac chopper was 5 minutes too late. "It used to," Dougal said, his voice dropping into a register of profound gravity. "I used to think my job was to fight death, to beat it back with my bare hands. I spent a long time being very angry when I lost." He paused, letting his gaze shift to the monitors above Raphael's bed. "But death isn't an enemy, Crofton.