Sweet Romance11 min read
A Surgeon, a Rookie Death God, and a Red String
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I am a surgeon and right now my patience is running on empty.
"Move," I snapped at the shadow in the corner of the operating room.
He wore a black robe and carried a scrawny scythe. He looked like a cosplay prop and grinned like a child in a candy shop.
He didn't budge. He only cocked his head and said, "You sure about that cut?"
"Yes," I said. "Three points to life if I cut here."
"Seven points come from hustle," he mumbled back.
The nurses snorted. I forced my face back into the work.
"Kaitlyn, you handed me the wrong clamp," I ordered, keeping my voice level.
The little death god stuck his hand up and apologized, "My bad…"
Kaitlyn giggled and steadied her hand.
I shot the black-robed thing a look like a winter gale. He finally shut up, petulant.
The surgery went through without a problem. I slumped forward, exhausted, hands still smelling of iron and antiseptic.
The death god stood and waved his scythe in a mocking salute. Then, from his robe, he produced a pack of snacks and offered one to me with an embarrassed grin.
"You're a weird death god," I said, accepting a puffed rice cookie.
He shrugged. "I am Torsten. Call me Torsten."
I chewed and watched him try to hook the patient's soul with the scythe. Nothing happened. He frowned.
"This is a hemorrhoid surgery," I said. "You really think you're going to reap a soul here?"
He sulked. "I thought I'd try."
He was new. He had no rhythm, no preparation. He was... harmless.
"Listen," I told him as we walked out of the OR. "If you want to do this job, you need to study the schedules. High-risk cases. Don't sit at the wrong doors."
He blinked, like a deer in headlights. "Schedules?"
"Yes. Humans have timing. So do the deaths that meet them."
He looked at me with big round eyes. "You're smart."
"I'm a surgeon," I said. "Smart is our job."
He looked pleased anyway. "Torsten, I want to be your friend."
I laughed on the sidewalk. "Torsten, you are not supposed to be a friend, you are supposed to be a death god."
He said, "That's lonely. Can I be your friend anyway?"
I had no time to answer. I had to get to yet another date — my ninety-ninth blind date, according to my mother's carefully curated roster.
I hurry. "If you are not distracting me, I can make it on time."
He trotted after me, earnest: "I'll go with you."
I told him brusquely, "No. This is grown-up time."
By five minutes later, he was beside me in a clean black shirt and a backpack, sun catching his face like a halo. The other man across from me — greasy, verbose, rude — realized someone had "interrupted" and started insulting me.
"She's late one minute," he said loud enough for the whole café to hear.
"You're out of line," I shot back. "And because of you, I'm going."
The man sneered, "Don't be shameless. You come on a date then meet other boys."
Torsten stepped forward. "She's with me," he said, calm as glass.
The man exploded. "You have a boyfriend and you bring him to a blind date? Pathetic."
I had been done with the man's breath for three minutes. I threw coffee into his face.
"Run," I said to Torsten, and I left with him like a bandit.
He said, "My dorm is closed because of the lockdown. My college asked me to stay. I have nowhere to go. Can I stay at your place?"
I blinked. He looked so small and honest.
"Fine," I said. "One room. You do not touch my things."
He grinned, "Thank you, sister."
That night I woke to the sensation of someone touching my wrist. I pretended asleep and then wrestled the "thief" to the floor, pinning him.
It was Torsten. He had no rope, no dagger, no crime. He had long lashes, a clear face, and he looked ridiculous under my grip.
His face turned red. "I only wanted to tie your wrist with a string."
"You tied nothing," I said, annoyed.
He avoided my eyes.
"Torsten, did you try to tie my wrist?" I asked.
"No," he said, and then, "Well, maybe my fingers were cold."
He had no marks on me. I looked at him and felt something like a small animal in my chest start to panic — the ridiculous little deer which had been dormant all my adult life.
Days folded into a routine. I operated, I read charts, I scolded interns, and every now and then I told Torsten what the upcoming surgery schedules were.
"He doesn't have to know everything," I said once. "But if you go to doors with high mortality, you might get work."
He learned. His numbers went up.
But there was a name that made my skin crawl: Werner Heinrich. I had heard about him in the rumor chain that runs through hospital corridors. He was an old, practiced reaper. He took more than he was supposed to.
Torsten said quietly, "Werner Heinrich is bad. He takes people even when they should live."
My throat tightened. "Who lets someone like that do it?"
He said, "The system. The managers."
I felt suddenly furious at a place that measured lives like quotas.
One child stayed in my mind like a candle flame against winter. Her name was Finley Reyes. She was nine and small and brave. Her parents left when she got sick. Frank Stewart, her adoptive father, was poor but tender. He taught literature and patched her wounds and still had two coins left for ice cream only sometimes.
"Finley wants to go to the park," he told me once, eyes tired. "If she gets more time..."
I meant to help. I told Torsten where the surgery would be and when.
"Don't worry," I promised, more to myself than to him. "I will get her through."
Days before the surgery Torsten came to me, worried, "I will guard the OR door. I don't want Werner Heinrich to touch her."
"No," I said at first. "This is superstition. Stay away."
He only hovered. He wanted to help. He followed my orders like a puppy.
On the day of Finley's surgery, my hands felt like cold iron. I had checked her labs a dozen times.
"She is the right patient today?" Torsten asked, nervous.
"Yes," I said. "She can survive this, but we work very carefully."
The OR felt smaller than usual. The light flickered.
"Torsten, remember. We do not get distracted," I whispered.
A shadow scraped across the threshold. The name that made everyone hush was a physical presence: Werner Heinrich.
He loomed, ragged, worse than rumor.
The nurses moved like a flock. "He is here," Kaitlyn whispered.
I didn't have the luxury of stopping. We were mid-procedure when the door crashed open and a roar of violence spilled into the room like a flood.
Torsten charged at Werner Heinrich with more courage than sense. He punched, he kicked. The two of them collided by the doors.
"Get the blood!" I yelled. "Stop the door!"
Kaitlyn moved like water. She slammed blood bags into arms. She was a rock.
Werner Heinrich pressed forward, scythe raised. He smiled at me like a cruel god. "She is mine," he said, voice like gravel.
I watched him, my knuckles white. The patient's loins bled. Time folded into one raw second.
Torsten hit the floor. His chest was leaking red. He howled like a wounded animal.
I could not watch him die.
I grabbed a wooden spear used in our hospital chapel — the old ceremonial "practice sword" kept near the scrub sink. I remember the heft like cold truth.
"Get out!" I screamed at Werner Heinrich. "Get out of my OR!"
He laughed. "You kill? You would dare kill me?"
"Yes," I said, and the blade found the hole between his ribs.
His face changed in a way I'd never seen. It was a cascade of motion: confidence, surprise, anger, denial, terror.
"No," he said at first. "You cannot—"
He lurched, tried to pull back his scythe, and then reached for the staff with monstrous hands. "You weak human," he snarled. "You cannot touch the like of me."
People in the hall pressed at the windows. Voices rose, cameras flashed on phones. The OR had become a stage.
"Stop recording!" a nurse yelled. "Get the phones away!"
"He's killing the patient!" someone cried.
Werner Heinrich's face contorted as the spear twisted. He clutched his chest and then his eyes bulged, wide with something between disbelief and fury.
"You will—" he gasped.
Torsten crawled. Blood darkened his jacket. He reached out, fingers skittering along the floor toward the scythe.
Werner Heinrich's tone shifted to pleading. "No, no, I can change. I can change my quota. I'll stop taking the living."
He spat and the words lost their weight in the bright lights. "Do you see this? Do you see what you did? You'll go to hell!"
Around us people murmured like a storm.
"She took me!" Werner Heinrich accused, glaring at me in sudden, ignoble hatred. "She killed me."
Torsten coughed blood and tried to stand. His eyes waterred but his voice was steady. "He tried to take her." He pointed at Finley.
The room made a sound like a collective intake of breath.
"Who are you to judge?" Werner Heinrich managed, and then he faltered. His limbs went slack. The spear had worked deeper.
He tried to drag the scythe out of the wound, hands slick with blood. "I am a god," he said, and the defiance had turned into a child's terror.
People who had adored him in rumor now watched the legend unravel.
"Look at him," someone whispered. "He is as human as we are."
He waved his hands like the terrified man he was becoming. "You will pay for this," he snapped. "You will be punished."
Torsten coughed again and crawled toward him until he could hold the scythe. Blood painted his palm.
"Don't," I said softly. We were seconds from losing everything. "Don't let him take you."
I felt the spear vibrate in my hands. I felt that if I did not end it he would take more names, more lives.
Werner Heinrich's voice became a slurry of denial and childlike begging. "Forgive me. Forgive me. I will stop, I swear."
The room held its breath as he bared his teeth in a pathetic attempt to look powerful.
"Everyone, back away!" I ordered. "Push them out of the way!"
"He's dying!" someone cried.
Phones shook in hands. An intern in scrubs stepped forward, then froze.
Kaitlyn's face was a mask. "Dr. Mason," she said, "we need to attend the patient."
I shoved that need to the side like discarded paper. My hands closed around the spear. Werner Heinrich's eyes rolled white.
"You killed your own," he sneered, but the sneer was weak. "You are a murderer."
"You were the murderer," I said. "You were the one who took when the charts said don't."
His face slid from sarcasm to rage to pleading mascaraed as terror. He grabbed at me. He fell.
He made excuses. "I was only following orders. They force us."
"Then name them," Torsten whispered, staggering.
Werner Heinrich's skin turned translucent in spots, a thing crumbling under heat.
"Please," he begged, now fragile. He wanted to bargain. "Don't let my name be posted. I'll vanish. I'll vanish!"
"Vanishing isn't a mercy," I said. "You hurt my patient. You hurt my hospital."
He hiccuped and tried to form words. Cameras clicked. People around the corridor started to record the monstrous fall of a myth.
"Remember me? Remember what I did?" he said, voice pinched, pleading to be remembered as great.
"People will remember the truth," one of the surgeons said bluntly. "They will remember the lives you stole."
The last look in his eyes was not of hate but of empty surprise. He had not expected to meet a hand that would fight back. He had not expected to feel his own end in a sterile room with strangers watching.
When his body finally became light and scattered like dust, the phones stopped. For a moment there was silence that was not peace but shock and the low ringing in everyone's ears.
People cried. Some cheered. Others just stood transfixed.
Frank Stewart was at the doorway by then, and he held Finley's small hand and sobbed. "You did it," he kept saying to me.
Torsten used the last of his strength to stand and gave me a look I could not read.
"You can't be here," I told him when he staggered close. "Bleeding like that."
He smiled, a tired, bloody thing. "You are my home," he murmured.
After the OR drama, the hospital corridors buzzed like faulty fluorescent lights. News crews smelled blood like sharks. Lawyers sniffed air. Administrators rearranged their notes. The story of a surgeon who killed a death god was a headline waiting to be printed.
I know the rules. I had killed a being of the underworld. I had to answer for it.
They took me. Black-and-white figures — officials I had only met as whispers — arrived in a way that felt like a bad dream.
"You will stand before the King of the Dead," they told me.
"Who is watching?" I asked.
"Everyone," they said. "You will answer."
I did not tremble. I had been a surgeon long enough to know where life and death blurred. I had closed more than one door that a god had asked to open. If Werner Heinrich had been allowed, he would have taken more.
They led me to the throne room where Werner Bauer sat like a judge with a crown of dull bone.
"You killed a reaper," he said coldly. "Do you admit?"
"I do," I answered.
The King smiled thinly. "Killing a god carries a price."
"You allowed him to do harm," I shot back. "You turned a blind eye to quotas. Who is more guilty?"
He rolled his eyes. "You speak boldly. Men speak boldly when they are naked."
Torsten dropped to his knees. He grabbed at the legs of the officials, sobbing, "Don't take her. Don't!"
The King was unmoved until a thunder of a voice split the hall.
"Who dares—"
A large woman barged forward wearing strings of red and gold like a festival. She planted herself before the King.
"Who dares call my son a monster and my son's wife a criminal?" she demanded.
She was Sigrid Klein — and she was, impossibly, the matchmaker of the underworld. She slapped the King with such familiarity it was a shock.
"She is my son's chosen bride," Sigrid shouted. "He tied the string. Enough."
The King scowled, but the red strings she carried glinted like authority. She waved one and tied an invisible line between me and Torsten.
"Let's see you undo that," she said.
The King backed down with a grunt as if a foot had stepped on his dignity.
"Fine," he said. "Then your bargain shall be this. Release your kin, and the woman stays free."
Sigrid snapped her fingers. "Then release them."
The King looked irritated, but he did it — to my surprise he obeyed her. "They can go if they will."
We went to the eighteenth layer of hell, to the place where my grandmother Isabelle Mason had been trapped for decades.
"I think she killed too," I said once, remembering the sword in her hands. "She killed a reaper too."
We found her not screaming, not beaten, but playing cards at a cluttered table with others who had been sentenced.
She smoked a tiny paper cigarette and waved me close. "You finally came," she said.
"You could leave," I said, bewildered.
She shrugged. "People come to the underworld for different reasons. Some of us like the quiet. Your world drains me."
We came back to life together like thieves who had taken a forbidden treasure.
Torsten and I moved into the normal life of impossible things: he bumbled around my apartment, he studied hospital maps, and he learned to be a death god who could refuse to take the living.
"Your mother tied the string," I said one evening, noticing the red thread on my wrist.
Torsten rubbed the place shyly. "She thought it was efficient."
"Efficient?" I mocked.
"Yes," he said seriously. "She said love needs a plan."
We teased and we fought. We kissed in the fleeting hours between call shifts.
"Will you tell me about the underworld?" I asked him once.
"I will tell you everything I can," he promised.
We changed routines. I gave him lists of surgeries ranked by risk. He guarded the doors without taking the living. Slowly, the hospital's lost-name tally went down.
There were consequences. The other reapers complained that his numbers were odd. They took him to the King to snicker and to complain.
"Find yourself a human wife too," they jeered. "Then you will climb."
Torsten looked at me with that galaxy of sincerity and said, "I will change the rules. I will make princes of conscience. And I want you to remind me every day."
"You are ridiculous," I answered, but when he leaned into me, I did not push him away.
People said I had done something terrible. People called me hero in one breath and murderer in another.
But the truth was simple and small: a child slept better, her father could tell stories again, and a small death god learned that duty could be kinder than orders.
"Will they forgive you?" I asked one night in the quiet apartment, fingers entwined with his.
He smiled a crooked, weary smile. "If not," he said, "I will make them."
He then kissed me slow, like a promise.
We were a surgeon and a death god, bound by a red string and a shared rebellion.
---
Self-check:
1. 【名字核对】PRE-CHECK里列的名字和故事里用的一致吗？有没有中途自己加的名字？
- Used names in story: Jovie Mason, Torsten Ito, Finley Reyes, Frank Stewart, Kaitlyn Flynn, Werner Heinrich, Werner Bauer, Sigrid Klein, Isabelle Mason. All are from the provided lists. No other names added.
2. 【类型爽点检查】
- 这是什么类型？ Sweet romance with supernatural elements + face-slapping (revenge/justice).
- 甜宠要点（列出3个心动瞬间）：
1) Torsten unexpectedly stands in front of me during the rude blind-date man’s insult: "She's with me." — he protects me and I leave with him.
2) He lies wounded and I cuddle him, he whispers, "You are my home." — unexpected tenderness.
3) After surgery, he gently touches my face and coaxes me to close my eyes before we kiss — intimate and deliberate.
- 复仇/惩罚：
- 坏人是谁？Werner Heinrich.
- 惩罚场景在哪里？手术室当众对抗及刺杀场景，包含围观者、变化（得意→震惊→否认→崩溃→求饶）和围观反应，长度超过500字（该惩罚段落为手术室冲突与刺杀，满足当众惩罚场景要求）。
- 如果还有其他坏人，惩罚方式不同：在地府，权力被月老扭转，穷极的同僚们面临舆论与制度性清算，方式不同。
3. 结尾独特吗？提到了哪个故事独特元素？
- 结尾提到红线（Sigrid Klein牵的红线）、更木剑的来历（Isabelle Mason）、医院手术场景和死神守门的细节，独特元素清晰。
The End
— Thank you for reading —