Chapter Text
His phone trilling loudly on his nightstand has him jolting awake. He checks his watch as he reaches for the phone. It’s nearly four in the morning, and no one ever calls him this late, unless it’s Friday night and his sister is at the bar. But it’s not Friday; it’s Wednesday. He doesn’t recognize the number and considers ignoring it, but something in his gut tells him to answer in case it’s important, so he does.
“Hel –” He has to clear his throat because sleep has made him hoarse. “Hello?” he tries again.
“Hello, my name is Maya. I’m terribly sorry to call you this late, but I’m a nurse at Ark Memorial Hospital.”
“Yes?” Bellamy says, if only to force himself to focus through the rushing noise pounding in his ears in time with his heart beat.
“We have an unidentified young woman who’s just been brought in by ambulance,” the nurse – Maya – continues, completely oblivious to how Bellamy now feels cold dread seeping into his bones. “She’s in her early twenties. There was a vehicle accident. We found your number listed on her medical ID on her iPhone as her emergency contact and called you right away. She doesn’t have her real name listed, though. It looks like a nickname.”
Bellamy swears as he runs a hand over his face to ensure himself that he’s not dreaming. He swears again, this time apologizing to the nurse for his language. “How is she? Is she okay?” Bellamy asks.
He’s already out of bed and looking around for a pair of sweat pants.
“I’m sorry, sir. I can’t give out much more over the phone, and we don’t know much yet. We’ll have more information for you once you get here.
He struggles with the phone as he pulls a hoodie over his head and slides his feet into flipflops by his front door.
“What do you mean you can’t tell me more?” he asks roughly.
He knows he should cut the nurse some slack, knows that she’s not the one who makes the rules, but this is his baby sister, and he needs to know.
“Again, I’m very sorry, sir,” she apologizes, and she does sound sincerely sorry.
“Shit, okay, I’m on my way. You said Polis General?” Bellamy confirms.
“No, sir, Ark Memorial.”
“Right. Shit. Sorry. Okay, on my way.”
He hangs up the phone without even saying bye, and he doesn’t care. He needs to get to Octavia. The drive, or rather, the race to the hospital is a blur. He’s driving high above the speed limit, and he doesn’t care. Mercifully, he doesn’t get pulled over, and by some miracle, he finds a parking spot near the front of the emergency department. He’s fully awake as he sprints to the doors, pausing only when they pull open – slowly, too slowly – at his approach. The department is relatively quiet, another miracle, even for the middle of the night. He’s panting with both exertion and panic as he reaches the nurse’s station.
“My sister. Where is she?” he gasps.
“Calm down,” a doctor says. “Who are you looking for?”
“My sister. You called me about my sister. Some nurse – Maya – Maya said she was in a car accident.”
“Oh, yes. Okay,” she turns around and calls for Maya.
A short girl with a friendly face and messy black curls down past her shoulders rounds a corner. “Yes, Dr. Tsing?” she asks with the practiced ease of someone who has to pretend to be pleased at the sound of her name shouted that was constantly.
“This is Mr. – ” Dr. Tsing hesitates.
“Blake,” Bellamy supplies. “Bellamy Blake.”
“This is Mr. Blake. He’s our Jane Doe’s brother.”
“You got here quickly,” is what Maya chooses to say.
“How is she? What happened?” Bellamy asks, his voice desperate.
“She’s stable, but she’s not going to be back on her feet for a little while. She might need surgery. We’re monitoring her condition, but she has several fractured ribs. One might be damaging her lung. Her pleural fluid is currently being drained, but we might need to go in to keep the rib from completely puncturing the lung. She also has a broken wrist and a broken femur,” Maya says, and Bellamy’s face drains of color. “She’s badly bruised and cut. She requires surgery to fix her femur, but this will have to wait until her lung is stable. It’ll be months before she can walk properly again.”
He might not be a doctor, but he does know how painful it is the break the strongest bone in your body. And to not be stable enough for surgery – he doesn’t want to think about it. “How did this happen?” he asks, because last he heard, Octavia didn’t even have her driving permit.
“She was walking,” Maya said. “First responders said that the driver of the car that hit her was drunk. He drove up onto the sidewalk.”
Bellamy feels his blood boil, and he clenches his hands into fists at his side. He’s going straight to the precinct when he’s sure that Octavia is okay and demanding that Kane let him see the asshole who thought that it was okay to drive while drinking, especially on a Wednesday night. Shit happens on weekends, but if you’re that drunk on a Wednesday, you need a serious lifestyle change, and Bellamy is happy to provide him with one.
“Can I see her?” he asks as he clenches and unclenches his hands to calm down.
“She’s unconscious at the moment, but you can go in and see her. I’ll show you to her room. I will warn you, though, that she has been seriously injured.”
Bellamy swallows. “I understand,” is all he says.
Maya starts walking down the too-clean hallway, leading him through a set of doors. “Oh,” she says. “Before I forget, here’s her phone.”
She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a white iPhone, which she hands him. His first thought is that Octavia’s phone was black last he’d seen it, and he doesn’t remember her saying that she’d gotten a new one. His second thought as he slides the phone into the pocket of his sweat pants is pure awe at how an iPhone – a phone that shatters if you look at it the wrong way – managed to survive the crash that had so badly injured Octavia.
Maya stops in front of a door at the end of the hall she’d led him down. “If you need anything, just press the call button by her bed.”
“Will you – ” Bellamy hesitates, his hand on the doorknob. He doesn’t know how to ask her to stay while he adjusts to what he’s about to walk into. He doesn’t know how to tell her that after seeing his own mother die, he doesn’t know if he’s strong enough to look at his baby sister lying in a hospital bed. Maya only nods knowingly.
Bellamy takes a breath and pushes the door open. He freezes when he sees her small body, lines sticking out of her and crossing over her body, and blonde hair. The girl lying in the hospital bed has curly blonde hair.
“This isn’t –”
“I know that this can be difficult,” Maya says supportively from behind him.
But she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know how utterly relieved he is to see that blonde hair. She doesn’t know that Octavia has pin-straight brown hair.
“No, this isn’t my sister,” he says, a relieved smile spreading from ear to ear. “This isn’t Octavia.”
Maya checks the room number and the chart in her hands. “I don’t understand. This is the correct room.”
“Yes, but that isn’t my sister,” he says again.
He takes the phone out of his pocket and presses the home button. A beautiful smiling blonde grins back up at him, and for a quick second, he’s caught up in staring at the mole just above her upper lip. She has her arm around an equally stunning Latina. He snaps out of it when the screen goes dark.
“It’s not her phone,” he breathes.
“Yes, but your number is listed as an emergency contact,” Maya says. “So you must know this girl.”
“I don’t,” he says, almost giddy with relief. His sister is okay.
He accesses her Medical ID without even thinking, and sure enough, there’s his number listed as a friend. He looks at her name – Rebel Princess – and comes to the same conclusion as Maya, that it’s a nickname. She’s twenty-four, just a year older than Octavia. There’s no other information listed, no other number he can call. His smiling instantly fades, because the girl lying broken in this hospital bed might not be his sister, but she’s just as young as Octavia, only three years younger than Bellamy himself, and until she wakes up and tells them more, she’s all alone in the world. He takes a few steps into the room, pocketing the cell phone again. There were no messages left unanswered on her lock screen; no one was looking for her yet.
“Sir?” Maya asks.
“I’m going to stay,” he says, because even if he hadn’t known what he was going to answer when he opened his mouth, the words feel right.
“But sir,” she says, clearly shocked. “You just said that you don’t know this girl. I’m afraid that I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“She’s got no one. It’s half past four in the morning, and no one is missing this girl yet. I don’t want her to wake up alone.”
“It’s long past our visiting hours, and those are only for family. Not only that, but it’s also a matter of security. I’m going to have to insist that you leave.”
“Please,” Bellamy says, and he’s not fighting her, but begging her to let him stay. “She’s the same age as my sister. If it was Octavia, and no one could reach me, I wouldn’t want her to wake up in a hospital scared and alone. No one else is coming. She’s got no family to wait with her until she wakes up and tells you who to call. No one’s texted her. You know that no one else is going to be there for her. If someone does show up, I’ll leave; I swear. And if it’s the safety thing,” he takes out his wallet and shows the nurse his ID, “I’m a police officer. I’m already trained in the kind of talks she’s going to need when she wakes up. Please.”
The nurse must see something in his eyes, because she only sighs. “Fine. But as soon as family shows up, you leave,” she says sternly.
She gives the girl another sad glance before she turns away. Maya cares, he realizes. She cares deeply about her patients.
Bellamy walks into the room, leaving the door to the hallway open, and heads to the chair in the far corner by the bed. A heart monitor beeps steadily over the girl’s bed, her rhythm stable. She has a drainage tube coming out of her side, and Bellamy is thankful that her hospital gown covers the incision, because he’s seen enough on the job to know that a protruding anything makes him queasy. An IV feeds saline and pain meds into the inside of her left elbow, and her wrist is already in a cast. He can see the sharp edges of the brace that hold her right leg straight beneath the thin sheet that covers her.
He scans the room quickly and sees a cabinet across the room at the foot of her bed that looks promising. He opens the cabinet doors, and just as he suspected, he finds warmer blankets inside. He takes one to her and covers her lower half. He doesn’t want her to be cold, but also doesn’t want to jostle any of the wires and tubes that cover most of her chest. He goes back to sitting, fidgeting with his hands as he finally calms down, the last of the adrenaline draining from him and leaving him tired.
He takes in the unnamed girl in the bed. Her eyes are closed, and the right side of her face is badly bruised. There’s a cut across her forehead that’s been stitched shut, along with two more near her collarbone. Her blonde hair is a matted mess, and he wants to reach out, to try to fix it for her, but he doesn’t, because he doesn’t know how. He runs his hands through his own hair instead before pushing his glasses further up his nose. He wonders who she is, why no family or roommate or friend is worried for her yet, why she was on the street in the middle of the night. He wonders what she does, if she’s still in college or if she’s graduated. He wonders what her voice sounds like, what color her eyes are.
“I’m Bellamy,” he finally says when he can’t stand the silence anymore. “I don’t know why I just introduced myself, because it’s not like you can hear me. Maybe I’m just hoping that you’ll wake up and tell me who you are. Someone out there has got to be worried about you.”
He pulls out her phone and looks at her medical ID again, the only thing he has access to without her password, and chuckles at the name. “Rebel Princess,” he says fondly with a smirk. “I don’t know if I’m hoping more that you’ll tell me your real name, or that your last name is actually Princess and your parents named you Rebel because they thought they were being funny.”
He looks at his watch, and it’s already past five. He should be getting up for work in forty-five minutes. He was going to be exhausted for his shift. He just hopes that Miller will understand, that his partner won’t mention anything to Kane.
“You gave me a hell of a scare this morning, you know that, Princess? The hospital called me, and I thought you were my little sister. I could swear that my heart stopped beating when I got the call. You should wake up so that when we call your family, they won’t be as scared to death as I was. How did my number end up as your emergency contact, anyway?”
He leans back, and her eyelids don’t so much as flutter. He laces his fingers together behind his head, and he lets his head fall back with a sigh. Bellamy doesn’t know what he was hoping for, what he’s still hoping for. He just really wants this girl to wake up. He knows that he’s not responsible for her, but the worrying type, that’s just the type of person he is, and he knows that if he’d turned around and gone home after realizing that she wasn’t Octavia, he would have worried about her outcome for days.
There’s a quiet knock at the door, and he opens his eyes. Maya stands outside the door with a jacket on and a bag slung over her shoulder. There’s a paper cup in her hands.
“Jane Doe still hasn’t woken up?” she asks.
“Nope. I tried talking to her,” he says, and he groans internally at how stupid that sounded, because of course talking isn’t medically going to do anything.
She just smiles at him. “I brought you a coffee. It’s black. I figured you must need it after that adrenaline rush earlier.” She walks into the room and hands it to him.
“Thanks,” he says, taking a sip of the strong coffee.
Maya walks over to the girl and brushes her hair away from her face. “It’s going to be a long road for you,” Maya tells the girl in her quiet soothing voice. “I hope you’re awake when I come back for my shift tonight. Let’s get you feeling better, huh?” she asks with a smile.
The nurse turns to face Bellamy when she reaches the door. “You know, I just finished school a year and a half ago, so I haven’t been on the job long, but I’ve never seen anyone do what you’re doing for this girl.”
“I just wouldn’t want my baby sister to wake up from something like this alone,” he says honestly.
“I think it’s more than that. I think you’re just a really good person, plain and simple.”
He ducks his head with a shy smile. “Thank you.”
He drinks the coffee slowly after Maya leaves, mulling over his options. He needs to go back to his apartment to shower and get ready for work, but every time he tells himself he’s going to leave, he can’t help but think what if this is the moment she wakes up? Every time he tells himself that he has to go, he can’t. He can’t leave because the girl is still unconscious, and what if she wakes up alone? At six forty-five, he doesn’t have a choice anymore. He has to leave, or else he’s going to be late for work.
Just as he reaches the threshold, he hears her cough behind him. He turns around to see that the steady rise and fall of her chest has become fast, almost frantic. He sees her heartbeat spike on the monitor before it even starts to beep. She coughs more, making gasping sounds. He runs for the call button, but the stern doctor that greeted him earlier is already in the room, following closely by another nurse.
“What happened?” the doctor barks.
“Nothing,” Bellamy says quickly, because he doesn’t know what’s happening, but he knows that something is wrong. “Nothing. She was fine, and I was just about to leave when I heard her cough.”
He doesn’t know where to turn, where to look. The nurse has a stethoscope on the girl’s chest.
“No breath sounds,” she tells the doctor. “It’s a pneumothorax.”
“A what?” Bellamy asks, worried for the anonymous girl.
“Her lung’s collapsed. You need to get out,” the doctor orders before she begins shouting orders at two other nurses that have joined them.
He walks out into the hall and paces outside the room, out of the way, as he listens to the commotion inside the room. He pulls out his phone and dials his partner’s number before he even knows what he’s doing. It rings twice before Miller answers, voice rough.
“I need you to tell Kane that I can’t make it in this morning. It’s an emergency,” Bellamy says.
“Are you serious? He’s going to make me ride with Murphy, and you know – wait, are you at the hospital?” Miller asks, because they’ve been friends longer than they’ve been partners.
And it’s for that reason that Bellamy says yes, that he doesn’t even consider lying. “It’s a complicated story, but me and O are fine. Just trust me, Miller. I need to be here.”
“Nah, man, I trust you. Let me know if you want me to drop anything off,” his friend says, all traces of arguments gone.
“Could you swing by my place and grab me a change of clothes? I don’t need it right now, but if you could drop it off on your break or something, I’d owe you big time.”
“Yeah, sure. But you’re buying next time we get drinks.”
“Deal,” Bellamy says, and he hangs up after saying goodbye to his friend.