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It’s radiologist Dr Emma Coburn’s second week working in Star City General Hospital, having moved here recently with her five-year-old daughter, and she has no idea what a Code Green is, but judging by everybody’s panic and alarm, she knows it’s pretty important. She’s paged by a Dr Schwartz to come down to the ER as quickly as possible. Emma hands off the current X-ray she’s running to another radiologist who arrives to relieve her, and rushes down, confused by the jealous looks other doctors and technicians are shooting her.
Stabbing her finger into the correct button on the elevator, she tries to get it to close faster. Within a second of the doors sliding shut, a nurse jumps inside, jittering nervously but a very confident expression on his face. They stand awkwardly next to each other as they wait for the elevator to descend.
“Are you Dr Colburn?” the nurse asks suddenly.
“Yes, I am,” she confirms, checking her watch. It’s nearly midnight. Her shift ends in an hour. Hopefully, this Code Green thing doesn’t last long.
“I’m George,” the nurse introduces himself, sticking his hand out for her to shake. “I usually work in maternity, but every so often I’m called on Code Greens to work with Dr Schwartz. You’re new, right? This must be your first one.”
A nurse from maternity also works Code Greens? “So these Code Greens, they’re to do with babies brought into the ER? Babies with bad bone breaks or something, like compound or comminuted fractures?”
George looks at her like she’s crazy. “Er, no. They’re normally nothing to do with babies. Except for those two times last year, but one of those was a sort of joke by Dr Schwartz, considering it was a planned appointment for Addie.” As Emma continues to stare at him bemusedly, he asks in an incredulous tone, “Wait, you don’t know what a Code Green is?”
“Am I meant to?” she questions.
“Uh, yes. Everybody is meant to,” George says, nodding furiously. “I can’t believe it wasn’t in your briefing packet, or you weren’t told by the head radiologist.” The elevator doors open and the pair of them step out, heading down the corridor at a jog. “Okay, just - do everything Dr Schwartz tells you to. Be as blunt as humanly possible, don’t let him push you around and if he says he’s fine, he’s lying. Also, his wife is amazing so you can always trust her to keep him in line.”
“Him?” Emma repeats, as they push through the doors to enter the ER. “Who is him?”
Him is the Green Arrow, in full gear with his hood down, being loaded onto a portable hospital cot as he winces and grits a scream through his teeth in pain. Emma blinks in shock. She has no idea what to say or what to do. Her brain sort of disconnects from the rest of her body due to her astonishment, so she can do nothing but stand, frozen. She knows about the Green Arrow, of course. Star City’s vigilantes have made the national news multiple times, although the Green Arrow, Oliver Queen, seems to be the most popular one to discuss, mostly due to the fact that his identity is known and he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom after being pardoned for his ‘crimes’.
“Don’t faint,” is George’s last piece of advice for her, before he rushes off to talk to the doctor holding the archer’s hand as he’s fitted with an IV and morphine line.
They begin wheeling Oliver Queen out of the very public ER room, where patients are leaning and almost falling over each other to take photos and videos. Emma watches in a daze, everything else a blur around her. Dr Schwartz, who is guiding the bed around the corner towards the private rooms while George forces the archer to lie down properly, shouts, “Where’s my radiologist? I paged for a radiologist.”
Somebody taps her on her shoulder, which triggers Emma to snap back into reality, brain connecting with her body again as she’s forced out of her stupor. She turns around and blinks, her throat seizing up as she comes face to face with Spartan, one of the vigilantes on the Green Arrow’s team. He’s tall and imposing but there’s a strange warmness to him that she wouldn’t have expected.
“I think she’s asking for you,” he tells her, reaching forward to point at her badge which says Dr Emma Colburn, Radiologist with a slight smirk on his face.
“Right,” she croaks. She jumps into action, dashing after the doctor, nurse, and her apparent patient. Spartan vanishes out of the ER doors into the night behind her. “Right. Dr Schwartz! You paged me? I’m the radiologist. Dr Colburn.”
The other doctor whips around, her anxious expression morphing into one of relief. “Thank god. I think this idiot has done some serious damage to his left patella and femur. Spartan said it got kicked in badly by some assassin they were hunting down. Oliver’s had issues with this knee for the last ten years but has refused any treatment. We need to get him X-ray-ed, preferably so we can get him into surgery tonight.” Dr Schwartz thrusts a file at her, which Emma takes and begins flicking through. “His personal medical history. Read quickly. We need to wait for his wife to get here, which shouldn’t take long, but then we can get him in.”
“You know, I can hear you, I’m right here,” the vigilante calls, his voice strained with pain. “Stop talking about me like I’m not here.”
“Shut up, Oliver,” Schwartz says, not even looking at him. They finally reach a private room that has a Reserved for Code Green sign hanging on it, and Oliver is pushed inside, away from prying eyes. “George, how many milligrams of morphine have you put him on? If he’s still coherent, that’s a problem.”
“Rude,” the vigilante huffs at her. “I thought we were friends, Beth.”
“I’ll call you my friend when you stop coming in here with broken limbs and act like it’s just a little cut you expect me to slap a band-aid on,” Beth deadpans.
Emma is surprised at how familiar Dr Schwartz (Beth, her first name is Beth) and Oliver seem to be with each other, so much so that Schwartz isn’t afraid to put the fearsome archer in his place. She tables her thoughts about how many times Oliver would have needed to visit the hospital for him to build a rapport up with the doctor, and instead bends down to examine his injured knee, as well as she can do while it’s covered by armored emerald leather. There’s definitely a fracture somewhere because of how his knee has twisted, which has probably damaged a load of the ligaments as well. He’s going to need an MRI as well.
“Here.” George passes her a pair of surgical scissors. “Cut his pants off him. Felicity won’t mind. Beth’s completely stripped him before and Felicity didn’t care.”
“I care,” the archer retorts feebly, his eyes fluttering as the higher morphine dose the nurse just put him on hits him.
“Actually, I’d rather not,” Emma says. “The stiffness of the leather and the armor together is acting like a splint and keeping his patella in place. Until we get him X-Ray-ed and in for an MRI, we should let him keep his pants on.”
“He needs an MRI?” Beth asks.
“Yeah, I can tell that just by looking at this,” Emma nods, motioning to the knee. “There’s no way he hasn’t damaged ligaments here.”
“Ligaments schmigaments,” Oliver slurs.
“That made absolutely no sense,” George tells him.
“How much morphine is he on now?” Beth asks, looking down at the archer with a frown, whose eyelids are fluttering wildly.
“You said you wanted him incoherent.”
His head lolling, the vigilante chuckles uncontrollably. It’s a very alarming sound, one that has Emma exchanging an unnerved glance with Beth. Even she, who has apparently been dealing with the Green Arrow for years now, looks a little scared of Oliver while he’s in this drugged state.
Thankfully, they’re saved by Felicity Smoak’s timely arrival. She staggers into the room, distressed and terribly concerned for her husband. Emma has a lot of respect for Felicity Smoak for many different reasons, but especially because of her company, Smoak Tech’s development of affordable handheld X-ray machine and their donation of thirty of them to the hospital.
“Oliver! Oh my god, are you okay? John told me what happened.”
George opens his mouth, most likely to inform Felicity that her husband is too drugged up on morphine to respond properly, but Oliver giggles and whispers, “You’re so goddamn beautiful,” stroking his fingers down her arm.
Felicity stares at him for a moment before turning to Beth and saying exasperatedly, “He’s high, isn’t he?”
“Oh yeah, he’s soaring with the birds right now,” Beth tells her.
“Great.” The blonde sighs but fondly ruffles Oliver’s hair, grinning when he leans into her hand and purrs at her touch. “So somebody fucked up their knee again, huh?”
The vigilante smiles dreamily at her. “Wanna fuck you -”
“Ooookay!” Emma interrupts hastily. “Let’s get him in for X-rays and MRIs.”
“Yes, that sounds like the best idea,” Felicity agrees, her cheeks red.
Five X-rays and three MRIs later, Emma determines that Oliver’s knee is completely and utterly screwed up. He has hairline fractures in both his femur and tibia and his patella is basically shattered. His lateral and medial collateral ligaments are torn. Just looking at the scans, Emma thinks that even if Oliver gets many, many surgeries and heals up well, he might never be able to walk the same way again. She informs Beth of all of this in a hushed whisper as they huddle in the corner of the room, aware that Felicity is sitting next to Oliver and still within hearing range. Beth walks off with a solemn expression, rubbing her hands over her face. When she returns, she’s set up a surgery team. They need to get the vigilante into the operating theatre within the next twenty minutes if they want to get his knee sorted out today, otherwise the next time they can fit him in is in a week.
“Dr Colburn, I need you to call the Anaesthesiology department and inform them that we need to initiate the Arrow Protocol,” Beth orders.
“What is that?” she can’t help but ask, curious.
“We’ve found that Oliver has an intolerance to most general anesthetics,” the doctor explains. “He also hates being forced unconscious while vulnerable, and due to his PTSD, we’ve found it’s much safer for him and our staff to keep him awake during surgeries, just very, very drugged up on painkillers. Ask for the Arrow Protocol. They’ll know what I’m talking about.”
Emma makes the call, not caring that her job as a radiologist is done and she technically doesn’t need to continue working with Oliver as a patient anymore. She’s not going to pass on helping out the Green Arrow, not after all he’s done to protect and save her new home. Ten minutes later, an anesthetist comes down, talks to Beth privately in the corner and then reveals a new bag to replace the vigilante’s morphine drip throughout the surgery.
She can’t actually believe this happening.
They’re getting the Green Arrow high off his rocks on oxycodone.
This is her life now.
Oliver is already babbling insanely as they roll him up to the operating theatre, and it takes every ounce of strength in Emma’s body to not burst out laughing. Felicity walks alongside her husband, keeping their fingers tangled together and smiling amusedly as he gives a speech about how amazing and wonderful his wife is, how he wants to have hundreds and hundreds of beautiful babies with her and how he’s the luckiest man in the world. It’s unbearably sweet and Emma thinks she hears Beth mutter about how the couple is giving her cavities.
Then, it gets weird. Because Oliver starts flirting with George.
“You’re a very good nurse,” the vigilante mumbles, patting the nurse on the head like he’s a puppy.
“Okay, Oliver,” George says, remarkably calm. “Thank you.”
“No, I mean…” Oliver leans in and whispers loudly, “You’re REALLY good.” He giggles again.
George barely blinks. “Oliver, I am very flattered, but you are straight and much more importantly, very married.”
The archer pouts at him. “Whoever said I was straight?” he complains. “I’m bisexual.”
Everybody falls quiet, pondering on that. Felicity doesn’t look surprised, however, and just gazes down at him with a loving grin, so she must have already known.
“I’m gay,” Beth offers, to break the awkward silence.
“Me too,” George pipes up.
“I’m demi,” Felicity adds.
All four of them turn to Emma.
“Oh.” She swallows. They’re expecting her to join their sudden coming out party. “I’m, uh. Not sure, I guess. Questioning.”
“That’s cool,” Oliver murmurs, rocking his head from side to side. “Hey. Hey. Miss Doctor woman person.” He beckons for Emma to come closer. Quirking an eyebrow, she bends over, playing along. “I’m the -” He breaks off, snickering to himself, “I’m the Green Arrow.” He whips around, tugging at George’s scrubs shirt to tell him too, “I’m the Green Arrow, did you know that, George?”
The nurse sighs. “Yeah, buddy. We know.”
Oliver gasps. Felicity’s hand slaps over her mouth to stifle her laugh. “You, you know? But it’s a super big important secret!”
“Oliver,” Beth says kindly, “Everybody knows.”
“Wow,” he whispers in awe. “Felicity, did you know?”
“Honey, I work with you, remember?”
“Oh my gooood, you do! You do! You know, I love you. I should probably marry you.”
Felicity laughs. “We are married, Oliver. You’re my husband. I’m your wife.”
He immediately beams with delight. “You are? That makes me soooo happy. I love you soooo much. I would marry you another ten times if I could. No, another hundred times. Noooo, another bajillion times. Because I loooooove you. Did you know that, Felicity? Fe-li-ci-ty. Your name is so lovely. Feee-liii-ciii-tyyyy.”
They stop outside their designated pre-op room. Emma helps George check over the vigilante’s IV lines, vitals, and the brace they’ve placed his injured left leg in one last time while Beth sticks her head inside the room to ask if they’re ready. Felicity covers her husband’s face with kisses, threading her fingers through his hair and caressing his shoulders comfortingly.
“Alright.” Beth pulls her head out of the room and gently places her hand on Oliver’s shoulder. “Oliver, I need to take you into pre-op now, so you need to say goodbye to Dr Colburn, George, and Felicity. You’ll see them again soon and I’ll be with you the whole time while you’re in there, so you can talk to me. Is that okay, honey?”
Oliver hums the Brooklyn Nine Nine theme tune under his breath, tilting his head from side to side. When Beth clicks her fingers in front of his face, he blinks rapidly and asks confusedly, “Sorry, what?” The doctor rolls her eyes fondly and repeats her statement. “Oh nooooo but we were all having so much fun!”
“We can have fun again once your knee is fixed, okay, sweetheart?” Felicity says.
“Okay,” he responds, nodding so violently he almost hits his head. “I love you, my sexy, incredible, darling wife.” He pulls her down for a passionate kiss. Felicity breaks it after a couple of seconds, staggering back with a wide-eyed, startled expression. “Goodbye, George, goodbye doctor lady who I’ve never met before!” The vigilante waves at them enthusiastically.
“Bye, Oliver,” George replies, waving back.
“Good luck,” Emma smiles.
The Green Arrow is wheeled away, Beth accompanying him. George whisks Felicity away to a waiting room, offering to grab her a cup of coffee and asking about ‘the kids’, leaving Emma behind in the corridor, standing alone. The radiologist doesn’t mind. She knows that in this situation, she was the odd one out when it came to their little group, the only person there who hadn’t been involved in a Code Green before. She’s glad she got to help though.
Emma’s asked to stay on duty until Oliver emerges from surgery, so she can run X-rays and MRIs again on the vigilante’s reconstructed knee. She busies herself by filing the previous scans she took so they appear in the archer’s personal records, making sure that the description of the scans is excellent. By the time she’s paged again, Emma is exhausted and wants to go home, mostly so she can see her daughter again. But she knows this won’t take long, so she walks through the hospital towards the hospital room that is apparently always reserved for Team Arrow with her head held high and a smile on her face.
“I wanna die,” she hears Oliver groan upon entering his room. “Just kill meeeeee.”
“Thanks for staying to do these scans,” Beth greets Emma. “Just warning you now, his oxycodone wore off and he’s really grumpy.”
“I’m not grumpy, you’re grumpy,” the archer fires back.
“And immature,” Beth adds, shooting Oliver a glare. Oliver sticks his tongue out at her, proving her point. “George and Felicity are going to meet us after his X-rays, let’s get him down there now.”
“And then after the X-rays, I can leave?” Oliver asks.
Emma pauses in disbelief. “Did you just ask if you can leave? You just had surgery on your knee and leg… you won’t be able to walk, at all, you’re going to need serious antibiotics and painkillers for the next two weeks, and you expect to leave? Today?” Her eyes flit over to Beth. “Is he always like this?”
“Yes. Sometimes worse,” she answers with a shrug. “He came in with a stab wound in his stomach once and asked if he’d be able to go to his son’s Career Fair the next day.”
Emma just shakes her head.
They take Oliver down to Radiology, give him an X-ray and frankly, the number of metal pins in his left leg is disturbing. But Beth looks very happy at the scan, so Emma switches the machine off.
“Everything went well?” Felicity asks concernedly, waiting outside the door with George just behind her.
“Everything went great,” Beth reports. “All the pins are correctly in place and we started repairing his ligaments. Oliver will need another couple of surgeries in a few months time, after the swelling around the knee joint has gone down, and he will have to remain on crutches and in a brace until then, but he is going to be fine.”
Felicity throws her arms around her husband’s neck with a sobbed, “Thank god,” kissing all over his face once again, just like she did when saying goodbye to him at pre-op. Oliver blushes and smiles at her dopily, his morphine dose still high but not as high as George had it before.
Emma reluctantly clears her throat and announces that she has to go. Oliver shakes her hand, Felicity hugs her and both George and Beth thank her for her help, telling her that she’s going to be on the Code Green call list from now onwards. The nurse leans in to whisper that working Code Green gets you a pretty hefty bonus at the end of the year, so Emma does not protest.
As she strides away, tired and worn out from a day and night’s work, looking forward to getting home and cuddling with her daughter, she hears Beth praise her to the others, “Finest radiologist in Star City,” and Emma preens.