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Gavin likes to think he has a relatively high pain tolerance. Oh, he’s absolutely a little bitch about things like shots or when he sleeps funny and can’t turn his head for like five days, but he’s been fucking shot before, man, it’s not like he doesn’t know what hurts and what seriously hurts. Maybe that’s why he ignores the abdominal pain until he goes to stand up from his desk and actually passes out and the only reason he doesn’t have a ruptured appendix and a concussion or traumatic brain injury is because Tina managed to catch his head on the way down.
Yeah.
He doesn’t really know what’s going on for a long time, or maybe it’s a short time, his sense of that is pretty well shot to shit, but he wakes up once in the ambulance in absolute agony and then he’s pretty much out until after they’ve cut what’s left of the stupid thing out of him, done whatever they needed to do with the exploded bits, and sewed him back up.
Apparently if the police station hadn’t been so close to the hospital, he probably would have died in transit. Fun.
The whole thing was so traumatic to his system, and considering he lives alone and his moms recently retired to Miami, they’ve decided to keep him for observation. Probably a good idea, considering he’s so fucked up on whatever they’ve got in his IV that he can’t even get out of bed to go take a piss.
Again, emphasis on fun.
When he first woke up, there was this female nurse who kept coming in to check on him, and he immediately didn’t like her. She was probably in her forties, kind of motherly, very doting and with a soft bedside manner, calling him “sweetie” and talking him through everything she’s doing. It makes him feel like a five year old, and every time he curses she looks at him like if he were her child, she’d wash his mouth out with soap.
It doesn’t help that he’s in an especially foul mood. He doesn’t get sick often, the only times he’s had to go to the hospital were because he was hurt on the job and Fowler is a real stickler on them getting everything checked out. Physical therapy after he got shot in the shoulder was a bitch, but it wasn’t the worse, and the point of all that is to say that he was never really out of it like he currently is. They had him drugged to hell and back when they were fixing his shoulder, but it was more of an external wound (it clipped through the top of his left shoulder, fucking up the muscle, but it was clean), not the internal shitfest his appendix apparently made of his abdomen.
So he curses more and does his best to make her life difficult because his life is currently difficult, to the point where he even shifts the pillows around in his bed (slowly, very slowly, because while the drugs keep him from hurting too bad as long as he’s laying absolutely still, they don’t do jack shit for when he so much as twitches) to kind of cover himself up with them. That’s around the time she leaves, and doesn’t come back for a long time.
Gavin falls asleep during that extended interval, and only wakes up because he hears the door sliding open. However, it’s not a woman’s voice that greets him, it’s deep and smooth but without a lot of inflection. “Mr. Reed?” the voice says, the door sliding closed behind the new intruder. “I need to take your vitals.”
“No,” Gavin says from beneath the pillows, the words muffled.
“I’m afraid I must insist.” As they speak, the voice is coming closer, and the pillow he has resting kind of halfway over his thighs and stomach is moved away. “The sooner I do what I need, the sooner I can be out of your hair.”
He tries to hold on to the pillow he has resting over his face, but he currently has the strength of a half-cooked spaghetti noodle, so the nurse is able to easily move it away. “No. Fucking, fight me,” he growls, squinting against the light. “Square up.”
“Perhaps later,” the nurse says, sounding vaguely amused. “May I have your arm?”
Gavin fully intends to tell him exactly what he can do with his arm (which makes no sense but hey, drugs) but then he isn’t having to squint so hard as his eyes adjust to the light and um. Excuse me? This is seriously the hottest nurse he’s ever seen in his life. The man is tall, with broad shoulders and while it’s kind of hard to tell in the navy blue scrubs he’s wearing, Gavin is pretty sure there’s a nice taper down to a narrow waist under there. His hair is neatly pushed back except for one errant piece that droops down onto his forehead, and when he leans in to take Gavin’s arm, he can see that his eyes are this really pretty grey-blue.
“Mr. Reed,” the nurse says, insistent, and Gavin is sure he’s staring but he doesn’t really have anything else in the stupid room to focus on, so he just moves his arm to make it easier for him to take his blood pressure and check his pulse and all the other medical shit he has to do.
“Can you just call me Gavin? Mr. Reed makes you sound like a fucking telephone solicitor or something,” he grumbles as the nurse unwraps the cuff from his arm.
“Gavin, then,” the nurse says. “Thank you for cooperating. Please do not bury yourself under the pillows again, it would make my job much more difficult if you smother yourself in your sleep.”
“Oh if that’s the case,” Gavin says sarcastically. “I’ll be extra sure to be a good little patient.”
“I would very much appreciate it,” the nurse says, giving his arm a little pat before moving away to put the blood pressure cuff and the few other things he’d used back in their proper places. “I’ll be back in a few hours to check on you again.”
“Oh, I’m sure you fucking will,” Gavin says, slumping back against the pillows, and he’s absolutely not pouting or sulking or anything like that. “Can’t get any fucking sleep because you guys won’t leave me alone.”
“Making sure there are no complications from your surgery trumps getting your beauty rest, I’m afraid,” the nurse says, punching a few things into the tablet he was carrying when he came into the room. “You will be free to sleep all you want when you’re released. In the meantime, I apologize for the inconvenience.”
That sounded too sarcastic to be sincere, so Gavin scowls, and the nurse gives him a little smile before slipping out of the room.
Ugh. What a prick. What a fucking gorgeous prick.
True to his word, the nurse is back in a couple hours to do the whole thing all over again, and Gavin is no less helpful because he hasn’t slept since he left, and he’s cranky, and starting to hurt, and he’s kind of pissed at his body but he can’t sit there and curse out his appendix (he doesn’t even know where it is, what did they do with it when they cut it out of him?) so he’s going to have to take it out on someone else, which sucks because he’s pretty sure he likes this nurse better than the first one.
“No,” he says before the nurse can even get through the door.
“Gavin,” the man says, and the amusement in his voice is much more pronounced now.
“No.”
“Gavin.”
“Fight me,” he says again, and the nurse has set his tablet down next to the sink as he washes his hands before coming over to him. The weight behind the words are ruined a little bit, because his voice rasps in his throat, making him start coughing which given the state of his abdomen is pretty fucking painful.
There’s the sound of running water, and the nurse comes over with a paper cup full of water, his hand resting on Gavin’s back, patting gently. Gavin takes the cup, trying not to blush at the sudden proximity and the new knowledge he has which is that the nurses hand is large, and pretty fucking cold, but it’s a hospital, everything is fucking cold.
The water is enough to calm the coughing fit, and Gavin drains the cup before handing it back. Setting it aside on the little table next to his bed, the nurse gives him a smile, which is small and a little lopsided but fucking adorable for it. “I’m fairly certain if I fought you, you would win,” the nurse says as if confessing a secret. “The other nurses would never let me live it down, and I have a reputation to uphold here. Take pity on me?”
Grumbling, Gavin sticks his arm out, which makes the nurse smile again, so it’s not so bad.
All in all, he’s stuck in the hospital for four days. They wean him off the intravenous painkillers and move him to the oral stuff, which he’s already trying to start weaning off it because fuck it, he worked in narcotics before making detective, he doesn’t want any more of this shit than he absolutely needs. The first nurse, the woman named Sophie, is apparently his daytime nurse and the man, Niles, is his night nurse. He still gives Sophie shit, and he gives Niles shit too but like, differently. It’s hard to explain.
Sophie grows on him once she stops coddling him, at least, and Niles is.....yeah. Apparently the complete fucking package. He’s gorgeous, he’s one of the head nurses, he has this dry sense of humor that works pretty much perfectly with how much of a turd Gavin is on a daily basis, he has a cat he got from a rescue and goes jogging every morning and like, what the fuck, he’s like something out of Men’s Health or GQ and Gavin is....kind of embarrassed by how much of a train wreck he is.
Also, he’s on painkillers and the first time they met he was literally buried under a mountain of pillows and telling Niles to fight him. Great impression, Gavin, the super successful, super well adjusted head nurse is totally gonna be into that.
But apparently....he is.
It’s the morning he’s supposed to be released, and Niles is about to get off his shift after taking his vitals for the umpteenth time, and Gavin was complaining, loudly, about the lack of caffeine and how it’s killing him and how there’s no way he’s going to be able to return to society without at least a fucking coffee. Graciously, Niles offers to get him some, which, fucking yes.
When he returns, he places the cup on the table, giving Gavin one of those slanted little smiles. “My evenings are going to be much less exciting when you leave,” he says.
“Yeah? Sounds like you’re ready to throw me out of here yourself,” Gavin says, picking up his coffee and taking a sip.
Niles just hums, his expression thoughtful, his gaze something that someone might consider fond. “Exciting isn’t necessarily bad,” he says. “Well, there certainly is bad exciting, you haven’t thrown anything at me or pulled your IV out and attempted to climb out a window, but your brand of exciting will be....missed.”
Gavin burns his tongue on a too big gulp of the coffee. Fuck. How does he respond to that. “I gotta get better eventually,” he settles on saying. “Maybe I’m the one who should be worried, you didn’t do something to me to keep me in here longer?”
“Hmm, I wonder,” Niles says, smirking. Double fuck, that expression is hot. “Perhaps I will see you around, Gavin.”
That’s kind of a weird thing for a nurse to say to a patient because shouldn’t the point be to not see him again? “Yeah, you too, Niles,” he mumbles, trying not to watch too avidly as the nurse slips from the room, sliding the door gently behind him.
He kind of wishes Niles was working a double or something and would still be here until he left. He kind of wishes he’d met Niles in a bar, or somewhere, anywhere but a fucking hospital. This sucks so much.
Setting his coffee on the table next to him, Gavin starts to reach for the remote sitting next to it, but a flash of black writing catches his attention, peeking up from under the paper sleeve of the cup. Turning it around and tugging the sleeve down reveals neat, loopy handwriting in bold, black sharpie.
Fight me?
xxx-xxx-xxxx
Niles