Chapter Text
Undisputedly, this week was the hardest week of their lives. At The Hub Hospital in Colorado, they got pretty much the most difficult cases Colorado had to offer. All the patients whose county hospitals couldn’t figure out got sent to the Hub, where people assumed they had a better chance.
Sure, sometimes they were right and they lived, but this week wasn’t one where all the patients lived and got happy endings. This was the hospital where they lost patient after patient until the interns broke and the doctors worked until they were just a complicated pile of mental stress and bones.
This week especially was hard. The organ transplant receivers were...struggling, as were the doctors treating them.
The first one to go was Mrs. Walter, and that wore everyone down a couple notches, to say the least.
Mr. Morello went next, and that...was hard. Losing patients wasn’t something you ever got used to, and losing multiple people so soon made it difficult for everyone to go on.
Walking into their little break room meant finding James, sitting on the couch and looking out the window, one hand gently stroking his facial hair as though he was trying to come up with some way to distract himself from the deaths.
“Hey, man,” Aleks spoke, jolting James out of his reverie with what he hoped was a way to cheer James up. James’ smile was the light of the hospital that meant to keep it out of dark places like this. But right now, James’ face looked tired, as though he was dead on his feet, and his eyes looked like they would be no different shut and sleeping when they directed their attention to Aleks.
Aleks smiled, hoping it would alleviate some of James’ emotional tension, but when it did nothing, Aleks continued talking. “So I thought you could use some lunch,” he said, instead of pointing out how obviously bad James needed Aleks, needed someone to take his mind off the pain.
“No, thanks,” James’ voice is barely a whisper as he shifts in his seat, facing more forward as Aleks sits beside him, putting the bag of take out on the coffee table in front of them.
“Guess that lunch was kind of a one time thing, then,” Aleks mumbles, shifting to face sideways on the couch to better address James. “There’s no way you saw that coming, dude. I mean, rabies? Who checks for rabies anyway? Testing for it woulda meant wasting time those patients didn’t have.”
“Guess I was obsessed with getting those organs,” James replies, and Aleks considers a whole sentence progress, something that he jumps on immediately.
“You had to be, those people would’ve died without them, and that was a call you had to make. I would’ve made the same call.”
James looks over at that, and he looks a lot more broken inside than Aleks could’ve possibly anticipated. But all he says is, “Yeah?” and he looks...almost like he believes Aleks, almost a little bit better.
Almost.
“Anyway, I got us lunch, and I think we’ve earned a little Panda Express.” He reaches for the bag and starts to open it, fully content on the idea that this is the moment he pulls James out of his depressive snap. His “all the patient deaths are my fault” self-blaming episode that Aleks hates seeing more than anything in the world. Like some kind of breakdown.
But, now was one of those days the universe liked to chose specifically to prove Aleks wrong, because the moment he started pulling boxes and chopsticks out of the bag, their pagers went off.
James looked at his before Aleks could look at his own, and immediately mutters, “Oh God,” and Aleks knows somewhere in the hospital, a patient is coding.
Not another one. Please. Not today.
James shuts his eyes, tightly, so tight that from across the couch Aleks can make out the wrinkles in his face that stress brought on, the gray hairs in his bun and his beard. “Come on ,” he mumbles, and it’s so soft a plea that Aleks almost doesn’t hear it.
Wishes he hadn’t.