Work Text:
Doctor, doctor
Stop me if you've heard this one before.
A man wakes up from surgery dazed and confused. Dizzily, he cries out, doctor, doctor! I can't feel my legs!
The doctor replies yes, I know. I amputated your arms!
End joke.
Frank Dufresne is not a doctor.
He really didn't pass his medical exam that well- and the less said about his residency, the better. He can't really remember it at this point- but according to the other interns, nurses, and field medics in training, it was less of a learning experience than a manslaughter experience.
Once he put on the helmet for the UNSC, suddenly he'd found somewhere comfortable. It didn't matter if he wasn't good at his job, or if blood made him nervous, or if corpses all had familiar faces- war was war was war. Red versus blue. Pick a side. Pick no side.
Be purple.
Frank is a field medic. He is not a doctor. His bedside manner has been described as 'fucking annoying, stop talking to me about organic kale', and people… well. People just don’t like him all that much. Which he’s come to terms with, because not everyone can like everyone else. God knows he has people he doesn’t like at all. But as a medical professional, it’s handy to have charisma. Just as a saving grace, in case things go wrong.
Frank doesn’t have charisma. He’s a wallflower.
Case in point, that one time he got three quarters of the way embedded into a cement wall.
Yeah, that was fun. So was the being kidnapped part, really.
Or it would’ve been fun if he hadn’t been kidnapped, threatened, and generally manhandled whenever Agent Washington had decided he wasn’t moving fast enough.
Story of his life.
Oh, Doc, we thought you were dead. Didn’t even notice you were gone! Hey, is O’Malley back yet? There are just so many WAYS he would like to make them SUFFER, drawn up by their toes and hung upside down until circulation did the hard work of inflicting pain for him-
No.
Not right.
Doc doesn’t want to hurt anyone. Not permanently. Because as much as they hate him, he’s still… Doc. He’s the medic. He’s a part of the crew, and Doc’s never been great at integrating himself into groups, okay?
O’Malley was a pain. Is a pain. It’s kind of a grey area, because Doc has done some light medical reading recently (ha ha, how unlikely) and it’s pretty sure being trapped in a void without sensation or social interaction for an unknown amount of time has royally fucked his psyche. Plus the stuff with the Blues and Reds, and the travesty with the paradoxes and fixing the timeline... He has no clue how his brain is still in order, but the human body is a miraculous thing.
Right. O’Malley. Doc knows he’s… dissociative. He doesn’t have a split personality, because that’s a whole other can of worms that just doesn’t fit what he’s been through. The O’Malley persona IS him. And it’s not. But it is, so even if he doesn’t know what’s going on in his head, he knows it’s his head.
Maybe that’s why he’s been reading so much.
Well, he’s also been gardening, and going to yoga, and facetiming Donut. Aside from half of his head BEGGING for some kind of violent release, he’s been doing well! His therapist says he’s been making encouraging progress.
So, when he’s fumbling with the catches on his purple armor, planning a visit to the Reds and Blues, he really shouldn’t be this nervous. Because he’s doing well. The world isn’t in danger, Wash is stable, pizza is back-
But his hands twitch when he sees bright colors in armor.
He can’t STAND that surprised look-
Frank’s happy to see that surprised look-
And suddenly it’s harder to focus on the fact that O’Malley IS him and he is whatever O’Malley wishes he could be, because half of him wants glare at Tucker and laugh like a supervillain and the other half is just happy that he isn’t being greeted with, ‘Oh, dude! Doc’s actually alive!’
So he just says it’s good to see everyone again and O’Malley runs like an undercurrent while Frank shuffles into the Blue Base (which has been tastefully redecorated.)
(Doc likes the new ficus.)
Grif’s sitting at the table in what Doc would call a dining room, which confuses him for a moment until he remembers that now, ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ are more honorary tags than anything else. There’s a six pack of beer there that only has two cans left, and Kai is sitting with Caboose on the couch in the ‘den’. Doc knows because he can hear them talking. Apparently, someone’s spilled nail polish.
“It’s a cement floor,” Kaikaina Grif scoffs when Wash sits up from his spot on a nearby armchair. He’s not in pain, if the dopey grin he’s wearing says anything about the dosage of painkillers he’s currently on. “Who cares about nail polish stains?”
“Good color,” former freelancer Agent David Washington hums, and Doc just looks away from the whole scene and takes a seat across from Grif at the table. He takes his helmet off. Nobody else is in armor, today.
Doc kind of likes having the extra layer of protection.
He takes a beer.
“Ask much?” Grif raises his eyebrows. Doc just cracks open the can, maybe a little more passive aggressively than he should. He takes a drink and then smiles, because Doc is happy and it’s nice to be around friends. He adjusts his glasses.
“It’s not even your beer,” Frank points out, and Grif has the decency to concede the point. “I’m guessing it’s Kai’s.”
This time, Grif tilts his head.
“Because it’s actually cold,” he explains. “And it’s good.”
He hears footsteps behind him and Tucker sits down to take a beer, too. He’s wearing this teal hoodie, it really brings out his eyes- but it doesn’t look right. Doc is used to armor. It’s familiar.
“She does have taste,” Tucker admits. His voice is low. “Except in men.”
“I have STANDARDS,” Sister shouts. “Don’t get mad at me that you’re like, a six at best!”
And then they start going back and forth and Doc feels forgotten again. That’s really the norm for him. Frank does like this beer, though. He wonders if there’s anything to go with it in the kitchen, or if it’s more ration bars and MREs.
O’Malley finds everything they talk about trivial. And he really wants to-
Finish this beer.
Doc really wants to finish this beer.
“How’s Wash?” He asks, his voice bright as he can get it. “Adjusting to the medication?”
And Grif shrugs and then gets up and Frank gets that. Yeah, he understands that, after their little… popularity thing, a lifetime ago. And the time thing. And basically everything. Understanding something doesn’t make it any better, sometimes.
“How are you?”
And Grif stops.
“Same as usual,” Grif says. He actually looks kind of confused. Like nobody’s ever just asked him how he’s doing. It’s a normal human interaction, Grif. Don’t look at Doc like that. “Sammy’s exists again, so I’m doing my best to physically cork all of Simmon’s arteries. I think I’ve deserved it after helping save the world.”
“So you’re… doing good?” Frank asks, and he presses his thumb into the side of his beer can, feeling more awkward than he ever has before in his life. And that’s saying something, considering that he once shared his head with a murderous AI and now he’s pretty sure he’s got some kind of unspecified dissociative disorder. “After everything?”
And Grif nods.
So Doc just looks away a little, pretends to be interested in how Kai has now started to paint Tucker’s nails the brightest tennis ball yellow he’s ever seen, while Frank tries to drum up ideas for conversation and O’Malley thinks about how many colors the inside of the human body is.
(It’s like, three or four. He’s pretty sure. Evil laughter rattles around his skull.)
“Good to hear,” Frank says. “I’ve been doing alright.”
Grif never asked, Frank.
Nobody asked. You have to TAKE what you NEED!
Doc watches Grif’s eyes glaze over when he starts talking about the new yoga group he’s been going to, and suddenly there’s a CRUNCH-
And there’s beer all over the table.
It’s all over his armor.
The can is folded neatly in half, and Frank can pick out individual fingermarks in the aluminum. So that’s… bad.
And he’s being stared at.
“Oh,” he fumbles, shaking beer off of his hand. “Whoa! Guess they don’t make beer like they used to!”
There is silence.
Doc is not meant to be paid attention to. Frank is always ignored.
“...so, do you guys have towels, or…”
“...do I have to clean this table using the very clothes you’re wearing? While you’re still in them?!” And O’Malley cackles and throws the can like a missile. It hits Grif.
Doc knows where the towels used to be, five years ago.
“I’ve got it,” he says. “I’ve got this.”
And then someone touches him.
“Beer doesn’t come out of this armor,” Grif tells him, with the voice of someone who speaks from experience. There’s an angry red welt on his arm where the can hit him. “Come on.”
And Doc stands there, still dripping, even as Grif walks down the hallway of blue base. Towards Wash’s room. He’s confused.
“It’s not like we don’t have clothes here.”
Oh. Frank fumbles, tries to shake off the feeling of being blindsided. Yeah. That’s a thing people do, when you know each other and get beer all over your dry-clean-only space marine armor. Let you borrow some clothes. And Wash’s the only one who’s really close to Frank’s height and build, so it makes sense that they’d head for his stuff.
Doctor, doctor. I can’t feel my legs.
I know, the doctor replies.
Yeah. Doc knows.
But it doesn’t mean that he suddenly understands why this day, and this beer, is any different from before.
Right now, Doc doesn’t have a leg to stand on. And he has no clue what he’s feeling as he walks down the hallway as Grif yawns and Tucker starts telling Caboose not to drink Kaikaina’s nail polish.