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“What are you doing?” Alex is startled by the all-too-familiar voice of an annoyed Dr. Ramsey. She turns around to see him leaning against the door frame, arms crossed, looking sternly at her, waiting impatiently to hear what she has to say for herself.
“This,” she moves aside and points at the three-foot tall plastic tree stood up on a cart, “is a Christmas tree.”
“Yes, I can see that,” he states flatly, clearly unamused. “Why exactly do you have a Christmas tree on a cart in a construction zone in the hospital?”
“Well, Dr. Ramsey, seeing as Christmas is just four days away…” her voice trails off when she sees his jaw clenching at her stating the obvious. She has worked with him long enough to know just how far she can push him before he loses all his patience. And given just how short-tempered he seems, she would guess that he’s had quite a difficult day with his diagnostics team patient today, or some intern had already pissed him off, probably both. She decides that she wouldn’t push him any further as she explains, “Well, Dr. Banerji told me the other day that he misses seeing the usual Christmas decorations around the city during the holiday season, especially the tree in Boston Common. So, I figured I’d bring him a Christmas tree instead. Hence the tree, and a cart to wheel the tree to his room after I’ve decorated it.”
Just like that, Ethan’s features soften immediately and he pushes himself off the frame of the door, walking towards her and the tree. He surveys the things she’s laid out for the tree and says, “Okay, so you’ve got the tree, string lights, an overabundance of ornaments, and a couple of tree toppers. Just how many trees are you planning to decorate?”
“My roommates weren’t planning on doing anything special given our current schedules, but Sienna’s been dealing with a lot of tough cases lately, so Elijah and I decided to put up a tree last minute to help cheer her up. I was gonna bring whatever’s left from this back home to help decorate the tree that Danny is getting with Elijah tomorrow,” Alex explains. “We won’t be able to celebrate together, since us interns are working multiple shifts through the holidays, but I think Sienna will be glad to have a tree at home. Anyway, that’s enough of my rambling… Will you help?”
“With what?” he asks with a raised eyebrow.
“Decorating the tree? Choosing the tree topper? Seeing as I already did the hard part and smuggled a tree into this part of the hospital?” she gestures at the stuff in front of them.
Ethan huffs and extends his hand towards her. “Fine, give me the lights.”
Alex gladly moves out of the way for after handing him the lights. Ethan’s movement is deft as he places the lights onto the tree, as if working through muscle memory, and she cannot stop herself from asking, “Do you do this often? I don’t recall seeing a tree the last time we worked on Dr. Banerji’s case at your apartment?”
Ethan looks over at her for a brief moment, debating how much to tell her. “Erm, my dad’s usually busy with work right before Christmas, but he always wanted to celebrate with me, so I used to get the house ready for Christmas,” he concedes before pausing for a moment, recalling something from the past, and shaking himself out of it, and returning to the task at hand. He looks back at her again and asks, “Are you just gonna stand there and watch me work, or are you gonna help?”
“And where were you when I needed help smuggling the tree in here?” she quips back immediately, and she spies Ethan trying to suppress a smile at her words. “Besides, it’s a tiny tree and you’re working so fast around it. I’d only get in your way.”
“Hrmph,” Ethan grumbles to himself before relenting, “seeing as you did smuggle the tree in here by yourself, I suppose I could give you a pass on this.”
It is a rare opportunity to see the great Dr. Ethan Ramsey do something so human like decorating a Christmas tree. She knows that he would never admit it, but he’s the type of person who’d go to the ends of the Earth for people he cares about, like that time when they went to retrieve the toy frog for Dolores, and now he’s decorating a Christmas tree for Dr. Banerji. She captures a few moments with her phone discreetly, and she is pleased when she manages to catch him hanging a glass snowflake ornament onto the tree with a carefree look and a joyous smile to himself. She knows Dr. Banerji would love to see some of the photos she’s captured today.
“If you show Naveen any of the photos you’ve taken, I’ll have your head,” Ethan barks at her, as if reading her thoughts. Alex looks up to see him just two steps away from her, and she realizes that she’s been too focused on checking her photos that she’d lost track of him and got caught.
“Fine, but I get to keep the pictures,” she counters immediately, because she doesn’t want to have to delete such moments. “I still can’t believe how fast you are with decorating a tree.”
“It’s a small tree, Rookie,” he shrugs. “Time to choose the tree topper.”
“What? Me? I thought you’d agreed to help!” she protests. “You managed to pick from the sheer number of ornaments I bought and decorated the tree in record time, but you don’t wanna choose the topper?”
“It is your tree.”
“No, it’s a tree for Dr. Banerji,” she replies. “And you know his preferences better than I do. Does he want a star to top his tree? Or an angel? Or—”
“Or that green thing? What is that?” he asks, pointing at the final tree topper.
“This? This is Baby Yoda, and it’s the hottest toy this year!” Alex exclaims, holding up the green figure proudly. “I got this bad boy custom ordered off Etsy, and it lights up if you plug it in. When I saw it, I knew I had to buy it.”
Ethan smiles at the way she speaks about the tree topper before asking her, “So, how much did the hottest toy of the year from Star Wars cost you?”
“Nothing I can’t afford,” she doesn’t answer him directly. “So, I’m giving you first dibs on the tree topper, and whatever you don’t choose I’ll bring home for us to use to decorate our tree. And if you get yourself a tree at home, you can have the last topper if you want.”
Ethan shakes his head at her comment because she knows he doesn’t have a tree at home. “What if neither Greene and I pick your Baby Yoda tree topper? Will you really let me take the hottest toy home for my non-existent tree?”
“Please, if I bring it home, Elijah and Jackie will be all over Baby Yoda,” Alex retorts. “The only issue there is that I won’t get to see the little guy as much because I actually spend more time here in this part of the hospital than I do in the living room of my apartment. It’s been a very busy month.”
“It’s always busy this time of the year. People hurting themselves trying to deep fry turkeys, people injuring themselves hitting the gym too hard in the name of trying to work off the extra calories from their turkey dinner, people getting seriously injured trying to put up Christmas decorations outside the house without proper safety, people rushing to get to places with black ice on the road,” Ethan laments. “I actually got called back four hours ago and just came from the ER myself. It’s bad enough there without interns screwing up intubations and central lines.”
“You could’ve paged me,” she says, confident in her abilities and he doesn’t refute her.
“I would have, if you hadn’t maxed out your shift hours when Zaid forced you to clock out three hours ago and took you off the call list for the day. Just because I’m hard on interns doesn’t mean I want to work you to death,” Ethan states. “So, have you decided if you wanna share your toy with Naveen or if you wanna let your roommates enjoy the hottest toy of the year?”
“You’re really not gonna choose?” she asks. “I mean, you’ve decorated the whole tree, you might as well choose the topper. That way, you can prove to Dr. Banerji that you’re not as grumpy over the holidays as he claims you are.”
“Of course Naveen whined about my lack of enthusiasm for the holidays to you,” he replies, rolling his eyes. He examines the three tree toppers she has laid out in front of them, and he reaches for the Baby Yoda tree topper, saying, “Everyone has angels and stars. Naveen will definitely appreciate your more eccentric tastes.”
“Yes!” she exclaims, watching gleefully as Ethan places the green figurine on top of the Christmas tree and she snaps yet another photo of him, hoping he doesn’t notice. Ethan plugs in the lights and the tree topper, and she is excited that everything looks perfect. “I hope this will help cheer up Dr. Banerji a bit.”
“Naveen will definitely appreciate your effort,” he agrees. “I’m gonna head back home now, are you gonna wheel this over to his room now, or are you—”
“We’ll bring it to him tomorrow before our shifts start,” Alex replies before unplugging the lights.
“C’mon, if you pack this up and meet me at my car in fifteen, I can drive you home,” Ethan offers. “Given the amount of snow that’s just fallen, it’s gonna be a struggle for you to lug all these things home by yourself.”
“Thank you!” Alex calls out as he leaves the room.
The Next Day…
Naveen awakes to the sound of his two visitors bickering. He looks over to see the newest addition in his room, a Christmas tree that was just wheeled in on a cart, and his two doctors standing next to it, arguing about how close the tree should be to him, and whether or not it’s too early to plug in the lights.
It is refreshing to see this side of Ethan, where he’s engaging his Rookie in a small argument about tree placement instead of them discussing his latest test results and his prognosis and all that mundane work stuff. A tree isn’t something that Ethan would fuss over, considering his seeming disinterest in the holiday over the years. And yet, here he is, telling the intern that Naveen would probably appreciate the tree being a little closer to the bed without the wires being a tripping hazard, and acquiescing to the intern’s wishes to plug the lights in now so that he could wake up to the sight of the tree.
He watches as the two of them fiddle a little more with their gift for him, a tree to help bring some of that festive spirit of Christmas to this wing of the hospital for him. Despite the fact that he’s ailed by an unknown illness and that he’s stuck in this wing of the hospital with only two people for company, Naveen knows that this is going to be one of his favorite Christmas celebrations in recent memory, especially when he sees the way Ethan seems secretly proud at the way the intern beams at the lit up Christmas tree.