Work Text:
When she opened her eyes, the lights were bright and there were voices she didn’t recognize. Everything hurt, and her mouth felt like she’d been chewing on cotton balls, dry and fuzzy. She blinked slowly, and glanced around, watching a nurse in dark blue scrubs bustle past her as if she weren’t there, and then watched a doctor, pretty, blonde hair pulled up into a quick ponytail, black scrubs and an ID that read “Ava Bekker, MD”, stopped at her side. Then, the doctor, Doctor Bekker, looked at her and smiled.
“Sarah, you’re awake,” she breathed, reaching up to touch her cheek, thumb brushing over her cheek. “Oh, sweetheart, you’re okay.”
Sarah, right. She was Sarah. She squinted up at the doctor, at the pet name slipping, accented and soft, from her lips so easily.
“Who -” Sarah started when something caught in her chest, and she had to cough. Doctor Bekker’s hand moved to press into her chest gently, firm but it didn’t hurt, until her coughing fit settled, and she laid back in the bed. “Who are you?”
“You don’t remember me?”
“Am I supposed to?” she asked, and the doctor flinched, a momentary expression that Sarah could still see and track. “Do I come here a lot?”
“Kind of, yeah,” Doctor Bekker said, “but because you’re a doctor here, Sarah.”
“I’m what?”
“Oh, I should get Sam,” she said softly to herself, and reached out to touch Sarah again. She didn’t mean to flinch away from Doctor Bekker’s touch, but this was a stranger, no matter what the stranger said. “Right. I’m sorry. I’ll get Doctor Abrams, and April here will keep an eye on you.”
She gestured to the nurse, a pretty black woman who kind of tickled Sarah’s memory but not anything solid. Then, Doctor Bekker left the room, leaving Sarah alone with April who had a small, warm smile directed at Sarah.
“Hi Sarah, you don’t remember me, then,” April said, “but I’m April, I’m a nurse here at Chicago Med. You were in a car accident, so you’re a bit banged up. We’re keeping a pretty close eye on you since you were brought in unconscious.”
“I’m sorry,” Sarah said, but she wasn’t sure why she said it.
“Oh, you don’t have to be sorry,” April said. She stepped in close to the edge of the bed but didn’t try to touch Sarah yet. “I understand that this must be very scary for you, waking up in the hospital without remembering much, if anything, about how you got here or who everyone is around you, but I promise we’re taking the best care of you possible.”
“Okay,” Sarah said. “Can I get some water?”
“Yeah, let me get you a cup,” she said before she was gone for a moment. Sarah looked around the room, and then down to her hands in front of her, one of her wrists wrapped in a cast, bruises peeking out from either end of the plaster. She wiggled her fingers, but it ached somewhere higher up her arm and she stopped. Her chest hurts, too, like she’d been struck, and she wondered if that was from the airbag or a seatbelt from the car accident April had said she’d been in. She couldn’t remember getting in a car that day, but she also barely had remembered her own name.
Did she even know how to drive? Was it her car? Was someone else hurt? Did she cause it?
“What happened?” Sarah asked, looking at April as she returned with a small cup filled with small chips of ice that Sarah could suck and crunch on to get her hydration. “Did I hurt someone?”
“No,” she said, pausing at Sarah’s side, setting the cup on the little table she moved over Sarah’s lap as she raised the bed so she was sitting up enough. “The other car was larger than yours. They got a little bump, but they’re already discharged and at home resting. You, though, got the brunt of it, sandwiched between two cars.”
“There were more cars involved?”
“It was three, the car in front of you, you, and the car behind you,” April said.
“Did I cause it?”
“I’m not sure,” she said honestly. “A police officer will be in to see you when you are ready, but until then, just relax and rest.”
“But did I cause it? I can’t rest if I hurt someone, so if -”
“Sarah, take a breath, sweetie,” April said gently and touched Sarah’s arm with a brush of her fingers, so gently, so sweetly. It was filled with tender care, and Sarah let out a small breath out at the touch. “The only person who got hurt was you, Sarah, everyone else is okay. So even if you caused it, big if on that, you didn’t cause any lasting or serious damage.”
“Okay,” Sarah said softly, her throat raw as she took an ice chip into her mouth to suck on. “Thank you.”
“You’ve got nothing to thank me for. I have to check on a few other patients, but Doctor Abrams and Doctor Bekker should be back soon.”
Doctor Bekker, Sarah thought. She was so pretty, and there was something familiar about her, not familiar in the way that April was, a warmth in her chest of friendship and shared history even if she couldn’t access that history just then. She couldn’t name it, there was something there but it was indescribably, an amorphous, changing blob that she didn’t know what to do with. She liked April, she was kind and sweet, but Doctor Bekker -
April had slipped out while Sarah was thinking, and when she blinked, she was alone. Well, that meant no one was around as she thought about Doctor Bekker with her black scrubs and slim hips, hands that looked so capable and strong. Something stirred inside her, interest for this stranger, who had touched her so sweetly when they were alone, who called her sweetheart, who had been hurt when Sarah couldn’t remember her face, that beautiful face that looked like it should be in a renaissance painting, a classic, timeless kind of beauty. There was something so special and so familiar about Doctor Bekker.
When she came back into the room, though, with another doctor, a man she wanted to say she’d seen before but couldn’t be sure, she wanted Doctor Bekker’s face to light up in her mind. It didn’t. It ached, though, as she was examined by the other doctor who introduced himself as Doctor Sam Abrams. He was quick and intelligent, incredibly confident and he put her at ease.
“I’d like to keep you overnight for observation, because you have a grade three concussion. We’ll have a nurse coming by occasionally to make sure you’re conscious and wake you up even so often if you do fall asleep.”
Sarah nodded and glanced at Doctor Bekker who was standing still off to the side.
“Will you be checking in, too?” Sarah asked, and she wasn’t sure what made her ask, if it were the quiet obsession or the familiarity of Doctor Bekker’s eyes on her.
“I will,” Doctor Bekker said softly with a nod of her own.
Doctor Abrams pat Sarah’s hand in an almost stilted way before leaving them alone, and Sarah looked at her.
“Will you stay with me when the police officers are in here with me? I don’t know if I can do this alone.”
“Of course,” Doctor Bekker said.
“I’m sorry that I don’t remember you. We clearly work together and know each other.”
“Yeah,” she replied, taking a seat next to Sarah’s bedside with her tablet resting in her lap. “Yeah, we work together. Not closely. You’re in psychiatry, I’m a cardiothoracic surgeon, but we cross paths quite a bit since we both frequent the Emergency Department.”
“Oh,” Sarah said and frowned to herself. Was that all they were? Why did it feel so soft in her chest and so raw at the same time? She didn’t know what to do with it, and she didn’t want to touch it too much. “Okay, thank you, and I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry, Sarah. Something traumatic happened, and you lost your memory. It should be temporary, and you’ll remember.”
Sarah hoped that Doctor Bekker was right because she didn’t know if she could keep sitting in this silence with a gaping wound in her heart where Doctor Bekker’s memory used to be.
When the officers stopped in, an older gentleman who introduced himself as Kent and his partner as Winnow, Sarah was glad for the distraction. They started out easy, asking her for information about herself. She could remember her name and her date of birth, and as they prodded, more information came to her. She was a doctor. She was a resident under Doctor Charles who was the head of psychiatry at Gaffney Chicago Medical Center, and she’d chosen psychiatry because of him. She loved her job. She’d been driving home after a long shift at the hospital, but she’d made a detour from her usual path because she’d wanted to swing by this little market in order to pick something special up.
She couldn’t remember why she’d done that, or what she’d wanted to get, but she remembered turning off one exit too soon to go home with the intention of stopping somewhere else. The sunset looked beautiful over the city streets, and she’d been rocking out to a special playlist, her favorite songs specially picked for her, and as she’d started to stop at the redlight at the end of offramp for the exit -
“I saw the brake lights, but not in time,” Sarah said, her voice scared and small, and she looked up at Officer Kent at her bedside. “It was my fault, wasn’t it?”
“It wasn’t,” the officer said, and he spoke sweetly, gently, as if she were a scared bunny he was trying to soothe. Maybe she was. “You were in the middle of the sandwich, essentially, Doctor Reese. You stopped in time, and several witnesses corroborated this, but it was the car behind you who didn’t stop. They didn’t even hit their brakes. They hit the back of your car so hard that it pushed you forward and you crashed into the car in front of you.”
That part didn’t come when called, but they weren’t trying to make her confess to anything, trying to trip her up. They didn’t seem to think she was guilty, so that had to mean something.
“I’m sorry, I’m such a mess. I’m so scrambled,” she said. “Everyone else from the accident are okay, though?”
“Yeah, we checked in on the other two drivers, and everyone else has already been discharged,” Officer Winnow added. “We suggest filing a claim with your insurance as soon as you can, and we’ll have an accident report on file as well for you to reference. Here’s my card, and you can call us when you need any information from CPD.”
“Thank you,” Sarah said, reaching her hand out and taking the business card held out to her. It was solid cardstock, with the Chicago Police Department shield in one corner with Officer Winnow’s contact information in the opposite corner. She curled her hand around it, protecting it, and nodded at them as they left the hospital room.
“Did that help?” Doctor Bekker asked.
“I don’t know,” Sarah said. “I don’t remember the accident itself, the crash, but I remember some of what I was doing. I don’t know why I wanted to make a detour. I remember feeling excited to get home, probably because the day had been so long, I don’t know. But I decided to make the stop, and that’s when the crash happened.”
She frowned at herself, frustrated that she couldn’t put the last piece together.
“That’s okay,” Doctor Bekker said, and she set her hand on Sarah’s, squeezing it gently. “It’s all going to be okay, Sarah. You survived, and it doesn’t matter why the crash happened, just that you survived it.”
Sarah couldn’t rid of the frown, though, and she wanted to cry.
A soft fingertip brushing below her eye, catching a tear before it could fall, a whispered it’ll be okay sweetheart , an I love you murmured into a neck as they held onto each other.
“It’s all going to be okay,” Sarah repeated, and she looked at Doctor Bekker.
No, not Doctor Bekker.
Ava.
Her Ava.
It flashed through her mind quickly one right after another, kissing Ava in the stairwell where no one could see them, a date out on Lake Michigan where no one could find them, Ava’s strong, dextrous hands, and fingers, bringing Sarah to pure bliss in her apartment away from anyone but themselves. She could taste Ava’s kisses, the slight mint of her chapstick, the coffee sweet and strong on her tongue. She had taken that exit to pick up some of Ava’s favorite chocolates because it was their anniversary. They’d made it an entire year, and on the day that they were supposed to celebrate the milestone, Sarah had forgotten.
“Oh, Ava ,” Sarah sobbed and grabbed at her girlfriend, curling her fingers in betwen Ava’s as if that would make up for her forgetting the best thing in her life, the only person who had ever made her feel welcome and home in her own skin. “Oh, god, I can’t believe -”
“Shh,” Ava said, sinking onto the bed and touching Sarah on the cheek the way she always did, fingertips brushing before she settled her palm underneath Sarah’s jaw to keep her attention. “Shh, sweetheart, you’re okay. You’re alright.”
“I forgot you!”
“You forgot everyone,” Ava reminded her.
“Yeah, but I’m not fucking everyone, Ava. They’re not my girlfriend, you are.”
“Baby girl, calm down,” she said, sitting forward so their foreheads touched and Sarah could feel the gentle warmth of Ava’s breath on her face. She smelled like those wrapped candies that she incessantly sucked on, quietly sweet and perfect in this space filled with antiseptic otherwise. “I’m not upset that your memory got screwed up and you forgot what was going on. You forgot that you were a doctor, which you’ve been for longer than you’ve been my girlfriend.”
“You’re the most important person to me,” Sarah said. “You know that, right? Me forgetting, that’s not an indicator of how I feel about you. I do, I love you, and -”
“Baby girl,” Ava said again, this time sterner, and Sarah paused at the tone. “You are not in trouble.”
“I’m not?”
“No, of course not, I’m not going to punish you for something you can’t control, something you didn’t do on purpose. You got into an accident and your brain got a little scrambled, that happens. You remember me now , and we can go forward from here. That’s what’s important.”
Sarah finally let the tension ease from her shoulders and jaw, muscles relaxing as she slumped forward and into Ava’s arms with a groan.
“I wanna go home,” she muttered.
“Few more hours, just need to make sure your concussion clears up overnight and we can go.”
“Promise?”
“Pinky promise,” Ava said and pressed a kiss into her forehead. “And I’m off for the night, so I’m going to hang out here, if that’s alright with you.”
“What if someone comes in?”
“If people haven’t figured it out by now with how I reacted when you were brought in, it’s a miracle, but also, I don’t want to be apart from you right now. If you don’t mind.”
“Of course, I don’t mind. Yes, please stay. Please tell the world. You’re right where you belong.”
Ava leaned in and kissed her soft, sweet, careful, and murmured into her lips, “happy anniversary, sweetheart.”
“I was getting you your chocolates, and -”
“Don’t worry about getting me a gift, baby. I have the best present in the world right here, in my arms, you making it through and staying with me. That’s all I need. You’re better than any chocolate or teddy bear. You’re perfect.”
“I love you,” Sarah breathed.
“I love you too,” Ava said. “Now, get some rest, baby girl. I’ll be here when you wake, for as long as you want me to be.”
“For the rest of my life, if you can.”
“And even longer than that.”