Chapter Text
Taking another long look at the dilapidated building before him, Peter Benton is starting to think he can't read.
The man knows that can't be true though. His entire house is filled with evidence to the contrary: massive medical textbooks stacked ceiling high, research papers — printed and stapled — left out on his dining room table, his kitchen island, and his bedside table. Hell, he makes sure he always has the latest J.A.M.A issue in his bathroom for something light to read on the toilet.
But, surely he can't be reading this address right.
The slip of paper in his hand clearly says this is Carter's current residence, but, instead of pulling up to a mansion like he expected — or even a nice, large house with a picket fence — Benton finds himself in front of a very worn-down apartment building located in a very run-down area of Chicago.
“What the hell,” he whispers to himself as he gets out of his car, actually worried for once that it might get stolen parked out here. Now, Benton himself doesn't live in the best part of Chicago — not even close — but he can admit to himself that his neighbourhood is a fair bit nicer than the one he currently finds himself in.
‘Maybe Carter wrote his address down wrong?’ he thinks, giving the slip of paper one last glance before tucking it into the pocket of his coat.
Apartment 2b.
The surgical resident only wanted to show up and berate his student for leaving — he knows Doug Ross had apparently ordered the student home after some argument the two had, but Carter is Benton's student — but now instead his chances of being robbed have tripled just by being in this area.
Entering the building, Benton is glad to see no one else in the apartment's small lobby area.
What he sees instead is trash.
Black bags full lining the hallway walls, litter strewn about the floor. The stench is eye-watering. ‘There's no way this building isn't infested with mice and bugs,’ thinks Benton, nose scrunched up in disgust as he makes his way up the rusted metal steps to the second floor.
Finding 2b, Benton raps on the door.
Silence from the other side.
“Carter,” he shouts through the door, knocking louder this time, “it's Benton.”
Silence again. No sound of movement from behind the wooden door at all, no shuffling of feet or any indication anyone is home. He waits a few more seconds before deciding to leave, assuming the young man isn't home.
“Are you looking for John?” A hoarse voice asks from behind him. Startled since he hadn't heard anyone walk up, Benton spins on his heel to see who it is.
Leaning out the door of the apartment next to Carter's — 2a Benton assumes — is a little old lady.
Like, for real.
If he had to guess, the woman before him looks to be 4'11 and possibly 90 years old. ‘What's such an old woman doing living in a shithole like this?’ he thinks sadly.
“Are you deaf, boy?” She questions, seeing as how Benton was too shocked to answer right away. “Are you here for John?” she asks again, slower this time.
“John Carter?” He tries to clarify, taken aback by the woman's rude attitude and being called “boy”.
“Deaf and dumb too. So you do know John, then. Why didn't you say so?” she rasps, voice gravelly like how a smoker's sounds.
‘Wow, what a mean old lady.’ Benton thinks. He's not feeling very sorry for her anymore.
“Sorry, ma'am,” he says, still polite even after being ridiculed because that's how his ma raised him, “yes, I do know him. I'm a doctor at County General, Carter is my student. Do you know how long ago he left?”
As he's replying the woman takes a cigarette and lighter out of her dressing robe pocket and lights it up right in the hallway.
“He's not left since he got in this morning,” she speaks around the cigarette in her mouth, “he left early for work and then came back only after a couple of hours. I was smoking out the window and I heard him coming from all the way down the street, spluttering and hacking up a lung. It's a good thing you sent him home ‘cus he looked like shit.”
Carter is sick? Benton doesn't remember his student looking or sounding ill this morning.
“And you're sure he hasn't left?” the doctor asks dubiously.
“Not unless he flushed himself down the toilet,” she barks out with a laugh, finishing her cig and then immediately grabbing and lighting another. “The walls in this place are so damn thin we hear each other blink. He's still in there.”
‘Son of a bitch,’ the doctor thinks, mad at his student all over again. ‘I can't believe he's ignoring me!’
“Carter!” He yells through the door, nose practically pressed up against it, “your neighbour (“Grace!” the woman cuts in) gave you up kid, I know you're in there. Don't ignore me.”
“He could just be asleep, he did sound quite ill.” Grace supplies, which may have been true before but not likely anymore with the amount of ruckus they're making right outside the man's door.
Pressing his ear to the door, Benton still can't hear anything on the other side but — now that his face is right up on the door — he can smell something that makes alarm bells in his head blare.
“Do you smell that?” He asks Grace, hoping he's wrong. Maybe the overall stench of the building is messing with his nose because there's no way he can be smelling what he thinks he smells from within Carter's apartment.
“Oh shit,” Grace replies and Benton quickly turns back to her, fearful she's agreeing with him.
“My pizza!” is what she shouts instead, running back into her own place but leaving the door open behind her. From her place he can hear an oven timer going off.
“What the hell,” Benton says aloud to himself again — twice in the span of 10 minutes — thoroughly perplexed by everything that's happening. This day just keeps getting weirder and weirder. When he got off work only an hour ago all he wanted to do was swing by and yell at Carter a bit — since he barely got to today before the young man left — and then go home and crash.
But now he's met Carter's crazy chain-smoking elderly neighbour and is currently catching a strong whiff of a very distressed Omega from behind his Beta students’ door.
‘Maybe there's someone else in there?’ Benton thinks, but for some reason that feels wrong.
He doesn't know how, but somehow he knows that scent is coming from Carter. He's not known Carter for long — and honestly the doctor can't say he likes Carter all that much really — but he has to admit that he's grown a bit fond of him. Kind of like a dad who doesn't want a dog but ends up begrudgingly caring for it anyways. And, from working late nights with the kid, he's learned a lot about him. His go-to meal from the canteen, his completely wrong opinions on basketball players, and his scent.
All secondary genders give off scents. It's sort of like everyone's own personal fragrance. Alphas and Omegas do tend to have stronger scents compared to Betas, but that's not to say that that's always the case. Benton had noticed early on that Carter had a quite noticeable scent — had actually joked that the kid was dousing himself in Hugo Boss cologne until he realised it was natural — but didn't think much of it beyond that fact.
Now he's thinking maybe he should have because the distressed Omegan scent smells like Carter's natural citrus and mint combo but rancid — like rotting oranges.
“Carter!” Benton tries one last time, even trying the handle on the off-chance it was unlocked as he shouts, “open this door now or you're fired!”
Nothing. If Carter was just ignoring him then the threat of losing his job should have been enough to get him to stop the pretense and open the door.
Benton is really considering kicking the door down, going as far as taking off his coat and rolling up the long, cuffed sleeves of his shirt, when Grace pops her head back out her doorway.
“Benson, here,” she says, holding out a small metal object. The surgeon wants to protest that that's not his name and also ask about the grey smoke billowing out the door around her but then he realises what she's giving him.
A key.
“It's John's spare. Sometimes my key runs away from me and John was kind enough to give me this one in case I get locked out.”
He takes it from the woman with a quick thanks and enters apartment 2b.
The smell immediately assaults his sensitive nose. ‘Definitely in pain Omega.’ Even though Benton himself is a Beta he considers himself quite in-tune with his instincts — he's honed them over the years to become a better surgeon — and the scent is telling him that this isn't your average Omegan distress.
This is serious. Like, life or death level bad. ‘What the fuck.’
Finally inside, Benton takes a moment to survey the place.
The space before him is small. If Benton were claustrophobic to any degree then this apartment might have had him panicked. It's a studio apartment — kitchen, bedroom and what could loosely be described as a living room all in open view. The only room that has a door to separate it from the others is the bathroom.
Not seeing the young man anywhere in the main area (unless he's somehow hiding under the small single bed) Benton makes his way to the bathroom door.
“Carter? You in there?” He calls while walking towards the bathroom. He gets his answer pretty quickly though as the scent becomes even stronger the closer he gets to the thin wood door. That's definitely Carter's scent.
Depressing the cool, metal handle he finds it to be unlocked. He doesn’t open it all the way though, not yet.
“I'm coming in now so I really hope you're dressed.” he says in warning, then he fully opens the door.
He finds Carter curled up on the tiled floor, practically wrapped around the base of the porcelain toilet. The med student is still wearing the outfit he had on earlier sans his tie, shoes, suspenders and white coat. From his position by the door, Benton can't discern any movement from his student, not even the expanding and deflating of his lungs.
‘He's not breathing!’ He panics internally.
“Carter!”
Rushing over, Benton crouches down to assess the damage.
Carefully, the doctor rolls the downed man over onto his back, tilts his head back to check his airway, and then listens for breath sounds from both Carter's mouth and nose. The noises are there but very faint, his breathing is too shallow.
The young man is also hot to the touch. Boiling actually. Benton's cursing himself for not bringing his first aid kit with him today, knowing that he'd usually have it with him and could therefore use the thermometer to gauge how cooked his students' insides are.
Carter's normally pale skin is nearly translucent underneath the fluorescent lighting in the bathroom apart from the apples of his cheeks which are bright red. Touching one of these red spots, Benton feels that the skin is dry.
This action causes Carter to release a quiet, low whine of pain and reflexively leans his blisteringly hot face against his mentor's cool palm.
“Hey man, it's Benton. You're going to be okay, “ the older man assures his student, checking his pulse. Fast and irregular.
‘This just keeps getting worse and worse.’ He thinks, noting the problems he's seen so far. Respiratory depression, hyperthermia, dehydration, sustained unconsciousness and the very obvious issue of Carter being an Omega. Some of the symptoms — such as the fever, dehydration and fast heart rate — could be chalked up to something more common like a heat but not to this degree of severity.
As much as he hates to admit it, this seems like a textbook case of SSRS — Sudden Suppressant Rejection Syndrome.
"Oh come on, kid!"
SSRS used to be a more widely prevalent ailment before suppressant medications became much more advanced. When Benton first started med school it was one of the first things they learned about — a real “big bad” that they had to really watch out for. Now, he wouldn't be surprised if Carter told him he didn't know what it was.
But luckily he does know what it is and therefore he understands just how bad this is.
“Fuck, okay. Okay. I'll be right back, just hold on.”
Leaping up and away from the prone man, Benton runs to Grace's apartment and through the open door — not even bothering to announce his presence. The old woman glances at him but doesn't pay him any more attention than that and instead continues frantically wafting smoke out of her open window, a blackened disc (the pizza?) on the stove top behind her.
Spotting a wall-mounted phone near the door, Benton beelines to it and dials 911.
“I need an ambulance at 413 Southside, Apartment 2b. There's a possible case of SSRS… Yes, I'm sure… No... Yes... No! Just send someone here ASAP and make sure they have CycleCede on hand… Look, I'm a doctor at County General, that's how I know! Just listen to me and get a bus here right now!”
After slamming the phone quite forcibly back onto the receiver and thus hanging up on the dispatcher, Benton allows himself a second to collect himself before jumping back into the fray.
‘Don't worry, Carter. I've got you.’