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Dennis has seen a lot, being a med student recently turned resident at PTMC. He’s not quite sure anything will ever compare to his very first shift at his job, but he’s not sure if he’d trade that experience for anything else in the world. He loves his job, as difficult as it may be, and he’s going to do it for as long as he’s able.
Still, being a doctor at a trauma center doesn’t mean that he’s seen everything.
He’s supposed to be on vacation. A string of days where he’s got no work, spending them off somewhere else for the week. Trinity had been the one to suggest going back towards the Pacific Northwest, which is how Dennis finds himself in Washington, driving a rental car.
His fingers keep tapping on the steering wheel, and for some reason he feels so uneasy. He probably shouldn’t have taken Trinity’s unsolicited “advice” in the first place—he’s too close to home, and too far away from Pittsburgh, and Dennis really hates the fact that he has anxiety at this very moment. Maybe he should just turn around. Sell his ticket for next Tuesday and buy a new one for this evening. Yeah, that’s what he should do.
He has seen a lot, but nothing—absolutely nothing—he had seen at PTMC could have prepared him for almost running a man over with a car.
Thankfully, Dennis sees the man stumbling out of the woods before it’s too late, and he presses down hard on the brakes just as the guy falls flat into the middle of the road. Dennis is quick to pull his car over to the side of the road, though he’s truly panicked at the same time, climbing out of the car just as quickly.
The man is dressed in some kind of military-looking uniform, in the way that Dennis has seen some of the material before back at the hospital, but there’s a mask on the guy’s head, obscuring him from Dennis entirely. Dennis flounders, unsure of what to do exactly. There’s no obvious blood that he can see at first, until he tries to roll the guy over and sees the red pooling on the asphalt beneath the guy’s torso.
“Ha-aaaah, shit,” Dennis mutters, biting hard at his lower lip. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. Oh man, what the hell am I supposed to do?”
He’s a doctor, for fuck’s sake—well, nearly, he’s just about done with his medical degree which is why he’s on a week long vacation in the first place—yet he’s panicking. Dennis can’t think of the first thing to do.
He looks around quickly, but there’s no sign of any cars coming from either side of the road, so Dennis jumps up and runs back to the car. It’s going to really suck having to pay the extra charges because of blood stains, but what else is Dennis supposed to do right now? He yanks open the passenger side door, then runs back over to the unconscious man.
Dennis huffs, breathing heavily as he throws the man’s arm around his shoulders and lifts him up. He’s not as strong as Robby or Abbot, still working up to handling so much dead weight at once, but Dennis manages to drag the guy over to the car and lay him out on the back seat. Panting, Dennis moves to the trunk and pulls it open, rummaging around in his belongings until he finds the first aid kit he remembered to pack.
Look, once a doctor, always a doctor. He never goes anywhere without being prepared for the worst.
However, Dennis seriously underestimated what “the worst” would end up being for him while in fucking Washington.
Shutting the trunk, Dennis moves back around to the open passenger door and pushes himself into the car, as cramped as the space is in the back. He settles with his knees in the space behind the driver’s seat, the first aid kit opened on the center console next to him.
There’s still panic inside of Dennis as he looks the man over, eyeing the now obvious gunshot wound to the guy’s ribs.
GSW to the right side, right under the rib cage. Can’t tell if the bullet went through or not, considering it looks like this guy is wearing Kevlar…
Dennis’s hands are careful as he grabs the man’s side and pushes him up, trying to assess the damage. There’s no obvious exit wound on the back side of the uniform, unfortunately, but it’s still entirely possible for the bullet to have left and lodged itself into the back of the uniform instead.
“Shit,” Dennis mutters, sitting up a little straighter. He immediately starts patting the man down, trying to figure out how the hell to strip him out of this godforsaken uniform, cursing softly to himself as he does.
He makes the mistake of reaching up to grab the guy’s mask, and suddenly there are hands grabbing Dennis’s wrists tightly. He’s being pushed back as the guy attempts to sit up, groaning in pain. The man hisses, the top of his mask hitting the roof of the car, and Dennis feels the panic rising up inside of him again.
“Wh–Whoa, hey! Hey, dude, listen, I’m a doctor—”
“A doctor?” The man seems to panic, suddenly twisting in his spot and hissing loudly.
“Y–You’re not in a hospital! Hey, will you lay back down?! You’re bleeding out in the back seat of my rental car!” Dennis says, voice shaking as he tries to shove the guy back down. He’s reminded of all the times at the hospital when he’s had to help hold a patient down.
“Rental car?” The man says, dizzily and airy, and the strength seems to leave him as he falls back into the seat again. “Fuuuuck… fuck, this hurts.”
“Yeah,” Dennis says, relieved, as he tries for the collar of the uniform again. “Someone shot you in the side. Look, I have to get this off to see if the bullet exited or not, because if it didn’t, then I really do need to get you to a hospital—”
“No hospitals,” the man grits out, left arm reaching across his body to touch the wound with another groan.
“But they can—”
“No hospitals.”
Dennis swallows. “Okay. Okay, no hospitals, but I really—”
“Fuck,” the guy groans loudly as the mask falls heavily against the back seat. “Hold on.”
Slowly, the man sits up in the back seat and reaches up to yank off his helmet. Dennis quickly turns his head away, holding up a somewhat bloodied hand in front of his face as he does.
“Why are you looking away?”
“Well—I mean, you, uh, probably wear a mask for a reason, right? Like, uh… Batman and stuff.”
“You’re trying not to look at my face?”
“Do you want me to look at your face?”
There’s a pause of silence, and Dennis is very tempted to glance at him, but he makes sure to keep his eyes fixed on the very interesting back of the driver seat headrest.
Then, the guy mumbles, “I mean, now that you’re trying to not look at my face, I kinda want you to look at my face.”
Dennis swallows a bit roughly. “Are you going to kill me for seeing your face or something? Because, uh, you have guns and… there’s that sword on your back…”
“Usually I would kill someone for seeing my face, but you said this was a rental car and you haven’t even called me by my name yet!”
Dennis furrows his eyebrows. “Yeah, ‘cause I don’t know your name, man.”
The guy sounds exasperated, and Dennis chances a glance to watch his arms flail around, almost in a childlike way. “What the fuck, man? Am I only known in Evergreen or something? How come you know Batman but you’ve never heard of Vigilante before?!”
“Is that, uh… is that your name?” Dennis asks, slowly lowering his hand. “Vigilante.”
“That’s what you can call me, yeah.”
“Cool. Uh, I’m Dennis. Can I look now? My neck is starting to kill me and I’m kinda worried you might pass out from blood loss soon if I don’t work on your wound…”
“Oh! Oh, yeah, sure, go ahead!”
Slowly and carefully, Dennis finally turns his head, blinking a few times. It takes him a minute to look up from the wound in Vigilante’s side to the guy’s face. It takes Dennis’s breath away—underneath that bulky helmet is a handsome man, curly hair sticking out in all directions caused by said helmet. Dennis takes several moments to register the man known as Vigilante in front of him, before he remembers what he’s supposed to be doing:
He has to stitch up Vigilante’s wound.
Dennis swallows. “Can you take your uniform top off?”
Vigilante grins at him, deep dimples on display and making Dennis’s stupid gay heart do a damn somersault. “Isn’t it illegal for a doctor to do that kinda stuff with their patients?”
Sputtering, cheeks flaring up with heat, Dennis tries his best to glare at Vigilante. “For your wound! I need to see if I have to dig a bullet out of you or not!”
As if just remembering that he’s wounded, Vigilante’s face looks like a lightbulb just went off. “That’s right! Yeah, sure. Hold on there, Denny boy.”
Denny boy? Dennis furrows his eyebrows, trying not to mutter out loud to himself. What the hell kind of…
His train of thought is derailed as Vigilante shifts in the backseat, reaching behind himself to grab the collar of his uniform top and yank it off. Vigilante groans loudly as he does, hissing through his teeth as soon as he drops back onto the backseat. “Fuck, bad idea—probably one of my worst ideas, really, next to that one time that I—”
Dennis tunes Vigilante out as he zeroes in on the gunshot wound on his abdomen, mouth twisting. He grabs the upper part of Vigilante’s torso and pushes him to the side, cutting him off mid-sentence, apparently, as his voice cuts out in a gasp. On his back, there’s the exit wound—which means that the bullet is probably in Vigilante’s uniform.
With a sigh of relief, Dennis places Vigilante back down and reaches into the floor for the first aid kit.
“Not gonna lie, I’m so glad I don’t have to go digging around inside of you for a bullet—I’m no combat medic like Dr. Abbot, so I can’t really do surgeries without the proper medical supplies. This first aid kit has just the bare essentials.”
Dennis rambles when he’s nervous, especially under circumstances like this. He pops open the first aid kit as he speaks, reaching for the stitching kit. When he turns back to Vigilante, holding a needle, ready to thread it, Dennis is taken aback by how red Vigilante’s face is. He’s staring at Dennis with wide eyes, his breathing a bit heavier now.
“Sorry, did I—did I agitate your wounds? I was just trying to see if there was an exit wound or n—”
“No!” Vigilante says quickly, shaking his head. “No, it was just, uh…” He clears his throat, seemingly embarrassed. “The way you handled me was pretty hot. I didn’t even mind that you were touching me—which is saying a lot, because I hate the touch of human skin, believe it or not.”
Dennis bites the inside of his lip, hoping that his face, or ears, aren’t too red. He swallows a bit and meekly shrugs his shoulders. “Sorry, then. The kit doesn’t come with latex gloves, otherwise I’d be using them to patch you up.”
He grabs some of the alcohol wipes and rips two of them open, wiping off both of his hands and then the front of Vigilante’s wound. Vigilante hissed again in pain, body twitching in reaction, but he otherwise doesn’t try to wiggle away, nor does he seem that uncomfortable.
“It’ll hurt a bit,” Dennis mumbles, threading the string through the needle and tying it off. “Sorry. No anesthesia just lyin’ around for you.”
“It’s cool, Denny,” Vigilante says, his head falling back against the armrest of the backseat door. “Not the first time I’ve had stitches this way.”
That’s probably not something he should be telling a doctor, but Dennis isn’t going to comment. He breathes in deeply as he steadies himself, and his heartbeat, placing his free hand on Vigilante’s stomach while the other gets ready to pierce his skin.
This is far from Dennis’s first time doing stitches. He’s had to perform a million of these surgeries before—both during med school on dummies and on real, living patients at PTMC. But this is his first time doing stitches on a patient who’s awake and talking through the whole thing.
And the thing is, it’s not annoying. If anything, the constant stream of Vigilante’s voice keeps Dennis grounded in the moment as his hands work quickly and accurately on his front wound. As Dennis reaches the final stitch, tugging it tight enough to stay but not so tight it’ll hurt, he ties it off and reaches back down to the aid kit to pull out gauze and tape. Dennis presses a piece of gauze to Vigilante’s wound and, finally, glances up at the other man.
“Hold this in place, please.”
Vigilante does so, not even hesitating as his hand replaces Dennis’s. Hands freed, Dennis yanks open the medical tape and applies it around the pad of gauze, then across it diagonally to keep it steady on the wound. Then he leans back and looks up fully at Vigilante.
“We have to turn you over,” Dennis says, placing a hand on Vigilante’s side. “But slowly and carefully. I really don’t want to have to redo the stitches that I just put on you.”
Vigilante grins at him, those dimples from before returning, as he gives him a two finger salute. “Got it, boss.”
With careful movements, and some help from Dennis, Vigilante lands on his stomach, feet dangling over the edge of the backseat. Dennis has to shift onto his knees between Vigilante’s legs, alcohol wipes already in hand. He cleans off the needle before he cleans around the exit wound, narrowly avoiding being kicked in the back by one of Vigilante’s feet.
“Dude, sit still,” Dennis mutters a bit harshly, pressing his hand down hard against Vigilante’s back. “You need to lay flat, or else the stitches won’t be able to hold well enough when you actually start to move normally again. They’ll be angled all weird.”
From above, he hears Vigilante sigh—dreamily? happily? whatever that was—as his body now relaxes as flat as it can be against the car backseat. Dennis shakes it off, huffing out a quiet breath as he presses the needle against Vigilante’s skin and begins stitching him up.
This time, Vigilante is much quieter, likely because he’s pressing his mouth into his hand or arm or something. Dennis is too focused on the task at hand, making sure that the sutures of the stitches aren’t too tight nor angled oddly—he wants to make sure that Vigilante will be able to move without accidentally pulling them.
With the last stitch in place, Dennis runs his thumb over the sutures, tugging the thread just enough before tying it off. He cuts the needle off and quickly packs the stitch kit back together. He grabs the gauze and medical tape and does the same thing he’d done to the front, pressing a square piece of gauze over the stitches and taping it in place. When he’s done, Dennis shoves the materials back into the first aid kit and sighs heavily with relief.
“Alright, we’re done.” Dennis says, shifting out from between Vigilante’s legs to kneel behind the driver’s seat. “Be careful when you move and get up, you could still easily pull your stitches out.”
Vigilante only groans as he slowly pushes himself up from the back seat, carefully turning himself around again. He sits up fully, leaning back against the right passenger side door, his head leaning back on the window. “I always forget how much that shit sucks when you’re not numbed. I’m gonna feel those for days.”
Dennis rolls his eyes, muttering under his breath. “If we’d gone to a hospital, you could have been numbed before the stitches…”
Vigilante groans again, shaking his head. “No can do, Denny. Hospitals would end up discovering my secret identity, and I can’t have that. One hospital knowing is already enough.”
“You’re not worried about me finding out your secret identity?” Dennis asks, raising an eyebrow. “And why do you keep calling me Denny?”
“What, you don’t like it?” Vigilante chuckles as he sits himself up, reaching for his uniform top. “I thought it was cute.”
Dennis lets out a long suffering sigh. His head is starting to hurt. He pulls out some of the wipes from the first aid kit and rubs the drying blood off his hands, grimacing as he stares at the drying patches of blood on the backseat of the card.
“Ah, shit… I really have no idea how I’m going to get out of owing a shit ton when I turn this car back in.”
“Oh!” Vigilante sits up straighter after tugging the top on, his eyes bright and way too excited. “My friends can help! We’ve had to clean blood out of places before. We’ll make the car good as new for you! And I can give you some money to help, just in case you do have fees.”
It’s a bad idea. A terrible one. Dennis doesn’t even know this guy. He really, really shouldn’t take up his offer.
But what the hell else is he going to do? There’s no way he can do it on his own, and Trinity is too far away. She can’t just drop ship and come flying out to him.
Dennis breathes in through his nose, trying to steady the anxiety in his chest.
Fuck it. He’s already gotten in this deep.
“Alright, I guess. Thank you for the offer—and the help.”
Vigilante grins as he waves a hand, reaching down to grab his helmet. “No problem at all, Denny! Here, let me tell you the address—”
(Two hours later, Dennis sits on the sidelines with two women named Adebayo and Harcourt, watching Vigilante and two other men scrub the blood out of the rental car. He tries to, as discreetly as he can, take a picture of Vigilante’s ass while he’s bent over before he sends it to Trinity along with a text:
trin, you’re never gonna fucking believe what happened to me.
His phone blows up immediately, making him grin, but he mutes it in favour of talking with Adebayo about his job.)