Chapter Text
Natsuo's phone buzzes on his nightstand, and he sleepily rolls over to smack blindly at whatever notification woke him up.
He wakes up a little more, and glances blearily at the orange sunlight streaming into his room. He thinks for a moment, his mind stalling, before he decides that the angle of sunlight isn't quite correct for six in the evening. He yawns, flops back onto his pillow, and doesn't check what his phone was buzzing about.
This is, of course, when his phone decides to buzz again. He squeezes his eyes shut, willing himself back into the restful sleep that he was chasing, but it doesn't come before the next notification does. He sighs in defeat and opens his eyes again. It might be important, and that thought alone is what drives his hand out of bed and towards his phone.
He yanks the plug out of it and checks on who bypassed his damned do not disturb settings. Of course, upon looking, he discovers that it's nothing important at all.
Though, considering that it's 5:59 anyway, he may as well get up. He sits up, hunching forward, and turns his alarm off prematurely before he even decides to check on the app that decided to wake him up.
The app in question is nothing important. It's just a dating app that he downloaded in a fit of despair last night- this morning, technically, sort of- after getting home from work to an empty apartment. It's just an app that he forgot to modify the settings for before falling asleep, exhausted from his twelve-hour shift and more than well aware of his upcoming twelve-hour shift tonight.
There aren't any texts or emails, thankfully. Genuinely nothing important was sent to him between the hours of ten in the morning- when he finally collapsed into bed- and right now. At least there's that.
Habitually, he navigates over to his contacts, and lets his thumb hover over Kiyoko's number. He debates, long and hard, the same as he does every time he wakes up. He then clicks away, the same thing he does most of the time, and sighs. He then slides the phone menu over towards the damned app he downloaded this morning.
He's of half a mind to delete it off the bat, now that he's got the clarity of sleep behind him. He also holds a little bit of a grudge, since it woke him up a few minutes early, but he's not too upset. He wasn't fully dragged out of bed or anything, anyway. Besides- he's lonely enough. He hears enough from the other residents about their own engagements and weddings and everything, he should get started on that again, shouldn't he?
Kiyoko broke it off months ago. Nearly a year. She'd said that he'd been absent, which was true enough, and had been growing steadily more distant the further he'd gotten through residency, which was true enough, too. He can't blame her, now that he's had time to think her whole breakup speech over. He couldn't. She was right, but he couldn't fix any of it, really. He can't.
He sighs, and starts scrolling through the notifications that he got. The app in question- one he's already forgotten the name of- has one of those Love is Blind gimmicks, where photos aren't allowed and the only personal thing aside from the hook on a person's profile is their gender. Beyond that, it works much the same as Tinder, with the usual swiping for matches and in-app messaging that also disallows images.
Even names are frowned upon, with the app randomly assigning ID numbers to identify individual users. Natsuo didn't choose this particular dating app randomly, at least, considering that his Todoroki name and more-than-passing resemblance to his father would be bait for bad actors and Pro-Hero superfans to latch onto his profile without wanting anything more than, at best, a casual fling.
Given all of this, Natsuo had downloaded it, made his profile, hesitantly put his settings as seeking both women and men, and begun swiping. He's never dated a man before, or even really pursued one, but it can't hurt to try, right? Besides, he knows that he's into guys, in the intellectual sense. His search history would have a lot of explaining to do if he wasn't.
Leading him to today's notifications. He hadn't gotten many matches initially, since it was early enough in the morning that nobody in their right mind would be camped out on a dating app, but throughout the day, several of his right-swipes became matches.
He scrolls languidly through the profiles of all of his matches, noting more than one profile that seems like it was composed entirely by AI. He hadn't noticed it in his sleep-deprived state this morning, but he certainly notices it now. He promptly unmatches them, and checks again through his thinned herd of possibilities.
User 33590729 seems interesting enough. His profile is as minimalist as most of the others, without any of the optional bells and whistles like an embedded song or decoration or anything. It's just a quick blurb about how the guy plays video games and hasn't dated a 3-D person- his words- in a long time.
Natsuo figures that it's not the worst place to start, if he wants to weed people out.
hey
It seems simple enough. No need to act overly formal to a guy who probably lives in a basement somewhere and doing nothing but playing video games and drinking Mountain Dew. There is the fact that this dude is into guys, considering that he matched with Natsuo, but that's not much in his favor.
He waits for about five minutes, during which he scrolls through various other timelines, and receives no response. He mentally shrugs to himself, fires off similar greetings to some of his other matches, and gets up to start getting dressed.
"Alright everyone, are we ready to intubate?"
His attending- Dr. Kinoshita- asks the nurses around if they're prepared, if they've pushed the ketamine, and if there are any issues at all with just a single question. Natsuo's already holding the laryngoscope- considering that he's doing the intubation, not Kinoshita- and he's waiting for any negatives before proceeding.
"Todoroki, go ahead," Kinoshita nods at him, and Natsuo dutifully moves the patient's head to the best position for the blade. The camera on the curved blade shows a clear airway, with a visualized epiglottis, and he's ready to proceed. He grabs the tube that's waiting for him, unwraps it, and gets ready.
"Cords visualized," He reports as he adjusts the camera angle slightly. True to his word, he sees the cords plain and clear on the camera ahead of him. Kinoshita nods, and he goes in with the tube. He bags it, and looks over at Kinoshita, who puts the stethoscope on his ears. Natsuo has one free hand that he uses to listen to the patient's lungs, and thankfully, they sound fine.
"Clear breath sounds bilaterally," He reports, and finishes up the rest of the intubation procedure. He's done it dozens of times, more than enough to fulfill this specific requirement for residency, but he never says no when the procedure is offered. Kinoshita's also the sort of attending who will let her residents do as much as they feel like doing, not the kind who insists on having residents watch the first procedure of that kind of the shift, no matter how many times the resident in question had performed the procedure or the likelihood of another procedure of that kind being required within the same shift.
Cough, cough. Dr. Murakami. Cough. Natsuo's still mad about losing the emergency laparotomy last night, not that he would say anything to anyone about that.
When the intubation is done and the impending call to the ICU is more pressing than personally monitoring his patient, he peels his gloves off and walks over to his work station. It's 2:01 AM, he's about halfway through his shift, and he's feeling fully in the groove of things. It helps that he's off tomorrow, he has a mid-shift the day after that, and then he slides back into a few more day shifts for the last of his time on the emergency room floor.
When he's done with that, all he's got left are his general surgery requirements, which will be done upstairs. After that, he'll be a fully qualified attending, specializing in trauma surgery. He's got applications sent out to burn units across the country, with the most promising one just a ten-minute train ride from this hospital. He smiles a little to himself at the thought as he flips through the binder of phone numbers and extensions, eyes scanning until he finds the ICU.
He calls with the phone by his desk, rolling his eyes when he gets an answering machine instead of an answer.
"Hi, this is Dr. Todoroki, one of the residents down here at the Shizuoka University ED. I've got a patient down here that I'd like to talk to you about, if someone could call me back. Thanks," He hangs up with no further elaboration. Patient privacy laws are strict enough that, while he's heard some attendings give personal health information to an answering machine, Natsuo's been repeatedly told not to risk it. The same is true for everyone else in his rotation year.
He sighs, pulls out his phone, and starts searching through the schedule to see who's on the ICU tonight. Some providers require the patient to practically code before they'll stop kicking them to the MICU, and others are far more normal about the requirements. Thankfully, tonight's Dr. Aishi, who's a reasonable human being. He doesn't have to worry about arguing for ICU admission, which is something off his plate.
He takes a second to check his other notifications. Several from TikTok, which he swipes away without thought, a few from Instagram, which he swipes away with equal prejudice, and one lone message from that dating app that he doesn't know why he still has.
Strike that. Two messages.
He clicks it quickly, furtively, hoping that it's nothing explicit. Yeah, pictures aren't allowed, but people have been very detailed with their words.
hey
OW?
Predictably, gamer guy's first message to him is to ask if he plays Overwatch. Unfortunately, Natsuo understands the abbreviation on sight, and furthermore, he does play Overwatch. It is the worst game he plays, though- if gamer guy had asked about CoD or League of Legends, he'd have been personally offended and unmatched on principle.
As it stands, he types out a quick message before swiping the app away entirely.
yeah but im at work rn
His phone buzzes soon after, but unfortunately for gamer guy, the provider phone also rings at the same time, with a call from the ICU. That takes priority, by far, so away his phone goes while he picks up the ED provider line.
"Shizuoka University ED, this is Natsuo," He answers on reflex, still habitually awful at introducing himself as Dr. Todoroki unless he's actively thinking about it. It'll feel natural at some point, maybe, but today is clearly not that day.
"Hi, this is Dr. Aishi from the ICU, I'm responding to a page from Dr. Todoroki about room 2?" In addition to calling, he'd also put out a digital pager, as is standard procedure. It contained much the same information as his voicemail did, plus a room number.
"Yeah, that's me," Natsuo grins self-deprecatingly to himself, knowing that Dr. Aishi can't see it. "I've got a patient down here that I'd like to talk to you about, 38 year old female, surname Misora. Do you need the MRN?"
"No, I see her chart. Go ahead," Dr. Aishi, ever efficient, prompts him to give her a report, which he's happy to start on.
"Right, so Ms. Misora was found unresponsive at a friend's apartment about half an hour ago. Friend called 119, EMS arrives and finds her surrounded by needles and other drug paraphernalia. Pupils are pinpoint when they arrived on scene, they administered narcan, and pupils dilated. On arrival here, she's A and O times zero, minimally responsive to sternal rub, hypotensive and bradycardic. We've seen a little improvement on further narcan drip, but she's still not protecting her airway, so she's intubated at the moment. We're still waiting on her toxscreen, but it should be coming back any minute now." It's an utterly normal overdose case, identical to several others he's seen before. At least this one's still alive- the last OD he saw came in as a cardiac arrest.
"Quirk and lab status?" Dr. Aishi asks, and Natsuo checks the documentation to make sure of what he already thinks. Thankfully, he had it right in his head.
"Her bicarb is 9 and her pH is 7.28, but otherwise, her labs almost don't suck. Her quirk is mental, per registry, with no known metabolic effects. We drew the usual battery, is there anything specific you want us to do down here otherwise?" He probably should've had both of those data points in his initial blurb. He gets too involved in telling the story of what happened, which is best saved for his charts, not his debriefs.
"No, I'll accept her. Thank you," Dr. Aishi says, then hangs up. Natsuo plugs in the admit orders, turns to get up, and is informed by the charge nurse that Miss Misora already has a bed assignment. He glances back at his computer screen, and sure enough, she's changed color on the board and the bed status says she has one, albeit a dirty one.
Fucking efficiency.
He breathes a sigh of relief, knowing that at least Misora's a problem that's been solved. Not that he's free of other problems, of course- he's waiting on fluids to finish before PO challenging a guy in 17, waiting out a girl that had one too many weed gummies in 13, and has an abscess to pop in 26 as soon as Kinoshita's free to supervise- but that is the biggest and gnarliest of the night so far. He doesn't doubt that he'll have more big ones, but there's a strong possibility it'll be his only intubation of the night.
With that, he checks his phone one more time, knowing that Kinoshita's going to be back from checking on her own patient in a moment, and she does technically have to evaluate patients before he does any billable procedures.
There's a single response from gamer guy, which gets a little bit of a laugh from him.
gross
He closes his phone again, and gets back to work. He starts typing at his computer until Kinoshita comes back, he saves his work, they nod at each other, then it's time for an abscess popping. This one looks like it'll be a gusher.