Work Text:
March 13th, 2025
6:30 pm
Starting a shift with your claw clip breaking and falling on the floor when a trauma arrived was the least of your worries and even to be expected with everything that could go wrong with a full moon—throw in an eclipse for good measure. They're been warning you about it since last month, even more so once you got your schedule learning you would work on this one, on the night shift to make matters worse—according to Dana, at least.
"Perfect, this is just great." You're already in a sterile gown and gloves about to head into Trauma 1 after Robby called you in to help.
"Stay still for a second." You can then feel Dana's hands twisting your loose hair up into a bun, shoving a pen in it pushing you on your way to the trauma room.
"Aw, you care about me." Better not to push her, she might stab you with the pen.
"I care about the patient's surviving rates with you having your hair on your face or dragging in his wounds. Go."
"Mean."
"And I want my pen back!"
"I'll think about it." You open the glass doors with your back, about to assist on your first case of the day before even officially starting your shift. The perks of coming in early.
Later on back in the hub once the patient is stable you catch Dana getting ready to leave, bag already in hand giving the board a last once over.
"You're abandoning us already?" You present her pen in two extended hands like a prize and she just shoves it back in her scrub's pocket. You'll need a locker visit for a spare hair tie or to borrow one from Princess when she comes in, also stuck in the full moon shift with you.
"Already stayed longer than I should have. Ellis just walked in someone with a hockey puck in a place that should never see the sight of one."
"You'd think they at least use the stick." How peculiar.
She cringes at you. "Spare me the mental image, see you in the morning, kid."
"Any words of wisdom for me tonight?"
"Now how many times have I told you not to willingly work nights?" That's not advice.
"At least a baker's dozen. Speaking on that, will you bring me a treat for surviving the eclipse shift?"
"I'll think about it." Unfair, you gave back her pen. "You stay out of trouble, okay?"
"No promises."
Trouble found you pretty quickly after that.
9:17 pm
Trauma 1 and 2 now occupied by four gunshot victims from a robbery gone wrong, ED and Surgery residents fighting for space elbow deep in blood until everyone is stable enough to either go to the actual surgery floor or the ICU.
"Isn't that an OR procedure?" You eye Abbot on the other side of the patient you share making sure you heard his instructions right.
"I like a challenge, and this is the closest he'll get to the OR today if I have any say in it." He nods giving you the go ahead with his usual steady eye contact, you'd have to ask him about that some other time.
"I heard that." Walsh calls up from the other room through the open inner doors.
"Good, glad you're here to assist in case we need the extra hands."
"You two love to piss me off."
"Always a pleasure." He then hands you the scalpel starting on directions right away.
11:32 pm
With your hair now in a neat braid—courtesy of Princess—and a fresh pair of scrubs on you finish a granola bar while charting before getting caught up on your next case. That is until the phone rings and Lena gives you a 'Sure you wanna work nights?' look before picking it up.
"Okay, two second degree burn patients coming in hot from a house fire, ETA five minutes."
"Did you really have to word it like that?" Charge nurse humor, Dana and her had that in common.
"Grab Dr. Ellis from 22 in a minute before you get out there."
"Heard." So much for a break.
9:21 pm
You try to catch a glimpse of the moon while catching up with Parker in the ambulance bay before the burn patients are brought in, not much visible at the moment with the gloomy skies. The eclipse is supposed to be the in its peak around 3 am, maybe you'll have better luck by then.
"Really, you didn’t see that? There was literal shit on the floor, he ran out naked shitting all over the place and escaped off into the elevator. Security had to run up the stairs and caught him on the abandoned floor."
"Gladly missed it the little while I was in triage earlier, probably. I'm sure environmental had a blast cleaning that up."
"Yeah, it was nasty."
"So where is he now?"
"Sedated in B.H." Oh, good.
"Great, let's hope he stays there. Heard about your hockey puck guy, how is he bearing?"
"Good as new to fall on more objects."
"Did you give him the flared base talk?"
"Always fun, right?" She doesn’t mean that.
"We need some educational pamphlets or something."
"Oh, definitely. How was triage?"
"Worse than usual, I aw a tibia after a clean ice skate slicing accident. By the way, never let me set foot in an ice rink please."
"Wasn’t planning on it." Your hang outs usually consist of a quick meal and gossip. Shopping around if you have the time to spare. After that the ambulance arrives and you two go back to work.
March 14th, 2025
1:03 am
Eyeing the board in search of a new case you notice there's a patient in pedes waiting on a Doctor, deciding to take him up you look at the the work stations searching for Princess catching her walking out of a hallway holding some supplies.
"Pretty Princess, can you help me in there?" You point back to pedes' general direction hoping she'll agree.
"I'll be right there, let me just get this blanket to a patient in 14 first."
"Okay I'll meet you there."
Now in pedes you talk to a not so worried mom about her 3 year old boy who's having a fun time with a toy car as you do initial assessments.
"You said he swallowed a silver coin?"
"Yeah I saw right as he did it." And she didn't think to stop him? Cool.
Princess comes in the room now stopping beside you ready to work.
"Okay, any chance it could've been a battery?"
She looks uncertain, great. Princess shares a loom with you as she finally answers.
"I don't know." Here we fucking go.
1:17 am
A crowd full of cuts and bruises comes in through chairs with more people arriving every few minutes and a fight seems to continue where it stopped before they came in as 'It was all your fault, asshole's and less tasteful offenses can be heard. You, Shen and Parker decide to divide and conquer, each taking a patient in as the other few wait to be seen after security comes in to set them straight. You go to Room 22, Parker takes 21 and Shen across you both in 16.
Your patient is calm enough, pretty girl in her twenties probably more than a few drinks in. A few blurred tear streaks ruin her perfect makeup and there's some blood on her shoes and sparkly dress but she doesn’t seem to mind it much as she types away on her phone with her good hand probably texting someone as you remove the improvised bloody bandage on her other arm to take a better look at her laceration.
"So what happened here?"
"I was on a boat and a fight broke out." She replies bored. Right.
"Sorry to intrude but what were you doing on a boat at this hour?"
"Oh, we had this boat party thing to watch the eclipse but everyone got super drunk including the captain, then it all just went to shit and the men started fighting, I got pushed to the buffet table and my arm got caught in a cheese knife stuck on a charcuterie board."
"Oh wow, okay. Well, it's better than a bunch of tiny pieces of glass like your friend next to us."
"Yeah, she fell on her knees after someone dropped a champagne bottle." How glamorous.
Setting up to give her stitches you notice you're out of your glove size with no other box to spare. Time to raid the shelves behind the twin rooms.
"Right. Okay, I'll be right back. Just hang in there, you will be good with a few stitches. I'll numb you up, shouldn't feel a thing."
"Alright. Can I have something to eat, please? I was too nauseous on the boat to have anything."
"Sure, I'll see what I can find for you, and we can work something out for the nausea if you're still feeling bad."
Glove box in one hand and stale sandwich and juice box on the other you stop by the hub to update a curious Lena of your case since almost everyone heard the fight breaking in chairs. Abbot ends up hearing the details too, standing beside her signing some papers.
"Eclipse watching boat party, can you believe it? During winter? I need to get out more, Jesus. Definitely not living life to the fullest of my potential." You wouldn't do that even if someone paid you to. Lena doesn’t seem very impressed.
"Then again you'd end up here, all banged up." Abbot looks up from his pile of documents.
"Worth the story. And you'd stitch me up nice and neat again, wouldn’t you?" He raises his eyebrows surprised at your quip but you don't give him any time to respond, heading back to 22.
1:33 am
"Will it scar bad?"
"Shouldn't be too bad, it's a pretty straight line, it will heal nicely if you follow everything I'll write in your discharge papers in a second."
Finishing up your suture you catch a man's voice coming through the closed curtain.
"I just wanna see my girlfriend, dude." He sounds aggressive, great.
"You can do that once I treat you, let's get you back to your room." You near Shen trying to appease him praying your patient isn't said girlfriend. As luck would have it today, she is. Or was, since she tries to dismiss him once the curtains are ripped open.
"I told you we're done. You're being an idiot, I don't want to see you anymore."
"Sir, if you don't leave right now security will escort you out, treated or not."
"Yeah I didn't want to come to this fucking hospital anyway."
"Then leave."
He has a temporary sling on his left arm and a butterfly bandage holding his right eyebrow together. Yet he insists on approaching you to get to your patient behind you.
Hearing yet another commotion Jack leaves the hub going to Room 22 where the argument seems to be coming from. He finds you cornered by a man in a sling being shoved back by John as him and your patient argue.
"Alright, if you’re done you can either leave untreated or get back in your room. Any more of this shit and it's gonna be really hard to reset your shoulder if you’re cuffed to the bed." He notices you relaxing once he gives the man a final shove out of the room and Shen takes him back to 16.
"You good?" He tries to hold eye contact but you avoid it this time around.
"I'm fine." Yeah, right.
"Okay, finish your discharge instructions and take a break."
"I don't need a break." Fuck, even he could use one right now.
"Yes, you do. And you?"
"Yeah?" You patient answers this time.
"No more boat parties." He closes the curtains after that.
2:03 am
Next time he finds you he catches you walking back and forth on the ambulance bay drinking water from a plastic bottle and looking up every few steps.
"What are you doing standing there by yourself?"
"Waiting for an ambulance to run me over, thought I'd make the night exciting before Shen says the 'Q' word again." You're trying to see the moon but you won't be able to from down here.
"You want your organs donated?"
"They’re not as pristine as they once were."
"I'll do my best to save what we can."
"Appreciate it."
He joins you once you rest your back on the wall. "Did you hear anything back about the kid with the battery?"
"They took him straight to the OR from imaging, I asked Walsh to call me once they were done, nothing yet."
He can work with that for how. "Did you eat anything recently?"
He doesn’t get an answer as your phone rings and your shoulders drop in relief as you listen to the other line. "Shit, okay. That's good, thanks for the update."
You hang up turning to him smiling. "They barely got it out before the battery started leaking, no damage to the stomach."
"That's great, good job on being quick before anything worse happened down here."
"Thanks, I better go inside. I want to tell Princess."
"Sure, yeah." You go in before he musters up the courage to tell you'll be able to see the eclipse better from the roof.
2:45 am
He finds you there in time to watch the moon fully turn red anyways.
"You're in my spot, Trouble." He should have given you the nickname earlier, it suits you and how you make him feel.
"I don't see your name anywhere." You don't even look back from the moon to tell him off.
"Easy fix, step aside." You do and he gets his pocket knife from his cargo pants, quickly carving his initials into the paint covering the railing. "There we go."
And you fucking laugh at him. "Who would’ve thought, Dr. Jack Abbot committing vandalism."
"It's hardly anything." He watches you fake offense at his territorial marking. "You're gonna tell on me?"
"I might."
"Those are cute shoes by the way." You look down as if forgetting you're wearing bright pink if not neon crocs with colorful shapes all over them."
"Oh my god, shut up." You laugh again. "John dropped his gigantic ice cold coffee all over me a few minutes before I came up here, my shoes were soaked. This is all Princess had to lend me, don't be mean."
"I'm not, I said they were cute. You plotting revenge on Shen?" You laugh at that again.
"No. It was an accident, he was very apologetic and nice about it. He promised me free coffee for a week, I might take him up on it. I still feel gross, though."
He then takes some antiseptic wipes from another pocket of his cargo pants handing them to you, watching you run them over your arms and hands.
"Thank you." He just nods at you.
"So how are you finding your first full moon shift? Anything to run by me?"
"Yeah, what the fuck is going on down there tonight? Everyone is acting insane."
"Where do you think the therm lunatic comes from?" He gestures at the reddish moon above you, smiling back at you.
"That wasn’t my fault earlier, by the way." The fight? He didn’t think it was.
"I know that, I was close by. Don't hesitate to call security in those cases."
"Yeah, lesson learned." You look calmer now, good. He takes a moment to really look at you in the pale warm light, your hair looks nice in a braid hanging on your back.
"I'm sure he learned his. I may or may not have reset his shoulder without any numbing."
You scoff at that. "You didn’t?"
"Sure did, gave him a real reason to dislike PTMC."
"I'm sure your patient scores will appreciate that."
"Oh, I expect a stellar review."
6:47 am
It's the morning now, you're finishing up your charting so you can go home sleep the day away. More tired than usual, in yet another pair of scrubs. Zoning out for a second you rapidly come back to your senses once a chubby baby turns a corner excitedly crawling freely in the not appropriate at all for babies hospital floor, she couldn’t be older than one. You scoop her up in a heartbeat.
"Where did you come from?" A happy babble doesn’t exactly answer your question. You massage hand sanitizer onto her tiny hands before she can take them to her mouth.
"Lena, where did we have a baby?"
She does a double take at you, clearly surprised at the sudden sight of a kid in your lap out nowhere, turning to the board trying to remember.
"There's a couple back in 22, mom is the patient. I think the dad had her in a car seat she probably escaped from, they must be asleep."
"Okay, we'll wake them up, won't we?" You wave her now clean little chubby hand at Lena. Full moon or not nothing would stop you from baby talking to a baby. As you turn around you almost run into Dana coming in.
"Dana, hi. Look what I have!" Carefully bouncing the baby waving ter tiny hand once again.
"Where did you find a baby?" She checks said baby's temperature over her curly haired covered forehead despite her lack of morning excitement.
"She found me, and I'm never letting her go."
"Sure. Give her back and get back here. I want the full debrief."
"Never, and you can't make me." You were going to do as she said anyways.
Back to central now holding your backpack ready to leave you give her all the details.
"Okay so it started with the puck, like you said, then it went downhill. We got GSWs, burns, literal shit everywhere which I luckily missed. Besides that, think of a bodily fluid, any of them, I've been covered in multiple all throughout the night. I think visited the scrub machine more times today than in my two and a half months working here. I was even soaked in coffee at some point."
"Perks of the job."
"Yeah, not fun. Nasty ice skates lac in triage, kid that swallowed a battery and a boat party group that came in fighting and left the same way. We had three or four births, I lost count after one set of twins. I almost got stuck in the elevator twice and the one minute of free time I got and decided to listen to music to decompress and stop hearing beeps one side my headphones decided to quit on me."
"That's it?" What more did she want to know?
"Didn’t get a needle stick by a millimeter. Just before I sat down to finish charting an unvaccinated toddler open mouth coughed on me in pedes, so that was great. The highlight of my night was definitely watching the Eclipse on the roof and that cute baby just now. I even took a shitty picture of the moon to show you. Look, I need a new phone."
She seemed to expect all that and more, looking from the shitty picture back to you. "And how are you doing about being superstitious now, huh? I'm sure Collins will love to hear about your shift."
"Just a little 'stitious'."
"And you still want to mostly work nights after all this?"
"Nothing beats being able to sleep during the day. I don't know, it just clicks, you know? There’s just something right at nights for me." Or someone.