Chapter Text
She had been doing better recently. It wasn’t going perfectly, but she was coping better with it all. Dennis had stayed at their apartment and only went to Robby’s occasionally to check up on his plants. She had patched things up with Garcia after the 4th and they had gone back to their normal routine. She still had a hard shift every now and again, that was unavoidable, but she found healthier ways of coping than she used to.
Today was an easy enough shift so far. She didn’t want to say the q word (quiet) just in case she accidentally cursed this shift into oblivion and it became hell on earth. In retrospect, she should’ve taken her chances.
She was, miraculously, almost caught up on her charting by now, but, by the end of shift, she knew she’d be behind again with the amount of patients she was picking up.
“Santos, broken arm for ya in south 5” Dana called out to her, approaching her with her arm outstretched, holding the tablet out towards her.
She sighed. “So close. Can’t you find someone else, Dana? I’ll even throw a pretty please in, just for you” she said looking up at the woman who seemed used to this routine by now and was taking none of it. She gave one look at Dana’s face and decided it wasn’t worth the effort to fight it.
“Fine, fine, I’m going,” she groaned out, relieving Dana of the tablet on her way there. She briefly scanned through the patient file to familiarise herself, autopilot already taking over. Broken arm should be fairly quick to take care of, and then she could finally go back to catching up on her charting. How wrong she was.
She rounded the corner and swung open the curtain, looking down at the tablet for the name.
“Mr Reyes?”
“Yes, that’s me, but please call me Gabriel. Mr Reyes was my father’s name,” he said with a little chuckle. She gave a polite smile and nod in response then continued, turning her attention back to the task at hand.
“Gabriel it is. I’m Dr Santos. So, do you mind telling me how you hurt your arm?” she said, taking the stool and sitting down beside the bed.
“It’s quite embarrassing and a long story really but I was helping my son move house and I noticed the lightbulb was broken, so I tried to fix it for him.” He went to shrug then winced as the movement jostled his arm. “Huh, guess it’s not that long of a story,” he said, once again chuckling to himself. He was definitely a rambler.
“May I?” she said, pointing to his arm. Maybe he was just nervous, she didn’t blame him. No one liked being poked and prodded, least of all in a hospital. Or maybe he was just like this. She couldn’t figure out which was worse.
She started the exam, inspecting his arm for swelling and deformities then moving onto the neurovascular exam to ensure the nerves in his arm were still intact. She ran through the checklist in her mind. Pulse distal to the injury, check. Skin colour and temperature, normal. Capillary refill, a little slow but otherwise normal. Sensation in his fingers, check. As she was going through this, she didn’t notice the man studying her intently.
“How’s your pain level?” she said, now looking up at him once again.
“It’s fine, the nurses gave me something for it earlier”
“Ok, well, I’ll be back to check on you but it’s most likely a closed fracture. We’ll get an X-ray to confirm,” she said, standing up from her stool.
“Wait,” he blurted out, “Do I… know you from somewhere?”
She shook her head, “No, maybe I just have one of those faces,”
He furrowed his brows, looking more certain now. “No, I’m sure I’ve seen your face before.”
“Ok, you think that over then and I will be back later.” God she just wanted to finish her charting so she could actually get off on time for once, was that so much to ask?
She turned and almost collided with someone entering the curtain who was carrying a coffee in each hand.
“Woah, you ought to be more-” the woman’s smile dropped as she registered the person standing before her. Trinity just stood there in the same fashion, same dumbfounded expression on her face before she also recovered. The man started looking between them, realisation seemingly hitting him as well. The resemblance. They had the same nose, the same eyes and they both seemed unhappy to see one another. More than unhappy. This was the type of reaction you’d expect when they hadn’t spoken, let alone seen each other, for over a decade. This was the last place Trinity was expecting to run into her mother.