Healed Under The Mistletoe

For the past year, he’d felt very little, aside from bouts of irritation and maybe a little paranoia, both of which served his purposes. Kept him sharp. He got irritated with people because stupidity and incompetence were pet peeves, and he paid close enough attention to his surroundings and everyone around him to stay safe, so he saw all the stupidity that went on. None of that inspired his libido.

Even before the shooting, he’d suspected violence and darkness lay at the heart of every person on the planet. That event had just driven the point home. Even the wide-eyed nurse practitioner changing in the other room had something wrong with her, deep down. Never mind her timid manner. Innocent masks were still masks.

He had darkness, he knew. Wolfe had it. Most people tried to fight that darkness, most of the time, or used coping mechanisms to cover it. Wolfe’s jokes and sarcasm. His minute-by-minute reminder of the need for restraint and vigilance.

He checked his watch just as the second hand rounded twelve again. Three minutes past his two-minute limit.

No one took that long to change into scrubs. It was two simple pieces of clothing and a change of shoes.

He knocked on the door, as if it weren’t a large public employee space, and before the sound had stopped resonating in the wood, his comm buzzed, a broadcast message immediately following. Four words.

All hands on deck.

His gut tightened.

All hands.

Departmental code for large-scale emergencies, when they expected to receive more patients than they were equipped to deal with. The kind of numbers that could only constitute a large group tragedy.

Right. Time for civility was past.

Decision made, he pushed into the locker room.

“Sabetta, what the devil is taking you so long?” He rounded the corner and found her wearing the scrub bottoms and shoes, but nothing above that save for a lacy pink bra that momentarily wiped his brain of any other thought besides the desire to stare, and absorb how delightful the pale pink lace looked against her tanned skin.

She had one foot braced against the locker beside hers, her blouse clamped between her elbow and her ribs, and both hands on the locker’s latch, trying to wrench the thing open.

“It’s stuck.” She sounded breathless, as if she’d been fighting it for a while.

Slower than he’d like, his brain started to work again. He could either ask for details, spend time opening it himself or deal with it later.

All hands.

Deal with it later. That would get her clothed the fastest and time mattered.

“Put your top on,” he bit out, dragging his gaze away, and opened his own locker instead of even attempting to wrestle hers into submission. As soon as he had it open, he began shoveling her things inside.

“If there’s anything in here you need, speak now. We’ve got a large emergency to deal with. They’ve called all hands, which means even other departments send down whoever is free to assist. We need to go.”

She stopped everything, maybe even breathing, for long enough that he had to look at her and found her eyes too wide again. And focused on him.

This was a mistake. She wasn’t up for this.

Her eyes were rich chocolate, and the innocence he saw sucked him in. He protected others from danger, should he be protecting patients from her? Or her from rushing into the deep end before he knew she could swim?

Whatever she was thinking passed, and it really had only been a couple of seconds before she started moving again, tugging her shirt in place and thrusting her hand into his locker to grab her stethoscope, a pen and her phone from her bag.

“I’m ready.”

Another lie. But then again, it was the same lie he told himself every morning at the start of shift, when the double doors that cordoned off Emergency from the rest of the hospital felt like gates to a bloody battlefield where he was going to drag off bodies.

No. She wasn’t ready. But he didn’t have time to coddle her.

As soon as they hit the hallway, he sped up to run down the three turns it took to reach Emergency, with her following close behind.

Another thing he had no time for: dropping her off with Backeljauw to find a new sitter. That would have to come later.

No sooner had he reached the monitoring station than he had to step aside for a stretcher and team to roll past. The man on the stretcher had dark red compresses and bandages held to his abdomen. Conley headed the team, but, seeing him, nodded, which he took as a request to follow.

“Sabetta.” He said her name, leaving her to figure out what she was supposed to do, and hurried off with the team.

Abdominal bleeding. A mass event. His mind could supply only one cause. Was this it, what his gut had been warning him about?

“Was it a shooting?” he asked Conley when he caught up, prompting her to begin her report there, since she was obviously wanting to hand the patient off. Pediatric emergencies were a little different from this kind of trauma.

A look flashed across her bonnie freckled face, confusion and then sympathy, but she shook her head. “Subway derailed. Yours is in triage.”

She knew. His brother had obviously been sharing, and Lyons didn’t have the mental currency left to be angry about it.

Derailment. That could still be a man-made incident, but it wasn’t a gun. It couldn’t follow into the department and begin attacking personnel, unless it had been orchestrated and was the first step in a larger plan.

He turned, nearly trampling his unfortunate shadow, and had to grab her shoulders to stop them both making more of a mess of this. She grabbed his forearms in return, back to the wild-eyed stare as he took a breath and put her to the side to step around.

He pushed the tingle spreading from the center of his palms and hot on his arms from his head and jogged to meet the next stretcher coming out of triage.

Tingles didn’t matter. The delicate, fragile-feeling slender shoulders on his new colleague didn’t matter either. His too-young new colleague.

She kept up this time.

“What have we got?” he asked the nurses and paramedics rolling with his new patient.

“He was standing, and when it jumped track, he flew. Person from behind him hit him right after.”

Crushing damage.

“Name?” Sabetta asked, reaching for the chart as they ran alongside the stretcher.

“Samuel Riggs.”

“Mr. Riggs?” she called in his ear but got no response. “How long has he been unconscious?”

“Since it happened, probably. Uneven pupils, he’s breathing too fast. Tachycardic,” one of the paramedics filled in as they wheeled into the treatment bay.

“Get his shirt off.” Lyons gloved and reached for his stethoscope.

She beat him to it, listening to the patient’s heart while the others in the team fell in, taking the steps he didn’t even need to order at this point. Get an IV started. Hook up the telemetry to monitor vitals.

A good sign, not freezing up as he’d half expected.