A patch

“Bloom? Bloo- Ah. Here you are.” Casey cracked open the supply closet door and, upon seeing Lauren sitting inside on the sleeper, slipped into the cramped space. “So uh- listen, we took care of the other patient from the accident. He got off the hook pretty easily - couple of bruises and two broken ribs. But he uh-” Casey kept on stumbling and if Lauren wasn’t so drained and numb, she would’ve seen something was obviously wrong. He looked painfully awkward, scratching his nape, and clearly steeled himself for the next words. They came out slow and blatant like each was an effort but also like he was making sure that she understood the implication. “The police are here. They wanna speak with you.” 

That got Lauren’s attention. She raised her face from where it was hidden in her hands and looked up at him with hollow eyes and hair ruffled from raking her fingers in it. 

“Wait, what?” She frowned. “The police? Why?” 

“Lauren…” Casey pleaded as though he didn’t want to say the rest and begged her to connect the dots herself. 

Lauren’s gaze hardened. 

“Why, Casey?” she emphasized, raising her stone-cold voice slightly. It should have been obvious at this point. This sort of thing happened way too often in the ED for her not to guess but Lauren needed to hear it said out loud. Icy fury was beginning to seep into her veins and she latched onto it immediately. The first emotion that appeared in hard situations was always the one she clung to like a rescue, a beacon of something in the vacuum she’d found herself in so frequently. Too many times that emotion was either anger or frustration. 

“We did his blood work and…” Casey sighed. “He was drunk, Lauren. Or more like, pissed.” 

“Drunk,” Lauren echoed, spitting the word out like it was scolding her tongue. 

“Yes.” 

“He was drunk and slammed into her head-on, nearly killed her and landed her in a cast on both legs for at least 7 weeks but,” Lauren listed slowly, purposefully, dangerously, “all he got were a couple of bruises and broken ribs?” 

“Please, don’t do anything stupid.” Casey started negotiating desperately with a steel look in his eyes. “Look, i can have some other attending talk to them. I can tell the police to get out of your hair and go straight to higher-placed guys. I can have him out of this hospital before Leyla even wakes up. Just… please, Lauren.”

Casey was familiar with her anger after all these years of friendship. He was aware she was an unstoppable force and there was no point in trying to quell it. Which was needed in the ED and often resulted in amazing things if she only channelled this energy in the right direction. The only problem was the same force that created, also had the very real ability to destroy. Casey was scared for her - Lauren could see it. 

She so wanted to gather all that anger and bitterness buzzing under her skin and just explode. But it wouldn’t help Leyla in any way. And the cops were already here, that drunk bastard wasn’t going to get away. Leyla was more important than some guy who had already single-handedly ruined his life. 

“Yeah,” Lauren finally muttered absent-mindedly. Casey raised a single brow at her. “Yeah, do that… Whatever you deem right. I don’t…. I don’t want to have anything to do with that guy.” 

“You’re not playing?” he inquired carefully, still not convinced. “Not gonna run off to strangle him the second I let you out of my sight?”

The silence hung between them for a moment as Lauren let Casey scan her face. See how defeated and tired she was. How her anger deflated in the face of worry about Leyla. 

“All i want is to be there for her,” she whispered and lowered her head. 

Casey crouched to her level and put a comforting hand on her shoulder. 

“The ortho is finishing up with her legs from what I’ve heard. Want me to go there with you?” 

Lauren gave him a small nod. 

“Okay.” He nodded as well, then stood up. “Let’s go then.” 

***

It was so quiet. Hospitals rarely were, even on graveyard shifts, and obviously, now in the middle of the day, the whole floor raised the roof with hums and beeps of the equipment and monitors, staff swishing by the room and yelling to each other, cars driving by and honking right behind the window. A nurse popped her head in a few times to ask if lauren needed help with anything. Lauren’s phone peeped a dozen time with texts from Casey apologizing for leaving her after he was called back downstairs. Iggy called and offered to come down. And yet, even with all these sounds, the silence was deafening in Lauren’s ears.

With Leyla, it’d never been quiet. Not even for a second when they’d been together. There was bickering and taunting, laughter and stories, sometimes fights and reproaches but there was always something . The new-found silence felt wrong. This was all so so wrong. 

Lauren hadn’t left Leyla’s side ever since they wheeled her bed into the post-op two hours ago. Her chin was resting on their intertwined hands as she watched Leyla and tried to match the image before her - of tubes sticking out of the woman’s body and violent purple bruises- to her memories - of Leyla’s laughter, stubbornness and strength. It didn’t fit. Was it really her? It seemed like the familiar warmth of Leyla’s skin was the only thing that kept Lauren on the ground. And although it was a selfish thing to do, it’d be a lie to say that any hesitation had creeped in before Lauren grasped it. It was an old habit to reach for her, an instinct. While the time dragged on, Lauren was thinking about how easy it would be to just lift their hand these few centimetres and plant a kiss on Leyla’s fingers, the same way she had done so many times in the past. Everything used to be so simple. Now she didn’t dare. 

In that awfully quiet room, her only companions were her own scattered thoughts and the cardiac monitor. Its steady beeping, telling her that Leya was here and stable, somehow wasn’t enough to ease her mind. It was killing her that there was nothing else she could do, and the only thing left was to wait. Patience was not her strong suit. 

God. She just couldn’t believe all of this. 

They hadn’t seen each other in months. And while it was the right decision to split up, at times, it took everything in Lauren not to just drive up to Baptist or lurk on Leyla’s social media, just to get a peek and see how she was doing. For the first time in her life, Lauren had made a healthy, reasonable choice but that didn’t mean she stopped caring about Leyla, not even a tiny bit. The longing was always somewhere on the edge of her awareness, even on days when she didn’t think about her ex and managed to push her to the back of her mind. That was human nature at its best - to miss someone, even though you were aware they shouldn’t be in your life anymore. We cared despite reason and, sometimes, despite ourselves. No truer words had ever left Lauren’s mouth than when she’d said she was going to regret losing Leyla for the rest of her life. 

And after all that effort for some resemblance of moving on, life in all its puckery dropped Leyla off at Lauren’s doorstep in the worst possible circumstances. It all seemed like a cruel joke.

Except it wasn’t. Not when Leyla’s eyes finally, slowly fluttered open with so much effort and they were the same dark eyes Lauren knew so well. This was really happening. A flood of emotions tore through her - equal part relief and anxiety. 

“Hey,” Lauren croaked out softly, throat dry after hours of silence. “How are you feeling?” 

The doctor in her got the best of her and she immediately stood up to examine Leyla. Or maybe it was just to busy her hands and mind with something, distract herself. How it also made for a convenient and fast excuse to drop Leyla’s hand, she made no note of. 

Leyla sighed and closed her eyes briefly. It took her a few seconds to muster up a weary, raspy answer. “Like a car smashed right into me.”

Lauren rolled her eyes teasingly, putting up a front but actually grateful for the joke remotely easing the flow between them. The corners of Leyla’s lips lifted just barely. The sight of it and the sound of Leyla’s voice after so much time rendered Lauren a bit breathless. She’d missed it. 

“May I?” Lauren asked, pointing to Leyla’s side after she took a look at her vital signs. She got a small nod in return. Leyla winced slightly when Lauren lifted her shirt, probably still a little tender, but the bruising looked much better. 

Silence stretched between them and Lauren filled it up by poking Leyla side delicately and humming in approval. She didn’t trust herself to speak, had no idea what to say. Leyla’s gaze seared holes into her the whole time. Lauren put off meeting it for as long as her thorough examination allowed it. Tough luck Leyla was a doctor and - even in her drowsy state - knew there was no reason to inspect her abdomen this much. 

“How am I?”

At Leyla’s weak whisper, Lauren’s hands halted abruptly and loomed over her skin. The words lodged somewhere in the lump in her throat. She couldn’t bring herself to recall this morning. 

“Lauren?” Leyla must have taken her silence for a bad sign. If only she knew the truth. 

Lauren raised her face to find unease and expectation in Leyla’s eyes.

“Tons of bruises and small cuts. A cut on your forehead but your CT came back clean, no pericranial haematoma or damage to the brain. Your legs… Well it looked worse than it turned out to be, thankfully. Your femurs were intact, they just had to put some rods and plates to stabilize your tibia in the left leg. All in all, you’re gonna be in a cast for approximately 8 weeks,  I’d say. And-” Up to this point Lauren managed to hide behind her professionalism, switching easily to the language and tone she used with all her patients. Until she reached the worst part of it. She harshly sucked in some air at the memories flooding back into her head. Leyla slipping through her fingers. “You had an internal bleeding, a bad one. I was just going to move you for the surgery when-”  As her voice grew higher and tighter around the lump, tears pricked at the corner of her eyes for the first time since Leyla had been brought in. 

Leyla frowned and weakly raised her hand in an impulse to graze Lauren’s cheek. Lauren so wanted to nuzzle into her touch but Leyla’s hand fell off before it could make any contact. Lauren squeezed her eyelids shut tightly, turning her face away so Leyla wouldn’t see the look on it. Some kind of tame broke inside her and she was drowning in the possibilities of what could have happened. 

“You were gone, Leyla, okay? Your heart stopped beating on my table under my hands and I couldn’t do anything and I- God, I fucking thought I lost you,” Lauren rambled, her voice on the verge of breaking all the time until it chipped off completely by the end. Leyla had this magic ability nobody else possessed to make her drop all her defences and open up like a helpless kid. Sometimes Lauren resented her for it. Especially now. Leyla looked so fuzzy and faint and it wasn’t fair to drag her into the mess of Lauren’s feelings again. They were over. She wasn’t Leyla’s problem anymore. I’’m sorry, I just…” Lauren got a hold of her tone. “I would never forgive myself if something happened to you under my care.”

The silence lingered between them. Lauren searched for Leyla’s thoughts in her eyes but she fell short. 

“But it didn’t. You helped me,” Leyla finally stated matter-of-factly like it was the most obvious thing in the world; like nothing at all had happened or if it had, she was already over it and Lauren should be too. 

Lauren just stared at her. Leyla shifted in the sheets at the lack of an answer. God, was Lauren making her uncomfortable? 

“It’s okay now, Lauren. I’m gonna be just fine.” 

Lauren nodded, hang her head and started fiddling with her fingers, unable to look Leyla in the eyes once again. She felt shame. Her dramatic panic and despair struck her as childish and over the top now. Besides, what right did she have to react that way anyway? 

“Yeah,” Lauren confirmed in a small voice, standing up from the chair. “I’m gonna let you rest now. Let me know if you need anything.” 

Too embarrassed to even asses Leyla’s expression, Lauren didn’t spare her a glance and shuffled towards the exit, ready to leave. Leyla’s small voice paused her hand on the door handle. 

“Lauren?” 

Lauren turned around, a frail spark of hope igniting within her chest despite herself.  

“Yeah?” 

Leyla opened her mouth, then closed it like she thought better of it. Some kind of conflict pursed her lips for a second. 

“Thank you,” she said ultimately.  

Lauren bobbed her head a little. “Anytime.”