Day 5
(AU)
×愛×▬▬▬×愛×▬▬▬×愛×
Splitting headache, throw up barely washed out of his crocs, and in the heart of a double shift; Gaara was ready to regret every second of schooling that allowed him to practice medicine.
His rounds had been chaos ever since night fell over the Emergency Room of Nara Medical Hospital. During the evening, it was manageable; a couple kids with a break here and a sprain there, a few middle-aged guys that got a little too cocky with the power tools, an unknown allergic reaction had been the highlight of the shift before. After his return from lunch, however, it had all started to go downhill.
He'd always heard stories of ER’s being overrun with abnormal admissions during nights of a full moon, or even patient wards being unusually active, though he was typically one to dismiss them. Gaara wasn’t a man of superstition, he favored practicality and reason, but this night was testing him. He’d even heard of a commotion in the parking lot near the ambulance bay but hadn’t made it anywhere close enough to the doors to check. As the night progressed, they received a few minor car accident patients, the leftover fray of a barfight brought in by police, the last college girl to drink too much made it known all over his feet, and he still had five hours left.
Beyond ready for the end of his shift, he was tempted to say so when the on-staff doctor called him over to the triage desk. Shikamaru was fresh out of a four-year residency and had been hired on by his family’s hospital as a general practitioner. He was on duty in the ER this evening and, when Gaara responded to his call, he was looking over various charts and discussing something with the triage nurse while talking on the phone. Glancing over, Shikamaru nodded to Gaara and tried to finish up his phone call as quickly as possible.
Resting an elbow on the desk, Gaara looked outside the ER doors for the first time in hours; there looked to be some people gathered to the side, maybe there had been a commotion in the parking lot earlier, and a few distinct flashes illuminated toward the ambulance bay. He craned his neck trying to get a better view, was someone using a camera?
“Thanks for responding,” Shikamaru said breathlessly, pulling his attention. “I have to get scrubbed and assist in the last trauma to come in, I need you to take this patient.” He handed off a clipboard and pointed over to the occupied beds. The phone at the triage desk rang again and the nurse answered as Shikamaru continued. “Sounds like another fight, they might need stitches.” The nurse tapped the phone on his arm, intending to hand it to him. He took the phone and held it to his chest with an apologetic glance back at his RN. “You got that, right?”
Gaara nodded and Shikamaru turned to address the latest call to come in, expressing his haste just as much over the phone as well. It was going to be a long night.
Setting off across the unit, he weaved through fellow nurses pacing about, dodged a gurney that busted through a set of double doors, all the while glancing down at the notes on the clipboard. The patient; a recent admission with a blank name slot – odd, was in bed 22 and given how hectic his night had been, Gaara figured the injuries were serious if they were waiting for Shikamaru. Stopping by the wash station, he scrubbed his hands and threw on a fresh pair of gloves before heading over to the patient’s bed.
The curtains were drawn and, as he approached, he could hear a woman’s voice muffled behind the thin linin. “You could have gotten this taken care of already, but you didn’t want to. So, here we are.” She sounded disgruntled and he was sure he had another pissed off girlfriend after a street fight turned out poorly for her man.
Taking a deep breath, he readied his bedside manner, before pulling back the curtain.
He was anticipating the smell of alcohol, maybe a man sitting on the bed with a few dirty cuts or clutching an icepack to a swollen eye socket. He wasn’t expecting a woman hunched over the side of the bed with a messy head of pink hair pulled back in a high ponytail, a headband keeping the strays out of her face. Her skin was flushed and she looked a little dirty, maybe sweaty, and she wore just a plain sports bra and a pair of grey sweatpants. Instantly upon taking in her appearance he had noticed the toned ribbons of muscle that stretched down her arms, how defined her shoulders were against the curve of her neck. When she looked over to him as the curtain swished aside, her green eyes bright under the fluorescents, his throat went dry and his greeting died on his tongue.
She stared at him for a moment and he froze as she did. Her face was red and blotchy, she had an icepack held to her right cheek – her hands wrapped with craps of dirty athletic tape, and he could see now that she wasn’t covered in dirt; she was covered in bruises.
“Um, hello?” she asked quizzically, lowering her icepack and letting the bloody gash along her cheek finally come into view.
“Who the hell are you?” asked the woman standing to the side of the bed.
Gaara looked over and saw an older blonde woman staring him down as well, she had a phone in one hand and the other was on her hip, looking impatient and perplexed. “Oh, um, my apologies,” he stammered as he stepped closer to the woman on the bed. “My name is Gaara, can you tell me about what brings you in tonight?”
“Well, he’s bright,” the blonde woman sneered to herself, displeasure ringing clearly in her voice, before asking, “Where’s Doctor Nara?”
Gaara glanced back to her as his patient turned her cheek and presented her injury to him, well…the worst of them at least. “Doctor Nara is on an important call,” he explained.
The woman scoffed, already dialing some number into her phone. “What’s the point of even bringing her here when we can’t see him?” She held the phone up to her ear, grabbed her purse and placed a hand on his patient’s shoulder. “I’ll sort this out and find you something to drink, be right back.”
She left the bedside and the linen curtains swished closed behind her, leaving Gaara cut off from the rest of the ER and alone with his patient. The atmosphere suddenly felt heavy. He’d seen people come in as beat up as she was before, worse even, but she sat with such a languid posture, so aloof to the chaos around her, it was like she was completely unbothered.
“What’s your name?” he asked, taking a cotton swab from the small utilities cart and soaking it in alcohol.
She squinted at him as she glanced over, but didn’t turn her head as not to interrupt him. He began dabbing the dried blood from under her eye and where it had dripped down her cheek. “You don’t know?”
“Somehow, your mom filled out your paperwork without a name.” He pulled back the alcohol swab when she cracked a smile and laughed.
Such a pretty smile for such a bloody face, his heart started to thump in his chest. He supposed his other patients hadn’t been quite like her though; she was calm, alert, she wasn’t even flinching when he dabbed the dried blood away from a tender bruise forming around her right browbone.
“Figures,” she sighed, that faint smile still present, and introduced herself. “Sakura Haruno, and she’s not my mom; she’s my agent.”
Throwing out the used cotton, Gaara grabbed another and continued cleaning the area around her wound. “Your agent?”
“Yeah, she knows the Nara’s and took me here to keep a low profile from the media. I’m a professional MMA fighter,” she explained casually, smirking a little when Gaara’s eyes widened.
“So, all this…” he said, alluding to her current disheveled state.
Sakura nodded, grinning. “Just another day on the job,” she bolstered with a click of her tongue. “I just finished my regionals tour with another victory, too. You should have seen my opponent tonight.”
“This isn’t an assault, then?” he asked just to clarify.
She shook her head and dismissed the notion entirely.
Using all of his professionalism to keep it hidden, Gaara felt a heavy wave of relief; he always appreciated knowing he didn’t have to make a good-will phone call to the police. “I think she’ll be disappointed to see you may have drawn a crowd either way.” Sakura snickered; he wondered if she was used to the attention. “Did your agent say something about letting this go untreated?” Gaara continued.
Sakura nodded, scooting back on the bed a little. She dangled her legs off the side, bouncing her heels against the frame, and waited for him to follow the step toward her; watching him all the while. He paused, looking down when he repositioned his feet, and he became very conscious of the defined silhouette of her thigh when she nonchalantly knocked her knee against him, playing it off as an accident. He swallowed as he proceeded with cleaning the wound and the surrounding area of her Zygomatic region, suddenly remembering that he hadn’t showered in two days and he was 8 hours in to his third double shift that week. Hadn’t someone thrown up on him earlier?
“I didn’t want to wait around for the other girls to get treated,” she explained. “First come, first served, and when you’re the winner; everyone wants to take your picture and get a post-fight interview. Plus,” she said, absentmindedly wetting her lips. She looked him up and down and he was sure he was sweating now. “I love my job for the sport, not the press, so I don’t like to stick around for picture time after fights.”
He cleared his throat and stepped back to welcome some air between them. “How’d you get the laceration?”
Her eyes bore into his and he pondered if he’d ever found a woman in such a state as beautiful as she was frightening before today. “You don’t get to my level by fighting pussies; I got kicked in face.”
God, Gaara thought as he looked down to the trash bin and threw away the used cotton swab. She could eat me alive. “You’ll need a suture,” he said, hoping she wouldn’t notice the slight waver in his voice as he returned to the medical cart and began opening drawers, looking for something that wouldn’t mar her face any further.
From behind him, Sakura lounged back on the stiff emergency room bed and drank him in; tall and lean, broad shoulders and dark red hair. She liked his voice catching a little, and he was cute when he was nervous, too, probably didn’t even notice that he’d been starting to blush. She grinned to herself, her tongue probing somewhere on the inside of mouth, the dull taste of iron, and her next words were smooth and quiet between them. “You gonna stitch me up, Doc?”
Gaara nearly dropped the packet of butterfly sutures when he heard her voice drop. Steadying his hands, he was thankful he didn’t need any needlework for this one, and returned a sheepish, “Sorry,” as he turned around. “I’m just your nurse.”
He froze in place once he fully faced her, jaw locked shut, sure that his eyes had gone wide.
Leaned back as she was, he could see the toned plane of her stomach give way to the soft curve of her breast, see the fabric of her sweatpants pull against the shapely muscles of her thighs as her knees swayed back and forth. Sakura popped her tongue and the sound punctuated an anxious sweat precipitating at the back of his neck.
Like she didn’t even feel the cut on her cheek, Sakura let a sly smirk pull at her features and, with that same low and raspy voice, said, “Even better.”
×愛×▬▬▬×愛×▬▬▬×愛×