Chapter 1
Steve frowns as he walks to the nurse's station and sees the empty waiting room. It's the beginning of his eight hour night shift on Thanksgiving and the lack of chaos in the ER is a bad omen. There's always freak accidents and cooking related injuries on Thanksgiving, so the quietness is unsettling. He picks up the tablet and checks to see how many patients are already in beds. There's only 3: an adult Male with the flu admitted for IV hydration, an elderly woman waiting for scans to come back to see if her arm is broken, and a young woman… with no last name? That's odd, Steve thinks as he checks the chart again. It reads: Skye. Female. 23. Admitted for lacerations across lower back, a twisted ankle (right), and potential hypothermia. There’s no other information so she must not have been checked out yet. As the head ER nurse, May, walks up behind him, Steve puts the tablet down. She asks, “I’m about to head out, are you going to be okay here alone for the next three hours? Hope’s shift doesn’t start till two?”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine. Go see your family before Thanksgiving’s over.”
“We’re celebrating tomorrow, but thank you.” May’s almost out the door when she stops and turns around. “Oh, by the way,” she tells Steve with exasperation in her voice, “the girl I just took back? Don’t encourage her. She’s in here all the time.”
“Is she fishing for drugs?” Steve asks. The injuries don’t really match up with a junkie looking for a hit, but he’s been working this job too long to make assumptions about the lengths drug addicts will go to.
“No. She just has no sense of self-preservation and a bit of a wild streak.” Steve thinks he may have seen a look of admiration on May’s face, but she turns and walks out before he can tell for sure.
He grabs the tablet and walks back to bed 4 where Skye is, stopping to grab his supplies on the way. Pulling back the curtain he expects to see a miserable girl cold and in pain. What he sees instead takes his breath away. The most beautiful girl he’s ever seen in real life sits on the edge of the bed, swinging her legs and smiling to herself. She’s soaking wet and shivering a bit, but her soft brown eyes are warm. She giggles at his dumbfounded expression and he shakes out of his stupor.
“Hey there, Soldier,” she says in a delighted and teasing tone.
Steve stutters, taken aback, “How… how did you know that?” Steve racks his brain trying to recall if they’ve met before, but he’s sure they haven’t. He couldn’t forget her. “Do I know you?” he says a bit frantically.
“Don’t worry, I’m not a stalker or anything,” she says joking. “It’s not hard to tell, you know? You carry yourself like someone with tactical training and since you’re clearly not a cop, I just assumed military.”
“I was in the Army. That’s impressive, most people don’t realise it on their own.”
She smirks at him, “Well, I’m not just anybody.”
“No, you aren’t,” he says softly. Steve blushes at his unprofessional slip, but pushes on before the situation can get any more awkward. “So, how’d you get hurt?” he asks and begins to take her vitals.
“I fell through a not-so-solid frozen pond while trying to skate. It was just an accident.”
“An ACCIDENT!?” an angry scottish voice yells from the doorway. “It wasn’t a bloody accident, ya just have a death wish!”
“Fitz, I didn’t break the ice on purpose!”
“No no! You just can’t go one day without risking your life!” Fitz takes a calming breath and turns toward Steve. “I just got back to the city from Thanksgiving with my aunt in Buffalo, and I decided to take Skye out for a late dinner since she had no plans. She decided to work all day though, so I drove to Stark Tower, where we work, and picked her up. But she can’t see anything dangerous without making it into a bloody challenge so she decided to slide around the frozen fountain in the quad! And of course she fell on the ice and it shattered beneath her! She’s trying to give me a heart attack or something!” Skye scoffs and he whirls around, “You were under the ice for THREE BLOODY MINUTES!”
“It wasn’t that dramatic,” she says to Steve blandly. My head just barely ducked under and I was only in the water for a few seconds. I wouldn't have even come to the hospital if it wasn’t for Fitz losing his mind. It was probably just a ploy to see his girlfriend anyway.” She mumbles the last part under her breath, but without malice. In fact, she’s still smiling cheerfully for someone who just got lectured. Steve can’t help but like this girl, she has spunk. He’s a little worried though, her temperature is lower than it should be and he can see a bit of blood that has begun to seep through her shirt. He chastises himself for getting distracted by their argument.
Getting back to work, he hands Skye a hospital gown. “Why don’t you put that on to get out of your wet clothes and I’ll go grab a suture kit. It looks like one of the cuts on your back is going to need stitches.”