A/N:

Hi All! Quick note before we begin- this is a sort-of fix it for K9+Smugglers+New Recruit. In all reality, Desi would have been dead or in an ICU very early in this episode, so for the sake of keeping the story intact, I super fudged the likely severity of her injuries (though not as much as the episode did, jeeze, there's not a scratch on her in that last scene!). Maybe one day I'll go back and completely re-write it. Also, this story features Gayle, an OC I made up for another one of my MacGyver fics, Rat Trap. Enjoy!

Her back ached.

It is physically impossible to dodge a bullet.

The pain in her chest was so bad that for all her training, she didn't get up.

At a top speed of 2,500 feet per second, bullets are fast creatures.

She was desperately unsure whether she was okay or not.

A couple hundred grains of lead and copper travelling that fast is more likely to kill than not.

She couldn't move.

Even a vest isn't a guarantee.

"Desi!"

She couldn't breathe.

Desi camped in an office with good visibility of the women's locker room door, pretending to work on her mission report. In reality, she'd finished it about 30 minutes ago- years of a report being the only thing between her and a bunk had made her a ruthlessly efficient writer- and now she was just waiting for some alone time.

The day had not, she reflected, been anything particularly thrilling by the standard of her life. She'd been in many a firefight, had similarly had to throw together missions at the drop of a hat, even found herself in a burning building a time or two, and whoa howdy, she'd had to carry out many missions pretending to be a lot less injured than she actually was.

There was a lot to learn about a new team, and what expectations they had around injury was a big deal in her line of work. On paper, team leaders were supposed to know every scratch or infirmity, and while she'd certainly been on teams where that was the norm, she'd also been on teams where if you could stand and fight, talking about an injury was a serious taboo. Being the first person hurt on a new team was like walking a tightrope- if she'd let on more than was socially acceptable it might earn her a reputation of being fragile, while sucking it up and letting on nothing might lead to needless suffering. Given her position as team protector, the former had not been an option she was willing to take.

But then that had also been a delicate topic to cover in the report. She liked to think she could read people, and Matty seemed like the kind of person who prided herself on caring deeply for the wellbeing of her subordinates. Desi wasn't entirely sure how she would take a report detailing the fact that one of her agents had taken 10 bullets to the vest and then proceeded to complete a mission. In the end, she'd said she was shot, just didn't explicitly detail how badly.

But hell, Desi had not enjoyed the day. Minutes after impact, she'd felt hard welts rise on her chest. All she'd been able to do without drawing attention to the injury was loosen her vest somewhat, but that had almost made the pain worse, creating space for fabric folds from her undershirt to rub against the raw bruised skin. Pain from movement had steadily increased, and by the time she'd kicked in the door- a conscious decision in case anyone had noted her lagging slightly- she was seeing spots in front of her eyes every time she turned her body or took a deep breath.

She'd determined that none of it had been life-threatening enough to bring up. Performance threatening, sure, and her expectation had been to be reprimanded during the debrief for at least one of the several times she'd noted herself slipping. It hadn't come up, and she was unsure if they had truly not noticed, or if they had chalked it up to her first day and would come down harder if it happened again.

Desi watched Riley exit the locker room, hair damp, and turn the corner toward the building exit. By her count, the room should be empty now. Gingerly, she stood, feeling her chest ache and her breath catch painfully. Reasonably sure no one could see her, she allowed her face to twist and she held onto the desk to keep herself standing as the spots on her vision cleared. Once they did, she made her way to the locker room and closed the door behind her.

"Anyone in here?" She asked, as friendly as she could. The room was a fairly generic, if well maintained locker room. A bank of lockers and a knee-high bench hugged one wall across from a counter with four sinks. Beyond that was a tiled section with three each of shower and toilet stalls. A shelf with clean towels, menstrual products, and found shampoo bottles was attached to the far wall. She could win a fight in here, no problem. Just to be safe, she checked each of the stalls, then came back and locked the door behind her.

Satisfied she was alone, Desi parked herself in front of the bank of sinks. She carefully shrugged out of her green jacket, and even more carefully pulled her damaged shirt over her head until she was staring at herself in simply the spent vest and undershirt. She worked the Velcro straps apart and more painfully lifted the heavy vest off her person.

She grimaced. Beneath the woven polymer of her vest, her undershirt was stained with blood where the impact of the bullets had forced the fabric into her skin. Worse, the blood had now dried, sealing the two together. She took a breath and steeled herself to pull it apart. The flesh below it had gone numb for a while after the bullets' impact, but the adrenaline had worn off and now she could feel the full pain of the injury.

She pulled a multitool out of her pocket and cut the shirt around the impact site, trying to jar the skin as little as possible. Around the swatch of shirt held to her chest by the dry blood, a reddish-purple bruise had already incorporated maybe a square foot of body surface.

Trying to make things a little easier for herself, she climbed carefully up onto the counter and sat beside the sink. Even that action had felt like something was grinding into her chest and it took her a moment to recover. She forced another breath and cupped some water in her hands. Leaning as far over the sink as she could, she worked the cool water into the performance fabric.

The coolness was welcome, both easing the hot surface of the injury and causing it to sting, pulling some of her attention away from the deeper, more worrying ache. Rusty blood loosened by the water dripped into the sink. Slowly, gently, teeth gritted, she began to pull the fabric away from her skin.

It was times like this when she was glad the vest was tight enough that she didn't need a bra. If her breasts looked this much like hamburger meat, she could only imagine what an underwire would have done pressed between her ribs and a bullet.

Before Desi could go any further, someone tried the door handle. Desi froze, trying to make no noise. If the person couldn't get in, she assured herself, the path of least resistance was in her favor- people would usually rather just find another restroom than figure out why one of them was locked.

The person knocked on the door. "Hello? Anyone in there?" A woman's voice, but not Leanna or Riley or Matty. She kept still, her hand shaking somewhat on the edge of the sink. The person would go if she didn't get an answer, Desi assured herself. The person knocked again, harder this time. "Anyone in there?"

There was a pause. Desi waited a few seconds until she heard the rattle of a keychain. What the hell? She couldn't run the sink due to the fact that this very tenacious person would almost certainly hear, so she gathered up the pieces of cloth and used them to wipe as much blood out of the sink as she could. Then, gathering up the vest, outer shirt, and jacket, she moved quickly and quietly into the farthest shower stall, pushing herself hard against the wall and letting the partially-open shower curtain hide her.

She heard the door open and a keychain being stuffed in a pocket. "Hello?" Desi forced her breathing to slow to where this intruder wouldn't be able to hear it. The adrenalin faded fast and the pain from the recent movement hit her hard enough that she had to work to contain a groan. She let the arm that was holding the vest slowly lengthen, letting the shower chair bracket take some of the weight.

"It's just me, Gayle." She listened to the woman walk over to a sink and turn on the water, then turn it off. There was a moment of quiet. She heard Gayle turn around and face the lockers. "Hey, I really don't care if you're not supposed to be here." The words were more cautious now and they hung in the air. Desi pushed herself harder against the shower wall. A trickle of blood and water dripped down her torso.

"Fuck it." Gayle said. "Listen, there's blood in this sink and I'm going to guess it's not natural causes. You're in the last shower stall on the left. I'm coming towards you, I'm a nurse and I'm unarmed, so don't kill me." Desi listened to the woman's footsteps as she came guardedly closer.

Desi wished she'd had the forethought to turn the shower on and pretend she just hadn't heard the woman come in, but it was too late now. "I'm gonna pull back the curtain."

Desi forced herself to relax as the shower curtain scraped open. Everything in her body was telling her this was the time to fight. But she knew hurting an employee would be worse for her reputation than a hidden injury.

"Hi, I'm Gayle. I'm really glad you're upright."

"I work here so you can assume I get to ask this question a lot, but quite frankly the answers never get old- why aren't you at a hospital?" Desi sat on the edge of a cot in the infirmary. Her chest had been cleaned and bandaged, and Gayle had made sure there was nothing immediately life threatening about her condition. This time of evening, the few left in the building were running more urgent missions and hadn't questioned her odd fashion choice of Gayle's XL orange scrub top over her black skinny jeans as they'd made their way down to the Phoenix's basement infirmary.

Desi shrugged. "I'm new. My insurance doesn't kick in for another 29 days." Gayle snorted.

"Unfortunately plausible but I'm gonna guess this is worker's comp, so try again."

"I might have told Matty I was fine."

"Fair." Gayle smiled as she cleaned up wrappers. "Hard being the new guy, huh?"

"There's a lot to work out, yeah."

"You know, teams change when a new member joins. But the team you're walking into is a good one- they have each other's backs. As someone who knows them unfortunately well," Gayle looked pointedly around her place of employment, "I can say they're not going to burn you for getting hurt or needing to take it easy once and a while. Also, they could really use that behavior role-modeled."

Now it was Desi's turn to snort. It didn't feel good on her bruised chest, and Gayle seemed to notice. "Shockingly I don't think that seriously broke any of your ribs, but I asked my medical direction put an order in at a 24-hour radiology place a few miles from here and a script for pain meds sent to the pharmacy you have on file. I don't want to keep you from that."

Desi stood carefully and pulled her own shirt and jacket over her injury. It was painful, but it didn't draw any attention, and that's exactly what she needed.

"Thank you."

"Just remember what I said about role modelling. Mac especially. Kid looks like he's got a papercut, have him come see me."

"Will do."