Setting: Modern AU
Rating: T
Genre: Friendship, Humor
Characters: Musichetta, Bossuet, Grantaire, Joly
Word Count: 1,709
A/N: Here, take this out of my hands. I've been working on this for a week now. This whole thing was made possible by a tumblr post, and I direct all blame to the OP.
I'm the Dude
Musichetta knew she should've realized this day was going to be a complete train wreck the moment Bossuet slipped on the pavement soaked by that afternoon's drizzle and spilt the piping-hot mocha he was drinking all over Musichetta's favourite sundress while they were rushing to work. She did try to be angry at him, but then she knew that effort would be useless when Bossuet put on those piteous (and highly adorable) puppy-dog eyes that neither she nor Joly could resist.
Ah, hell, he owed her one now.
While being a telephone operator was already tough to begin with, being an emergency hotline operator was a different type of hell. Musichetta should know, she did choose this particular type of hell on earth as her job.
Musichetta suspected Bossuet's luck rubbed off her along with the spilt mocha when she noticed that all of the calls she's been answering all evening were tough cases (well, tougher than usual, it's a given that all calls to the emergency service were tough, after all). Loudly sighing as the last call ended, Musichetta stole a glance at the clock on the computer's display and almost threw her hands in the air when she saw the time. One fifty-nine in the morning. One more minute and she's free.
Unfortunately for her, her victorious grin turned into a frown just as quickly when the display showed a new incoming call. Whoop-de-fucking-doo. She was seriously going to throttle Bossuet for giving her his luck when she gets home later, Musichetta thought as she once again threw her headset over her head and put on her best operator voice.
"Hello, you've reached 911, what's your emergency?"
A slightly slurring voice answered Musichetta from the other end of the line.
"Hey, am I bothering you? I am, aren't I? Sorry, but I'm kinda sitting in a pool of blood here."
Musichetta quirked an eyebrow, not that the person on the other end could see that.
"Do you know whose blood it is, sir?"
The guy on the other end snorted then said, "Oh, it's mine. Though I might have given the other guy a bloody nose, so I'm not really sure at this point."
Well. This was interesting.
"Sir, do you know where the blood's coming from?"
To which the guy cackled and replied, "The stab wound on my hip, probably."
"What the hell?" Musichetta thought. Usually when she talks to someone who got stabbed, that would be the first thing they'd be telling her, although they're barely ever coherent, thanks to sheer, bloody panic. (Heh, bloody. She should tell that to Joly sometime.)
"So…" Musichetta said slowly, enunciating the syllable. "Have you been stabbed, sir?"
"Oh, yeah, definitely."
Musichetta face-palmed.
The dispatch phone was ringing. As the only two other people down at the quarters were dozing off (Bossuet didn't have the heart to wake up either of them; Pierre just came back from another call, and Marius was an overworked intern), Bossuet took it upon himself to answer it. He then regretted his action a short two seconds later.
"Hello?"
"Hey, B," Musichetta's voice said from the other end of the line. "Remember when you said you owed me for my dress this afternoon?" she said rather affectionately. "Well, it's payback time. I got a job for you. Some guy stabbed near the corner of…" she paused, probably checking her computer display. "32nd, near the Maclaren's Pub. Sounds drunk, too. In fact, he didn't even bother to tell me he was stabbed until I prodded. You'll like him."
Bossuet groaned at her words. "Ugh, 'Chetta. When I said I'd pay you back for that dress, I meant maybe take you and Joly out for a date after payday, not take some disorderly drunk off your hands."
Musichetta's laughter rang out. "Just go and make sure my caller doesn't croak due to blood loss," she said, voice laced with mischief.
"Aye, aye, Captain."
Bossuet sighed as he hung up the dispatch phone. Musichetta should know better than to send the world's unluckiest paramedic to a stabbing victim, right? Wrong.
At least, however unlucky he is in everyday life, he's never lost a patient en route to the emergency room before.
"Hey, Pierre," Bossuet said as he lightly tapped his napping partner on the shoulder. "We've got a new job."
Pierre whined as he opened his eyes. "But we only just got back! Can't you pass it to Enjolras instead?"
"Nope. 'Chetta personally called and gave this to us as payback. And besides, Enjolras went out for a different case," Bossuet pointed out.
"Damn," Pierre muttered. "So what's it this time?" he asked as he stretched out his sore arms.
"Someone got stabbed on the 32nd. 'Chetta mentioned the guy's pretty wasted, so this is probably a handful," Bossuet said as he shifted his attention to a bleary-eyed Marius, who was blinking away sleep like a barn owl. "Hey, Marius!" he yelled, eliciting a high-pitched squeak from the bedraggled intern. "Can you give the folks at the Perpetue a heads up? Tell them we're going to deliver a bleeding drunk over."
Marius nodded, then scurried away to Bossuet's errand.
Pierre laughed. "One of these days, that kid's going to quit because of the lot of you."
The Maclaren's Pub was a place Bossuet only ever saw from the outside, due to having an almost non-existent nightlife. It's not that he doesn't have the money (well, that's part of it, sure), it's because he always draws the short end of the shifting stick, ending with him having a perpetual graveyard shift at work.
Sure enough, Musichetta's caller was still there. On the corner of the alley beside the pub was a guy sitting on a pool of his own blood leaking out of his side. Said guy had a shit-eating grin plastered on his face, waving at the ambulance with the hand not applying pressure to his wound.
"Took you a while to get here," the guy said with a smirk.
"It's only been ten minutes since your call," Bossuet retorted.
"Name's R, by the way," the guy said, offering his unbloodied hand for a handshake.
"I don't really think this is the right time to be acting casual," Bossuet said as he took the offered hand then sat down beside the guy calling himself R to check the wound. "But R is short for what, exactly?"
"Oh, Grantaire. Self-explanatory there," R replied, with the last word coming out more as a groan when Bossuet poked at his wound to check its seriousness.
"Can you walk towards the ambulance, R? Or do you want to lie down on the stretcher?" Bossuet asked patiently, deciding that the wound, though rather deep, wasn't that serious. The blood loss, on the other hand, debatably so.
"I could maybe walk, but you'll need to pull me up. My legs have all gone to sleep," R said, stretching his unbloodied hand towards Bossuet, eyes glinting.
"Oh, alright," Bossuet said sheepishly as he took the arm. "Hey, Pierre!" Bossuet shouted towards the ambulance. "I need a hand here!"
Pierre poked his head out from the driver's side's window, eyebrow raised in question. Then shaking his head and laughing at the sight of Bossuet and R, alighted the vehicle and ran off to help them. By the time Pierre had reached the pair of them, Bossuet already managed to pull up a pale-faced R, who was leaning on his uninjured side towards Bossuet. Pierre then reached over to R's other side, supporting the rest of the weight with one arm and keeping pressure on R's wound with his free hand.
"I'm never going back to that pub again," R muttered as the three of them walked towards the waiting ambulance.
"In the first place, what were you even doing there today?" Bossuet asked.
"They have cable," R whispered.
Bossuet waited for R to elaborate when he realized he and Pierre were now carrying dead weight.
R had fainted.
"Morning, sunshine," Joly greeted as his patient of the night (or, he supposed, wee hours of the morning), groggily opened his eyes.
"Ugh, where am I?" R groaned, voice thick with exhaustion, as he tried to lift his right hand to shield his eyes from the glare of the lights.
Joly automatically swooped down and swatted R's hand away gently, before sitting down on the chair provided on the side of the bed frame. "Careful, you're going to pull out your IV line. Trust me, you do not want that to happen. You're in Perpetue. Do you remember what happened?"
"Uh, I got stabbed in the heat of an argument in a pub?" R suggested.
"Anything else?"
"Nope, not much. There was that 911 operator I talked to on the phone, oh god I sounded so dumb to her, I bet. There's also those two paramedics she sent. Wait. Did I faint on their arms? So embarrassing," R said in a rush, looking like he might blush if he didn't lose too much blood a few hours ago.
Joly was smiling. "Officer Theodule will be here in a while to ask you about the person who stabbed you. We managed to stitch up everything, and thankfully, you weren't stabbed in a major organ. Though there was a lot of blood loss, which is why I told you not to pull out your IV, we're still transfusing blood," Joly said as he lightly tapped on the blood bag. "What were you even arguing about in that pub?"
"Game of Thrones," R replied nonchalantly. "I was telling this guy that Benioff and Weiss' writing was bull and that GRRM's books were so much better, probably couldn't take the truth, so he stabbed me."
Joly was suppressing his laughter at this point. "Really?"
"Yep."
"Do you want me to tell you something?" Joly offered.
"Yeah, sure," R yawned, eyes starting to shut again.
"That was incredibly stupid. By the way, that operator you talked to? My girlfriend? And that bald paramedic? Our boyfriend," Joly was grinning.
R opened his eyes again in surprise.
"If you want to meet them before you talk to Theodule, they're both outside waiting for my shift to end."
R's shit-eating grin had returned. "Send them in."
A/N: I share R's opinions on GoT, and like R, I don't want to be stabbed.
