A/N: I should be studying for finals but I had an idea and well... it's become a Thing. This will probably be way more chapters than it needs to be. Hope you like it.
Some mornings start with sun shining on your face, and leisurely getting ready for work while you sip the cappuccino you actually had time to make. Some mornings start by realizing you're going to be late to the first day of your new job. Sirius Black, who was running out of his apartment not even bothering to make sure he was wearing matching shoes, was experiencing the latter.
He downed his iced coffee in two gulps and threw the empty cup onto the floor of his car as the wheels screamed on the parking lot asphalt. Jumping out of the driver's seat he ran half way across the parking lot.
"SHIT!" He had forgotten his lab coat. Running all the way back to his car, which he had also forgotten to lock, he grabbed the coat and sprinted back the way he had come.
His hands frantically trying to pull his hair back into a bun- did he remember a hair tie? Oh thank god- he used his elbows to push through the front doors of St. Mungo's hospital, crashing into the nearly silent lobby.
Heads turned.
He straightened up, adjusted his lab coat over his scrubs, and walked over to the group of people staring at him that he assumed were his new co workers.
"Hey, uh, I'm guessing we're all the new interns?" He tried not to sound out of breath.
"You have coffee on your coat." The girl who spoke was tall, with red hair that she had neatly tied in a knot at the base of her neck. Her lab coat read 'Evans'.
"Uh, no." Sirius licked his thumb and rubbed at the brown spot on his left pocket. The cup must not have been empty when he threw it on the floor. "It's blood," He lied. "We're doctors."
"Actually," A tall, stern looking woman in her early thirties was fast approaching them. She towered over the lot as she got closer, the frown she wore not quite masking her rather pretty features. "You're interns."
The General.
The legend preceded the woman, all of the interns standing before her knowledgeable in the horror stories that followed the General around. Get on her good side, and you'd have your pick of surgeries. Get on her bad side and your life would be hell. Either way, for the next year, she owned each and every one of them.
"My name is Dr. Mcgonagall and I am your Resident in charge. You can call me the General, you can call me Mcgonagall, you can call me whatever, but when I call you, you come running. Understand?" She smiled, as if her mere presence didn't send chills down each of their spines.
They nodded.
"Evans, Pettigrew, Black, Mckinnon, Macdonald." She read the names off their coats, checking that everyone was in attendance. "Let's move." She strode off quickly.
"There goes the general..." Evans whispered.
"Rise up." Sirius whispered back, earning himself a grin and a nod.
Mcgonagall's height gave her a stride so impressive that each of them struggled to keep up as she wound through the hospital.
"Forty-eight hour shifts, huh?" The small, clumsy looking boy next to Sirius piped up. His coat read Pettigrew. "I'm gonna die."
"We knew what we signed up for." 'Macdonald' chastised, her long dark ponytail swishing behind her. She didn't seem to be one for chit chat.
Sirius could already see the intern hierarchy forming. It looked like Evans and Macdonald were going to be the ones to look out for. He could probably outperform Pettigrew in his sleep. Mckinnon he still wasn't sure about.
The group stopped at a nurses station on the second floor, facing a whiteboard on the wall, full of names, times, and medical jargon.
"This is the schedule board." Mcgonagall explained, gesturing to the surgery schedule on the wall. "Impress me this week and you may find your own name up here by Friday."
Everyone's eyes went wide, as glances were thrown around the group. It was kill or be killed now.
"Here's how your day will go. I have a surgery in ten minutes so I'm sending you down to the pit. Any misbehavior, any mistake and I'll hear about it. Just because I'm not there doesn't mean you aren't trying to impress me. I've told the other residents they are free to grab you for their services today. Each of these people are exponentially more important than you are, do you understand? If someone asks for you, you drop what you're doing and go." Mcgonagall briefed them as she tied a scrub cap over her hair.
They stared at her in obedient silence. Her brow furrowed. "Don't just stand there, get moving!"
Feet hit the ground running...and kept running, down several hallways that all looked exactly the same.
"We're fucking lost." Macdonald spoke, as they passed the same nurses station for the third time, the nurses chuckling softly as they watched them pass.
"We're fucking what?" Sirius said. "The hell are we following you for, then?"
"Well, if you don't want to be lost anymore, by all means lead the way."
"Guys, what's the pit?" Pettigrew asked awkwardly, scratching the back of his head. He didn't even know where they were trying to go.
"For fuck's sake, It's the emergency room. Is this your first time in a hospital?" Evans was just as frustrated as the rest of them. "Let's just ask a nurse…"
"If you want to look incompetent on your first day, by all means…" Macdonald rolled her eyes.
"Oh my god." Mckinnon, who had been quiet so far, marched herself right over to the nurses station, and casually leaned herself up against the counter. "Ladies, I so hate to interrupt the show we've been putting on for you, but could possibly point us in the direction of the pit…"
One of the nurses listed off some directions, pointing down various hallways, all the while trying to keep her laughter at a minimum.
"Thank you," Mckinnon blew her a kiss, and then looked back at her coworkers, making a circling motion in the air with her finger. "Let's go dumbasses."
5 minutes later they arrived at the destination they should have found half an hour ago.
"What's the trauma resident's name again? Fletcher?"
"I think it was Floyd…"
"Frazier?"
"Flitwick." Everyone's heads turned, looking for the source of the voice. "No, no. Down here."
The man was...three feet tall. Sirius, and the rest of his new found frenemies, stared in shock at the man that looked like he had to buy his scrubs at a costume store. The shock must have been apparent on their faces.
"Never what anyone is expecting, I know. Mckinnon, there's a lady in bed 3 who could use sutures. Black, I need vomit bags for bed five…" Flitwick rattled off orders to each of them and they scurried off to do their various tasks, still trying to figure out if the tiny but intimidating man was real.
The next hour or so became a full fledged competition of who could smile the hardest, suture the fastest, and avoid vomiting patients the most diligently.
Sirius took immense pride in the compliment he received from Flitwick on his bedside manner, and the pout from Macdonald that came with it.
Evan's was handling the stress of the bustling emergency room spectacularly, earning jealous glances from both Sirius and Mckinnon as they waited in the bay for an ambulance a few minutes out.
"I don't know if I want to be her or fuck her." Mckinnon said as she watched Evans tell a little kid jokes to distract him from the gash in his mom's leg she was sewing up. Sirius's head cocked in surprise.
"Homo?" He asked, the tone of his voice implying that he answered to the same term.
"Homo." She confirmed, and they nodded. The ambulance arrived and, their conversation forgotten, Sirius and Mckinnon got to work on the most recent tragedy to pass through St. Mungos.
Not everyone was blending in so seamlessly, however.
"Pettigrew, if I have to tell you one more time that we don't use kidney dishes as vomit trays I'll be giving the janitorial staff your address so they can deal with you themselves." Flitwick shouted across the emergency room, where an unfortunate patient had just vomited into one of the aforementioned dishes, the vile liquid shooting up the sloped walls of the tray and splashing on the floor. "We use bags, god damn it. BAGS!"
"Sorry sir." Peter profusely apologized both to Flitwick and the patient for the next ten minutes. But he was getting the hang of things. Just slowly.
As promised by Mcgonagall, various residents began to stop by looking for help for their services. Lily, to no one's surprise but everyone's envy, was chosen first, by the resident neurosurgeon, Dr. Slughorn.
"Of course she gets chosen for the coolest specialty on her first day." Marlene said, taking a break at the nurses station with Sirius. As the day wore on, they were starting to learn each other's first names.
"First three hours, no less." Sirius shot back, sipping water out of a paper cup and trying not to be bitter.
"Black!" Flitwick piped up from behind them...well, below them. "There's a woman choking in bed four. See if you can do something about it."
Dr. Binns, the general surgery resident, only had a chance to step one foot in the emergency room before Mary Macdonald was off her ass up trying to get on his service. He was glad to take someone so eager, and as Mary learned later, if she had waited to hear his specialty she might not have wanted the case.
"Have fun observing your bowel resection, Mac!" Marlene called after her, earning herself a dirty look.
"If you weren't so busy making fun of her you might land a surgery for yourself Mckinnon." Flitwick, who had seen her perform flawless sutures throughout the past hours, but had also seen her take about a hundred breaks, scolded her from the nurses station.
"Astute observation, 'Wick my man. Have you ever thought yours is the service I want to be on?" She winked at him as she grabbed a chart and called her next patient back.
Eventually Marlene got picked by a Dr. Sprout, a plastics resident who was looking for help with an ear reconstruction. That left only Sirius and Pettigrew, who's first name turned out to be Peter, left in the emergency room.
While Peter had turned out to be good conversation, Sirius couldn't help but feel a little defeated that he was the last one left in the emergency room with the guy who hadn't even known what the pit was.
Not to be gay, but he felt like he was on the bottom two of America's Next Top Model, anxiously waiting for Tyra to call his name.
"Flitwick?" A booming voice echoed throughout the emergency room, the man that came with it just as large and imposing. "Got any residents left?" Sirius's ears perked up from where he was attending to a patient.
Watching the man talk to Flitwick was like watching an elephant and a mouse have a conversation. "Just two. Take Pettigrew, he's not busy." Flitwick bit his tongue so the words 'and a liability' didn't also escape.
"Reporting for duty sir," Peter mumbled as he scampered across the floor to his new assignment.
"This ain't war kid," The giant, who's white coat read 'Hagrid', chuckled as he lead Peter out of the pit.
"Where are we going? Ortho? Cardiothoracic?"
"Peds."
Sirius deflated, feeling like he just lost a race he was so sure he was going to win. Tyra's voice echoed in his head. "We were rooting for you. We were all rooting for you." But he had to ignore that voice and listen to the one telling him "I need you to run an EKG in bed six."
"Yes sir."
It turned out that Sirius didn't have to waste any time imagining the fun cases his coworkers were getting to work on because they were all too eager to share during their lunch break.
"Black!" Marlene called from where the rest of them were sitting around a table, enjoying their lunch. He sat down, gratefully taking the banana she offered him as he realized his lunch was on his kitchen counter at home.
"So, let's hear it." He said as he ate his banana. At least he got to hear the cool stories, if he didn't get to be in them. "How amazing was everyone's day?"
"You guys, I saw an actual fucking brain." Lily, which had turned out to be Evans's first name, was the most eager to recount her very first surgery observation in the prestigious operating room of the Dr. Horace Slughorn. "Slughorn is a genius. Did you know six of his students have gone on to win nobel prizes? Six!"
But Marlene wasn't going to let some stuffy brain surgery upstage her ear reconstruction. "Who cares about brains, I helped build an ear today. I built an ear and I put it on somebody's face. "
"Poor bastard. That's not where ears go, Marlene." Peter said, muffled through a bite of chicken salad. "Besides, ears are pretty standard stuff, you should check out peds."
"What, sick little kids?"
"Honestly, this is going to sound bad, but I don't remember a single patient I saw today. I couldn't stop watching that guy." Peter motioned to Hagrid, who was sitting on two cafeteria chairs and chatting loudly with Dr. Sprout.
"That is the peds resident? He's huge."
"I know it was incredible. Like watching a giant care for smurfs. They love him." While they chatted about the size disparities of some of the residents, Sirius looked over at Mary who had been uncharacteristically quiet and, for some reason, was wearing a clean pair of scrubs. She noticed him looking over.
"What?"
"No stories about how much ass you kicked on Binns's service?" Sirius asked. Marlene rolled her eyes as Marlene and Lily started to laugh.
"Her day has been kind of shitty." Lily laughed, seemingly placing unnecessary emphasis on the word 'shitty'.
"Yeah, her story kind of stinks." Marlene added, still chuckling.
"Shut it." Mary turned to Sirius, and sighed, obviously having already prepared her monologue in her head. "Not only is Dr. Binns THE most boring person I have ever met in my life, I just spent the last thirty minutes washing actual literal shit out of my hair."
Sirius cracked a grin, "Oh damn."
Mary pushed her bottom lip out, pouting at her own misfortune. "He let me carry the tray with the resected bowel in it and I dropped it." She groaned in defeat, her face going red. "The entire janitorial staff is calling me butterfingers." She rested her head on the cafeteria table. "It's going to be a looooong 48 hours."
"Hey," Peter said, "We knew what we signed up for."
They finished up their lunches, still casually joking around. Lily offered to throw everyone's trash away, getting up and walking across the cafeteria to the bins. Sirius nudged Marlene.
"Still chasing Evans?"
"Oh I'm already over that. That girl is hella straight."
Sirius raised an eyebrow. "You sure?"
"One hundred percent. She doesn't think Katie McGrath is hot."
"I'm not even going to ask how that came up in conversation naturally."
The group got up, everyone straightening their white coats and starting to split off to their respective services when McGonagall approached them. In seconds, backs were straight, eyes were alert, and lips were sealed.
"You're doctors, not soldiers. Breathe." She could try and hide the smile, but McGonagall always enjoyed terrifying the new interns a little bit. "Black, Evans, you're on my service the rest of the day. Everyone else is dismissed." No one moved. "Go, people are waiting for you."
While their friends scampered off, Sirius and Lily looked at each other questioningly.
"Why us?" Sirius asked.
"Question me, Black, and you risk me changing my mind." She turned on her heel and started off down the hall, Sirius and Lily half jogging to keep up. "But if you must know, you're the only two I think could handle this."
That was all the answer Sirius needed. Although he was proud that Flitwick was seemingly becoming fond of him, anything had to be better than the pit. If he had to do another suture today, he'd scream.
As they arrived on the cardio wing, McGonagall stopped them in front of this mysterious new patient's door. "There are some things that need to be said." She started.
"I've been working with this patient for a year now, which is a miracle in itself because this case should have closed six months ago and not because I did my job. This patient has very very severe hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Do either of you know what that is?" Both Sirius and Lily pretended to ignore the small breaks in her voice.
"Abnormal growth of the heart muscles. It can cause systolic dysfunction, diastolic dysfunction, and unstable arrhythmias. Leads to death by heart failure." Evans rattled off.
"Good. Our patient has been experiencing chronic diastolic dysfunction, which means what, Dr. Black?"
Sirius startled. She had called him Dr. "It means that the thickening of his heart muscles won't let his heart relax. It means his heart can't fill up all the way."
"Good again. The two of you will be helping me on this case intermittently until its end, which admittedly might be very soon. This case won't take all your time, but I want you to consider it a priority. From here on out, you'll be helping me monitor his vitals and progression while we do the hardest thing a doctor ever has to do. Wait for a donor." She put one hand on the door handle before pausing and looking back at them.
"Are we ready?" Sirius and Lily nodded. She took a deep breath, smiled, and opened the door.
"Good evening Mr. Lupin. Mr. Potter." McGonagall greeted the patient and the young man seated next to the bed reading a book.
The man reading the book, presumably Mr. Potter since the chart read 'Remus Lupin', looked up and smiled. "New recruits!"
The patient was a frail young man that was surrounded by pillows and who, Sirius thought, looked around his age. "Hey Minnie."
He looked over from the TV on the wall that he was watching, but stopped when his eyes met Sirius's. They lingered there, before moving down and taking in the whole of this new, very attractive doctor. His eyes, for some reason, stopped at Sirius's feet.
"Are you aware that you're wearing mismatching shoes?"