"… Our sincerest apologies, but we must reject your application as we simply cannot- End of message. Next Message. "Hi Dr. Smith-"
He reaches a long, slender finger and presses stop on the answering machine. It was their seventh application and it was the seventh denial. He was starting to think that the people down at the adoption agency were a whole bunch of bigots, but as it turns out, it was just because of some bad history with the cops. If only he knew that hanging with the wrong crowd in his teen years was going to bite him in the ass. Sighing to himself and thinking of how he was going to tell his lover, he places the phone back in its cradle. As he walks into the living room, he troubles himself over the message and how to tell his loving partner that they were denied, once again, the pleasure and joy of raising a child together.
"… here on Highway 17 in the middle of the most devastating snow storm we've seen in almost twenty years -" A reporter is saying on the television before his arm reaches for the remote and cuts her off with the power button. The man drops the remote on the sofa and quickly heads for the door, grabbing a warm jacket on his way. As he walks, fast paced toward the elevator doors, the pager on his hip beeps wildly, even as he's calling the number with his hand phone. The elevator doors open with a ding just as he reaches through to the other line, "Dr. Smith. We need you in right now –"The voice on the other line is almost shaky, sounding panicked. He quickly cuts him off to get to the point, "I know. Snow storm. Accidents. Car pile-up. Who's my attending?" He asks pointedly. He wants to let out an annoyed sigh when he doesn't get an answer right away. He's ready to drive out of the parking spot before he hears a shaky reply, "Dr. Zoe. Doctor Hanji Zoe is your attending."
"Good." He says with finality, shoving the phone in his pocket and putting the car in drive.
The trip to Maria General was brutal. His back and front tires spun on ice and snow for almost two minutes on Main Street before gaining traction again. He swerved into the adjacent lanes more times than he is comfortable with and the wind blew snow onto his windshield in torrents, allowing zero visibility. But thankfully, somehow, he arrives safely at the staff parking lot. He parks in his designated spot and quickly head to the E.R. entrance, not bothering to check if he was in between the lines and shielding his face as much as he could against the cold bite of the wind. He skillfully wades between paramedics and police, and their cars with flashing blue and red lights.
Finally, he escapes the terrorizing storm and enters the chaos that is Maria General Hospital Emergency Room. Patients with varying degrees of injuries line up at the triage while a couple nurses try to take each person's vital signs. He hears the moan and groan of agony from someone with bandages that are stained red, but he continues on.
The man enters the locker room to hang his soaked through jacket and change into a fresh set of scrubs. When he quickly goes out into the hallway again, he is immediately greeted by one of his interns. "Dr. Smith. I thought you'd never get here. We need you in 105."
"What do we have?" He asks as he takes the chart from the smaller man. The intern answers him as they're walking, fast-paced, in the direction of said room. "Mrs. Yeager. Early to mid-30's. She has a cut on the right side of her head but it doesn't look too bad. Though, she may have a mild head trauma. Pneumothorax, seat belt. A suspected herniated disc. And a fractured arm." At seeing the older doctor's questioning look, the intern elaborates, "Apparently she was on her way here to get the arm fixed."
His eyes get narrower as Gunter, briefs him on what they have to deal with. They enter the scrub room and start scrubbing in for the emergency procedure. "Auro and Erd should be done prepping the patient for surgery," The young intern continues. "And Dr. Ral should be in with them already."
A few hours later, with a quiet sigh of victorious relief, he can finally say, "Alright, close her up." It was a brutal procedure, but they managed correct her fractured arm and save both her lungs. The disc will have to be dealt with after she recovered for a bit and was awake for Physiotherapy, of course. As he is about to turn away from the patient, he hears the glaring sounds of her vital monitors. "Doctor, we've got a bleed."
"She's coding!"
"Shit." He curses. "Shit. Shit. Shit. Find out where it's coming from!"
"Where the hell is this coming from?"
"I don't know, man. Shit. We were about to close her up!"
"We're losing her."
"Doctor, we're losing her!"
"I can read the screen just fine! What I want is to find where all this fucking blood is coming from!"
"Shit." He curses in disbelief, through the glaring sound of the flat line. "Fuck." He whispers in frustrated acceptance. "Call it." He says emptily.
"Time of Death, 11:17 pm."
And he utters quietly, in a much different tone than before, "Close her up."
He throws the bloody gloves into the hazard bin in angry defeat and bursts through the doors of the OR. "Where is Dr. Smith?" he barks to a mousy-looking intern in the hallway. His eyes narrow in irritation when he hears the squeak of response. Not waiting for the stuttered answer to his question, he swiftly turns and strides to the Nurse's Station. Useless, he thinks irately.
"Page me Dr. Smith!" He demands from the nurse at the station. The nurse jumps in surprise causing his glasses to go askew. "Uh… Dr. Smith?" The nurse asks confused, as he adjusts his glasses properly on his nose.
A dark brow twitches in annoyance, "Yes. Doctor Smith. Where is he?"
The nurse looks at him as if he was making an absurd joke, which is just the thing that erupts his anger, "Dr. Smith! The Chief of Surgery, Dr. Smith! You know, I don't ask for much around here, so one would think that when I asked for one thing, it'd be done by now! And for that matter, where is my fucking attending?!"
The nurse jolts at his angry outburst and his glasses clatter on the table from his face. "Uhm," he hesitates as he puts the spectacles back on his nose. "Doctor Smith," he starts slowly, "aren't you Dr. Smith?"
It was at that point that the nervous nurse should've thanked whatever god he believed in, because it was in that moment that Levi was about to terminate his job, and it was in that moment when finally the obnoxious attending interrupted, "Well, Well. Yes. You see, little nurse. There are two Dr. Smiths currently employed in this, our humble Maria General Hospital. This here, is Dr. Smith, first attending surgeon, though you might as well think of him as co-Chief of Surgery along with the bigger Dr. Smith. But this one just so happens to be the one you do not want to piss off, though you probably shouldn't piss the other one off. You know, we're all better off when both Dr. Smith are happy."
"Hanji." He acknowledges, completely reverting back to calm irritation from explosive anger moments before. His lips take an annoyed downward turn at the corner when the taller woman places an arm around his shoulders and starts to lead him away from the incompetent nurse. "Well, come now Doctor. Let's be forgiving to the brand new nurse. Not everyone understands your committed love affair to the Chief of Surgery. I will bring you to your other half myself."
He allows her to lead him into the elevator but as the doors are closing, she slowly drops her arm from his shoulders. "Levi," she starts while turning to face him, "I heard what happened with Mr. Yeager. That glass shard was too close to his heart. Even with me in the room, there would have been nothing we could do."
He shifts his narrowed eyes quickly to the side, avoiding the concern radiating through her own. They needed more competent people to take over the scheduling, but he recognises Hanji's point. Even if she was there as his attending, it wouldn't have mattered, Mr. Yeager would have died on the same table from the same wounds. He lets the silence sit another moment more as he rakes a hand through his hair and rubs his restless eyes.
"I know," he says at last. The shorter man leaves it at that, allowing her to read into it that he is thankful for her concern.
The elevator doors open with a ding and they step out in silence together. Staring up at his old friend, he asks finally, "Where's Erwin?"
"Locker room at the end of this hallway," Hanji replies with an odd smile that Levi decides to ponder upon at a later time.
When he arrives at the door, he takes a moment for himself before entering the room with a sigh. The locker room was unlit, only the green of the emergency light and the fluorescent from the hallway shone into the room. Levi moves further inside with sure steps. He doesn't bother to call out for anyone because he knows that they are alone.
Finally, Levi finds him sitting miserably at the far end of a bench. Erwin's dirty-blonde hair looked darker in the dim room as it covers his eyes in his slouch. And unbidden, almost unnoticed, Levi lets out another sigh.
He moves closer and sits with his legs on either side of the bench and his back facing Erwin. "I will lend you my back, Dr. Smith." A quiet moment passes before he hears the tell-tale sound of the coarse fabric of a scrub suit rustling and he feels Erwin's arms encase him in a tight embrace from behind. Another moment passes until he feels the unmistakable wetness between his shoulder blades through the stiffness of his own scrubs.
The younger surgeon reaches for the hands grasping tightly around his chest and he holds on just as tight. "Not even if it was me, Erwin." He consoles. He means that even though Erwin was the Dr. Smith who was Chief of Surgery at Maria General, Levi was the Dr. Smith who was the best surgeon in the entire hospital, if not the whole country. And he means that even if he was the one who performed that surgery on Mrs. Yeager, there would've been nothing he would do different and the outcome would still be the same. And all that he means must've been understood because he feels Erwin move his head in a slow nod.
They sit together in silence, locked in a comforting embrace, lost in their own thoughts. Levi has no idea exactly what Erwin is thinking, but he is sure of the dark thoughts that lurk in the corner, threatening to cloud his mind. It happens every time - however rare those times are - when Erwin's patient dies on the table. Levi knows this because feels the same way. When a patient dies, whether expected or unexpected, the doubts start to creep in. What did he do wrong? What didn't he do right? What could he have done different? Was he really cut out for this line of work? This kind of practice?
It happens to every other doctor, he believes. Though each time it happens, it chips away at their being, taking a little of themselves away, leaving someone a little different, someone hardened to death, maybe someone who trivializes it, anything to make them sleep at night. But Levi and Erwin, after all their years in the medical field, pronouncing deaths and dictating death summaries; they still weren't hardened to it. This is one of the many traits that Levi and Erwin share in common, though they have different ways of dealing with it.
Levi internalized it. He kept each little thing and locked those little dark critters that made him doubt himself away, until eventually he became so full of it the he lashed out at everyone around him as a way of letting the dark things go. This, quite obviously, resulted in fewer friends, more enemies and a misunderstood self. This was his only way of dealing until he met Erwin.
Erwin, on the other hand, would usually put it to the back of his mind, he did his duties and what was expected of him, until such time when he was free to think. And he would usually retreat to an abandoned corner or an isolated room and drown himself in dark thoughts, coming back up to his duties once again. But each time he came out of the dark, there it lay in wait for him to visit again, a heavier burden of guilt and doubts and fears. This was Erwin until Levi came along to bring him back.
But with all their doubts and fears, eventually, they bounce back, they have to. They used each other as a clutch of what sanity they had left. They brought each other out of their own darkness.
Levi, usually the quiet one, tells Erwin of his day and his own patients, trying to fill the silence, his usual desperate act of distraction from their dark thoughts, a desperate act of letting his critters out. "…We need to talk to HR about the level of incompetence they seem to keep employing…. Hanji was assigned to you instead of me… I haven't slept in my own bed in days…. Mr. Yaeger. He was in his 30's…"
"Mrs. Yeager. She had children," Erwin interrupts bleakly, coming out of himself and finally opening up to Levi. And for the first time in a long time, Levi allows the tears to fall as he feels a fresh wetness on his back.
"Mr. Yeager didn't make it," he admits in a choked whisper. And when he feels Erwin tighten his embrace, he finally understands Hanji's expression. It was a smile of amusement but hating herself for being amused. It must've been the irony that Levi tried and failed to save one half, while Erwin failed at saving the other. And as he turns to face Erwin, the same odd smile forms on the older man's lips. What sick, sick circumstance, he thinks to himself.
They bask in silence once again, then Levi slowly breaks their embrace, wiping his face as he stands in front of Erwin. "I want to meet them. So, go wash your face clean and meet me in The Garden in twenty." He finishes with a pat on the blonde head and he leaves the room.
The Garden was the entirety of the fifth floor. It was the Pediatrics Ward but it got its name for all its green and flowery murals with fairies and animals all around. This nickname was eventually immortalized when they painted The Garden on the wall in the main waiting area in front of the elevators. The Chief of Surgery, now dressed in a fresh pair of scrubs, sat on the lone yellow bench that was placed right below The Garden written on the wall. His face was now devoid of any evidence of his misery from earlier, other than the slightly red and puffy eyes. He sat with his elbows upon his knees and his eyes riveted on the floor, ignoring the scenery on the walls. When he hears a set of footsteps coming his way, he immediately turns his head and looks up to see the shorter Dr. Smith already standing in front of him with an important looking folder in his hands. "Good. You changed. Come with me." Levi says in greeting, though already walking away. And Erwin quickly gets up to follow him.
The walk for a while in silence, and make a few turns before finally stopping in front of a room with glass walls where they could see inside. And that room looked just like many others in children's ward but this particular room was playroom for toddlers, ranging in age from two to six years. For a long time, Levi and Erwin just stand outside the playroom watching the children play. There were about ten of them in the room, but three in particular caught Erwin's attention. The three were the only ones not engaged in play. A small blonde boy, a taller girl with dark brown hair and another boy, also with dark hair. They were huddled in the far corner of the room with a book open on the lap of the blonde boy. They looked so captivated in what they were reading that Erwin wanted to read with them too.
It was dark, late and very cold outside, when Erwin finally opens the door to the warmth of their home. He takes his time hanging up his coat and putting away his shoes, Levi would've wanted nothing less. Speaking of the man, it seems Levi waited up for him. Well, tried to by the looks of the motionless lump on the couch. He treads quietly on the warm, soft carpet floor and reaches for a slender shoulder. "Levi," he calls softly, placing a kiss on pliant lips. After a moment, he feels a response. A slow movement of soft lips against his in a chaste kiss.
He is pulled out of his musings when Levi speaks again, "You want them?" He glances at the shorter man as Levi elaborates, "The boy with the dark hair is Eren Yeager. Mikasa, was adopted by the Yeagers two years ago. Armin, the little blonde in the middle is their cousin. They took him in after his grandfather died last winter. He had no one else." Erwin looks back to the three again as Levi continues, "I know we said we were going to look into a surrogate, if we got denied again."
"We did."
"Right. Well…" And he can't make himself continue, because how could he say that they were the cause of the children's brand new orphan status. And that he fell in love with them at first sight. And that they've waited so long and here they are. But hearing Erwin's soft "I know," relieves him because Erwin understands, without fail, whatever Levi leaves unsaid.
"Are they asleep?" he asks as they break apart. He takes hold of the smaller hand and starts to lead them upstairs.
"If they're not, they should be," Levi replies.
When they get to the landing, Erwin quietly opens the first door on their right, shedding light from the hallway into the room, allowing Levi and himself to gaze lovingly upon the three peacefully sleeping faces.
I'm so sorry for taking so long to update the wolf stories. I've completely lost my drafts. The ones I made before I put the work down to focus on school and now I don't even remember where I was going with that, so I have to start fresh again. As a result of that, it's going to take even longer to update. But here's something as consolation that I hope you'll like. :)