Title: Choose Your Own Adventure
Universe: Trauma Center/Trauma Team
Notes: Stories do not take place in the same timeline. NOT ACTUALLY A CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE STORY. Enjoy.
1.
No one mentioned the co-ed dorms when you applied to this college.
Your roommate is studying to be a nurse. You have a full-ride at a prestigious university without the faintest idea what you are going to do with you life.
She seems to float rather than walk, pixie-like. Her paintings and sketches brighten the cinder-block gray walls of your dorm. You always catch a whiff of her lavender perfume when she leaves for a morning classes. You've caught yourself pausing to watch her chew the end of her pencil when the assigned reading confuses her.
Despite your best efforts, she has bewitched you, body and soul after the first month.
One late night she convinces you to accompany her and some friends to the seashore. You take turns driving. Halfway there, her friends call and say other things have popped up, they can't make it.
Pity.
You kiss her under palm tree with warm sand under your toes.
She says you should be a doctor.
You brush her off at first. You aren't good with people, your bedside manner would be atrocious.
She insists you can work behind the scenes.
Nevertheless, you take some classes. You enjoy the research immensely. You declare your major and call home to a proud father. His son will be a doctor.
The years past. You move out and into a bigger place togehter. Her friends begin referring to you and her as "the old married couple."
You are still in love with the same girl that ensnared you with her wit and charm.
She feels the same way.
Except not about you. At least not anymore.
She and the new boy leave school. She isn't going to be a nurse anymore. She leaves the paintings on the wall and you tear them down. Splintered wood and dirty canvases litter your floor for weeks.
Years later, you spot her name in the newspaper. She's won second place in an art competition or something. A picture of her painting is in the paper and you think for a second that you recognize the ocean landscape.
2.
They bury your sister when you are still burying toys in your sandbox. She is twenty-three and too young to have an obituary in the paper, a child crying in the other room, and a husband overseas. You are too young to be an only child.
A doctor, they say. A smart girl, a beautiful girl, a doctor. A doctor who made her patients light up with joy, a doctor who saved lives, but couldn't save her own. All your aunts and uncles and cousins talk about how she was and how she won't be anymore. They throw around long, complicated names for diseases that you know nothing about.
Her headstone is shiny pink marble. Mother, Wife, Sister, Daughter.
(You think, no no no. It should read only read Sister because she is your sister and you will never see her again.)
The day of the funeral is too hot and too windy. Your black coat is itchy. Tears fall from behind your father's glasses and your mother presses a handkerchief to her mouth. They are silent and you curse the diseases that can both silence great people and steal greater ones.
You pause in front of her grave. From nearby you hear an uncle say that she was a great doctor. How she made everyone proud.
You make a pact. The sun beating down on your face and the winding whipping at the flowers in your hand.
Me too. One day.
3.
When you are sixteen, the resident high school jock shoves you aside in hall and hisses that you'll never amount anything.
Derek operates him on eleven years later with the GUILT serum you made.
You don't normally like to leave your lab but you decide it would be a marvelous idea to make a round in the ICU and visit the recovering patients.
4.
You're the runt of the litter. Your dad knows this. He passes on his old football jerseys to your brother and his fencing trophies to your sister, but you, you are special.
When your older brother turns sixteen he gets the keys to a new car. When you are sixteen your dad presses into your hands the heavy copper key of his private home library.
(Your dad warns your brother not to drink and drive. Your dad warns you not to highlight in his books.)
Your brother's a good kid but even good kids get in car accidents.
There's blood everywhere. Your brother is covered in red and your sister's unconscious in the backseat. You look at the scene and you think back to the thick medical volumes in your dad's library and the books on surviving disasters.
You think back to the framed family picture sitting on the desk in the library. You know you are going to save your family no matter what.
When the EMTs arrive they patch up the gash on your chest and the cuts on your face and every other injury on your own body that you didn't even notice. They compliment you on your care of your siblings. They ruffle your hair and say that your parents would be so proud. Your siblings will pull through just fine. Because of you.
When you finally make it home that night, with your mother breaking into tears every time she sees you, you decide you want to do this. You want to save people.
Your dad comes into your room later and declares the library yours now.
You definitely made the right decision.
5.
"Why did you want to be a doctor, Victor?"
Linda looks up expectantly at you, her hand curled in your own. It the first time that she has left her room since her last surgery. The weather is beautiful.
You stutter. "W-well..."
You don't want to ruin the day.
You decide to lie.
xXx
A/N: ARGH. I am so tired. And this story is barely 1000 words long. It's raw and has not been beta read. Forgive me!
First person to find the Pride and Prejudice reference gets a fic request.