Hola, muchachos!
This plot bunny has been annoying me for a while now, so I finally just caved and started writing. This first chapter doesn't have that much of the Team in it, but the others will, trust me. Without Reservations is my favourite episode of the series, there was some awesome acting, particularly from Dwight and Dirk (whose gunshot victim was apparently very accurate - I wouldn't know, because I've never seen someone bing shot, but props to him for it anyways!) and if you haven't seen it yet, GO WATCH IT, because it's fabulous, and you might not understand this fic otherwise. :)
Disclaimer: The A-Team does not belong to me. But the hospital staff do :P
Enjoy!
Rosa Jackson stood in front of the mirror in the nurse's locker room, looking blankly at her reflection. It was her first day back from a two-week long leave of bereavement, after losing her brother to cancer.
It had been stage 4 metastatic melanoma, a serious type of skin cancer that had spread to his brain. He'd been only 36 years old, a schoolteacher with a wife and kids. He'd lived in upstate New York, and the funeral had been there. She'd returned to DC only two nights ago. She wasn't sure if she was quite ready to go back to the hospital after soending so much time in the one Aaron had died in.
But, she thought, smoothing down the front of her comfortable lavender scrubs, at least she wouldn't have to deal with many patients face-to-face. Being a scrub nurse, she worked mainly in the OR, not on the floor where the patients recovered. It was a small releif. She tied her thick dark hair in a messy bun and evaluated herself one last time in the mirror.
She looked gaunt, with dark circles around her eyes, the product of two weeks of sleepless nights. She attempted a sunny smile, found her facial muscles weren't quite up to the task, grabbed some coffee, and headed for the ambulance bay.
Dr. Annie "Sarge" Clarke, an imposing general surgeon with firery red hair and a temper to match, was waiting. Rosa was almost a minute late for the start of her shift, and Annie had built a reputation as a hard-ass in the six years she'd worked at DC Gen. She looked down at the floor as she approached, praying that Annie wouldn't say anything to her about it in front of everyone. Strangely, she didn't.
When no rebuke came, Rosa looked up at her attending, expecting at the very least one of her infamous glares. Instead, the woman was looking at her with something close to pity. Almost all the staff at the hospital knew how close Rosa was with her brother. During his fight with cancer, she would often go to the surgical staff with questions and concerns. They all knew how hard she'd been hit by his death. Still, she had never talked to Annie about it. Embarassed, she looked back down, and Annie started to speak in her booming voice.
"Alright everyone," she proclaimed, sounding every inch the drill sergeant that she was nicknamed. "We all know that tonight's game night. That could mean one of two things. One, a nice, quiet evening with most of the population at home watching TV. In that case, I want you all working on updating patient charts until something happens. Or, the game could mean a bunch of drunk morons attempting to drive their cars while intoxicated, causing a backed-up waiting room, in which case I need you all on your toes."
She started pacing the row of the staff she was in charge of, nurses and surgeons alike. Rosa expected to be put on charts duty, or something like that to keep her quiet and not upset her too much. Not even Sarge would expect her to deal with the organized chaos of an OR after such a loss. Of course, as usual, she was wrong.
"...Fiennes, O'Reilly, Brown, Connor, you're with Dr. Todd in neuro if the need arises. Regan, Cooper, Russell, and Jackson... you're with me. Get your pagers on and start on those charts until I call you. Got it?"
Sara Regan, Leah Cooper, and Jim Russell looked sadly at Rosa as they passed her on the way to start their paperwork. Rosa guessed none of them understood Annie's choice to put her in the OR either. She started after the others, but was stopped by a hand on her shoulder.
She turned and noticed Annie looking at her with something close to concern in her eyes.
"Rosa," she began, in a much softer voice than she usually use around the staff, "I know you're going through a tough time, kiddo, and you think that what you need is some quiet time alone with your thoughts, but I've been there, and I know that wallowing doesn't help anyone. You need to dive back into your life headfirst, keep yourself busy, keep moving on. That's the only way this will ever get better. You understand?"
Rosa was in shock. She'd never thought of Sarge as actually having a human side. She swallowed her speechlessness, and stammered out an unsure thank you. Then Annie blinked and that trace of humanity was gone from her face, her features rearranged into their customary scowl.
"Now, why are you still standing here, Jackson? I want to see some progress on those charts. Move, move, move!"
Rosa moved.
An hour and a half passed, with Rosa realizing more and more that Sarge had been right about the work thing. Filling out patient charts gave her mind time to wander, and it always wandered back to Aaron, and how he'd looked the last time she'd seen him. His curly hair gone, victim of the chemotherapy. His once strong frame, wasted away to skeletal proportions. His once rich, espresso skin now pale and cold to the touch. He hadn't looked like her big brother anymore, except for his smile. He'd smiled until the very end, through the pain, to make things easier for his wife, and his daughter, and she and her father...
Rosa's pager beeped suddenly, snapping her out of her reverie. She noticed her eyes were a bit damp, and wiped them with the back of her hand before rushing towards the ambulance bay. To her surprise, there was no ambulance there. Only a big black van with a red stripe parked haphazardly in the unloading area. She guessed the four men standing next to the van were a few of the drunks Sarge had mentioned earlier, until she took a closer look.
One of them, a tall, skinny guy with an expression stuck halfway between fear and guilt was covered in blood. The attractive Latino next to him had a bit on his hands, and the other two were clean. They all looked stone-cold sober though, wearing expressions of concern for their friend, who was just now being unloaded from the back of the van. Rosa turned to evaluate the patient, and her breath caught in her throat.
Blood, was the first thing she saw. A hell of a lot of it. And under the blood, a pale unconscious young man who looked about the age of Aaron. He wasn't a spitting image, of course, but he was about the same height as her brother, and was handsome like him, too. For a split second, it was Aaron she saw bleeding on the gurney, not the patient.
"Jackson!" Annie barked, snapping Rosa out of it. She was already on the move with the patient, on the way to the OR. "Get his info, and then come and join us. OR 3!"
Rosa nodded, and approached the group of men standing by the van, looking very unsure of what to do and very unaccustomed to it.
"Sirs, if you could talk to me over here for a minute, I need some information about your friend. " She said, slipping automatically into her role. From the silver-haired man, the one who looked old enough to be the patient's father - even though he confirmed he wasn't - she gathered his name, age, and blood type. She learned that a slight sinus problem was the only spot on an otherwise clean bill of health, and that he had no allergies or notable medical problems.
"And can you give me a brief explanation of what happened? How he sustained the gunshot wound?"
The man who'd been answering the questions so far, who'd introduced himself as Hannibal, looked to the guy covered in blood. Rosa guessed that that was the most logical, since he'd clearly spent the most time with the victim.
"Um..." the man began in a shaky voice, still in shock. "T-the restaurant where I work... it got held up... three guys with guns. He uh... he tried to stop them."
So he was brave, too. Like Aaron. It was a bad idea, Rosa knew, to be comparing this patient, who was very likely not going to make it out of surgery if she was judging from the amount of blood he'd lost in the past hour, to her dead brother, but she couldn't help herself.
She thanked the men for their time, showed the burly one where to park his van so it wouldn't be in the way of any other ambulances that happened to show, and directed them towards the waiting room before heading for the OR. But as she turned, a voice called, "Doctor!"
She turned to see the shaken guy, who the others had called Murdock, hurrying over to her, worry etched in every feature.
"I'm just a nurse," Rosa murmered insitinctively. Murdock didn't seem to hear her.
He looked into her eyes with something close to desperation and asked the question that those in the mecial profession most hate to hear: "Is he gonna live?"
Rosa's customary professional answer caught in her throat as she remembered asking countless doctors the very same thing withtin the last few months, and how it had felt when they'd brushed her off.
She sighed deeply, then looked right at him. "We're sure as hell gonna try our best t make sure he does," then turned, and rushed towards the Operating Room.
It'll get longer and more interesting in the next few chappies, but it may take me a while to update because school is heaping an inhumane amount of work on me. Still, I shall do my best. In the mean time, REVIEW, love it or loathe it! :)