Disclaimer: I do not own ATWT and unfortunately I don't own Reid Oliver either *sniff, sniff*

AN: Once again, when I opened Word to work on "Le choix du Coeur" , it was something else entirely that decided to pop up. I've been thinking about this since yesterday and it was driving me nuts not to write it, so voilà!

And nothing else

Chapter 1

Reid Oliver felt his chest constrict painfully as he watched Luke walk away from him. He should have known. He actually had known down in his gut that Bob's ultimatum would rip his world apart. He had tried to find a solution, he really had. He thought that waiting a few months to get together with Luke wouldn't be so bad. He had already waited for Luke for months now. Ok, it had been and would have been hell not to be with Luke immediately, but it was better than losing the one thing he could always depend on, his calling in life. Apparently, Luke and he didn't see eye to eye on the matter. Why couldn't Luke understand? What he is, is a surgeon (urban cowboy joke aside), nothing else. For years, his self-definition and self-esteem were based solely on his job. To risk losing it, was risking losing himself. He was a successful surgeon, but for everything else? What if he quit his job for Luke only for Luke to realise that Reid isn't what he wanted or figured out how he deserved so much better than a sarcastic jerk like him? It was too big of a risk. He had really thought that Luke could understand. He was with him in Texas after all. He, better than anyone else, knew how crucial Reid's work was for him. But that doesn't mean Luke wouldn't be his priority too! He would have put Luke before his job every single time he would have needed too, that's how much he cared about Luke and wanted things to work out, but he couldn't give up his job altogether. He had always wanted to be a surgeon and he was really good at it. He saved people's life on a regular basis! Why couldn't Luke understand the importance of it?

It was with a painful empty feeling in his gut that Oliver got back in memorial. He felt like nothing mattered anymore. As he told Hughes about his, well Luke's really, decision, he felt completely numb. It didn't matter anymore. Luke couldn't take that Reid wasn't ready to truly fight for him and Reid couldn't take that Luke wasn't ready to wait for him. This whole thing had gotten no where. He should have known. Who was he kidding, really? He had been thinking that he had no true chance with Luke for a while now, but he had kept going after Luke and hoping, even with all the Noah drama and the pain it caused him. He was so stupid. What did he expect? For Luke and him to have a nice little walk-in-the-park-romantic-gestures-relationship? Argh. He wasn't like that before Luke. And now, he wouldn't be like that either. He was done with all this drama. There was a reason he never got personally involve in his patients' life or with anyone really. But then this pompous, blackmailing kid had come into his life and squashed all his prior beliefs. But it was over. Time to move on and get his priorities back on track once and for all. Reid Oliver would be a doctor and nothing else.

Katie Snyder looked at her watch worryingly. Her roommate had been due from his double shift at the hospital hours ago and he still wasn't back. Of course, emergencies happened and you really can't predict when someone will have an accident and need instant brain surgery from the best surgeon in Oakdale, but she still worried. You see, it wouldn't have been so worrisome if it had been the second or third time, but the truth was, this had been going on for probably over two months now. Reid would leave for the hospital and wouldn't come back for hours and hours. He didn't even come back home to make his disgustingly huge sandwiches for lunch or dinner. He was just never there. It wasn't like him at all. Yes, Reid had always been a loner and a slight workaholic, but there was an exception to this rule. Well, three exceptions really: Luke, Jacob and her. As much as Reid loved his job, he also loved her son very, very much and would always take a couple of days off here and there to spend time with him and Katie. It was his way of supporting her and cheering her up. Somehow, the sarcastic doctor who had been dragged in Oakdale against his will had formed a very strong a bond with her and could always tell when she was at her lowest. She missed that guy. He hadn't done any of that in so long and she had been too involved in herself to notice.

You see, the last two months had been emotional hell for Katie Snyder thanks to one Doogie Hughes (she had started to use Reid's nickname for him out of spite. It annoyed him like crazy and normally succeeded in making him leave her alone) kissing her passionately, then avoiding her for two weeks straight, only to start going after her like an almost-stalker and trying to make her discuss the feelings they supposedly had for each other. In other words, he had been driving her up the wall! And that was without the whole Vienna/Henry drama, with them always running to her for help. She had been so occupied by all those things that she had failed to understand the implication of her roommate's changes right away. She saw that he was home less often, that he looked tired, and that he, who talked almost only about Luke, hadn't said his name in forever, but it was as if her preoccupied brain just hadn't made the connections between what she had witnessed and what it implied. But in the last two weeks, things had settled down between Chris and her and he had agreed to give her space and be her friend. And that's when her nerves started to take a hit. In two weeks, she could count on one hand the number of times that she had seen Reid. She was literally a bouncing ball of anxiety. Something was dreadfully wrong, she could feel it. There was this voice in the back of her mind telling her that something bad was going to happen. She needed to see Reid and talk to him. She had a really bad feeling about this. She had to do something to keep herself sane. With a new goal in her mind, Katie dropped Jacob off at Henry's (waking up the couple. Hey, if they wanted to be parents, they had to get used to being awoken at odd hours….that is, if Vienna could actually get pregnant for real) and then she drove to the hospital determined to get answers out of her friend once and for all.

Oliver was the most talented surgeon Memorial Hospital currently had. As such, he was one of the most demanded doctors on staff (Falling second to Doogie Hughes. Oakdale citizens still hadn't quite gotten used to Reid's rather unique bedside manner) Therefore, it was quite normal that he was one of the doctors who worked the most hours. However, there was working, working a lot, working like a workaholic and working yourself to an early grave. In the last two months, Reid Oliver had gone from number 2 well into number 4. But there wasn't any problem with that. The job needed to be done and it was Reid's calling to do it. After all, even hooked solely on tremendous amount of caffeine after working for 57 hours straight (and hiding it from his chief of staff and other employees very well I might add), Reid's mental capacity and natural talent was still superior to most doctors in this hellhole. His patients were fine. Actually, now that he had been living at this rhythm for a while, his patients were better than ever. Missing some sleep for a day or two made Reid cranky. It had caused more than one nurse to either run off angrily, muttering death threats about him or to run off crying into the nearest bathroom. However, while missing a little sleep made him more insupportable than normal, it just happens that missing a lot of sleep and being exhausted had the exact opposite effect on him. It may not look like it but being arrogant, exigent, intransigent, sarcastic, impatient and sometimes downright rude, took a lot of energy. Therefore, Reid Oliver had miraculously become a patient, don't-worry-about-it, I'll-just-take-care-of-it-myself, almost nice doctor. The nurses couldn't be happier. For a couple of weeks that is.

After a while, a couple of nurses started asking themselves questions. Especially, a little blond nurse named Allison. She couldn't help being intrigued, then worried about the huge dark circles under Dr. Oliver's eyes. Now, she had never been a fan of Reid Oliver, and Noah telling Casey and her about Reid and Luke hadn't really worked in his favour, but no matter his faults, he was still a colleague and something seemed wrong. So she started to be more observant when he was concerned. It was actually very hard. Reid was hard to find in the hospital, although he was always there when he was needed. Actually, she slowly started to think that he was there when needed a little too often. She would leave the hospital when he was still there and come back the day after with him still being there and the night nurses talking about how good the night had been even though they had been stucked with Reid Oliver as their affiliated doctor. She soon began to wonder when exactly did Dr. Oliver sleep. She first tried to talk to his chief of staff about it, but Bob Hughes had been extremely busy and seemed quite preoccupied about who knows what, so she had never had enough time with him to be able to bring up Reid Oliver's issue. Next, she had tried approaching the subject with himself. Many times. She kept dropping hints as to how tired he looked or how he could depend more on the nurses, no need to do all the work by himself. However, Reid Oliver was nothing if not a stubborn man. He never listened to her and everything stayed the same. She figured things couldn't be so bad if he reacted that way.

But still, Allison didn't give up. She still thought the man worked way too much and if he didn't make things easier for himself, she would do it for him. So whenever she heard that they would need someone to stay or come to do overtime, Allison hacked into the system and made sure that Dr. Oliver's name was at the bottom of the list and would only be called upon if everyone else said no. It had never happened yet. Then, she made sure she was always working under and whenever a patient who didn't need surgery was assigned to , she would check the other doctors' availability and, when possible, transferred the cases to other doctors without anyone knowing about it. This way, would finally get breaks between patients and be able to relax, and sometimes even nap. Then, when she had skipped lunch a few times because of stomach problems and noticed had done the same, she started dropping sandwiches, yogurt, apples and granola bars anonymously in the doctor's office whenever she could. She happily observed that none of her food ever got thrown in the garbage, only the packing. All the while, Casey had looked at her like she was crazy. He had kept saying that she was imagining things, was working herself up over nothing and really, should mind her own business. But she couldn't quite shake the negative feeling she had in the pit of her stomach. And tonight, she had been proven right. A new very nervous nurse had spilled some of her coffee on Reid. Worried that he could have quite a serious burn, Allison had followed him in the lockers room with a cold wet towel and first aid kit in her hands. The sight that had greeted her had send horror chills up and down her spine. In front of her stood Reid Oliver with a new shirt on and the shirt was wide open. She had never seen Reid's torso before but she knew most nurses had called him "" before he showed them his personality. was a slim man but he had a toned body for sure. Tonight though, what Allison saw were visible ribs pushing again his skin and a stomach that was inwards instead of flat or outwards. He looked like an ANAD awareness add. This couldn't go on any longer. This was way more serious than she had thought. Knowing that Bob Hughes would probably still be unavailable, she did the next best thing: she went to talk to his son.

Chris Hughes was tired. It was late at night and he wanted to go home. However, every month, the chief of staff had to check the employees' charts. Sometimes, some doctors found ways to do a lot of overtime and left the other doctors who might have wanted to do overtime too and make more money, unable to do so. But more often than not, it was simply to check if someone had been taking too many sick days or days off. Normally, Bob Hughes was dealing with this kind of paperwork but he was busy these days and hadn't even had the time to do them last month. Since he would be retiring soon, he had decided that Chris should be the one to do these from now on and had left his son with two months worth of paperwork. He really hated these things. Was it really necessary?

"Chris!" Chris jumped started out of his thoughts. Looking around to see who was calling him, he was accosted with the view of a very distraught looking Katie Snyder.

" Katie, what are you doing here this late? Where's Jacob?"

"I dropped him off at Henry's. Listen, do you know where I can find Reid? He was due home hours ago and he's still hasn't come back yet."

" Maybe he still had some paperwork to do. It's the end of the month. Dad will be checking that everything was done correctly. There's no reason to be this worried"

"Well I think there is. Quite a lot actually" Katie was fidgeting like crazy as she was saying this. Her bad feeling had triple on the way here.

"Reid is almost never home anymore. He hasn't taken a walk or taken care of Jacob in so long I can't remember when was the last time, I can count on one hand the number of times I saw him in the last 14 days, he looked exhausted from the little glimpse of him I was able to see, he hasn't been eating those horrible sandwiches in a while, he never talks to me anymore, he never mentions Luke either, he doesn't go out…"

"Ok, ok Katie, calm down" interrupted Chris. His friend had started babbling so fast she was practically hyperventilating by the end of her speech. "Calm down, Katie. I'm sure everything is just fine ok? We'll just look around the hospital. He's probably just doing a double shift."

"You mean a triple shift, right? He was already doing a double shift today"

"Katie. A triple shift would be working 24 hours straight. There are no such things in Oakdale's hospital"

"I wouldn't be so sure about that" interrupted Allison Stewart's worried voice. "I think made triple shifts a very common reality in this hospital need to talk Dr. Hughes."

Reid Oliver took a couple of anti-migraine pills. He had been getting these horrible headaches recently. The kind that makes your head pound while your eyes are attacked by thousands of mini-swords and your stomach wants to vomit so badly you actually get dizzy from it. The pills helped at first, but now he had to take more of them in order to function somewhat properly. He knew it wasn't a good idea to take that many pills in that short amount of time, but he had a job to do and he couldn't do it with a migraine. Besides, it wasn't like it was an every day thing. And at least nowadays, he didn't have to worry about unwanted thoughts coming up in his mind since the headaches kept him from thinking at all. The first week after Luke had definitely put a stop to their whatever-they-had had been hell. He couldn't stop thinking about the younger man. He wanted to go to him and try to fix things up, to explain his decision better. But he knew it was futile. If there was one thing he knew about Luke Snyder, it was that he was the most stubborn kid he had ever met. Beside, Luke leaving was a good thing. Obviously, they would have never worked out. It was better this way. Like Luke had said, it was better to know what the other's priorities were before they got in too deep with each other.

Still, he had missed the other man's presence like crazy. He had tried taking walks since it's supposedly helped clear one's mind, but Oakhell was small and everywhere he went, he was reminded of Luke. Even his own home was filled with memories he really wanted to repress. Therefore, after a week of his heart torturing him relentlessly, Reid Oliver had decided that the only place where he could move on and get better would be at the hospital. So he had started to check out when there was need to do overtime and offered to replace other doctors so they could take a day off to be with their families. It wasn't like Reid had or needed anything else other than his job, so if the other idiots wanted to waste their time with annoying wives, troublesome brats and moronic friends, he was more than glad to take their duty for them. Being a doctor was who he was in the deepest depths of his being. He had a calling and he wouldn't fail to fill it just as he had told Bob Hughes. So Reid put all his energy in his work, pushing away the painful empty void he felt deep down in his soul. It didn't matter that he didn't feel an ounce of pleasure, satisfaction or happiness while doing his job. It didn't matter that he was emotionally numb and tired and felt like everything in the world was a different color of blah and nothingness. Nothing mattered but healing his patients. And sure he had gotten physically tired and had a little trouble keeping up with the job, but he could deal. Although, he really should send a thank you letter to whoever invented those marvellous, though horrible tasting, energy drinks. Coffee was all well and good, but after the first twenty-four hours straight of work, you started to need something a little stronger than regular coffee. He now had an entire drawer filled with emergency energy drinks in his office desk.

Swallowing down his Xth caffeinated drink of the day, he picked up patients charts and started doing his rounds. The night was the least busy time in the hospital, so Reid had to double his effort in order to keep himself occupied. Tonight was no exception, and although it took him a lot more time to do his rounds than normal thanks to his migraine, he still found himself with nothing to do much too quickly. So when a tired intern needed to bring some folders to the next floor, Reid proposed to do it for him so he could take a break. Feeling a little nauseous, Reid decided that taking the stairs would be a much better idea than taking that dreadful elevator. However, as he was running up the stairs, a sudden wave of dizziness hit quite hard. Steadying himself with the wall, he slowly slid down until he was sitting on the stairs, his back to the wall. The world however, didn't stop spinning around him and soon, Reid Oliver's eyes rolled back in head and everything went black. The last thing he recalled was feeling his body falling on his right side.