Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Author's Note: Idea inspired by 'Vanishing Point' by PinkElephant5. Not sure why this is as long as it is. Anyway, hope you enjoy and please review.
Thanks
Hanson and Jo arrived in the OCME morgue with the body of the culprit from the most recent case. Henry came out of his office to greet them.
"Ok, Jo. Let the doc have a look at that arm." Hanson commanded refering with a pointing finger to the place on her upper arm covered by her hand.
"No. I'm fine."
"What happened?" The ME asked with concern, directing the question to the more likely to answer Detective Hanson.
"The suspect pulled a knife on her." Hanson explained.
"Once again I say, I'm fine!" She said, with an annoyed passion. Blood began again to seep through her fingers from the wound.
"Let me have a look at that." Henry said, she pulled back reluctantly.
"Come on Jo," she opened her mouth to offer Hanson a retort, but was cut off. "I saw it, it was pretty deep."
"God, Mike, anyone would think you were my father. Even if I were to get it looked at, which I'm not, it certainly won't be in a morgue by an ME."
Henry's response to her exclamation was an expression of genuine offense. "I assure you; before I became medical examiner, I was a physician."
"Not to mention that this is probably the most sanitary place in the city." Hanson added.
Henry nodded graciously toward him in recognition of the compliment. Then, turning his attention back to Detective Martinez he noticed that the flow of blood from the wound was only increasing. "Detective, you're bleeding copiously. I must insist. If you would please take a seat." He motioned toward the examination table immediately behind her. She made no movement to follow his well-mannered request. His concern was growing into a level of impatience he had not known since Abraham was much younger. "If you will not do it willingly, I will forcibly make you." He threatened.
"Yeah, right, Henry." She said scoffingly, his threat gaining a skeptically raised eyebrow from Hanson as well. "Like your-"
Her sarcasm was interrupted by the surprise of his taking hold of her waist and lifting her off the ground onto the table. Before she had fully processed this he had pried shock-numbed fingers from where they had stubbornly held, and had cut off her sleeve a few inches above the gash.
"Detective Hanson, could you get the first aid kit from the corner?" Hanson went in search of the rarely used kit. While he looked, Henry was carefully cutting away the blood darkened sleeve from her arm.
"This was a new shirt, you know." Jo stated, still annoyed that she had indeed been put in this situation by force, while she watched the doctor move to a sink and fill a bowl with water and retrieve a cloth.
"I would bring that up with him." Henry replied gesturing with his head to the body bag still containing the culprit as he returned to where she sat, his reluctant patient. "After all he got to it long before I did."
A loud bang came from the vicinity of Hanson's search, quickly followed by an even louder expletive.
"You alright there, Hanson?" Jo asked him, a laugh in her voice. Henry was at work wiping blood from around the deep cut with the damp cloth.
"Yeah, fine." A moment later he came back into full view, carrying the first aid kit in one hand and rubbing his head with the other. "Here you go, Doc." He placed the box on the table next to Jo. "Don't mind me. Its only head trauma, I'll just go fall asleep and never wake up." He said, aware he was of little priority.
"Let me see." Hanson bent forward, giving the doctor a view of his head, after a little head prodding and waving of fingers in front of his eyes Henry gave his diagnosis. "You'll be fine." Then he went on, remembering his manners. "and thank you for retrieving the kit." Hanson, fulfilled, backed away but remained close by as a watchful guard. Henry returned to washing the wound. He noticed another scar running nearly parallel to the fresh opening, it was wider and had evidence of burns. Knowing he wouldn't get any answers, he didn't bother asking about it.
The knife wound was deep, too deep to close with any tape. "Its going to need stitches." He stated, moving to open the kit for disinfectant, lidocaine, needle, and silk thread.
As he worked to close the still bleeding gash, Henry felt a strong sense of familiarity in this situation. It seemed so similar to a not so long ago clinic patient, even the hulking protective presence.
~1987~
A man and his young daughter, no older than six, walked into the free medical clinic. Inside, the clinic was filled with the wounded, sick, and needy denizens of this, one of the many bad sides of town in New York. The little girl, holding a dirty piece of cloth to her bleeding arm, curled into her father's leg away from the crowd and the medical staff. Her father placed a protective hand on her shoulder and pushed his way through the throng to the window.
"Can I help you?" The tired receptionist asked, sounding more like a waitress.
"My daughter was shot."
"How badly?" She asked automatically, craning to look down at the girl.
"A graze on her arm." He answered reluctantly, knowing that it decreased the priority greatly.
"You're going to have to wait a while so we can care for the more serious cases, Sir." She dismissed him, gesturing toward the packed waiting room.
"She's a little girl, frightened and in pain! I demand someone see her, it won't take long!" He screamed, short temper flaring, pounding a fist on the counter.
"I can't help that, we have limited facilities and are understaffed. So you'll have to wait!"
With a threatening glare, hardened by use and experience, he cleared a nearby chair and took a seat, bringing his daughter to his lap. The scrap of cloth, that she clutched to her arm, was soaked and beginning to leak blood down her small arm and through her fingers. He wrapped his own hand around her much smaller one, adding pressure to staunch the bleeding. There he sat, bloody and scared girl on his lap and waited, impatiently.
A doctor stepped out of the tiny clinic room, in which he worked, for a moment to wash his hands. "Doctor Morgan," he looked up to see one of the nurses, "you've been in since dawn. Why don't you go home?" This was true, he had been busy treating patient after patient for fifteen hours. But going home was out of the question. He'd been avoiding the place as much as possible in the last few years, the house was too empty. He drowned his troubles in long hours at work.
"Thank you for your concern, but I'm fine."
"You don't look fine."
"What's all this about?" Another doctor asked exiting his own room. "Christ, Henry, you look awful. You should really go home." Henry prepared to abject. "You've been here longer than any of us today. I think the rest of us can handle anyone comes in." The nurse came back out into the hall with Henry's bag. The other doctor accepted it then placed it into Henry's hand. "Here's your bag. Go home."
No other choice readily available to him, he relented and made his way out to the waiting room. A few steps in, a large rough man stood, holding a little girl close to his leg. "Hey, doctor." The man addressed him, cutting off his path. "You a father?"
"Pardon?" He asked, taken aback by the odd question from the hulking man.
"Just answer. You got a kid?"
"Yes."
"Then you understand how much I want my girl taken care of."
He remembered the time when Abraham had broken his leg, even his century and a half of medical training had not prepared him to handle that. He knew very well that all rational thought disappeared when your child was hurt. "I do. Come in." he led the man, who was a few steps behind continually prompting the increasingly distressed child onward, to the empty room he had recently vacated.
Once inside the room, the girl shrunk against her father even more, away from the strange man in the white coat. She felt her father's hand comfortingly on her head. "Her mother died in a hospital last year." Her father explained to the doctor, as the reason for her shyness.
Nodding in understanding, the doctor removed the white symbol of his occupation. Emboldened by the revelation of a man no different in appearance than any other, perhaps a little more clean cut than other men she'd seen, the young girl released her grip upon her father.
"Hello, sweetheart, what's your name?" The coatless doctor asked, a warm smile crossing his face, as he knelt down as close to eye level with the girl as possible. The soft accents of his voice further encouraging her out of her shyness, she meekly stepped toward him.
"Joey." She whispered her tomboyish nickname.
"That's quite the unusual name for a little girl." The doctor's fancy, educated voice may be comforting to his daughter but it brought only suspicion from her father. In his experience gentlemen were the last ones you trusted, they were shrewd and manipulative businessmen who were determined to get their way.
"What's your name?" Joey asked, curiously, of the doctor.
"Do forgive my lack of manners. I'm Henry. It's a pleasure to meet you, Joey." He said, offering his hand to the girl. She took her hand off the lightly bleeding arm to shake it. The girl's blood transferring to his hand during the shake, he moved to start treating. "Let's get that looked at, shall we?" He suggested, referring to her wound. She nodded. "Can you get up on the table by yourself?" He inquired, being familiar with the pride of childhood, he knew she would prefer it to being aided. She walked to the amination table and inspected it for ways up to the surface. Attempting to climb via several approaches, she soon found the injury an incumbrance. She relented to the futility and turned back the doctor for help. The doctor looked to the man, tacitly asking 'May I?". With a curt nod the girl's father gave his permission. "Up we go, then." The doctor lifted the light young girl upon to the table from underneath her arms, as she let out a short giggle.
As he began to clean blood away to better examine the wound, he felt the watchful gaze behind him. Without even seeing the glare, from the protective hulking figure, he could sense its meaning, a clear one. 'I know men who wouldn't blink an eye at beating a doctor to a bloody pulp, if he did anything to my baby girl.' If there was one thing Henry had learned from his time doctoring in places like this, it was that is nothing more sacred to the underworld of New York than family.
"Its a graze, the earliest contact area has been cauterized, and the rest of the bleeding has nearly stopped." He was taping a layer of gauze over the arm before wrapping it snuggly, as he reported. "You've been a very brave girl, Joey." He offered his hands to assist her down. She wordlessly refused the aid and simply slid off the edge and landed unsteadily on her collected two lollipops, which a young Abe had insisted he carry, from his bag and offered them to Joey, she accepted them gratefully with a grin. Taking a plastic bag he began packing it with extra gauze, medical tape, and disinfectant. Henry turned to the man, to whose side the girl had returned. "The bleeding will stop soon. But it will still be an open wound, and therefore liable to infection. Every few days the bandages will need changed and the wound cleaned. All the necessaries are in here." He explained, handing the bag over to the man. "By the time the supplies run out, it should be safe in the openair."
"Thank you, Dr, Morgan." He said, offering a hand to the doctor, which he accepted.
"Its my pleasure."
"We've kept you long enough from your kid.'
Henry couldn't really explain that his son was 42 and currently married again. So instead of a reply he simply nodded.
The two began to leave, when as they were about to cross the door Joey turned and waved. "Goodbye."
"Goodbye, Joey." He returned, as they left.
Henry never expected that he would see either of them again, certainly not the very next day. Nevertheless, the day after their first meeting as he was heading out for the few minutes he took for lunch when he found Joey waiting for him outside his room. "Thanks, Doctor Morgan." She said before he could inquire of her return.
"You're quite welcome." But she had already disappeared.
~present~
Finishing the stitches he covered the closure with a strip of gauze. "A bullet wound and a knife wound on the same arm. Its quite the life you lead, Detective."
"Says the doctor with a scar from a gunshot in the chest." She taunted back.
He gave an unrevealing smile. After that day in 1987 he hadn't expected to cross paths with either the street hardened man nor Joey, and by some strange stroke of fate they had indeed met again.
"Done, Doc?" Hanson asked, from his position.
"All finished." Henry took a step back to allow Jo a way off the table.
"Do I get a lollipop?" She asked.
"I'm afraid I quit carrying those around quite awhile ago." He replied.
"Aww." She pouted, sliding off the table. "Come on, Hanson, we've got paperwork to do." She said taking Hanson's shoulder and leading him out of the morgue, leaving Henry alone.
"Do we have to?" Henry heard Hanson's whining response before the door fully closed. It brought an amused smile to his continents as his musings turned to somewhere between the now and twenty-eight years earlier. He wondered whether she remembered the clinic visit and that Dtr. Morgan, remarkably like himself in all ways. She hadn't made any mention of it. What had he been thinking, making all those references? She'd made one too, of course all this could have been completely innocent and not secret endangering in the slightest. Would it be such a bad thing after all if she had remembered?
His thoughts, on the verge of frantic, were interrupted by the door to the morgue opening once more. Jo peeked her head in; reminding him of her younger, much shyer self. "Yes, Jo-?" He stopped himself from adding the childhood suffix.
"I just wanted to say. Thanks, Doctor Morgan." She said, then ducked back into the hallway, effectively disappearing again.