A/N: IT'S FINALLY OVER! WOO! Congrats on a great week, everyone!
Disclaimer: I don't own Fairy Tail.
Wendy Marvell peeks around the corner and immediately whirls around, shaking her head vehemently.
"No," she says firmly. "I'm not doing it."
"You drew the short stick," Chelia Blendy points out. Beside her, Romeo Conbolt nods and holds up the red-tipped stick that had unwittingly sealed her fate not ten minutes ago.
"I didn't sign a binding contract beforehand so I don't have to," Wendy says, though she decides to neglect to mention that verbal contracts hold as much weight as written ones provided there are witnesses to corroborate. There are a lot of benefits to having a lawyer for a best friend, one of them being that everything he learned in law school, she did by proxy. He'll have a riot when she texts him later seeing as they both hate contract law.
"Honour the traditions of the staff of life!" Romeo's ghost imitation, complete with a wavering voice and wiggling fingers, serves to raise more eyebrows than their levels of fear. Wendy rolls her eyes and grabs the 'staff', throwing it in the nearby bin.
"It's a tongue depressor you dipped in iodine, not some mystic staff," Wendy snaps. "The staff of life isn't gonna keep me safe from that room now is it?"
"You should be super careful, Wendy. If you don't make it out alive..." Chelia hisses, fiddling with the lapels of her white coat nervously. Wendy's both amused and slightly alarmed to see her pupils dilate - Chelia is well and truly terrified of that place. They've all heard the same rumours, which are admittedly the kind that lead to people (read: all three of them) going around the halls to avoid walking in front of that place, but Chelia is a strong, stubborn woman who should absolutely not be drawn to such dramatics. Unless, of course, she's seen something herself in which case Wendy will slap down her ID and book it out the back.
"I was in there once," Romeo says solemnly. Wendy gawks, eyeing him up and down. He's in one whole piece as far as she can tell, but given what they deal with in there, she won't be surprised if she learns that he's missing a kidney or two.
"And?" Chelia whispers.
"It's too much...I can't…"
"Oh, for God's sake," Dr Laxus Dreyar says from where he's leaning against the nurse's station, amused. "It's Pathology. You're all medical students on rotation in Infectious Disease, you need to get used to running samples down here for testing. Don't let hospital gossip freak you out."
"Make nice with the lab techs, even if they all look like vampires," Dr Mirajane Strauss reminds them. "Knowing your attending, you'll be running your samples down at all sorts of odd hours and the graveyard shift techs hate her because she asks for genetic testing at 3 AM and those are a pain to run."
"Isn't Erik on graveyard shift?" Dr Dreyar asks. "He likes her weird shit. Half the time he winds up testing for other things on top of it just so he can say he solved the case sooner."
"Erik lives here, I think," Dr Strauss laughs. "Oh, but he's the exception."
Wendy listens to their conversation and creates a new mental file for 'Erik', with a link to her attending in big, bold red. If he's the exception to lab techs hating her attending then that implies he holds her in high regards, which gives them a degree of closeness that transcends a regular friendship. They have competitions to solve cases and he runs extra tests for her, which means they're each others confidants. All in all, he is a very important person to her attending and Wendy is curious to find out more. A doctor is merely a detective who's allowed to play with sharp toys and scary pills, after all, and a good detective always looks into new connections. Hippocrates has signed off on this; who is she to deny the father of medicine?
"Fine," Wendy says with a touch too much reluctance. She grabs the vials of blood and gives them a cursory glance, just to be sure the labels read 'Dengue Antibodies (IgG, IgM); Dengue Virus by PCR' and not something ridiculous like 'white body count plz' - the last person who did that still has yet to recover.
"Good luck!" Chelia cheers.
"I hope Mest has a copy of your will," Romeo says.
Wendy flips them the bird and marches off.
Pathology is one of those weird departments that doesn't have glass windows or a direct entrance. Instead, it's got a solid steel entrance and requires navigating two halls to find the actual doors. Wendy winds up walking into the bathroom, an office, and a janitor's closet before she locates the right door which, in retrospect, she should have found earlier accounting for the giant red "ENTER" sign above it.
She slips through the smallest crack she can make and slowly tip-toes forward. The lab is empty, eerily so, and she can't help but be reminded of all those zombie outbreak movies where the protagonist creeps through the empty lab, only to find the techs dead in a room and the vials of contagious blood missing from a glass box. Wendy's not afraid of the zombie apocalypse, no sir, she's had a battle plan formulated since she was fourteen and it's only been refined since. Step one is to locate a zombie. Step two is to isolate it in a steel trap that has a camera in it for viewing purposes. Step three is to run either Operation Gummy Worm (Wendy's idea) or Operation Upchuck (Mest's idea after watching an episode of House); Gummy Worm involves throwing in maggots to eat the dead zombie flesh, and Upchuck involves allowing necrotizing fasciitis to do wreak havoc on the zombie. Step four is to figure out which is more effective and then save the rest of the world with it. Foolproof, really.
"You're in so much trouble," a deep voice comes out of abso-fuckin-lutely nowhere, causing Wendy to squeak and drop down behind a steel rack. Holy shit there's someone here (there's supposed to be someone here, idiot, it's probably a tech) and he says she's in trouble. Mest's lectures did not prepare her for this - cops and their interrogation tactics? Check. Malpractice lawyers? Check. Evil aliens from the next solar system over? Check. Psycho's in abandoned pathology labs who have access to things that can make her body disappear in under an hour? Not check.
"Only because you couldn't keep your stinking hands to yourself," a female voice Wendy is very familiar with hisses back.
Dr Heartfilia? Wendy thinks, surprised. Her attending asked her to run the blood down - why would she do that if she was coming down herself? Unless, of course, this visit was unplanned, which makes this conversation one of passion and great importance. Deductive reasoning gives the mysterious male voice the title 'Erik'. Wendy gently maneuvers boxes on the rack over noiselessly, so she can catch a glimpse of the elusive head of pathology. She can see maroon hair held back by a headband, and dark skin. Any more and she risks exposing herself.
"Those pants made your ass look great. Besides, knowing what kind of underwear you had on underneath just...well, I couldn't help it," Erik laughs.
Wendy is totally not freaking out. In the span of ten seconds she's learned that Erik and Dr Heartfilia are in a relationship of the sort that allows them to get all...touchy-touchy, and means she now has advantage over all of Dr Heartfilia's med students in the bet on who she's dating. All she has to do is discreetly change her bet from Dr Dreyar to Erik and she'll be sweeping in hundreds. That's enough for a textbook, two if she's lucky.
"Can't help it my ass, you get enough down here…" Lucy grumbles. Wendy freezes. Get enough down here? Implying that...they grab ass down here? Get dirty down here? When they think it's empty, which it most definitely isn't right now? She prays to every deity she knows, begging them to save her eyes and sense of self - if they start fucking while she's hiding not two feet away, she's going to need more therapy than the hospital allots to deal with it. Maybe a Valium prescription will do. Their sexual escapades will be her very own muscle infarction.
"Please, do you think Dreyar Sr will do anything to us? I'm irreplaceable," Erik declares rather smugly.
"And I am?" Lucy asks. Wendy can hear the eyebrow raise.
"Eh, infectious disease isn't that vital - ow!" Erik yelps. Wendy imagines her attending has pinched his shoulder or something equally painful.
"Half your techs get training doing our tests," Lucy says. "Pathology and infectious disease are symbiotic entities."
"Which is why you'll be fine," Erik assures her. "Besides, Makarov is an unrepentant perv himself. If he gave us shit for necking on our downtime then he's a fuckin' hypocrite."
"I know, I just...ugh, I can't believe I did that! What will my med students think?"
That you're human? You should see what some of the ones on rotation in immunology get up to in their lounge, Wendy thinks. She's walked in on one too many Eiffel Towers when ducking in for a consult, which is why she sticks to paging then down to her lounge instead.
"That you're human?" Erik echoes her thoughts. "Have you seen what the immunology people get up to? We're tame."
Wendy's going to get along with this one very well in the future.
"I wish we didn't have to keep this a secret."
"We don't have to, we can tell everyone anytime you want to. Say the word, I'll go yell it in the halls."
"You know why I can't just yet."
"I know. Just a few more months, yeah? Until then, I'll keep running unnecessary tests so you can come yell at odd hours."
"Is that why you keep taking the shifts I work? Oh, Erik, you idiot."
"You know what they say about people in love and all."
"We've known each other since we were five, the honeymoon phase shouldn't exist for us."
"I can keep using it as an excuse to stick my tongue down your throat, so…"
And with that, Wendy crawls back to the front doors, stands up, dusts herself off, and then very, very loudly calls, "Hello? Anybody down here?"
There's a brief pause before Erik yells, "Yeah, back here!"
Wendy retraces her steps and passes her hiding rack to a bit of an open space next to a lab bench that's a little wider than the rest. Erik and Lucy are a respectable distance apart, him seated on a spinny stool, and her next to a mass spec across from him. She stifles a snort. They're being way too obvious, even for a random passerby. Nobody stands that far apart that awkwardly unless they're doing it on the side. No wonder Dean Makarov caught on.
"Wendy," Lucy greets. "Erik, meet Wendy, she's a med student on rotation in my department. Wendy, this is Dr Erik Vivas, head of pathology."
"It's nice to meet you, sir," Wendy says politely. "I hope I'm not interrupting?" I so am.
"Nah, Lucy here was about to fillet me for running a test she never asked for. Thanks for coming to my rescue, kid," Erik says. He nods his head at the vials she's holding. "Those for me?"
"Yes." Wendy hands them over and stuffs her hands into her pockets immediately. Mest once told her that her 'tell' is in her hands, so it won't do to have those out. "I was wondering if you could test them for dengue fever?"
"Ah, for our patient, yeah? How's he doing?" Lucy asks. Wendy perks up at the obvious distraction - it's bait she's more than happy to latch on to.
"He's stable for now, fever is still pretty high but we've got him on fluids and he's responsive, so at this point we just need the tests to confirm dengue so we can start treatment," Wendy rattles off. Lucy gives her a warm, approving smile. "Excellent! Good diagnosis, by the way, I'm glad you made it so efficiently."
"Thank you, ma'am." Wendy bows a little, and then nods at them both. "I'll be off, then. See you around!"
"I'll page you when it's ready, kid."
"Bye, Wendy!"
She exits Pathology with a wicked smile on her face, and ignores Chelia and Romeo's alarmed chatter as the trio makes their way back to their department.
She is so going to win this bet.
A/N: I based the hospital off the one in House, except Pathology there does have glass walls, which always bothered me tbh. For one, I've never seen a hospital look THAT pretty, and for two...glass walls? Really? Anyways. Fun fact, Operation Gummy Worm and Operation Upchuck are actual battle plans in case of a zombie apocalypse - I devised them a few years ago when talking with friends.
Hit that mf review!
-Eien
