A/N: Thank you so much to Elena, Joel Shell, Lillepus, Kymby, and BJMccoy! So happy to have you all reading along!
"I'm here to meet someone," Charles muttered to the hostess, neglecting to wear his fedora this time around. He'd even left his tie on this time, his nervousness making him mindful that his vehicle and his social status were noticeably out of place here. "Blonde woman."
The hostess turned around to look at the expansive main room of the restaurant and then turned back to him.
"Come with me," the hostess replied, giving him a smile. He could only gulp—so she was already here, waiting for him. As he walked through along the row of booths, it was as if he was on his way to the gallows. But alas, now was the time that he would have to face the music, as it were.
"Charles," Margaret said, the smile on her face confusing him due to its implied sincerity.
"Margaret," he replied, gulping yet again, sliding into the booth and taking his seat across from her. Carefully he threaded his fingers together and set them on the tabletop, mentally willing himself to stop the shaking of his suddenly gelatinous legs.
"Do you know why I wanted you to meet me here?"
"Please… enlighten me," Charles could only remark with a sheepish look, not wishing to perhaps take his confession too far.
"Simple: I want to know what you're thinking."
He blinked several times now, stupefied by the vagueness of her statement.
"About what?"
"About me. Be honest. What am I to you? Are you satisfied with our relationship as it stands?"
"I'm not certain where this is coming from, Margaret," Charles murmured, fidgeting in his seat now, his throat dry as bone. "What exactly do you want to know?"
"I want to know how you feel about me. That's all."
She watched his Adam's apple rise and fall as he remained speechless across from her, his eyes unable to stay on hers for more than a second or two at a time.
"I value our relationship very highly," he finally uttered. "I value the time we spend together. Not only that, but I consider you to be my… closest friend."
Several seconds followed his statement in which the words slowly seemed to sink into Margaret's mind. Yet, rather than reply, she raised her eyebrows, an expectant expression on her face.
"You—you want me to say more?" he stammered, flashing a look of bewilderment. "I don't understand."
"Tell me, Charles, do friends purposely try to make each other unhappy?"
"No," Charles said, wincing as he could see the floodgates of Margaret's rage ready to open. So this served as the segue into the reason they were currently here.
"Then why did you deliberately schedule me to work with those miserable asses Dr. Baker and Dr. Fitzgerald all week, and not my other friend Clyde?"
"Friend? Not hardly," he said with a scoff.
"That's the part of that statement you take offense to? I knew it!" she seethed through gritted teeth, "I just knew you manipulated the schedule, and your reply just proves it to me! You're just lucky I haven't told anyone else yet!"
Now she could see that all the color was drained from Charles's face and there was a sheen of sweat on his forehead. He could only gape at her, his eyes both shocked and terrified. Margaret wasn't finished speaking just yet.
"And if your definition of friend is to stab someone in the back because of petty jealousy, then no, I guess Clyde and I aren't friends after all," she retorted.
Now Charles looked surly.
"I'll have you know, Margaret, that what I did was borne out of the depth of my immense appreciation for you," he snapped back.
"Right, by punishing me whenever I'm not with you."
"So not being with your beau Clyde is a punishment? I see what this is all about." Charles grimaced now, gesturing toward the entrance of the pub by the hostess stand. "What, is he currently waiting outside the door, preparing to chase me off again?"
"No," she replied emphatically. "And as I've said several times now, he and I are just friends."
"For now," he remarked, raising an eyebrow.
"You are infuriating, Charles," she replied through clenched teeth. "I just don't know what to think of you. It's like you don't want me to have any other friends besides you. Since when did you become so… so possessive?"
"Possessive? Surely you jest."
"What you are doing with the schedule is highly inappropriate, far more than any kind of romance that you believe to be occurring here. Are you so blinded by jealousy that you can't see that it's you who's completely and totally in the wrong?! If you were anyone else, I'd turn you in to the higher-ups!"
Charles's face was stricken now, his ears hot with shame, as he absorbed her words.
"Well, I can now see the gauntlet you've thrown down before me," he said, beginning to stand up, "and I've my dignity to uphold, so I will take my leav—"
Margaret reached out and grabbed his arm, pulling him back down to a seated position and immediately halting him mid-sentence.
"What dignity?" she said, pretending to look around. "I don't see any dignity in a man who has waaaay overstepped his role just to keep a so-called friend from working with a particular person of the opposite sex."
"Well, did Mr. O'Rourke tell you of his visit to the nursing supervisor?"
Margaret frowned at Charles's disrespect for another surgeon, one who deserved to be called doctor, and sighed.
"He did. So what?"
Charles kept his eyes low, unable to meet Margaret's. Her hand stayed on his forearm, and he found himself staring at it in wonder. She could see him blinking rapidly now, his brain working in overdrive to formulate a response.
"Well, having heard through Daniel Jackson about Clyde's ridiculous requests, I made my own requests to the nursing supervisor. Tell me; how is his manipulation of the system fair, and mine isn't? We are all friends, after all, aren't we?"
"That's not all that you did," she shot back, her voice a low growl as she pointed in his face. "Admit it."
He could feel a chill shoot up his spine at being put on the spot. Last time he and Margaret had been here, he had been prepared to speak of his envy, and yet he'd been interrupted. His eyes suspiciously scanned the room and the dance floor, and yet the booths along this wall were unable to be seen from this angle. Was Clyde O'Rourke hiding somewhere with some kind of recording device?
"Where is the recorder?" he suddenly blurted, leaning over in his seat. "Under the table? At the next booth over? Perhaps you both wish to rid the department of me, as it were."
"I think you're doing a bang-up job of that yourself," Margaret said, shaking her head, her face dead serious. "Look at you; you're a paranoid wreck."
"Surely you jest," Charles said with far less conviction, nervous chuckles erupting from him now.
"Let's see: you've alienated not one but three of your surgeons by screwing up their schedules to punish them, merely for how I feel about them. You're using your position to control who I interact with every day. And yet you think you have the right to make fun of Dr. Baker for his height! Some chief surgeon you are."
Now Charles gulped and his face transformed from defiance to total defeat as he visibly sank in his seat. Her words had devastated him and he could only gawk at her now, his mouth ajar, his entire body heavy with shame.
"You're absolutely right, Margaret," he finally answered, his voice breaking. "What I have done… is unconscionable. I have behaved abominably and will be correcting the schedule henceforth."
With that, he stood up from the booth, his face pained.
"Where are you going?" Margaret said, frowning up at him. "We didn't even get anything to eat!"
"I have to undo all my wrongs, which will take some time. Goodnight, Margaret."
"What's wrong?"
Charles was not his normal Major Ego self on this brisk fall Friday afternoon, the cool, self-assured man last week who was confident in his knowledge, cracking hilarious jokes, and being startlingly nonchalant about everything that had to be troubling him. It had alarmed Margaret that she hadn't seen him at lunch all week, but chalked it up to his being busy correcting his missteps he'd alluded to at the pub. She could see his chest rise and fall now beneath his surgical gown, bags beneath his tired eyes, as he stood under the bright lights of the O.R., just through with creating the initial incision in the patient. It had been exactly a week since they'd met at that pub, and already things had drastically changed in the department, as he said they would.
Charles didn't immediately reply to her question, which worried Margaret further.
"Charles—"
"Yes?" he said weakly, glancing over at her but keeping his eyes low.
"What's going on with you? We haven't worked together all week—and you look like hell."
He glanced over at her for a split second, his eyelids heavy.
"Why, thank you."
"No—I don't mean to be insulting. You look beat."
Little did she know how beat he really was. To follow through with correcting his wrongs, all week Charles had purposely avoided scheduling himself for surgeries, going so far as to reassign his planned Monday surgery to someone else. And all week, whenever Clyde O'Rourke was in the O.R., Margaret was certainly right beside him, as the ever-increasing pile of postoperative reports on his desk indicated, mocking Charles in their stark black typeface on white paper. Now that Charles had vacated the O.R., Clyde's requests for Nurse Houlihan seemed to have again taken precedent, and it was heartbreaking to view those many postoperative reports marking the encounters in which their romance continued to bloom.
Before committing to a week of self-inflicted punishment, Charles had made the unfortunate mistake to go to lunch in the hospital cafeteria on Monday, and, seeing Margaret and Clyde together in a corner booth, looking like lovebirds as they chatted animatedly, he'd promptly dumped his tray into the garbage and trudged back to his office. The loss of Margaret from his day-to-day existence was draining Charles of energy, of appetite, of happiness.
Ever since their interaction in the pub, Charles had wallowed in a mire of self-loathing, causing him to revert not only to the mindset of his initial days back in the States but also to the habits he'd adopted in those early days of his job at Boston Mercy, that of working long uninterrupted hours, being sent to bed early without supper, and strict limitations on social interactions with his peers.
In contrast, the return to Margaret was certainly doing much the opposite to a certain Irish surgeon. There was a new sparkle in Clyde's eyes at the afternoon scheduling meeting on Wednesday, as the tight control Charles had been exerting had been relaxed in its entirety. In the meantime, Charles holed himself up in his office all week, unable to pretend any longer that he wanted to listen to his music. Margaret had made her decision and seemed to be very comfortable with it. She hadn't even so much as stopped by his office to chat, not that she did that often before due to her busy schedule. He had undone his wrongs, so why did he still feel so terrible about it?
Yes, Charles was beat, and it had taken five days for Margaret to recognize it, let alone to care about it. And it was just what he deserved.
"Some retraction here—and here," Charles murmured, pointing to two distinct areas of tissue, his voice barely audible. The case he had picked—a small aneurysm—was a relatively simple one to fix, one that did not invite unforeseen errors. This was an open and shut case he had picked for him and Margaret today, his only case of the week. His state of mind did not invite the opportunity for improvisation or creativity—he was in utter despair.
With Charles's bloodied gloved hands currently in the surgical field, now Margaret reached her hands, holding the correct clamps, into the same small space they had created together. All at once, his senses were overwhelmed with Margaret. Her body, clothed entirely in white, emanated heat, a body that was so near to his, so near and yet so far. He could smell her perfume now, the faint scent of the perfume she'd often doused herself in at the 4077th. Her gloved hands brushed against his, the slickness of blood making them slide past each other with effortless grace. All the while, he watched their four hands once again working in perfect harmony, like a conductor's hands instructing the different elements of an orchestra, and his vision blurred with unexpected tears.
Little did Margaret know, but he had decided that this would be the last time they would be working together.
At the sound of an involuntarily sniffle from Charles, Margaret turned her focus to him. Was he about to cry? What the hell was going on with him? This was not the time nor place to discuss such things, being as they weren't alone, but it would have to be addressed as soon as was possible.
There were no jokes from Charles this time, no silly quips or any confident commands for one thing or another. The man standing next to her seemed to be quivering now, his breathing audibly and erratic, an occasional sniffle interrupting the relative silence of the operating room. Margaret bit down on her lip now to prevent herself from addressing his behavior at this very moment. Something was very wrong here—she instantaneously applied suction to a bleeder, well before it would have been requested, all in the spirit of finishing this procedure quickly.
"Why such haste?" Charles finally blurted, his voice breathy and unrecognizable.
Again Margaret turned fully to face him and could see again that his eyes looked glassy. For the sake of his dignity, she could not address what was going on with him in front of the circulating nurse and the anesthesiologist. It struck her deep inside to see Charles so clearly miserable, on the verge of tears, while trying so very hard to hide it.
"Do you want me to slow down?" she asked.
"Yes," he murmured, grimacing. "Please, if you would."