:*:*:*:*:*:*:
A/N: I know, I know. It's getting long. Sorry I made you guys wait so long. I just want to point out that I placed Jerry into this chapter, and whether he's there or not during this time frame (I am naming this story's setting as Season 6-A because it is so conveniently placed before S 7 and S 6), I don't really care. That's all. Read on, and enjoy! (You can review, too!)
:*:*:*:*:*:*:
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
:*:*:*:*:*:*:
Carter nearly fell running down the steps, which would have been disastrous. Woohoo, Carter tries to make a confusing situation perfect... but he falls down the steps instead! He could just see the headlines! Flashing lights! But he only thought about that for a second, a quick second that was eradicated when he spotted Yosh.
"Yosh!" Carter yelled to him. Yosh raised his head. "Yosh!"
"Calm down Carter, what's wrong?" He looked concerned.
"Where's Abby? I've got to find Abby... it's REALLY important... REALLY IMPORTANT!" he pleaded with a smile on his face.
"She's in a trauma, you'll have to wait." He looked frustrated for a second. He obviously knew what was going on. He smiled at Carter. "You," was all he could say.
Carter laughed a bit. "Yea, me. Wait, no one paged me," he realized.
"You've got the next one. ETA... now."
:*:*:*:*:*:*:
"Name?"
"He told us that it was Jeremy."
"Jeremy, I'm Doctor Carter, can you tell me what happened?"
"I don't know."
"Yes you do."
Carter's eyes met with those of the man deemed Jeremy. He knew well that he was staring right through him and to the truth when the air of fake helplessness turned to one of nervous fear.
"We were playing chicken."
Carter couldn't speak. The stupidity of the idea of two men, apparently friends, driving head on toward each other to see who would quick swerve out of the way in terror paralyzed his vocality.
"We never hit, we just both..."
"Chickened out?" Carter suggested.
"Yea. We each went off the side of the road. How's my friend?" Jeremy tried to look into the adjacent trauma room when Chen walked through, but the door slammed on his hopes.
"We don't know yet. But you're damn lucky, you know that? You're going to get away. Maybe not walking, but you'll get away."
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, I didn't want to do it! I just wanted to play a game!" His pleading was unbearable as it was annoying.
"Some game," Carter scoffed.
"I'm sorry!"
Carter went to the door between the two trauma rooms. He put a blood- soaked, gloved hand on the door and pulled it toward himself, then turned and looked Jeremy straight into his teary, scared, brown eyes.
"Tell him."
Jeremy froze.
"Now."
:*:*:*:*:*:*:
Having been tormented with two different trauma teams rattling commands into his ears, Carter grew to the point of utter exhaustion. He slumped himself into a chair in the lounge, heaving a long, exasperated sigh. Something that had been nagging in the back of his mind suddenly caught up with him then, making him jump up and run out the door.
"Yosh!" he called once more down the hallway.
"She's on break."
Carter slouched in dismay. "Do you know where she wen........."
"No," Yosh said, cutting him off. "I saw her at the end of the trauma, but I didn't notice where she went. Sorry, Carter." He had no attitude, just the same frustration.
Carter had nothing to do but display a boyish frown. "The Lip" began to resurface after many years of surpressing the childish urge to bring its inevitable power into play. Yosh did not, however, notice the all-powerful "Lip".
:*:*:*:*:*:*:
"All right, now I'm getting pissed," Carter thought aloud as he stood in front of his locker. He had not the energy to search for Abby, nor did he have the time when he was not on a break. He then got an idea. It was an idea of high school creativity, but he figured that it would work.
Ruffling through a small stash of papers that had sunken to the abyss that was the bottom of his locker, Carter found what could scarcely be named a notebook. The spiral was about a quarter of the way ripped out of the binding and streched into a long bar of wire, the corners of the cover bent, and half the pages were long gone, leaving meek, wrinkled leaves of paper to complement the poor mistake for a notebook. Despite how aged and decrepit the book was, he fussed with the cover until it gave under his force and he folded it around the back of the book. On the shelf of his locker he spotted a pen. It was a clear-barreled pen with black ink and read "Fexofenadine HCI" on the clip. He would have given a small, unenthused laugh had he seen this. He hastily turned the pen around and clicked it against his leg as he found a chair in the corner.
To add to the ensemble of the notebook, he shredded a page out as gingerly as he could manage, then leaned against the wall with the pen figuratively glued to the sorry leaf of crumpled, lined paper. With as much haste and joy as he had shown when he had come booking down the steps, he scratched a message onto the paper:
"Hopefully Yosh will get this to you......... Abby, I haven't seen you all day......... there is something I must talk to you about. It is very serious........."
Looking at the word he had just written, he raised an eyebrow. He scribbled.
"It is very important," he said as he wrote. He looked at the sentence, now pleased. He continued to write:
"My shift ends at 12 tonight, come to the roof at 12:30. I'll be there at quarter after. Please humor me and come, if I don't see you before the end of the day. Thanks a lot. -Carter"
As he folded (crumpled) the letter (memo), he couldn't help but laugh (in embarassment) at how youthful (Old-School) this apprehension would seem to Abby, but despite all this, he ran the letter to the desk.
"Yosh!" he yelled yet again.
"Jerry," was the reply.
"Jerry!" Carter said with a smile.
"Now you've got the idea, Carter."
"Hey, do you see Abby at all?"
"Sometimes, why?"
"Well, if you do see her, could you give her this?" he asked, handing him the giant, dry spitball.
"Well happy birthday, that'll get her," Jerry said, making fun of Carter.
"Just do it, please."
"And if I don't see her?"
"Give it to Yosh. You'll see him."
"Well, why don't you just give it to her?"
"Because, your luck combined is better than mine," Carter said with a sudden realization that he was, in fact, not having much luck at all. "Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go hibernate in the lounge so that Abby can show." He flashed a smile then went to his destination.
:*:*:*:*:*:*:
It had been about an hour since Carter had last had something to occupy himself with, and even now there was still nothing. And then came a knock......... soft, but loud enough to wake him out of his daydream that was nothing more than staring out the window of the lounge (had hadn't moved from his chair in the corner) at the drifting snowflakes and accumulating crystals of ice. He seemed to have watched the icicles that dripped from the roof as they grew, meaning he had obviously been there longer than he had thought. It was in a way mesmorizing as it was blinding when the ambulance lights flashed through them.
"Hey Carter, the chicken man slipped," Yosh said slowly.
"You mean Jeremy's friend?" he asked, closing his eyes and rubbing his forehead.
Yosh only nodded.
"How long is he going to be out?" Carter asked.
"Mark couldn't tell......... can we ever tell?"
"Nope."
Carter rose stiffly from the folding chair, his back paining him slightly, to go break the news to the man's little chicken-playing friend Jeremy.
:*:*:*:*:*:*:
Carter took a deep breath as he opened the door to curtain three, ready to go telling. He nodded to Marie as he passed. She smiled back. As he rounded the curtain on the other half of the room, the college-aged man perked up a bit.
"How's Mike?" he asked, his voice rasping slightly.
Carter sighed breathily as Jeremy leaned back and frowned.
"What happened? Is he okay?" Jeremy asked again, posing his question different ways and wrinkling his brow.
"He's okay, but uh........." Carter seated himself on a visitor's chair next to a table that held one small flower in a plastic cup along with a youthful and handwritten card. He looked at in in a small amusement.
"My niece made that," he pointed out, noting Carter's interest. "My brother was always the older, responsible, respectible type."
"Yea. Uh, as hard as we tried to prevent this, Mike slipped into unconsciousness again......... and we can't bring him to this time."
"Are you saying he's not waking up?"
"Yes. We just have to wait it out. That's all we can do right now," Carter said, looking sympathetically into Jeremy's fear stricken eyes. The sympathy then changed to firmness. "But I guess you've both learned something."
"I know......... Don't say it. I've been going crazy over the thought of it, you know? Why I did it, why he thought of it, why I agreed, what the hell was wrong with me......... I know." He listed his thoughts.
"I'm hoping the best though, you do know that."
"Thanks. Me too." Jeremy looked to his left, away from Carter's glance.
Carter was going to recommend that he get some sleep, but he figured Mike was doing enough of that for the both of them. He stood and went to Marie's curtain.
"Tough day?" she asked, sympathizing with him.
"Yea. Very. Do you need anyting?"
"No. It's not just about that Jeremy guy, is it?" she quizzed him, noticing his lack of attention.
"You're good." He couldn't help but laugh a little.
"It's about that girl......... Doctor Lockheart."
"Abby? Well I........."
"There's no hiding it from me," Marie said cleverly. "Unfortunately for you, I am very good at telling these things. My friends hate it. I love it."
"Right again. Well, let's see if I can catch up with her now."
"Good luck, but you know you'll see her when you least expect it."
"Probably."
"No, you will. So expect it."
Carter smiled and looked at the girl, a fourteen-year-old love psychic it seemed, but he knew that it had to be women's intuition taking over in the teen years.
"I will. Thanks."
"Sure thing. Have a nice night," she said invitingly.
"You too."
Carter walked out of the room, now a little paranoid that Abby could possibly round the next corner at any moment. He stopped in front of the window outside curtain three to see his reflection in the blinds, then pushed some of his hair out of the way. He looked again, spruced it some more, then left. Inside the room, Marie, seeing his shadow, could not keep herself from laughing lightly at the thought of a doctor (who had to be at least twice her own age, she figured) being so very like someone she would normally be friends with......... in school. Little had Carter known that anyone had noticed him fixing his hair in a sorry reflection of himself. Had he known this, he probably would have waited for a mirror, but that high-school antic kept taking over. Yes, the letter (memo) was definitely an underaged idea. But love was love......... and these loopholes were really beginning to piss him off.
:*:*:*:*:*:*:
"Can we please keep the littering to a minimum?" Weaver bellowed at the front desk. "This is a prime example of why we have trash cans!" she added, swiping a pile of papers including fixed pictures undoubtedly from an online source from the fax tray into a nearby trash can. "This is also why our fax machines and printers are running out of ink." She picked up a leaf that she had missed. "Oh, come on......... who prints out pictures of Jack Russels in suits?"
"Actually," Jerry cut in, "That's a wirehaired terrier......... in a tux," he added happily, recrumpling and putting down the note that Carter had written and he had read next to the charts.
"I don't care and God forbid if it's a supermodel in a G-string, don't let it happen again!"
"All right, all right!" Jerry pleaded, jumping out of her way and to the computer to cancel his next printout......... which could have resembled what Weaver had suggested judging by the look on his face.
"Thank you!" Weaver said angrily, swiping more papers. She made her way to where Jerry had been standing, having noticed that he had read something and simply crumpled it and threw it so conveniently on the counter. "And please, somebody call housekeeping or something," she added, taking the paper ball with her as she walked toward a biohazard bin.
Jerry hadn't turned around just yet, but anyone plotting against him could not have waited to see the look on his face......... and when he did turn around, a look did cross his face. One of terror of letting a friend down. He immediately looked under the desk. It was time to search the trash bins.
:*:*:*:*:*:*:
"Jerry?" a familiar voice asked about ten minutes later. "Why are you in the garbage?"
He looked up from his spot. "Yosh! Am I glad to see you. I need your help. You see, Carter gave me this note to give to Abby, telling her to meet him on the roof. I promised to relay the message, but I lost it!"
"So why don't you just repeat it? I mean, even I know you read it."
"No I didn't," he said defensively.
"Well, snooping could have been good for once. Come on, what did it say?"
Jerry just went back into the trash can. Yosh looked at him hopelessly. After a sad thirty seconds or so, he joined him.
"So?" Yosh asked.
"Okay, okay. I read it."
"And?"
"Well, I didn't want you to think I was stupid, but I forgot what time it said."
"You what?"
A/N: I know, I know. It's getting long. Sorry I made you guys wait so long. I just want to point out that I placed Jerry into this chapter, and whether he's there or not during this time frame (I am naming this story's setting as Season 6-A because it is so conveniently placed before S 7 and S 6), I don't really care. That's all. Read on, and enjoy! (You can review, too!)
:*:*:*:*:*:*:
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
:*:*:*:*:*:*:
Carter nearly fell running down the steps, which would have been disastrous. Woohoo, Carter tries to make a confusing situation perfect... but he falls down the steps instead! He could just see the headlines! Flashing lights! But he only thought about that for a second, a quick second that was eradicated when he spotted Yosh.
"Yosh!" Carter yelled to him. Yosh raised his head. "Yosh!"
"Calm down Carter, what's wrong?" He looked concerned.
"Where's Abby? I've got to find Abby... it's REALLY important... REALLY IMPORTANT!" he pleaded with a smile on his face.
"She's in a trauma, you'll have to wait." He looked frustrated for a second. He obviously knew what was going on. He smiled at Carter. "You," was all he could say.
Carter laughed a bit. "Yea, me. Wait, no one paged me," he realized.
"You've got the next one. ETA... now."
:*:*:*:*:*:*:
"Name?"
"He told us that it was Jeremy."
"Jeremy, I'm Doctor Carter, can you tell me what happened?"
"I don't know."
"Yes you do."
Carter's eyes met with those of the man deemed Jeremy. He knew well that he was staring right through him and to the truth when the air of fake helplessness turned to one of nervous fear.
"We were playing chicken."
Carter couldn't speak. The stupidity of the idea of two men, apparently friends, driving head on toward each other to see who would quick swerve out of the way in terror paralyzed his vocality.
"We never hit, we just both..."
"Chickened out?" Carter suggested.
"Yea. We each went off the side of the road. How's my friend?" Jeremy tried to look into the adjacent trauma room when Chen walked through, but the door slammed on his hopes.
"We don't know yet. But you're damn lucky, you know that? You're going to get away. Maybe not walking, but you'll get away."
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, I didn't want to do it! I just wanted to play a game!" His pleading was unbearable as it was annoying.
"Some game," Carter scoffed.
"I'm sorry!"
Carter went to the door between the two trauma rooms. He put a blood- soaked, gloved hand on the door and pulled it toward himself, then turned and looked Jeremy straight into his teary, scared, brown eyes.
"Tell him."
Jeremy froze.
"Now."
:*:*:*:*:*:*:
Having been tormented with two different trauma teams rattling commands into his ears, Carter grew to the point of utter exhaustion. He slumped himself into a chair in the lounge, heaving a long, exasperated sigh. Something that had been nagging in the back of his mind suddenly caught up with him then, making him jump up and run out the door.
"Yosh!" he called once more down the hallway.
"She's on break."
Carter slouched in dismay. "Do you know where she wen........."
"No," Yosh said, cutting him off. "I saw her at the end of the trauma, but I didn't notice where she went. Sorry, Carter." He had no attitude, just the same frustration.
Carter had nothing to do but display a boyish frown. "The Lip" began to resurface after many years of surpressing the childish urge to bring its inevitable power into play. Yosh did not, however, notice the all-powerful "Lip".
:*:*:*:*:*:*:
"All right, now I'm getting pissed," Carter thought aloud as he stood in front of his locker. He had not the energy to search for Abby, nor did he have the time when he was not on a break. He then got an idea. It was an idea of high school creativity, but he figured that it would work.
Ruffling through a small stash of papers that had sunken to the abyss that was the bottom of his locker, Carter found what could scarcely be named a notebook. The spiral was about a quarter of the way ripped out of the binding and streched into a long bar of wire, the corners of the cover bent, and half the pages were long gone, leaving meek, wrinkled leaves of paper to complement the poor mistake for a notebook. Despite how aged and decrepit the book was, he fussed with the cover until it gave under his force and he folded it around the back of the book. On the shelf of his locker he spotted a pen. It was a clear-barreled pen with black ink and read "Fexofenadine HCI" on the clip. He would have given a small, unenthused laugh had he seen this. He hastily turned the pen around and clicked it against his leg as he found a chair in the corner.
To add to the ensemble of the notebook, he shredded a page out as gingerly as he could manage, then leaned against the wall with the pen figuratively glued to the sorry leaf of crumpled, lined paper. With as much haste and joy as he had shown when he had come booking down the steps, he scratched a message onto the paper:
"Hopefully Yosh will get this to you......... Abby, I haven't seen you all day......... there is something I must talk to you about. It is very serious........."
Looking at the word he had just written, he raised an eyebrow. He scribbled.
"It is very important," he said as he wrote. He looked at the sentence, now pleased. He continued to write:
"My shift ends at 12 tonight, come to the roof at 12:30. I'll be there at quarter after. Please humor me and come, if I don't see you before the end of the day. Thanks a lot. -Carter"
As he folded (crumpled) the letter (memo), he couldn't help but laugh (in embarassment) at how youthful (Old-School) this apprehension would seem to Abby, but despite all this, he ran the letter to the desk.
"Yosh!" he yelled yet again.
"Jerry," was the reply.
"Jerry!" Carter said with a smile.
"Now you've got the idea, Carter."
"Hey, do you see Abby at all?"
"Sometimes, why?"
"Well, if you do see her, could you give her this?" he asked, handing him the giant, dry spitball.
"Well happy birthday, that'll get her," Jerry said, making fun of Carter.
"Just do it, please."
"And if I don't see her?"
"Give it to Yosh. You'll see him."
"Well, why don't you just give it to her?"
"Because, your luck combined is better than mine," Carter said with a sudden realization that he was, in fact, not having much luck at all. "Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go hibernate in the lounge so that Abby can show." He flashed a smile then went to his destination.
:*:*:*:*:*:*:
It had been about an hour since Carter had last had something to occupy himself with, and even now there was still nothing. And then came a knock......... soft, but loud enough to wake him out of his daydream that was nothing more than staring out the window of the lounge (had hadn't moved from his chair in the corner) at the drifting snowflakes and accumulating crystals of ice. He seemed to have watched the icicles that dripped from the roof as they grew, meaning he had obviously been there longer than he had thought. It was in a way mesmorizing as it was blinding when the ambulance lights flashed through them.
"Hey Carter, the chicken man slipped," Yosh said slowly.
"You mean Jeremy's friend?" he asked, closing his eyes and rubbing his forehead.
Yosh only nodded.
"How long is he going to be out?" Carter asked.
"Mark couldn't tell......... can we ever tell?"
"Nope."
Carter rose stiffly from the folding chair, his back paining him slightly, to go break the news to the man's little chicken-playing friend Jeremy.
:*:*:*:*:*:*:
Carter took a deep breath as he opened the door to curtain three, ready to go telling. He nodded to Marie as he passed. She smiled back. As he rounded the curtain on the other half of the room, the college-aged man perked up a bit.
"How's Mike?" he asked, his voice rasping slightly.
Carter sighed breathily as Jeremy leaned back and frowned.
"What happened? Is he okay?" Jeremy asked again, posing his question different ways and wrinkling his brow.
"He's okay, but uh........." Carter seated himself on a visitor's chair next to a table that held one small flower in a plastic cup along with a youthful and handwritten card. He looked at in in a small amusement.
"My niece made that," he pointed out, noting Carter's interest. "My brother was always the older, responsible, respectible type."
"Yea. Uh, as hard as we tried to prevent this, Mike slipped into unconsciousness again......... and we can't bring him to this time."
"Are you saying he's not waking up?"
"Yes. We just have to wait it out. That's all we can do right now," Carter said, looking sympathetically into Jeremy's fear stricken eyes. The sympathy then changed to firmness. "But I guess you've both learned something."
"I know......... Don't say it. I've been going crazy over the thought of it, you know? Why I did it, why he thought of it, why I agreed, what the hell was wrong with me......... I know." He listed his thoughts.
"I'm hoping the best though, you do know that."
"Thanks. Me too." Jeremy looked to his left, away from Carter's glance.
Carter was going to recommend that he get some sleep, but he figured Mike was doing enough of that for the both of them. He stood and went to Marie's curtain.
"Tough day?" she asked, sympathizing with him.
"Yea. Very. Do you need anyting?"
"No. It's not just about that Jeremy guy, is it?" she quizzed him, noticing his lack of attention.
"You're good." He couldn't help but laugh a little.
"It's about that girl......... Doctor Lockheart."
"Abby? Well I........."
"There's no hiding it from me," Marie said cleverly. "Unfortunately for you, I am very good at telling these things. My friends hate it. I love it."
"Right again. Well, let's see if I can catch up with her now."
"Good luck, but you know you'll see her when you least expect it."
"Probably."
"No, you will. So expect it."
Carter smiled and looked at the girl, a fourteen-year-old love psychic it seemed, but he knew that it had to be women's intuition taking over in the teen years.
"I will. Thanks."
"Sure thing. Have a nice night," she said invitingly.
"You too."
Carter walked out of the room, now a little paranoid that Abby could possibly round the next corner at any moment. He stopped in front of the window outside curtain three to see his reflection in the blinds, then pushed some of his hair out of the way. He looked again, spruced it some more, then left. Inside the room, Marie, seeing his shadow, could not keep herself from laughing lightly at the thought of a doctor (who had to be at least twice her own age, she figured) being so very like someone she would normally be friends with......... in school. Little had Carter known that anyone had noticed him fixing his hair in a sorry reflection of himself. Had he known this, he probably would have waited for a mirror, but that high-school antic kept taking over. Yes, the letter (memo) was definitely an underaged idea. But love was love......... and these loopholes were really beginning to piss him off.
:*:*:*:*:*:*:
"Can we please keep the littering to a minimum?" Weaver bellowed at the front desk. "This is a prime example of why we have trash cans!" she added, swiping a pile of papers including fixed pictures undoubtedly from an online source from the fax tray into a nearby trash can. "This is also why our fax machines and printers are running out of ink." She picked up a leaf that she had missed. "Oh, come on......... who prints out pictures of Jack Russels in suits?"
"Actually," Jerry cut in, "That's a wirehaired terrier......... in a tux," he added happily, recrumpling and putting down the note that Carter had written and he had read next to the charts.
"I don't care and God forbid if it's a supermodel in a G-string, don't let it happen again!"
"All right, all right!" Jerry pleaded, jumping out of her way and to the computer to cancel his next printout......... which could have resembled what Weaver had suggested judging by the look on his face.
"Thank you!" Weaver said angrily, swiping more papers. She made her way to where Jerry had been standing, having noticed that he had read something and simply crumpled it and threw it so conveniently on the counter. "And please, somebody call housekeeping or something," she added, taking the paper ball with her as she walked toward a biohazard bin.
Jerry hadn't turned around just yet, but anyone plotting against him could not have waited to see the look on his face......... and when he did turn around, a look did cross his face. One of terror of letting a friend down. He immediately looked under the desk. It was time to search the trash bins.
:*:*:*:*:*:*:
"Jerry?" a familiar voice asked about ten minutes later. "Why are you in the garbage?"
He looked up from his spot. "Yosh! Am I glad to see you. I need your help. You see, Carter gave me this note to give to Abby, telling her to meet him on the roof. I promised to relay the message, but I lost it!"
"So why don't you just repeat it? I mean, even I know you read it."
"No I didn't," he said defensively.
"Well, snooping could have been good for once. Come on, what did it say?"
Jerry just went back into the trash can. Yosh looked at him hopelessly. After a sad thirty seconds or so, he joined him.
"So?" Yosh asked.
"Okay, okay. I read it."
"And?"
"Well, I didn't want you to think I was stupid, but I forgot what time it said."
"You what?"