A/N: Er - no. Afraid I'm not QUITE done yet. I blame Steve, though - he makes an excellent fall guy. I've always meant to go back and count how many t-shirts were injured or lost their lives in the making of this story, but I never actually have.

9. No Pain No Gain

"Steve!"

Steve was in the middle of dragging his spare t-shirt over his head and had to fight to find the head hole. He managed to pop his head through, yanking the rest of the shirt down to cover his torso. At least this one is brown. Maybe it will look sort of clean for more than a couple of hours. "What now, Cristina?"

Cristina leaned through the pass-through to the kitchen, barely pausing to clip a number of orders to the revolving wheel. "I heard the crash! Is everything all right?"

"Yeah…" Steve allowed himself a second to rub his hands over his face. "A couple of beers and a coffeepot lost their lives, but the rest of us are fine."

Cristina squinted hard at him. "Then how come you're bleeding?"

Steve frowned at her. "I'm not bleeding."

"Think you are." She grabbed his right arm and twisted it so that he could get a glimpse of the back of it. Blood actually was running down it, dribbling from his wrist.

"Huh." He reached automatically for a clutch of paper napkins. "Must have landed on some glass. How many orders you got?"

"They can wait." Cristina disappeared for a second and reappeared in the entryway of the swinging door. "Let me see you arm." She tilted her head at him. "And what's wrong with your foot?"

"Nothing's wrong with my - "

"You're standing funny." She crouched down at his feet and gestured for him to sit.

Steve blew out a breath. This is what happened when you posted 'waitress needed' ads on the hospital bulletin board. He half-perched on a stool. "Look, Cristina, I'm all for you furthering your studies, but - hey! Ow!" He actually jumped as she manipulated his shoe, a burning heat making itself known there for the first time.

"Your foot looks red. There's some little blisters starting, too."

"Oh." Steve slumped more deeply into the stool, suddenly tired. "The coffee. Must have scalded it. It'll keep - " She was on her feet again and at the freezer. "Look, I appreciate your concern, but we've got a whole dining room full of cranky customers who need our attention - what are you doing?" He stared as she emptied a bag of ice chips into a compact cooler.

"You're going to put your foot in here. It will stop the burning - really. The burn keeps doing damage for a while unless you pack it in ice - this will stop more blisters from forming and will keep it from hurting so much later."

It was going to hurt later. Just great. "We really need that ice for the drinks. Besides, I have a lot of orders to fill here - I can't be sitting around with my foot in an ice bath."

"That's why I chose this cooler - you should be able to move around with it on your foot - you can just sort of shuffle."

Steve stared at her. "You're kidding, right?" Cristina's answer was to grab his shoe and tug it off. "OW! Cristina!" She guided the foot toward the ice, but Steve yanked it away. "I don't think the Health Department would appreciate me being in the kitchen with a bare foot."

"That's why you need to put it in the ice cooler."

"Oh, and you think that Health Inspectors will accept that as a shoe?"

"It's first aid. Come on - " This time she got a firm grip on his ankle and pushed his foot into the ice, heaping it over the top.

The initial chill made Steve want to howl, but after a second the burning did stop, numbed in the cold. "That does feel better," he admitted reluctantly, studying it. "Can you get extra credit for something like this? Field duty?"

"I could write a paper. Let me see your arm…"

Steve was busy plucking orders off the wheel. "It's a cut. Just slap a band aid on it."

"It's actually pretty…oh…"

Steve glanced up from the plates he was lining up, startled to see Cristina pale. "You okay?"

"Yeah…" Cristina fanned herself with one hand while fumbling for the first aid kit. "It's the sight of blood…gets to me…"

Steve sucked in a breath as she dabbed the cut with antiseptic. "I thought you were pre-med?"

"Yeah…I don't see any glass in there - wonder if it should have stitches. Oh…" She pressed a gauze pad against the wound, looking hastily away.

Steve glanced at her warily again as he spooned servings of baked beans and coleslaw onto the plates with his good hand. "Isn't that kind of an inconvenient quirk to have if you want to practice medicine?"

"Not really. I mean, for now. I intend to specialize in something relatively bloodless, like Dermatology or Ear, Nose and Throat…" she wrapped the gauze with medical tape, keeping her eyes half-averted. "You're all set…wow…"

Steve glanced at her again. "Put your head between you knees for a minute."

Cristina sat on the stool Steve had vacated and tucked her head between her knees, folding her arms over her head. "Can you move okay with that cooler?" Her voice was slightly muffled by her position.

Steve reached for a rack of ribs with a side of sauce, dragging the cooler with him. "Yeah, it works." Thank God Jesse isn't here. He'd have a heyday with this. "Until I have to bus again, anyway."

"By then it should have stopped the burning and taken a lot of the sting out. There's burn cream - " she gestured over her shoulder without raising her head, "in the kit. You should put it on before you put your shoe back. And tie it loosely."

"Mm. Thanks, Doc."

Cristina stood up carefully. "I'd better check on my tables. That's a good trick. I'll have to remember it."

"Yeah, it got me through a lot of autopsies in my early days. I'll have these for you in a minute."

Steve was sliding his cooler across the floor to the fixings for a pulled pork sandwich when he stopped suddenly, staring from it to his assortment of bandages.

How the heck did this happen? I'm like the Quasimodo of Barbecue Bob's. And the day started out so beautifully - so perfectly. Should have just rolled over and pulled the covers over my head.

For a moment the air seemed to push in on him, redolent with the smoky scent of barbecue sauce, trapping him in a wave of misery.

He heard one of the girls clip a new set of orders to the wheel and Cristina call, "Steve? Are those almost ready? We've got some tables that need attention, too."

"Yeah, yeah - " Steve hastily constructed the sandwich, checking the order slips one more time. And tomorrow - which was not very far away - he'd be back to dancing with corpses. Somehow, somewhere, something had gone very wrong.

"Steve…?"

"I've got it." He wiped the plates and pushed them through the pass through, grabbing the next set of slips.

Next time he had a day off he was going into hiding - deep in the woods, or undercover, or maybe even a cave or something. Maybe another town. He lined up the new set of slips. Or country, even. Any place they didn't have barbecue. He reached for a fresh stack of clean plates and set them up. At the very least, he was unplugging the phone. Throwing it out the window. Something.

He read through the orders and grabbed a bag of frozen steak fries from the freezer, slitting the bag open and shaking them free over a wire basket, submerging the basket in the rumbling vat of grease. The fries hissed and added their scent to the heavy air, making him feel momentarily light-headed.

That's right - he never had gotten around to dinner, had he? Somehow, scraping all those plates of rib bones had killed his appetite for ribs. Maybe if he worked here long enough he would even learn to hate them. That was a depressing thought.

He lifted the basket out of the grease and let it drain for a minute while he checked on his sizzling ribs. The cooler shushed over the floor as he moved and he made a face at it.

If he could start this day over, what would he do differently?

He glanced at the drink orders - two Pepsis, one Fosters, one water - and set them up on a separate tray with ice and lemon.

Everything. He would do everything differently.

He divided the hot fries among the plates, crunching his eyebrows togetherwhen he remembered his father's face as he'd told him about the neighbors over breakfast, Amanda's voice as she'd asked him to help her out, and Jesse's few and far between opportunities to see his father.

On the other hand… it wasn't like he could ever actually -

"Steve?"

"Coming right now - " He shook himself to clear his head and tonged ribs onto each plate, wiping the plate edges, reread the orders one more time to be sure. Well, all that was water under the bridge anyway. But next time -

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Cristina approach with a fistful of new order slips. She jerked her head toward the dining room to remind him that there were tables that needed his attention. He nodded to show that he understood.

Next time. Next time he'd plan a little further ahead - hide out. Go to ground. But for right now he needed to see if he could get his left shoe on and bus some tables.

He reached through the pass through and tapped the bell. "Order's up."

TBC