AN: Wow, I cannot believe how much of a response I got from this story. I really wasn't expecting quite that much attention, but thank you everyone who reviewed/faved/alerted this story. It honestly makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.I think I managed to reply to each of the reviewers, but if I missed you I'm really really sorry and I really do appreciate your reviews.
Okay now onto the real bit I forgot to mention in the first chapter: This is set around the early parts of season 8, but is a little timeframe screwy because Dr. Cox is the Chief of Medicine, but JD and Elliot are not back together yet. Just wanted to establish that bit. And the T rating is solely for safety, because the worst that this story ever really gets is a bit of swearing that never gets worse than what happens on the show. Oh and at the moment the updates are scheduled for Wednesdays and Saturdays, but I think I may be changing to three times a week because the waiting and suspsense wears on me too and there are at least twenty chapters more to go, so this story could take a long time if we only go two chaps a week.
Anyway, now on to the beginning of a long string of Perry POVs. Hopefully you all enjoy it as much as you did the last, and thanks again for the support. ~Artemis
Chapter 2 – His Being Wrong-ness
Life at Sacred Heart is usually pretty predictable, honestly. Things don't often change around here and it takes a lot to throw someone as experienced as me for a loop. Kelso lurks down in the CoffeeBucks and is as much of an ass as when he ruled this hellhole, Carla bosses people around and keeps me sane-ish, Barbie is, well, a Barbie doll, the surgeons are overly-cocky jocks, the interns are idiots, and Newbie follows me around and tries to be my best friend. Of course every once in a while there is that bizarre day where nothing seems to make sense at all. And that day had been today.
I tried to convince myself that not having Newbie hovering over me all day had been a relief. It was a blessing to not have to deal with the girl pestering me, trying to tell me personal stories that no-body could possibly care about, and calling me 'mentor' while trying to sneak in a hug. And any other day it would have been like a welcome reprieve. But damn it all, not today.
It was a rare occasion when Newbie lost his temper with anyone, especially with me. Angry just wasn't something that the kid did. It had happened before, but even then it had seemed strange and it hadn't lasted all that long. The kid would let off a rant that almost made me proud of him, although I would ne-hever admit it, and then he would just go back to being the normally, puppy-esque Newbie. So when the kid blew up at me, (using one of my own trademark insults against me, I might add), I had expected that in an hour or two he would be back, toting a coffee like some sort of apology and pretending nothing happened.
Boy did I hate being wrong.
For the rest of the day I hardly ever saw Newbie, except occasionally when he was rounding a corner far ahead of me. When we ended up moving toward each other in a hall the kid would turn into a room or another hall before he was within whistling range. It was almost like the kid was avoiding me. Probably expected his mentor – don't you think that word too, Perry - to give him a good ranting for that little display of backbone, if I knew Newbie. Which of course I did. Honestly though, I never felt closer to the kid than when he had those moments. They were sort of like watching a younger, extremely more feminine and infinitely less awesome and impressive version of me. Imitation was the first form of flattery, or something like that.
Still when the kid didn't snap back to his normal self I started to worry. No, not worry, I didn't worry about the girl. Perry Cox doesn't worry. It just had me – confused? No, not that either. Anyway, whatever it was, it was driving me crazy. I didn't like things to change around the place, and not having Newbie coming to me all day me was a change. As annoying as it was, it was a sort of normalcy that I craved. Sure, Beezlebob was still sitting downstairs, stuffing himself with muffins and making snide remarks, Carla was being a mother hen, Private Practice Barbie was thankfully already clocked out and gone home to be annoying to some flavor of the week boy toy, the Janitor was mopping the same spot he'd been in for three hours (why did I pay that jackass so well again?), and the interns had nearly killed someone (which I was surprised to learn had led to Newbie ending an internship with a long-winded rant; another swelling of almost-but-not-really-pride for me.) However Newbie was being that stupid last missing piece of the puzzle and I was annoyed at him for ruining my perfect little safe-haven.
Oh well, I was on-call tonight - because despite being Chief of Medicine, I believed as a doctor I should still do, well, doctorly stuff - with Newbie and one of the interns who had survived his wrath, so I would get everything back to normal. Surely some code would come up, I would tell the kid to assist me, and after that it would all be normal again. The kid could go back to irritating me and I could be frustrated with that instead of with dealing with the fact that I was mad at myself for actually – god, am I really gonna say it? – missing having the kid chasing me.
I was laying down in the on-call room when I heard Newbie come in just like I'd expected. For a moment it seemed like the little girl would turn tail and run but I just chimed in with a half-true, "Hey ya wanna shut the door there, Gladys? I'm trying to sleep." So I wasn't actually trying to sleep, mostly because I'd only recently finished downing several coffees and was still full of caffeine. However I did want that damned door closed; it was sickeningly bright out in the hall and my eyes had only just adjusted to the darkness in the on-call room.
To my relief the kid decided that he'd been given the all clear and shut the door quickly. Out of the corner of my eye I watched the kid drop down onto the mattress opposite mine as if he hadn't lain down in months. Before I'd counted to ten I heard the kid's breathing slip into the slower cadence of sleep.
Grunting, I shifted myself into a more comfortable spot on the terribly uncomfortable mattress. Mental note: try to fit new mattresses into next quarter's budget somehow. No wonders the doctors were always exhausted. Speaking of exhausted, it had been obvious this morning that Newbie was tired. The rings under his eyes had been evidence enough but the explosive anger didn't help the case any either. The kid had been working himself like a lunatic lately, willingly covering shifts without asking for a trade and doing more than his fair share of on-call all-nighters and weekends, probably all to help support that kid of his.
I hadn't said anything yet, hoping the kid would get the hint on his own, but it was about time to step in. It wasn't healthy. He needed his sleep or he was going to make mistakes and kill patients. That was something I knew I couldn't let him do. With Ted as a lawyer the hospital couldn't handle that sort of lawsuit. And the kid had a hard enough time dealing with the deaths, even after all these years, but doing so with as burnt out as he was now was asking for a mental breakdown.
The silence in the on-call room had only lasted fifteen minutes before it was broken by the all-too-familiar incessant beeping. I sat up calmly but the kid bolted up so fast his head collided with the underside of the mattress above him. We both checked our pagers, Newbie cursing none-too-impressively under his breath as he rubbed his forehead. It was that worst-case scenario: a patient who'd been recovering that morning had gone into cardiac arrest.
Both of us jumped up, me snatching my lab coat off the end of my bed, and charged through the door. As we ran the younger doctor was fiercely rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. Just down the hall from the room the skittish intern jumped out in front of me and I crashed into her, sending us both to the ground, her screeching in fear and me cussing. By the time I managed to extract myself from the tangle with the crushed girl and get my bearings enough to move, Newbie was already running the room.
The shrieking of the flat line on the heart monitor played as a back drop for the chaos of Newbie shouting and nurses bustling around adjusting IVs and doing what the doctor was telling them. "He's bleeding internally," the kid said loudly enough to be heard. "Need to relieve the pressure." An instant later a nurse had stepped in to cover the side of the guy's chest with a topical anesthetic and put a scalpel in Newbie's hand. It was as the young attending lowered the blade toward the orange-tinted skin that I noticed it: his hand suddenly faltered, shaking slightly, and he blinked hard in an attempt to focus his vision. Oh shit.
"Move it, Rebecca," I said, simultaneously pushing the kid away and snatching the scalpel out of his hand. I ignored the other doctor's startled complaint and continued with the procedure. Once the incision had been made we forced a tube through and put the suction hose in. I watched as the crimson liquid was pulled out through the hose and after a few seconds the line on the monitor began registering heartbeats again. When the monitor finally settled into a steady rhythm I inwardly sighed with relief. My day had been bad enough, I didn't want to start my night off by losing the first code.
Five minutes later we had stabilized the man completely, stopping the internal bleeding and stitching the cut in his side. The man was conscious, responding while the nurses checked him for any further damage. Now that I was certain everything was under control without me, I turned to let loose on Newbie.
He was gone.
"Where'd Clara go?" I snapped at a passing nurse.
"Clara?" she asked in confusion. I crossed my arms, after quickly touching nose with my thumb, and glared unrelentingly until she seemed to understand. "Oh, I dunno. He took off after you took over and didn't come back."
Nodding curtly to show I'd heard her answer, I left in search of the younger doctor. The stupid intern could handle working the patients for a little while, she needed to learn how anyway. I was still annoyed with her for stepping into my way and making me second into the room. If I'd gotten there before Newbie then we wouldn't be in this mess now.
Finding Newbie turned out harder than I'd anticipated. I checked everywhere the kid commonly haunted; the on-call room, the lounge, the empty cafeteria, the lockers, and even the restrooms, looking around in the mens' and pressing my ear to the girls' in case the kid had gone in there to cry. Starting to get anxious, I began thinking more abstractly. I peeked into a few of the kid's patients' rooms to see if he'd gone there. It wasn't unlike the kid to talk to a patient at night or even seek advice from the kinder old ones. Not seeing him there I checked in a few coma patients' rooms, not at all surprised by the idea Newbie might talk to one of them. Nothing. I jogged down and out onto the ramp outside the hospital, remembering having seen him come out here sometimes for air. That silly blue car was still here but no Newbie.
No one that I asked seemed to give me any useful answers. It was mostly, "I think he went that way about ten minutes ago." Yeah, because knowing where he was ten minutes ago did any good. I had just closed the door to that supply closet where Barbie used to hide when she was upset when I let out a growl under my breath, startling a lone orderly. Why did the stupid little girl have to complicate things so much? I set off down another hall when I spotted a sign outside a door I hadn't thought of yet. I threw it open and ran up the stairs.
When I pushed open the door to the roof I froze. The rain had mercifully stopped a few hours ago but the damp gravel and concrete glowed beneath the lights that lined the roof. Newbie was standing on the low ledge of the building, out of the light and hardly visible, with his arms wrapped around his torso and his back to me. A fleeting, horrified thought claimed me before I brushed it away. He wouldn't do that, I assured myself. The kid knows better, he's smarter than that.
"Newbie." He didn't respond but it was clear he'd heard because his back tensed and he stood up straighter. "What are you doing up there?"
"I love the way it smells after the rain," the kid answered in an oddly detached voice that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. "Sometimes I can forget I'm standing over a building filled with death. Everything smells so clean and – alive. I wish it always smelt so nice."
"Yeah well you can talk to your janitor friend and see if he'll put in some of those scented air fresheners like you have all over your girly little apartment," I responded, trying and failing to achieve my normal level of sarcasm. The kid was standing calmly enough but the concrete beneath his feet was wet and probably slippery, not to mention the kid had never been the most graceful ballerina. "Now you wanna tell me again why you're standing up there? What, does the air not smell as pretty down at a level where you wouldn't kill yourself if you fell? Well, you might still manage it–"
Newbie snorted derisively. "I'm not gonna jump, if that's what you're thinking."
The abrupt answer, dripping with cynicism, startled me as much as the fact that he had interrupted me. I'd heard the kid get bitter plenty of times before, it sort of came with the job, but he was rarely so blunt. "I didn't–"
Newbie let his arms fall down to his sides, and the movement made me stop short, intuition flaring. "I've learned how to take all you throw at me by now. If I was gonna make some morale-crushed dive to death it would've been years ago. Don't flatter yourself, you've never tormented me that bad. I'm over all the name-calling and the insults and the ranting. But I just–"
As Newbie paused, I took a step forward and the door, which had been propped against my side, swung shut. The noise surprised the kid and for a second his arms went out away from his sides as he steadied himself.
"Would you get the hell down from there?" I said, my voice thankfully coming out more waspish than worried like I felt. "No more balance beam, Marsha, you're clumsy enough when you're standing on flat ground and not on the edge of a building."
The kid mumbled an irritable, "I'm fine," but turned around and jumped down onto the roof. When he straightened up I was once again struck by how bad he looked. His skin was pale, paler than usual anyway, except for the thick rings under his eyes and the shadow of what looked like a healthy bruise on his forehead. Had he done that sitting up in the on-call room? His nose was pretty red, probably from standing out here in the cold for so long. That ridiculous hair, which was normally obsessed about to a point which made it impossible to question that sort of femininity, was oddly devoid of products and hung limply around his face. However most alarming was that expression: goofy smiled replaced by a firm line, and his eyes were so – lifeless. Definitely not my Newbie.
"Listen, Newbie–"
"I had it under control!" he suddenly shouted. "I had everything under control. Why'd you come in and throw me out? Believe it or not, I do know how to do my job by now. I mean, I did that same procedure my very first day here."
"Now listen here, Petula," I said loudly. I flicked my nose and folded my arms on my chest, spreading my legs slightly to strengthen my stance. Alpha male mode. "I stepped in so you wouldn't kill your patient. You're so tired you can't even see straight. And in case you're wondering, that is nawt a good thing when you're cutting into a guy's chest."
"We're always tired around here, part of the job, I'm used to it," Newbie threw in.
I whistled sharply and the kid fell silent. "Don't interrupt me, Lucy," I warned. "Now when was the last time you got a good night's sleep?" Newbie scowled and crossed his arms, solidifying his stance in a way that seemed a little too familiar to me, but he didn't answer the question. "Yeah, by that I'm guessing it's been just a bit too long. So here's what you're gonna do; you're gonna go get your stuff and skip on home. Tonight you're gonna sleep even if you gotta bang your head re-he-heely hard with a rock to do it, cause I'm sure all that girly hair will keep your skull safe. And then you can come back in for your shift tomorrow when you're all fully functioning. Got it, pum'kin?"
"I don't need to go home, Dr. Cox," Newbie protested. "I'll get a bit of a nap in the on-call room and a cup of coffee. I can do it, I'm fine." He started for the door but I stepped in front of him, blocking the path with my proudly-muscled girth. "Could you move it? I'm sure I've got patients waiting for me."
"Well then they're just gonna have to wait a little longer, aren't they?" I said, my voice rising into the higher pitch I used when I was being patronizing. "Alright, Rita, I'm gonna break it down real easy for ya. Here are your options: either you go home now and sleep like I said or I am gonna have your skinny ass suspended and you'll have all the time in the world to sleep until I decide you should come back. Now get the ha-ell outta here. If I see you here again before your shift tomorrow you had better have cracked your skull on that aforementioned rock and are dying. Capisce?" I stepped back and opened the door to the stairs, gesturing over-dramatically for the kid to go.
Newbie stood there for a moment, glaring determinedly at me. We might look way, way different, but the kid had certainly mastered his mentor's – gah, quit using that word, Perry! – angry pose. I half expected to see the kid flick at his nose with a thumb. We waited in that burning silence for a full minute before a muscle twitched in the kid's jaw.
"Go to hell."
The pure, cold hatred in that simple sentence was enough to make my perfect façade crack for a split second. Not only had I never anticipated getting that sort of answer, but I remembered a time when the phrase had been thrown in the opposite direction. Had it stung the kid this bad? Of course, it would've been worse. The kid idolized me. And in those simple three words I saw something else that I quite suddenly decided I didn't like. He had become me.
Without another word the kid had stormed passed me and down the stairs. It was a long two minutes after the sound of footsteps had died before I moved. With a sigh I let the door shut again and moved to the ledge where the kid had been standing. I scrubbed my hands over my face a few times, trying to wash away the memory of what had just happened, before resting my elbows on the concrete and staring out into the night. As much as I secretly enjoyed the way Newbie had hero-worshipped me from the moment he'd appeared at Sacred Heart, being like me was not a fate I wished on the kid.
For the first time in a long time, I found himself wondering if I could have made things different. On Newbie's very first day the kid had been doing that same procedure I had just snapped away from him. When the kid did it I had almost clapped him on the shoulders but stopped at the last second. What if I'd gone through with it? Given Newbie that little sign of approval that he seemed to need so badly? Maybe then Newbie would have understood that he was a good doctor the way he was and didn't need to be like his mentor. Damn, said it again. Newbie had always taken the abuse I put on him surprisingly well for such a femmy guy, but it seemed like he'd built up too many expectations for himself. He still needed to understand that he couldn't do it all. It's not like he was some kind of Superman.
The sharp, metallic slamming of a car door made me look down. The lights on Newbie's sissy car flared into life along with the low rumble of the engine. A second later it had reversed out of the stall and tore out of the parking lot, probably a lot faster than he really should. Still, at least he was going home to sleep like I'd said. Newbie would thank me for it tomorrow.