The kid won't stop coughing.
He's out of healthy mucus to cough up; now he wheezes and hacks dryly, skinny shoulders shaking as his body responds to a stimulus you can't find.
Your colleague - superior, colleague, friend, all the same, really - gets up from where he was kneeling next to the kid. He strips off his gloves and tosses them in the trash can across the room.
"What's he got?" you ask, knowing that he won't have an answer any more than the last two experts who examined the kid did, or any more than you did when he started coughing up neon-green shit.
"Kennel cough," he snarls through his facemask, blue eyes narrow and angry above the paper.
You step out of his way, feeling a little less like his equal, a little more like a peon in his wake.
He doesn't step by you; he pats you on the shoulder instead, apologizing for... something. "Sorry, Reilly. These things happen."
You nod dumbly.
He smiles before he leaves, but all you can see is the faint crinkle at the corners of his eyes.
[BE THIS GUY]
That's not your name.
[BE BEAUREGARD REILLY]
Fine.
Your name is Beauregard Reilly. You are an intern here, which means you are everyone's lab bitch and no one's superior.
Unless you count the kids.
Today you are caring for one of the kids assigned to you after your recent semi-promotion, forced upon you by the unfortunate and totally accidental death of your immediate superior.
You can barely keep a fish alive on your own, but it is kind of cool being responsible for things this important.
Luckily for you, the other five are in good health. This one caught a minor cold last week from a lab tech who came to work during the symptomatic phase of a strep infection.
Unfortunately, due to his strange biology, this kid didn't catch a cold, or strep. Well, maybe he has strep. You can't get a culture started from him.
[BE THIS KID]
He's asleep. As much as you can sleep while you're coughing that hard.
[DON'T BE THIS KID]
This kid is named Ratchet. You are not sure why. You didn't name him. It is definitely a stupid name, though it's not like you could have come up with a better one yourself.
You're only an intern anyway. You don't get to name things.
The kid coughs again, ribs contracting and squeezing inward hard. If he were human he'd have broken at least one by now. He was on sedatives for a while, before you discovered he's allergic to the ones that work on the other five. Finding something new that works would take too long.
So you're stuck playing babysitter for graveyard shift, watching the second hand sweep silently around the clock face, listening to racking coughs and miserable wheezing, unable to do a thing.
[DO SOMETHING]
You could, but you'd like to keep this job.
[DO NOTHING]
That's the spirit.