Work Text:
Her blood smelt like failure.
The blood that gushed, oozed and squelched out of patients smelt like iron fillings and elicited from her no particular emotion. There was nothing to blood at all unless it was her own; save for periods, of course, she had not watched herself bleed proper- from cuts in her skin, from abrasions- for, well, too long. Long enough to forget that it could happen entirely.
Blood was something other people had. Those poor souls in the beds with the wires and catheters. Not her.
Her elbow hurt like a bitch- it felt like a reprise of childhood bicycle incidents, and would have been more nostalgic if it didn’t sting so damn much- and she had cuts and scratches on her arms, mostly, and a pretty little paint-splatter of a graze marring her cheek, right under the eye. She’d come away quite well for a victim of a floor-to-ceiling glass window. George- the patient-had broken her fall and taken the brunt of the shards. Bless him and damn him in equal measure. He shouldn’t have been walking. He could have gotten himself killed.
She’d been helped out of the wreckage by a couple of concerned nurses, who had brushed her down and asked if she was alright- more attention given, of course, to the patient, whose figure was considerably worse-off. It had not been hard to sneak away and swipe antiseptic liquid and cotton pads from a station and barricade herself in the nearest bathroom, and she stood over the sink now like a weary, pill-popping detective in a crime drama, attending to her wounds with shaking hands, feeling angry and vulnerable all at once- like a mother cat attending to the claw-marks of a runabout kitten who had done something very bad, very bad indeed.
Drugging George had been low. But it had been necessary. She knew House would see it her way, be alright with it. She hated that she knew that about him, could predict him that well. In a just world, any human would have doubts, concerns about the dubious admission of phenytoin to induce collapse in a morbidly obese, hardheaded and markedly unhealthy patient- but this wasn’t a just world, because people like House were in it, who’d probably congratulate her for the idea. She’d soak in those congratulations, and allowed herself to imagine it for a few brief moments, no more than half of a single second, before dabbing a cotton pad doused in antiseptic right into the ugliest abrasion. The sting was immediate and bright and she gritted her teeth, hissed involuntarily, and successfully banished idle thoughts of House and phenytoin.
The grazes were not really large enough for bandages. She wiped softly at her wounds with the pads, watching the last pinkish drops of blood swirl gently down the drain with the tapwater. The ends of her sleeves were wet. She’d given her injuries a careful sweep with antiseptic-drenched tweezers and could be sure there were no little fragments of glass buried under her skin, but she still felt stuck with shards in every place, tingling with tiny pinpricks of hurt.
She spit into the drain. No reason for it- it just felt fittingly final, if not a little uncouth. House’d be waiting- probably just outside the door, knowing him- to bombard her with whys and the hows as to George’s sudden ill-turn of health, and obviously she’d welcome it- more eyes on George’s condition had been her goal, after all- but a part of her, not insignificant, didn’t want to leave the bathroom.
Nevertheless. She had taken certain actions, and she had to see them through. Fucked-up elbow or not.
Back to work.