#alpha frank langdon

[squishypanda6]

THE WOMAN ON THE BILLBOARDS - part 1

SUMMARY - Daisy St. John is twenty-eight and one of the most recognisable faces in fashion. She is also an omega — something nobody knows, kept buried under layers of suppressant patches and deliberate privacy. On her way to visit the ten children she has come to know in PTMC's cancer ward, her car is struck by an SUV running a red light, and she arrives in the emergency department unconscious, bleeding, and completely unaware of what is about to find her.

WARNINGS - frank langdon x fem!patient. brendon park x fem!patient. mentions of death and blood. medical therms. medical inaccuracy. unspecified age-gap. ooc ... everyone?

AUTHOR NOTE - this is my first fic so lmk what you think. this was meant to be x reader but I think it fits better with a name.

part 2 , part 3

The weeks leading up to Christmas had been unusually quiet. Ice on the roads normally meant a steady stream of trauma, but this year the city seemed to have collectively decided to stay home and behave itself, which nobody in the pitt was complaining about. Nobody said so out loud, of course. That was the other rule, right up there with never eating the last of the break room coffee without making a fresh pot.

Ogilvie, apparently, knew neither rule.

"Quiet day today, huh?" He slid up beside Santos with the particular confidence of someone who had not yet learned that Santos did not do company while she was charting.

The groan that rippled around the pitt was almost harmonised.

"What the fuck, Ogilvie," said Santos, looking up.

"What?" He looked genuinely bewildered, which somehow made it worse.

Frank didn't bother turning around from his computer. "You just jinxed us." A pause, for effect. "Even the med students know you don't say that in the ED." Frank couldn't help but scoff as he continued, mumbling under his breath, "you do take the scenic route to understanding though..."

Dana got the call two minutes later.

Trauma inbound. Two patients. MVC — driver's side T-bone, high-speed impact. Patient one, female, twenty-eight, GCS seven and dropping. Head lac, suspected lower extremity fracture. Patient two, male, fifty-three, blunt chest trauma, unconscious. ETA two minutes.

Dana was already moving. "Robby — incoming trauma, ETA two minutes. Langdon, Santos, Trauma One. Jack, you've got Two." She didn't look up from the board. "Ogilvie, sit yourself back down."

Frank was pulling gloves on before she'd finished the sentence. Almost five years and it still arrived the same way every time — that particular coil of focus tightening in his chest, the rest of the world narrowing down to whatever was about to come through those doors.

Trinity appeared at his left, tying her hair back. The beta glanced at the empty doorway, then at him.

Neither spoke.

A blast of icy air swallowed them whole as the doors opened.

Two gurneys, two sets of paramedics, the controlled chaos splitting itself between the bays without anyone having to direct it. Frank's attention went immediately to the gurney coming toward him — young woman, head dressing already bleeding through, left leg immobilised and sitting at an angle that told him everything he needed to know about the ankle before anyone opened their mouth.

The paramedic was already talking. "Female, twenty-eight, unconscious passenger. Vehicle took a full-speed T-bone on the driver's side from an SUV that ran a red. Head lac, left temporal — bled significantly at scene but we've had pressure on it. Left ankle is dislocated, probably fractured. GCS was eight when we got there, dropped to seven en route. Vitals stable but tachycardic the whole ride, sitting around one-ten."

Frank was already at her head. He tilted her jaw slightly, watching her chest rise. Airway clear. Respirations shallow but present. He brought his pen light across — left to right, right to left.

"Pupils reactive, but left's lagging." He straightened. "I want CT head and C-spine, chest film, full panel. Have neuro on standby." Two fingers to her wrist, counting against his watch. "She's one-twelve. Let's get a second line in."

It was routine. His hands knew what to do and did it, moving through the checklist the way they always moved — efficiently, without hesitation, without needing him to think about each step consciously anymore. He reached her neck to check her airway more carefully and registered the scent patches there, multiple of them, peeling slightly at the edges from the impact. Standard hospital protocol meant they'd come off — the autosprayers couldn't do their job over the top of them — and he removed them without particular thought, dropping them into the waste bin at his side.

The autosprayers cycled.

And then —

It was so faint he almost missed it entirely. The trauma bay smelled the way it always did: latex and antiseptic and the low copper-iron of blood that never fully left no matter how clean the floors were, and underneath all of it the hospital's neutralising mist, flattening the scent environment down to something manageable and professional and controlled.

But for half a second, through all of that —

Something warm. Something that didn't belong to the antiseptic or the blood or the recycled hospital air. Fleeting, barely there, gone almost before he'd registered it was present at all. Like a door opening briefly onto somewhere else and then closing again.

He tilted his head slightly, angled toward her as though checking her breathing, and caught the very edge of it again before it disappeared.

She was suppressed. Heavily. Whatever she had been wearing had survived the crash and the blood loss and the shock of impact, had held through all of it and let almost nothing through. She'd been wearing those patches for a long time — this was not a casual precaution but something practiced and deliberate and deeply private, the kind of thing an omega did when they had good reasons not to advertise what they were.

Only the trauma had shaken anything loose. Only barely. Only for a single second before the autosprayers swallowed it back down.

Frank's hands were completely steady. He was an alpha. A steady, controlled and reliable member of this team. The thought felt gross to him, having to reassure himself when he used to be so confident.

Inside, something had gone very quiet — the particular silence of a realisation arriving that he had no framework for and no time to examine and absolutely no intention of examining right now, in this room, with this patient in front of him.

No, he thought, with the same flat authority he used to stop a room full of residents. Not here. Not like this.

"Where are we on imaging?" he said, because her pulse was one-twelve and she was his patient and that was the only thing that was true right now.

"Ordered," Dana said from the door. "It's on the way."

"Good." He reached for fresh gauze and pressed it carefully against the laceration at her temple. The bleeding had slowed but hadn't stopped. Under the dressing her skin was very pale, a small bruise already beginning to mottle at the edge of the wound.

Twenty-eight years old. Unconscious. No idea where she was.

He kept his hand steady and his eyes on the monitor and did not think about the half-second that had just happened.

From Trauma Two, through the partition, he could hear Jack's voice — clipped, efficient, directing his team through whatever the second patient was dealing with. Frank had learned years ago to filter it out the way you filtered out the ventilation hum.

He filtered it out now.

"Robby." Dana's voice came from just behind his right shoulder, carrying the particular quality she reserved for things that needed to be said carefully. "You should see this."

He heard Robby cross the room. Heard the rustle of something — a wallet, from the paramedic's kit — and then a silence that lasted just long enough to mean something.

"Tell me you're joking," Robby said.

"I'm not," Dana said.

Frank looked up.

Robby was holding an ID card, and the expression on his face was the one he got when a situation had reclassified itself without asking his permission — not alarmed, because Robby did not do alarmed, but quietly and rapidly recalibrated. He turned it so Frank could see.

Daisy St. John.

The name landed differently the second time. Frank had filed it when the paramedic said it, given it no particular weight, moved past it because names were not his job in the first three minutes of a trauma. But now it arrived in full — context, recognition, the particular cultural saturation that came with someone very young building something impossible and refusing to explain themselves about it. The billboards. The magazine covers on the newsstands outside the hospital entrance that Frank walked past every morning and registered in his peripheral vision without ever quite stopping to look.

And suddenly the scent patches made sense.

He looked now, though she was not on a billboard. She was on his trauma table, twenty-eight years old, and the laceration at her temple had bled through the fresh gauze already.

Trinity had gone still at his left. Even Trinity, who had never once in Frank's experience allowed anything to interrupt her clinical momentum, had stilled.

"Huh," she said. Just that.

"Chart on lockdown." Robby's voice had dropped — not dramatically, but with the particular weight of an alpha drawing a line. "Nobody outside this team touches it. Not upstairs, not admin, nobody." He handed the ID back to Dana.

"Marcus Webb, fifty-three," Dana said, already reading from her notes. "He was in the driver's seat. Her driver — the paramedics said she doesn't drive, he takes her everywhere." A pause. "He's in Trauma Two. Blunt chest trauma. Jack's got him."

Something in the room shifted. Frank kept his eyes on the monitor.

Robby looked toward the partition, then back. "Get me a number for her emergency contact. She's going to want a familiar face when she wakes up, and if her regular person is on the other side of that wall—" He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.

"Already on it," Dana said.

The room resumed its rhythm. Frank adjusted the pressure on her temple and looked at her face and thought about the CT coming back, and whether the sluggish left pupil was going to mean what he was afraid it might mean, and whether the tachycardia was pain response or something worse. All the things that were his actual job.

He couldn't help softly brush his thumb across her cheek. Her soft cheek. Even now, in this delicate state, he couldn't help think that she looked like an angel.

He thought about those things, and only those things, for the next twelve minutes until imaging came back.

No bleed. Concussion. Superficial lac. Brief hypoxia accounting for the GCS drop. All of it survivable. All of it manageable.

She was going to be alright.

He stood with that in the narrow privacy between himself and the imaging screen and let out a breath he hadn't entirely been aware he was holding.

The ortho consult went out at 15:14.

Santos paged it while Frank was reviewing the CT with the neuro fellow — who had appeared, taken one look at the patient, performed the same quiet recalibration that everyone in this bay seemed to be performing in sequence, composed herself, and done her job. Frank appreciated that.

He stayed at the imaging board while Santos made the call. Heard her explain the findings, and her current status. Heard the pause on the other end that meant someone was checking the board for available attendings.

Heard her say: "Okay. Tell him we're in Trauma One."

Frank looked back at the CT.

Brendon Park arrived at 15:31.

Frank knew his footsteps. After years in the same hospital, sharing the same corridors and the same impossible hours, you learned the rhythm of the people around you the way you learned the sounds of a house you'd lived in long enough. Park the Shark walked like a man who had decided where he was going before he stood up — each step placed with the unconscious precision of someone who had stopped second-guessing himself somewhere in his surgical training and never started again. There was no question what he was. You knew it simply by looking at him, the particular quality of his stillness filling a room before he'd said a word.

Those footsteps came down the corridor, pushed through the trauma bay doors, and stopped.

Frank was at the side station updating the chart. He did not look up.

The footsteps resumed after a beat — slower now, more deliberate — and came to a stop at the foot of the bed.

Silence.

Not the working silence of a surgeon beginning an assessment. Something else. Something that lasted three seconds longer than it should have before Park the Shark's hands moved to his gloves. His size ten gloves. There was nothing small about the man; not his ego, not his height and certainly not his biceps.

Frank kept typing, trying not to focus on the alpha he called 'friend'.

The autosprayers ran their constant cycle. Antiseptic. Neutral. Flattening everything down to its managed baseline.

Almost everything.

Frank wondered, with the small detached part of his mind still capable of detached wondering, whether Park had caught it too. Whether whatever the crash had briefly shaken loose was still just barely present — just enough, for an alpha in close enough proximity, paying the right kind of attention.

He did not look up to find out.

"Talk to me," Park said. Frank recognised the register — that particular flatness Park used when he was working harder than usual to sound like he wasn't.

"Left ankle, fracture-dislocation. Imaging's here." Frank pointed toward the chart. "She's unconscious. Tachycardic since admission. Neuro's happy with the trajectory."

Park said nothing. Frank could hear him examining her — careful, controlled, the absolute precision he brought to everything he touched clinically, every movement exactly what it needed to be and nothing more.

"She'll need an OR," Park said eventually. "ORIF, proper setup. Not here." A pause. "Keep her NPO. I want to see her again when she's conscious — upstairs."

"She moves up in the next twenty minutes," Frank said. "Neuro cleared it."

Another pause. The kind that had weight in it.

"Which room?"

Frank glanced at the board. "Four-twelve."

He heard Park strip his gloves. The snap of latex. The drop into the bin. The sound of him not moving immediately — the particular stillness of someone deciding whether to say something and then deciding against it.

The doors swung shut.

Frank finished the line he was typing. Then the next. Then the one after that, working through the chart with the same steady focus that had carried him through four years of this job and kept carrying him now, one line at a time.

Through the partition, Jack's voice was still going — low and continuous, which meant the man in Trauma Two was still alive and still being fought for. Marcus Webb, fifty-three. Her driver. The person who put himself between her and whatever the world intended to throw at her, every single day, and who had not been able to stop this one thing from happening through absolutely no fault of his own.

Frank thought about that briefly.

Then he closed the chart, pulled up the next one, and kept going.

Outside, the storm had not let up. Snow against the windows, the sky pressed down to white and grey, the city carrying on somewhere underneath it. Inside, the fluorescent lights hummed their indifferent hum over all of it.

In Trauma One, Daisy St. John's monitor kept its steady rhythm.

One-oh-four now. Coming down.

Frank noticed. He told himself it was because she was his patient and her vitals were his responsibility, which was true, but it was also not the only reason — but that was something he was not going to examine right now.

He went to find Robby.

It was only going to be a long afternoon.

[rrrobbin]

Frank never fully felt like an alpha, always grew up hearing he’s too soft, too delicate, and too fragile to be a real alpha. His whole life from the moment he presented, he was told he was never quite alpha enough, that he could be better and do better. So he tried. He tried for years and hurt his back while trying to measure up to his families traditional standards. He doesn’t try to explain it to Robby. He knows Robby won’t understand, he doesn’t think anyone will, so he doesn’t.

It takes Dennis less than a month to see right through Frank. Everyone assumes they’ll hate each other, or at least avoid each other but Dennis never gives Frank a chance. He’s always there.

Dennis despite how he initially presents is more alpha then Frank will ever be. Then he ever wants to be.

The first time Dennis reaches out and puts a hand on Frank’s nape, Frank is unprepared for such a touch, it sends a shock of panic through him but is so quickly chased away by a feeling Frank can’t even begin to figure so quickly it leaves him light headed and dizzy.

He thinks about that moment for days, he feels wrong for wanting Dennis to reach out and put his hand on his nape again, to want more but he does. He finds himself drifting after Dennis, subconsciously seeking him out, and Dennis doesn’t say a word about it, instead one day after a couple weeks, he just reaches out and puts his hand, broad heavy and calloused against the nape of Franks neck and squeezes.

Frank forgets how to breathe and he swears Dennis’ touch his the only thing keeping him still standing.

“Good omega.” Dennis murmurs and Frank all but blacks out from need and want.

[squishypanda6]

THE WOMAN ON THE BILLBOARDS - part 3

SUMMARY - Daisy St. John is twenty-eight and one of the most recognisable faces in fashion. She is also an omega — something nobody knows, kept buried under layers of suppressant patches and deliberate privacy. On her way to visit the ten children she has come to know in PTMC's cancer ward, her car is struck by an SUV running a red light, and she arrives in the emergency department unconscious, bleeding, and completely unaware of what is about to find her.

WARNINGS - frank langdon x fem!patient. brendon park x fem!patient. mentions of death and blood. medical therms. medical inaccuracy. unspecified age-gap. ooc ... everyone?

part 1 , part 2 , part 4

The surgery took two hours and twelve minutes.

Park had known it would be close to that from the imaging — the dislocation had been clean but the fracture pattern was more complex than the initial films had suggested, and he had taken his time, which was the only way he knew how to do anything. His residents knew better than to rush him. The scrub nurses knew better than to rush him. The anaesthesiologist, who had worked with him enough times to have stopped taking it personally, simply kept her patient stable and let him work. Though the extra care taken was silently noted by everyone in the OR.

He closed at 15:12.

The notes would say the surgery was uncomplicated, which was accurate. What the notes would not say — what notes never said — was that he had been aware, for two hours and twelve minutes, of the particular quality of his own attention in that OR. The way it had been more precise than usual, if that was possible. More careful. The way he had checked his work twice in places he normally checked it once, not because he doubted himself but because the thought of getting it wrong was not something he was willing to sit with.

The notes would not say that either.

He handed off to his resident for the close and went to scrub out, and stood at the sink with the water running over his hands and said nothing to anyone, which was normal enough that nobody commented on it.

Recovery was quieter than the OR. Lower light. Slower rhythms. The particular hush of a room where people were coming back from somewhere and needed not to be rushed about it.

Daisy St. John was in room 113.

Park checked her chart at the nurses' station first, the way he always did — vitals, anaesthesia notes, the recovery nurse's observations. All of it clean. All of it exactly as it should be. He read it twice, because that was what he did, and then he crossed the hallway and pushed the door open.

She was awake.

Not fully — her eyes were open but they had the particular quality of someone operating several floors below their usual altitude, consciousness present but not yet fully unpacked. Her hair had been braided back by someone at some point, he noticed, probably a nurse who had done it without being asked. She was looking at the ceiling with the unfocused attention of someone who found it mildly interesting.

Then she turned her head and found him.

Something shifted in her face — not alarm, not confusion, something softer than both. Her mouth curved slightly, unhurried, the natural smile of someone whose usual careful composure had been temporarily chemically relieved of duty.

"Sharkie," she said.

Park looked at her. He lifted one brow, slowly.

"Hi," she added, as a secondary offering.

"Miss St. John." He pulled the stool from the corner of the bay and sat, which was not something he did often in recovery — he was usually in and out in four minutes, chart checked, patient assessed, next thing. He sat now. “Where on earth did you hear that?”

He leaned forward slightly, because she was clearly not about to say what she was thinking at full volume and he was not about to ask her to.

"One of your little fishies told me," she said, with the gravity of someone delivering important intelligence. Then she smiled again, small and pleased with herself, and he felt something shift in his chest that he was not going to examine in a recovery bay.

"Is that so," he said.

"Mm." Her eyes drifted to the ceiling, then back. She was quiet for a moment in the way of someone following a thought at its own unhurried pace. The room hummed softly around them. Then her brow gathered slightly, working something out.

"How's your pain."

She considered this with the dreamy seriousness of the well-medicated. "S'okay," she decided. "’M floaty."

"That's be the anaesthesia. It'll pass."

She nodded, processing this with great solemnity. Then she looked at him again, with the slightly too-direct attention of someone whose usual filters were not yet back online, and crooked two fingers toward herself.

Her gaze dropped to the space between them. The distance that was not, currently, very much distance at all.

He watched her register it — the proximity, the absence of the antiseptic wall of the trauma bay, the recovery room's slightly different scent environment. Watched the realisation move across her face in slow motion.

Her eyes came up to his.

"You’re an alpha," she said quietly. Before he could respond, she whispered, “you smell good.”

She said it the way you said something you had only meant to think, the words arriving in the room before the part of her brain that would have stopped them was back at its post. The colour came into her face immediately after, a deep and instantaneous flush that started at her throat and went upward, and she made a small sound that was not quite a word.

Park let the silence sit for precisely one beat.

"Is that so," he said, "little omega?"

The flush deepened. Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

"I—" she started. "That's— I'm not—" She stopped. Started again. "How did you—" Another stop. Her hands had found the blanket and were gripping it with a focus that had nothing to do with the blanket. "I wear patches. Six of them. I always— how did you—"

"The crash," he said, simply and quietly. "And pre-operatively, I needed your full prescription list."

She stared at him. "Marcus told you."

"He told me what I needed to know to keep you safe under anaesthesia." He held her gaze, his voice firm. "That's all it is."

"That's—" She exhaled, a short and slightly unsteady breath. "That's still— no one is supposed to— I don't—" She pressed her lips together. Her eyes were bright in a way that had nothing to do with the medication. "Does everyone know? Does the whole hospital—"

"No."

She looked at him.

"You have my word," he said, and meant it, and from the way she looked at him she seemed to understand that his word was not a thing he deployed carelessly. To her surprise, he lifted a large hand before smoothing it over her forehead. He soothed her like she was his own omega, his small, quiet omega in need of comfort and reassurance.

She was quiet for a moment, the flush still present, the blanket still gripped. Then the door opened.

Frank had been in the building when the surgery finished. He had not been hovering — he had been doing his job, which happened to involve being on the same floor as the post-op unit for entirely legitimate reasons that he did not need to enumerate. He checked the board. Saw she was in bay three. Told himself he was doing a routine follow-up on a patient he'd received in trauma.

He pushed the door open.

Park was on the stool beside her bed, leaning slightly forward, close in the way that had a reason behind it even if the reason was not immediately apparent. Daisy was sitting up against the pillow, pink from her collarbone to her hairline, gripping her blanket with both hands.

She looked at Frank, nibbling on her bottom lip.

Something in her expression — the flush, the grip, the particular quality of ‘I’ve been caught’ — crossed her face, and Frank read it in approximately one second.

The smirk arrived before he could do anything about it. It was not, he was aware, his most professional moment. He didn't particularly try to correct it.

"Miss St. John." He crossed the room, looked up her chart from the end of the bed with the ease of someone who belonged here. "How are we feeling?"

She looked between them. Park had straightened on the stool and was watching Frank with the expression of a man cataloguing a situation. Frank kept his eyes on the chart, still smirking, and turned a page he had already read.

"You know," she said, slowly, working it out.

Frank looked up. "Know what?"

She looked at him. At Park. Back at Frank.

"Both of you," she said.

Frank set the chart down. The smirk had settled into something quieter, something that was almost — almost — a little gentler than the arrogance it had arrived as. "Your patches came off in the trauma bay," he said. "Standard protocol. The autosprayers did what they could." A pause. "You were unconscious, Daisy. No one is going to—"

"How many people," she said. "In the ED. How many people—"

"Two," Park said, from the stool. Flat, unambiguous, not a syllable of uncertainty in it. "Just us."

She looked at him, hands itching at the uncovered scent gland.

"You have my word," Frank said, and the smirk was entirely gone now.

She held the silence for a long moment. Then she exhaled — not quite relief, more the sound of someone setting down something heavy and not yet sure if they were allowed to. Her grip on the blanket loosened slightly.

Frank frowned, moving towards her and pulling her hand away from her neck. “Stop itching this. It will only get worse.” He seemed more self assured, as though he knew exactly what control he held.

Before Daisy could argue, the door opened again. Why the fuck do people keep disturbing me?

Dana came first, which meant she was pushing the wheelchair, because Dana had decided somewhere in the last twelve hours that Marcus Webb was her problem and had simply proceeded on that basis without consulting him about it. Marcus had, to his visible lack of enthusiasm, accepted this.

He came through the curtain in the chair, his sling adjusted, his stitches cleaned, his expression in its default configuration — steady, watchful, giving nothing. He took in the room. Frank by her side. Park on the stool. Daisy sitting up against the pillow, still slightly flushed, her hands loose now in her lap.

He didn't comment on any of it.

Dana positioned the wheelchair beside the bed and then stationed herself near the curtain with the particular quality of someone who intended to stay and had already decided it was not up for discussion.

Marcus looked at Daisy.

"There's something you need to know," he said.

She looked back at him. Something in his tone had reached her — not the words, not yet, but the register beneath them. The careful, deliberate evenness of someone about to say something they would rather not have to say.

"Marcus?"

"Administration confirmed you're here." He said it straight, no preamble, because he had never insulted her by softening things she needed to hear clearly. "Not your condition, not your room. Just that you're a patient in this building." A pause. "Your parents pushed for it. They threatened the hospital with legal action."

The room was very quiet.

Daisy did not move. That was the thing Frank noticed first — not a flinch, not a sharp breath, not any of the visible reactions you might expect. She simply went still. As though something in her had very quietly closed a door and stepped back from it.

A cold chill settled over her bones, and Daisy couldn’t hide the shiver. She held Marcus’ gaze. Something passed between them that Frank could not read and did not try to. He simply adjusted her blanket higher up, trying to be discreet. Dana would have laughed had it not been in the middle of the conversation.

"Okay," she said. Very quietly.

"I've spoken to your legal team," Marcus continued. "They're aware. They're handling the administration side. The hospital has been advised that any further disclosure constitutes a HIPAA violation and they won't be doing it again." His jaw tightened slightly. "But they know you're here."

"Okay," she said again. Same register. Same quiet.

Marcus held her gaze. "Daisy."

"I heard you." She smoothed the blanket over her lap with one hand, a small and careful gesture. "It's okay."

It was not, Frank thought, okay. He had worked in emergency medicine long enough to know the difference between someone who was fine and someone who was managing, and Daisy St. John had gone somewhere behind her own eyes and was managing from there.

"Can someone tell me," Frank said, to the room generally, with the deliberate evenness of someone laying groundwork, "what we're actually dealing with. So we know what we're protecting her from." Dana was surprised how firm he sounded, smirking like a proud mama.

Marcus looked at him. Then at Daisy.

Daisy was quiet for a moment. Her hand had stilled on the blanket.

"They've made some legal attempts," she said finally, choosing each word with care, "to argue that I'm not capable of managing my own affairs adequately." She did not look up. "As an omega. Without a bonded alpha." A pause. "It's been dealt with. My lawyers are very good."

"More than once," Marcus said quietly.

She didn't contradict him.

"The most recent was four months ago," he continued, looking at Frank and Park. "They're arguing instability — using her seizure history, the use of suppressants, the fact that she lives alone and works the hours she does. It hasn't gone anywhere, legally. But it hasn't gone away either." He held Frank's gaze. "Which is why no one comes into that room without my say-so. Not family. Not anyone who arrived because they read about this online or got a call from someone at this hospital. No one."

Frank regarded him carefully. He didn't qualify it, didn't add to it, just nodded in the way that meant it was done.

Park had not moved from the stool, but his jaw was clenched. He watched Daisy with the particular focused attention he usually reserved for imaging results — reading something, working something out. She had not looked at him since Marcus started talking. That thought sent him into an inexplicable rage. The kind of rage that simmered in the background until it exploded catastrophically. Though, everything about Daisy seemed to throw him.

Dana, by the curtain, had been very still and very quiet. She caught Frank's eye and held it for a moment. Then she looked at Daisy, at the careful stillness of her, at the hand smoothing and resmoothing the blanket, and something in Dana's face settled into a decision that she did not announce and did not need to.

She crossed the room and sat in the chair on the other side of the bed — not the stool, a proper chair, settled in the way of someone who was not going anywhere — and said nothing at all.

Daisy looked at her.

Dana looked back.

Something in Daisy's face, very slightly, shifted. Not a breakdown — nothing so legible as that. Just a single hairline crack in the composure, there and gone in a second, so brief that only someone paying close attention would have caught it.

Frank looked at the Ipad.

Park looked at the window.

Both of them had been paying close attention.

[squishypanda6]

THE WOMAN ON THE BILLBOARDS - part 4

18+ MDNI

SUMMARY - Daisy St. John is twenty-eight and one of the most recognisable faces in fashion. She is also an omega — something nobody knows, kept buried under layers of suppressant patches and deliberate privacy. On her way to visit the ten children she has come to know in PTMC's cancer ward, her car is struck by an SUV running a red light, and she arrives in the emergency department unconscious, bleeding, and completely unaware of what is about to find her.

WARNINGS - frank langdon x fem!patient. brendon park x fem!patient. mentions of death and blood. medical therms. medical inaccuracy. unspecified age-gap. ooc ... everyone?

part 1 , part 2 , part 3

The medication wore off at half past seven.

Not all at once — it never happened all at once. It happened in stages, the way the tide going out happened in stages, each wave pulling back a little further than the last until the shore was just cold and exposed and there was nothing left to soften it. First the floaty quality that had made everything feel slightly removed from consequence. Then the pleasant vagueness. Then the edges of things, arriving back one at a time: the pull of the surgical site, the ache behind her eyes, the particular quality of silence in a hospital room at night that was not actually silence at all but was somehow lonelier than silence would have been.

Daisy lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling and felt, in the bone-deep way that had nothing to do with sleep, completely and utterly dead.

Her phone was on the side table. She had been ignoring it for two days — professionally, routinely, as a matter of survival — but tonight the ignoring took effort.

It buzzed.

She looked at it.

Mom.

She should not have answered. She knew, in the part of her brain still functioning clearly, that she should not have answered. She was exhausted and unmedicated and alone, and those were precisely the conditions under which her mother had always thrived.

She answered anyway.

"Daisy." Her mother's voice was warm in the specific way of something that had learned to perform warmth without containing any. "Sweetheart. How are you feeling?"

"Stop with the bullshit," Daisy said. She was done with it. Eleven years of automatic, of being a punching bag, and she was done. "Just say what you called to say."

"Honey, is that any way to speak to your mother?" There was the condescension Daisy remembered like a smell. "We've been so worried. Your father and I have been absolutely beside ourselves." A pause, perfectly timed. "We just want to see you. Make sure you're alright. It's such a difficult time to be alone."

"I'm not alone. And it's none of your business."

"Of course." Another pause — the particular silence her mother used to communicate what she thought of things she had decided not to say out loud. "Marcus must be there. Though he can't be much help right now, can he, given his own situation." Not a question. "You know, if you had a proper support system—"

"I have a support system."

"A bonded alpha," her mother said, the way you said something gentle that was not gentle at all. "Someone who could actually be there for you. Make decisions when you can't. Daisy, this is exactly the situation we've been trying to—"

"I'm not doing this tonight."

"We're not doing anything, sweetheart. We're just worried. You're in hospital, alone, after a serious accident, and we can't even—" Her voice caught, expertly. "We can't even confirm that you're being looked after properly. As your parents. As the people who love you. We have rights, Daisy. We have the right to care for you and your assets—"

"You don't," Daisy said. Her voice had stayed even for most of this. It was beginning, at the edges, not to. "My lawyers have been very clear about what rights you—"

"Your lawyers." Something shifted in her mother's voice, the warmth thinning, the thing underneath it finally showing through. "You have lawyers, Daisy. That's what you have. Instead of a mate, instead of a family that functions, you have lawyers and a driver and an empty apartment and a schedule that would hospitalise anyone, bonded or not." A pause. "Though of course, it's hospitalised you now, hasn't it."

"Having a mate has nothing to do with my assets, Caroline." The name landed the way she intended it to — stripped of everything maternal, just a name, just the two of them. "Do me a favour and stop. Hasn't nine years of no contact been enough of a sign for you? You want my money, my image, my name. What's next? My soul?"

The line went quiet.

Daisy was looking at the ceiling. The same white acoustic tile. The same water stain in the corner. Completely indifferent to everything happening beneath it.

"I'm going to hang up now," Daisy said, holding in her sniffles by sheer force.

"Of course," her mother said, back to her controlled register. "How typical."

The call ended.

Daisy set the phone on the blanket.

She lay there for a moment.

She heard it, very faintly — a voice in the corridor. Familiar. Unwelcome. Then other footsteps, purposeful and heading away, and then quiet.

Then the door opened.

Frank had been on his way up when he saw them.

He almost didn't — they were at the far end of the corridor near the stairwell, moving with the purposeful speed of people who had done what they came to do and were leaving before anyone could stop them. He recognised the woman first: the set of her shoulders, the particular quality of her exit. He had seen those shoulders two days ago in the ED and had watched them go into an elevator and had assumed, incorrectly, that the elevator had been the end of it.

He did not chase them.

He pulled out his phone, called security, gave a description, gave a location, listened to the confirmation. Said thank you. Hung up. His shift had ended twelve minutes ago and he had finished his handoff, which made this visit technically optional, which was a technicality he was choosing not to examine too closely.

He turned and walked to her room and pushed the door open.

The room was dark except for the low light above the bed. She was curled on her side facing the window, shoulders drawn in, and the sound she was making was the kind that arrived when everything that usually managed it had stopped working.

He crossed the room in four steps and sat on the stool beside the bed and put his hand in her hair without deciding to, smoothing it back from her face with the same steadiness he brought to everything — except that this was not steady in the clinical sense. This was something else entirely.

"Hey," he said. Quiet. "Hey. I've got you."

She flinched slightly at the touch — not away, more like someone who had forgotten that hands could do something other than what the last pair had done — and then something in her went loose, and she cried harder.

"That's it," he said, his hand moving slowly, thumb tracing back from her temple. "Good girl. Let it go." His other hand found her back, running the length of her spine in long, even strokes. "Deep breath in." A slow, deliberate inhale, demonstrated without thinking about it. "And out. That's it. There you go."

She was trying. He could feel her trying — the breath shuddering in, catching, going back out. She smelled of distress in the specific, unmistakable way that an omega in genuine anguish smelled of it, the suppressants had long since worn off and the hospital's autosprayers did very little against the real thing, and something in his hindbrain responded with a focus and a ferocity that he was not, in this moment, even attempting to moderate.

"My good girl," he said, almost to himself, still moving his hand through her hair. "That's it. Slow and steady. You're doing so well."

Her breathing was evening out. Still ragged at the edges, still wet, but beginning to follow the rhythm he had set. He kept his hand moving and kept talking — low and steady, that's it, you're alright, I've got you — and when she reached blindly for something to hold onto he shifted from the stool to the bed itself, letting her curl into him, his back against the pillows, her face against his shoulder.

Then the door opened.

Park had the post-op numbers on his phone. Her inflammatory markers had ticked up over the last two hours — nothing alarming, well within the range of normal surgical response, but enough to warrant a look at the site. He had texted his resident and then, without entirely examining why, decided he would go himself.

He pushed the door open.

Frank was sitting up against the pillows with one hand in her hair and the other moving slowly up and down her back. Daisy was curled into his side, face hidden, shoulders still trembling. The room smelled of distress and something else underneath it — the particular scent of an omega in pain breaking through the last of the suppressants — and Park stood in the doorway for approximately one second before something closed down in his expression and he crossed the room.

He didn't ask. There was nothing to ask. He pulled the chair from the corner and sat on the other side of the bed, close enough that his presence registered, and his hand found her shoulder — large and warm and completely still, just there — and he said nothing, because Park did not do the words. But he stayed.

Daisy made a sound into Frank's shoulder and then lifted her face far enough to see Park, and cried harder.

"It's over," she said. The words came out broken, stripped of their usual careful assembly. "My whole— they're going to— I have nothing, I have no one, I don't have— I'm just an omega and I don't have anyone and they're going to take everything I built and they're going to say I was never capable in the first place and they're going to be right because I can't even—" She stopped. Couldn't get the next part out. "They're going to take everything because I don't have any alphas." The last words arrived like an exhale, like something she had never said out loud before, something that had been sitting in the lowest drawer for years and had finally, in the dark of a hospital room, forced itself open. She pressed her face back into Frank's shoulder and shook.

The room was quiet for a moment.

Frank's hand had stilled in her hair.

Park looked at her. Then at Frank. Then back at her.

"Daisy," Park said.

She didn't answer.

"Daisy." His hand on her shoulder shifted, just slightly, enough to be felt. "Look at me."

She turned her face out of Frank's shoulder by degrees — eyes red, face blotched, completely without any of the composure she usually carried so automatically she had probably stopped noticing it was there. She looked at Park with the expression of someone who had run out of everything and didn't know what happened next.

Park held her gaze.

"Just because you're unbonded," he said, "doesn't mean you don't have alphas."

He said it the way he said everything — flat, direct, without decoration or softening, no particular awareness of how much weight he was setting down on the table with it. As though it were simply a fact that needed stating because she had stated an incorrect one and he was correcting her.

Daisy stared at him.

"What do you mean?" she said. Small. Genuinely confused, the kind of confused that had nothing performative in it.

Park looked at her steadily. He did not elaborate, because he had said what he had said and he meant all of it and she was going to have to sit with it.

She looked at Frank.

Frank raised an eyebrow, the particular expression of a man who was not going to pretend he didn't know exactly what Park meant. "Take your time," he said.

She looked back at Park. Then at Frank again. Something was moving across her face — slow, tentative, the dawning of something she had not given herself permission to consider. Her brow furrowed. Her lips pressed together. Her eyes, still wet, tracked between the two of them as if she were looking for the part where it stopped being true.

She didn't find it.

The flush started at her throat and went upward, fast and thorough, and she made a small, strangled sound that was not quite a word and turned her face directly back into Frank's shoulder.

"No," she said, muffled. Mortified. "No, absolutely not."

"Mm," said Frank, and the smirk was audible.

"Stop it," she said into his shoulder. "Stop— both of you stop— I said you smelled good." The words came out half-buried in his scrubs. "I said that. Out loud. To your face." A pause. "While I was high."

"You did," Park confirmed.

"That's so embarrassing."

"It was," Park agreed, pleasantly.

She made the sound again and pulled the blanket up over her head with one hand, which was not particularly effective as a hiding strategy but was clearly the best she had available. Frank's hand had resumed its movement through her hair, unbothered, as though she were not currently attempting to disappear into the mattress.

"You're both awful," she said, from under the blanket.

"You're going to have to come out eventually," Frank said.

A pause. "I genuinely might not."

Park let the silence sit for exactly as long as it needed to. Then he said, with the brisk precision of a man returning to his area of expertise: "That's enough. I need to take a look at that foot."

The blanket moved.

One eye appeared over the edge of it, red-rimmed and deeply suspicious. "Right now?"

"Your inflammatory markers have been trending up for the last two hours." He was already reaching for the chart at the end of the bed, reading it with the focused attention of a man who had filed the last five minutes somewhere internal and returned fully to the clinical. "It's well within normal range but I want to see the site. So yes. Right now."

Daisy looked at Frank.

Frank looked back at her with an expression that said, quite clearly, show him your foot.

She emerged from the blanket.

Her face was still flushed, her eyes still red, her hair thoroughly destroyed by Frank's hand and the last half hour in general. She looked, Frank thought, completely and entirely herself — more herself than she had looked since they had wheeled her through the doors of the trauma bay — and he kept his eyes on the middle distance and said nothing about it.

Park moved to the foot of the bed with the economy of someone who had already mentally moved on, pulling on a glove, his attention entirely on her ankle now. Clinical. Exact. The Shark, back in his water.

Daisy watched him work with an expression that she was clearly trying to keep neutral and was not entirely succeeding at.

Frank noticed. He said nothing. He looked at the ceiling.

Outside, the corridor hummed with the quiet industry of a hospital at night. Down the hall a call bell rang and was answered. The city beyond the window was dark and indifferent.

In here, something had shifted on its axis — quietly, permanently, without any of them having signed anything or said anything that couldn't technically be walked back — and all three of them knew it.

Park pressed two careful fingers to the surgical site, watching her face for the wince.

"Does that hurt?"

"A little," Daisy said.

"Scale of one to ten."

She considered him for a moment. "Three."

The corner of his mouth moved. Almost nothing. Almost.

"Good," he said.

Holy fuck, she thought, I could orgasm from the praise.

[squishypanda6]

THE WOMAN ON THE BILLBOARDS - part 2

SUMMARY - Daisy St. John is twenty-eight and one of the most recognisable faces in fashion. She is also an omega — something nobody knows, kept buried under layers of suppressant patches and deliberate privacy. On her way to visit the ten children she has come to know in PTMC's cancer ward, her car is struck by an SUV running a red light, and she arrives in the emergency department unconscious, bleeding, and completely unaware of what is about to find her.

WARNINGS - frank langdon x fem!patient. brendon park x fem!patient. mentions of death and blood. medical therms. medical inaccuracy. unspecified age-gap. ooc ... everyone?

part 1 , part 3 , part 4

The first thing anyone noticed about Daisy St. John, before she was even properly conscious, was that she was sorry.

Not in the way people were sorry in hospitals — not the performative apology of someone who had inconvenienced themselves into an emergency, not the embarrassed deflection of a patient who felt they were taking up too much space. Something quieter than that. Something that surfaced even through the fog of pain medication and a Grade 2 concussion, like a reflex so deeply ingrained it didn't need consciousness to operate.

Dana noticed it first, the way Dana noticed most things — without making a production of it, filing it away behind her glasses with the same quiet efficiency she filed everything else.

She was doing a routine check of the monitors in Daisy's room, watching Park examine her ankle for the third time that morning, when she heard it. A sound from the bed, barely audible, more breath than word. She set down the chart and crossed the room and leaned in slightly.

Park didn't look up — not in the way Dana would have clocked as unusual. No. He stilled, slowing his movements, giving the bed his full attention in the particular way of someone who had decided, without quite examining the decision, that she deserved it.

Daisy's eyes were still closed. Her fingers twitched against the blanket. Her face was pale against the pillow, the laceration at her temple dressed cleanly, the bruising along her jaw beginning to deepen to purple. She looked younger than her billboards.

She said something again, her lips barely moving.

"What was that, honey?" Dana crouched beside the bed.

"I was—" Daisy's brow furrowed slightly, the particular concentration of someone trying to locate a thought that keeps sliding away from them. "Was supposed to see the kids." A pause. The frown deepened. "They're gonna be so 'pset."

Park looked at her then. In this state, with the suppressants stripped away and the hospital's autosprayers doing what they could, she looked like an omega, his ome— he pulled the thought back before it finished forming. It was a wonder, he thought instead, clinically, that no one had speculated before. A genuine wonder.

Dana straightened, made a note in the chart, and went to find Frank.

He came up at the start of his shift, which he told himself was routine — he was one of her physicians, checking on a patient after handoff, nothing more or less than what he would do for anyone else in this building. He told himself that in the elevator and in the corridor and right up until he pushed open the door to her room and found he was not, as he had expected, the first one there.

Park was already in the room.

He was standing at the foot of the bed with his arms crossed and his eyes on the chart in his hands, which was where Frank's eyes should have been and weren't, because Frank's eyes had gone immediately to the bed the way they apparently could not stop doing — the monitors, the IV line, the slow and steady rise and fall of her chest — and then to Park, who had not looked up when Frank came in and showed no particular intention of doing so.

There was a wheelchair beside the bed.

The man in it was large — broad across the shoulders in the way that came from a lifetime of physical work rather than a gym, somewhere in his early fifties, with the particular stillness of someone who was in considerable pain and had decided not to let it show. His left arm was in a sling. Four stitches above his right eyebrow. He was watching Park with the careful, measuring attention of a man who assessed people for a living and had not yet finished deciding what he thought.

"Mr. Webb," Frank said.

Marcus Webb looked at him — not intimidated, not particularly moved, simply present in the way of a man who had spent enough years around alphas to know he did not need to perform anything to hold a room. "Doctor Langdon," he said. His voice was low and even.

"How are you feeling?"

"Fine." Immediate, and entirely beside the point, and all three of them understood that. His eyes moved back to the bed. "How is she?"

Not phrased as a question.

"Stable," Frank said. "Concussion, superficial lac, no bleed. The ankle is the main concern." He glanced at Park. "Mr. Webb was briefing you?"

"He was," Park said, setting the chart down. He looked at Marcus. "You were saying — the absent seizures."

Marcus nodded once. "She's had them since she was nineteen. Managed — she's taking her medication and it's mostly under control. But stress and disrupted sleep are triggers, and she's been running on too much of both lately." His jaw tightened slightly. "She'll need monitoring. She won't tell you that herself."

"Why not?" Frank asked.

A pause. "Because she doesn't like to be managed." He said it without judgment, simply as fact, the way you stated facts about someone you had spent years paying careful attention to. "She'll tell you she's fine." His eyes stayed on her face. "She's not always fine."

The room was quiet for a moment. Outside in the corridor someone was pushing a cart, the wheels catching on the join in the linoleum, and the monitor kept its steady rhythm, and the light through the window was the flat grey-white of a December sky that had run out of snow and was simply sitting there now, spent.

"The suppressants," Park said, his voice carrying a flatness that cost him something, though he could not have explained precisely what.

Marcus looked at him. Something in the look said carefully.

"I need to know what she's on," Park said, with the patience of a man who did not often have to explain why he was asking something. "Pre-operatively. There are interactions I need to rule out before I take her into an OR."

A beat. Then Marcus reached into the pocket of his hospital-issue robe and produced his phone, unlocking it one-handed and turning the screen toward Park. "Her prescription list. The suppressants are at the bottom. She uses a combination — hormone and scent. Six patches at a time." He said it without embarrassment and without apology, in the tone of someone who had long ago decided that Daisy's privacy was worth protecting and that protecting it sometimes meant disclosing the right things to the right people. "She'll be angry I told you."

"She'll be angrier if I don't account for them and something goes wrong under anaesthesia," Park said.

Marcus held his gaze for a moment. Then he nodded, once, and put the phone away.

Frank was looking at the chart. He was reading the neuro fellow's overnight notes and the nursing observations and everything that was his job to read, and he was definitely not thinking about six patches and a half-second in the trauma bay, and he was doing very well at both of those things right up until the bed moved.

Not dramatically. Just the small shift of someone changing their weight — the rustle of sheets, the faint sound of a breath taken differently than all the ones before it.

Everyone in the room went still.

Daisy St. John woke up the way people woke up from concussions — slowly, in stages, consciousness arriving like a tide coming in rather than a switch being flipped. First her fingers curled slightly against the blanket. Then her brow furrowed. Then, with visible effort, her eyes opened.

She stared at the ceiling for a moment.

Then she turned her head, carefully, and found Marcus.

Something in her face shifted entirely — not relief exactly, but something that had relief in it alongside pain and guilt and the particular expression of someone who had been frightened and was trying not to show how frightened they had been. Park stilled, wishing he could be the one comforting her. He looked away from her face before the thought that had started to form could finish doing so.

"Marc," she said. Barely a whisper.

"Hey, kid." His voice, for the first time since Frank had walked into this room, had lost its careful evenness. Still quiet. Changed. "Take it easy."

"You're in a wheelchair." She was frowning at him now, the anaesthetic daze warring with something that wanted to be alarm. "Are you okay? What happened to your—"

"I'm fine."

"You have stitches."

"I'm fine, Daisy."

"You have a sling—"

"Daisy." Firm, and quiet, and weighted in the specific way of someone who had used that particular tone before and knew exactly how much to put behind it. "I'm fine. I promise you I'm fine. Stop moving your head."

She stopped. Her eyes drifted to the ceiling, then to the IV line in her arm, tracing it with the slow focus of someone whose brain was running slightly behind schedule. Then she seemed to register the room properly for the first time — the monitors, the window, the two men standing at the foot of her bed.

She looked at Frank first. Then at Park.

Two alphas, in her room, at the foot of her bed. Two hot alphas.

Something flickered across her face, too briefly for either of them to catch it clearly. She pressed herself back slightly into the pillow. The room smelled entirely of antiseptic and recycled hospital air, which was as it should be — and yet, underneath it, at the very edge of her perception, something else. Something warm that might have been sea salt, or cedar, or perhaps nothing at all.

"Hi," said Daisy.

Frank blinked. Park ran his tongue briefly over his teeth and said nothing.

"Daisy, I'm Doctor Langdon, and this is Doctor Park."

"I'm so sorry. I'm sure you have a lot of patients," she interrupted, quickly and quietly, as though she were genuinely concerned about the inconvenience she was causing. Her voice was still rough, her eyes still slightly glassy, and she was operating at maybe forty percent — and she was apologising for being here.

From the wheelchair, Marcus made a sound that might, in another man, have been a sigh.

"Miss St. John," Park said, stepping slightly forward. "How's your pain on a scale of one to ten?"

Something in his expression told her this was not a man you gave a vague answer to. She considered the question with the careful attention of someone who wanted to get it right. "A five, maybe? Am I— will I need surgery?"

"You're on pain medication, which is why it isn't worse." He reached for the chart. "I need to walk you through what the imaging showed and what we're recommending. Are you able to follow me?"

"Yes." She said it immediately, happy to listen to his voice, straightening slightly against the pillow — the automatic gathering of herself, composure assembled from whatever pieces were available, concussed and half-medicated and still trying. Frank looked briefly at the monitor. Holy shit, she thought. This is so embarrassing.

Park walked her through it — the fracture, the dislocation, the ORIF, what surgery would involve and what recovery looked like. He was not warm about it, because Park was not warm, but he was thorough and precise and he answered her two quiet questions without making her feel they were inconvenient. Frank watched her listen. She tracked every word with the careful attention of someone who wanted to understand rather than simply be told — processing, filing, following the thread even through the medication.

When Park finished she was quiet for a moment.

"Okay," she said. "When?"

"This afternoon, if your neuro observations stay clean until noon. Surgery is currently scheduled for 13:00."

She looked at the clock. 08:16. Then her gaze drifted, going somewhere else briefly, and when it came back it had something different in it.

"The children upstairs," she said. "On the fifth floor." She looked at Frank. "There are ten kids up there. I was supposed to visit yesterday. Could someone—" She stopped, catching herself, and the apology returned. "Sorry. That's not your problem. Never mind."

"I'll call up," Frank said. It came out before he'd finished deciding to say it.

Park's expression shifted, almost imperceptibly, in a direction that was not quite a smirk and not quite anything else. God, we're both whipped already.

She looked at Frank with an expression that was difficult to read — surprised, he thought, in the specific way of someone not accustomed to people following through on small things. "Thank you," she said. Quietly, and like she meant every syllable of it.

The room held that for a moment.

Then Marcus said, without preamble: "Doctors." Both Frank and Park looked at him. His face had returned to its default — steady, watchful, giving nothing. "No one comes into this room except the two of you and nursing staff. Nobody else. Not without my explicit say-so." He held eye contact with each of them in turn, making certain it had landed. "Not family. Not management. No one."

A beat. Frank and Park both watched Marcus and Daisy exchange a glance — brief, weighted, the kind that carried a history neither doctor was privy to.

"Understood," Frank said.

Park tilted his chin once, which from Park was unambiguous.

Marcus held the silence a moment longer, measuring. Then he settled back into the wheelchair, his good hand finding the edge of her blanket. She had already found his forearm with her fingers, loosely, the way you held onto something when you weren't ready to let go of it yet.

Nobody commented on it.

Two strangers arrived in the ED at 08:17.

Dana saw them before they reached the desk, which was how Dana saw most things — early, and without making a production of it. A man and a woman, both somewhere in their late fifties, dressed in the manner of people who considered appearance a form of argument. The woman led. She had Daisy's cheekbones and none of Daisy's expression, her face arranged into something performing concern over the top of something harder and considerably less photogenic.

Dana set down her pen and waited.

"We're here for our daughter," the woman said. "Daisy St. John. We know she's here."

"I'm not able to confirm or deny whether any individual is currently a patient at this hospital," Dana said pleasantly. "That's our standard policy under patient privacy regulations."

A pause. "She's our daughter."

"I understand. Our policy applies regardless of the nature of the relationship. If you have concerns about a family member, I'd suggest contacting the relevant emergency services for information about any incidents that may have occurred." She paused. "Is there anything else I can help you with today?"

Frank appeared then, coming down the corridor, and Dana's eyes found his in the way of two people who had worked together long enough to communicate a great deal without opening their mouths. He read the look — which said, clearly and without ambiguity, handle this — and altered his course.

He took the time of his approach to observe them. Both presenting as alphas, both carrying the specific energy of people who had decided the rules were largely for other people. The woman led, the way alpha women who were used to leading always did, her chin slightly raised, her jaw set.

"We're here for our daughter," she said, turning to him. "Daisy St. John. We know she's here."

"I'm Dr. Langdon." His voice was even. "I'm not able to confirm or discuss whether any patient is being treated on this floor. That's protected information under HIPAA."

"She's our daughter." The man this time, with the faint irritation of someone who felt the usual rules ought not apply to him.

"I understand. The law doesn't make exceptions based on family relationship." He kept his tone level, not unkind, not flexible. "If your daughter has been in an accident, the Pittsburgh Police Department would be your first point of contact for information about the incident. I'd be happy to get you the non-emergency line if that would help."

The woman's jaw tightened. Her eyes moved past him down the corridor, as though she could locate what she was looking for if she just looked hard enough.

"We have it on good authority that she's here," she said.

"I'd encourage you not to act on unverified information. Rumours cause unnecessary distress." He held her gaze. "I'm sorry I can't be more help."

Neither of them moved. The woman's expression hardened in a way that had stopped being about concern some time ago, if it ever had been. "Do you know who I am?" she said. "I could have you fired."

Frank looked at her for a moment, tilting his head. "The administrative offices are on the ground floor," he said. "The receptionist will be able to direct you."

He watched them go to the elevator. He watched the doors close. Then he turned back to the nurses' station, where Dana was already on the phone to administration, her voice pleasant and immovable, and he picked up his chart and found his place and kept going.

Down the corridor, Daisy St. John's monitor kept its rhythm.

She didn't know they'd been here.

She wouldn't, if Frank had anything to do with it. He was still telling himself that was purely professional. He was becoming less convincing by the hour.