blood in the water
joining the babyshark train with my wip, blood in the water!!
four chapters available already on ao3!! tags will be updated as i write more but for now here is the first chapter on tumblr :)
you are responsible for your own media consumption. my blog is 18+ no minors interact plz.
warnings: parental death (off page), estranged family, eventual age gap relationship.
ch 1: acquire a taste
Emma Nolan stood at the command center of “The Pitt.” She had to admit it was a funny name to call the emergency department of a trauma center. She could feel her legs starting to bounce and her palms starting to sweat while she waited for one of the nurses to bring the charge nurse back to meet her. To say that she was nervous was an understatement.
Graduating from Michigan was a dream but getting out of the whole state of Michigan was even more of a dream.
Nine hours from Sault Ste. Marie and five hours from Ann Arbor.
It’s not that she hated the place where she was from. She just hated what that place reminded her of. When she would go home for breaks and long weekends when the university was closed, the looks of the people in her hometown got to her.
The pitying looks and the whispers in the grocery store grate on you when you hear it for years.
Her parents died right before she graduated high school. Only child. Such a tragedy. I don’t know how someone moves on from that. So strong.
Her grandparents had been retired for three years when her parents had died. They really didn’t need to take Emma in when it happened, she was already 18 and only a few months from starting her freshman year at Michigan anyways. The settlement from the courts paid for four years at Michigan and all her living expenses plus some left over so she was already doing better than some of her nursing school peers.
But now she was out of Michigan and moved into her tiny studio apartment in Pittsburgh. She didn’t know anyone else in the city and wasn’t about to try and find a roommate so quickly. Close enough to work to be convenient but far enough away as to not feel like she is always there. Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center was the furthest job she applied for, the best paying one and the first job offer she got.
The welcome email she got from HR didn’t provide her with much information but it did stress to her repeatedly what she needed to do once she got to the ED her first day.
When you get to the Emergency Department find Dana Evans ED Charge Nurse.
Emma knew how she looked in the ED. She knew that she looked like a baby deer and that she seemed too docile to survive in this department. But she picked this job. She wanted to be in the ED. She wanted to understand why the hospital in Sault Ste. Marie couldn’t save her parents.
The Pitt was different from the other rotations she had done. Different from the EDs she had been in before. A lot bigger than the one in SSM. It always seemed from the outside like there was no structure. But she knew it was because of the nurses that the machine was well oiled. Because of Dana, everyone knew what to do. “Organized chaos” is what her professors would call the ED.
The chaos of the ED needed the structure Dana provided and so did Emma.
Brendon Park hated holidays. All of them. There wasn’t a single one that he liked. Which is why, when the Chief of Surgery sends a message asking who’s available to work the Fourth of July, Brendon says he can. Everyone probably thinks that he’s doing it because he’s obsessed with his job, and he is, but he does it so he has an excuse to not go see his family for the holiday.
Park also hated being around his family.
None of them understood what he did even after explaining it during the four years of undergrad (Yes he was majoring in Biochemistry and yes he liked it), the four years of medical school (Yes, I am still in school even though I just graduated) and during the five years of his residency (Yes, I am a surgeon. I work with bones. No I cannot write you a script for benzos). They liked to try to get more out of him than he would like. Which is to say nothing.
He liked being at work. He loved his job. He tolerated his co-workers. Walsh was the best. Garcia was okay. Walsh liked her so it made her more tolerable than otherwise. But getting involved with a resident down in the Pitt was a disaster waiting to happen. Nothing good could come out of that. The nurses liked to gossip too much but they were good.
Park knew his reputation in the department. In the hospital. Hell in the entire orthopedic surgery community.
The Shark.
Park thought it was ironic that that was the name they gave him given that sharks have zero bones in their entire body. But he supposes that’s part of the humor of it.
He doesn’t remember where it necessarily came from. Medical school was already cutthroat as is but adding in how competitive orthopedic surgery residences are and the nickname made sense. Top of his class in undergrad at Penn State and then the same at Penn.
Getting out of Pennsylvania was the only thing that got him through high school. But Penn State gave him too much scholarship money to turn away from and he knew that he was going to be starting his career in a mountain of debt. Getting a job in State College during the summer was easy and allowed him to not have to go home for anything. Penn was a little closer to home but he stayed so busy that there was never a need to find a reason to not go home.
Pittsburg was perfect. After going to school his entire life in Pennsylvania an admiration and love for the state grew. And PTMC was exactly where he wanted to be. He needed to stay so busy that he never had to go home for any reason.
The Fourth of July was Park’s least favorite holiday to spend at home besides Christmas and his birthday. Too many redneck cousins trying to fire off M80’s in the driveway and his family asking invasive questions about a girlfriend and his fancy doctor salary (the last time Park went home was his MS4 year so he was actually broke).
This Fourth of July though is shaping to be one of Park’s favorites. Finding something good about work everyday is hard. But potentially getting to do a replantation makes the answer easy today.
The Pitt is full of people. Beds line the walls and Park can’t walk two steps without getting stopped by someone who still needs to be seen again by their doctor.
It is complete chaos and he doesn’t know which room he is supposed to be heading to. The charge nurse is nowhere to be seen at the command center. The people that are there are in three different scrub colors and none of them are grey or black.
“You have to be fucking kidding me,” he mutters under his breath. Why wasn’t he told what room he needed to be in? It’s not like there weren't other things that could be done right now.
He’s in the middle of turning around and going back up to the surgical floor until he hears his pager go off.
Trauma 1
As he’s turning around and putting his pager away he feels his shoulder go back and loses his footing for a second. Not as bad as ending up on the floor like the nurse in the gray scrubs. Awesome, the one ED nurse he finds and he pushes her to the ground. She raises her face up at him with the biggest doe eyed expression.
Emma looks up at the man she just ran into at breakneck speed trying to find Dana. But as soon as she makes eye contact with the man she completely forgets what she was trying to do. She thinks they’ve been staring at each other for an uncomfortable amount of time before she shuffles up to stand. He is still looking at her while she sputters out her apology for running into him and rambles that she wasn’t paying attention and needs to find Dana.
Emma is still thinking of the man she ran into long after he leaves the Pitt. Dr. Brendon “The Shark” Park. An attending orthopedic surgeon.
They made eye contact again after he left Trauma 1 and Emma might be going crazy but it seemed like he was looking for her. The thought of that forms a weird feeling in her stomach and she starts to feel fuzzy. It’s most definitely the lack of sleep from last night and the overall exhaustion of the day. It most definitely doesn’t have anything to do with the attractive older doctor whose steel blue eyes stared into hers.
Park moves through the rest of his shift on auto pilot. Which works for him since he needs to be as focused as possible to make this replantation have as high of a success as possible. And it should be successful. Everything thankfully goes as smooth as it could during that kind of operation with the circumstances. With the right physical therapist and rehab Park is hopeful for an 85% recovery.
But every time Park closes his eyes, he sees dark doe eyes looking up at him and curls coming out of braids. She looked flustered and maybe embarrassed. She looked young. She looked like someone Park would take a bite out of. Someone who he wouldn’t be able to only have once after he had acquired a taste for her.
next chapter >>
thanks for reading! i'll upload the other chapters soon and as i write more :)
