Sometimes your first week as an intern goes terribly. Sometimes you go to a bar and pick up a stranger about it. And sometimes that stranger shows up six months later to bleed all over your doorstep and you just have to go with it.
or
the one where Caitlyn and Vi accidentally find themselves in a strangers-with-benefits situationship except the benefits are medical care and anxiety
The first time it happens, Caitlyn is just barely home from a twelve-hour shift that turned into a twenty-hour shift, tired enough that her eyes feel like they’re shivering, and assumes the knock on her door is an uber driver with a burger and way too many fries. Jayce has – annoyingly – worked out that she’s more likely to actually eat something when a meal is presented to her directly, and that it’s much harder for her to decline if he skips the offering step and just orders food for her.
So sure is she, in fact, that she opens the door looking at her phone instead of through the peephole, texting Jayce a thank you sandwiched between demands that he stop misusing Find-my-Friends, and she only glances up when no vaguely greasy bag is thrust towards her.
The woman she finds does not have too many fries.
“So this is weird,” the oddly-familiar stranger says, holding up the hand not folded over her stomach. “I know this is weird, and you have no reason to help me, but you said you were a doctor, and…” She uncurls her other arm, presenting Caitlyn with a limb wrapped in an oddly-patterned fabric.
It takes Caitlyn’s exhausted mind a moment to realise that the darkest part of the pattern is slowly spreading, that the red smears continue from the cloth wrap onto the woman’s skin and short-sleeved jacket.
“Is that blood?” Caitlyn asks – an automatic, pointless question because it very obviously is blood.
“Yeah.” The stranger shoots her a lazy grin that curls something warm and tight in Caitlyn’s stomach, even as the woman’s confident demeanour is undercut by the haze in her grey eyes. “Don’t worry, not all of it is mine.”
continue on AO3
