i really couldn’t stop thinking about voltron x grey’s anatomy, so here we are now.
For @lokitheevilkitty because you made my imagination go fucking wild in a fandom i hadn’t intended to do anything but lurk in.
part 1 of ?? (haven’t decided how far down this rabbit hole i’m gonna go)
Keith’s eyes snap open, and he throws an arm up to shield himself from the warm Nevada morning sunlight filtering through a crack in his curtains.
Fuck, he thinks, stumbling to his feet when he sees the time on his watch, I’m going to be late for work.
He steals the throw just barely covering--he pauses. What was his name again? He surveys the unmoving body attached to a very nice looking piece of equip--prosthetic, his mind says firmly--on the floor as he swings the blanket around his shoulders. Past trauma, nice ass, he muses, dropping a couch cushion unceremoniously on the aforementioned backside as he hastily gathers up his clothing. The pillow jerks Mr. Nice Ass awake with a startled grunt.
“Hey, baby,” he says sleepily, pillow falling off his ass as he turns over, totally unconcerned with his nudity. “Where are you going? Come back and we can finish what we started last night.”
“You have to go,” Keith says. “I’m going to be late for my first day of work.” He tears his eyes away from the gleaming silver arm attached to a very nice looking torso. He desperately needs a shower and a toothbrush. “And don’t call me that.”
“You didn’t seem to mind so much last night,” his hook up says conversationally, pulling his boxer briefs on. “So, you actually live here?”
Keith cringes, one foot on the stairs. The house had stood empty all the years he had been away, first to college, then medical school. He’d always meant to sell it, but he just hadn’t gotten around to fixing up the dusty old place. “Yeah--uh, kind of,” he mutters. “It was my dad’s.”
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.” The man’s eyes fill with apology, and he runs his prosthetic through his white hair.
“Don’t be,” Keith says curtly, averting his eyes from the way his skin pulled taut over muscles. “Look, I’m going to go take a shower, and when I come back down, you won’t be here, so, uh, it was nice meeting you...” Somehow calling him Hot Asian Bucky didn’t seem like an appropriate send off.
“Shiro,” Hot Asian Bucky supplies as he covers up his magnificent pecs with his shirt. “And, if you don’t want me to call you ‘baby’...”
“Keith,” Keith says. “Good bye, Shiro,” he adds, beating a hasty retreat up the stairs.
He never thought he’d be back, walking through the very doors of the very hospital that he’d been born in. He never thought that he’d make it so far in his fledgling career that he’d be able to stand with a cohort of equally nervous interns, listening to Chief Iverson lecture about the next seven years of his life as a surgical resident. What he did know, however, was that he wasn’t here to waste time or to make friends. He wanted to be the best.
“Man these scrubs are ugly,” one of the interns mumbles, picking at the almost fluorescent orange fabric, which clashed brilliantly with his skin color. “Why couldn’t we have gone with a nice, neutral blue or something?”
“Kogane! Holt! McClain! Garrett!” Iverson’s growl broke Keith out of his inner pep talk. “You’re with Altea!”
“Great,” the same intern mumbles, “the Nazi.”
Curiosity piqued, Keith closes his locker and turns to look at the mouthy one. “The Nazi?” he asks, tying his hair back with a rubberband.
“Yeah. The Nazi. Garrison General’s most feared resident,” Mouthy says, looking Keith up and down with a finger on his pointy chin. “Hey, I remember you--we met last night at the mixer. You were in the black shirt with the red jacket. Very unforgettable,” he adds with a wink.
Keith stares at him blankly. “Who are you?”
“Who knows? Maybe they’ll be nice!” another intern interjects over Mouthy’s indignant squawk. He has a wide, friendly smile. “I’m Hunk, by the way. Garrett.” He sticks his hand out, and Keith takes it with a small smile.
“I’m Lance,” the mouthy intern says. “And I’ve heard the Nazi’s a real hard-o. They say he eats interns for breakfast.”
Hunk’s eyes grow as big as dinner plates and he sways a little in his shoes, only to be propped up by a very short woman with messy, sandy hair.
“Whoa there buddy, try not to lose your breakfast before the Nazi even has a chance to see theirs,” she says dryly.
“Hey, aren’t you a little young to be here?” Lance squints at her. “The medical school is on the opposite side of town.”
“I have a PhD and an MD from Stanford--not everyone is who you think they are,” she says in the same dry tone she’d used before. Keith is suddenly very invested in staying on her good side. “The Nazi’s over there next to the HUB.”
Keith, Hunk, and Lance follow her line of sight to a tall, imposing woman whose silvery hair was pulled back into a slick bun. She was jotting notes down in a chart, laughing at something one of the nurses said.
“I thought the Nazi was going to be a man,” Lance says with a low whistle. “Not hot.”
Keith rolls his eyes. “Yeah try not to piss her off on our first day? She might actually still have the power to crush our spirits.”
Lance smirks in response. “Oh please! In med school they called me 007 because I was such a charmer.”
Hunk lets out another whimper. “This makes everything so much worse!” he says in a strangled tone. “I want to go home!”
The short woman says nothing and marches off. The rest of the interns trail behind her, content to let her make the first move. As she approaches Altea, she sticks her hand out for a handshake.
“Hi! I’m Katie, but most people call me Pidge.” Altea is so tall that Pidge has to crane her neck up to make eye contact.
“I’m Lance,” Lance interjects hastily, also sticking a hand out. “And you must be Allura Altea, of the legendary Alteas. I’ve read so much about your father’s revolutionary minimally invasive bicuspid valve replacement technique!”
“Hello!” Dr. Altea shakes the proffered hands jovially. The sparkle in her eye helps loosen the tension in the interns’ shoulders. She looks each one of her interns up and down, and Keith can’t help but feel as if she was peering into his very soul. “Yes, I’m Allura, but you’ll call me Dr. Altea. And, yes,” she takes a deep breath. “I am related to Dr. Alfor Altea. You might call me royally inbred.” Her eyes go from warm blue water to blue steel. “But if I hear any of you so much as question my ability to be here, you will be assigned rectal exams until you finish residency.”
The four interns gulp audibly, though Pidge and Lance both look a little starstruck.
“Now, I have five rules, and I expect you to follow them.” She picks up her stack of charts and the four interns hurry after her. “Rule number one: don’t bother sucking up--you are nothing to me, and that’s not going to change any time soon. Trauma protocols, phone lists, pagers. Nurses will page you, and you will answer at a run -- a run, that’s rule number two! You are interns--you run labs, do grunt work, and work forty-eight hours shifts. People, this is war and you will not complain.” Dr. Altea opens a door and gestures for them to peek inside. “This is an on-call room--no funny business in here! Attendings hog them, so sleep when you can, where you can. Rule number three, if I am sleeping, don’t wake me, unless the patient is actually dying. Rule number four, if the patient is dying, the patient better not be dead when I get there, or else I would’ve woken up from my beauty sleep for nothing. Are we clear?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Lance and Hunk squeak out.
Keith and Pidge exchange a look. “You said five rules. That was only four,” Keith says as all five of their pagers start beeping insistently.
Dr. Altea checks her pager. “Rule number five,” she says crisply. “When I move, you move. Let’s go, people!” She rushes off, and the interns run after her.
They make it to the roof-top helipad just in time to hear the EMT list off the patient stats. “Katie Bryce, 15, complaining of major knee pain for two weeks, fell and hit her head during a rhythmic gymnastics routine and started grand mal seizing as we descended.”
“Okay, let’s get her on her side and hooked up before we lose her,” Dr. Altea barks orders and corrections while the four interns wrestle their patient into her cot. “Pidge, ten milligrams of Diazepam stat!”
As their patient stabilizes, Chief Iverson shows up. “Well, what do we have here, Princess?” he growls, looking through her chart. “A wet fish on dry land?”
Visibly irked by the nickname, Dr. Altea grits out, “Yes, absolutely.”
“Very well, then, Dr. Altea, let’s shotgun her.” He gives her a perfunctory nod and leaves to go check on something else.
“That means every test in the book, people! CT, MRI, CBT--Pidge, you’re on labs. Hunk, you’re on patient work-ups. Keith, get her prepped for CT--she’s your responsibility now.” Altea turns to leave.
“And what about me, Princess?” Altea’s laser-focused glare burns a hole through Lance’s sternum, and the other interns watch with baited breath as the smarmy grin slips off his face.
The interns go their separate ways. While Hunk and Pidge seem rather pleased with their fairly routine workloads that allow them to explore more of Garrison General Hospital, Lance reluctantly leaves for the clinical rooms, where he’d be spending the rest of the morning pouring KY Jelly over his hypoallergenically gloved fingers.
Once Katie stabilizes enough, Keith unhooks her from the heart monitor and unlocks the hospital bed, wheeling her off to the Radiology wing.
“You’re lost, aren’t you?” Katie asks.
“No,” Keith grits out, pushing her out of the elevator. “I know exactly where I’m going.”
“I can’t believe I’m stuck here with someone so clueless,” Katie complains. “I’m missing my pageant, you know, the Reno Teen Miss. I do rhythmic gymnastics, and that’s like, really cool. I was in the top 10 after two rounds! This could’ve been my year!” She flops back down onto the hospital bed with a huff. “You know, I tripped during talent rehearsal the week before last and I had to go to the hospital, but I wasn’t stuck with someone this clueless, and she was, like, a nurse. What are you, like, new?”
Keith pointedly ignores her and instead forgets to warn her that the CT contrast would make her feel like she was peeing herself.
Lance looks distinctly green around the gills when they reconvene over lunch in the slightly dingy intern mess hall. Hunk and Pidge tear ravenously into their meatball subs while Keith channels his frustration into ripping his roll apart into tiny pieces.
“These shifts are a marathon, not a sprint,” Hunk mumbles through the food in his mouth. “Eat.” He motions at Lance’s salad.
“I can’t,” he moans, picking at the slightly wilted leaves. “Not after doing seventeen rectal exams! The Nazi hates me. How can someone so beautiful be so cruel?”
“She doesn’t hate you,” Hunk consoles him. “She just...” He trails off, not knowing what to say next.
“Katie Bryce is a fucking nightmare, I swear to God! If I hadn’t taken the Hippocratic Oath, I’d Kevorkian her with my bare hands,” Keith snarls, throwing the scraps of his roll into his lukewarm soup.
“Did you know that the intern that shows the most promise is going to get picked to be the first one who gets to do an appy?” Pidge exclaims excitedly. “That would be so cool! I want it to be me so badly. I heard that Allura was handpicked by Coran her year.”
“Good afternoon, donkeys!” Iverson barks out, striding into the mess hall. “As you probably all know, the intern that shows the most promise is going to get the first shot at surgery at the end of this shift! Now, the pick has been posted already, but I figured I’d come down and inform the lucky intern myself.”
Pidge straightens up in her seat.
“McClain!” Lance tries not to jump out of his seat when he feels Iverson’s heavy hand fall on his shoulder. “You have the honor of scrubbing into my appendectomy this afternoon. Enjoy it!”
Lance looks like he can’t decide whether or not to curl up and die or puff his chest out with pride.
“Congrats, 007,” Pidge says, just a little snidely.
During one of Keith’s rounds, Katie’s parents show up.
“How is she? Is she okay? Why isn’t she awake?” her mother asks, brushing her hand over her daughter’s forehead. “Our doctor in Spokane said she might need surgery--is that true?”
Keith hesitates. “Look--um, we gave her a sedative for the CT scan. She’s just sleeping, and will be awake in a few minutes. Let me go get the doctor--I mean, her doctor--I mean, I am a doctor, but I’m not the doctor. I’ll--go get him for you.” He shuts up and wisely chooses to stumble out of the room instead of facing their confused and worried faces for another second. Along the way, he’s intercepted by Dr. Atlea, who asks him what he’s looking for.
“Katie’s parents have questions. Do I refer them to you, or do I get Dr. Iverson?”
“Uh, no,” Altea redirects his attention to a man bent over a chart at the HUB. “Dr. Iverson’s off the case. Katie’s doctor is the new attending, Dr. Shirogane, now.” And with a swish of her white coat, she’s off, leaving Keith to make shocked eye contact with none other than Hot Asian Bucky--Shiro, his traitorous brain corrects viciously--from this morning.
Oh no, he’s still hot, Keith thinks, high-tailing it out of the room.
“Hey! Wait! Keith! Can I talk to you for a second?” Dr. Shirogane catches him by the elbow and drags him into the stairwell.
“Dr. Shirogane, actually, I was--”
“Dr. Shirogane? As much as I like the sound of that, this morning it was Shiro,” he says with a wounded look in his warm eyes.
“Yeah, well, that was before I knew you were my boss!” Keith hisses after checking if the coast was clear. “We should pretend this never happened.”
“What never happened? Me sleeping with you last night, or you so unceremoniously throwing me out this morning? Because both are fond memories I’d like to hold onto.”
“No! There will be no memories--I’m not the guy at the bar anymore, and you’re not--”
“Not what? Some stranger? I get it, I get it,” Shiro says. “I was drunk, vulnerable, good-looking, and I had my good shirt on. You took advantage of me and now you regret it!”
“I don’t regret anything!” Keith throws his hands up. “You’re my boss! That was before I knew you were an attending at this hospital! And I was the one who was drunk. And you were not that good-looking.”
“That’s definitely not what you said last night,” Shiro says with a wink. “I had my good purple shirt on, and you took advantage. Come on. Wanna take advantage again? Say, Friday night?”
“No!” Keith says, inching away. “You’re an attending, and I’m your intern. Stop looking at me like that!”
“Like what?” Shiro’s come-hither eyes morph into something innocent and adorable.
“Like you’ve seen me naked! Dr. Shirogane! This is inappropriate.” Keith walks away before he can be tempted to do more, like actually take advantage of the rapidly closing space between his mouth and Shiro’s mouth. Instead, he chooses to go watch Lance’s appendectomy.
Lance stands with his hands above the scrub barrier in the middle of the operating room, nervously rehearsing the procedure as the nurses set up the stage. Keith settles down next to Pidge, head still spinning a little bit from his run in with Dr. Shirogane.
“Fifteen says he code brown’s right in his pants!” an intern shouts.
“Ten says he sweats himself unsterile.”
“Fifty says he pulls the whole thing off,” Hunk snaps. “That’s one of us down there! Where is your loyalty?”
Momentarily cowed, the interns take a bite of their power bars.
“Seventy five says he doesn’t get to close,” Pidge announces, polishing her glasses on her scrub top.
“I’ll take some of that action,” Keith says bumping his shoulder into Pidge’s. Hunk huffs and turns to watch Lance as he makes his first cut into the patient. When he finds the appendix and cuts it out without problem, the interns let out a collective cheer, only slightly dampened by Iverson’s strict glare.
“Hold on, guys,” Pidge reminds them. “He’s still gotta invert the stump into the cecum and pull up on the purse strings.” She lets out a groan just as Lance pulls up a little too hard. “Shit, he ripped them.”
The interns watch as Lance looks at his blood-covered hands and freezes as the patient begins to spiral. “Come on, come on,” Hunk mutters into his hands. “No!”
Iverson pushes Lance out of the way and begins the closing procedure while Lance stares helplessly at his hands.
“I guess he really is 007, huh?” Pidge mutters.
“What does that mean?” Intern #1 asks.
“License to kill,” Hunk replies, horrified as the other interns start filing out, disappointed.
By hour nineteen, the interns are exhausted. Sitting on a gurney in a less-heavily trafficked hallway, Lance lies with his head in Keith’s lap and his feet in Pidge’s lap while Hunk attempts to meditate. “Oh my god, you guys,” Lance says dramatically, throwing his arm over his face while Keith tries to eat his fourth protein bar of the day. “I’m literally 007 now.”
“No one is going to call you that,” Keith and Pidge say simultaneously.
“We weren’t every going to call you that even when you called yourself that,” Pidge adds.
Lance groans. “This fucking sucks.”
Keith’s pager starts peeping before Lance can continue complaining. “It’s Katie!” he says, pushing Lance unceremoniously off his lap. “I’ve gotta go.” He takes off with a sprint, going up the stairs two at a time, not slowing down until he reaches her room.
“Finally!” she exclaims. “I’m so bored!”
“What?” Keith gets out between pants. “You’re okay? The nurse paged me 911.” He picks up her chart and checks through the notes the nurses left.
“I had to go all ‘Exorcist’ before the nurse would even come. The nurses won’t pay attention to me, I can’t sleep because my hip hurts so much, and I wanted to watch my pageant, but this stupid hospital doesn’t have the channel!”
Keith’s eyes narrow in annoyance. “Are you ff--I am not your cruise director! I’m your doctor! You can’t just fake an emergency because you’re bored.” He slaps the chart back onto the tray and comes over to check her IV and heart monitor. “Stop wasting my time and go to sleep!”
“But I can’t! My head’s all full,” she protests.
“That’s called thinking. Get used to it!” Keith says, barely managing to keep from flipping her the bird. He decides, that, since he was up anyway, he’d go check on the rest of his patients.
Halfway through his third of twelve patients, Hunk catches up to him. “Hey! Do you know how to do a central line?” he asks.
“Yeah, uh...but I’m kind of in the middle of checking on my patients right now,” Keith replies, jotting down a couple of notes in Mr. Jones’ chart. “Can’t you ask Altea?”
Hunk dithers. “But,” he starts, sweat beading his forehead at the thought. Keith shrugs.
“Good luck, buddy,” he says, finishing up with Mr. Jones and moving onto his next patient, a 98 year old woman who was sleeping peacefully in her hospital bed.
He passes by Lance on his way back to the HUB, who was putting the moves onto one of the nurses. “Look, hun, do you know why they call me 007?”
“Because you almost killed a patient? Look, are you sure that this is right?” she asks, clearly annoyed by his antics. “His white count is so elevated.”
“I’m positive--I didn’t spend four years in medical school learning nothing!” Lance pats her shoulder and tries to ignore the indignant blush that paints his face as he walks away to stack his chart on top of the growing stack at the HUB. “God I hate nurses.”
Keith snorts. “She might be right, you know,” he remarks, not looking up from his charting.
“Like I said,” Lance shoots back. “I hate nurses.”
“Excuse me?” Keith slams his chart shut. “What did you just call me?”
“If the white cap fits,” Lance says with a wiggle of his eyebrow.
“You know what, forget Katie Bryce. If I didn’t take the Hippocractic Oath, I’d Kevorkian you with my bare hands,” Keith grits out before stalking away, his pager ringing.
Lance lets out a low whistle and ribs the intern next to him. “Hey, is he single? ‘Cause damn I’d be his Eva Braun over the Nazi’s any time.”
The intern rolls his eyes and walks away. “Whatever, 007.”
“What took you so long?” a nurse demands when Keith gets arrives to a flurry of activity in Katie’s room. “She’s having multiple grand mal seizures, now how do you want to proceed?”
Internally, Keith begins to panic. The nurse continues to update him. “I’ve given her a bolus of Diazepam, and she’s not responding. What do you want to do?”
He looks around frantically and grabs her chart, thoughts scrambling as he tries to figure out the next step. Everything was spiraling out of control, and he couldn’t keep up. “Have you paged Dr. Altea and Dr. Shirogane?”
“Yes! Lorazepam isn’t working!”
“Load her with Phenobarbitol!”
Katie’s sinus rhythm begins spiraling out of control. “Fuck!” Keith exclaims. “Someone get me a crash cart!” He loads the pads with gel and rubs them together. “Charge to 200!”
“Clear!” Nothing. “Somebody page Dr. Altea and Shirogane again!”
“Clear!” Blip...Blip...Blip.
Keith wipes his forehead in relief.
“What the hell happened here?” Keith’s heart sinks. Dr. Altea and Dr. Shirogane had finally arrived.
“Katie’s heart fell out of her normal rhythm and I shocked her back.”
“You were supposed to be watching her!” Dr. Shirogane rushes over to Katie and begins flipping through her chart. Keith doesn’t reply. Instead, he walks out of her room, sidestepping Altea, who’s yelling at him for waiting so long before paging her. He lets Dr. Shirogane and Dr. Altea check over Katie, while he somehow manages to keep his composure until he’s outside in the warm nighttime air, at which point he doubles over and loses the four protein bars he’d eaten in the last 24 hours.
“Keith?” Pidge’s small, warm hand comes to rest on his back. “Are you okay?”
“If you tell anyone about this,” Keith says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I will end you.”
Morning rolls around and the interns find themselves called into a conference room. Keith and Pidge find a spot next to the windows and Lance and Hunk snag chairs.
“What are you doing?” Keith asks, masking a large yawn behind his hand.
“I’m suturing a banana, hoping that it wakes up my brain,” Pidge says. Lance snickers. “What are you smiling at, 007?”
Lance shoots her a wounded look.
“Sorry, I get mean when I’m tired,” Pidge says, setting her tools aside in favor of eating the banana instead.
“All is good,” Lance replies, laying his head on his fist. “I got to tell a patient that he’s free to go, hang out in the OR, and comfort a family. It’s been smooth sailing ever since stormy waters.”
“Why are we here?” Hunk asks, sipping at his coffee, just as Dr. Shirogane marches into the room, looking as chipper as if he hadn’t just been chewed out by Katie Bryce’s parents.
“Well, good morning everyone!” he says cheerily. “I’ve called you all in here because I want to do something unusual. You were all chosen because you were the best and the brightest, and I want you to help me figure this out: I have this kid, Katie Bryce. She’s a total mystery--not responding to any meds, scans don’t show anything unusual, and she’s having grand mal seizures. She’s a ticking clock, and she’s going to die if we don’t figure this out soon.” He pauses his pacing at the head of the table, and lays down a stack of case files.
“Now, you might be wondering, what’s an orthopedic surgeon got to do with this case? Well, we know that Katie has a slipped capital femoral epiphysis, which is where I come in. But before we can proceed with more surgery, we have to figure out why she’s have these seizures. This is where you come in. I need your extra minds and your extra eyes. I need you to be the detectives on this case. The first intern who can come up with an answer for me gets to scrub in on her surgery.” He gestures to the case files. “Good luck, and remember: patience yields focus!”
Keith doesn’t bother to grab a file. He’s resolved to spend as little time as possible near Dr. Shirogane, but as luck would have it, Lance catches up to him just as he’s finishing his last chart. “Hey, I really want this chance to scrub in with Shirogane, and you’ve been Katie’s doctor from the very start. What say you and I get together and do a little group work in the library?”
“Doctor, your patient’s not responding to any antibiotics!” the same nurse from before thrusts the chart into Lance’s hands. Keith continues walking.
Annoyed, he glances over it. “Look, she’s old. Just give her a little time for the antibiotics to start working. Now, I have a chance to scrub in on a surgery that’s on a patient who lived after the Civil War. If you’ll excuse me--hey, Keith! Wait up!”
“Look,” Keith says. “Why don’t you find Pidge, or Hunk? They’re both smarter and better detectives.”
“Okay, sure, but I’d rather work with you. Plus, you might know something about Katie that they don’t know.”
“Fine. But you can have the surgery. I don’t want to be anywhere near Dr. Shirogane.”
“What? Why?” Lance pulls up short.
“Do you want to work together or not?” Keith says over his shoulder, heading to the library.
“Deal,” Lance says, following Keith into the library.
They settle down into a corner with a stack of literature each. “It can’t be infection, no elevated white blood count. And we know it’s not a tumor because her CT’s clean...are you really not going to tell me why you won’t touch Dr. Shirogane with a ten foot pole?” He prods at Keith, who’s reading the latest literature about blunt force trauma.
“No. What about...something congenital? Maybe it’s comorbid with her epiphysis?”
“No way. Her parents would have said something. Come on, just tell me.”
“Fine!” Keith shuts the journal. “But if I tell you, you can’t comment, make a face, or react in any way.”
Lance stops flipping through Katie’s chart.
“We had sex.” Keith’s shoulders set in a way that dares Lance to comment.
“Uh, so what about an aneurysm?”
Keith’s shoulders sag with relief. “No, the CT would have caught that. Okay, so no drugs, no pregnancy...”
“Was he good? I mean, he looks like he would be good. D’you think I could get tips from him?”
Keith shoots him a glare and shuts the journal he had been reading. “Look, I don’t want to be a downer, but what if she dies?”
Lance sighs. “I know it sounds really bad, but I really wanted that surgery.”
“It just kind of sucks that she’s going to be stuck as this awful fifteen year old girl who’s only greatest accomplishment in life is almost winning Miss Teen Whatever, y’know? You know what her pageant talent is? Rhythmic gymnastics.” Keith snorts derisively. “I don’t even know what that is.”
“I think that’s the one with the ribbons and the ball,” Lance says with a little laugh. “You know, with the sparkly leotards and stuff.” They share a little chuckle between the of them.
“Wait, what if she does have an aneurysm?” Keith’s mind starts running at a million miles a second. “Shirogane said that she had a slipped capital femoral epiphysis, and she did fall. She did fall,” he repeats, urging Lance to believe him.
Lance’s eyes widen slowly in realization. “You do realize that she’s one in a million, right?”
“Yeah, but maybe, just maybe.” Keith and Lance stand in a hurry and sprint out of the library, only to catch Shirogane just as he’s entering the elevator.
“Dr. Shirogane!” Lance yells.
He turns, the tiredness of the day already etched into his face. “Yes?”
“Katie has an aneurysm. I know that it didn’t show up in her scans or her patient history, but she did fall. She’s one in a million, Dr. Shirogane,” Lance blurts out, catching the elevator door with his hand. “You’ve gotta believe me.”
Keith makes himself unobtrusive behind Lance, hoping that Shirogane wouldn’t notice him.
“You said it yourself,” Shirogane said slowly. “One in a million.” He lets the door close, and Lance and Keith turn away, dejected. “Wait!”
They turn around and see Shirogane striding toward them. “Let’s go see if Katie’s our one in a million.”
Lance sighs in relief and the two interns hurry after their attending to get Katie prepped for an angiogram.
An anxious hour later, Shirogane exclaims, “There!” He points at a fuzzy spot in the upper left quadrant of the screen. “It’s minute, but it’s there! A subarachnoid hemorrhage. We need to go call Coran.” He turns to the interns waiting in the doorway. “You two did excellent work,” he tells them happily. “Thanks to you, a little girl’s going to get to live. Now, I’d love to stay, but I have to tell Katie’s parents she’s having surgery.”
The smile on his face makes Keith melt on the inside just a little bit, before he hardens his resolve again.
“Uh, so who are you going to pick to go into surgery with you?” Lance asks, shifting forward so that he’s partially in front of Keith.
“Oh, uh, I’m sorry, I can’t take both of you--it’s going to be a full house with Coran in the room, too. Keith, I’ll see you in the OR,” Shirogane says, much to their surprise. Keith, unsure of what to say, stays silent as Shirogane leaves the room, while Lance fumes for a second and then shoots him a dirty look, eyes blazing.
“Lance,” Keith tries. Lance just walks away. Keith follows him to an empty hallway, where Pidge sits, trying to meditate. “Lance, please.”
“You know what?” Lance says, whirling around to face him. “You sharked me. And you don’t like it because it makes you feel bad in all your warm, gooey places, but you know what? If you want to be a shark, be a shark. I didn’t get a surgery because I slept with my boss!”
Pidge opens her eyes in shock.
Speechless again, Keith’s mouth sets into a thin, hard line, and he leaves to prep for surgery.
He watches as Shirogane preps a sedated Katie with care, shaving strips of fine blonde hair off the side of her head. Coran, the neurosurgeon putters around, familiarizing himself with Katie’s scans, humming idly to himself, twirling his moustache between his thumb and index finger.
“I told her I’d make her look cool,” Shirogane tells him with what Keith is rapidly considering his signature fond, but tired smile. “Apparently being a bald beauty queen is ‘like, literally, the worst thing in the world.’“
Keith snorts at his imitation of Katie. “Did you give me the surgery because you slept with me?” he asks, wrapping his arms around his middle.
Shiro levels an earnest gaze at him. “Keith, you’ve been Katie’s doctor since day one. If anyone deserves this surgery, it’s you, who, with very little training, managed to figure out that she had an aneurysm. You deserve to see this case all the way through.”
“I’m not going to scrub in,” Keith decides. “You should give this surgery to Lance.”
“Keith,” Shiro says, setting his tools down. “You deserve this. You saved her.” He lowers his voice as Coran walks by. “You shouldn’t let the fact that we had sex get in the way of you taking your shot.” He puts a gentle hand on Keith’s shoulder before leaving the prep room. “You should get some rest. This isn’t going to be a quickie,” he says with a wink.
Mind preoccupied with Shiro’s words, Keith finds Hunk sitting on a ledge outside the hospital, staring out into the lawn. Wordlessly, he boosts himself up to sit next to him.
“I lost a patient today,” Hunk confesses to the lawn.
“I think I would have been a good farmer,” Keith confesses. “Or a kindergarten teacher.”
“I just wanted to be a hero, you know? Someone the family could depend on.”
Keith chuckles. “You’re a surgeon, Hunk, and it’s day one. We’ve all made mistakes.”
“You know, my parents tell everyone their son’s a surgeon. Like it’s some big accomplishment. Like I’m a superhero or something. I’m just so scared of disappointing them...and today, my patient’s family just reminded me so much of them. I just didn’t want to let them down,” Hunk sighs. “I didn’t expect his heart to be irreparable.”
“I never knew my parents, not really,” Keith says. “My dad was a firefighter who died when I was twelve, and my mom never showed up to get me. I just bounced around from acquaintance to family friend to foster home until I aged out of the system and somehow made my way into college.” Keith pauses. “I never thought I’d make it this far. The way I see it, superhero is pretty good.”
Hunk breaks eye contact with the lawn. “We’re going to survive this, right?” he asks softly. Keith puts his hand on his shoulder in warm comfort.
“I’ve gotta go check on my patients,” he says softly, leaving Hunk to his thoughts.
He’s halfway through rounds, when he hears Iverson’s rough growl resonate throughout the ward. “She’s still short of breath. Did you get an ABG or a chest film?”
Keith looks up from his charting to see who Iverson’s yelling at this time, and sees Lance, looking contrite.
“Yessir, I did,” Lance says.
“And? What did you see, intern?” Iverson booms.
“Oh, well, I had a lot of patients last night, and I--”
“Name the five common causes of post-operative fever, intern!”
Lance squeaks and begins fumbling for his notepad.
“From memory, intern! You should know this by now!”
Lance stammers and stalls.
“Can anyone name the five common causes of post-op fever?”
Still annoyed from earlier, Keith smirks to himself, finishing up with his chart before closing it and leaning on the HUB desk. “Wind, Water, Wound, Walking, and Wonder Drug.”
“What was that?” Iverson whips his head around to eye Keith. “Say that again.”
“The five common causes of post-operative fever: wind, water, wound, walking, and wonder drug--the five W’s. Most of the time it’s wind--splinting or pneumonia. Pneumonia’s easy to assume, especially if you don’t have time to do the tests.” He tries not to look at Lance, but Iverson has no compunctions with throwing Lance a dirty look.
“And how would you diagnose 4-B?” Iverson asks.
“I think it’s the fourth W--walking,” Keith recites. “She’s a prime candidate for pulmonary embolus. Spiral CT, V/Q scan, provide O2, dose with heparin, and consult for an IVC filter.”
Iverson harrumphs. “Do as he says,” he barks at Lance. “And then go tell Altea I want you off this case.” He walks away, leaving no barrier between Keith and Lance, whose expression was a mixture of indignation, shame, and jealousy.
Keith shoots him a smirk and leaves to scrub for Katie’s surgery.
Watching Shiro work alongside Coran is in and of itself a beautiful ballet. Keith stands, silently, watching in the background as Shiro makes the first cut into Katie’s thigh, a thin, sure, precise stroke, choreographed to the music of Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto--Coran’s pick, he’d whispered to Keith. He preferred heavy rock over the lush piano tones, he said as he exposed Katie’s femur. But Coran was the more senior attending, so he deferred the choice of music to him. Plus, Tchaikovsky’s wasn’t that different from Linkin Park.
Keith stored away that bit of information to tease Shiro about later. Wait, later? Keith mentally shakes himself. There will be no later. No teasing Shiro about his inner angsty teenager, he scolds himself.
“Keith, come over here,” Shirogane murmurs. “I want you to watch how I do this.” His hands were sure and deft, pinning the epiphysis in place. He looked so at ease in his element. Keith felt a surge of emotion behind his rib cage, and for once, he wasn’t sure if it was for Shiro, or for surgery.
After two more Tchaikovsky concertos and Symphony No. 4, Katie’s surgery was a success. Shirogane and Coran close with the closing bars of the finale, and Keith feels the thrumming in his veins, matching the euphoric energy in the room. He knew. This was what he wanted.
He collapses outside the OR, mustering up just enough energy to pull his surgical mask down. Pidge finds him there, with stars in his eyes. “You should get some sleep,” she says, sitting down next to him, taking in his red rimmed eyes. “You look like crap.”
“I look better than you,” he retorts.
“Not possible,” she says, leaving just as Shirogane walks out of the OR.
He spots Keith, and pauses just a moment. “How was it?” he asks gently, taking his scrub cap off.
“I loved it,” Keith says, leaning back. “You practice on cadavers. You imagine what it’s going to be like. But it was such a high. I don’t know why anybody does drugs.”
“Yeah,” Shirogane says with a smile. “Yeah. I, uh, I have charting to do. So--I’ll see you around? I guess?”
“Yeah,” Keith says, with a dreamy smile. “I’ll see you.”
By the time he leaves the hospital, the sun is already setting, and the rest of the interns have gone home. He kickstarts his bike, and rides off, feeling a little more confident about his intern year, unaware of the fond gaze following him off the hospital grounds.
