Bedside Manner (Law x Reader)

10. It's Complicated

"Help me?" He scoffed. "Just stay the hell out of my sight." 

Your finger hovered over the call button for the elevators for a long moment. So far you were hating every part of this day. The talk with Kureha, the interaction with Trafalgar and now this mess. It felt like there was something keeping your finger from closing the gap to the button. An invisible barrier. With a click of your tongue, your turned away sharply and headed towards the stairwell. 

It wasn't the first time you had attempted to take the elevator, only to turn away with your tail between your legs. You weren't giving it much thought. Thankfully, no one seemed to notice or you were sure they'd have mentioned it. But Law had noticed. Each and every time. Lately, it seemed that at any given moment, you two were never too far apart from one another.

He didn't have a valid reason for following you down to the emergency department. He was meant to be doing rounds and checking in on a couple patients to see how they were recovering.

The man had hung back, but remained close enough to hear what was going on as you approached the desk. 

"Ah!" The woman perked up in her seat, adjusting her glasses. "Dr. l/n, they're just bringing him over to bed three." 

"Does he have anyone else listed as an emergency contact?" 

There was an uncomfortable pit forming in your stomach and you felt you might just collapse in on yourself at just the thought of seeing him again. Let alone in a situation like this. It brought you back to that night and you could only hope that your anxiety wasn't apparent. 

The woman hesitated a moment, sinking back behind her desk as she furrowed her brows. Perhaps she expected you to have immediately dashed off to bed three. And you wanted to, you did. But you were torn by the guilt that gripped you in a vice. 

She shook her head. You were the only one. 

"Of course." You scoffed. "Hopeless as ever." 

You should have expected that you were still down as a contact. It was always you taking care of all those small, technical details. Neither one of you had anyone else around. And he never could be bothered with filling out forms and reading through documents. He would have never even seen a doctor had you not set the appointments up and dragged his ass there. You wondered who was taking care of all that now. 

You could hear the paramedics reciting his vitals and overall condition as you approached. A possible concussion. Several contusions and lacerations. He had been awake, but barely, when they arrived on scene. Now, he lay unconscious as they transferred him from the gurney. 

Maybe if the hospital was less pristine and was painted more muted, natural tones, the scene before you wouldn't have been so overwhelming. 

Red. 

It was everywhere. Splattered across the chests of the paramedics, soaked into the white sheet that rested beneath the hulking figure. It was the color of his wild and untamed hair, of his painted lips and now it was smeared all across his porcelain skin. 

"What happened?" You inquired, already pulling on a pair of gloves.

A nurse was cutting away his shirt, revealing a particularly deep wound that stretched from his shoulder to his hip. You cursed under your breath, hands gingerly followed the jagged edge of the wound. Blood was bubbling out of it like that old fountain in your building's courtyard. 

"Can't say." The paramedic replied, getting ready to leave. "We got a call, but no one else was at the scene." 

As you called out orders to the nurses, you struggled to remain present and focused. Flashes of a memory overlapped the man on the bed before you. He wasn't quite as big, but even if he had changed his appearance completely, that scowl would give him away. The crude prosthetic gave way to blackening skin, bound and bleeding; barbed wire cutting into the muscle below. 

Your fingers slowly slipped from the rail of the bed as the nurses continued to rush him off to an operating room. 

_____

"Did you lose something?" An arm crossed under your chest, you watched the man as he slept. With your free hand, you held a phone up to your ear. "Yeah, he's here. I'll... stay with him until you get here." 

You hung up before the man on the other end could say anything more. 

The surgery had went as well as it could. You had been forced to wait outside, wandering the halls to dispel your nervous energy. You hadn't been happy about it. But you understood it was against protocol to let you treat a patient you were connected to. 

You leaned forward in the chair at the man's bedside, glaring up at his sleeping form. 

"How do you know Eustass-ya?" Law suddenly spoke, leaning against the doorframe. 

"How do you know Kid?" You shot back, eyes never leaving the redhead. "Doesn't seem like your crowd." 

The young surgeon hummed, seemingly as uninterested in answering the question as you were. He studied you for a time and you grit your teeth. 

"He's my brother." You relented, grimacing at yourself. "Sort of." 

"I didn't know you had a brother." 

You messed up your hair, grumbling. Your foot bounced wildly. "It's complicated."