Sweet to the Bitter || Harry Styles AU

chapter one: when loren takes it for herself.

Taking a bite from my chicken sandwich, I can't help but wonder how I'm going to survive the next two weeks.

I'm used to multitasking my way through the day - brain-storming, running scans, prepping for surgeries, managing crises here and there. It might lead me to exhaustion by every evening, so much so that I rarely remember how I got into bed that day, but it's also what I signed up for when I decided I wanted to go into medicine at barely 12 years old.

For the last two days, however, I've been doing anything but.

It's been two days and I'm already dying of boredom. I knew Dr. Minnick hadn't taken an interesting patient in nearly two and a half years, but I underestimated just how bad it actually was. Why she's still in the hospital is beside me, but she is – and my plans for this afternoon are to schedule her hairdresser appointments for the next two months and, after that, to get in touch with her housekeeper to check on her dry-cleaning situation.

Ridiculous.

Granted, you could argue that this is all my fault. I wouldn't have been in this situation if I hadn't slipped on last Friday's surgery. But, honestly, I still believe I shouldn't have been punished this hard for singing a couple of verses from Shania Twain's That Don't Impress Me Much as we were closing up. It's not like I did it on purpose, either, and I think if it was any other attending, I would have gotten away with it. But Dr. Harry Styles just takes any excuse he can get to kick me out of his service.

It's like a ritual by now. I get two weeks with him; he gets two weeks without me. I should have known my time was up.

Still, I thought I was going to end up on Dr. Zamir's or Dr. Shay's service. They're not quite at Dr. Styles level – after all, he's the head of the department – but they take interesting enough patients and they actually like me, which is a nice change after being yelled at for fifteen days. Unfortunately, I ended up with the one attending I've been avoiding ever since I chose Neuro as my specialty, almost two years ago.

I'm brought back from my thoughts when I overhear two nurses chatting right by my window. My hand, about to grab my water bottle, freezes when I actually hear what they're saying.

"Dr. Coleman has given him permission to perform the surgery, can you believe it?" Nurse One half-whispers, though I can hear her perfectly.

"He must be out of his mind. Both of them, apparently." Nurse Two seems to agree with her friend. "I mean, Dr. Styles has always taken risks, but this? I've never seen a tumor quite so big."

It's like my brain lights itself up with the mention of the devil. Suddenly, I'm standing up and pressing my ear into the fogged glass.

"I think it's because it's someone from his family." I hear Nurse One again, though I feel like they're already walking away. I'm right and, unfortunately, the last thing I manage to hear doesn't give me any more information. "Which makes it even worse, if I'm honest."

It's like a light turns on at the end of the tunnel - a way out, an end to my boredom. I'm already picking my stuff up from the table when my eyes land on the cupcake I had saved for dessert and the perfect move takes shape in my brain. Dr. Styles doesn't have a sweet tooth (I figured that out right on his first day) but we both know someone who does - our mutual friend, Dr. Niall Horan.

I take the last bite from my sandwich and practically run to the third floor, avoiding two nurses on the way, to whom I had promised a little chat earlier today. I feel bad but, as it turns out, circumstances change and, while I had all the time in the world until five minutes ago, now I'm running against time.