Work Text:
Dana exhales.
The cigarette leaves her mouth bitter and ashy, and the grey fumes rise, obstructing the setting August sun.
In all my years, she wants to say, like a lecturing schoolmarm staring down a class of unruly kids. That’s what it truly feels like sometimes. Sometimes it feels like a schoolyard, dealing with the snipes and snark of overgrown children.
But the truth is, she has seen this before. It stinks of the eighties and nineties, when this was not only allowed implicitly, the idea of a department involving themselves in someone’s lives laughable, but in fact it bled through every facet of nursing, of work.
The old stereotype of the doctor and his nurse, servant to him first and foremost. My girls are good, my girl’ll fix you up, some old fuck Kowalsky used to say, an Attending in the eighties and then the early nineties. It took all the willpower she never had not to pummel him into the ground by the ambulance bay, pink brains splattering and spilling onto the grainy brown concrete.
I hope you have a brain aneurysm you ass, she used to think watching the old bastard, clueless and jovial and jolly, all white coats and button ups and ugly schoolbus seat ties and Italian leather dress shoes. Just die already you dumb bastard, she would think, when doctors looked down their scrubs, groped them, and he let them, even encouraged it with his good-natured laugh.
Boys, he’d chidingly say, and she’d resist the urge to put rat poison in the coffee percolator. Oh, she thinks now, and the best part is he would’ve sipped it slowly, guided by the assumption that she worked for him, not PTMC, not the patients. She’d offer coyly, sweetly, perhaps.
Brian, she’d say, coffee?
She imagines him now, gaping and gasping, white skin purple.
Emma just watches her, careful wide brown eyes staring at her. They are so perceptive and attentive it’s almost bizarre to her. It’s unfathomable to her — Dr. Park and Emma, she refuses to call him Shark (she’s not five), the lost little lamb and the all knowing, senior Surgeon.
It’s so easy to superimpose them in the closed hallways of the nineties, some doctor towering over some nurse, taking what is not his to take, what she cannot give willingly.
Where did you even meet him? she wants to ask in an incredulous voice but stops herself. It’s all power and height and she can’t imagine the bright-eyed bushy-tailed Emma standing a chance. She doesn’t even remember them talking or interacting and the thought that maybe she isn’t so attuned with the comings and goings of the ED, that she’s not the woman she thought she was anymore shocks her a bit.
It would have been impossible to miss, she thinks, as Emma looks at her, his towering stature and steely eyes and her gesticulations and wide eyes. It should have been impossible, that man and that girl a phantom limb, a phantom mind, a phantom memory.
It’s etched into her, her marrow, her beginnings. She thinks of nursing and she thinks of care, of love, of purpose but she also thinks of that; of servitude, of harassment, of belittlement.
‘Jesus, kid,’ she drawls, and Emma jerks back, inhales.
She doesn’t know why, really, why the kid needs her approval. She’s sweet, and she sees Christmas cards and birthday cupcakes in their distant future, but she doubts the sanity of any woman who sees Dr. Park and thinks, yes. She has so much potential, that I’m-twenty-and-I’ve-got-the-whole-world-ahead-of-me smile deafening and heartbreaking all the same.
To think it’ll be wasted on that asshole. She knows how men take, not just literally, not just bony hands on the fat and flesh of the body, but how a smile drains, how eyes darken.
She just cares for her, really.
She turns back, takes another drag.
‘Sorry,’ she says, and Emma softly smiles back at her, an almost pleading look in her eyes. ‘It’s just generational.’