Chapter Text
She’s back on monitoring and documentation.
No scrubbing in for her.
But Emma doesn’t even mind.
She is frankly relieved to be sitting in front of a computer, eyes focused on the screen, while he works in her periphery, his large, perfectly calibrated hands wielding a Cobb elevator to retract paraspinal muscles.
“Nolan. Bring up the MRI on the screen.”
His voice makes a tiny muscle in her shoulder jump. But she doesn’t lose her head. He sounds as he usually does – authoritative and in control.
Emma’s fingers fly over the keys quickly.
“Zoom in on the sagittal,” he orders promptly.
Emma complies, pulling up the sagittal MRI sequence.
“Adjust brightness and enlarge axial at L4-L5.”
Emma pauses, fingers trembling slightly. She contemplates several options, heart pounding in her ears. She clears her throat. “Do you – do you want the pedicle level?”
“Disc,” he corrects crisply.
“Right. Got it.”
“Scroll down one slice,” he directs.
Emma swallows. “Here?”
“One more.”
She scrolls slowly.
“No. Keep going…stop. That’s the one.”
Emma releases a small breath when he turns on the high-speed burr and begins to thin the lamina. The noise means she can relax for now.
She wonders if the other nurses get this anxious. She also wonders if they like being anxious. If they get a secret kick out of it.
Or is she the only weirdo?
The high-speed burr pauses.
“Nolan. Adjust lights.”
Emma jumps up from the chair. She rushes to the overhead surgical lights.
She grabs the handles. “Ready.”
“Down a bit.”
Emma turns and presses down on the handles.
“Angle it toward me. I said toward me.”
Emma swallows. She adjusts again.
“Tighten the focus,” he commands.
Emma tightens the focus. A little out of breath.
“Good,” he says.
She is flooded with endorphins, warmth spreading all over her.
She waits by the handles, body tense with anticipation. Trying to look collected and normal in front of the other nurses.
Ten minutes pass until he asks her to bring in the bipolar unit.
Emma does as she is told.
She wheels it in and begins connecting the bipolar forceps. She tries not to hurry, tries to be precise and composed, like him. In control.
“Don’t have all day, Nolan.”
Her breath hitches. “Um, coming right up.”
“Foot pedal?”
Emma lags. Tries to get all the settings in the right order.
“Nolan. I said foot pedal.”
“At your right foot,” she mumbles, handing the scrub nurse the forceps.
“Don’t make me wait for it next time.”
“Yes, Sir.”
It’s a reflex response. She doesn’t even think about it in the moment. She only realizes it might have been uncalled for when she catches him looking up at her through his goggles.
She can’t tell what he’s thinking, because he quickly looks down again.
Because they’re in the middle of surgery.
Emma decides she will not obsess over this. She will not turn it into a moment.
She returns to her workstation and stares at the screen without blinking.
She is only roused again when Park tells her to document the decompression towards the end.
“Nice work in there,” one of the more seasoned nurses tells her as they come out of OR 4.
Emma gives her a grateful smile. “Really? I feel like such a klutz. But thank you.”
“No, you’re fine…Dr. Park can be a little harsh sometimes. But that’s his way of teaching too.”
“Yes. I – I can see that.”
The nurse leans over, lowering her voice. “I will say, he’s been in a mood recently. Don’t know why. He’s normally a little more patient with newbies.”
Emma’s heart starts to thump again. “Oh…well, I’m sorry to hear he’s upset.”
“I don’t think it has anything to do with you.” The nurse’s eyes glint. “Heard he gave you a ride home last week.”
“Y-yes. It was very nice of him.”
“He can surprise you like that. So, if he’s a little harsh, he probably thinks you’re a fast learner. Probably thinks you can take it.”
Emma swallows. She nods, feeling a flush come over her.
“I – yeah. I can take it. I can definitely take it.”
Emma doesn’t mean to, but while scrolling one night, she ends up watching a four-minute TikTok about “emotionally unavailable men”.
The woman giving advice wipes off her make-up very meticulously on camera as she explains that these kind of men are not trying to hurt you or punish you; they are trying to protect themselves.
“Their guard is up, babe. All the time. Because they’re so afraid of you, babe. This is their survival strategy. You are the real predator, in their eyes.”
Emma can’t help a weak chuckle. Oh, sure. She’s the one with the big jaws and an appetite for blood.
“I know you don’t believe me,” the woman says, removing a false eyelash, staring straight into Emma’s soul. As if she were talking to her, specifically. “I know you see yourself as small fish. But it’s true. These men are terrified. They retreat into facts and logic and routine because that’s what keeps them safe. You interfere with that, you get the silent treatment. You disturb their comfort zone? They immediately put up walls. Because they’re so afraid, babe. Of you.”
Emma chews on her thumb, ripping into the cuticles, wondering what “afraid” would even look like on Park.
Wondering what it would feel like to have that kind of power.
Next time during the first deep suture, he has her documenting closure start time.
And she slips it out again.
Just to see.
“Record EBL at 350 and Hemovac placement.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Park pauses, large curved needle dangling above the fascia. He looks as if he were recalculating. Recalibrating. The scrub nurse misinterprets his hesitation. She asks whether he wants a heavier needle.
The shark suddenly rears his head. Maw clamping down on the nearest victim.
“Did I ask for a heavier needle?”
The scrub nurse shrinks slightly. “No.”
“Then let’s continue.”
Emma feels bad for her. She feels guilty. But she also feels a shiver of pure, selfish satisfaction.
She doesn’t know what to do with it, except carry it with her for the rest of the day.
She’s scooping up yoghurt out of a jar when he walks into the breakroom a few days later.
“Nolan.”
Emma’s first instinct is to get up.
He shakes his head. “Sit down. I’m just grabbing something from the fridge.”
“Oh. Of course.”
Emma pauses, spoon to mouth, watching him bend over the fridge. The sight of his broad back makes her toes curl slightly in her sneakers.
She wishes she didn’t feel the need to fill up the silences when she’s around him. But she can’t help it.
“What – what are you having for lunch?”
“A sub,” he replies coolly.
Emma almost misses the spoon to her mouth.
“Turkey sub,” he amends after a moment, shoulders stiffening.
When he turns around she’s still licking around the spoon, trying to clean up the mess. But there’s a few white stains on her scrubs. And on her chin. She’s not normally a messy eater.
Park clicks his jaw.
Emma looks down sheepishly. “Darn it. I guess I have to get new scrubs.”
When she glances up again, she finds he is still staring at her chin.
Emma quickly wipes the white beads with her thumb and licks the thumb.
Park’s eyes turn a dark, lusterless gray.
“Go and change, Nolan.”
The slight roughness in his voice reminds her of sitting in his car. Being told he doesn’t think about her.
Emma gets up cautiously. She feels another sense of déjà vu.
This time, he’s the one blocking the exit.
“Can you, um,…”
Park quickly moves aside, brow furrowed.
She wishes she could stay and count each furrow. Analyze the twitch of each facial muscle.
Indulge in the kind of voyeurism she has only practiced on her phone.
She’s returning unused supplies to storage at the end of her shift when Colin comes up to her to ask if she wants to grab a bite.
Emma almost drops the skin staplers.
“Oh, um, that sounds good, but I… have to check with Angie. I think I still have some stuff to log out.”
“That’s fine, I’ll wait for you. I’m not in a rush.”
Emma tries to think of another, more discouraging delay to get him off her back. Her stomach rumbles suddenly, reminding her that she hasn’t eaten anything except that stupid yoghurt all day.
And she thinks, Why shouldn’t I grab a bite with Colin?
Why does she need to find excuses? She’s hungry and he’s nice.
And Dr. Park has already left, as far as she knows.
Emma smiles at Colin. “Thanks. I’ll try to wrap things up quickly.”
“Great. Are you up for Thai? I know this great little spot.”
By the time they go down to the car park, Emma begins to regret having said yes. Colin is a talker. She knew that about him already, but at the BeerHive they were surrounded by other people and she was much more interested in what he had to say because Park was watching them.
Now, with no audience, her shoulders slump slightly.
Colin makes a joke about his slightly beaten up Chevrolet, then launches into the story of how he bought it off his best friend’s uncle. Emma is racking her brains for an excuse to get out of their probably very long dinner, when she sees the familiar looking Lexus driving past.
The car slows down. The driver’s window rolls down.
“Evening, Dr. Park,” Colin says, raising two fingers in salute.
Emma’s throat closes up. She manages an unsteady “hello”.
“Nolan, Becker. Nolan, didn’t I tell you to file that intraoperative event note before you leave for the day?”
Emma’s eyebrows shoot up. She doesn’t recall any such request.
“Um, I’m sorry, I didn’t see any message about it in my inbox.”
Park’s nostrils flare slightly. “I left the details with Angie. You need to start learning how to file those.”
“I will, I promise.”
“I’m sure she will get it done tomorrow,” Colin interjects, oblivious to the undercurrent of tension between the surgeon and the nurse. “Emma is probably one of the most conscientious people I’ve ever met.”
And he beams at her, expecting her to appreciate the compliment.
Emma stares past him. Park’s lip is curled in what looks like mild distaste.
She clears her throat. “I could – go up right now while it’s fresh in my mind. Just to get it over with.”
To tell the truth, she has no idea what particular surgery Park is even referring to, because the only notable thing today was an arthroscopy which was quite low-key. But he has given her an excuse to get out of this and she will grab it with both hands.
Park nods, lip uncurling. “Yes, you should. You two will have to raincheck.”
Colin sputters for a moment in disbelief. Really? Right now?
But Park’s glower makes it hard to protest any further. The male nurse resigns himself.
“Next time, Emma.”
And because Park is watching, she smiles up at Colin with more enthusiasm than she feels. “Yes, next time.”
Park revs the engine behind them and drives off in a loud huff.
When Emma trudges back upstairs to Angie’s station, asking about the intraoperative event note that Dr. Park had wanted her to file, the charge nurse gives her a blank, confused look.
Normally, if this were any other floor and any other doctor, Emma would chalk it up to miscommunication. Random human error.
But this is not any floor and not just any doctor.
So when Angie assigns her to ENT and Plastics for the next two weeks and not a single Ortho case, she senses that Park is avoiding her.
It strikes her that he might be embarrassed about the lie. That he might not have a way of explaining his “mistake”.
Though, whenever she catches sight of him on the floor, he doesn’t make a particular effort to look away. Their eyes meet a couple of times. Small flashes across a service corridor or through an observation window. He does not nod or acknowledge her presence, but his gaze moves slowly, unhurriedly, when she is within sight.
Taking her in before moving on.
He does this almost every time.
Sizes her up, as if she might have changed overnight.
As if by going over her features, again and again, he might slake a particular thirst.
I just have to get you out of my system.
The shark stalks the deer from afar, unable to approach. Probably because she stays on land. But more likely because he is caught in the morass of churning waves.
“Multiple critical incomings! We need as many hands as you can spare! And by that I actually mean all of them!” Dana calls out briskly one afternoon, standing over Angie’s station, as the OR nurses scramble.
Emma is the first to come up to her.
Dana gives her a roguish smile. “So, a building has to collapse for you to join us in the ER again? Well, glad to have you with us, kid.”
Emma feels oddly energized as she steps back into the hectic rhythms of the emergency room. For all its chaos and trauma, the ER feels less stressful at the moment than whatever she has going on upstairs.
She jumps into the fray with relish, glad to work beside Dr. Langdon and Dr. Whitaker again. She even missed Santos and her acerbic quips.
Her gown is spattered in crimson, her braids have almost entirely unraveled and are caked in residue plaster, she is bathed in a river of sweat and fluids and cement dust, and she has the taste of metal and viscera on her tongue, but she feels almost at peace.
This feeling carries her seamlessly from patient to patient, making her feel invincible, airborne.
Above it all, somehow.
Maybe that’s why she doesn’t see the arms coming round her head and shoulders.
The patient wakes up from sedation howling.
He does not understand where he is and what has happened. The last thing he remembers is the ceiling falling. He is terrified by the bright lights and the girl covered in blood.
Emma is too shocked in the first few moments to struggle.
His arm cannot be that thick. It can’t possibly cut off her airway.
She is supposed to be young and invincible.
And – on the other hand, she’s only a nurse.
By the time she begins to struggle, the room has started to spin.
At some point, multiple arms push him off her and wrest her away. She thinks she can hear Donnie and Jesse. Maybe Dr. Robby too.
Voices swarm and wash over her. The noise of a world that does not have her in it anymore. High-pitched moans and intercom announcements, distant beeps and the squeaking of wheels against floors.
She realizes she can breathe now.
There’s an oxygen mask attached to her nose and mouth.
Bright light is shone into her eyes. She shrinks from it. Someone is massaging her neck. Perlah.
She wants to thank her, but even without the mask, she is incapable of speech. Her throat feels raw. Burning, almost.
She can’t focus on anything except the nurse.
But out of the corner of her eye, she thinks she sees a dorsal fin.
Parting the waters like a blade.
Then she hears the loud, angry snarl.
“…and you took my nurse, left her unsupervised, put her in danger, then couldn’t even find her a bed –”
“We’re dealing with a mass casualty event, Shark –”
“Don’t fucking call me that. You take my people, you don’t treat them like they’re disposable. And you call the police on the fucker that did this.”
“Police a little busy right now, if you haven’t noticed, plus the guy was in shock; it was an acute stress response –”
“I didn’t ask and I don’t give a shit.”
Emma feels a strange weightlessness as she hears the heavy tread of the carnivore. Entering the room. Pushing Perlah aside.
Dr. Park looks down at her with eyes that have no blue in them. No grey either. Only dark, glassy pupil.
Lips parted, nostrils flared. Brow beaded with terror.
Emma has never seen him like this.
He looks fleshless. All bone. Sharp and severe and brittle.
He bends over her, inspecting her throat.
She wants to give him a thumbs up, to let him know she’s okay, actually.
But as she lifts her hand, she accidentally touches his arm.
Her fingers graze bare flesh – so thin it’s almost bone.
His hand freezes for a moment.
But he allows her to touch the bloodless veins. Feel the spiked pulse.
Then he removes her fingers gently. So gently.
“You’ll be all right,” he tells her quietly, thumb tracing her jaw.
Emma nods, leaning into his touch. Wondering if this is a dream.
They keep her under observation overnight after imaging.
She wants to tell them it’s not necessary, but her vocal cords are fried. And she’s exhausted. So she sleeps. And she dreams.
It must be a dream, because she sees the dorsal fin again. Weaving through the dark with a mother-of-pearl glimmer.
His hands turn her face gently. Check her vitals. Leave warm prints on the column of her neck as he adjusts the soft collar.
In the dream, she hears his voice telling her, don’t do that again, Nolan.
Do what? she wants to ask.
But he speaks before she can ask. Don’t ever scare me like that again.
And she wants to say, Yes, Sir.
But she falls into a deeper, calmer sleep as the shark swims endless laps around her bed.
("Weird shit went down yesterday, man," Ahmad is telling Olsen as Emma pauses by the entrance to call herself an Uber.
Ahmad eyes her soft collar and nods with a sympathetic smile.
"Yeah, no shit. A building collapsed."
"Nah, man. You missed all the action. We had actual brawls. Shit got violent. Patients versus nurses. Doctors versus patients. I had to keep Park the Shark from trying to rip into this guy who was already crashing. It was like Midsommar up in here."
"What the fuck is Midsommar?")
It’s Dana who feels most guilty, afterwards. Even though Emma assures her that it was just a case of bad luck. She’d been on the receiving end of an acute stress response in an uncontrolled environment during a mass casualty event. It could’ve happened to anyone.
It could’ve been worse.
She has only had to wear a soft collar and take it easy for a few days. The bruises will vanish soon.
She has mostly recovered her voice.
Dana heaves a haggard sigh.
“I’m sorry, kid. Maybe it’s a good thing you’re upstairs and not down here anymore.”
Emma licks her lips. Fights the impulse to touch her still tender neck. “Actually, um. I was thinking of coming back.”
Dana tilts her head. “You want to come back.”
“To the ER, yeah.”
“Being asphyxiated was not enough excitement for you?”
Emma grins a brittle, masochistic grin. “I guess not.”
She figures it’s the best course of action. She has to do something to get away from Dr. Park.
She thought something would change after her brush with violence. That, since he had shown so much concern that day, he would be different from now on.
But her first day back, he was, if possible, more glacial than usual.
Told her at one point that she should have stayed home if she was not ready to prepare suction in under a minute.
She knows, realistically, that he was saying that because she was lagging during one of the most time-sensitive transitions.
She understands that he can’t be otherwise. That nothing can happen.
It’s bad enough that he lost his temper. Showed that he cared in some capacity.
The nurses in the OR are chattering. And pretty much everyone in the ER, if Ahmad and Olsen are anything to go by.
So, overall, it’s better to cut herself off. Keep interaction to a bare minimum.
And stop daydreaming about a relationship that could never work out.
Because it just hurts too much.
Her sister agrees, eventually.
“You must have been miserable in that OR, Mimi, to want to go back to the madhouse.”
She’s only been back in the ER for three days, when he comes down for a consult.
She’s at the nurses’ stations, letting Princess talk her into joining a betting pool titled “will this patient go to the OR?” for borderline cases, when she sees him marching out of the elevator, cutting through the waves of people.
Emma’s first instinct is to duck.
But she keeps upright. Keeps talking to Princess like it still matters. Probably bets money without realizing it.
The shark sweeps the room, gaze passing over her without noting her presence.
She's back to small fish.
Emma feels a terrible sense of anticlimax. That’s it?
Is this how it’s going to be from now on?
But she reminds herself it’s for the best.
A few minutes later, the consult is interrupted. Dr. Whitaker yells for a crash cart. The patient is going into cardiac arrhythmia.
Emma has, by now, learned to act without thinking. She grabs the crash cart and wheels it towards the room.
As she drags it next to the bed, she peels the pads from their backing. This is a dance she knows all the steps to. First pad on the upper right chest, below the collarbone. Second pad on the left side of the chest, below the armpit line.
“All clear!” she yells, as everyone steps away from the bed.
She takes a step back herself – and almost collides with a solid chest.
She turns around quickly.
She forgot Dr. Park was in the room. His hands have come up to her shoulders. Touching her, but not quite.
Keeping her away. Pulling her in.
Gray eyes swollen with resentment.
Emma reels back towards the patient. Princess is telling her to resume compressions.
Emma lowers the bed and laces her fingers. Hands on the patient’s chest, she looks up at Dr. Park briefly.
“We’ll call you back in when he’s ready for a consult again, Dr. Park. But we need the room right now.”
And before she turns her attention back to the task at hand, she catches the astonished look on Park’s face. Lips parted and pale. Eyes flashing, almost livid.
She has never spoken to him this way.
Never told him what to do.
But maybe he should have foreseen it. After all, their acquaintance had started with her getting him to give her his personal phone in under a minute.
It's only that - he has never not been the one issuing commands.
First, she leaves his OR. Then, she tells him to leave the ER too.
He is unresponsive for a moment. A shark turned upside down. Tonic immobility.
Then – with a glare that would have probably reduced her to ash on her first day – he sweeps out of the room.
That last look seems to promise pain.
Emma swallows thickly, pressing her hands against the patient’s chest.
She feels like she’s being asphyxiated again. His hands round her neck. Applying just the right amount of pressure to keep her alive. To keep her going.
Emma grins madly, like a true masochist, picturing his retribution.