Fic: when moving a line
when moving a line
miami medical ; PG ; 2,168 words
bars are never ready for the war stories. procter/warren. general series spoilers.
notes: for enots. BECAUSE she’s my partner-in-crime. and she’s the only one that can sympathize with me at how hard this crazy, crazy love for this show has hit me. i mean, I DON’T KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON WITH ME GUYS. red bull probably, but that’s another day, another entry.
-
Procter is outside the OR even before she finishes. Serena says nothing to Chris, passing him by and then Procter, heading straight to the sink to wash her hands.
The water comes on with an angry slap and she studies it, just as it hits the sink, loud and hard, and her hands curl around the sides. She takes a deep breath and tries not to think about the patient, the shaky pulse that runs through her fingers; they dig harder into the metal.
“Nice job,” Procter says, and still says, just as he and Chris part, and Chris passes the two of them with an awkward smile. Serena catches it, or just a piece of it, meeting Procter’s gaze instead. “Really,” he says too. “Nice job.”
There is something about the way that he says it, or doesn’t say it, that makes Serena look away and sigh.
“You were watching?” she asks. He doesn’t answer yet.
They never really talk later either. She doesn’t pretend to get it.
What she understands about what she wants to do is that things come and go, they pass and that means that you’re not supposed to linger on them too long. It’s like today, she thinks, when for a moment, she forget the patient’s name. It’s not the doctor that she wants to be.
But she sits at the bar, at the Crab Shack, watching Chris and Eva hover against a corner, flirting or not flirting; it doesn’t matter to her. Eva catches her gaze briefly, the other woman’s smile faint but there. Serena tries and smiles back.
“I find this all particularly curious,” and it’s Procter again, Procter who sits next to her at the bar. There is a drink in his hand. She watches as he passes a smile to Tuck, who disappears, and then orders her another drink.
She sighs though, again it feels like she’s back in that room, right outside the emergency room. These things pass, or that’s what they continue to tell her; they started in medical school and it sort of regurgitates into her workday still. She tries not to think about it more.
The bartender brings her another drink. Serena turns to Procter. “Alcohol?”
He smirks. “No,” he says. “But that works for the direction of the conversation, I suppose. Should I need an example, of course.”
“Of course,” she echoes.
She listens to him laugh, softly, and the sound is swallowed by the rise of music. She turns her gaze to the corner and watches the band stumble back to the stage. It happens every once in awhile and she can see the beach from the off-corners of the stage too. Serena fidgets.
Next to her, a small group starts to laugh. She picks up her drink.
“I don’t intimidate you.”
She blinks, looking up. Procter studies her.
“What?” she asks.
“Well, what I’ve been seeing - or watching, rather, is how all of you respond to me. I don’t intimidate you. It’s remarkable, really, given that half the staff runs around me like they’re … well, I’d rather avoid the metaphor.”
She shakes her head. He’s right, she thinks. She doesn’t touch that either. It’s a strange sort of acknowledgment about how she feels. She hasn’t figured him out yet, and she doesn’t know how to go about it, as if it were just another structured, necessary relationship.
Except he doesn’t fit, and fitting means something completely different in his case anyway. He doesn’t talk to her like everyone else. She doesn’t talk to him like she’s supposed to either.
“What?” he asks then, and he catches her staring, just as she catches herself. She smiles a little, shaking her head, and he leans forward, closer to her. His knee presses against hers and she half-expects him to move back, but he doesn’t. “Really,” he says. “What?”
She bites her lip. He raises his glass in question.
“Nothing,” she says. She laughs too, reaching for her drink. “Nothing,” she says again. “You’re just - you’re you. It’s funny that you’re you.”
“Thank you?”
The corners of his mouth turn, and she watches as he finishes his drink off, sliding the glass over the counter. The bartender is too far on the other side to pay attention.
“You did do well,” he offers.
She shakes her head. She doesn’t want to talk about it. She doesn’t say that to him and sneaks a glance over to Chris and Eva again, watching the two of them. She doesn’t have that, she thinks. She doesn’t know if she wants it either.
“Thanks.”
He chuckles. “You don’t believe me.”
She doesn’t answer yet. She listens to the music. It goes from high to low; then the guitar starts an introduction to the latest radio hit. It’s funny too, she thinks, how hard she fights to have a life and then how little she retains. She’s not trying too hard to be one of those doctors, but she wants to be a good doctor. She wants to be a great trauma surgeon.
When she looks at him again, she puts her drink down. She slides her fingers around the rim of the glass and then studies what’s left at the bottom. The light hits the alcohol, but the color is dimming.
“I don’t believe myself yet,” she says slowly. She stop too, but then forces herself to start again. “I’m still learning to go through the motions, and catch up with - with everybody else.”
“You don’t need to.”
“That’s what you say.”
She tries to brush it off, to take it as kindness and something a mentor would say. But he looks at her, he seems to really look at her and it’s in a way that she’s completely unsure of how to place. She can’t look away either.
They stare at each other and she can’t help but replay all the moments, the string of them, that she’s not entirely of still. Maybe it’s a confidence thing, maybe it’s because she doesn’t know how to place him or doesn’t care to, but there’s something there, and when he looks her, when he looks at her and she sees the way his mouth starts to turn, she has to look away.
“And anyways,” she manages, “it’s not important.”
He scoffs. Her fingers linger against the rim of her glass.
“You’re terribly odd,” he tells her. She laughs, but he remains somewhat serious. “I mean it. Although I suppose confidence comes around in other forms.”
She shakes her head.
“It’s not that. I’m just careful.”
“Careful?”
But she doesn’t answer, she doesn’t stop herself either; it just doesn’t belong to him, and she’s not keen on sharing that with him yet.
When the bartender comes back to the two of them, Serena manages thank you as she pushes her drink forward. She reaches for her purse too, kicking off her heels and then picking them up in her other hand.
He laughs this time, soft and low. Her heels dangle from her fingertips. He shakes his head and then reaches for her bag, swinging it into a fist. When she laughs too, he grins boyishly and the whole thing is so different for her, that she forgets to look around for Chris and Eva and hope that they don’t see.
It doesn’t really matter, she thinks. “Let’s go for a walk,” he says.
This is a test, she thinks, or should think as he steps ahead of her, further into the beach and towards the water. She studies him, watches the strange rise and fall of his shoulders, the way he holds himself, and the way she likes it. It’s him, she thinks too, and it’s unapologetic.
She stops first in the sand, standing and then looking down at her feet. The sand is wet and in clumps, and a few pieces roll over her skin, as she tries to trace one of his footprints with her toes.
She looks up again, and Procter is walking back. He drops her bag in front of her and they stand too close to each other.
“Aren’t you going to ask me?” he asks.
“Ask you?” she says back. He smiles and she looks away shyly, the corners of her mouth turn. She drops her shoes into the sand. “No,” she says. “I don’t think so.”
“Why?”
It’s the question, the real question, but Serena doesn’t want to give that to him either. She’s half-convinced that whatever relationship she does have with him is something completely out of her control at the moment. She knows any decision really has to be her decision.
She thinks he scares her too, but not in the way that she expects. There are nerves, there is confusion, and the combination of the two leads straight into a back and forth that keeps rolling around in her head.
But she decides to take this somewhere else, to try and push for another part of him to make sense of. Stepping forward, she pokes his arm.
“You’re going to tell me.”
He chuckles.
“You are,” she insists shyly, and somehow, it feels like the three drinks she had, the way her stomach is starting to turn into knots and the taste that comes with it. Her throat burns, only slightly, and she forces herself to smile to ignore it.
“You are,” she says again. “Then I guess I’ll tell you too.”
He raises an eyebrow. He cocks his head to the side too. There’s that smile, but she loses it and her heels dig hard into the sand, drawing her back to create some sense of distance between the two of them.
“So this is how it works?” he drawls, and then stops, expectantly. Her lips curl slightly and she picks that up. Her hair brushes into her face and she lifts a hand to cover her eyes. “I mean, if it is -”
She cuts him off, just as he leans into her space. “I don’t know.”
His voice is low and she blinks. His hand catches her hair, the few, stray strands that spread and hit her skin. She freezes. His fingers brush against her cheeks.
She forces herself to look at him, watching him as his fingers start to move. They stay at her cheek, they move, slowly, to her draw and then slide across to her mouth. He hesitates and she catches herself leaning into him too, watching still as his thumb slowly grazes her lip.
His mouth opens, then closes, and she doesn’t know if she’s supposed to see this or not, if she needs to see it. His eyes are too dark. He’s too close, too tall, it’s too soon, too quiet - stop, she tells herself.
But then slowly, she presses her lips against the pads of his fingers, just as his thumb stops moving to start again. He leans closer and she’s trying not to think of Procter as Procter, but then there’s never been a way that she’s supposed to think of him in. He’s never let any of them.
When her lips part again, she does think he’s going to kiss her. She feels his hand move away from her mouth, and then as it slides to open against her check, his fingers pulling into her hair. There’s no tug, no catch, but her eyes start to get heavy and he leans into her, against her, his mouth touching hers.
She doesn’t freeze, she doesn’t breathe, she doesn’t think or try and recognize the quick taste of whatever he had to drink in the bar. She lets a hand press against his chest, her fingers curl slowly in the fabric of his shirt, and it’s then, right then, that she feels her mouth open against his.
She starts to kiss him back, even as he hovers and seems to wait. She doesn’t pull him closer, but Procter slides an arm around her waist and his other hand seems to slip into her shirt. She feels his fingers against, flushed over her skin as she kisses him, as she really kisses him. She feels those knots too, just as they begin to twist in her stomach, and makes a soft sound as he draws his tongue lightly over her lip and into her mouth.
Somebody breaks away first. Serena doesn’t catch herself either.
She breathes, or tries to, and his arm doesn’t move from around her waist, just as her fist stays pulling at the fabric of his shirt.
“I still find you curious,” he says, and his voice is low, not hard nor is it soft. She hears things, but her mind is spinning faster. He kissed her. She kissed him back. She doesn’t let herself think further than that.
“Okay,” she manages.
When they sit in the sand, Procter only after her. He turns to her too and she shakes her head, resting her gaze on the water. She swears he laughs.
Her mouth is still warm.
miami medical ; PG ; 2,168 words
bars are never ready for the war stories. procter/warren. general series spoilers.
notes: for enots. BECAUSE she’s my partner-in-crime. and she’s the only one that can sympathize with me at how hard this crazy, crazy love for this show has hit me. i mean, I DON’T KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON WITH ME GUYS. red bull probably, but that’s another day, another entry.
-
Procter is outside the OR even before she finishes. Serena says nothing to Chris, passing him by and then Procter, heading straight to the sink to wash her hands.
The water comes on with an angry slap and she studies it, just as it hits the sink, loud and hard, and her hands curl around the sides. She takes a deep breath and tries not to think about the patient, the shaky pulse that runs through her fingers; they dig harder into the metal.
“Nice job,” Procter says, and still says, just as he and Chris part, and Chris passes the two of them with an awkward smile. Serena catches it, or just a piece of it, meeting Procter’s gaze instead. “Really,” he says too. “Nice job.”
There is something about the way that he says it, or doesn’t say it, that makes Serena look away and sigh.
“You were watching?” she asks. He doesn’t answer yet.
They never really talk later either. She doesn’t pretend to get it.
What she understands about what she wants to do is that things come and go, they pass and that means that you’re not supposed to linger on them too long. It’s like today, she thinks, when for a moment, she forget the patient’s name. It’s not the doctor that she wants to be.
But she sits at the bar, at the Crab Shack, watching Chris and Eva hover against a corner, flirting or not flirting; it doesn’t matter to her. Eva catches her gaze briefly, the other woman’s smile faint but there. Serena tries and smiles back.
“I find this all particularly curious,” and it’s Procter again, Procter who sits next to her at the bar. There is a drink in his hand. She watches as he passes a smile to Tuck, who disappears, and then orders her another drink.
She sighs though, again it feels like she’s back in that room, right outside the emergency room. These things pass, or that’s what they continue to tell her; they started in medical school and it sort of regurgitates into her workday still. She tries not to think about it more.
The bartender brings her another drink. Serena turns to Procter. “Alcohol?”
He smirks. “No,” he says. “But that works for the direction of the conversation, I suppose. Should I need an example, of course.”
“Of course,” she echoes.
She listens to him laugh, softly, and the sound is swallowed by the rise of music. She turns her gaze to the corner and watches the band stumble back to the stage. It happens every once in awhile and she can see the beach from the off-corners of the stage too. Serena fidgets.
Next to her, a small group starts to laugh. She picks up her drink.
“I don’t intimidate you.”
She blinks, looking up. Procter studies her.
“What?” she asks.
“Well, what I’ve been seeing - or watching, rather, is how all of you respond to me. I don’t intimidate you. It’s remarkable, really, given that half the staff runs around me like they’re … well, I’d rather avoid the metaphor.”
She shakes her head. He’s right, she thinks. She doesn’t touch that either. It’s a strange sort of acknowledgment about how she feels. She hasn’t figured him out yet, and she doesn’t know how to go about it, as if it were just another structured, necessary relationship.
Except he doesn’t fit, and fitting means something completely different in his case anyway. He doesn’t talk to her like everyone else. She doesn’t talk to him like she’s supposed to either.
“What?” he asks then, and he catches her staring, just as she catches herself. She smiles a little, shaking her head, and he leans forward, closer to her. His knee presses against hers and she half-expects him to move back, but he doesn’t. “Really,” he says. “What?”
She bites her lip. He raises his glass in question.
“Nothing,” she says. She laughs too, reaching for her drink. “Nothing,” she says again. “You’re just - you’re you. It’s funny that you’re you.”
“Thank you?”
The corners of his mouth turn, and she watches as he finishes his drink off, sliding the glass over the counter. The bartender is too far on the other side to pay attention.
“You did do well,” he offers.
She shakes her head. She doesn’t want to talk about it. She doesn’t say that to him and sneaks a glance over to Chris and Eva again, watching the two of them. She doesn’t have that, she thinks. She doesn’t know if she wants it either.
“Thanks.”
He chuckles. “You don’t believe me.”
She doesn’t answer yet. She listens to the music. It goes from high to low; then the guitar starts an introduction to the latest radio hit. It’s funny too, she thinks, how hard she fights to have a life and then how little she retains. She’s not trying too hard to be one of those doctors, but she wants to be a good doctor. She wants to be a great trauma surgeon.
When she looks at him again, she puts her drink down. She slides her fingers around the rim of the glass and then studies what’s left at the bottom. The light hits the alcohol, but the color is dimming.
“I don’t believe myself yet,” she says slowly. She stop too, but then forces herself to start again. “I’m still learning to go through the motions, and catch up with - with everybody else.”
“You don’t need to.”
“That’s what you say.”
She tries to brush it off, to take it as kindness and something a mentor would say. But he looks at her, he seems to really look at her and it’s in a way that she’s completely unsure of how to place. She can’t look away either.
They stare at each other and she can’t help but replay all the moments, the string of them, that she’s not entirely of still. Maybe it’s a confidence thing, maybe it’s because she doesn’t know how to place him or doesn’t care to, but there’s something there, and when he looks her, when he looks at her and she sees the way his mouth starts to turn, she has to look away.
“And anyways,” she manages, “it’s not important.”
He scoffs. Her fingers linger against the rim of her glass.
“You’re terribly odd,” he tells her. She laughs, but he remains somewhat serious. “I mean it. Although I suppose confidence comes around in other forms.”
She shakes her head.
“It’s not that. I’m just careful.”
“Careful?”
But she doesn’t answer, she doesn’t stop herself either; it just doesn’t belong to him, and she’s not keen on sharing that with him yet.
When the bartender comes back to the two of them, Serena manages thank you as she pushes her drink forward. She reaches for her purse too, kicking off her heels and then picking them up in her other hand.
He laughs this time, soft and low. Her heels dangle from her fingertips. He shakes his head and then reaches for her bag, swinging it into a fist. When she laughs too, he grins boyishly and the whole thing is so different for her, that she forgets to look around for Chris and Eva and hope that they don’t see.
It doesn’t really matter, she thinks. “Let’s go for a walk,” he says.
This is a test, she thinks, or should think as he steps ahead of her, further into the beach and towards the water. She studies him, watches the strange rise and fall of his shoulders, the way he holds himself, and the way she likes it. It’s him, she thinks too, and it’s unapologetic.
She stops first in the sand, standing and then looking down at her feet. The sand is wet and in clumps, and a few pieces roll over her skin, as she tries to trace one of his footprints with her toes.
She looks up again, and Procter is walking back. He drops her bag in front of her and they stand too close to each other.
“Aren’t you going to ask me?” he asks.
“Ask you?” she says back. He smiles and she looks away shyly, the corners of her mouth turn. She drops her shoes into the sand. “No,” she says. “I don’t think so.”
“Why?”
It’s the question, the real question, but Serena doesn’t want to give that to him either. She’s half-convinced that whatever relationship she does have with him is something completely out of her control at the moment. She knows any decision really has to be her decision.
She thinks he scares her too, but not in the way that she expects. There are nerves, there is confusion, and the combination of the two leads straight into a back and forth that keeps rolling around in her head.
But she decides to take this somewhere else, to try and push for another part of him to make sense of. Stepping forward, she pokes his arm.
“You’re going to tell me.”
He chuckles.
“You are,” she insists shyly, and somehow, it feels like the three drinks she had, the way her stomach is starting to turn into knots and the taste that comes with it. Her throat burns, only slightly, and she forces herself to smile to ignore it.
“You are,” she says again. “Then I guess I’ll tell you too.”
He raises an eyebrow. He cocks his head to the side too. There’s that smile, but she loses it and her heels dig hard into the sand, drawing her back to create some sense of distance between the two of them.
“So this is how it works?” he drawls, and then stops, expectantly. Her lips curl slightly and she picks that up. Her hair brushes into her face and she lifts a hand to cover her eyes. “I mean, if it is -”
She cuts him off, just as he leans into her space. “I don’t know.”
His voice is low and she blinks. His hand catches her hair, the few, stray strands that spread and hit her skin. She freezes. His fingers brush against her cheeks.
She forces herself to look at him, watching him as his fingers start to move. They stay at her cheek, they move, slowly, to her draw and then slide across to her mouth. He hesitates and she catches herself leaning into him too, watching still as his thumb slowly grazes her lip.
His mouth opens, then closes, and she doesn’t know if she’s supposed to see this or not, if she needs to see it. His eyes are too dark. He’s too close, too tall, it’s too soon, too quiet - stop, she tells herself.
But then slowly, she presses her lips against the pads of his fingers, just as his thumb stops moving to start again. He leans closer and she’s trying not to think of Procter as Procter, but then there’s never been a way that she’s supposed to think of him in. He’s never let any of them.
When her lips part again, she does think he’s going to kiss her. She feels his hand move away from her mouth, and then as it slides to open against her check, his fingers pulling into her hair. There’s no tug, no catch, but her eyes start to get heavy and he leans into her, against her, his mouth touching hers.
She doesn’t freeze, she doesn’t breathe, she doesn’t think or try and recognize the quick taste of whatever he had to drink in the bar. She lets a hand press against his chest, her fingers curl slowly in the fabric of his shirt, and it’s then, right then, that she feels her mouth open against his.
She starts to kiss him back, even as he hovers and seems to wait. She doesn’t pull him closer, but Procter slides an arm around her waist and his other hand seems to slip into her shirt. She feels his fingers against, flushed over her skin as she kisses him, as she really kisses him. She feels those knots too, just as they begin to twist in her stomach, and makes a soft sound as he draws his tongue lightly over her lip and into her mouth.
Somebody breaks away first. Serena doesn’t catch herself either.
She breathes, or tries to, and his arm doesn’t move from around her waist, just as her fist stays pulling at the fabric of his shirt.
“I still find you curious,” he says, and his voice is low, not hard nor is it soft. She hears things, but her mind is spinning faster. He kissed her. She kissed him back. She doesn’t let herself think further than that.
“Okay,” she manages.
When they sit in the sand, Procter only after her. He turns to her too and she shakes her head, resting her gaze on the water. She swears he laughs.
Her mouth is still warm.