SPN FIC - Chicago
I know, I know: you're waiting for Part 2 of Bay. (Or maybe not.) It's in the works, half done or so. In the meantime... yes, it's summer rerun time again.
August 1994 in Chicago -- hot, humid and depressing. Nurse Carol Hathaway is on her way home from a 12-hour barrage of stabbings, gunshots, fistfights, heat stroke, and lawn mower accidents, when a brown-haired kid calls out to her from a window across the street: "My brother's sick. Please help."
This is one of my very, very few crossovers -- and one I'm really pleased with, because the Winchesters blend in so well with the desperate chaos of Cook County General's ER. If you're not familiar with ER, don't fret -- Carol Hathaway is a little bit of every nurse who's ever helped one of us. She's Everywoman, faced with a cry for help from a scared and worried child.
CHARACTERS: Sam (age 11), Dean (age 15), John, and the Season 1 cast of ER
POV: Outsider (Carol Hathaway)
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 4900 words
CHICAGO
By Carol Davis
She walks down the metal stairs from the El platform with all the enthusiasm of the hangman's next victim.
The heat's held on tight to Chicago for three days now. Breathing is like sucking air through a wet wool blanket wrapped around your head. At work she felt like one of Ma's Parker House rolls, sitting pale and doughy on a cookie sheet inside the oven. County General's AC's on the fritz again, but that's no surprise; the only time it's not on the fritz is in the dead of winter, when the staff is on their knees begging for heat.
She grimaces at the feel of a dribble of sweat running down her spine to pool against the elastic waistband of her scrub pants. Her whole back is wet and her scrub top is pasted to her skin. She knows without looking that there are big dark stains under her arms. So much for the stay-dry power of… whatever brand of deodorant that was. Something she'd found on sale.
Yeah, so much for that.
She puts one foot in front of the other and keeps moving, because she's sure that if she stops, she'll fall down. Just go into a heap on the sidewalk. She's just worked for twelve hours non-stop - the whole city goes nuts when it's hot like this, and they all show up in County's ER. Fistfights, stabbings, shootings, on top of heat-related heart attacks and heat stroke and MVAs and lawn mower accidents and cuts from broken glass and more cuts from kids running around barefoot.
Half a block from the El she starts thinking about the bathtub. The water won't run cold, because it only does that in the winter, but it'll be a little cooler than the air. She can make herself a glass of iced tea and sit in the tub.
All night, maybe.
She feels like she hasn't slept since Easter.
She starts counting steps - it's what, maybe a thousand more to her building. Maybe not. Maybe eight hundred.
She's up to eighty-seven when she hears the voice.
"Wait! Please, wait!"
Wait? Wait for what? She looks around and sees no one who looks like they've called out. There are a few people sitting on the front steps of the old brick and brownstone row houses this neighborhood is full of, but they're all fanning themselves with their hands, folded-up newspapers, pieces of cardboard. None of them seems to have heard the voice.
She starts trudging forward again and she's gone another nine steps when the front door of one of the houses flies open - she can see it in her peripheral vision - and a brown-haired kid comes tearing out. He streaks across the street without looking for traffic and pulls up short within arm's reach of her. Locks of his hair are stuck to his face and he's panting like an overheated racehorse.
"Please," he says. "You're a nurse? Are you a nurse?"
It's in his eyes: he wants her to be a nurse as badly as most kids want free tickets to Six Flags. She wants to deny it, wants to send him back into the house - but she can't. A nurse is what she is, not just what she does. And he's a kid. Scared and desperate. That's in his eyes, in the pinched look around his mouth. "Yeah," she says. "I am."
"My brother's really sick."
She looks toward the house he came running out of. All the windows are open, which means there's no AC inside. Not that she thought there would be; only a few of the houses here, close to the El, have AC units, and they're the cheap, "room cooling" kind that hit you with cold air only if you're standing four inches in front of them.
She wants to sit in her bathtub with a glass of tea so badly she could weep.
"Please?" the kid says.
Carol Hathaway cuts him off before he can call her "ma'am." "What's wrong with him?" she asks in a sigh.
"He keeps throwing up. And there's blood in it."
"Where are your parents?"
He chomps down on his lower lip. "My dad's working," he tells her after a beat. "I don't have a mom."
"Did you call your dad?"
"I can't - there's - there's no…"
There's no point in asking any more questions. She's seen enough latchkey kids, neglected kids, abandoned kids to fill Comiskey Park. This one looks to be eleven or twelve, and bright. Bright enough to manage things on his own? Whatever. Someone thought so, and at this point it doesn't matter whether it's true or not. Carol nods, and he spares only a moment to beam gratefully at her before he trots back across the street.
The smell inside the apartment is bad enough to make her stomach roll over like an old dog. All these old houses have a funky smell to them in the summertime, a sort of mildewy, musty ripeness that all the air freshener in the world couldn't cure. This place has that layered with old food smells and vomit, with a little eau de diarrhea to top it off.
Up here, on the top floor underneath the flat roof, it has to be over a hundred degrees.
"He'll be mad," the boy says by way of a warning.
Carol shrugs that off. "What's your name?"
"Sam. Henderson."
"And your brother?"
"Dean. He's in there." Sam tips his head toward a door that's been pulled halfway shut. "Can you wait a minute? I'll tell him -"
He lets that trail off and disappears into the other room. Carol can hear him saying something in a soft, placating tone, and the groan of dismay that comes in response to it. A moment later Sam pulls the door open all the way and beckons her inside.
She expected a younger brother, but the boy huddled on one of the two twin beds is older than Sam. Fifteen, Carol thinks. Like Sam's, his hair is plastered to his head with sweat and his t-shirt and undershorts are soaked and clinging to him. He's pale, but his cheeks carry the bright flush of fever.
"How long has he been sick?" she asks Sam.
"All day."
She approaches Dean like she would a frightened, cornered animal. He isn't likely to bite her, but he's got his knees drawn up close to his chest in a way that has to be uncomfortable and he's trembling. "My name is Carol," she tells him softly. "I live up the street. I'm a nurse. Your brother asked me to come and see if I can help." Without asking for permission she switches on the lamp on the night table and rests a hand lightly on Dean's forehead.
Sam is hovering near the doorway, his face pinkish from the heat. "Will he be okay?"
She ought to ask Dean the questions and not talk about him like he isn't here. But he doesn't look like he wants to chat. "Chinese food?" she asks Sam, sniffing the air.
"Yeah," Sam confesses. "We blew it up in the microwave."
"When was that?"
"Last night."
"Leftovers?" Off Sam's nod, she asks, "How old were they?"
Sam gnaws his lip. "A couple days?"
There's a chance she's wrong, that it's something else that's wrong with Dean, but she's been a nurse long enough to know that the simplest explanation is usually the right one. Sam either didn't eat any of the leftovers, or he's got a cast iron gut. Two-day-old fried rice, in this heat - if they weren't careful about keeping it in the fridge…
"Where's your phone?" Carol asks.
And Sam ducks his head sheepishly. "We don't have one."
She thinks, God, you're conspiring with Ma again to make me nuts. To Sam, she says quietly, "Swell."
~~~~~
Dean will not have anything to do with an ambulance. Not that calling one would be such a great idea; in addition to having no telephone, the boys have no insurance and no cash, and she'd catch it from half a dozen different people for racking up unnecessary expense on behalf of the hospital. So she bangs on the door of the apartment downstairs, where they do have a phone, and bullies them into letting her use it to call Malik. He still owes her for the schedule-juggling she did for him two weeks ago, and can't argue much when she asks him to take the El over here and help her carry a sick kid down three flights of stairs and pile him into a cab.
She could have called Doug and asked him to drive over here and ferry the kid back to County in his car, but it's July and things are what they are with Doug and Carol's not about to ask him to do her any favors.
Bad enough that when they finally do get to County, it's Doug who comes strolling in to take a look at Dean.
"I'm Dr. Ross," he says. "What's going on?"
Dean peers at him blearily and shudders underneath the blanket they've pulled up over him. In spite of the soupily warm air that's being fluttered around by the box fan on the floor in the corner, he's cold. And nauseated and crampy and furious at Sam, who wouldn't let him stay in the apartment and get through this on his own like a good soldier. Sam is standing in the corner next to the box fan, hands stuffed into his armpits, head tucked down low between his shoulders.
"Ms. Hathaway says he's got food poisoning," Sam says helpfully.
Doug isn't looking at him; he's poking at Dean, peering into Dean's eyes. "She did, did she," he says idly.
"Uh-huh. Is that right?"
"Nurse Hathaway's a smart cookie." Doug turns and cocks a brow at Carol. "Parents?"
"Mother's deceased. Father's…working."
"Working," Doug echoes. He doesn't believe that any more than Carol does. For most of the patients who roll through the doors at County, "working" is a euphemism. When he finishes his exam, he glances at the chart Carol hands him, makes a few notations, and orders a couple of tests. "Can you keep water down?" he asks Dean.
"No," Sam announces. "It comes right back up."
Dean glares across the room at his brother. Doug grins at the look. "We're gonna get some fluid into you, then. All the puking and the runs've made you dehydrated, and we need to fix that."
"Don't want needles," Dean hisses.
"Sorry, Charlie."
"Want to go home."
"Sorry about that too. We'll talk to your old man when he shows up. But for now you're staying put."
"Don't need…"
"Yeah, you do."
If he felt any better, Dean would be out the door like he was shot out of a circus cannon. As it is, all he can do is mutter complaints. He makes a show of sliding his arm out of Carol's reach, but Doug picks up the set of restraints somebody left lying on the other bed and dangles them idly from one hand so Dean can see them. If Dean was any sicker, Doug wouldn't be doing that. But he's borderline, just okay enough for Doug to mess with him. Once the IV's in and taped down, Doug gives Dean a pat on the shoulder, tells him he'll be fine, and walks toward the door of the exam room.
He turns and winks at Carol when he reaches the doorway, and she could kill him, just kill him.
The IV helps; Dean stops shivering after a few minutes and lies there looking up at the ceiling like he's counting the tiles.
He'll be fine, and she could leave, but she doesn't.
She finds a chair and pulls it up next to the bed so Sam can sit down. He perches on it guiltily, like he's sitting outside the principal's office. He wasn't supposed to go find help, she realizes - the two of them are supposed to tough things out on their own, and they screwed that up. Frowning, she beckons to Sam and steps out into the corridor.
"Sam," Dean says, and it's a warning.
Sam bobs his head and follows Carol out. It's noisy in the corridor. There are people bickering out in Chairs, a couple more bickering at the admissions desk and somebody down the hall - in Curtain Three, she thinks - is shrieking. Everybody on staff looks fried except for Doug, who's talking to Lydia over by the water fountain.
"When is your father supposed to be back?" she asks Sam quietly.
She watched him write a note back at the apartment, carefully printed on a sheet of lined paper he took out of a ring binder. County General Hospital, he wrote after she told him where they'd be going. Dean is sick. He fastened it to the door with a strip of Scotch tape at top and bottom. No, there was no phone number to reach their father at, he told her. Yes, he was sure.
"Soon," he says now, but it sounds like a guess.
"Is he in Chicago?"
Sam nods, shrugs.
So what do you do? she wonders. She could call Social Services. She's supposed to call Social Services. But they're overloaded, they're always overloaded, and Sam and Dean aren't babies. Little ones, toddlers, like the ones she sometimes sees. Little kids barely out of diapers who've tried to care for each other, fixing each other bowls of cereal. It makes her sick and makes her marvel at their abilities at the same time.
She wonders how long these two have been pretty much on their own.
"Is Dean gonna be okay?" Sam asks.
"Yes. He'll be fine. We'll keep an eye on him overnight." She glances into the room, where Dean is still scowling. "You did a good thing, Sam."
He's not convinced.
"Really," Carol says. "You did the right thing."
"Would he have died?" Sam ventures.
How long is their father going to be wherever the hell he is? Maybe not that long, but maybe he'll be of no use when he gets back. Drunk, more than likely, too busy being hammered to notice his son is sick. Carol holds back a sigh. It takes a second to come up with a smile that'll be genuine enough to comfort Sam a little. "He'll be fine," she tells him, and rubs his cheek with the backs of her fingers. "You did good."
With these kids, you can't say that too many times. And it's not possible to say it enough times for them to believe it. She'd hug Sam, because he looks like he could use a hug. But it's just too damned hot.
And these kids…God, there are so many of them. She can't give up a piece of herself to all of them. She'd run dry too soon. Run completely dry, like she did four months ago, when the hours and the stress and her life got to be too much for her to juggle and she dropped all the balls all at once. But she wants to hug Sam, she does, because he looks like he wants somebody to give a damn. Like that would be so much better than tickets to Six Flags.
"How long ago did you lose your mom?" Carol asks, even though she really doesn't want to know.
"When I was a baby."
"So it's just the three of you? You and Dean and your dad?"
"Yeah."
She has to tug him aside so a gurney can go flying past. There's a kid on it, gang-banger from the look of him, no older than Dean. His oversized t-shirt, so white it's blue, has a big flower of blood in the middle of it. His eyes are rolled back in his head, just the whites showing. There's more blood on the sheet underneath him in a way that says the exit wound is a whopper.
"Somebody shot him?" Sam asks.
"People lose their tempers when it's hot."
Sam's lip twitches.
The next gurney has a pregnant woman on it, squealing and howling, her baby already halfway out. It's like a cliché, the juxtaposition of life and death, each happening with blood and pain here in the corridor. Carol and Sam both watch the gurney go by, Sam a little goggle-eyed with fascination. The gurney's maybe twenty feet away when the baby pops out the rest of the way.
"Wow," Sam murmurs.
The birth seems to interest him more than the dying gang-banger. Which is funny, because kids his age are usually drawn to blood and missing limbs and impalements. They see all that on TV, in the movies, in video games, and she knows they really can't differentiate the actual from the fake. It all looks like special effects - unless it's happening to them, or to someone they love.
But Sam's watching the baby, processing that whole thing.
"Cool, huh?" Carol offers.
It takes a minute for Sam's attention to shift back to her. He looks like there are fifty different lines of thought going on in his head. "Do you have any kids?" he asks.
"No. I…no."
"Oh," Sam says.
Outside, it's getting dark. The heat won't be going down much overnight; it hasn't for the last couple of nights. That apartment near the El might be home for Sam and his brother, but with the heat and the smell, sending them back there would be a punishment. There are little wisps of cool air coming out of the AC vents now, and with all the fans pushing the air around, the ER is almost tolerable.
"You can stay here with Dean tonight," Carol says. "In the morning, we'll…" She has to let the thought trail off because she has no idea what they'll do in the morning if the boys' father doesn't show up.
"Thank you," Sam replies.
~~~~~
She could go home, but she stays. She tells herself it's because she's too tired to face the heat outside and the El and the walk to her building. She washes up in the ladies' room and finds a clean scrub top that doesn't smell like sweat, eats half a cookie from the plate somebody left at the desk, then shuts her eyes for a little while in the lounge. There's no real reason for her to go home, anyway; no one's waited for her there since Ma moved back to her own place. The ER, for a lot of reasons, feels more like home than home does.
It's been four months to the day since she took the pills and tried to die.
~~~~~
A little after one in the morning she blinks herself awake and shuffles down the hall to check on Dean. He's asleep, and so is Sam, sitting in the chair with his arms folded on the bed, his head pillowed on them. Dean's right hand is curled around Sam's neck and his head is tipped in Sam's direction. He looks like he fell asleep watching Sam.
They're like that, these kids, the neglected ones. Stuck together like conjoined twins and fiercely protective of each other. They're like pack animals - they'll fight amongst themselves, but if a threat approaches from outside, they'll defend each other with their dying breath.
In a way, she's surprised Sam hasn't crawled up onto the bed to sleep with Dean.
Smiling absently, she turns and looks down the corridor. Nobody's screaming right now, but it's noisy. Voices, gurney wheels, the fans, some weird thumping and clanking that seems to be coming from the AC vents.
The ER is still busy at this hour, especially at this hour. It gets this way in the summer, in the heat. It'll taper off after a while, but for now…
She's walking past the desk when she sees the man sitting in Chairs.
Something about him makes her look, then look again. He's scruffy, dirty, has a couple days' growth of beard. He probably smells of sweat, of booze, of a hundred other things. But something about him sends a shudder through her that comes not from fear but from awe, and maybe a little bit of lust. He looks at her, lets eye contact happen for a second, then lets his gaze drift away toward the vending machines. He's in his forties, she guesses, but looks both older than that and younger. Everything about him seems dark: his clothing, his hair, his eyes. He's got blood smeared on his forehead and cheek from a scalp wound that needs sutures.
Carol is still looking at him when Carter - Peter Benton's med student (Benton's pet monkey, she thinks) - approaches the man and flashes that earnest look of his. Carter's talking but the man doesn't even seem to notice he's there.
Doug is still around, leaning against the desk. He and Carol both watch Carter walk the man back to Sutures.
"We get enough business without you going out on the street and gathering up stray kids," Doug says softly.
For anyone else, that would be a simple comment. For Doug it's a preamble to yet another round of the game he's been trying to play since she came back to work in May. He wants to believe what she did was his fault. Wants to believe he's the center of her universe; hell, of everybody's universe. Nothing happens in Chicago unless Doug Ross set it into motion.
She wishes he'd disappear. That's all. Disappear.
And yet she doesn't.
"He's got scars," she says, apropos of nothing.
"What?"
"The boy I brought in. He's got a line of scars. On his back, near his left hip."
"From what?"
Carol looks off in the direction of Sutures. "I don't know. They almost look like claw marks." Frowning, she looks down at her hand and flexes her fingers. She's seen kids who got into it with dogs and cats. Whatever got Dean was bigger. "It almost looks like - I don't know. A bobcat?"
Doug raises a brow. "A bobcat?"
"A big cat of some kind."
"Zoo accident?" He's mocking her. A little bit, but enough. "Who knows. They look okay otherwise. Well fed."
"On take-out."
"Hey," Doug smiles. "Nothing wrong with take-out."
"I guess," Carol concedes. She's too tired not to. "They don't look -"
Dean looks fifteen going on forty, she thinks. If the tables were turned and it had been Sam who'd gotten sick, he'd have this place turned upside down. He wouldn't have waited all day to find help. But for himself, he refused help. At least tried to. He let her clean him up, back at the apartment - did a lot of grousing, but there was something in his eyes that said he was grateful to have the sweat bathed off of him, have his clothes changed.
If their mother died when Sam was a baby, then Dean had been what, three? Four? The thought makes her heart ache. And it makes her look at Doug, who has a son of his own he seldom sees.
It makes her wonder if Sam and Dean's mother did what she did. With the pills.
"Carol?" Doug says.
His voice startles her. "What?"
"You all right?"
"Tired. Hot."
"You should go home. Get some sleep."
All she can do is shrug.
~~~~~
The heat makes her sleepy. That and the fact that she's been up for almost twenty-four hours. Her arms and legs feel like wet plaster. She ought to go home, lie down, try to rest. But there's no one there - no Ma, no Doug, no Tag, the guy who's been kind enough to let her set the pace for their relationship. Right now it's in Neutral, she thinks. Her whole life is in Neutral. Her shrink says no, she's doing fine, but if this is "fine," then "fine" is overrated.
She has no kids, can't imagine having kids. They need so much. Even other people's kids need so much she has to push herself sometimes to give it.
The four months since that night with the pills seems like four days. On nights like this, "fine" seems out of reach.
She's walking back toward the lounge when Carter comes out of Sutures, looking around like he's lost something.
"Did you see -?" he grimaces, shaking his head.
"What?"
"My patient. My pager went off and I came out for a second, and when I went back in he was gone."
He means the man with the dark eyes. She isn't surprised. Patients get up and leave the ER all the time - they get tired of waiting, get scared, get freaked out by the stuff that goes rolling past them in the corridor. She finds a smile for Carter, who has more bad days than good ones. He's a good learner, and, yeah, he's very earnest and eager. But he still gets bowled over by how bad things can get around here.
She thinks of Sam - the way Sam's eyes fell on the gang-banger and took stock of the blood as if he'd seen it before.
Maybe Sam saw whatever clawed up his brother.
"What do I write on the chart?" Carter sighs.
Carol asks, "Did you finish the sutures?"
"Pretty much."
"Then -"
But Carter's already walking away. Carol lets him go, wondering if he'll be able to stick it out around here. Mark Greene hustles by then, asking over his shoulder, "Are you on?" and smiles ruefully when she shakes her head. Sam reminds her of Mark, a little. He has that same sort of seriousness about him, the same sort of compassion. She suspects there might be some of Mark's brand of gentle, silly humor hiding inside Sam as well.
Smiling a little, she walks back to the exam room where the Henderson brothers are sleeping quietly back in the corner.
But they're not sleeping there now.
Dean and Sam are gone.
Just…gone. Like Carter's patient, the dark man with the scalp lac. She asks, quickly, urgently: at the desk, in Chairs, in the other exam and treatment rooms, in Sutures. No one saw them leave. Dean's IV has been disconnected, the pump shut off. The gown he was wearing is lying on the bed. He's vanished into the Chicago night, with his brother.
And their father, she realizes.
She thinks about the man in Chairs, the moment of eye contact they had. He wasn't drunk, she knows now. His gaze was focused, clear, almost feral. He wasn't here to get his scalp wound sewn up, although getting it done was probably useful.
He came to get his kids.
He found Sam's note, she understands, came down here and sat in Chairs. Waited to be taken past the desk.
Waited for Carter to be distracted.
And she was right here, only a few steps away. She checked on the boys half a dozen times. Maybe the man knew that.
No, not "maybe" - he knew.
He got himself into the back and waited. Got his kids out of here without speaking to anybody, without asking anybody if that was wise. Took his kids out of here so they could go back to toughing things out on their own, and not because he didn't have insurance. They are like pack animals, she realizes - the three of them, defending each other against outsiders.
She could go to the apartment near the El, but she knows she won't find them there. She'd just find some odds and ends, empty Chinese food containers, some magazines. Whoever owns the building won't know much about them, and neither will the people who live downstairs. They might be able to agree that a man and two kids had the top-floor apartment for a while, but not much else.
A man with dark eyes, and two kids.
Whose name isn't Henderson.
"Carol?" someone says, and rests a hand on her shoulder. The touch makes her jump, and she's still trembling when she realizes it's Mark. "Are you all right?" he asks, concern etched all over his face. He worries about her a lot more than she wants him to, as a friend, a colleague, a good and kind man. Someone with no darkness in him. Someone who doesn't quite get why she did what she did, and certainly doesn't try to gather attention by blaming it on himself.
"My patients," she sighs.
Mark looks at the empty bed and chuckles quietly. "Carter lost one too. I've had a couple tonight I wish would head for the hills, but no such luck." Then, joke over, he asks, "Kid, right? Was he okay to leave?"
"More or less."
"You should go home. Get some rest." He doesn't say it, but his expression adds You look like hell.
And that's true.
She could stay, but right now there's no reason to. Her apartment will be dark and quiet, and she could run cool water in the tub and sit in there with a glass of tea. If she does, she'll think about the man with the dark eyes.
Somehow, that doesn't seem like a bad idea.
Idly, for a moment, as she walks out of the hospital into the heat of the Chicago night and heads toward the El, toward home, Carol wonders what that family's last name really is.
* * * * *
August 1994 in Chicago -- hot, humid and depressing. Nurse Carol Hathaway is on her way home from a 12-hour barrage of stabbings, gunshots, fistfights, heat stroke, and lawn mower accidents, when a brown-haired kid calls out to her from a window across the street: "My brother's sick. Please help."
This is one of my very, very few crossovers -- and one I'm really pleased with, because the Winchesters blend in so well with the desperate chaos of Cook County General's ER. If you're not familiar with ER, don't fret -- Carol Hathaway is a little bit of every nurse who's ever helped one of us. She's Everywoman, faced with a cry for help from a scared and worried child.
CHARACTERS: Sam (age 11), Dean (age 15), John, and the Season 1 cast of ER
POV: Outsider (Carol Hathaway)
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 4900 words
CHICAGO
By Carol Davis
She walks down the metal stairs from the El platform with all the enthusiasm of the hangman's next victim.
The heat's held on tight to Chicago for three days now. Breathing is like sucking air through a wet wool blanket wrapped around your head. At work she felt like one of Ma's Parker House rolls, sitting pale and doughy on a cookie sheet inside the oven. County General's AC's on the fritz again, but that's no surprise; the only time it's not on the fritz is in the dead of winter, when the staff is on their knees begging for heat.
She grimaces at the feel of a dribble of sweat running down her spine to pool against the elastic waistband of her scrub pants. Her whole back is wet and her scrub top is pasted to her skin. She knows without looking that there are big dark stains under her arms. So much for the stay-dry power of… whatever brand of deodorant that was. Something she'd found on sale.
Yeah, so much for that.
She puts one foot in front of the other and keeps moving, because she's sure that if she stops, she'll fall down. Just go into a heap on the sidewalk. She's just worked for twelve hours non-stop - the whole city goes nuts when it's hot like this, and they all show up in County's ER. Fistfights, stabbings, shootings, on top of heat-related heart attacks and heat stroke and MVAs and lawn mower accidents and cuts from broken glass and more cuts from kids running around barefoot.
Half a block from the El she starts thinking about the bathtub. The water won't run cold, because it only does that in the winter, but it'll be a little cooler than the air. She can make herself a glass of iced tea and sit in the tub.
All night, maybe.
She feels like she hasn't slept since Easter.
She starts counting steps - it's what, maybe a thousand more to her building. Maybe not. Maybe eight hundred.
She's up to eighty-seven when she hears the voice.
"Wait! Please, wait!"
Wait? Wait for what? She looks around and sees no one who looks like they've called out. There are a few people sitting on the front steps of the old brick and brownstone row houses this neighborhood is full of, but they're all fanning themselves with their hands, folded-up newspapers, pieces of cardboard. None of them seems to have heard the voice.
She starts trudging forward again and she's gone another nine steps when the front door of one of the houses flies open - she can see it in her peripheral vision - and a brown-haired kid comes tearing out. He streaks across the street without looking for traffic and pulls up short within arm's reach of her. Locks of his hair are stuck to his face and he's panting like an overheated racehorse.
"Please," he says. "You're a nurse? Are you a nurse?"
It's in his eyes: he wants her to be a nurse as badly as most kids want free tickets to Six Flags. She wants to deny it, wants to send him back into the house - but she can't. A nurse is what she is, not just what she does. And he's a kid. Scared and desperate. That's in his eyes, in the pinched look around his mouth. "Yeah," she says. "I am."
"My brother's really sick."
She looks toward the house he came running out of. All the windows are open, which means there's no AC inside. Not that she thought there would be; only a few of the houses here, close to the El, have AC units, and they're the cheap, "room cooling" kind that hit you with cold air only if you're standing four inches in front of them.
She wants to sit in her bathtub with a glass of tea so badly she could weep.
"Please?" the kid says.
Carol Hathaway cuts him off before he can call her "ma'am." "What's wrong with him?" she asks in a sigh.
"He keeps throwing up. And there's blood in it."
"Where are your parents?"
He chomps down on his lower lip. "My dad's working," he tells her after a beat. "I don't have a mom."
"Did you call your dad?"
"I can't - there's - there's no…"
There's no point in asking any more questions. She's seen enough latchkey kids, neglected kids, abandoned kids to fill Comiskey Park. This one looks to be eleven or twelve, and bright. Bright enough to manage things on his own? Whatever. Someone thought so, and at this point it doesn't matter whether it's true or not. Carol nods, and he spares only a moment to beam gratefully at her before he trots back across the street.
The smell inside the apartment is bad enough to make her stomach roll over like an old dog. All these old houses have a funky smell to them in the summertime, a sort of mildewy, musty ripeness that all the air freshener in the world couldn't cure. This place has that layered with old food smells and vomit, with a little eau de diarrhea to top it off.
Up here, on the top floor underneath the flat roof, it has to be over a hundred degrees.
"He'll be mad," the boy says by way of a warning.
Carol shrugs that off. "What's your name?"
"Sam. Henderson."
"And your brother?"
"Dean. He's in there." Sam tips his head toward a door that's been pulled halfway shut. "Can you wait a minute? I'll tell him -"
He lets that trail off and disappears into the other room. Carol can hear him saying something in a soft, placating tone, and the groan of dismay that comes in response to it. A moment later Sam pulls the door open all the way and beckons her inside.
She expected a younger brother, but the boy huddled on one of the two twin beds is older than Sam. Fifteen, Carol thinks. Like Sam's, his hair is plastered to his head with sweat and his t-shirt and undershorts are soaked and clinging to him. He's pale, but his cheeks carry the bright flush of fever.
"How long has he been sick?" she asks Sam.
"All day."
She approaches Dean like she would a frightened, cornered animal. He isn't likely to bite her, but he's got his knees drawn up close to his chest in a way that has to be uncomfortable and he's trembling. "My name is Carol," she tells him softly. "I live up the street. I'm a nurse. Your brother asked me to come and see if I can help." Without asking for permission she switches on the lamp on the night table and rests a hand lightly on Dean's forehead.
Sam is hovering near the doorway, his face pinkish from the heat. "Will he be okay?"
She ought to ask Dean the questions and not talk about him like he isn't here. But he doesn't look like he wants to chat. "Chinese food?" she asks Sam, sniffing the air.
"Yeah," Sam confesses. "We blew it up in the microwave."
"When was that?"
"Last night."
"Leftovers?" Off Sam's nod, she asks, "How old were they?"
Sam gnaws his lip. "A couple days?"
There's a chance she's wrong, that it's something else that's wrong with Dean, but she's been a nurse long enough to know that the simplest explanation is usually the right one. Sam either didn't eat any of the leftovers, or he's got a cast iron gut. Two-day-old fried rice, in this heat - if they weren't careful about keeping it in the fridge…
"Where's your phone?" Carol asks.
And Sam ducks his head sheepishly. "We don't have one."
She thinks, God, you're conspiring with Ma again to make me nuts. To Sam, she says quietly, "Swell."
~~~~~
Dean will not have anything to do with an ambulance. Not that calling one would be such a great idea; in addition to having no telephone, the boys have no insurance and no cash, and she'd catch it from half a dozen different people for racking up unnecessary expense on behalf of the hospital. So she bangs on the door of the apartment downstairs, where they do have a phone, and bullies them into letting her use it to call Malik. He still owes her for the schedule-juggling she did for him two weeks ago, and can't argue much when she asks him to take the El over here and help her carry a sick kid down three flights of stairs and pile him into a cab.
She could have called Doug and asked him to drive over here and ferry the kid back to County in his car, but it's July and things are what they are with Doug and Carol's not about to ask him to do her any favors.
Bad enough that when they finally do get to County, it's Doug who comes strolling in to take a look at Dean.
"I'm Dr. Ross," he says. "What's going on?"
Dean peers at him blearily and shudders underneath the blanket they've pulled up over him. In spite of the soupily warm air that's being fluttered around by the box fan on the floor in the corner, he's cold. And nauseated and crampy and furious at Sam, who wouldn't let him stay in the apartment and get through this on his own like a good soldier. Sam is standing in the corner next to the box fan, hands stuffed into his armpits, head tucked down low between his shoulders.
"Ms. Hathaway says he's got food poisoning," Sam says helpfully.
Doug isn't looking at him; he's poking at Dean, peering into Dean's eyes. "She did, did she," he says idly.
"Uh-huh. Is that right?"
"Nurse Hathaway's a smart cookie." Doug turns and cocks a brow at Carol. "Parents?"
"Mother's deceased. Father's…working."
"Working," Doug echoes. He doesn't believe that any more than Carol does. For most of the patients who roll through the doors at County, "working" is a euphemism. When he finishes his exam, he glances at the chart Carol hands him, makes a few notations, and orders a couple of tests. "Can you keep water down?" he asks Dean.
"No," Sam announces. "It comes right back up."
Dean glares across the room at his brother. Doug grins at the look. "We're gonna get some fluid into you, then. All the puking and the runs've made you dehydrated, and we need to fix that."
"Don't want needles," Dean hisses.
"Sorry, Charlie."
"Want to go home."
"Sorry about that too. We'll talk to your old man when he shows up. But for now you're staying put."
"Don't need…"
"Yeah, you do."
If he felt any better, Dean would be out the door like he was shot out of a circus cannon. As it is, all he can do is mutter complaints. He makes a show of sliding his arm out of Carol's reach, but Doug picks up the set of restraints somebody left lying on the other bed and dangles them idly from one hand so Dean can see them. If Dean was any sicker, Doug wouldn't be doing that. But he's borderline, just okay enough for Doug to mess with him. Once the IV's in and taped down, Doug gives Dean a pat on the shoulder, tells him he'll be fine, and walks toward the door of the exam room.
He turns and winks at Carol when he reaches the doorway, and she could kill him, just kill him.
The IV helps; Dean stops shivering after a few minutes and lies there looking up at the ceiling like he's counting the tiles.
He'll be fine, and she could leave, but she doesn't.
She finds a chair and pulls it up next to the bed so Sam can sit down. He perches on it guiltily, like he's sitting outside the principal's office. He wasn't supposed to go find help, she realizes - the two of them are supposed to tough things out on their own, and they screwed that up. Frowning, she beckons to Sam and steps out into the corridor.
"Sam," Dean says, and it's a warning.
Sam bobs his head and follows Carol out. It's noisy in the corridor. There are people bickering out in Chairs, a couple more bickering at the admissions desk and somebody down the hall - in Curtain Three, she thinks - is shrieking. Everybody on staff looks fried except for Doug, who's talking to Lydia over by the water fountain.
"When is your father supposed to be back?" she asks Sam quietly.
She watched him write a note back at the apartment, carefully printed on a sheet of lined paper he took out of a ring binder. County General Hospital, he wrote after she told him where they'd be going. Dean is sick. He fastened it to the door with a strip of Scotch tape at top and bottom. No, there was no phone number to reach their father at, he told her. Yes, he was sure.
"Soon," he says now, but it sounds like a guess.
"Is he in Chicago?"
Sam nods, shrugs.
So what do you do? she wonders. She could call Social Services. She's supposed to call Social Services. But they're overloaded, they're always overloaded, and Sam and Dean aren't babies. Little ones, toddlers, like the ones she sometimes sees. Little kids barely out of diapers who've tried to care for each other, fixing each other bowls of cereal. It makes her sick and makes her marvel at their abilities at the same time.
She wonders how long these two have been pretty much on their own.
"Is Dean gonna be okay?" Sam asks.
"Yes. He'll be fine. We'll keep an eye on him overnight." She glances into the room, where Dean is still scowling. "You did a good thing, Sam."
He's not convinced.
"Really," Carol says. "You did the right thing."
"Would he have died?" Sam ventures.
How long is their father going to be wherever the hell he is? Maybe not that long, but maybe he'll be of no use when he gets back. Drunk, more than likely, too busy being hammered to notice his son is sick. Carol holds back a sigh. It takes a second to come up with a smile that'll be genuine enough to comfort Sam a little. "He'll be fine," she tells him, and rubs his cheek with the backs of her fingers. "You did good."
With these kids, you can't say that too many times. And it's not possible to say it enough times for them to believe it. She'd hug Sam, because he looks like he could use a hug. But it's just too damned hot.
And these kids…God, there are so many of them. She can't give up a piece of herself to all of them. She'd run dry too soon. Run completely dry, like she did four months ago, when the hours and the stress and her life got to be too much for her to juggle and she dropped all the balls all at once. But she wants to hug Sam, she does, because he looks like he wants somebody to give a damn. Like that would be so much better than tickets to Six Flags.
"How long ago did you lose your mom?" Carol asks, even though she really doesn't want to know.
"When I was a baby."
"So it's just the three of you? You and Dean and your dad?"
"Yeah."
She has to tug him aside so a gurney can go flying past. There's a kid on it, gang-banger from the look of him, no older than Dean. His oversized t-shirt, so white it's blue, has a big flower of blood in the middle of it. His eyes are rolled back in his head, just the whites showing. There's more blood on the sheet underneath him in a way that says the exit wound is a whopper.
"Somebody shot him?" Sam asks.
"People lose their tempers when it's hot."
Sam's lip twitches.
The next gurney has a pregnant woman on it, squealing and howling, her baby already halfway out. It's like a cliché, the juxtaposition of life and death, each happening with blood and pain here in the corridor. Carol and Sam both watch the gurney go by, Sam a little goggle-eyed with fascination. The gurney's maybe twenty feet away when the baby pops out the rest of the way.
"Wow," Sam murmurs.
The birth seems to interest him more than the dying gang-banger. Which is funny, because kids his age are usually drawn to blood and missing limbs and impalements. They see all that on TV, in the movies, in video games, and she knows they really can't differentiate the actual from the fake. It all looks like special effects - unless it's happening to them, or to someone they love.
But Sam's watching the baby, processing that whole thing.
"Cool, huh?" Carol offers.
It takes a minute for Sam's attention to shift back to her. He looks like there are fifty different lines of thought going on in his head. "Do you have any kids?" he asks.
"No. I…no."
"Oh," Sam says.
Outside, it's getting dark. The heat won't be going down much overnight; it hasn't for the last couple of nights. That apartment near the El might be home for Sam and his brother, but with the heat and the smell, sending them back there would be a punishment. There are little wisps of cool air coming out of the AC vents now, and with all the fans pushing the air around, the ER is almost tolerable.
"You can stay here with Dean tonight," Carol says. "In the morning, we'll…" She has to let the thought trail off because she has no idea what they'll do in the morning if the boys' father doesn't show up.
"Thank you," Sam replies.
~~~~~
She could go home, but she stays. She tells herself it's because she's too tired to face the heat outside and the El and the walk to her building. She washes up in the ladies' room and finds a clean scrub top that doesn't smell like sweat, eats half a cookie from the plate somebody left at the desk, then shuts her eyes for a little while in the lounge. There's no real reason for her to go home, anyway; no one's waited for her there since Ma moved back to her own place. The ER, for a lot of reasons, feels more like home than home does.
It's been four months to the day since she took the pills and tried to die.
~~~~~
A little after one in the morning she blinks herself awake and shuffles down the hall to check on Dean. He's asleep, and so is Sam, sitting in the chair with his arms folded on the bed, his head pillowed on them. Dean's right hand is curled around Sam's neck and his head is tipped in Sam's direction. He looks like he fell asleep watching Sam.
They're like that, these kids, the neglected ones. Stuck together like conjoined twins and fiercely protective of each other. They're like pack animals - they'll fight amongst themselves, but if a threat approaches from outside, they'll defend each other with their dying breath.
In a way, she's surprised Sam hasn't crawled up onto the bed to sleep with Dean.
Smiling absently, she turns and looks down the corridor. Nobody's screaming right now, but it's noisy. Voices, gurney wheels, the fans, some weird thumping and clanking that seems to be coming from the AC vents.
The ER is still busy at this hour, especially at this hour. It gets this way in the summer, in the heat. It'll taper off after a while, but for now…
She's walking past the desk when she sees the man sitting in Chairs.
Something about him makes her look, then look again. He's scruffy, dirty, has a couple days' growth of beard. He probably smells of sweat, of booze, of a hundred other things. But something about him sends a shudder through her that comes not from fear but from awe, and maybe a little bit of lust. He looks at her, lets eye contact happen for a second, then lets his gaze drift away toward the vending machines. He's in his forties, she guesses, but looks both older than that and younger. Everything about him seems dark: his clothing, his hair, his eyes. He's got blood smeared on his forehead and cheek from a scalp wound that needs sutures.
Carol is still looking at him when Carter - Peter Benton's med student (Benton's pet monkey, she thinks) - approaches the man and flashes that earnest look of his. Carter's talking but the man doesn't even seem to notice he's there.
Doug is still around, leaning against the desk. He and Carol both watch Carter walk the man back to Sutures.
"We get enough business without you going out on the street and gathering up stray kids," Doug says softly.
For anyone else, that would be a simple comment. For Doug it's a preamble to yet another round of the game he's been trying to play since she came back to work in May. He wants to believe what she did was his fault. Wants to believe he's the center of her universe; hell, of everybody's universe. Nothing happens in Chicago unless Doug Ross set it into motion.
She wishes he'd disappear. That's all. Disappear.
And yet she doesn't.
"He's got scars," she says, apropos of nothing.
"What?"
"The boy I brought in. He's got a line of scars. On his back, near his left hip."
"From what?"
Carol looks off in the direction of Sutures. "I don't know. They almost look like claw marks." Frowning, she looks down at her hand and flexes her fingers. She's seen kids who got into it with dogs and cats. Whatever got Dean was bigger. "It almost looks like - I don't know. A bobcat?"
Doug raises a brow. "A bobcat?"
"A big cat of some kind."
"Zoo accident?" He's mocking her. A little bit, but enough. "Who knows. They look okay otherwise. Well fed."
"On take-out."
"Hey," Doug smiles. "Nothing wrong with take-out."
"I guess," Carol concedes. She's too tired not to. "They don't look -"
Dean looks fifteen going on forty, she thinks. If the tables were turned and it had been Sam who'd gotten sick, he'd have this place turned upside down. He wouldn't have waited all day to find help. But for himself, he refused help. At least tried to. He let her clean him up, back at the apartment - did a lot of grousing, but there was something in his eyes that said he was grateful to have the sweat bathed off of him, have his clothes changed.
If their mother died when Sam was a baby, then Dean had been what, three? Four? The thought makes her heart ache. And it makes her look at Doug, who has a son of his own he seldom sees.
It makes her wonder if Sam and Dean's mother did what she did. With the pills.
"Carol?" Doug says.
His voice startles her. "What?"
"You all right?"
"Tired. Hot."
"You should go home. Get some sleep."
All she can do is shrug.
~~~~~
The heat makes her sleepy. That and the fact that she's been up for almost twenty-four hours. Her arms and legs feel like wet plaster. She ought to go home, lie down, try to rest. But there's no one there - no Ma, no Doug, no Tag, the guy who's been kind enough to let her set the pace for their relationship. Right now it's in Neutral, she thinks. Her whole life is in Neutral. Her shrink says no, she's doing fine, but if this is "fine," then "fine" is overrated.
She has no kids, can't imagine having kids. They need so much. Even other people's kids need so much she has to push herself sometimes to give it.
The four months since that night with the pills seems like four days. On nights like this, "fine" seems out of reach.
She's walking back toward the lounge when Carter comes out of Sutures, looking around like he's lost something.
"Did you see -?" he grimaces, shaking his head.
"What?"
"My patient. My pager went off and I came out for a second, and when I went back in he was gone."
He means the man with the dark eyes. She isn't surprised. Patients get up and leave the ER all the time - they get tired of waiting, get scared, get freaked out by the stuff that goes rolling past them in the corridor. She finds a smile for Carter, who has more bad days than good ones. He's a good learner, and, yeah, he's very earnest and eager. But he still gets bowled over by how bad things can get around here.
She thinks of Sam - the way Sam's eyes fell on the gang-banger and took stock of the blood as if he'd seen it before.
Maybe Sam saw whatever clawed up his brother.
"What do I write on the chart?" Carter sighs.
Carol asks, "Did you finish the sutures?"
"Pretty much."
"Then -"
But Carter's already walking away. Carol lets him go, wondering if he'll be able to stick it out around here. Mark Greene hustles by then, asking over his shoulder, "Are you on?" and smiles ruefully when she shakes her head. Sam reminds her of Mark, a little. He has that same sort of seriousness about him, the same sort of compassion. She suspects there might be some of Mark's brand of gentle, silly humor hiding inside Sam as well.
Smiling a little, she walks back to the exam room where the Henderson brothers are sleeping quietly back in the corner.
But they're not sleeping there now.
Dean and Sam are gone.
Just…gone. Like Carter's patient, the dark man with the scalp lac. She asks, quickly, urgently: at the desk, in Chairs, in the other exam and treatment rooms, in Sutures. No one saw them leave. Dean's IV has been disconnected, the pump shut off. The gown he was wearing is lying on the bed. He's vanished into the Chicago night, with his brother.
And their father, she realizes.
She thinks about the man in Chairs, the moment of eye contact they had. He wasn't drunk, she knows now. His gaze was focused, clear, almost feral. He wasn't here to get his scalp wound sewn up, although getting it done was probably useful.
He came to get his kids.
He found Sam's note, she understands, came down here and sat in Chairs. Waited to be taken past the desk.
Waited for Carter to be distracted.
And she was right here, only a few steps away. She checked on the boys half a dozen times. Maybe the man knew that.
No, not "maybe" - he knew.
He got himself into the back and waited. Got his kids out of here without speaking to anybody, without asking anybody if that was wise. Took his kids out of here so they could go back to toughing things out on their own, and not because he didn't have insurance. They are like pack animals, she realizes - the three of them, defending each other against outsiders.
She could go to the apartment near the El, but she knows she won't find them there. She'd just find some odds and ends, empty Chinese food containers, some magazines. Whoever owns the building won't know much about them, and neither will the people who live downstairs. They might be able to agree that a man and two kids had the top-floor apartment for a while, but not much else.
A man with dark eyes, and two kids.
Whose name isn't Henderson.
"Carol?" someone says, and rests a hand on her shoulder. The touch makes her jump, and she's still trembling when she realizes it's Mark. "Are you all right?" he asks, concern etched all over his face. He worries about her a lot more than she wants him to, as a friend, a colleague, a good and kind man. Someone with no darkness in him. Someone who doesn't quite get why she did what she did, and certainly doesn't try to gather attention by blaming it on himself.
"My patients," she sighs.
Mark looks at the empty bed and chuckles quietly. "Carter lost one too. I've had a couple tonight I wish would head for the hills, but no such luck." Then, joke over, he asks, "Kid, right? Was he okay to leave?"
"More or less."
"You should go home. Get some rest." He doesn't say it, but his expression adds You look like hell.
And that's true.
She could stay, but right now there's no reason to. Her apartment will be dark and quiet, and she could run cool water in the tub and sit in there with a glass of tea. If she does, she'll think about the man with the dark eyes.
Somehow, that doesn't seem like a bad idea.
Idly, for a moment, as she walks out of the hospital into the heat of the Chicago night and heads toward the El, toward home, Carol wonders what that family's last name really is.
* * * * *