S:TVSWAD 4/??
Hey players. I'm sorry it's been so long between updates, and I know this probably isn't the update that (most) of you wanted, but here's an update. I've gotten a job and an extra-internet hobby, so I haven't had nearly as much time to write as before. But I do promise that I'm writing whenever I can-- in memos on my phone, in a little notepad, when I'm in the bathroom, when I'm at lunch, hell, even when I'm waiting for my slow-ass computer to accomplish things at work. I'm still working on both fics, and I'll finish 'em both, damn it! Anyway, dig in.
Fic: Scruffy: The Vampire Slayer With a Doctorate
Chapter: 4/??
Fandoms: Scrubs / Buffy: The Vampire Slayer crossover (Set in Sacred Heart Hospital, my money's on Sacramento, CA)
Characters this chapter: Dr. Cox, the Janitor, JD, Kelso, Nurse Roberts, Carla, Elliot, Doug.
Chapter rating: PG-13 for violence and minor character death, and probably some language
Overall story rating: NC-17 in parts, if I can make myself stop blushing, but relatively plot heavy overall.
Genre: Romantic, angst, smut, humor, horror.
Warnings: Slash, OOCness, minor character death, icky violence.
Spoilers: Up to Scrubs Season 6, episode 11, "My Fishbowl" and ALL of B:TVS and ALL of Angel.
Chapter Narrator: Various, labeled.
"don't call your mother - don't call your priest
don't call your doctor - call the police
you bring the razor blade - I'll bring the speed
Take off your coat - it's gonna be a long night."
-Ween, "It's Gonna Be a Long Night"
John Dorian
Standing around the TV that morning watching the police press conference really wasn't making any of us feel any better about the bodies in the basement. We were used to natural causes, or accidents, sometimes gunshots. This was different.
The police had brought us three mutilated bodies earlier that day. Apparently their morgue was full, so we were being helpful.
As helpful as one could be to murdered people who'd had their eyes and tongues cut out.
The only pattern seemed to be that the victims were all white males between their twenties and mid-forties. That and the mutilation.
"I have never been so glad to be black as I am right now," Turk said, smooching his cross and looking at the ceiling. "Thanks big guy!"
Doug whimpered over in the corner, and for once no one could blame him. As a thirty-something lacking in any significant melanin, I could sympathize.
"Not staying?" Dr. Cox asked me from the lounge doorway as I walked away from the press conference.
"I think I heard all I needed to," I answered, continuing to go past. He put his hand on my chest to stop me, right over my heart.
"Stay inside today," he said, eyes still on the TV. I looked at the side of his head.
"It's hamburger day in the cafeteria. I even brought my own ketchup," I said.
"Whatever works," he answered. "Just stick close to the hospital."
"You fit the target demographic too, you know," I answered, feeling my heart beat harder against his hand, which hadn't moved. I started to walk away and he pushed me back to where I'd been standing.
"That's not a bad point," he said. "You're staying at my place tonight."
I shook my head.
"My shift ends two hours after yours."
His fingers twitched on my chest.
"I'll wait," he said, glaring slightly before slapping my sternum hard and walking into the lounge. I turned around to try and argue, but without turning around he whistled sharply.
"Go," he said. I obeyed, since clearly this was another one I wasn't going to win.
"Stupid serial killer," Elliot squeaked as she turned out of another corridor to walk alongside me.
"Stupid wasn't my immediate reaction, but okay," I replied, looking at her quizzically.
"JD," she sighed, "I just bought a house and this is not doing anything for my potential resale value down the line," she explained, talking through her nose the way she does whenever she's explaining something she considers completely obvious.
"Besides," she continued. "You're a landowner, aren't you a little p.o.ed about it?"
"Actually, I'm a bit more concerned for my eyes and tongue, to be honest with you," I winced. "Also my continued metabolic processes."
"You never see the big picture," she said, rolling her eyes. "You're not gonna get serially killed, but when you try to farm that land off on someone else, they're gonna remember your address and say, 'Oh yeah, wasn't that the town where people got their eyes and tongues cut out?' and boom, there goes any hope you have of turning a profit."
"I've made improvements!" I protested.
"You added a porch," she answered, "With no house attached."
"It's a really nice porch," I retorted. "You've sunbathed there, don't act like you don't know."
"Ooh, you're right, I'll call Town and Country and have them send a team over, pronto," she sniped, sweeping by the nurse's station and picking up her charts and stalking into her office.
"What's with her?" Carla asked, fishing out my charts and turning them over.
"She's mad cause she thinks all the murders are gonna bring down the value of her house," I answered.
"All she's gotta do is claim one of the murders happened there," Carla shrugged. "She'll get a morbid buyer and be just fine."
"Warped, but okay," I replied.
"How are you feeling? No more cantaloupes or glowing, right?" she asked, taking my face in her hands and pulling me down, looking at my pupils and feeling my lymph nodes.
"I have remained vertical and non-incandescent," I answered, making funny faces at her until she let me go.
"Charming," she said dryly with a half-smile. "I just don't want my Bambi passing out someplace where he's not surrounded by doctors and nurses who want him alive and well."
"Glowing?" the Janitor said from where he was mopping a few feet away. "Who was glowing?"
"JD was," Carla answered before I could insist no one ever had been glowing and that if he needed me to check his ears I would. The Janitor didn't even look at me as he walked over.
"What color?" he asked. Why did everyone keep asking that?
"Late afternoon gold," Carla and I answered.
"That's weird," he said.
"Why does everybody keep saying that? I mean, I could see 'hey, you were glowing, that's weird,' but why would it be normal if I was glowing a different color?!" I exclaimed.
"Well, smart guy, you're not dead, so it clearly wasn't a hit. The fact that someone would bother trying to locate you without trying to curse you or kill you is bizarre all on its own. If you'd been glowing green, I'd say someone had fired off a love spell at you. Also bizarre all on its own. Metallic gold would be money, metallic silver and someone'd be trying to drive you crazy…"
The Janitor continued to list off colors and what it apparently would have meant if I had been glowing one of them instead of late afternoon gold as Carla and I glanced at one another nervously.
"And of course, pale silver, non-metallic, and someone would be trying to set me off," he concluded. "Late afternoon gold though? That's nothing. And since nothin' happened to you, the only thing that makes sense is if it's a locator of some kind, but locators have chromatic themes. A basic one is high noon yellow, so you can see what or who you're actually looking for, but that's different from late afternoon gold."
"Oh," I said stupidly.
"And you have no idea what I'm talking about, do ya?" the Janitor sighed. "Just be glad the Watcher likes you enough to stick his neck out."
"The what?"
"Exactly," the Janitor said with an expression of abject disgust, mopping away from us.
"I have no idea what just happened here," I said. Carla looked uneasy, but not as confused as I did. "Do you?"
"No," she said. "I don't."
Percival Cox
"You've been duckin' me all day!" I said when I finally caught up with her. "You know what I need."
Laverne gave me a very stern look.
"You know I don't do that anymore. You know that. So don't ask me," she said, shaking with anger. I pulled at my hair.
"Laverne, how can you, of all people, knowing what you know, hold out on me?" I snarled. "I need to know what this is!"
"I don't. Do that. Anymore," she glared.
"You really wanna play this way? Fine. You know damn well that things are stirring up. Unknown spells flying around, eyeless, tongueless corpses. The sun is out in L.A."
Laverne stared hard at me, like nothing I could say could break through.
"Jordan went dark again," I added. That made Laverne's eyes widen, and she took hold of the cross she wore. "She fixed our baby with six words. I know you felt it, Laverne."
"Dear Lord," she began saying quietly. "Please forgive Jordan Sullivan and send your angels to watch over those babies-"
"STOP," I spat. "Stop it with the superstition. Jordan didn't walk under a ladder with them, or happen to be trawling for flesh and have a black cat walk by. She cast on them on purpose because she thought she had to to protect them."
"Really. 'Cause I heard she did all that 'cause you went back on the terms of your little truce," Laverne said coldly. "I don't need to look anywhere but at your face to see that."
I had to resist the urge to physically shake the woman.
"I have got to know what's coming, Laverne, or people are gonna die."
"The day you get this through your head is the day you recognize the world for what it is: People are always gonna die. Face your destiny as the Lord intended: One day at a time. If He wants you to know something in advance, you'll know."
"Yeah. That's why you're here. Do you really think it's some wacky coincidence that an oracle, a watcher, a vampire, a werewolf and the wicked witch of the East Wing all have their cute little day jobs at the same hospital?"
"You do," she pointed out.
"And as you've made so abundantly clear, sweetcheeks, you don't give a longshoreman's crap about what I think. How do you know your buddy Jesus didn't send you here to save people's lives from unspeakable evil? It was JD that got nailed. How much more innocent can you ask for outside the NICU?"
"Q-Tip…" she started, then forced herself to say, "Dr. Dorian is a good boy. But what I may want to do and the laws God's laid down don't always go hand in hand."
"Really. Laws. Gravity is a law. Entropy always increasing in a closed system is a law. Where in the Bible does it say 'And the Lord did forbid them to save the lives of their friends'?!"
Laverne just looked at me, and I sighed.
"Then teach it to someone else. If you want me to stop bothering you, give it to someone else," I said. "Please think about it."
I left her behind, hoping to the God that she believed in and I didn't that she'd decide I was right, or at least let herself be convinced long enough to get it done.
I went over to the Nurses' station, picked up my charts and banged my head against the wall a couple times, since I really don't feel like a doctor if my head isn't at least half-throbbing.
"I wish you wouldn't do that," JD sighed, coming up by my side and picking up charts of his own.
"Do you? Maybe I'll stop. If yesterday and today have been any indication, I'm gonna need every ounce of my formidable brain power this week," I said, closing my eyes and leaning my head against the wall.
"I'd offer to rub your neck, but I'd like to live," he replied. Before I could say something about the level of stress I was under being so great and a massage being so very, very welcome that I'd willingly toss the no touching rule forever, he continued:
"I think the Janitor had an extra large bowl of crazy flakes this morning."
"Oh?" I said. "What makes you say that?"
"He went on this whole rant about how someone had tried to cast a spell on me, and that's why I was glowing, and he had this really exhaustive list of what it would mean if I’d been glowing a different color," he said. He kept his voice nonchalant, but he was still examining my face to gauge my reaction. "Incidentally, why is it that people only act surprised when they find out I was glowing 'late afternoon gold'? Is this another hospital wide hoax like jiggly ball?"
"What the hell is jiggly ball?" I asked, though I ardently did not want to know.
"It's-never mind. It was an almost-hospital-wide hoax nefariously devised by the Janitor to prank me."
"Nefariously? Cupcake, you must dump the word of the day calendar."
"Cupcake?" he replied incredulously. I smacked myself in the forehead with my charts.
"Cupcake, Gidget, Chicklet, you know, generic Frankie and Annette beach bimbo names?"
"Gidget and Chicklet, yeah, but Cupcake?"
"It's from Surf Nazis Must Die III: Panama Jack's Revenge," I lied. I couldn't tell him where cupcake had come from, I didn't know where cupcake had come from.
"Back to my original question-what's so special about late afternoon gold?" he asked.
"I have no idea, that's the thing," I sighed, looking up at the ceiling and cursing Laverne's god. "It's just not something we see regularly."
"'We' being the people used to seeing people glow in general?" he followed up.
"Basically."
"Of which you are one, I take it?" he winced.
"Yes. You sure as hell are pulling this bandaid off slowly, Newbie."
"Somebody cast a spell on me?" he finally asked, eyes wide, frowning just a bit, I suppose in case I was winding him up.
"Would you believe me if I said I think they did?" I asked.
"Will you make fun of me till the end of time if I say yes?" he answered. I crossed my arms so that the clipboard was against my chest and tried very hard not to glare at him.
"You bet your satin-pantied ass that I'm going to make fun of you till the end of time either way, but no, not for this."
"He put his head to one side, and I could tell he was running the scenario through his imagination several times, with different, and I'm sure increasingly disturbing, twists each iteration.
"Verdict?" I asked when his head righted itself.
"I believed you nine times out of ten."
I was satisfied for about half a second until that ever-so-slightly less than perfect assessment started digging at me. As much as I wanted to prevent the words from coming out of my mouth, they exploded anyway.
"What the hell happened the tenth time?" Newbie looked sheepish.
"I might have been a frog whose mind was just filled with terror because you were giant."
"And if I hadn't been giant or if you'd been less of a massive girl of a frog?"
He started to tilt his head. I quickly grabbed his face and straightened it before he could get much further.
"Forget I asked. Wouldya believe me or not?"
"Any time you two wanna start making out, don't mind me," a voice said from behind the counter. I glanced over at Carla, glared, grabbed JD's wrist, and dragged him off into the supply closet. I could give a crap what Carla thought was going on, but I didn't need an audience for things like this, which were actually serious. The absolute last thing I needed was the person flinging around spells getting a heads up because Carla couldn't keep a secret. I pushed him into the closet and slammed the door behind us, turning on him again.
"Well?" I asked. He looked down at the floor.
"I guess I would believe you," he murmured, not meeting my eyes. I sighed and leaned back against one set of shelves. There was a very long pause of silence, during which JD continued to stare at his shoes. "So… do you think that?"
"Look at me," I demanded, which he didn't. I reached out and grabbed his head again and made him look at me. He was blushing a little bit, probably still embarrassed that he'd smooched me instead of Nurse Tisdale.
"I do think that. I do. I know it. Most spells that leave you glowing are locators, but spells can also leave a glow to make it clear that they hit the intended target. Do you feel any different?" I asked. He looked off to the left. "JD," I prompted.
"Different how?" he asked.
"Hotter, colder, taller, shorter, angrier, scalier, attracted to someone you never really noticed before, attracted to someone who never existed before, more confident, more gelatinous-"
"Not really. Except…" he trailed off. I moved closer.
"Out with it!" I said. He mumbled something. "Come again?"
He switched to staring off to the right, blushing harder.
"I said my nipples have been really sensitive," he said.
You have to understand, I really just couldn't help it.
"Oh my god… really?" I asked with my eyes wide. His eyes snapped back to mine, wide and fearful.
"Is that a sign? Am I gonna explode?" he asked.
"Explode, no. But you might be pregnant," I said, before bursting out laughing, letting my hands fall to his shoulders and resting my head on the left one as I just let all the stress I'd been accumulating out as laughter.
"Can I hug you?" I heard him ask quietly. I wrapped my arms around his shoulders.
"What the hell, sport, knock yourself out," I said, and his hands came up tentatively, resting tensely on the outside of my ribs. "Well don't waste it!"
Eventually he started laughing with me, which apparently gave him the courage to hug me properly, and we stood like that for a while. Just like we were in the last thirty seconds of a shitty sitcom.
"You really had me going for a minute there," he sighed finally, still laughing.
"You honestly thought you were pregnant? How did someone as gullible as you graduate from med school?" I asked, fighting the urge to fall over laughing again.
"Nah," he giggled, "but you seemed so serious that the whole spell thing seemed realistic."
I loosened my grip so I could back off enough to see his face.
"Wasn't kidding," I said.
"Oh…" he replied softly, arms dropping to his sides and face clouding over.
I couldn't stand to keep looking at his face, which had taken on an alarmed expression at the distinctly unrealistic direction reality had taken. So I hugged him again. It did give one a chunk of time in which to stall and think of something to say while the other person couldn't see your face.
"This is really weird," he said, and I wasn't sure if he meant his sudden plunge into the world of metaphysics or the fact that I'd just hugged him twice, voluntarily, and allowed him to hug me back. "Who'd want to locate me?"
I had to give the kid credit, he couldn't be fazed by hugs, or so I thought until he jerked away, eyes wide. God damn it, if he made a big deal out of this, I was gonna have to hit him.
"Janitor!" he exclaimed. It took me a moment to figure out what he was talking about before I shook my head in reply.
"He's not qualified, trust me. I'll figure it out, Eglantine, don't worry your pretty little head about it," I said, patting his shoulder in a manly way and turning to the door.
"Who's the Watcher?" he asked as my hand touched the door handle.
"Who told you about that?" I asked, looking back over my shoulder at him.
"Janitor," he explained.
"Oh. You're lookin' at him, angel."
"Angel can be a guy's name," he pointed out.
"It's not."
It wasn't.
John Dorian
I was in bizarro world. I had to be.
"Elliot," I said. "Slap me across the face."
"Can't, my nails are drying. Keith, sweetie, help out JD."
"Um… I'm not really comfortable hitting an attending, babe," Keith replied, looking at me like I was going to leap at him and bite his face off. Looking at Keith's big ol' mitts, I wasn't particularly comfortable with it either.
"Bambi!" Carla exclaimed loudly behind me. I spun around, a full three sixty because once I turned, she slapped me so hard I just kept gong.
"Euoooh," Elliot said, blowing on her fingertips. "You'd've been better off with Keith."
"Someone answer the phone," I said, shaking my head and planting my hands on the counter to help me stay upright. "Did you have to use the ring hand?"
"Be nice to Q-Tip," Laverne said sternly to Carla before giving me a warm smile. I blinked-Laverne liked me, I knew that, but she was never particularly snuggly towards me.
"You heard Nurse Roberts. There will be no abusing Dr. Q-Tip," Dr. Kelso said, strolling up to the counter, mimicking Laverne's warmth for just a moment before his face crashed into a scowl. "Now get the hell back to work before I put you all in the damn morgue."
We reluctantly sprang into something that might've passed for action, if you squinted at it. Carla took one set of charts from me and handed me another, Elliot wrote up instructions for her patients for us non-private practice plebs to follow while I half listened to her special instructions for one particular old man with deep vein thrombosis. Dr. Kelso went on his scary way, and Nurse Tisdale waited on the elevator to help Mickhead out with a patient upstairs.
I didn't actually see it happen, but I heard it. First, the bell rang as the elevator arrived. Then I heard Nurse Tisdale take a sharp breath, then a crunch, like someone had stomped on a bunch of celery.
I looked up just in time to see a man with no eyes let go of her head. She fell to the floor, head limp, and didn't make any other sounds. The two men swung their heads around immediately to where Elliot and I stood, almost like they were looking for us, which probably wasn't that easy given the lack of eyes. Oh, and the being dead. For the first time in a long time, I was far to scared to scream, but Elliot wasn't. She let out a glass shatterer as the two men launched themselves at us, one holding a large knife with a curved blade. I thought back to my D&D days and reminded myself that the correct term was dagger, and that generally daggers were wielded or brandished; they were only held by auctioneers, antique dealers and museum curators.
I finished my thought just in time to bring up a small stack of charts to block the knife (dagger) before it could be used to stab me in the chest. I was pretty pleased with myself, under all the terror, until the guy used his other hand to backhand me across the corridor. Right in the same cheek Carla had just smack too. The wind got knocked out of me as I hit the wall. I tried not to panic as the charts went skidding out of my reach. The man fell onto his knees in front of me, raising the blade over his head. I glanced over at Elliot, who was struggling with the other eyeless zombie assassin with Carla, then shut my eyes tight and waited to find out what getting stabbed felt like.
Interestingly, it felt like getting deeply scratched on the right arm while the left was yanked so hard it was almost dislocated.
"Good god Windemere, who told you shutting your eyes mid-fight was a good strategy?" Dr. Cox hissed, dragging me behind the counter of the Nurse's station. "Are you all right?"
I opened my mouth to try and tell him that I was fine but no sound came out other than a faint rasp.
"Damn it, talk!" he snapped, grabbing a bedpan from a cart and using its surface as a mirror to see around the corner.
"I'm fine," I gasped, just as Dr. Cox leapt up, a half second after the dead guy, and slammed him in the face with a bedpan. I grabbed another bedpan off the cart and went to go try and help Elliot and Carla.
I had to leap to one side to avoid getting knocked down by a flying Latina as the second dead guy managed to shake Carla off his shoulders. I raised the bedpan above my head and tried to bring it down on his but felt it yanked out of my grasp.
"Step aside, sport," Dr. Kelso said, tossing the thing aside and walking towards the man. His voice sounded strange, like he had marbles in his mouth or something.
"You heard the man, Scooter," the Janitor said from behind me as I stood there, gaping.
"It's about goddamn time," Dr. Cox said, standing with his foot on second dead guy's throat and holding out his hand. I didn't know what he wanted; the only thing I could figure was for me to join him in a jitterbug on the dead guy's larynx, at least, that was the only thing I could figure until the Janitor walked past me with an ax dangling from one hand and another resting on his shoulder. I looked back over at Elliot and Carla, who both shrieked in horror as Dr. Kelso twisted the second dead guy's head around the same way Nurse Tisdale's had been. Except Dr. Kelso kept twisting and twisting until the dead guy's head came off his neck in Dr. Kelso's hands.
I thought I might be sick, so I turned away from that scene and back towards the Janitor and Dr. Cox, who were having an argument.
"Let me do it," the Janitor said, spinning one of the axes on the toe of his workboot.
"Oh like hell, just gimme a damn axe," Dr. Cox retorted.
"No, you are all kinds of old and rusty, and you'll nick Monica."
"Monica's standing way the hell over there!" Dr. Cox pointed at me. The Janitor looked at him like he was insane.
"Not your boyfriend, the floor. The floor is Monica!"
"Newbie!" Dr. Cox shouted. "Kick me one of those charts, wouldya?"
I obeyed. I did go to soccer camp. Dr. Cox kicked the chart underneath the first dead guy's neck and snatched the axe the Janitor was balancing on his shoe. He raised it back over his head with both hands, then paused, glancing over at me.
"This would be the point at which you'd probably wanna look away, Kitten," he said.
I didn't.
"Good timing, Lurch," Dr. Kelso said to the Janitor. "You're just in time to start cleaning up this mess."
"'M on break," the Janitor replied, leaning on the other axe like his mop. Kelso started to open his mouth as Dr. Cox and the Janitor glared at him.
"Wait!" I shouted before I even thought it. All three looked over at me.
"Weren't there three of them?" I asked.
"Ah shit, nervous guy!" Dr. Cox said. He and the Janitor headed for the stairs, with mme in pursuit, a bit faster than intended as I skidded through a puddle of blood. "Any time you want to join us, Bobbo!"
Dr. Kelso shrugged, picking up a blood spattered muffin.
"Murphy? Pass," he said, taking a big bite.
We tore down stairs.
"Get the fuck back upstairs," Dr. Cox said, stopping suddenly and spinning around as the Janitor continued running. I ran into Perry's chest.
"What about Doug?" I protested. Dr. Cox opened his mouth and paused. There was a wet thudding sound coming from the morgue.
"Because this might be deeply disturbing," he answered. "-Er."
"It's okay," the Janitor said, though the wet thudding sound continued. "I mean, it's disturbing, but it's okay."
Dr. Cox growled at me, but didn't try to make me stop following him, though he did make me stay behind him as he opened the morgue door.
On the other side, Doug stood, whacking a body with a fire extinguisher over and over.
"I think it's our guy," the Janitor said. "Of course, he is now thoroughly lacking in the department of face. Or skull."
Sure enough, Doug had beaten the third dead guy's head in so thoroughly that it was just a wet mess on the floor.
"Think you got him, Nervous Guy," Dr. Cox said, carefully taking the extinguisher away.
"Dead people," Doug said grimly, "Should be dead."
Fic: Scruffy: The Vampire Slayer With a Doctorate
Chapter: 4/??
Fandoms: Scrubs / Buffy: The Vampire Slayer crossover (Set in Sacred Heart Hospital, my money's on Sacramento, CA)
Characters this chapter: Dr. Cox, the Janitor, JD, Kelso, Nurse Roberts, Carla, Elliot, Doug.
Chapter rating: PG-13 for violence and minor character death, and probably some language
Overall story rating: NC-17 in parts, if I can make myself stop blushing, but relatively plot heavy overall.
Genre: Romantic, angst, smut, humor, horror.
Warnings: Slash, OOCness, minor character death, icky violence.
Spoilers: Up to Scrubs Season 6, episode 11, "My Fishbowl" and ALL of B:TVS and ALL of Angel.
Chapter Narrator: Various, labeled.
"don't call your mother - don't call your priest
don't call your doctor - call the police
you bring the razor blade - I'll bring the speed
Take off your coat - it's gonna be a long night."
-Ween, "It's Gonna Be a Long Night"
John Dorian
Standing around the TV that morning watching the police press conference really wasn't making any of us feel any better about the bodies in the basement. We were used to natural causes, or accidents, sometimes gunshots. This was different.
The police had brought us three mutilated bodies earlier that day. Apparently their morgue was full, so we were being helpful.
As helpful as one could be to murdered people who'd had their eyes and tongues cut out.
The only pattern seemed to be that the victims were all white males between their twenties and mid-forties. That and the mutilation.
"I have never been so glad to be black as I am right now," Turk said, smooching his cross and looking at the ceiling. "Thanks big guy!"
Doug whimpered over in the corner, and for once no one could blame him. As a thirty-something lacking in any significant melanin, I could sympathize.
"Not staying?" Dr. Cox asked me from the lounge doorway as I walked away from the press conference.
"I think I heard all I needed to," I answered, continuing to go past. He put his hand on my chest to stop me, right over my heart.
"Stay inside today," he said, eyes still on the TV. I looked at the side of his head.
"It's hamburger day in the cafeteria. I even brought my own ketchup," I said.
"Whatever works," he answered. "Just stick close to the hospital."
"You fit the target demographic too, you know," I answered, feeling my heart beat harder against his hand, which hadn't moved. I started to walk away and he pushed me back to where I'd been standing.
"That's not a bad point," he said. "You're staying at my place tonight."
I shook my head.
"My shift ends two hours after yours."
His fingers twitched on my chest.
"I'll wait," he said, glaring slightly before slapping my sternum hard and walking into the lounge. I turned around to try and argue, but without turning around he whistled sharply.
"Go," he said. I obeyed, since clearly this was another one I wasn't going to win.
"Stupid serial killer," Elliot squeaked as she turned out of another corridor to walk alongside me.
"Stupid wasn't my immediate reaction, but okay," I replied, looking at her quizzically.
"JD," she sighed, "I just bought a house and this is not doing anything for my potential resale value down the line," she explained, talking through her nose the way she does whenever she's explaining something she considers completely obvious.
"Besides," she continued. "You're a landowner, aren't you a little p.o.ed about it?"
"Actually, I'm a bit more concerned for my eyes and tongue, to be honest with you," I winced. "Also my continued metabolic processes."
"You never see the big picture," she said, rolling her eyes. "You're not gonna get serially killed, but when you try to farm that land off on someone else, they're gonna remember your address and say, 'Oh yeah, wasn't that the town where people got their eyes and tongues cut out?' and boom, there goes any hope you have of turning a profit."
"I've made improvements!" I protested.
"You added a porch," she answered, "With no house attached."
"It's a really nice porch," I retorted. "You've sunbathed there, don't act like you don't know."
"Ooh, you're right, I'll call Town and Country and have them send a team over, pronto," she sniped, sweeping by the nurse's station and picking up her charts and stalking into her office.
"What's with her?" Carla asked, fishing out my charts and turning them over.
"She's mad cause she thinks all the murders are gonna bring down the value of her house," I answered.
"All she's gotta do is claim one of the murders happened there," Carla shrugged. "She'll get a morbid buyer and be just fine."
"Warped, but okay," I replied.
"How are you feeling? No more cantaloupes or glowing, right?" she asked, taking my face in her hands and pulling me down, looking at my pupils and feeling my lymph nodes.
"I have remained vertical and non-incandescent," I answered, making funny faces at her until she let me go.
"Charming," she said dryly with a half-smile. "I just don't want my Bambi passing out someplace where he's not surrounded by doctors and nurses who want him alive and well."
"Glowing?" the Janitor said from where he was mopping a few feet away. "Who was glowing?"
"JD was," Carla answered before I could insist no one ever had been glowing and that if he needed me to check his ears I would. The Janitor didn't even look at me as he walked over.
"What color?" he asked. Why did everyone keep asking that?
"Late afternoon gold," Carla and I answered.
"That's weird," he said.
"Why does everybody keep saying that? I mean, I could see 'hey, you were glowing, that's weird,' but why would it be normal if I was glowing a different color?!" I exclaimed.
"Well, smart guy, you're not dead, so it clearly wasn't a hit. The fact that someone would bother trying to locate you without trying to curse you or kill you is bizarre all on its own. If you'd been glowing green, I'd say someone had fired off a love spell at you. Also bizarre all on its own. Metallic gold would be money, metallic silver and someone'd be trying to drive you crazy…"
The Janitor continued to list off colors and what it apparently would have meant if I had been glowing one of them instead of late afternoon gold as Carla and I glanced at one another nervously.
"And of course, pale silver, non-metallic, and someone would be trying to set me off," he concluded. "Late afternoon gold though? That's nothing. And since nothin' happened to you, the only thing that makes sense is if it's a locator of some kind, but locators have chromatic themes. A basic one is high noon yellow, so you can see what or who you're actually looking for, but that's different from late afternoon gold."
"Oh," I said stupidly.
"And you have no idea what I'm talking about, do ya?" the Janitor sighed. "Just be glad the Watcher likes you enough to stick his neck out."
"The what?"
"Exactly," the Janitor said with an expression of abject disgust, mopping away from us.
"I have no idea what just happened here," I said. Carla looked uneasy, but not as confused as I did. "Do you?"
"No," she said. "I don't."
Percival Cox
"You've been duckin' me all day!" I said when I finally caught up with her. "You know what I need."
Laverne gave me a very stern look.
"You know I don't do that anymore. You know that. So don't ask me," she said, shaking with anger. I pulled at my hair.
"Laverne, how can you, of all people, knowing what you know, hold out on me?" I snarled. "I need to know what this is!"
"I don't. Do that. Anymore," she glared.
"You really wanna play this way? Fine. You know damn well that things are stirring up. Unknown spells flying around, eyeless, tongueless corpses. The sun is out in L.A."
Laverne stared hard at me, like nothing I could say could break through.
"Jordan went dark again," I added. That made Laverne's eyes widen, and she took hold of the cross she wore. "She fixed our baby with six words. I know you felt it, Laverne."
"Dear Lord," she began saying quietly. "Please forgive Jordan Sullivan and send your angels to watch over those babies-"
"STOP," I spat. "Stop it with the superstition. Jordan didn't walk under a ladder with them, or happen to be trawling for flesh and have a black cat walk by. She cast on them on purpose because she thought she had to to protect them."
"Really. 'Cause I heard she did all that 'cause you went back on the terms of your little truce," Laverne said coldly. "I don't need to look anywhere but at your face to see that."
I had to resist the urge to physically shake the woman.
"I have got to know what's coming, Laverne, or people are gonna die."
"The day you get this through your head is the day you recognize the world for what it is: People are always gonna die. Face your destiny as the Lord intended: One day at a time. If He wants you to know something in advance, you'll know."
"Yeah. That's why you're here. Do you really think it's some wacky coincidence that an oracle, a watcher, a vampire, a werewolf and the wicked witch of the East Wing all have their cute little day jobs at the same hospital?"
"You do," she pointed out.
"And as you've made so abundantly clear, sweetcheeks, you don't give a longshoreman's crap about what I think. How do you know your buddy Jesus didn't send you here to save people's lives from unspeakable evil? It was JD that got nailed. How much more innocent can you ask for outside the NICU?"
"Q-Tip…" she started, then forced herself to say, "Dr. Dorian is a good boy. But what I may want to do and the laws God's laid down don't always go hand in hand."
"Really. Laws. Gravity is a law. Entropy always increasing in a closed system is a law. Where in the Bible does it say 'And the Lord did forbid them to save the lives of their friends'?!"
Laverne just looked at me, and I sighed.
"Then teach it to someone else. If you want me to stop bothering you, give it to someone else," I said. "Please think about it."
I left her behind, hoping to the God that she believed in and I didn't that she'd decide I was right, or at least let herself be convinced long enough to get it done.
I went over to the Nurses' station, picked up my charts and banged my head against the wall a couple times, since I really don't feel like a doctor if my head isn't at least half-throbbing.
"I wish you wouldn't do that," JD sighed, coming up by my side and picking up charts of his own.
"Do you? Maybe I'll stop. If yesterday and today have been any indication, I'm gonna need every ounce of my formidable brain power this week," I said, closing my eyes and leaning my head against the wall.
"I'd offer to rub your neck, but I'd like to live," he replied. Before I could say something about the level of stress I was under being so great and a massage being so very, very welcome that I'd willingly toss the no touching rule forever, he continued:
"I think the Janitor had an extra large bowl of crazy flakes this morning."
"Oh?" I said. "What makes you say that?"
"He went on this whole rant about how someone had tried to cast a spell on me, and that's why I was glowing, and he had this really exhaustive list of what it would mean if I’d been glowing a different color," he said. He kept his voice nonchalant, but he was still examining my face to gauge my reaction. "Incidentally, why is it that people only act surprised when they find out I was glowing 'late afternoon gold'? Is this another hospital wide hoax like jiggly ball?"
"What the hell is jiggly ball?" I asked, though I ardently did not want to know.
"It's-never mind. It was an almost-hospital-wide hoax nefariously devised by the Janitor to prank me."
"Nefariously? Cupcake, you must dump the word of the day calendar."
"Cupcake?" he replied incredulously. I smacked myself in the forehead with my charts.
"Cupcake, Gidget, Chicklet, you know, generic Frankie and Annette beach bimbo names?"
"Gidget and Chicklet, yeah, but Cupcake?"
"It's from Surf Nazis Must Die III: Panama Jack's Revenge," I lied. I couldn't tell him where cupcake had come from, I didn't know where cupcake had come from.
"Back to my original question-what's so special about late afternoon gold?" he asked.
"I have no idea, that's the thing," I sighed, looking up at the ceiling and cursing Laverne's god. "It's just not something we see regularly."
"'We' being the people used to seeing people glow in general?" he followed up.
"Basically."
"Of which you are one, I take it?" he winced.
"Yes. You sure as hell are pulling this bandaid off slowly, Newbie."
"Somebody cast a spell on me?" he finally asked, eyes wide, frowning just a bit, I suppose in case I was winding him up.
"Would you believe me if I said I think they did?" I asked.
"Will you make fun of me till the end of time if I say yes?" he answered. I crossed my arms so that the clipboard was against my chest and tried very hard not to glare at him.
"You bet your satin-pantied ass that I'm going to make fun of you till the end of time either way, but no, not for this."
"He put his head to one side, and I could tell he was running the scenario through his imagination several times, with different, and I'm sure increasingly disturbing, twists each iteration.
"Verdict?" I asked when his head righted itself.
"I believed you nine times out of ten."
I was satisfied for about half a second until that ever-so-slightly less than perfect assessment started digging at me. As much as I wanted to prevent the words from coming out of my mouth, they exploded anyway.
"What the hell happened the tenth time?" Newbie looked sheepish.
"I might have been a frog whose mind was just filled with terror because you were giant."
"And if I hadn't been giant or if you'd been less of a massive girl of a frog?"
He started to tilt his head. I quickly grabbed his face and straightened it before he could get much further.
"Forget I asked. Wouldya believe me or not?"
"Any time you two wanna start making out, don't mind me," a voice said from behind the counter. I glanced over at Carla, glared, grabbed JD's wrist, and dragged him off into the supply closet. I could give a crap what Carla thought was going on, but I didn't need an audience for things like this, which were actually serious. The absolute last thing I needed was the person flinging around spells getting a heads up because Carla couldn't keep a secret. I pushed him into the closet and slammed the door behind us, turning on him again.
"Well?" I asked. He looked down at the floor.
"I guess I would believe you," he murmured, not meeting my eyes. I sighed and leaned back against one set of shelves. There was a very long pause of silence, during which JD continued to stare at his shoes. "So… do you think that?"
"Look at me," I demanded, which he didn't. I reached out and grabbed his head again and made him look at me. He was blushing a little bit, probably still embarrassed that he'd smooched me instead of Nurse Tisdale.
"I do think that. I do. I know it. Most spells that leave you glowing are locators, but spells can also leave a glow to make it clear that they hit the intended target. Do you feel any different?" I asked. He looked off to the left. "JD," I prompted.
"Different how?" he asked.
"Hotter, colder, taller, shorter, angrier, scalier, attracted to someone you never really noticed before, attracted to someone who never existed before, more confident, more gelatinous-"
"Not really. Except…" he trailed off. I moved closer.
"Out with it!" I said. He mumbled something. "Come again?"
He switched to staring off to the right, blushing harder.
"I said my nipples have been really sensitive," he said.
You have to understand, I really just couldn't help it.
"Oh my god… really?" I asked with my eyes wide. His eyes snapped back to mine, wide and fearful.
"Is that a sign? Am I gonna explode?" he asked.
"Explode, no. But you might be pregnant," I said, before bursting out laughing, letting my hands fall to his shoulders and resting my head on the left one as I just let all the stress I'd been accumulating out as laughter.
"Can I hug you?" I heard him ask quietly. I wrapped my arms around his shoulders.
"What the hell, sport, knock yourself out," I said, and his hands came up tentatively, resting tensely on the outside of my ribs. "Well don't waste it!"
Eventually he started laughing with me, which apparently gave him the courage to hug me properly, and we stood like that for a while. Just like we were in the last thirty seconds of a shitty sitcom.
"You really had me going for a minute there," he sighed finally, still laughing.
"You honestly thought you were pregnant? How did someone as gullible as you graduate from med school?" I asked, fighting the urge to fall over laughing again.
"Nah," he giggled, "but you seemed so serious that the whole spell thing seemed realistic."
I loosened my grip so I could back off enough to see his face.
"Wasn't kidding," I said.
"Oh…" he replied softly, arms dropping to his sides and face clouding over.
I couldn't stand to keep looking at his face, which had taken on an alarmed expression at the distinctly unrealistic direction reality had taken. So I hugged him again. It did give one a chunk of time in which to stall and think of something to say while the other person couldn't see your face.
"This is really weird," he said, and I wasn't sure if he meant his sudden plunge into the world of metaphysics or the fact that I'd just hugged him twice, voluntarily, and allowed him to hug me back. "Who'd want to locate me?"
I had to give the kid credit, he couldn't be fazed by hugs, or so I thought until he jerked away, eyes wide. God damn it, if he made a big deal out of this, I was gonna have to hit him.
"Janitor!" he exclaimed. It took me a moment to figure out what he was talking about before I shook my head in reply.
"He's not qualified, trust me. I'll figure it out, Eglantine, don't worry your pretty little head about it," I said, patting his shoulder in a manly way and turning to the door.
"Who's the Watcher?" he asked as my hand touched the door handle.
"Who told you about that?" I asked, looking back over my shoulder at him.
"Janitor," he explained.
"Oh. You're lookin' at him, angel."
"Angel can be a guy's name," he pointed out.
"It's not."
It wasn't.
John Dorian
I was in bizarro world. I had to be.
"Elliot," I said. "Slap me across the face."
"Can't, my nails are drying. Keith, sweetie, help out JD."
"Um… I'm not really comfortable hitting an attending, babe," Keith replied, looking at me like I was going to leap at him and bite his face off. Looking at Keith's big ol' mitts, I wasn't particularly comfortable with it either.
"Bambi!" Carla exclaimed loudly behind me. I spun around, a full three sixty because once I turned, she slapped me so hard I just kept gong.
"Euoooh," Elliot said, blowing on her fingertips. "You'd've been better off with Keith."
"Someone answer the phone," I said, shaking my head and planting my hands on the counter to help me stay upright. "Did you have to use the ring hand?"
"Be nice to Q-Tip," Laverne said sternly to Carla before giving me a warm smile. I blinked-Laverne liked me, I knew that, but she was never particularly snuggly towards me.
"You heard Nurse Roberts. There will be no abusing Dr. Q-Tip," Dr. Kelso said, strolling up to the counter, mimicking Laverne's warmth for just a moment before his face crashed into a scowl. "Now get the hell back to work before I put you all in the damn morgue."
We reluctantly sprang into something that might've passed for action, if you squinted at it. Carla took one set of charts from me and handed me another, Elliot wrote up instructions for her patients for us non-private practice plebs to follow while I half listened to her special instructions for one particular old man with deep vein thrombosis. Dr. Kelso went on his scary way, and Nurse Tisdale waited on the elevator to help Mickhead out with a patient upstairs.
I didn't actually see it happen, but I heard it. First, the bell rang as the elevator arrived. Then I heard Nurse Tisdale take a sharp breath, then a crunch, like someone had stomped on a bunch of celery.
I looked up just in time to see a man with no eyes let go of her head. She fell to the floor, head limp, and didn't make any other sounds. The two men swung their heads around immediately to where Elliot and I stood, almost like they were looking for us, which probably wasn't that easy given the lack of eyes. Oh, and the being dead. For the first time in a long time, I was far to scared to scream, but Elliot wasn't. She let out a glass shatterer as the two men launched themselves at us, one holding a large knife with a curved blade. I thought back to my D&D days and reminded myself that the correct term was dagger, and that generally daggers were wielded or brandished; they were only held by auctioneers, antique dealers and museum curators.
I finished my thought just in time to bring up a small stack of charts to block the knife (dagger) before it could be used to stab me in the chest. I was pretty pleased with myself, under all the terror, until the guy used his other hand to backhand me across the corridor. Right in the same cheek Carla had just smack too. The wind got knocked out of me as I hit the wall. I tried not to panic as the charts went skidding out of my reach. The man fell onto his knees in front of me, raising the blade over his head. I glanced over at Elliot, who was struggling with the other eyeless zombie assassin with Carla, then shut my eyes tight and waited to find out what getting stabbed felt like.
Interestingly, it felt like getting deeply scratched on the right arm while the left was yanked so hard it was almost dislocated.
"Good god Windemere, who told you shutting your eyes mid-fight was a good strategy?" Dr. Cox hissed, dragging me behind the counter of the Nurse's station. "Are you all right?"
I opened my mouth to try and tell him that I was fine but no sound came out other than a faint rasp.
"Damn it, talk!" he snapped, grabbing a bedpan from a cart and using its surface as a mirror to see around the corner.
"I'm fine," I gasped, just as Dr. Cox leapt up, a half second after the dead guy, and slammed him in the face with a bedpan. I grabbed another bedpan off the cart and went to go try and help Elliot and Carla.
I had to leap to one side to avoid getting knocked down by a flying Latina as the second dead guy managed to shake Carla off his shoulders. I raised the bedpan above my head and tried to bring it down on his but felt it yanked out of my grasp.
"Step aside, sport," Dr. Kelso said, tossing the thing aside and walking towards the man. His voice sounded strange, like he had marbles in his mouth or something.
"You heard the man, Scooter," the Janitor said from behind me as I stood there, gaping.
"It's about goddamn time," Dr. Cox said, standing with his foot on second dead guy's throat and holding out his hand. I didn't know what he wanted; the only thing I could figure was for me to join him in a jitterbug on the dead guy's larynx, at least, that was the only thing I could figure until the Janitor walked past me with an ax dangling from one hand and another resting on his shoulder. I looked back over at Elliot and Carla, who both shrieked in horror as Dr. Kelso twisted the second dead guy's head around the same way Nurse Tisdale's had been. Except Dr. Kelso kept twisting and twisting until the dead guy's head came off his neck in Dr. Kelso's hands.
I thought I might be sick, so I turned away from that scene and back towards the Janitor and Dr. Cox, who were having an argument.
"Let me do it," the Janitor said, spinning one of the axes on the toe of his workboot.
"Oh like hell, just gimme a damn axe," Dr. Cox retorted.
"No, you are all kinds of old and rusty, and you'll nick Monica."
"Monica's standing way the hell over there!" Dr. Cox pointed at me. The Janitor looked at him like he was insane.
"Not your boyfriend, the floor. The floor is Monica!"
"Newbie!" Dr. Cox shouted. "Kick me one of those charts, wouldya?"
I obeyed. I did go to soccer camp. Dr. Cox kicked the chart underneath the first dead guy's neck and snatched the axe the Janitor was balancing on his shoe. He raised it back over his head with both hands, then paused, glancing over at me.
"This would be the point at which you'd probably wanna look away, Kitten," he said.
I didn't.
"Good timing, Lurch," Dr. Kelso said to the Janitor. "You're just in time to start cleaning up this mess."
"'M on break," the Janitor replied, leaning on the other axe like his mop. Kelso started to open his mouth as Dr. Cox and the Janitor glared at him.
"Wait!" I shouted before I even thought it. All three looked over at me.
"Weren't there three of them?" I asked.
"Ah shit, nervous guy!" Dr. Cox said. He and the Janitor headed for the stairs, with mme in pursuit, a bit faster than intended as I skidded through a puddle of blood. "Any time you want to join us, Bobbo!"
Dr. Kelso shrugged, picking up a blood spattered muffin.
"Murphy? Pass," he said, taking a big bite.
We tore down stairs.
"Get the fuck back upstairs," Dr. Cox said, stopping suddenly and spinning around as the Janitor continued running. I ran into Perry's chest.
"What about Doug?" I protested. Dr. Cox opened his mouth and paused. There was a wet thudding sound coming from the morgue.
"Because this might be deeply disturbing," he answered. "-Er."
"It's okay," the Janitor said, though the wet thudding sound continued. "I mean, it's disturbing, but it's okay."
Dr. Cox growled at me, but didn't try to make me stop following him, though he did make me stay behind him as he opened the morgue door.
On the other side, Doug stood, whacking a body with a fire extinguisher over and over.
"I think it's our guy," the Janitor said. "Of course, he is now thoroughly lacking in the department of face. Or skull."
Sure enough, Doug had beaten the third dead guy's head in so thoroughly that it was just a wet mess on the floor.
"Think you got him, Nervous Guy," Dr. Cox said, carefully taking the extinguisher away.
"Dead people," Doug said grimly, "Should be dead."