Bulletproof (13/52)
Title: Bulletproof
Author: blasthisass
Rating: PG-13 to NC-17
Summary: AU- when Luke is shot by Colonel Mayer, his condition quickly deteriorates. In order to save his life, Bob calls in a young, hotshot doctor from Texas, brilliant and already making a name for himself.
Disclaimers: All characters and such property of ATWT, CBS and anyone else who can legally take credit for them. If they were mine, I would take infinitely better care of them.
Title from the song by La Roux. There is dialogue from both the time in which the story takes place as well as the LuRe storyline.
A/N: This is unbeta'd, so any mistakes are mine.
Comments much appreciated . . . I love them like Reid loves Luke.
Previous parts: prologue | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
***
Luke smiled brightly, for some reason even more so when he spotted the stony expression on Reid’s face. Reid frowned, ignoring the deep thud of his heart as the smile threatened to light up the room like a Christmas tree. It was very rarely that Reid disliked the necessity of having to do his job (actually, he’d never in his life been reluctant to do his job), but at that moment he wished to eliminate Luke Snyder off his patient list.
He made up for the necessity of speaking by picking up Luke’s chart and flipping through it, frowning slightly as he spotted handwriting other than his own filling up the blank spaces on the paper.
Luke watched him, waiting for medical jargon to escape the doctor’s mouth in that rough voice of his, but as silence continued to filter through the room, he finally decided that he’d speak first.
“That phone call you made . . . personal or professional?” he inquired curiously.
Reid grunted, refusing to look up. “Not that it’s any of your business, but professional.”
Luke laughed. “Really, now? I should have known, as your patient, that you could have long-winded medical conversations, but I count myself lucky to have never experienced one that lasted two whole days.”
Reid couldn’t help but smile, desperately trying to keep his walls up, but they didn’t seem to stand a chance against sunshine in the form of Luke Snyder. “What’re you talking about, Snyder?”
Luke shrugged with feigned nonchalance. “You walked out of here two days ago under the pretense of making a phone call and telling me that by the time you came back you expected a witty response from me. This is the first time I’ve seen you since. A bit cliché for you, of all people, to pull a Dr. House, isn’t it?”
Reid flicked past the medical charts and perused the discharge papers carefully. “Contrary to what you may believe, Mr. Snyder, the world does not revolve around you. I do have a life outside of your care.” He flipped the metal cover back over the information and started to make his way around the bed, his hand fiddling in the pocket of his lab coat for his penlight.
“Is that so?” Luke mused, watching Reid carefully as he approached. “See, I have two other theories: either you thought I was wholly incapable of thinking up a witty response or you simply thought I needed vast amounts of time to come up with one.”
“Oh, the former. Definitely,” Reid muttered, almost to himself, flipping on the light and easing himself tentatively over Luke to examine his eyes.
Luke’s fingers twitched over the starched sheets, for some reason thrown off by the doctor’s sudden proximity. He caught a glimpse of the color of Reid’s eyes as he passed the penlight from one chocolate eye to another and his brow furrowed slightly. It was the same sort of Mediterranean blue that he’d seen just moments before he’d regained consciousness. “Aww, come now, Dr. Oliver. Not even a little bit of faith in my abilities?”
Reid pulled away, pocketing the light. “I have no reason to. All I’ve heard from you is whining. Nothing to be impressed by as of yet.”
He moved forward, adjusting his stance so that he wouldn’t lose his balance as he proceeded. He motioned for Luke to sit up so that he could remove his bandages. His nimble fingers flew effortlessly to Luke’s head. One hand gripped the side of Luke’s skull carefully, as though to hold it in place. Luke found himself staring straight at the fourth button from the top of Reid’s burgundy shirt, the uppermost one thrust into the empty hole of his shirt. If he raised his eyes but a little bit, he’d find himself staring at the definitive line of Reid’s neck, rising from his Adam’s apple up to the strong line of his jaw.
Reid’s fingers worked carefully on unhooking the fastenings of the bandages. He tossed the clips on the bedside table. His left hand moved away from Luke’s head as he carefully unwound the bandages, rolling them into a ball as he went until they were all rolled in his hand and his concentration strayed from the task due to the fact that he could feel his shirt fluttering lightly with each breath that Luke took.
Luke smiled softly, the weight of his head slightly more familiar now and he made to glance up happily at Reid.
“No,” the latter muttered, his hand moving to Luke’s face to keep his head in the position it was in. “Don’t move.” His fingertips pressed gently into Luke’s jaw line as he leaned in closer, squinting lightly at the stitches and smiling in satisfaction at his handiwork. “You’re healing well,” he murmured.
Luke wanted to nod, as for some reason he couldn’t find his voice. The fingers pressing into his skin seemed to be flaming hot. The sensation, the action, that of fingertips pressed lightly against his face . . . it wasn’t a new one. The contact was one he’d experienced before. It was the intoxicated feeling that coursed through his bloodstream that he’d never experienced while being alcohol-free.
“Why . . . Why are you still here?” he whispered, his nostril breathing in the strange scent of Reid’s cologne. Somehow, he hadn’t expected the doctor to bother with such trivialities.
“We’ve had this conversation before,” Reid muttered condescendingly. “I’d rather not keep harping over the same nonsense when there are so many more interesting conversations to be had.”
“Not really. You don’t have to be here, you know. You . . . you saved my life and I never even thanked you,” Luke murmured, eyes unfocused as he somehow felt out of line staring straight ahead at the small patch of visible skin of Reid’s chest. “But . . . you did what you had to do . . . So . . . I don’t understand why you’re still here, especially if you feel the necessity to go AWOL randomly for two days.”
“There’s probably not too much warning I can give you when it comes to not ripping your stitches out,” Reid answered, avoiding the question. “Only so many ways to exert the skin around your skull. Thinking too much, maybe, but you don’t seem to have that problem.”
His pride once again prompted him to keep his displeasing transaction with Lucinda to himself. His hands fell away from Luke’s face and he started to move away, but Luke’s hand automatically rose to grip the fabric of Reid’s lab coat.
Reid grunted as his escape was impeded, almost in the same sense as his running from Oakdale was prevented and he found himself looking directly into Luke’s intent gaze, which held in it the perfect mixture of curiosity and youthful innocence. Luke’s eyes scanned his face, as though he expected the answer to be written there in plain English, but all he found, once again, as Reid’s impeccable poker face.
“Why do you care?”
Reid’s mouth dropped open and his Adam’s apple bobble lightly as he swallowed. His brow furrowed in concentration, as though the rephrasing of the previous sentiments had thrown him off guard and he wasn’t quite sure how to answer. He was saved the trouble of doing so when the door to Luke's room opened and Holden poked his head inside. He opened his mouth in surprise when he spotted his son with the doctor, who was being held in place by Luke’s tight grip on his lab coat and the locked gaze of his brown eyes.
He cleared his throat and the reaction was almost instantaneous. Luke’s hand fell as though he’d just noticed that he was touching something unbelievably hot and the back of his neck flushed a light pink as he realized what the situation might look like to someone who just happened to walk in. Reid cleared his throat gruffly, moving away from the bed.
“Umm . . .” Holden frowned, glancing between the two of them. “Noah’s outside. He’s been shanghaied into a conversation with your mother, but he should be in to see you soon.” He didn’t know how much of that statement was necessary, but he watched Dr. Oliver’s reaction carefully out of the corner of his eye. Despite what Jack thought, he needed to know whether it was necessary to protect his son.
And the reaction he received was exactly the one he expected. Reid let out a sharp exhalation, like a noiseless laugh, before shaking his head and biting his tongue, as though he wanted to say a thousand things and had to physically keep himself from doing so. The expression on his face was stony.
He started to sweep past Holden when Luke’s voice stopped him. As he was being discharged the next day, Luke couldn’t be entirely sure when he’d get another chance. “You never answered my question.”
Reid paused, hand poised on the door handle. “Because it reeks of idiocy,” he forced out, voice suddenly freezing from the warmth it had held during the examination. “I do not care in the slightest, Mr. Snyder. As to why I’m still here, I’m sure your family could tell the story with much more color than myself.” With that he wrenched open the door and nearly had a full-on collision with the entering, tall brunette. He suppressed a growl and threw Noah a seething look before disappearing into the hallway.
Noah frowned, the deadly look he was on the receiving end of unnerving him. “What’s his problem?”
Luke’s face fell, as though a cloud had suddenly covered it and murmured, “I have no idea.”
Holden, however, gazed angrily after the doctor, his suspicions all but confirmed. “I do. Excuse me.”
He followed Reid out into the hallway, looking down both ends before spotting Reid checking something on a hospital computer near the nurse’s station. He approached, his fist clenched tightly. “Do you really have to be so cold, doctor?”
“There’s no time for niceties in my profession,” Reid muttered absentmindedly, finally finding what he was looking for in the database. He glanced up and snapped his fingers at a passing woman in scrubs. “Hey, you! Nurse! Get me Carly Tenney’s file, and don’t be all day about it.”
“I don’t think-” she started, but never got a chance to finish.
“Well, luckily you’re not paid to think, you’re paid to do as I instruct,” Reid snapped, sending her scurrying away on the verge of tears. He turned to see Holden still standing behind him, arms crossed. “Mr. Snyder, I don’t appreciate being stalked around the entire hospital.”
“You know, I think that there’s something else going on here. Something more than the necessities of profession. Something to do entirely with my son.”
Reid raised his eyebrow, unable to read where Holden was going with this. “And your keen instinct tells you what, Mr. Snyder?”
“You wouldn’t treat my son this way if the person in that room right now was his girlfriend rather than boyfriend. You don’t respect him because he’s ga-“ Holden cut himself off as Reid’s hand rose to his face and he started laughing uncontrollably. “You think this is funny?”
“You think I’m homophobic? That’s . . . hysterical,” Reid commented, shaking his head in amazement.
“Well, why don’t you let me on the joke, Dr. Oliver?” Holden demanded, growing increasingly tired of Reid’s attitude. “What, is your best friend gay? Or, your mom, or your dad? Who?”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but me, Mr. Snyder. I’m gay,” Reid answered, turning away at the scampering noises of the approaching nurse, thereby missing the shocked expression on Holden’s face. “And you better learn the definition of ‘don’t be all day about it.’ It’s synonymous with ‘stat.’ As in, faster than you’re moving right now.” Reid grabbed the case file and disappeared around the corner before Holden could even move.
Holden closed his mouth a couple of moments later when it became clear that words were not quick in coming and, even if they were, there was no one around any longer to hear them. Dr. Oliver’s revelation should have made everything that Holden had seen in the light of homophobia become muddled and confused, but it was as though things were suddenly all too clear. His gaze flew from where Dr. Oliver had just disappeared to Luke’s room and back with lightning speed as he tried to put all the pieces together. If Dr. Oliver didn’t hate Luke, then-He shook his head, as the alternate possibility seemed to sit even worse with him. Somehow, his nerves weren’t settled with Dr. Oliver’s sexual orientation. Somehow, now, they were heightened.
Chapter 14-->
Author: blasthisass
Rating: PG-13 to NC-17
Summary: AU- when Luke is shot by Colonel Mayer, his condition quickly deteriorates. In order to save his life, Bob calls in a young, hotshot doctor from Texas, brilliant and already making a name for himself.
Disclaimers: All characters and such property of ATWT, CBS and anyone else who can legally take credit for them. If they were mine, I would take infinitely better care of them.
Title from the song by La Roux. There is dialogue from both the time in which the story takes place as well as the LuRe storyline.
A/N: This is unbeta'd, so any mistakes are mine.
Comments much appreciated . . . I love them like Reid loves Luke.
Previous parts: prologue | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
***
Luke smiled brightly, for some reason even more so when he spotted the stony expression on Reid’s face. Reid frowned, ignoring the deep thud of his heart as the smile threatened to light up the room like a Christmas tree. It was very rarely that Reid disliked the necessity of having to do his job (actually, he’d never in his life been reluctant to do his job), but at that moment he wished to eliminate Luke Snyder off his patient list.
He made up for the necessity of speaking by picking up Luke’s chart and flipping through it, frowning slightly as he spotted handwriting other than his own filling up the blank spaces on the paper.
Luke watched him, waiting for medical jargon to escape the doctor’s mouth in that rough voice of his, but as silence continued to filter through the room, he finally decided that he’d speak first.
“That phone call you made . . . personal or professional?” he inquired curiously.
Reid grunted, refusing to look up. “Not that it’s any of your business, but professional.”
Luke laughed. “Really, now? I should have known, as your patient, that you could have long-winded medical conversations, but I count myself lucky to have never experienced one that lasted two whole days.”
Reid couldn’t help but smile, desperately trying to keep his walls up, but they didn’t seem to stand a chance against sunshine in the form of Luke Snyder. “What’re you talking about, Snyder?”
Luke shrugged with feigned nonchalance. “You walked out of here two days ago under the pretense of making a phone call and telling me that by the time you came back you expected a witty response from me. This is the first time I’ve seen you since. A bit cliché for you, of all people, to pull a Dr. House, isn’t it?”
Reid flicked past the medical charts and perused the discharge papers carefully. “Contrary to what you may believe, Mr. Snyder, the world does not revolve around you. I do have a life outside of your care.” He flipped the metal cover back over the information and started to make his way around the bed, his hand fiddling in the pocket of his lab coat for his penlight.
“Is that so?” Luke mused, watching Reid carefully as he approached. “See, I have two other theories: either you thought I was wholly incapable of thinking up a witty response or you simply thought I needed vast amounts of time to come up with one.”
“Oh, the former. Definitely,” Reid muttered, almost to himself, flipping on the light and easing himself tentatively over Luke to examine his eyes.
Luke’s fingers twitched over the starched sheets, for some reason thrown off by the doctor’s sudden proximity. He caught a glimpse of the color of Reid’s eyes as he passed the penlight from one chocolate eye to another and his brow furrowed slightly. It was the same sort of Mediterranean blue that he’d seen just moments before he’d regained consciousness. “Aww, come now, Dr. Oliver. Not even a little bit of faith in my abilities?”
Reid pulled away, pocketing the light. “I have no reason to. All I’ve heard from you is whining. Nothing to be impressed by as of yet.”
He moved forward, adjusting his stance so that he wouldn’t lose his balance as he proceeded. He motioned for Luke to sit up so that he could remove his bandages. His nimble fingers flew effortlessly to Luke’s head. One hand gripped the side of Luke’s skull carefully, as though to hold it in place. Luke found himself staring straight at the fourth button from the top of Reid’s burgundy shirt, the uppermost one thrust into the empty hole of his shirt. If he raised his eyes but a little bit, he’d find himself staring at the definitive line of Reid’s neck, rising from his Adam’s apple up to the strong line of his jaw.
Reid’s fingers worked carefully on unhooking the fastenings of the bandages. He tossed the clips on the bedside table. His left hand moved away from Luke’s head as he carefully unwound the bandages, rolling them into a ball as he went until they were all rolled in his hand and his concentration strayed from the task due to the fact that he could feel his shirt fluttering lightly with each breath that Luke took.
Luke smiled softly, the weight of his head slightly more familiar now and he made to glance up happily at Reid.
“No,” the latter muttered, his hand moving to Luke’s face to keep his head in the position it was in. “Don’t move.” His fingertips pressed gently into Luke’s jaw line as he leaned in closer, squinting lightly at the stitches and smiling in satisfaction at his handiwork. “You’re healing well,” he murmured.
Luke wanted to nod, as for some reason he couldn’t find his voice. The fingers pressing into his skin seemed to be flaming hot. The sensation, the action, that of fingertips pressed lightly against his face . . . it wasn’t a new one. The contact was one he’d experienced before. It was the intoxicated feeling that coursed through his bloodstream that he’d never experienced while being alcohol-free.
“Why . . . Why are you still here?” he whispered, his nostril breathing in the strange scent of Reid’s cologne. Somehow, he hadn’t expected the doctor to bother with such trivialities.
“We’ve had this conversation before,” Reid muttered condescendingly. “I’d rather not keep harping over the same nonsense when there are so many more interesting conversations to be had.”
“Not really. You don’t have to be here, you know. You . . . you saved my life and I never even thanked you,” Luke murmured, eyes unfocused as he somehow felt out of line staring straight ahead at the small patch of visible skin of Reid’s chest. “But . . . you did what you had to do . . . So . . . I don’t understand why you’re still here, especially if you feel the necessity to go AWOL randomly for two days.”
“There’s probably not too much warning I can give you when it comes to not ripping your stitches out,” Reid answered, avoiding the question. “Only so many ways to exert the skin around your skull. Thinking too much, maybe, but you don’t seem to have that problem.”
His pride once again prompted him to keep his displeasing transaction with Lucinda to himself. His hands fell away from Luke’s face and he started to move away, but Luke’s hand automatically rose to grip the fabric of Reid’s lab coat.
Reid grunted as his escape was impeded, almost in the same sense as his running from Oakdale was prevented and he found himself looking directly into Luke’s intent gaze, which held in it the perfect mixture of curiosity and youthful innocence. Luke’s eyes scanned his face, as though he expected the answer to be written there in plain English, but all he found, once again, as Reid’s impeccable poker face.
“Why do you care?”
Reid’s mouth dropped open and his Adam’s apple bobble lightly as he swallowed. His brow furrowed in concentration, as though the rephrasing of the previous sentiments had thrown him off guard and he wasn’t quite sure how to answer. He was saved the trouble of doing so when the door to Luke's room opened and Holden poked his head inside. He opened his mouth in surprise when he spotted his son with the doctor, who was being held in place by Luke’s tight grip on his lab coat and the locked gaze of his brown eyes.
He cleared his throat and the reaction was almost instantaneous. Luke’s hand fell as though he’d just noticed that he was touching something unbelievably hot and the back of his neck flushed a light pink as he realized what the situation might look like to someone who just happened to walk in. Reid cleared his throat gruffly, moving away from the bed.
“Umm . . .” Holden frowned, glancing between the two of them. “Noah’s outside. He’s been shanghaied into a conversation with your mother, but he should be in to see you soon.” He didn’t know how much of that statement was necessary, but he watched Dr. Oliver’s reaction carefully out of the corner of his eye. Despite what Jack thought, he needed to know whether it was necessary to protect his son.
And the reaction he received was exactly the one he expected. Reid let out a sharp exhalation, like a noiseless laugh, before shaking his head and biting his tongue, as though he wanted to say a thousand things and had to physically keep himself from doing so. The expression on his face was stony.
He started to sweep past Holden when Luke’s voice stopped him. As he was being discharged the next day, Luke couldn’t be entirely sure when he’d get another chance. “You never answered my question.”
Reid paused, hand poised on the door handle. “Because it reeks of idiocy,” he forced out, voice suddenly freezing from the warmth it had held during the examination. “I do not care in the slightest, Mr. Snyder. As to why I’m still here, I’m sure your family could tell the story with much more color than myself.” With that he wrenched open the door and nearly had a full-on collision with the entering, tall brunette. He suppressed a growl and threw Noah a seething look before disappearing into the hallway.
Noah frowned, the deadly look he was on the receiving end of unnerving him. “What’s his problem?”
Luke’s face fell, as though a cloud had suddenly covered it and murmured, “I have no idea.”
Holden, however, gazed angrily after the doctor, his suspicions all but confirmed. “I do. Excuse me.”
He followed Reid out into the hallway, looking down both ends before spotting Reid checking something on a hospital computer near the nurse’s station. He approached, his fist clenched tightly. “Do you really have to be so cold, doctor?”
“There’s no time for niceties in my profession,” Reid muttered absentmindedly, finally finding what he was looking for in the database. He glanced up and snapped his fingers at a passing woman in scrubs. “Hey, you! Nurse! Get me Carly Tenney’s file, and don’t be all day about it.”
“I don’t think-” she started, but never got a chance to finish.
“Well, luckily you’re not paid to think, you’re paid to do as I instruct,” Reid snapped, sending her scurrying away on the verge of tears. He turned to see Holden still standing behind him, arms crossed. “Mr. Snyder, I don’t appreciate being stalked around the entire hospital.”
“You know, I think that there’s something else going on here. Something more than the necessities of profession. Something to do entirely with my son.”
Reid raised his eyebrow, unable to read where Holden was going with this. “And your keen instinct tells you what, Mr. Snyder?”
“You wouldn’t treat my son this way if the person in that room right now was his girlfriend rather than boyfriend. You don’t respect him because he’s ga-“ Holden cut himself off as Reid’s hand rose to his face and he started laughing uncontrollably. “You think this is funny?”
“You think I’m homophobic? That’s . . . hysterical,” Reid commented, shaking his head in amazement.
“Well, why don’t you let me on the joke, Dr. Oliver?” Holden demanded, growing increasingly tired of Reid’s attitude. “What, is your best friend gay? Or, your mom, or your dad? Who?”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but me, Mr. Snyder. I’m gay,” Reid answered, turning away at the scampering noises of the approaching nurse, thereby missing the shocked expression on Holden’s face. “And you better learn the definition of ‘don’t be all day about it.’ It’s synonymous with ‘stat.’ As in, faster than you’re moving right now.” Reid grabbed the case file and disappeared around the corner before Holden could even move.
Holden closed his mouth a couple of moments later when it became clear that words were not quick in coming and, even if they were, there was no one around any longer to hear them. Dr. Oliver’s revelation should have made everything that Holden had seen in the light of homophobia become muddled and confused, but it was as though things were suddenly all too clear. His gaze flew from where Dr. Oliver had just disappeared to Luke’s room and back with lightning speed as he tried to put all the pieces together. If Dr. Oliver didn’t hate Luke, then-He shook his head, as the alternate possibility seemed to sit even worse with him. Somehow, his nerves weren’t settled with Dr. Oliver’s sexual orientation. Somehow, now, they were heightened.
Chapter 14-->