Fic Repost: "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner" (X-Men/ER)
Title: Guess Who's Coming To Dinner
Fandoms: X-Men Movieverse / ER
Characters: Ray, Logan
Summary: Crazy mutant stalker. Exactly what Ray didn't want in his life.
Warnings: Graphic depiction of a medical procedure, involving lots of blood.
Author's Note: Written for a prompt by scribble_myname some time last year. Thanks to millari for the beta. This is part of the Allegiance ‘verse, but can stand on its own no problem.
It was probably just Ray who thought Logan stuck out in the ever-busy ER, idly lounging against a wall and looking for all the world as if he weren't taking in every movement, every scent around him. But it was still a mutant - a killer - standing in Ray's ER, and the sight alone made him tense up. He stopped himself from throwing furtive looks over his shoulder when he strode over.
"Haven't seen you around in a while," he said for the benefit of two of the interns craning their necks and Pratt watching them out of the corner of his eye. Everybody watched everything he did nowadays, speculating, whispering, checking what the mutant was up to and if it had anything to do with it. And, clipped, "I figure this isn't a social call."
Logan smirked, eyes flickering over Ray's shoulder. Morris stop staring and started whistling, suddenly busy doing something else. "Aw, I was just in the area, thought I'd stop by. Your lady-friend around?"
The tension within Ray doubled. Wolverine wouldn't just show up to say hi, he knew that much about that man, and a mutant with twelve inch claws just had no business showing up in Chicago and asking for Neela. "At a surgical conference in Florida."
The grimace Logan gave in answer was real. "Fuck. Ain't no one like a pretty surgeon to handle a scalpel."
"If a scalpel is all you need, you've got me," Ray said, who wanted nothing less than getting involved in the X-Men's business in the middle of County, but who also knew that things tended to be serious once people started asking for the 10-blades. Neela really was in Florida, but he still just wanted Logan out of here.
"Pretty much," Logan said, his hands buried in his pockets. "That and a pair of pliers."
---
Whenever he'd been back in Westchester, Ray had made sure to stay the fuck away from Logan.
The first day they had met, Logan had ended up killing at least a dozen heavily armed Marines, then hitched a ride by clinging to a helicopter's base with the intention of killing some more. Everything about him made Ray's skin crawl. Too at ease about his mutant powers. Too willing to use them. Too foreign. Ray's therapist had found that last one so interesting, but even she had to admit that only a madman wouldn't wake up shaking after nightmares about people such as Logan.
Right now, Freddy Nightmare was limping.
"Don't tell me you broke your mutation," Ray said, irritated, once they were out of the ambulance bay, throwing multiple looks back to make sure that Sam and Malik, outside on their break, were safely out of hearing range.
Logan sniffed the air, ridiculously at home in the snow although he only wore a leather jacket, but openly on alert, as if ready to grab Ray and pull him out of the line of danger. "Kind of a present Stryker left behind when we blew up his base," he said. "Sleeper agent. That or his serum has fucked with her head. She's been following me around, calls herself Ambush." He snorted. "Spits bullets." He hissed when he tried to make it up the stairs to the El, incapable of bending his thigh at the hip. "One of them got stuck."
Ray had been reaching out to steady him, putting Logan's arm around his shoulder. He paused to give him an incredulous look. A train was rumbling past; he had to raise his voice. "I don't gather you could have led her somewhere else than Chicago, do I?" Crazy mutant stalker. Exactly the kind of thing he didn't want in his life. And judging by Logan's behavior, the stalker lady wasn't only still around but also really pissed.
"It's close to the border," Logan said, making another stairway with a grimace.
Ray grimaced, too. "If you want me to extract a bullet, we need to go back to the ER." There was nothing he'd hate more. "I guess we wouldn't need to disinfect the wound, but I'll still need drugs and someone to assist." Sam was the only nurse with surgical training they had, but maybe he could ask... Fuck, he didn't know who. Maybe Abby. "It's not just a matter of cutting you open, man. There are surgeons in there." He swallowed down the lump in his throat. "It's okay. They know what I am."
"Yeah? That working out for you so far?" Logan raised his eyebrows at him.
And Ray wasn't proud of it, but his skin crawled from the mere thought of bringing a mutant with a gunshot wound back into the ER. Pressing his lips together, he didn't answer.
"Shop style it is," Logan said. "I'll even clean away the blood once we're done."
---
There were things Ray hadn't ever pictured himself doing when he became a doctor.
"We need to make sure you'll stay still," he heard himself say. "You'd be administered drugs for that in surgery, actually. There's a pretty good change they'd take better than anesthesia," he added, because remembering Logan picking darts out of his shoulder in a mansion swarming with soldiers, he wasn't so sure that ordinary doses of anything would impress the man's healing factor. "They work in a different part of the brain."
"Yeah, they work better," Logan said. Leaning against the wall with his leg stretched out and watching Ray unpack the trauma kit he'd brought along, he looked slightly sick at the answer, making Ray wonder about the real reason the other man had opted against taking care of things at a real hospital.
Ray looked at the set of scalpels on the ground, his mind blank for a second before he managed to scan them in this different way - searching for the one that would get the job done fastest, without regards to reconstruction.
"I could still knock you out first," he reminded Logan doubtfully.
Logan gave him a look. "You're prepared to shoot me in the head?"
"I must have left my shotgun at work."
"Then don't bother, bub."
Running his hand through his hair and damn how it would stick up afterward, Ray sighed. Of course he was ready to help. But that didn't mean he liked it. He couldn't wait to tell Neela about his day. "Alright. Get out of your pants and slide down." He waited while Logan did so, the other man muttering an annoyed swearword when the motion required more work than it ordinarily should.
Grabbing Logan's shoulder with the left so that he could steady him, Ray put his knee on the other man's thigh to push it down in case he jerked reflexively. Reaching for the 11-blade, he had a loathsome look at the field of the future incision - somewhere in the gap between femoral head and pelvis joint. And it wasn't that he hadn't seen plenty of male genitalia in the ER, but Ray still avoided looking - because it was close enough to the incision line to make him break into sympathy hives. He was about to mangle a man's loin.
It's just another procedure, he reminded himself. He'll be as good as new in a minute.
"So," Logan said. "You plan on staying at that hospital for good?"
Ray took a deep breath, laying out the steps of the procedure in his head. "It depends on if they offer me an attending position," he said. "My contract is gonna run out in two months. The Professor bribed them into letting me stay that long, but they'll have plenty of excuses to get rid of me now." It was nothing he liked thinking about, but right now, he was somewhat distracted.
"They want proof that you're not gonna go berserk on them, huh?"
"Don't they ever," Ray answered. "I don't suppose you have any advice on how to make the humans trust the mutants, do you?"
When he'd gone back to Chicago, he'd counted on it being hard - the looks people would give him, the sense of betrayal, the knowledge that he was different from them, a mutant, a freak. Morris having to open and close his mouth sometimes before words came out. Sam's eyes burning into him with the ever same questions: Can we trust you? What are you doing to us? Moretti watching his every step. What Ray hadn't counted on had been how much it would hurt.
"Not exactly my area of expertise," Logan said with a snort.
Ray grimaced for what had to be the hundredth time that day. "Hold onto something," he said, and Logan buckled with a silent scream when the scalpel teared through muscle and ligaments, scratching the acetabulum and sliding through the gap of the joint. Sweat broke on Ray's forehead when he tried to hold the man down with his knee, focused on his work. Pressing his lips together, he slipped his hand inside to keep the cut from closing, searching for the bullet by scratching along bone with the blade. Ignoring Logan ramming his fist against the ground, Ray flicked his wrist and levered it out the moment he found it, peeling it out with a finger and hissing when he cut himself in there.
He jerked away. His jeans were soaked from the growing puddle of blood. The bullet rolled into a corner. Dropping the scalpel, he was breathing hard, watching Logan in fascinated horror. The other man's face was tight and ghostly pale when he struggled not to pass out, grunting against what had to be excruciating pain, garish cut already closing up.
Surreally, Ray had a vision of Pratt storming in and demanding to know what the fuck he was doing, and if he hadn't learned anything in med school.
Apparently not, Ray thought, trying to control his breath.
The spraying artery he'd nicked had painted a rainbow of blood across the shower curtain, thickly dripping to the ground in stark red clots.
---
Logan had kept true to his word. He'd cleaned the blood off the tiles. With actual cleaning products. For a moment there, Ray toyed with the idea of keeping quiet about the incident and telling Neela it had all been him, but who was he kidding about pulling that off.
Logan had also washed out Ray's jeans and his own bloody clothes in the sink with a bag of tricks about getting rid of blood stains that Ray, an expert on that himself like any ER doctor, really didn't want to know more about. Waiting for the laundry dryer to finish, the other man was sitting on the couch in boxers and the only shirt big enough for his biceps that Ray had been able to dig up, gratefully accepting a beer.
"So what are you gonna do about that Ambush person?" Ray asked, lounging in a chair with a beer of his own. "She's still lurking around somewhere out there, right? Doing..." He smirked in search for words. "Doing as stalkers do."
Swallowing down a gracious sip of his drink, Logan shrugged. "Now that I know what she smells like..." he said, leaving it hanging how little effort it would be to get rid of the problem. "I'll try and get her out in the open outside of town. I doubt she'll have a problem with it. It's easier to avoid the cops outside the city limits."
It was easier to get rid of a body outside of Chicago, too, Ray thought, shuddering.
"Isn't there any way to stop her without killing her?" he asked, in an unsteady voice even to his own ears, because he just had to ask. The police wasn't on either Logan's or this woman's side, he knew. As much as he hated it, but that was another thing he so despised about the existence of Logan: He'd left society behind. He was, like, way beyond it. It scared Ray out of his mind to think that it could happen to him.
That was probably another insight he should bring up in therapy.
"You've got some advice on how to do that?" Logan said dryly. It took Ray a moment to figure out that Logan was throwing his own words back at him. He smirked.
"Not exactly my area of expertise."
He'd offer a sarcastic comment instead of advice, but it was late in the day, night shift starting at County. He'd ripped a bullet out of a man's hip, transformed his bathroom into a slaughterhouse, and he was about to see that same man off to go and 'take care' of the woman who had shot it at him.
It was a mutant bullet. Biological. Maybe he should send it to Hank for his research.
Like, as a Christmas present.
They were alike, Logan and he, Ray thought, watching the other man down the rest of his beer and getting up to check on his clothes. That's what he disliked so much about him, nothing to do with what he'd done or what he was. Both of them had been made into something they didn't want to be, except Logan had fallen off the wagon, ending up outside of justice and the world for no fault of his own. He, Ray, would go back to work tomorrow, and call his girlfriend tonight, but it could easily have been the other way around. It made him sick to his stomach, thinking about it.
It made him sick to know that those commandos, like Stryker, could decide to come for him, too, experiment on him just because.
But he also knew he'd face Morris' fear again tomorrow and Moretti's distrust, and he'd think of pulling a bullet out of one of his own in his bathroom, trying to keep a blank face and working on. It was what he'd signed up for after all. It was his choice. He had to keep remembering that. He hadn't ended up like Logan yet, and he still had a choice.
The rest of it might start hurting less one day, too, if he kept that in mind.
"Thanks for the beer," Logan said, slipping into his jacket.
"Any time," Ray said without bothering to get up. "See you around."
Fandoms: X-Men Movieverse / ER
Characters: Ray, Logan
Summary: Crazy mutant stalker. Exactly what Ray didn't want in his life.
Warnings: Graphic depiction of a medical procedure, involving lots of blood.
Author's Note: Written for a prompt by scribble_myname some time last year. Thanks to millari for the beta. This is part of the Allegiance ‘verse, but can stand on its own no problem.
It was probably just Ray who thought Logan stuck out in the ever-busy ER, idly lounging against a wall and looking for all the world as if he weren't taking in every movement, every scent around him. But it was still a mutant - a killer - standing in Ray's ER, and the sight alone made him tense up. He stopped himself from throwing furtive looks over his shoulder when he strode over.
"Haven't seen you around in a while," he said for the benefit of two of the interns craning their necks and Pratt watching them out of the corner of his eye. Everybody watched everything he did nowadays, speculating, whispering, checking what the mutant was up to and if it had anything to do with it. And, clipped, "I figure this isn't a social call."
Logan smirked, eyes flickering over Ray's shoulder. Morris stop staring and started whistling, suddenly busy doing something else. "Aw, I was just in the area, thought I'd stop by. Your lady-friend around?"
The tension within Ray doubled. Wolverine wouldn't just show up to say hi, he knew that much about that man, and a mutant with twelve inch claws just had no business showing up in Chicago and asking for Neela. "At a surgical conference in Florida."
The grimace Logan gave in answer was real. "Fuck. Ain't no one like a pretty surgeon to handle a scalpel."
"If a scalpel is all you need, you've got me," Ray said, who wanted nothing less than getting involved in the X-Men's business in the middle of County, but who also knew that things tended to be serious once people started asking for the 10-blades. Neela really was in Florida, but he still just wanted Logan out of here.
"Pretty much," Logan said, his hands buried in his pockets. "That and a pair of pliers."
---
Whenever he'd been back in Westchester, Ray had made sure to stay the fuck away from Logan.
The first day they had met, Logan had ended up killing at least a dozen heavily armed Marines, then hitched a ride by clinging to a helicopter's base with the intention of killing some more. Everything about him made Ray's skin crawl. Too at ease about his mutant powers. Too willing to use them. Too foreign. Ray's therapist had found that last one so interesting, but even she had to admit that only a madman wouldn't wake up shaking after nightmares about people such as Logan.
Right now, Freddy Nightmare was limping.
"Don't tell me you broke your mutation," Ray said, irritated, once they were out of the ambulance bay, throwing multiple looks back to make sure that Sam and Malik, outside on their break, were safely out of hearing range.
Logan sniffed the air, ridiculously at home in the snow although he only wore a leather jacket, but openly on alert, as if ready to grab Ray and pull him out of the line of danger. "Kind of a present Stryker left behind when we blew up his base," he said. "Sleeper agent. That or his serum has fucked with her head. She's been following me around, calls herself Ambush." He snorted. "Spits bullets." He hissed when he tried to make it up the stairs to the El, incapable of bending his thigh at the hip. "One of them got stuck."
Ray had been reaching out to steady him, putting Logan's arm around his shoulder. He paused to give him an incredulous look. A train was rumbling past; he had to raise his voice. "I don't gather you could have led her somewhere else than Chicago, do I?" Crazy mutant stalker. Exactly the kind of thing he didn't want in his life. And judging by Logan's behavior, the stalker lady wasn't only still around but also really pissed.
"It's close to the border," Logan said, making another stairway with a grimace.
Ray grimaced, too. "If you want me to extract a bullet, we need to go back to the ER." There was nothing he'd hate more. "I guess we wouldn't need to disinfect the wound, but I'll still need drugs and someone to assist." Sam was the only nurse with surgical training they had, but maybe he could ask... Fuck, he didn't know who. Maybe Abby. "It's not just a matter of cutting you open, man. There are surgeons in there." He swallowed down the lump in his throat. "It's okay. They know what I am."
"Yeah? That working out for you so far?" Logan raised his eyebrows at him.
And Ray wasn't proud of it, but his skin crawled from the mere thought of bringing a mutant with a gunshot wound back into the ER. Pressing his lips together, he didn't answer.
"Shop style it is," Logan said. "I'll even clean away the blood once we're done."
---
There were things Ray hadn't ever pictured himself doing when he became a doctor.
"We need to make sure you'll stay still," he heard himself say. "You'd be administered drugs for that in surgery, actually. There's a pretty good change they'd take better than anesthesia," he added, because remembering Logan picking darts out of his shoulder in a mansion swarming with soldiers, he wasn't so sure that ordinary doses of anything would impress the man's healing factor. "They work in a different part of the brain."
"Yeah, they work better," Logan said. Leaning against the wall with his leg stretched out and watching Ray unpack the trauma kit he'd brought along, he looked slightly sick at the answer, making Ray wonder about the real reason the other man had opted against taking care of things at a real hospital.
Ray looked at the set of scalpels on the ground, his mind blank for a second before he managed to scan them in this different way - searching for the one that would get the job done fastest, without regards to reconstruction.
"I could still knock you out first," he reminded Logan doubtfully.
Logan gave him a look. "You're prepared to shoot me in the head?"
"I must have left my shotgun at work."
"Then don't bother, bub."
Running his hand through his hair and damn how it would stick up afterward, Ray sighed. Of course he was ready to help. But that didn't mean he liked it. He couldn't wait to tell Neela about his day. "Alright. Get out of your pants and slide down." He waited while Logan did so, the other man muttering an annoyed swearword when the motion required more work than it ordinarily should.
Grabbing Logan's shoulder with the left so that he could steady him, Ray put his knee on the other man's thigh to push it down in case he jerked reflexively. Reaching for the 11-blade, he had a loathsome look at the field of the future incision - somewhere in the gap between femoral head and pelvis joint. And it wasn't that he hadn't seen plenty of male genitalia in the ER, but Ray still avoided looking - because it was close enough to the incision line to make him break into sympathy hives. He was about to mangle a man's loin.
It's just another procedure, he reminded himself. He'll be as good as new in a minute.
"So," Logan said. "You plan on staying at that hospital for good?"
Ray took a deep breath, laying out the steps of the procedure in his head. "It depends on if they offer me an attending position," he said. "My contract is gonna run out in two months. The Professor bribed them into letting me stay that long, but they'll have plenty of excuses to get rid of me now." It was nothing he liked thinking about, but right now, he was somewhat distracted.
"They want proof that you're not gonna go berserk on them, huh?"
"Don't they ever," Ray answered. "I don't suppose you have any advice on how to make the humans trust the mutants, do you?"
When he'd gone back to Chicago, he'd counted on it being hard - the looks people would give him, the sense of betrayal, the knowledge that he was different from them, a mutant, a freak. Morris having to open and close his mouth sometimes before words came out. Sam's eyes burning into him with the ever same questions: Can we trust you? What are you doing to us? Moretti watching his every step. What Ray hadn't counted on had been how much it would hurt.
"Not exactly my area of expertise," Logan said with a snort.
Ray grimaced for what had to be the hundredth time that day. "Hold onto something," he said, and Logan buckled with a silent scream when the scalpel teared through muscle and ligaments, scratching the acetabulum and sliding through the gap of the joint. Sweat broke on Ray's forehead when he tried to hold the man down with his knee, focused on his work. Pressing his lips together, he slipped his hand inside to keep the cut from closing, searching for the bullet by scratching along bone with the blade. Ignoring Logan ramming his fist against the ground, Ray flicked his wrist and levered it out the moment he found it, peeling it out with a finger and hissing when he cut himself in there.
He jerked away. His jeans were soaked from the growing puddle of blood. The bullet rolled into a corner. Dropping the scalpel, he was breathing hard, watching Logan in fascinated horror. The other man's face was tight and ghostly pale when he struggled not to pass out, grunting against what had to be excruciating pain, garish cut already closing up.
Surreally, Ray had a vision of Pratt storming in and demanding to know what the fuck he was doing, and if he hadn't learned anything in med school.
Apparently not, Ray thought, trying to control his breath.
The spraying artery he'd nicked had painted a rainbow of blood across the shower curtain, thickly dripping to the ground in stark red clots.
---
Logan had kept true to his word. He'd cleaned the blood off the tiles. With actual cleaning products. For a moment there, Ray toyed with the idea of keeping quiet about the incident and telling Neela it had all been him, but who was he kidding about pulling that off.
Logan had also washed out Ray's jeans and his own bloody clothes in the sink with a bag of tricks about getting rid of blood stains that Ray, an expert on that himself like any ER doctor, really didn't want to know more about. Waiting for the laundry dryer to finish, the other man was sitting on the couch in boxers and the only shirt big enough for his biceps that Ray had been able to dig up, gratefully accepting a beer.
"So what are you gonna do about that Ambush person?" Ray asked, lounging in a chair with a beer of his own. "She's still lurking around somewhere out there, right? Doing..." He smirked in search for words. "Doing as stalkers do."
Swallowing down a gracious sip of his drink, Logan shrugged. "Now that I know what she smells like..." he said, leaving it hanging how little effort it would be to get rid of the problem. "I'll try and get her out in the open outside of town. I doubt she'll have a problem with it. It's easier to avoid the cops outside the city limits."
It was easier to get rid of a body outside of Chicago, too, Ray thought, shuddering.
"Isn't there any way to stop her without killing her?" he asked, in an unsteady voice even to his own ears, because he just had to ask. The police wasn't on either Logan's or this woman's side, he knew. As much as he hated it, but that was another thing he so despised about the existence of Logan: He'd left society behind. He was, like, way beyond it. It scared Ray out of his mind to think that it could happen to him.
That was probably another insight he should bring up in therapy.
"You've got some advice on how to do that?" Logan said dryly. It took Ray a moment to figure out that Logan was throwing his own words back at him. He smirked.
"Not exactly my area of expertise."
He'd offer a sarcastic comment instead of advice, but it was late in the day, night shift starting at County. He'd ripped a bullet out of a man's hip, transformed his bathroom into a slaughterhouse, and he was about to see that same man off to go and 'take care' of the woman who had shot it at him.
It was a mutant bullet. Biological. Maybe he should send it to Hank for his research.
Like, as a Christmas present.
They were alike, Logan and he, Ray thought, watching the other man down the rest of his beer and getting up to check on his clothes. That's what he disliked so much about him, nothing to do with what he'd done or what he was. Both of them had been made into something they didn't want to be, except Logan had fallen off the wagon, ending up outside of justice and the world for no fault of his own. He, Ray, would go back to work tomorrow, and call his girlfriend tonight, but it could easily have been the other way around. It made him sick to his stomach, thinking about it.
It made him sick to know that those commandos, like Stryker, could decide to come for him, too, experiment on him just because.
But he also knew he'd face Morris' fear again tomorrow and Moretti's distrust, and he'd think of pulling a bullet out of one of his own in his bathroom, trying to keep a blank face and working on. It was what he'd signed up for after all. It was his choice. He had to keep remembering that. He hadn't ended up like Logan yet, and he still had a choice.
The rest of it might start hurting less one day, too, if he kept that in mind.
"Thanks for the beer," Logan said, slipping into his jacket.
"Any time," Ray said without bothering to get up. "See you around."