Anya
Giovanni returned about twenty minutes later, looking just as angry as he had before. “Your tech wouldn’t tell me what the CT showed.” He grumbled, arms crossed over his chest, as the nurse locked the bed back into place.
“Of course they didn’t,” I laughed, scanning my badge at the computer. “That’s not their job; it’s mine.”
Ezra chuckled from the small chair in the corner. “Don’t try to tell Doctor Volkov how to do her job, boss.” His smile was chipper. “Desmond has been training her. She’s got thick skin.”
“I don’t care,” he griped again, shifting uncomfortably in the bed. “Just tell me what it says, Doc?”
His CT lit up the screen in front of me, and while everything looked clear and safe, I had to run it by my attending. “Let me get Doctor Vaughn. He’ll be able to give you a sound answer.”
“Just give me the answer, Volkov.” The fire chief snapped, a little harsher than I had expected. I did my best not to flinch. I wasn’t that girl.
“No, and I apologize, Captain Marshall. But residents have to present to attendings.” I turned to him, noting that it wasn’t anger on his face. Just impatience. “Doctor Vaughn should confirm my thoughts for your safety. I’ll just be a moment.”
“That’s what you all say,” he called after me as I shut the curtain.
Desmond was just a few steps away, talking to Carter over a chart. I fiddled around at the nurses’ station while I waited for him to finish.
Once Carter walked away, Desmond turned to me. “Marshall back?” He held his hand out, waiting for the clipboard.
“Mhmm,” I nodded, handing the chart over. “I don’t see anything on the CT, but I’d feel better if you checked it over. Just to be on the safe side.”
“Trust your gut, kid.” He laughed, shaking his head. “You’ve got good instincts. If you don’t see anything, I trust you.”
“You don’t trust me when I ask you to sit down,” I replied, glancing up to meet his gaze for just a moment. “Or when you need a break and are too stubborn to listen to your body.”
Desmond’s mouth pulled into that crooked, infuriating half-smile he used whenever he knew perfectly well I had a point and intended to ignore it, anyway.
“That’s different,” he said, flipping through the chart as if the pages had offended him.
“Oh?” I asked, folding my arms.
“That’s me.”
I rolled my eyes, but the familiar warmth of the exchange still spread through my chest before I could stop it.
It was a dangerous sort of comfort — the easy rhythm we had fallen into over the last months, the one that lived entirely in glances and quiet comments and the constant awareness of each other that we both pretended not to notice.
I was opening my mouth to argue when the curtain to Marshall’s bay snapped open hard enough that the metal rings screeched along the track. “Doc.” The voice was deep and impatient and entirely unsurprised to find us standing outside the room as if we’d been waiting for him to do exactly this.
Giovanni Marshall stepped out of the bay like a man who had spent twenty minutes forcing himself to sit still and had finally decided that the experiment had run its course.
His hospital gown hung loose over broad shoulders that clearly had no business being contained by thin cotton, and the bandage at his temple had already spotted faintly through the gauze.
He looked irritated. But not mean. Just… finished with this.
“You haven’t been discharged yet,” I said automatically, already stepping toward him.
“I’ve got a warehouse full of people waiting on me,” he replied, running a hand over the back of his neck. “My scan’s clean. You said so yourself.”
“I said I didn’t see anything,” I corrected, trying to keep my voice steady even as the old reflex—the one that had been trained into me during my intern year — flared somewhere behind my ribs. The reflex that remembered being spoken over. Dismissed. Corrected in front of rooms full of people.
I swallowed it down. “That’s not the same thing, Captain Marshall.” I added.
Behind him, Ezra slowly pushed himself up from the chair in the corner, dragging a hand down his face like a man who had watched this exact scene unfold dozens of times and had long since lost patience for it. “Chief,” he said, voice flat with familiarity, “sit down.”
“I’m fine.”
“You said that before the CT.”
“And I was right.”
Desmond moved then. He didn’t rush. He didn’t raise his voice. He simply stepped around the end of the bed and into the space between Giovanni and the hallway, his presence alone enough to alter the shape of the room.
Even after months of working beside him, I still noticed that about Desmond — the way he seemed to take up space without trying.
Tall, broad, steady in a way that made people instinctively slow down around him.
“Marshall,” he said calmly, “give my resident two minutes.” The word resident still felt strange when it applied to me.
Giovanni exhaled sharply, clearly measuring his patience against whatever responsibility was waiting for him outside these walls. “Two minutes turns into twenty in places like this.”
“Then you’ll have spent twenty minutes not passing out on a job site,” Desmond replied evenly.
I watched Giovanni’s expression carefully then, searching for the anger I’d expected earlier. But it wasn’t anger. Not really.
The kind of urgency that lives in people whose job it is to run toward disasters while everyone else runs away.
For a moment it looked like he might actually sit back down. Then the monitor cable caught on his elbow. The movement was slight — barely more than a tug as he shifted his weight to step forward — but it was enough to throw off his balance by a fraction.
And in emergency medicine, fractions matter.
He swayed.
The reaction was instantaneous. Desmond stepped forward without hesitation, one hand catching Giovanni’s shoulder to steady him before the stumble could turn into a fall.
It was such a familiar movement — automatic, protective, instinctive. But my stomach dropped the second I saw the angle. The pivot forced Desmond’s weight sharply onto the prosthetic.
The foot slipped.
Just a little.
Just enough.
Time stretched in that awful, elastic way it sometimes does in the trauma bay when you realize something has already gone wrong, but your brain hasn’t caught up yet. “Des—”
He caught himself against the metal edge of the bed before he went down fully, but the movement dragged the frame across the lower curve of his residual limb where the socket met skin.
The sound he made was barely audible, but I felt it like a blade under my ribs. “I’m fine,” he said immediately, before anyone had even uttered a word.
But blood had already begun to seep through the edge of the liner.
Ezra swore quietly under his breath. Giovanni went completely still. For a man who commanded fire crews and collapsed buildings for a living, the look on his face in that moment was startlingly human. “Shit,” he said softly.
Desmond straightened immediately, his pride moving faster than his balance. “You didn’t—”
“Sit,” I said. The word came out before I could soften it.
All three of them turned toward me.
For a split second, the old version of myself — the one who used to flinch under Frank Patel’s voice, the one who second-guessed every command that left my mouth—tried to claw its way back into my chest.
But Desmond was bleeding.
And that voice didn’t get a say anymore. “Desmond,” I said again, quieter but firmer. “Sit.”
His jaw tightened. I could see the familiar flicker of resistance behind his eyes, the instinctive refusal to look vulnerable in a room full of people. Then he exhaled slowly and lowered himself onto the edge of the bed.
The relief that washed through me was so immediate it made my hands tremble for half a second before I forced them steady. Ezra leaned back against the counter, arms folded across his chest as he watched with the resigned patience of someone who had clearly expected this outcome from the beginning.
Giovanni didn’t move. “I’m sorry,” he said finally.
Desmond looked up at him, shaking his head. “It’s just a scratch.”
“That’s not the point.” Giovanni ran a hand over the back of his neck, the earlier frustration gone now, replaced by something heavier. “I know better than to argue with doctors in their own house,” he said. “And I damn sure know better than to let a friend take the hit for me.”
“You didn’t make me do anything,” Desmond replied.
“Still,” Giovanni said. “I’m sorry.”
I knelt in front of Desmond before the moment could stretch any further. The prosthetic latch clicked under my fingers with practiced familiarity. “Anya,” he murmured quietly.
“Don’t,” I said. The socket released. The liner peeled back easily in my hands.
The laceration wasn’t large. But it was open.
And the sight of fresh blood along a scar that had taken months to heal made something tight twist behind my ribs. “You tore the distal edge,” I said, forcing my voice to stay calm.
Desmond leaned back on his hands, watching me the way he always did when I was working—steady, patient, trusting in a way that still felt dangerously intimate.