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Anders (crazycatman) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2015-05-22 08:48:00

Who: Anders and Van (Fenris)
When: Recently.
Where: Anders’ Clinic
What: Anders treats a late night patient.
Rating/Warnings: Gunshot wounds, all the doctory stitchy stuff that comes with that
Status: Complete



Anders had had a long day at work, and was looking forward to dinner with Tink. With the exception of Mandy the receptionist, the rest of the staff had gone home.

“Thank you for staying,” Anders said, as he walked her out of the clinic doors. “I appreciate all your help.”

“You don’t need to thank me, Anders,” Mandy said, smiling at him. “Don’t forget that those brownies are for Tink. I’ll be very upset if I find out that you ate them before they made it home to her.”

Anders couldn’t help but laugh at that. “Okay, okay,” he said. “I promise that they’ll make it back to her. I’ll see you tomorrow, Mandy.”

“See you tomorrow, Doctor,” Mandy said, and walked around the building toward the parking lot. Anders watched her go for a moment, before he turned back toward the clinic door and began to lock it.

~

Van watched the last of the clinic staff leave from his vantage point in the alley. So this is what I’ve been reduced to, lurking in alleys, stalking doctors to beg for help, Van thought bitterly. Still, this was his best option. The gunshot wound in his side was too serious not to get stitched up, and he couldn’t risk going to a hospital. Too many questions.

An entire country between him and his past, and things were still the same, it seemed.

Van waited until the girl was out of sight before leaving the shadows and approaching the doctor. He leaned against the building, trying to look nonchalant but probably just looking like he’d just been shot.

“I need your help.”

There was a moment, left over from getting ambushed by bandits and darkspawn around every corner no doubt, where Anders immediately opened himself to the Fade and turned to the man. But he was asking for help, so he relaxed and looked the man over. He had… pretty obviously been shot, or stabbed, or something.

There was very little change to his face when he caught sight of the wound, it really wouldn’t do well to have a doctor freaking out every time he saw a wound. He reached to his pocket for his phone. “I can call you an ambulance,” Anders said. “How long ago were you injured?”

“If I wanted an ambulance I would have called one,” Van bit out, his nerves frayed from what had been a long and rather unpleasant day. When he realised that he’d just snapped at the person whose help he needed, he sighed. “I… apologise. I can’t go to the hospital. I--” Van searched for an excuse that didn’t involve ‘I crossed some very powerful and dangerous people’ or ‘I may have been doing something that was, technically, highly illegal’. “I don’t have insurance.

“It happened a little while ago. It’s not too bad.” Van grunted, trying to hide the poorly timed stab of pain through his side. “Bullet missed all the vital parts.”

Anders looked at the man for a moment, trying to decide if he should call an ambulance anyway. Really, this wasn’t much different than that fact that he had offered some under-the-table healing to Leliana’s people as well. Apparently, he was just to become the doctor to people mixed up in some sort of illegal activity. He would have to make sure that this person wasn’t hurting innocent people, but that was a talk they could have later. Perhaps after he stopped bleeding on the sidewalk in front of the clinic.

“Alright,” Anders said, unlocking the clinic door and holding it open for the man. “Go into the first treatment room on the left. I don’t have the all supplies needed for something like this at the clinic, and I certainly don’t have any anesthesia here. It’s not going to be pleasant. Are you sure you don’t want me to call a hospital?”

“I’m sure we’ll be fine, doctor.” Van was secretly grateful the doctor held the door for him, but damned if he was going to show it. “First room on the left? Good.”

Van moved as quickly as he could to the indicated room, wanting to get settled before the doctor came in. He knew from past experience that gunshot wounds made climbing onto exam tables difficult, and he really didn’t think his pride could take the hit of being watched at such an awkward maneuver.

As Anders went to gather supplies from the rest of the clinic, he shot off a quick text to Tink to let her know he wouldn’t be coming by tonight after all. Then he grabbed a chunk of wood, found a scalpel, and pulled the local anesthetics out from the safe that he locked them (and the other drugs he kept in the clinic) in.

“I’m Doctor Anders,” he introduced himself (‘Anders’ might not have been his real first or last name, but it was how he introduced himself to all his patients) conversationally, when he walked into the treatment room. He headed over to the sink in the room to wash his hands. “What can I call you?”

He donned his face mask and gloves, and then went over to the patient to assess the wound.

Van hissed as he lifted his blood-encrusted shirt away from his skin. “Van.” He hissed again as the movement dislodged a clot and the entry wound began to bleed sluggishly. “My name is Van.” Once the fabric was away from the wound, he rolled the shirt up carefully, just high enough to expose the relevant area and no further.

He studied the young doctor as the doctor studied him. Blond, seemingly professional, though his introduction of ‘doctor’ plus his first name seemed a bit patronising. Probably felt it made him easier to relate to. Hell, maybe it did, for regular people. In any case, Van was aware he wasn’t in much of a position to judge anyone’s choice of name.

“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Van,” Anders said. He liked to think of himself as pretty good at the whole bedside manner thing. He looked at the wound, and was pleased to see that there was, in fact, an exit wound. “Oh, good, this isn’t so bad,” Anders said. He wouldn’t even need the scalpel or the piece of wood for Van to bite down on. He fetched some gauze, and placed it over the wound. “I’ll just have you place some pressure here. Are you aware of any allergies to local anesthetic? I’ll just use a little around the wound before I begin to stitch it up.”

Van obliged, holding the gauze firmly against the wound. The pressure alleviated some of the pain, and he relaxed a little.

"I have never had an allergic reaction before, no." Van bit down on the urge to tell this 'Doctor Anders' fellow to hurry up and stitch it up already. The man was being helpful, after all, and Van knew he wasn't generally a person who inspired such helpfulness. Better not to alienate this doctor.

“Good,” Anders said. He administered the anesthetic, though he didn't wait too long for it to take effect before he started with the stitches. He was quick, and his hand steady, and once he got the first couple of stitches started, he grabbed hold of the Fade. It wasn't easy doing stitches while at the same time attempting some minor healing magic, but he had been practicing multi-tasking, and he had done enough stitches that he didn't have to put too much thought into what he was doing. He had decided that it would probably be a little suspicious to completely stop what he was doing to just focus on the magic.

It was the first time he had tested out Elaine's pendant in a room that wasn't as brightly lit as St. Joseph's operating room, and he was a little worried that some of the glow of his healing magic would leak through, but he was relieved when it didn't. He didn't Heal too much, but he did Heal much of the deeper internal damage, leaving the superficial part of the wound.

Once he had finished stitching both the entrance and the exit wound, he taped some clean gauze to it, removed his gloves and his face mask, and gave Van a smile. "There, all fixed up," he said. "You won't want to do anything too strenuous for the next couple of days, but the wound really wasn't that bad. The stitches will dissolve themselves so you won't need to get them removed, and you should be as good as new in about a week or so."

The anaesthetic hadn’t completely started working when the doctor started stitching, but there was soon a faint tingling. Van supposed that meant the freezing was working. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling by any means, so he didn’t say anything.

Once Doctor Anders was finished, Van lowered his bloody shirt back into place. That one would have to be thrown out, and before Van got anywhere near the house he was living in. It wasn’t the sort of neighbourhood that would ignore a blood-stained brown guy walking about. He’d ditch the shirt in a dumpster or something and just wear his hoodie the rest of the way. Or buy a new shirt, if he had enough cash left after this to do so.

On that thought, Van dug around in his pants pocket and pulled out several crumpled twenty dollar bills. They’d managed to stay pretty much unbloodied, thank God for small favours. “How much do I owe you?” He held the handful of bills out to the doctor.

“You do remember that you came to a free clinic, right?” Anders asked, raising an eyebrow. Why was it that everyone who came to see Anders for his after hours services tried to offer him money?

Van mumbled something about it being ‘after hours’ before he shoved the bills back in his pocket. “Fine, don’t take it, then.” He eased himself down from the exam table.


“How are you feeling?” Anders asked, walking toward the front reception area, and noting the blood on the floor. Ugh, he was going to have to clean that up before he left. When he became a doctor he thought his days of mopping the floors of his work places would be over, but he supposed that’s what he got for helping people who wanted to stay under the radar. Once he made it to the front desk, he grabbed one of his business cards, and scrawled his phone number onto the back.

“This is my personal phone number. If anything goes wrong with the stitches, or you need anything else, just give me a call.”

“I feel like I just got shot,” Van replied, though when he thought about it, he didn’t actually feel like he’d just been shot. Perhaps the local anaesthetic was numbing some of the pain. He took the business card, promising he’d call if anything happened, and left the clinic.

First thing first, he ditched the bloody t-shirt in a dumpster in an alley a couple of blocks away, then headed back to what he couldn’t really think of as home, rather than ‘the house he was staying in’. A couple days rest seemed like a very good idea.