Work Text:
12:40 am
All Norma Diaz wanted was to go home. That was all.
She rubbed at one temple with a disgruntled thumb. Why — why, Norma — did you agree to take the rest of Leon’s shift? Guilt, probably. Forty-eight years of Catholic guilt ran deep. Leon had a wife and a vomiting, flu-sick toddler at home and Norma had, what…an aging cocker spaniel named Sugar? Obviously she stayed. No way in hell she stood a chance against the guilt.
Mother Mary look kindly upon the merciful, Norma thought archly, crossing herself with an automatic brush of fingertips to lips.
Also, twenty-three hours in emergency hadn’t sounded so bad at the time. Now she was feeling every hour, every minute of the passing time with a stabbing pain in her Keds. Norma yearned for her apartment, her couch, her aging cocker spaniel.
To finally kick off her pink scrubs.
To pour a giant glass of box chardonnay.
To heat up the Spinach Chicken Supreme Lean Cuisine she’d been saving —
(this was only the second best kind of Lean Cuisine, but she died a little inside every time Brenda in admitting asked why Norma couldn’t just buy her favorite kind all the time, because to eat Deluxe Beef Lasagna every day would render it completely un-special, the point was the WAITING for life’s tiny pleasures, and she had explained this to Brenda SO MANY TIMES AND YET SHE ASKED)
— and slip on her cutoff sweatpants, the ones with the elastic band rolled over twice.
To watch her beloved Pacers game, snuggled against Sugar’s greying coat and the comforting round bulk of her side.
The thing sitting on the gurney in front of her was now the main obstacle to all that.
A giant, man-sized obstacle in black leather and nightmarish hair, elbow propped against one angular knee, fingers rubbing at his temple. The fingers, ringed in heavy silver. The knee, straining against a threadbare hole. The face, resplendent in purple and yellow, lips cracked and bloody. The chart in front of her: Eddie Munson - Concussion, Multiple lacerations, Periorbital hematoma, Assorted injuries due to physical altercation. Eddie Munson looked like a two-hour obstacle, at least.
Norma cursed silently and muttered a quick apology to Sugar.
She snapped a latex glove and the man’s head popped up. The reddish blonde woman next to him — Norma registered her for the first time — also startled, her folded hands jumping an inch in her lap. Pretty, shiny-lipped, dressed in a red denim halter top and a short black apron bristling with ballpoint pens. Tapping one strappy, platform-heeled sole impatiently. What, Norma wondered, in the ever-loving world are you doing with this one, princess? She scanned the two seated figures for any connecting detail. There must be something.
“Mister Munson.” Norma’s eyes flicked to the clipboard and back to the man in black. “Looks like a bad night.”
“You should see the other guy.” He grinned wide and sharp, displaying only slightly gory blood-tinged teeth.
At this the woman next to him gave the tiniest ladylike snort, burying it behind the back of her hand. “The other guy.” She shook her head.
Eddie then aimed his grin sideways at the waitress. It had dissolved slightly, Norma noticed, into a softer smile. He had one chipped canine. A scraggly wolf tooth. Eddie flapped one hand in her direction like, Proceed.
“I mean. Just. The other guy. Was a table.” The petite woman blinked quickly in between each word, but Norma noticed the left corner of her mouth twitched upwards in a smile.
Huh. Interesting.
There was maybe something to be said for black leather, she admitted. A certain appeal to the shredded denim for some girls — this was a girl, not exactly a woman, Norma revised her age downwards a bit to twenty or so. And the man, still mostly a boy. Somewhere between Carlo and Jimmy’s age, probably.
“Devastating. Absolutely brutal. Stripped of a hero’s glory — which I paid for in blood, okay —“
Eddie’s grin seemed permanent, even though his split lip oozed every time it widened. Norma rolled her eyes, an experienced mom of boys. All alike, honestly.
“You were very heroic. With the table.” The pretty waitress added this last part generously. Her blue eyes sparkled.
“Christ. The lady speaks. I am wounded.” He clutched his chest in a swoon. This time the waitress’s eyes rolled.
“You definitely are.” The girl turned toward Norma. “I just wanted to make sure he was all right, I think he has a concussion, they left him alone but he’s not supposed to be alone —“
“You’re Mister Munson’s…girlfriend? Family?” Norma had to admit she was still curious.
“I’m not his…I’m just Chrissy.”
“She’s Chrissy,” Eddie nodded, as if this had significance. Near Norma’s elbow, the machine monitoring Eddie’s blood pressure chirped faster during the words She’s Chrissy.
“I work at Ruthie’s, we have live music sometimes.”
Eddie waved his hand proudly. “I’m the sometimes music. My band. We rip apart people’s subconsciouses and tear a portal into other realms with the life-altering power of metal. It’s a whole thing.”
Chrissy clucked her tongue at him and continued. “He’s not supposed to be alone, right? He shouldn’t, um, fall asleep? The band brought him here, but then they all just took off —“
Norma briefly imagined Eddie deposited in the waiting room the way you’d dump someone in a cartoon wheelbarrow, gangly elbows and knees hanging out, a crown of scruffy bandages and chirping bluebirds circling his head.
But, Eddie insisted, the boys had only skittered off when Chrissy arrived five minutes later. “Dead fucking scared of her. Which, I mean…kind of fair.” He jerked a thumb sideways at her, coffee-black eyes wide. “Terrifying.”
Chrissy folded her arms, her mouth stiffening at the corners. “I just wanted to make sure.”
Her voice was soft and measured, but underneath it was something steelier, like someone used to shouting into a megaphone. Jimmy had brought home a cheerleader once who sounded just like that. Norma could imagine Chrissy’s curling strands gathered into a bouncy ponytail, one fist punching the air.
“Hmm. Lucky day for you, Mister Munson.” Norma clicked her penlight and held it at pupil level. “Let’s get a look in those baby browns.”
The concussion was mild, but obvious. Norma wondered if it explained the volume of his declarations or the little dopey glances he kept beaming at Chrissy, but decided it was probably just the general state of being Eddie Munson. She bent to make notes and when she straightened, the pairs of young knees were angled slightly towards each other. Almost touching.
Interesting.
“So, the concussion was sustained during an incident with…a table.”
“Ah, no. That was later.”
Chrissy ahem ’ed. “Tell her.”
“Okay, uh. Well, you know how it is at the end of a set. The last big solo, leave ‘em weeping on their knees and creaming their jeans —“
(honestly, was this just the way everyone talked now, was this the normal world and if so why did no one keep her updated? Did Carlo and Jimmy go around saying things about creaming jeans and if so — no, never mind, she didn’t need or WANT to know)
If Chrissy minded the language, her face didn’t give away anything at all. Her eyes were unreadable.
“Anyway. I’m tearing up the last couple of riffs and I get this idea — I mean, look, I knew they’d catch me so —“
“He got up on the bar and was doing some kind of…” Chrissy pinwheeled her arm around in a rockstar guitar motion. “And then he dove off. Backwards.”
“Backwards. From up on the bar?”
“Norma. It’s not as bad as it sounds.” Eddie tipped his shaggy head sideways.
“Nurse Diaz.”
“Nurse Diaz. They were always gonna catch me, it was a calculated stage gambit.”
“They dropped you, I assume.”
Eddie again looked affronted. “They caught me. And it was fucking awesome . You…saw it, right?”
Chrissy shook her head. “Just the very end part with the falling, I’m sorry. I was mixing for a customer who needed me to make a perfect Manhattan, whatever he thought that was.”
Eddie’s kicked-puppy expression suddenly dropped to study the floor tiles closely.
“Anyway, about five very non-sober people caught him —“
Eddie silently mouthed, AWESOME.
“— but his boot knocked into this guy’s Michelob on the bar and tipped it and he was, um…not very happy about that. As it turned out.”
“Big Jesse Ventura-looking guy. Extremely attached to that beer.”
“He stood up and took a swing at the one holding Eddie’s leg, and that’s when they all fell…”
Eddie cupped the back of his skull with one wide, ringed hand. “Mistakes were made.”
“And the bruised eye, that was when this large man punched you, too?” Norma felt her pen tapping the clipboard impatiently.
“Well. Uh, no.” The metalhead didn’t elaborate.
(all right, let’s keep this moving along, Diaz. Couch. Snuggly dog. Chardonnay and the Pacers.)
The patient had an egg-shaped purple eye socket bulging with hematoma, and a worrying yellowish hue to one sclera. Probably hurts like hell to smile, Norma diagnosed, but all he’s done is grin at that girl since he got in here. She almost scribbled this in her chart notes.
“How do you — OW — know so much about — FUCK — concussions, anyway?” Eddie asked Chrissy out of the corner of his mouth as Norma probed his zygomatic arch.
“Oh, cheer. In high school. Half the girls on my squad had one sometime or another.”
He gave a low whistle. “You know, if I had known in high school that cheerleaders were hardcore as fuck …”
“You would have, what? Dated one?” Chrissy’s tone was dry but amused.
Silence followed, an awkward five beats of it.
“That’s a cheekbone fracture,” Norma said briskly, as though none of this were taking place eight inches away from her. “Come on, Van Halen. We’re headed to x-ray.”
Eddie let himself be led while Chrissy stayed behind. “She didn’t see,” he murmured as they shuffled to radiology, directed either toward Norma or his boots, “she wasn’t even looking.”
Christ have mercy. This boy was going to jump off a stage every single night.
“Listen.” Norma sat him on the x-ray table and said this with great firmness, picturing her own twenty-something sons as she did. “If it’s meant to be, it’ll be. Don’t go breaking any more face bones over it.”
The boy’s grin developed slowly then all at once, splitting his face — and his lip, damn it, he needed a butterfly closure at the very least — into dimples once more. “Miss Norma, I’m genuinely touched.”
“Nurse Diaz.” She swatted his shoulder until he lay down and let himself be x-rayed.
Admit it, you had a thing for bad boys in black leather once upon a time, Norma thought as she deposited Eddie back in the room. Remember Brando? Steve McQueen, Robert Mitchum? Everybody probably has one or two of those. At the edge of the gurney, Chrissy sat folding her hands in her lap and recrossing her legs. Her eyes sparkled at Eddie, the earlier awkwardness fading.
Twenty minutes later, returning from making her rounds, Norma stood unnoticed in the doorway and heard them agree that yes cheerleading injuries were, in fact, extremely metal, and that they had gone to high school exactly one small town apart, and wasn’t that so amazing, Eddie? When she entered the room fully, they were comparing scars. Knees touching.
“That’s a battle wound. Rode my bike off a shallow pier chasing a kraken with Davey Mullins, when I was twelve.” Eddie brushed aside shaggy bangs and tapped a light mark on his forehead. When Chrissy traced it with her fingertip, Norma actually heard Eddie’s exhale from across the room.
Chrissy hiked her skirt a modest three inches above the knee and revealed a jagged Z-shaped scar.
“Let me guess, pep squad pyramid tumble? A three-cheerleader pileup?”
Chrissy’s nose crinkled in a smile. “This was, um, roller derby. Lead jammer for the Circle City Crushers, actually.” She gave a little half-wave. Eddie clutched his heart and mouthed fuuuuuuck .
Norma had never actually watched two people fall in love in real time before.
Chrissy pushed his leather sleeve away, then laughed and pulled him back in. Eddie bent in close like a jeweler squinting through a loupe to examine the scar on her thigh. He didn’t trace hers, not even with a single finger. When he swayed back again, Chrissy blushed and leaned into the gap.
Good boy, Norma realized. Letting her come to you. Despite his idiot exterior it was…anyway, it was nice. Respectful. Wherever they were right now, she hoped she’d raised her boys to be this wise.
“Roller derby queen. Should have seen that coming when you dropped the guy in the polo shirt, I guess.”
“No regrets,” Chrissy said airily, but winced and rubbed her elbow.
Eddie’s brow knitted. “Hey, you’re —” His eyes snapped towards Norma. “Uh. Medic!”
“ NURSE DIAZ. Let’s take a look, sweetheart.” Chrissy gently extended and rotated her arm, revealing a purpling bruise to the elbow. Her knuckles, when Norma turned over her palm, were red and embedded with small pieces of broken glass.
“Holy shit, Chrissy.”
“It’s not that bad, really. We can take a look at it after…”
Eddie leaned back and crossed his arms casually, shaking back long hair over his leather shoulders. “Nuh-uh. That’s your patient now, Medic Diaz.”
He wouldn’t budge. Not until Norma had identified and treated anything even resembling a bruise ( Chrissy Cunningham: Elbow contusion - blunt force ) or a scrape ( Metacarpal abrasion - foreign object removal ), despite mild protests from Chrissy that she was okay, really. For the first time since appearing in Norma’s ER — a dark, nightmarish shape in leather oozing blood and charisma — Eddie Munson was quiet. His face looked boyish and still.
Chrissy blushed again when her eyes met Eddie’s, but she didn’t look away.
Eddie looked like someone who’d sit bleeding in an ER a hundred times, just to have this.
(and maybe denying yourself the special thing WAS stupid, maybe nothing could actually BE made un-special by repetition, maybe when the special thing was right in front of you the only thing you could do was let it come to you, a hundred times or a thousand or however many more, maybe Brenda was right about Deluxe Beef Lasagna and a few other things — but if you thought for one second she’d admit any of this to GODDAMNED BRENDA in admitting you’d be very mistaken)
Norma actually considered making an excuse to leave the room, but the girl’s knuckles were full of filthy bar glass after all, and sepsis wasn’t sexy, so she reached for the saline.
“So, is brawling in public a roller derby thing, too?” Eddie gnawed an unsutured, still-bleeding lip and leaned directly into Norma’s light as she tweezed out the last slivers of glass. Again, she swatted his shoulder and pushed him backwards until she could see again. Honestly. Impossible enough to do detailed work with middle-aged eyes as it was, thanks very much.
“No! I just…got caught up. They were such jerks.”
“The big man? Jesse Ventura?” Norma heard herself ask, unable to bite back her curiosity. There were a few puzzle pieces missing from the night that she still wanted to find.
“No!” Chrissy yelped again. “No, he was actually just fine.”
“He’s this big Aussie named Clive, turned out to be pretty cool, actually. Just a huge, bald, hot-headed teddy bear.”
“Eddie bought him a beer and got him talking about AC/DC, and now they’re basically brothers.”
The problem, apparently, had been with someone completely different.
Eddie and the members of the band had settled in and got comfy at the table with Clive and his biker friends. Chrissy brought them round after round, and apparently paid them a little too much attention. Which after a while attracted a preppy young man in a polo shirt. He came steaming over from across the room, chest puffed righteously and upper lip in a do you know who my father is sneer.
“Mister Perfect Martini himself,” Chrissy added with a tiny snort.
Miss, the blond man had Prince Valiantly smirked, are these degenerates bothering you? He had literally said degenerates. His hand had circled her wrist and jerked backwards a little — probably by accident, Chrissy admitted, but she didn’t particularly like it — and that was all it took to get Clive on his feet.
OI FUCKSTICK!!! was what Clive had said — or something like it, Eddie recalled, looking like he couldn’t be more excited to use this phrase at the next possible opportunity — and in one motion he had separated Chrissy's arm from the preppy man’s grasp and pinned his Rolexed wrist to the table. When he gave an undignified squawk, three more polo shirts arrived to defend the first, the bandmates scrambled to their feet, and from then on everything got a bit…
“Blurry,” Eddie admitted.
A confusion of male arms and legs.
Punches.
(Eyewitnesses couldn’t agree on whether Eddie had managed to actually hit anyone.)
Broken pint glasses.
A pool cue.
A failed attempt with a chair.
Some undignified slapping.
Patrick Swayzee in Roadhouse , it probably was not.
Not far into the fight, the original stuffed polo shirt — Eddie’s jaw twitched at this — had caught and pulled Chrissy around the waist from behind.
“I think he thought he was saving me, but —“
“She went full Wonder Woman.” Eddie walked his fingers across her palm and, with surprising tenderness, turned it over to check her bandaged knuckles.
“Eddie and his friends didn't do anything wrong! It wasn’t fair. And he looked a little like a boyfriend I had in high school,” Chrissy muttered, eyes darkening. “Anyway. I took self-defense about five seconds after I started working at Ruthie’s, so…”
On the advice of her instructor, Chrissy had dropped into a crouch, then brought an elbow straight back into the meat of his neck and twisted herself away. Eddie frowned questioningly at Chrissy’s hand. Then I slipped, she mouthed in a whisper, miming her fist hitting the broken glass-strewn ground. He flinched.
“Anyway. Dude was so fucking stunned, he didn’t see the Clive Express on the tracks.”
The big Australian’s fist had connected with the blond man’s face, and that was it. Down like a wet sandbag. At which point Eddie had spun around on a booted heel to face what was left of the fight and —
“I mean come on, there were still three of them, I wasn’t gonna run away…”
— tripped instantly over the preppy man’s sprawled leg and flown into —
“The table.” Eddie groaned. Where he’d broken his face in three places and bruised his eye to the color and shininess of an eggplant. Without landing a single punch. Probably.
“The table,” Chrissy nodded simply. But she took his hand into her lap.
“That was some real Roadhouse shit, your thing. It was fucking awesome.” Eddie mumbled through puffy lips as Norma taped the split shut with a butterfly closure.
Chrissy bit her own lip. “Actually. I saw yours, too. The earlier thing. I just didn’t want to say.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“And?
She crinkled her nose and exhaled a laugh, shaking her head. “And it was really stupid. But fine, it was also kind of… fucking awesome.”
Blue eyes met and held brown ones.
The girl liked him — really, really liked him, Norma figured. Blood and all. Have the special thing already. It’s not going anywhere.
Norma straightened her glasses and brushed her hands together briskly. “All right. All patched up.” Two pairs of eyes swiveled in her direction and blinked unsurely as if in bright sunlight. Their fingertips hovered, almost touching, but neither made any move toward the door. Sweet merciful Christ, these lovebirds needed a push out of the nest.
It had been twenty-three hours, after all. A woman did hit her limit eventually.
“I don’t wanna see your broken head anywhere near my ER again, are we clear, Mister Munson?”
Eddie twitched a quick, two-fingered salute from his forehead with a grin. “Nurse Diaz.”
“And Miss Cunningham…” Keep this boy’s feet on the ground. “He’s probably going to need…watching for several hours. He shouldn’t be…alone. Understand?” Norma winked.
Chrissy’s eyes widened, and she reached sideways with her un-bandaged hand to take Eddie’s. Norma watched them walk down the exit hallway until they disappeared around the far corner, elbows bumping into each other as they went. She exhaled for a full twelve seconds.
Good.
Norma Diaz was going to go home. She was going to finally kick off her pink scrubs.
Pour a giant glass of box chardonnay.
Slip on her cutoff sweatpants, the ones with the elastic band rolled over twice.
Watch her Pacers game, snuggled against her beloved, aging cocker spaniel.
And she was going to heat up the Deluxe Beef Lasagna, the one she’d really been saving saving. She was going to enjoy every bite, right down to the last smear of sauce in the corner.
Tomorrow she was going to buy more.