#*wh

Jooheon, your partner, trots down the hallway, his shoulders slumped, and comes up to you, letting out a deep sign as he leans onto the desk. He has just made sure the patient got taken care of by one of the doctors and doesn’t seem too thrilled about waiting around for it.

“This old man…” he sighs again for emphasis and shakes his head, “what can I do?” It’s a rhetorical question. Nothing, there’s nothing to do when someone is too stubborn to take your word that they’re in no danger and you’ve been doing this job long enough to know there’s no use arguing. “Just promise me you won’t let me become an old grump, okay?”

“I don’t plan on knowing you that long,” you laugh, capping your pen and handing the finished paperwork to the nurse behind the desk. Truthfully, Jooheon is too sweet to ever become a scrooge. In his old age he’ll probably the much too happy grandpa handing out bird feed to all the children in the park and getting mistaken for a creep because there’s no way anyone is just that kind without ulterior motives.

“Hey!” Jooheon fakes outrage and watches you walk away from him towards the ambulance you share. “Gramps there just called me a taxi driver, can you at least be nice to me for a second?”

“Not in my job description, love.”

“Aish, what am I ever going to do with you?”

There are only a couple of people you really love sharing a shift with and Jooheon is one of them. He’s smart, capable, has great reflexes and somehow always manages to calm down screaming children, which pisses you off especially because more often than not it’s you the children are screaming because. You’re not great with children and one day you’ll have to accept that. Not today though; today you can tease him for being bad with old people.

Jooheon gets into the driver seat and waits. “Ten bucks the next call is the first drunk people call of the night.”

“I’m not going to bet on something I know I’ll lose, Jooheon,” you say. “Honestly, I’m surprised it’s almost 1AM and we haven’t had any yet.”

“Maybe people got a late start today.”

Just then the radio line rustles and the dispatcher voice breaks through, announcing the new call: partygoers fell through an old store front, leaving some cut up and bleeding. Jooheon swiftly answers back and switches on the engine.

“Damn, I could be 10 bucks richer right now.”

It takes five and a half minutes for you to get to the address in the old part of town, which is now mostly bars and clubs, and the scene looks pretty much as you expected it to. The entire store front is lying in hundreds of pieces on the ground, two guys and one girl with visible lacerations on their skin sitting on the edge of the sidewalk and another older man gesticulating frantically between his phone and the now shattered window — the owner, you expect. He doesn’t look too pleased. Jooheon parks the ambulance in front of them and you get out first.

“Oh thank god you’re finally here!” the owner cuts in front of you and you take a step back in surprise. “These hooligans completely ruined my store, they’re gonna pay for it! I’m gonna press charges, I’m gonna take it to court—”

“Sir, I’m sorry, but you need to call the police for that. Now, are you injured?”

“No. But my store!”

“I’m sorry, we’re medics,” you point back at the car, that says AMBULANCE in big bold letters; hard to miss. Frankly, you don’t really care about his store and unless he’s injured, it’s not your job to care either. “Please, call the police if you would like to report this.” He’s visibly irritated by you now, but doesn’t say anything else, thankfully.

Jooheon already has his gloves on when you get back to your task and you let out a disgruntled huff he understands too well as you slip yours on. Half of the battle doing this job is not losing your cool with people who don’t seem to grasp what it is you’re supposed to do. And that’s a lot of people from old man thinking you’re a taxi service to this guy thinking you’re the police to this one lady at the start of your shift who called you in to take her dog for a walk. It’s impossible not to become even a little bit of a misanthrope doing this job.

“We need to cleans the cuts, but doesn’t look like any of you need stitches,” Jooheon flashes his best dimpled smile to the three sitting on the curb.

The girl shoots up, wobbles quite badly on her feet and nearly falls over, but manages to catch her balance just in time. “I’m calling dibs on the cute doctor!” she says, with what you assume is her trying to put on her most charming smile, but ends up being a lopsided grimace because she’s drunk out of her wits. Jooheon doesn’t argue–it would be pointless to–he just takes her hand and guides her to the back of the ambulance where his kit is.

“I guess you two are stuck with me then,” you say looking at the two other guys. One of them starts giggling like mad and the other is about to fall asleep. None of them are complaining about pain, which is good.

“I’ll go first,” the giggling guy stands up, but gets vertigo and threatens to topple over without extra support.

“How about we don’t go anywhere?” You help him sit back down and he grins at you. A cute grin, you notice; factually, objectively he has a very cute smile and you noticed, nothing wrong about that. You make sure he’s steady before you grab your own kit and take out the gauze and disinfectant. For some reason, he keeps giggling every time you do something. “What’s your name?”

He stops giggling and hums. “Hoseok.”

“Hoseok,” you repeat, he grins at the sound of his name. “How did you manage to break that window?” You slowly dab the gauze over a bleeding cut on his forehead. It’s not a deep cut, but the blood streaking down his face makes him look like he’s been through hell.

“Dunno,” Hoseok does a full body shrug. “One second we were here, then we were there and there was this big crash.” He giggles again when you push hair away from his face for easier access to clean him up. There’s something very infectious about his induced child-like happiness and you wonder if he’s like this when not under the influence. “For what it’s worth I think you’re the cute doctor.”

The last sentence catches you off guard and a laugh escapes you. Hoseok seems proud of that because his lips curl up at the ends and you try to hide your own smile and focus on what you’re doing instead of how cute he is and despite the reek of alcohol emanating off his clothes. You put on the antibiotic cream over the cut and patch it up, moving to the next one. You can feel Hoseok’s eyes burning holes into you all the while, seemingly very taken with the way your hands move over all his bloody marks.

“You’re very cute when you’re focused,” he interrupts. “Your eyebrows do this furrowing thing. Cute. I like cute.”

He’s so drunk he can barely string together a sentence, you think, stop falling for it. You ignore him, choosing instead to try and finish him and move on to the other guy now lightly snoring next to you.

“Are all the doctors where you come from as pretty as you are?” he asks again, unbothered by the lack of replies. You purse your lips to try to hide a smile. You really want him to shut up. “I hope I get injured more often.”

“Please don’t!” you yelp. You really hope sober Hoseok knows better than to get himself hurt on purpose to score a date. Not that a date would ever be on the table, who mentioned anything about a date? “Okay, you’re done. Hoseok please promise me you’re not going to hurt yourself on purpose.”

“Oh, you’re very cute when you’re serious.”

You sigh. “Promise.”

“Okay,” Hoseok giggles again. “But I do want to see you again, you saved my life.”

“You weren’t in any life-threatening danger, Hoseok,” you say matter-of-factly as you wipe some blood off the other guy’s face. He’s only half conscious and largely ignoring you.

Jooheon shows up a few minutes later to check up on you just as you’re trying to keep second guy, whose name you don’t manage to find out, from going to sleep on the concrete.

“We should call a cab for them,” he tells you then turns to Hoseok. “Would you like us to call a cab to take you home?”

“Can’t we go in your car? I’ve always wanted to ride in an ambulance.”

“NO!” Jooheon blurts out and immediately realises he said it a few notches too high. The sting of being compared to a taxi just the previous hour must still hurt him. Hoseok flinches at the outright refusal and stares at you with pleading eyes. He låooks like a lost puppy and you have to remind yourself again he’s stupidly drunk and you’re on a call, you shouldn’t be flirting with a patient.

“Don’t look at me, he said no already.” You quickly put the last patch on sleeping guy and close the kit. For once, you would actually want to say yes and take him home, but you know that’s not going to happen tonight. Hoseok is still looking from you to Jooheon and back for several moments before you can’t take any more of his big brown eyes and decide to dial up a taxi for the three of them. They’ll have to deal with the police report when they’re sober, to the owner’s dismay and you can go on your way for the rest of the night.