harm/ coyfish

“Hey, did you get the x-ray back on your girl with the bike fall?” Frank looked over at Santos as he walked up to Central, finding her staring at a tablet.

She glanced up barely before looking right back, nodding a little. “Yeah, just got it. Fractured wrist, small stable. I was going to just put her in an immobilizer.”

Already she had pulled it up, pushing the screen his way to let him examine. Of course, he took it, nodding slightly.

“I agree, yeah. No need for the extra time a cast would bring.” He swapped it back around to her, the center of his face wanting to cinch suddenly. He didn’t grab on the string, letting it happen, the whole thing not lasting long enough to even interrupt his breathing.

Santos glanced over him, watching as he was grabbed into doing it a few more times before the gods of his brain were considered satisfied. At least there was no blood sacrifice this time around.

“Why do you do that?” She asked after a second, pulling up her labs for a different patient.

All that did was make him furrow his brows, not sure if she was teasing or genuinely forgot. “Well, Santos, I have this neurological condition that causes-“

“I know about that.” She sent him a half dead look, tilting her head after. “I mean that one. You scrunch up your nose, you do the eyebrows and everything.”

Ah, that made more sense, but it did make him shrug with a small chuckle. “No idea. I don’t really get to control what kind of tics I get. Sometimes they’re store bought, sometimes they’re made from scratch. I can adopt them from basically anything.”

That seemed to answer her question, nodding slowly with a small ‘huh’. “Can you get it from people you’re around?”

“Yeah, sure. Why?”

She shrugged plainly. “Because Mel does that expression all the time.”

To be honest, he didn’t really believe her.

He spent some time with Mel one on one, and while he wasn’t going to claim to be the most observant person ever, nose scrunches were a pretty common facial expression for people to make. He could’ve adopted it from anywhere, or none at all.

Hell, he pulled that face more often than he thought, hyperaware of it now that it was a tic, because of course he was.

It wasn’t really until later when he was talking with Mel did it click.

They’d just wrapped up a trauma, sent a thirty something woman off to surgery after a driver decided not to stop for a crosswalk. Fun.

“Hey, you did really good in there.” Frank pulled off his gloves after taking off his gown, nodding at her.

Mel looked up at him, eyes a little wide at the compliment. “Really?”

He nodded, certain with his words. “Oh yeah. You kept your cool the entire time, even when she started crashing. Good job, Doctor King.”

She smiled the way she always did when she got praise, a little small, a little embarrassed. The middle of her face scrunched up a little, and he felt it mirror near instantly on his own.

Huh.