(no subject)

[trustmeimadoctor]

WHO: Nat Stokes & Niko Kostopoulos.
WHEN: Earlier last week.
WHERE: Meagher Valley High School.
WHAT: Two former AP kids scavenging some chemistry/lab supplies!
WARNINGS: Rat jump scares, anxiety, nerding out.

"Hmm, AP Chemistry," Niko whispers, examining the dusty cover of one of the textbooks left behind. "We might be able to find some good stuff here."

He nudges open the classroom door with the business end of his fire axe, hanging back as the hinges let out an excruciating creeeeeeeeeeeeak. The silence hangs heavily in the air as they wait for anything to emerge from the classroom—fortunately, nothing does.

Niko looks to Nat, raising his eyebrows as though to say, Shall we?

She nods. We shall.

Meagher Valley Highschool has been on the receiving end of scavenging runs before, but never for this particular purpose: lab equipment retrieval, if the high school even had much of that to begin with.

There was something about an empty, dust covered classroom that made the whole situation all the more depressing, a reminder of a generation all but completely wiped out when they should have been complaining about test taking and worrying about their college applications between mooning over fleeting crushes.

“Pipettes!” Nat’s hushed exclamation seems out of place, but she grins as she spots a stand of the glass tubes against a far counter, racks and racks of them perched next to stacks of hot plates. “This might be Christmas for me.”

"Oooh, those are the nice ones! Someone hooked this teacher up," Niko agrees excitedly. "We're gonna make sure you have a good Christmas—you deserve it."

He carefully opens up a cabinet, and the gifts keep coming. "You must've been a very, very good girl this year, 'cause I got like, a half dozen unopened boxes of Kimwipes over here." Niko takes them out, one by one, and sets them down on the counter. When he comes across what appears to be a misplaced student notebook—complete with metal band logos scrawled in ballpoint pen across the cover—he quietly ignores it, not wanting to dampen the mood with the implication.

"I'm gonna guess you were an AP kid," Niko surmises instead.

“Like recognizing like,” Nat volleys back, smirking at him overtop of the bunsen burners she was examining by one of the stations. “I was an AP kid, mostly science and math. Found english to be a foreign language,” she admits, exhaling in a long burst as if remembering the horror of being forced to interpret A Midsummer Night’s Dream when she quite frankly did not give a shit about the motifs and illusions of dreams and reality. “What about you?”

"Me? An AP kid?" Niko scoffs jokingly, as though someone who'd been med school Valedictorian could have been anything but. He chuckles and admits, "Yeah, had to be competitive—Chem, Bio, Calc, Stats, Psych, English Comp, English Lit… you name it. I felt like I had to work twice as hard if I wanted to go head to head with the rich kids." He says this with more resignation than fondness. "You can probably guess how popular I was back then."

He opens another cabinet and lets out an impressed whistle. "Hey, do you already have a spectrophotometer?"

“No,” Nat’s eyebrows are in her hairline. What kind of high school had this been? “Next you’ll tell me they have a fully functioning automatic titrator,” which would be impossible but she sighs, wistful for a life she took for granted and millions of dollars in top of the line equipment at her fingertips.

“And I feel like you’re forgetting that I was one of those nerds,” she chastises as she rifles through one of the other storage cupboards, beakers lined up in orderly fashion. “So I bet you were very popular with our people. That charm? The hair,” she throws a grin over her shoulder, daring him to challenge her.

"I'll let you know if I find one—we've still got tons of cupboards to infiltrate," Niko says hopefully, setting the spectrophotometer aside so that they'd remember to take it.

He chuckles and confesses, "Yeah, I guess I was popular with the dorks—not that I can even picture you being a dork. Learned the charm from flirting with little old ladies for tips at the restaurant. Didn't really figure out proper hair care until I hit college, though—had like, a Bob Dylan thing going on, curls everywhere. You, though—you seem like you were probably born cool. Were you like, a leather jacket badass even back then? Or did that come later?"

Nat chuckles, rueful as she carefully begins to pack up some of the glass. “My sister would disagree with you. I did have a leather jacket in high school, but it was some thrift store find that was way too big for me. I always wore whatever I felt like, but if I was ever ‘cool’ it was definitely all the teenage self confidence rather than the clothes. I didn't graduate to something better until I nicked this from an ex girlfriend in Seattle.”

She eyes Niko’s healthy curls (even in an apocalypse, impressive!). “I used to have really long, thick curly hair,” she commiserates, can feel the phantom brush of it on her back. “An absolute mess I don’t think I ever got a handle on. I was in labs so much anyways that it just got pulled back.”

"Well, your ex had good taste, even though I'm sure she probably deserved the theft," Niko chuckles, popping open another cabinet to find some boxes of nitrile gloves and safety glasses—very useful stuff, he decides, putting them up with the rest of the stuff.

"I'm sure it could've been glorious—real pain in the ass though, true," he commiserates in turn. "It was easier to just shave it off when I did my residency than to try to stay on top of it. Buzzed hair, clean-shaven, the youthful light hadn't yet left my eyes… you wouldn't've recognized me."

Niko startles and whisks around as he catches sudden movement out of the corner of his eye. He swings his axe and just misses decapitating a fat rat—but not a zombified one!—scurrying across the classroom floor.


He heaves a sigh of relief. "At least my reaction time's still good."

Nat blinks between the axe embedded in the floor and the look in Niko’s eyes. “Damn, Arlo been giving you axe lessons? Looks like you’re slowly but surely turning full firefighter. We need to press pause though,” she braces her hands on her hips, hair a much more important conversation than sharp weapons. “You had a shaved head? I honestly can’t picture it, you’re at least 33% hair to me.”

Niko looks pleased, and is always happy to sing the praises of his friends. "Yeah, he has, actually! I've learned a lot from him. By the end of his course, maybe I'll have a chance of being a beefcake with a heart of gold, too."

He reaches up to ruffle his fluffy mop for effect. "Well, I wasn't bald. I was just very, very focused on becoming a good doctor. It grows back quickly. I'm gonna be fully grey soon though, so I sure hope the wizard look works for me."

Nat’s fingers automatically fly up to her own curly mop. “The wizard look will definitely work for you. Might make you more powerful even. For me?” She was 38 and somehow had completely escaped even a single thread of grey amidst all that black. “Mad scientist.” And proud of it.

"I can dream," Niko says hopefully, even as he feels himself growing older and more decrepit by the day—although perhaps that was more due to the lack of sleep and proper rest than anything.

"Mad Scientist is a great aesthetic to aspire to! Let's find you a lab coat! At this rate, you're probably gonna look twenty-five 'til you're eighty, though—like, damn. What's your secret?"

“Oh I synthesized the elixir of life of course,” she offers, blasé as she returns her attention to examining some of the containers of solvents that had been collecting dust on the bottom shelf. “If you want some, it’ll cost you merit. This has been a great find,” she cheers from where she’s squatting. “Might make ourselves a very pretty stockpile at the vet clinic. You see anything you might want to take for Prescott?”

"Nah, you should take it all. Prescott's still got stuff from when the military pulled out. And besides—maybe you'll be able to make us some ibuprofen someday," Niko says, using the axe to nudge open a closet in order to peer inside. "Or y'know. Maybe share some of that elixir of life with a sick old man. Oooh, we got…. Ewwww, dead rats in here. Gross." He slams the closet shut again and moves on.

"What're you gonna make first?" he asks instead.

“I think ibuprofen is a long ways out,” she apologizes, nose wrinkled in sympathy for both that and the rats. “That ether you need sounds like a good maiden voyage, do you have any other requests? What do you miss the most?”

Niko has to contemplate this for a moment—out of all the chemistry-based things he misses, it's hard to rank them in order of importance. "I miss being able to offer my patients the best relief that medical science has to offer. It sucks to just have to make do when I know that things used to be better. But since that's a tall order… think you could do anything for allergies? Even excluding the ones that'll kill me, it's tough out here for a city boy who's allergic to trees and grass and dust and bugs and pretty much everything else that lives out in the countryside. Selfishly, even a little less sneezing would make a big difference in my—and others', I'm sure—quality of life."

He finds a scale in a drawer and also sets it aside. Then, he looks to Nat again, "What about you? What do you miss?"

It’s a big question, because truly, what doesn’t she miss? “Oh we’d be here all day if I gave you that list, but honestly right now? It’s not even something I miss, but something I wished I’d done,” she gestures to her glasses, only needed in detail oriented moments like these, slightly crooked and smeared. “I really wished I’d gotten Lasik.”

She’s thoughtful though, adding to mental list she has in her head that’s divided by can do, hope to do, and not possible. Nat knows she’s a competent chemist, but there are limits to everything, including her own abilities, even if she has an attitude towards trying no matter what.

“You know, epinephrine is possible,” she keeps her focus on Niko, cleaning her glasses with one of the stray paper towel rolls they’d found. “Not synthesized lab made epinephrine really, but actual useable adrenaline from the adrenal gland. They were doing it in the 1890s from sheep and other animals. It’s possible, I can make it one day,” it’s a promise in fact.

Niko gives her a sympathetic nod. "Yeah, Lasik would have been killer. I'm still kicking myself for procrastinating," he agrees. Just one of many regrets that it's now too late for him to do anything about.

While he fully believes in Nat's abilities—she's a skilled scientist, and knows more than he does about chemistry—Niko is hesitant to get too optimistic, lest it jinx him somehow.

"I'm sure you could, although please don't go out of your way for li'l ol' me. I'd be happy enough with some Claritin for the sniffles. Besides, if I keel over dead, then you're stuck with a bunch of epinephrine, and then what?" he says, a touch wistfully. His usual hopeful facade falters for a moment, as the topic touches upon one of the many very real fears that constantly rattle around in the back of his brain.

The air in the room seems to change with Niko’s mood, even if briefly, and Nat pauses in her examination of a jug of bleach. “And then we’d have it in case someone else has an allergic reaction,” she says carefully, chewing at the inside of her cheek. “What is it?”

Niko shakes his head and lets out a nervous little laugh. "Oh, nothing, nothing. It's just that… like, I know I joke a lot about how I'll be dead any day now, but it's actually terrifying? Like, I think I've probably literally seen more people die than most people have—even before the whole apocalypse thing!—but I've also been near-death myself more than a lot of people—also even before this. Like, we're all so close to death at any given moment now, but… I don't know what I'm saying. Just that I'm painfully aware of it at all times, I guess, and I should probably quit joking about it… and yet… " He shrugs, making a But what can you do! face just to deflect some of the tension.

"Ain't no ICU if I go down and my expired epinephrine doesn't work out, and you haven't invented a replacement yet, but y'know, as the kids say, YOLO," Niko says cheerfully, sounding more than a little deranged in his efforts to keep it light. "I do appreciate the offer, though! Sorry to bring down the mood."

He strolls over to a locked cabinet and uses the axe to hack off a padlock, mostly as a distraction. "Got some fun chemicals in here!" he declares.

Yeah, Nat is not going to be easily distracted by this one. She doesn’t move from her spot at one of the stations, instead, she dusts off the top of one of the stools and takes a seat.

“Niko,” she urges, “no YOLO, come sit. That was a fucking lot and you Prescott folks…you do not need to keep trying to hold things together for the rest of us. Come on, let’s talk about it.”

"I'm sorry, I know it's a lot. That I'm a lot," Niko apologizes quickly, expression changing to one of defeat as he joins her in sitting on a lab stool. He sets the axe down on the counter and clasps his hands together nervously. "I just don't like to bother anyone. I don't wanna be any more of a liability than I already am."

He hasn't known Nat for very long, but she seems to him like someone who's the epitome of Having Her Shit Together. He worries about what she must think of him—falling asleep in her bar, blurting out his fears and insecurities on a scavenging run—he's a mess.

"Sorry to shatter any illusions you might've had about fearless Responders or whatever. I'm no Court or Arlo. They're the real heroes! I'm a middle-aged man with Imposter Syndrome. You're braver than I am! I'm sorry."

Nat reaches over and sets her hand on his, hoping it’s as reassuring as the tone of her voice because she’s not sure she has the right words for it. “Niko, you’re the Quad’s only trauma surgeon. You’re responsible for saving a number of lives here that no one else could have, you throw yourself into danger on the regular just to help others with zero thought to yourself. I really…don’t know where any of this is coming from because it isn’t based on any facts,” and that probably isn’t a helpful thing to say.

She clears her throat. “You’re not a lot, Niko. You’re a hero, you are brave.”

For a moment, Niko just looks at her, big brown puppy dog eyes wide. Generally, he tries his best not to put himself in a position of being the receiver of reassurance, even when he desperately needs it. While he knows, logically, that she is correct about his saving lives and putting himself in danger, he does not feel all that brave. Is it bravery to run into danger when the reason you're doing it is because you're scared something will happen to someone else if you let them do it? Is it bravery to work yourself half to death because you're scared you'll be abandoned the moment you show any vulnerability or become an inconvenience?

"Thank you," he manages finally, quietly, more subdued than usual. He takes a deep breath before asking, contemplatively, "Do you ever feel like you're just fake-it-til-you-make-it-ing yourself into a corner?"

She inhales deeply, the stool creaking as she leans back at the question. “No,” she answers honestly, opens her mouth to clarify before shutting it again, does it a few more times in an aborted attempt at articulating her thoughts before she laughs at her inability to. “Sorry, no I don’t, but it’s not because I feel like I always know what I’m doing. None of us do, we’re just making the best, informed choices we can and working to make sure it’s the best outcome. I don’t see it as faking it, you’re just trying, I’m just trying every day.”

She shrugs as she gives him a wry smile. “We’re scientists Niko, failure is a good thing…so long as it doesn’t come with a body count,” she amends before he can, chuckling. “The only way we can ever learn to do anything better is by fucking up a few times. So, I’m not worried about any corners, because none of us are stuck in one. And neither are you, but if you want to tell me what this corner looks like, I’m all ears.”

Niko admires her confidence, and wishes he felt the same; while he had faith in his professional skills, his interpersonal skills had always been a weak point. She was right, though—trying was all you could do, but that didn't lessen the fear of failure Niko had long carried with him, and that had only intensified now that the stakes were so much higher than they'd used to be.

He was well-aware that this was a him problem, though, and he wasn't about to anxiety spiral in front of his friend any more than he already had today.

"No, I'm good. But thank you. We should probably finish scoping out this place and head back before it starts getting dark," Niko says, hopping down off the stool and giving her what he hopes is a pair of reassuring finger guns. He's fine! Everything's fine!

They’re not the least bit convincing, but Nat knows when not to push. She supposes an abandoned science classroom where names are carved into the desks and homework is still etched into the board is haunting enough for now, lends itself too closely to examining their own fears and anxieties.

She stands, carefully not to let the stool scrape against the dirty floor. “Just say you’re afraid of the rats,” she teases as if to reset the mood. “Come help me find a box, we’ve hit beaker gold and if we drop any I may in fact cry.”