April Yang and Dick Grayson share deep-rooted connections to Gotham, even if they prefer not to give them much thought and keep their emotions to themselves. When Dick turns up in Devon City, where April works towards becoming a surgeon, she inevita...
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Devon Memorial was not a safe place to be on Saturdays.
Aside from the usuals—the aftermatches of brawls, the drunken individuals, or the simply unlucky ones—there were the criminals. Trying to somehow mix in with the crowd or pose as mildly intimidating. They chose to come in the mornings rather then the afternoons, assuming it would be easier to fly under the radar of freshly awoken nurses. This superficially harmless assumption was exactly the grave mistake they'd make, as for medical professionals there were no mornings or nights.
There were only the shifts.
Long ones, short ones, it didn't matter that much. At the end of the day, there was always something more important than sleep. Or eating.
April had been running high on her eighteen-hour shift when she was asked to cover the ER for a few minutes. These minutes led to hours and, well, now her shift was getting dangerously close to the twenty-four-hour line. This not being the first time she was being put in this situation, she knew better than to complain or try to get out of there before seven in the morning.
It proved fairly easy to sense that there was something seriously off with one man in particular. Granted, April had been on a lookout for these types of instances due to an acquainted detective giving her a tip on a possible case, but it wasn't that often she actually got to these men first. Usually there would be an attending briefing her about a potential criminal beforehand and then sending her to patch up their wounds, but this time she was all on her own. With everyone else busy after a major car-crash, April was left in a small emergency room, face to face with a serial killer that had a taste for women in their thirties.
She didn't want to ponder whether the three years which stood between her and his ideal murder age mattered in whether he wanted to kill her as well. As far as April knew, it was her with a near-lethal syringe tucked into her scrub-pants against a guy that couldn't walk straight.
"Are ye gon' take it out or what?" He rushed her once again whilst staring at his own stomach. April figured out it hurt like hell, mainly because he'd taped the wound with duck-tape and now the flesh was peeling off, but also because she did nothing to ease his pain.
She smiled innocently, sticking to her tactic of being sweet up until she ensured her own safety. For all she knew, he could be armed, and police officers storming into the room would not help her case if this man wanted to shoot her brains out. The reception nurse waited for a clear signal to let the officers in, but April needed to be sure.
"Right away, sir," she said and grabbed the bullet extractor. "Are we sure on the anaesthesia?"
"We're sure, sweetheart, don't you worry." His fist tightened as April's hand, along with the extractor, got closer to his stomach. "What pretty hair color you have," he said, nervous.
