The new F1s were, as expected, entirely incompetent. It was a Monday morning when they arrived with big smiles on their faces, practically falling over themselves to get on Jac's good side.
She'd done her best to give them a chance. For three entire hours, she'd answered their questions and she'd ignored their small mistakes, until Dr Walmsley managed to switch off a patient's heart monitor.
"Don't let me see you for the rest of your shift. You will report to Ms Petrenko and try not to kill anybody!" Jac bit out at the timid young woman, glaring at her sharply. "Understood?"
Having received a small, frightened nod of agreement, Jac headed for her office with a throbbing pain on her temple.
The other one, she couldn't remember his name, he seemed somewhat capable. One out of two wasn't terrible going, even if it was going to give her a hernia to try and run a ward with that moron on it.
Frieda briskly entered the office less than half an hour later with a face like thunder.
"Why do I get stuck with the useless one that you're trying to get rid of?" the Slav questioned, obviously somewhat embittered that she had been given such a horrendous babysitting task for the day.
"Because you're the only person left on the ward who won't tell her what a great job she's doing, and I am not about to risk getting in trouble with Ms Campbell again after last time, remember?" Jac retorted, reminding Frieda that there was absolutely nothing Jac couldn't do without holding that particular incident over her head.
Rolling her eyes, the registrar walked out of the room again without a word.
She had surgery at 3 and somehow, she'd been persuaded to let one of the new F1s observe. Luckily for her, it was a matter of personal choice who got picked so at least she didn't have to deal with Little Miss Imbecilic in her ear for an hour and a half.
"Wouldn't it be easier to insert the trunk at the connection the heart itself, rather than in the middle of the artery?" he had questioned with a furrowed brow, paying close attention to Jac's every move.
"No, it wouldn't, because that would restrict bypass function and mean that the entire body was starved of blood. She might come out of surgery with a more effectively functioning heart, but she'd be a vegetable with half a dozen failing organs."
What happened in medical schools these days? Did people just get drunk and mess around for 5 years instead of actually doing any work? Jac could've sworn she was never quite that stupid, even as a child.
He was subdued for the rest of the operation, speaking only when spoken to and trying to stay out of Jac's way as well as he could. It was clear to everybody in the room that she was in no mood to deal with his failures, and nobody could blame her when the other F1 of the day had already proved herself to be even worse.
Finally having finished, Jac left surgery and headed for her office where she took two paracetamol to try and calm the pounding in her head. Today truly wasn't going in her favour.
Though she wouldn't admit it to anybody who asked, she felt that it was made even worse by Fletch's absence. It was his day off and he was making the most of it and steering well clear of the hospital.
There was nothing for her to do for the rest of the shift now, apart from trying not to kill the F1s or let them kill anybody else. She put her feet up on the desk and leaned back in her chair, dialling Fletch's phone number and waiting for it to ring.
"Hello?" he answered casually, obviously having failed to look at his phone before answering.
"Hi," Jac responded easily. "You busy?"
"Jac! Nope, not busy, what's up?"
"Just need to hear about something other than the dreadful day I'm having, how's things?"
"Oh, nothing exciting. I got some washing done this afternoon, got around to fixing the lock on the bathroom door, Theo's taking a nap. What was so dreadful about your day?"
She scoffed at him, fully aware that his response to incompetence was to encourage improvement, positive reinforcements only.
For ten minutes, she regaled the terrible experience of her day with explicit detail. Even getting the chance to complain to somebody about it was cathartic, and Fletch had become vastly skilled in the art of listening to Jac complain.
"You want me to come in and see if I can't give them a motivational Fletch speech?" he offered wryly, feeling a little bad for her after the bad hand she'd been dealt with the new staff.
"No, it's fine. There's only a couple of hours left of the shift. I'll see you at home for dinner though, right?" Her tone had been entirely casual but as soon as she realised what she had said, she wished she could swallow her own tongue.
Her mind was running at 100mph, processing what she had just done and what her subconscious had just told her. He had just called Fletch's house 'home'.
"Yep, see you at 6 then," Fletch finished before hanging up the call and leaving Jac to existentialise in peace. I hadn't meant it, she told herself, it was just a slip of the tongue. A Freudian slip that told her precisely what her subconscious mind thought of Fletch and his house...home.
Whether she liked it or not, this was what she'd always wanted. A home to return to at the end of the day where she felt safe and loved and calm. Fletch's house was that for her, and it didn't matter whether she lived there or not. It was an undeniable truth.
Emma already tended to call his place home, she'd probably picked it from Theo and Ella but she said it nonetheless. The only thing that Emma valued in the Naylor household was a real bed, and Fletch had suggested a number of times that they put a real one in Ella's room, though Jac kept putting it off.
At the end of her shift, with her headache finally beginning to subside, Jac headed home.
