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It was supposed to be a good day today, Dennis thought. Looking back on it, he had to laugh at himself for thinking it though.
‘Good day,’ the mere thought was hilarious now that it was the end of the day.
He also thought it would have been a good day on his first day on his emergency medicine rotation ten months ago, and look how that turned out with the Pittfest shooting.
He had thought that, with this being his first day as an actual doctor, things would be great. He had more freedom to work now (well only slightly, barely really) and he was working in the same department he had fallen in love with ten months ago (despite having that awful first day).
But today was also the fourth of July, and that should have been a major flag to Dennis that today wasn’t going to be easy or straightforward. Holidays never were easy, no matter if it was the Fourth of July, Christmas, or even Valentine’s Day. And it also didn’t matter which part of the hospital you were in, though the emergency department was probably always hit the worst. The ED was always hit the worst no matter which day it was.
But Dennis decided to stay positive. If he stayed positive, things would go great, he just had to keep thinking that. He just had to keep telling himself that.
And while things had started great, it was short-lived, very short-lived, winding up downright awful by the time they left that evening.
First Louie died, and boy was that unexpected.
Louie had been in and out of the ED for years now, had grown on pretty much everyone in some way. Some people more than others, on Dennis a lot.
Maybe it was due to his death being so sudden and unexpected that made it feel… feel worse. Sure in the half a dozen times he had treated Louie during his ED rotation, Louie hadn’t given Dennis his entire life story or anything, but they had got to talking about a lot of random things. At one point, Dennis had told him about what growing up on the farm was like. Dennis remembered that day clearly. It was the most homesick he had felt in years, even more than when he first moved out to his college dorm his freshman year of undergrad.
And now, he wouldn’t be seeing Louie again when he came into the Pitt. Dennis wondered how long it would take for everyone to forget about him, even if it was a morbid thought, he knew it happened to everyone at some point after they died, some people faster than others.
After that, things had started really picking up. One of the hospitals across town, Dennis blanked on the name, there were so many in this city, had to shut down its emergency department after what everyone said was a cyber attack, which meant they had to take their patients.
And to make it better, the big wigs upstairs running the hospital made them turn all of their systems off as a precaution to not get hacked. And boy, doing everything on paper and a whiteboard was an adjustment. It felt like… Dennis couldn’t even say, even in his high school they were doing a lot of work on computers, and he lived out in the boonies.
If it wasn;t for Joy somehow being able to memorize everything they had on the board though, Dennis could only imagine the amount of trouble they would have been thrown into. God, he couldn’t believe he had messed up taking that picture. No wonder Brendon never trusted him with taking pictures of them.
But of course that couldn’t be the worst thing that had happened that day, and it wasn’t by a longshot.
But somehow, for the last couple of months Trinity had gotten it into her head that whenever he wasn’t at work or at their apartment, he was helping the farm girl whose husband was brought in on the day of the Pittfest shooting and died a couple of days later.
Yes, he had gone out to that farm to help a couple of times. But that was only ever three times, and he hadn’t been out there since Thanksgiving when the family had insisted he join them after helping them in the fall. After that, two of Amy’s brothers came back and took over the majority of the work on the farm, everything was being taken care of out there and really, Dennis was only getting in the way. They had a big grain operation going on and Dennis had grown up on a dairy and poultry farm.
He wasn’t spending all of his free time at the farm though. Sure, he also wasn’t at Trinity’s apartment, in fact, he was rarely there nowadays considering how Brendon wanted to monopolize nearly all of Dennis’s free time (and Dennis certainly wasn’t complaining about Brendon doing that). But that didn’t stop Trinity from telling Robby that she thought he was there for some reason.
And if the day couldn’t get even more out of left field, Robby had pulled him aside in the breakroom to talk about the farm, or well, start to talk about the farm, somehow they wound up talking about Robby’s sabbatical road trip.
And then Robby had offered, no asked, no basically ordered Dennis to move into his apartment while he was gone. ‘It will give you and Santos some space, you know?’ Robby had said later that day. If only he had told people before that he was already planning on moving out of Trinity's place soon.
He and Brendon had just reached their five month mark. And well, he and Dennis were spending a lot of time around each other now. Just about whenever they were both off of work, Dennis would be at Brendon’s place. They hadn’t spent much time at his and Trinity’s apartment. In fact, Brendon hadn’t been to their apartment at all. Mostly because neither of them really wanted anyone to know they were dating yet. Brendon because he said it would ruin the image people had of him, even though Dennis told him that was ridiculous. People might think he was crazy for wanting to volunteer his time around the Shark, but no one would fear Brendon any less. And Dennis because, well he just liked keeping this thing their little secret.
Now at the end of the day, if someone like Robby or Dana demanded to know he would tell them. But he didn’t just want everyone in the hospital to know yet.
So he had been spending almost every night off at Brendon’s place. Half of his limited possessions were already at the older man’s house. It only made sense for him to think about moving in. And it was actually Brendon who asked him first to move in, saying that he wanted all of Dennis’s free time to himself.
And the tone in which Brendon had said it… that led to some of the best sex of his life.
So Dennis hadn’t mentioned any of this to Trinity yet, because if he mentioned it to her, she would have demanded to know where or who he was moving in with, not wanting him to be sleeping in an abandoned hospital wing again. And if he had told her that he was moving in with Brendon Park, his and Brendon’s little secret would not be a secret for even an hour longer.
Looking back on it, that entire conversation with Robby was just weird.
Sure, everyone knew Robby was going on his extended three month road trip. Many people had opinions on it, which wasn’t surprising when you heard he was doing a three month road trip on a motorcycle. But the way Robby had been talking to him about it in the breakroom, it almost sounded like Robby wasn’t planning on coming back.
Which was a weird and crazy thought.
But Dennis was hearing things that weren’t really there, he had to be, because otherwise…
No, he couldn’t think of it that way. Robby just wanted someone who could check in on his house from time to time and he must think that Dennis was getting tired of spending all of his time dancing around Trinity and Garcia having sex throughout the apartment. Robby was just giving Dennis an out.
It was nothing more than that, definitely nothing more than that.
But he didn’t have long to dwell on it, working down here, he never had long to dwell on anything, part of why he liked working down here so much.
Dennis thought the most hectic part of their day would be after the waterslide collapsed at the nearby waterpark. He hadn’t been able to see the news coverage of it, too many people were surrounding the TV in the breakroom when the news was covering it, but from what people were saying, it sounded like they were going to send dozens of people their way.
But they were only sent two patients.
A man with some sort of hand injury that had been screaming for his son/
And then more crazily, a woman who had her leg cut clean off.
Dennis had heard of amputation like this a couple of times, he’s only ever seen it with fingers here though, never someone coming in with a full leg cut off, especially one that was able to be reattached.
Dennis had been slightly distracted, focused on cleaning off the woman’s remaining leg when the ortho surgical consult was called down. He had missed someone saying that it was the Shark coming down to them, and hadn't thought of the possibility until Brendon was walking into the trauma room himself.
Brendon was the last person Dennis expected to be brought down from ortho.
If there was one thing that Dennis knew from all the months he had been working under and then dating Brendon, it was that the surgeon absolutely hated coming down here. Which is kind of ironic seeing as how Dennis was now working down here for the foreseeable future.
But he almost always would tell one of the other ortho doctors to come down here when they called for a consult, never the shark himself. Or well, almost never Dennis guessed.
Seeing the way Brendon had looked at him as he sat over the patient in the exam room, it sent him back to when he first met the man six months ago.
When Dennis had first started his rotation in ortho, he thought that Brendon, the head of orthopedics and orthopedic surgery, had hated him. There he had been, a little MS4, coming right up to ortho after a month in the ED, thinking things would be very similar. For someone who was still a med student, he had been given a lot of freedom down there to work on patients, and he had mistakenly assumed that it would be the same everywhere else in the hospital. Apparently you also couldn’t just jump straight into orthopedics the same way you could with emergency medicine. And thirdly, it didn’t help that every single mistake he made was directly in front of Dr. Brendon Park.
By the end of his first week up there, he hadn’t had anything he could consider a ‘win’ in front of the man, and it felt like whenever Park looked in his direction, he saw him the same way he saw a fly that had somehow got inside his house and wouldn’t leave. He never looked at him for information on a patient or asked what he thought the next step would be.
But then, during his third week in orthopedics, something, something that Dennis didn’t know, had caused the way Brendon looked at him to shift. It didn’t start with much, just him occasionally sparing Dennis a glance. Then Brendon started to ask him questions when he briefed patients, actually listening to him.
Dennis hadn’t thought much of it, to be honest, figuring he had finally been around the section enough for Park to deign him worthy of his attention. It wasn’t until one of the third year ortho residents said Park didn’t even pay that much attention to her that he began to think it was a bit weird.
It wasn’t even a week after he had been rotated from orthopedics to cardio that Brendon had cornered Dennis in an empty hallway, cutting straight to the point like he always did by asking, no, telling Dennis, “Tomorrow, seven thirty, the bar across the street.”
Dennis froze, looking at Brendon with large and wide eyes. “What?” he asked.
“I’ve seen the way you’ve been looking at me,” Brendon said. “And I’m sure you haven’t missed the way I’ve been looking at you.”
Dennis had to think back on that for a moment. The way he had been looking at Park? And the way Park had been looking at him? Sure, Dennis hadn’t missed the way the attending was looking at him during his last two weeks in ortho, but… was that supposed to be Park flirting with him?!
“What do you say?” Brendon asked him when Dennis hadn’t said anything after a long moment.
“Um… sure,” Dennis said.
Brendon had given him a smile then… a fucking smile! “Cute,” he said.
As Brendon nodded and turned around, Dennis was left standing there, having no idea at the time what he had been signing up for. Sure, he had gone on the occasional date here and there ever since he was fifteen, but those were all with girls, never men.
Why the fuck did he just say ‘yes’ like that?
As Dennis walked into the bar after the end of his shift the next day, everything inside of him was telling him to just stop and turn around, to go home, it wasn’t like saying ‘yes’ meant he would lose his job if he didn’t show up here tonight. But still, there was some sort of pull that he couldn’t name that had Dennis continue to walk down the street and into the bar.
He prayed that as soon as he walked inside someone would recognize him and pull them over to their table. But as he opened the door and walked inside, he had to curse. He had been in this bar a couple of times before after work, usually only on a Friday or Saturday night, when it was always super crowded and busy. Tonight though, a Tuesday in the middle of February? There were less than ten people in here. Three sitting at the bar, the two bartenders behind it, two couples sitting at two tables further inside, and then there was the man himself, Brendon Park walking towards him.
And well… looked like he was stuck here now.
The night ended up going better than Dennis had feared, a lot better in fact.
When Dennis had sat down across the table from Brendon, a thought popped into his head that maybe this wasn’t a date at all, Brendon hadn’t actually used that word after all. Maybe this was something like Brendon wanting to talk him into going into orthopedics. Sure, Dennis didn’t have big muscles like most of the surgeons up there, but he spent his entire childhood and adolescence working on a farm, he had muscles where it mattered.
But no, two minutes later, Dennis realized that wasn’t what this was about. This meeting was in fact a date. But weirdly by then, Dennis didn’t mind it. He quickly realized that Brendon was different outside of the hospital than inside of it, and weirdly, he didn’t mind it.
A week later, Brendon took him on a second date to a restaurant a couple blocks down the street from the main entrance of the hospital. And a week after that, Brendon invited Dennis back to his place, apparently in another surprise, Brendon quite liked cooking, and eating his food, it was some of the best food Dennis had eaten in a long while.
And then things went to Brendon’s bedroom.
Before that night, Dennis had been a complete virgin, not having had sex with any women, and definitely not men. It really wasn’t that surprising when you looked at his family background, but it also wasn’t anything that he was rushing to fix like some of the kids he knew from his town who moved away from under their parents’ thumbs.
Sure, he knew how everything worked logistically when it came to sex, he was training to become a doctor after all, but he never would have imagined what it actually felt like… what it made him feel like.
Especially with a man like Brendon Park, eye opening was putting it lightly.
When Brendon had asked him a week later if he wanted this to be an exclusive thing, Dennis had the words out of his mouth saying yes before Brendon could even finish the question.
With all of his interactions working with and around the man in the ortho department, actually dating Brendon Park was a completely different experience, Dennis quickly realized. It was almost like the Dr. Park at work and the Brendon outside of the hospital were two completely different people.
Where as Dr. Park never showed any emotion beyond cold indifference and vague interest in complex cases, Brendon never stopped smiling at just about everything Dennis said. And it was a shame really, Brendon had a very nice smile.
Dr. Park was someone who got annoyed at people who made mistakes, Brendon would just smile and shake his head fondly when Dennis spilled his third drink of the day onto the carpet.
Dr. Park was a surgeon who never hesitated, Brendon was someone who got flustered and nervous with his words whenever he tried to ask if they should take their relationship to the next stage.
And then there were the things Dennis would have never expected from the man.
For one thing, no matter how much Dennis told him to stop and that it wasn’t needed, Brendon loved spoiling him. Dennis didn’t know why he always did this, some of the ways were simple, like making sure his pantry was filled with all of Dennis’s favorite snacks, other times Brendon would notice that his shoes were getting a bit on the worn side and buying him a new pair. It wasn’t like Dennis had ever told Brendon of his money problems before all of this, at least he couldn’t remember telling him. Maybe Brendon just assumed he was low on money being in med school? He hoped it was anyway.
Brendon Park was also a very possessive man, Dennis had learned. And Dennis had no problems with that, he liked how Brendon was possessive. It was one of Brendon’s personality traits that Dennis liked the most.
But it was a little hilarious how Brendon tried to show he was off limits to people in the hospital while at the same time keeping their relationship a secret.
Each time Dennis came into a shift wearing one of Brendon’s T-shirts or jackets, he was sure someone was going to ask him about it. Each time Brendon left a snack or drink in the breakroom for him, Dennis was sure someone was going to ask where he got it from. But it never happened.
And now, five, almost six months after they started dating, they finally ran into each other while working on the same patient again.
Brendon had come into the room just like he did every examination room, with a one track mind fully fixated on the patient and what he needed to do to fix them. That didn’t surprise him, Dennis had seen on more occasions than he could count what Brendon looked like at work. Fully focused, not wanting to entertain any bullshit or small talk.
When he wasn’t on the side of one of Brendon’s barbs that weren’t really all that negative, he thought the man was really hot. When he was receiving them though…
Granted, it was nothing compared to the disappointed comments Brendon would send his way that first couple of weeks in ortho. In fact, to everyone else, they probably wouldn’t even see what Brendon said as anything abnormal or wrong. And maybe Dennis was just overreacting - he was definitely overreacting to this, but Brendon hadn’t talked to him that way in months.
They could talk about it later, Dennis told himself after the patient was taken upstairs to surgery and Brendon with her. No, Dennis was just looking into things too deeply like he always did. It wasn’t important.
The rest of the day passed just as hectic as their first ten hours. And when their shift was extended, it almost had him flashing back to the day of Pittfest, when it felt as if he was never going to leave the hospital, even though back then he was still living in the abandoned wing.
He really had grown a lot in these last ten months, hadn’t he?
On the second floor of the hospital, right above the ED, there was a long hallway of mostly administrative offices on half the floor and the cafeteria, the optometry office, and a nice lobby looking place. In the lobby section, right behind the fancy looking fountain feature the hospital had that was broken and turned off half the time was a set of bathrooms hardly anyone went into. The perfect place to go and hide in for a couple of minutes when he needed a breather, because the bathrooms in the Pitt were always being walked in and out of.
Dennis took a deep breath as he splashed water on his face, trying to clear his thoughts for a second. He looked at his face in the mirror over the sink. God, he didn’t look this bad when he left this morning, Trinity would have told him if he did. He slowly let his breath out of his mouth as he leant down and splashed his face again.
Then behind him, Dennis heard the door to the bathroom open and footsteps come inside. He wiped off water remaining around his eyes and blinked them open, looking in the mirror to see Brendon standing on the opposite side of the bathroom. Out of everyone who might find him here, Brendon was the last person he thought would come in.
Dennis rubbed his hands on his pant legs to dry the remaining water off as he turned around.
“Den,” Brendon said, stepping up to him and doing that deep look into Dennis’s eyes that always made Dennis feel like he could read all of his thoughts. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“N- Nothing,” Dennis said. Brendon lifted an eyebrow, not believing him for a second. “It’s just… been a long day.”
“That’s saying a lot,” Brendon said, giving him a small smile. One of his soft ones that he would never let anyone else see. It was funny, Dennis was pretty sure he was the only person in this entire hospital who had seen Brendon smile. But these small soft ones were his favorite. “There’s something else?”
Dennis bit his lip, wanting to tell him what was wrong but not wanting to tell him at the same time. “When you came down to the Pitt today…” he started then paused. Brendon nodded, silently asking him to continue. “It was just… I know how you are at work, and after spending months with the outside of work you… it was unexpected.”
“God Den,” Brendon sighed, dropping his head just a fraction. “I’m so-”
“No, it’s alright,” Dennis said, cutting his apology off. “I’m fully aware of what you’re like when you’re working, spent almost three weeks before you even said anything to me. I just wasn’t even expecting you to be the one to come down. But it’s fine, really.”
Brendon looked into Dennis’s eyes for a long moment, before giving him a nod.
“Are you done downstairs?” Brendon asked.
“Yeah,” Dennis said, sighing as he rested his head against Brendon’s chest. “Thought the end of the day would never come.”
Honestly, in the last eight months he had been away from the Pitt, Dennis had completely forgotten how busy the palace could get.
Brendon slowly reached his hands up Dennis’s back, rubbing small circles into the sensitive spot between his shoulders. “At least your first day back was a bad one,” Brendon said softly. Dennis let out a small questioning hum. “Think about it, can’t get worse from here, can it?”
That caused Dennis to let out a small chuckle, most of it muffled from his face being pressed against Brendon’s clothes.
“How about you go get changed and then we get out of here?” Brendon asked when the laughs subsided.
Dennis looked down, just now realizing he was still in his scrubs. “Yeah sounds good, you’ll-”
“Get the car and meet you by the front entrance?” Brendon asked. “Yeah, we can make it a race,” he said as he tapped Dennis’s shoulder. “Now come on, get moving.”
Dennis laughed and shook his head as he left the bathroom and jogged downstairs, trying to make quick work of getting changed into his street clothes and throwing the set of scrubs into the dirty basket. Thankfully, no one tried to stop him as he left the locker room and ran to the front of the hospital.
And damn, somehow Brendon was still able to beat him, the car running and he waited for Dennis in the front loop right outside the hospital’s front entrance.
“How are you able to get through this place so quickly?” Dennis asked as he climbed into the passenger seat.
Brendon laughed. “I’ve been working here since you were in at least middle school, I know the hallways a lot better than you can hope to.”
Dennis pouted, mumbling something that Brendon couldn’t hear. The older man acted like that a lot, but Dennis knew there were only so many ways someone could take to get from point A to point B in this hospital. Brendon had to have some secret he was hiding from him. An unfair secret.
In less than fifteen minutes, Brendon was pulling up to his house. They got out and walked inside, and just like every time they stepped in through the front door of what he had to consider a very fancy house, Dennis was once again amazed that someone of Brendon’s wealth would want to be with him. Though he never brought up these doubts to the older man, they weren’t that deep for each other yet.
“You hungry?” Brendon asked as he stepped into the kitchen. “We still have the food from Wednesday.”
Dennis smiled as he followed after Brendon. “That baked ziti?” he asked, a large smile forming on his face. “Cuz if so, obviously yes.” God he was starving, he had barely gotten five full minutes to eat a snack all day.
And Brendon must have seen that somewhere on his face. “Did you even eat anything today?” he asked as he pulled the leftovers out of the fridge.
“I had a sandwich… and an apple,” Dennis said.
“Over fifteen hours?” Brendon asked, shaking his head.
Dennis pouted, leaning in and wrapping his arms around Brendon’s chest. “I tried to eat, but we were busy.”
“Aren’t you guys always busy down there?”
Dennis hummed, considering his answer. “A lot of the time, but not all the time,” he said.
Brendon gave him a fond smile and tilted his head over to press a kidd into Dennis’s curls. “Then on the days you go into work, I’m making you a large breakfast.”
Dennis deepened his pout. “I don’t like eating that early in the morning.”
“Well I don’t like when you come home near starving,” Brendon shot back. He pulled the now reheated food out of the microwave, passing Dennis his portion. “Now eat.”
Dennis took the bowl and a fork, starting to eat. “I’m not near starving,” he muttered.
“Sure you’re not,” Brendon said. “You’ve only eaten that entire bowl in less than three minutes.”
Dennis’s pout turned into a small glare. “Just because you’re right this one time doesn’t mean anything,” he said, putting the empty bowl in the sink and grabbing Brendon’s hand.
“Where are we going?” he asked as Dennis pulled him through the house.
“Upstairs,” Dennis said.
Brendon shook his head as he followed Dennis upstairs to the main bedroom. Once in there, Dennis pushed Brendon onto the bed, leaning over him as Brendon pulled him into a kiss.
A long and passionate kiss.
Brendon broke their kiss apart, breathing heavily as he regained his breath. “I kept telling you that you should have tried to match into ortho. You could be upstairs with me instead of downstairs with those hooligans,” he said.
Dennis rolled his eyes. “You would have hated me being up there after a week,” he said.
Brendon mock gasped. “I would not,” he said as he pulled Dennis down onto his chest and muttered into Dennis’s ear. “If you worked upstairs with me, it would mean that we’d have more time to do this.”
“We- We can’t do this at work!” Dennis nearly screamed.
“Not with that way of thinking,” Brendon said as he leant in and pressed a kiss to Dennis’s lips. Dennis hesitated for half a second before meeting him in the kiss and pressing back harder.
Brendon smiled into the kiss, wrapping his arms around Dennis’s shoulders and pulling him even further down so that Dennis collapsed on his chest.
Dennis moaned, a deep exhaustion mixed with wanting moan. They continued, Dennis reaching his hands up underneath Brendon’s T-shirt, while Brendon’s fingers curled into the hair on the back of his head.
After another long minute, they broke apart again, both panting. Dennis dropped his head on Brendon’s chest, more tired than when he left the hospital, but not enough to go to bed right now.
God, the day was catching up with him, and Dennis didn’t want it to yet. He could take another breather. Then they would take things further.
In the half a minute though that he rested his head on Brendon’s chest, his mind flashed back to today, and for some reason, he thought about probably the least important moment, that weird conversation with Robby.
“You know Robby offered me his apartment?” Dennis said as he laid with his head against Brendon’s chest.
“No?” Brendon said, raising his head off of the pillow to look down at Dennis’s curls. “What do you mean he offered you his apartment?”
“I’m sure you heard that he’s going on that three month sabbatical road trip thing? He wanted me to look after his place, stay in it or whatever,” Dennis explained.
Brendon was silent for a long moment, Dennis was almost scared to hear what the older man had to say about it when he spoke up again. “I heard a rumor that he was going on some sort of sabbatical,” Brendon said. “I guess that’s confirmed now. He wants you to watch his place though?” Brendon lifted an eyebrow.
Dennis nodded. “Yeah, I kind of got a weird feeling about it afterwards,” Dennis said, thinking the whole conversation over again. He shook his head though as he moved his arms to either side of Brendon and leaned over the older man. “But he doesn’t matter right now,” Dennis said, his eyes roving over Brendon’s chest.
“You’re exhausted," Brendon said as he looked into Dennis’s eyes.
Dennis pouted, looking up at Brendon with his pleading eyes, the ones he knew always managed to get Brendon to do whatever he wanted. “I still have enough energy to go further.”
Brendon rolled his eyes. “We both have shifts starting at 7 a.m. tomorrow,” he said. “And I know how bratty you can be when you’re running on less than five hours of sleep.”
“Am not,” Dennis said. He stared down Brendon for a moment, and when it was obvious he wasn’t going to be getting what he wanted tonight, he moved up to kneel on his knees. “I guess I should be going home then.”
“You don’t have to do that, I can drive you in tomorrow,” Brendon said, cutting off Dennis’s arguments for why he needed to go home. They did this almost every night. Dennis would say that he needed to get home before Trinity started worrying about him, despite it usually being around midnight and if she had cared enough she would already be worried about him by now, and Brendon would give him reasons to stay. It was something they had been doing since that first night Brendon had brought Dennis back to his house.
And Dennis always wound up staying over.
“If you drive me tomorrow, people will see us, you have a pretty memorable car. Then they’ll have ideas,” Dennis said.
Brendon rolled his eyes. “You think people pay way too much attention to the cars driving into the garage than people actually do.”
“You drive a bright yellow Jeep Wrangler!” Dennis said as he settled into his spot on the bed, head resting on Brendon's right chest. “Literally everyone knows which car is yours!”
Brendon reached over to his nightstand to turn the bedside lamp off. Then he turned his head and pressed a kiss right on Dennis’s hairline. “Go to sleep, Den.”
In the distance, Dennis could hear the sounds of straying fireworks being popped off nearby. He could only hope and pray that all of the resulting patients were discharged by the time he got to the Pitt tomorrow morning.