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John Shen loved the idea of soulmates, something that always seemed to surprise people when the topic was brought up.
Ever since his mom first read him a storybook about two people finding their soulmates when he was three years old, all he wanted to do was find whoever was out there for him.
His parents were soulmates, both sets of his grandparents were soulmates. It only made sense that he would find his one day too.
Granted, when he told anyone this outside of his family, they looked at him with a small laugh.
“Really, isn’t that kind of childish to think at this age?”
“You don’t really think you’ll still find them, do you? Less than three percent of people do.”
“You’re thirty now and haven’t met them. Do you still think you’re going to?”
John did his best to put all of those comments out of his mind whenever he heard them. He was barely thirty, that was still young. He had more than enough time to find and make a life with his soulmate.
His soulmark appeared on his arm when he was twelve. At first, he didn’t know what it was, he had to look at it from a couple different angles in the mirror, but eventually the brownish black mark right below his shoulder started to look like something.
A shark to be specific. A silhouette of a tiger shark, he determined after a bit of researching.
May rolled her eyes when he showed it to her. “Of course you would get a shark,” she said. “Mine is a flower. Do you know how many people have flowers?”
John had shrugged his shoulders. “I take it not as many as the people that have sharks?”
That day was almost two decades ago now.
And now, he was at the point where he had completed his residency and started an attending position in the PTMC’s ED. He had been here for four months so far, and well… he kind of liked it here.
Everyone was certainly a character.
After switching off between days and nights for his first month in Pittsburgh, John determined that just like at the hospital he completed his residency at, he preferred the night shift.
Things were never boring, not that they were during the day shift, but nights had… a different kind of excitement.
Like this night shift, when they had two patients brought in with nearly identical soul marks.
Identical soul marks, while not impossible, weren’t all that common. Usually your soul mark had something to do with your soulmate’s personality or a special interest of theirs. But on occasion, when two people met young or had really similar personalities, their soulmarks were exactly the same.
Of course, the reason the two patients had been brought in had nothing to do with the soul marks themselves, with both marks being prominent on their forearms, it was certainly a conversation starter once the two were discharged.
“I have to know, Huckleberry, what does your soulmark look like?” he heard Santos ask from a couple feet away from him.
Whitaker rolled up his sleeve to show the inside of his right forearm. “My mark is a cat’s head. I have no idea what this means.”
“Are you sure that’s a cat, Huckleberry?” Santos asked as she peered over to look at his arm. “To me, that looks more like a chicken.”
“You’re not the first person who’s told me that,” Whitaker said as he rolled his sleeve back down. “But trust me, it’s a cat. I grew up with a whole bunch of chickens, I can’t stand them. No way do I want to deal with someone associated with chickens.”
“Whatever makes you feel better,” Santos said.
“Well what does your mark look like, Dr. Shen?” Whitaker asked, looking at him.
“Mine?” John asked as both Santos and Javadi also looked at him expectantly. “Well I’ll just show you.” He set his iced coffee down on the closest counter, then used his left hand to hike up the right sleeve of his scrub top and undershirt, showing the shark outline.
“Is that supposed to be a shark?” Whitaker asked as he leant in to get a closer look at the mark.
John nodded. “What else could it possibly be?” he asked.
“It could be like… a bat?” Trinity said. Whitaker gave her a weird look at hearing that. “Ok, not a bat then.”
“So, have you met your soulmate then, Dr. Shen?” Whitaker asked as John dropped his sleeve.
“Not yet,” Shen said. “Hope to one day.”
It would be great if that day could be soon, but at this point, he wasn’t holding his breath.
☕ ☕ ☕ ☕ ☕
Brendon Park never cared for soulmates. His younger sister had been near obsessed with them since she learned about them in elementary school, and through the amount of romance books and movies she consumed and talked about, Brendon felt he knew all that he needed to know about soulmates.
And from that knowledge, he determined that he didn’t care if he ever met his soulmate or not.
He knew that most people didn’t wind up with their soulmate long term, if they ever met them to begin with.
And even though their parents were soulmates, he knew from being raised by them that to have a healthy relationship with your soulmate required just as much work as having a healthy relationship with anyone else.
So yeah, if he met his soulmate then he met them. But he wasn’t going to go out actively looking for them, and if they met, he wouldn’t take two vague soulmarks as a reason to spend his entire life with them.
His soulmark had appeared on his skin an inch above his right hip when he was thirteen. At his first look, Brendon had no clue what he was looking at. A deep brown circular shape with some lines coming out of it.
He knew it had to be something, but no matter what angle he tried to look at it, he couldn’t make any sense of it.
So he went to the only person he knew who could, his younger sister.
Jenna hummed as she stared at it intensely. “I think it’s a cup of coffee,” she said.
Brendon turned around and looked at the mark in the mirror. “What?” he asked. “What are you talking about?”
Jenna poked the mark with her finger. “That’s the cup, and that’s the handle thing on the side. Then these lines above are like… steam coming up.”
Brendon narrowed his eyes as he studied it more. He supposed Jenna could be right. But whose soulmark was a cup of coffee?
“It has to be something else,” he muttered.
Jenna rolled her eyes as she stood up and walked to his bedroom door. “Says the guy who had to come to his sister for help deciphering it,” she said.
“Whatever,” Brendon muttered as she walked out. He had his entire life to figure out what the mark meant, and there was no way it was a cup of coffee. Something would make sense later. It wasn’t like he was going to meet his soulmate tomorrow or anything.
He wouldn’t meet them for another couple decades, and the day he met them, he wouldn’t even realize it.
The day had been like any other, or almost any other, until he had been called down to a consult in the ED at 8 a.m.
Whenever Brendon was called down to the ED, he just knew it was going to be a bad day. If he was the one going downstairs, that meant they were busy enough upstairs that no one else could go in his place. It also meant that he was going to have to fix whatever mistakes the ED doctors made, and they often made a lot of mistakes.
Knowing his luck, whoever the attending was today probably wanted to give the med students and interns a ‘learning opportunity’ and let them take the lead. He hated when Robby and Abbot did that. The kids always made stupid mistakes and Robby and Abbot always stopped him from tearing their heads off.
But as he walked through the main ED area to the trauma room, he didn’t see any sign of Robby or Abbot, and they weren’t in the trauma room either. He could only hope that meant they weren’t working today.
Walking into the trauma room, there were three doctors. He recognized two of them as residents, though he didn’t know their names, and then there was a new doctor. One he hadn’t seen down here before.
The man held himself calmly, a little too calmly compared to everyone else down here.
“What do we have here?” he asked when he knew that everyone in the room’s eyes were on him.
“Patient came in from an MVA,” one of the residents began to explain. “Multiple broken ribs, probably concussion though we haven’t taken up to CT yet. Compound fracture in lower left leg.”
During their entire explanation, Brendon tried to pay attention to them as he looked over the patient and their visible injuries. But every couple of seconds, he found himself glancing at the new doctor. The man hadn’t said anything yet, which could mean multiple things.
He hadn’t even spoken to this new doctor but already his entire attention was on him. And what did this mean?
“As soon as he gets the CT send him up to the OR,” he said to the residents, then stepped out of the room.
Brendon heard footsteps behind him as he stepped into the walkway. He turned around, seeing that the ED’s new doctor had followed him.
“You’re new here?” he asked the man.
“Hm?” the man looked up at him, seemingly distracted by something. “Oh yeah, I am, second week here,” he said, giving Brendon a smile.
Not only was this guy new, he was friendly, great.
“John Shen,” the man said as he held his hand out to Brendon to shake in an introduction.
“Brendon Park,” Brendon said as he shook Shen’s hand.
“How long have you been here?” Brendon asked as he looked Shen up and down. Getting a closer look at him, he looked slightly on the younger side, but not young enough to be an intern. But Brendon was sure he had never seen this man around the hospital before.
“About three months,” Shen said. “Just finished my residency up in Boston.”
So he was new then. “And you chose to come here?” Brendon asked.
Shen shrugged. “They had an opening here, and my parents live right outside the city. And Boston’s expensive, didn’t want to stay there any longer than I had to.”
As he was speaking Brendon couldn’t help but think that this man had a completely opposite personality than Robinovitch. Shen wasn’t incompetent, obviously not to have a job here, but Shen didn’t have the same sort of sense of urgency that all the other doctors down here had. Brendon had to wonder how long Shen was going to survive down here.
“Nice to meet you,” Brendon said as he was about to step away. “Hope to see you around again.”
He couldn’t say why exactly he had told the new doctor that at the end. From the expression of the nurse standing behind Shen, they obviously hadn’t expected Brendon to say something like that either. But as Brendon walked across the ED floor to head back upstairs, he had to think it was true, he wanted to see Shen around more.
Shen was just the sort of chaos Brendon wanted to see in this hospital.
🦈 🦈 🦈 🦈 🦈
John chewed on the straw of his iced coffee, the cup long since emptied, but he didn’t want to throw it away yet.
He needed another cup. But no where around here had any iced coffee, the cafe in the lobby upstairs would be closed until 6 a.m. and even if he could get a cup delivered, it was nearly midnight, there weren’t any Dunkins open right now.
He should have ordered a second drink before he came in. He could have poured it into one of the travel mugs his sister kept giving him for Christmas, it would have stayed cold enough in one of those.
He’ll have to remember that for his next shift.
Twenty minutes later, Shen walked out of Trauma 2, Shen knew this was going to be a long shift. It still wasn’t midnight yet and he had already had to deal with patients from five separate car accidents and judging by the weather outside, that wasn’t going to be the end of them coming in.
He covered his mouth in a yawn, something that wasn’t missed by Ellis.
“Yawning already?” she asked, smirking. “We’re just getting started here, you know?”
“I know,” he said around another yawn. He rubbed his eyes afterwards in an attempt to wake himself up more.
“You know we have some in the breakroom?” she said.
“That instant stuff?” Shen asked. “No way, I have standards.”
Ellis chuckled. “You drink a basic dunkin iced coffee? What standards are that?”
“They might not be much, but my standards still exist,” he argued back. “And one of those is that I don’t drink that instant stuff.”
Ellis let out a hum. “Well seeing as how you finished your dunkin already, I see you having a long night ahead of you,” she said as she turned around as walked away.
John let out a sigh. Why did she have to be right?
After stitching up a head laceration, John walked out of the patients room fully needing something to give him an energy boost. At this point, he would even be willing to reduce himself to getting one of those energy drinks out of the vending machine.
As he approached the breakroom, he saw the figure of the ortho surgeon he had met during his first week here standing outside the door, leaning against the wall.
“Park?” he said. Park, and thank God John was right when he guessed the man’s name, looked up at him. “What brings you down here?”
“Here,” Park said as he pushed the cup into John’s chest forcing him to raise his hands to hold it so it didn’t splash all over his scrubs.
John looked down at it, an iced coffee in one of the generic plastic cups with a lid you could find in most breakrooms in the hospital. “What is this?”
“A coffee,” Park said. “Hope it's the way you like it.”
“Did you make this?” John asked. Brendon nodded - ‘yes.’ Slowly, John brought the straw up to his lips and took a tentative sip. His eyes lit up as the liquid hit his tongue. “It’s amazing,” he said.
“Thanks,” Park said. “I have an espresso machine up in my office.”
“And you made something for me?” John asked. “We’ve only met like… once before.”
“You’ve been on my mind a lot lately,” Park said, as if that answered John’s question. It didn’t - at all. In fact, it only put more questions into John’s head.
“So, what brings you down here then?” John asked as he drank more of the coffee. And God, it was good. “I thought you worked days.”
“I’m just finished with an emergency surgery that came in this afternoon,” Park said.
John raised an eyebrow. “Must have been long. What? Six hours?”
Park nodded. “Reattachment of an arm, seven hours actually.”
“Like I said… complicated,” John said, raising his eyebrows. Watching the corners of Park’s lips, he could see the start of a smile forming there. John smiled.
“What are you smiling about?” Park asked, his lips falling back down to their natural slightly grumpy state.
“I got you to smile,” John said, leaning forward slightly and taking another long sip of the coffee. “Something tells me you don’t smile around here often.”
Park rolled his eyes and looked away from John. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said.
John hummed. “Sure, whatever you say.”
“I’m going to walk away now,” Park said as he turned his back to John. “Finally go home.”
“Sure, have a nice night,” John said as Park walked away. “See you soon.”
“That’s what you think,” Park said without looking back at him.
As Park finally walked away, hopefully to go home, the man must have been working over fifteen hours today, John turned around and came face to face with a wide eyed nurse looking at him like she had seen something unbelievable.
“Can I help you with something?” John asked her.
“That was Doctor Park? From ortho?” she said.
“Yeah, that was,” John said, confirming her question.
“And you were… joking with him?” she asked, saying it like Park making a joke was some sort of impossibility.
“Um… I guess so?” John asked, he didn’t really think Park had said a joke of any sort, but it definitely wasn’t a serious conversation.
“I didn’t know he could joke,” she said, in a slight daze as she gripped the tablets in her arms tighter and turned around.
John was left standing in the middle of the ED, completely confused as she walked away. Was Park some sort of guy who refused to talk to people or something?
John brought the coffee back up to his mouth and took another sip. If one thing was for sure, Park could make a damn good cup of coffee.
☕ ☕ ☕ ☕ ☕
Over the next couple of days, Brendon’s mind continued to be consumed by one John Shen.
Which, honestly, made no sense to him. He had met the man exactly twice. The first time when he was called down to the ED for that consult, the second time when he brought Shen that coffee.
Why did he make and bring Shen a coffee?
How did he know Shen even wanted a coffee?
It had to be because the man was an ED doc, they all survived off of caffeine, didn’t they?
He was going to stop thinking about it. He made the man a coffee and the man really liked it. There wasn’t anything more to it.
Brendon had no idea what it was about Shen that kept bringing the new attending to the front of his mind. There wasn’t anything particularly extraordinary about him job wise, except for the fact that he seemed to have the opposite personality of every other ED doctor Brendon had met before.
And why did he care about an ED doctor so much? They were usually the last people Brendon ever wanted to interact with around here.
Most days, he and Shen weren’t even working the same shift. Shen seemed to work exclusively night shifts for whatever strange reason, and he would never understand why some people down there voluntarily worked on the night shift.
Then again, after his run-ins with Robinovitch, Brendon could understand why.
Who would want to work with that man if they could help it? He was a walking mental health case on the best of days and an active suicide risk on his worst days.
But he didn’t care about Robinovitch, all he could think about for the last week was John Shen, and he had no idea why. It was infuriating.
It was a week after he had dropped off the coffee to Shen before he went home that Brendon ran into him again. He was heading down to the parking garage to go home, and it looked like Shen was just coming in to start his night shift.
“Ah, Park!” Shen called out to him when he was spotted.
Park stopped where he was walking out to his car, waiting for Shen to come up to him.
“I got something for you,” Shen said when he was a couple feet away.
Brendon raised an eyebrow. What did Shen mean by that?
Shen pulled out a small ziploc bag from his backpack and handed it to Brendon. Taking it, Brendon saw that there were…
“Cookies?” Brendon said.
John nodded. “Yeah, my sister’s in town. She’s a big baker, when I told her you gave me that awesome coffee last week she insisted that I repay the favor.”
“You didn't need to do this,” Brendon said. What he had done for Shen was a spur of the moment thing he was never going to be able to explain. He didn’t need Shen to ‘pay him back.’ In fact, he hated when people tried to do so.
“Oh, I know,” Shen said, a smile bright and clear on his face. “But I’m sure you know how younger sisters can be. Wait, do you have a sister? I shouldn’t just assume that.”
“I do,” Brendon said. “A younger one.” He had no idea why he was telling the other man this. Or why Shen had sought him out to deliver these. There were a lot of things regarding Shen that gave Brendon constant questions.
Shen hummed, his eyes lighting up as Brendon stood in front of him, like he wanted to hear more from Brendon. It confused Brendon, made no sense. A lot of things about Shen made no sense.
Yet still, Brendon couldn’t find it in himself to just walk past the younger man.
Something that he would never be able to explain kept drawing Brendon to Shen.
“A younger sister, we have that in common,” Shen said, then hummed. “I wonder what else we have in common?”
Brendon quirked an eyebrow upwards. “Any reason why you would want to know?” he asked.
Shen smirked. “I don’t really know how to describe it, but there’s something about you.”
Huh, so Brendon wasn’t the only one thinking along these lines…
Subconsciously, Brendon’s hand strayed to rest on his hip as he walked back to his car, rubbing his shirt right above where his soulmark was. An action that, as soon as Brendon realized it, he stopped.
He had noticed it a couple of times the past couple of weeks, whenever he was thinking about Shen, his hand would go down there.
He had no idea what it meant.
He didn’t want to know what it meant.
He didn’t want to know what it meant.
When he got to his car, he dropped his bag in the back seat and then got into the driver’s seat of the car. He looked down at his hand, the hand still holding the bag of cookies. Some form of chocolate chip, if he had to guess. He opened the bag and took one out. He wasn’t usually one for sweet foods, but he was curious as to why Shen made such a point to give him these.
He took a bite. It was good… really good.
What was he supposed to do about this now?
🦈 🦈 🦈 🦈 🦈
John sucked on the straw of his coffee cup, finding it once again, to be empty. Annoying.
But that also meant the night was slow enough that he had been able to drink all of it. He guessed that could be considered a good thing.
He tried to swirl the straw around the cup, trying to knock around the ice so that he could suck just a little bit more of the coffee out of it. He was having little success.
“That stuff is shit,” he heard a voice say behind him, one that sounded a lot like Park.
John turned around to see Park standing about ten feet down the hallway. He hummed. “What was that?” he asked, purposely bringing the straw up to his mouth again and sucking up the few drops of liquid left inside.
“What’s the higher percentage in that? Sugar or coffee?” Park asked as his eyes bore into the cup in John’s hands.
John shrugged. “Now it’s just ice,” he said. “So neither, sadly.”
Park held his hand out in between them then. “Give me your phone,” he said.
John blinked. “What?” he asked.
“Give me your phone,” Park repeated himself. “I’m going to put my number in it.”
“Oh,” John said. That makes sense. He quickly took it out of his pocket, unlocking the device and pulling up an entry for a new contact, he put it in Park’s hand. “Yeah, that would… be great?” Now that Park was typing his name and number into it, John had to wonder why Park had suddenly asked to do this.
“If you want something that's actually good and not that shit, text me,” Park said as he gave the phone back to John.
“Really?” John asked, a smirk growing on his face. “Even if it’s at two a.m.?”
Park stopped right in front of him, probably less than six inches away, but John was never that good at guessing distances. “I forgot you like to work the night shift exclusively,” he said.
Yeah, John knew that wasn’t true. “It’s when all the fun cases come in,” he said, wiggling his eyebrows. He watched as Park’s lips twitched. “Now, that’s definitely a smile,” John said.
Almost as soon as he heard John say that, his lips thinned back into that line he always wore. John pouted. “You know, you could smile more,” he said. “It might help you make some friends around here.”
“Who said I want friends around here?” Park asked.
John hummed. “Well, I consider us to be friends.”
“Do I have any choice in this friendship?”
“No.”
Park gave another smile at that, one ever so slightly bigger than the one thirty seconds ago, as well as a small laugh. “Good to know what you think of me,” he said.
John smiled. “Just so you know, some of my friends find me annoying,” he said.
Park raised an eyebrow. “Whose to say I don’t already find you annoying?” he asked.
“You probably wouldn’t be giving me your phone number if you did,” John said. “Or offering to buy me coffee.”
“You have a point there,” Park said as he adjusted the straps of his bag on his shoulder. “Well, I just finished up here.”
“It’s eleven,” John said. “You seem to be working later and later.”
“You might be right,” Park said. “But I can’t stick around much longer.”
John nodded as Park stepped away. “See you tomorrow morning?” he asked. “Bring me a coffee?”
Park shook his head, but there was still that smile on his face. “Sure,” he said.
John then turned around. There was Abbot, standing right around the corner of the hallway leading to the main ED area. “Were you watching all of that?” John asked as he closed his locker and walked towards the man.
“Only like… the last ten seconds,” Jack said. “Is there something going on between you and Park?”
John shrugged. “He makes me coffee from time to time,” he said. “And I’m trying to teach him how to have emotions.”
Jack’s eyes widened and his mouth hung open, staring at John with a look of disbelief, but he didn’t say anything. John shrugged as he walked past, he took a sip of his coffee, the one from Dunkin. Next time he should tell Park that the only way he would be able to stop drinking this stuff was if Park brought him more of the stuff from two weeks ago.
Jack shook his head as he started moving. “Only you could make friends with the Shark, John.”
“The shark?” John asked, stopping where he was walking.
Jack turned back to look at him. “Yeah, you’ve been here for what now? Four months? You haven’t heard that yet?”
John tried to think back to if he had heard anyone using the nickname. He thought he could recall hearing it a couple of times during his first week, but that was before he had met Park, he had put it completely out of his mind back then.
“Maybe I’ve heard it,” John muttered to himself. “I just never connected the two.”
Park the Shark…
He had to admit that it was a good rhyme.
But Park being a shark?
Try as he might, John couldn’t see it.
☕ ☕ ☕ ☕ ☕
When Brendon had given Shen his phone number, he had expected maybe the random ask for a coffee, it was what he had given Shen his number for, after all.
What he hadn’t expected was for Shen to be texting him at least twice a day, before he went in for his shift in the evening and when he had gotten off in the morning. And then on the days Shen wasn’t working, Brendon would receive more text messages from Shen than he could reasonably count.
These texts ranged from everything from a new TV show Shen discovered to random memes Shen found funny to restaurant recommendations and even more topics Brendon could keep track of.
Brendon responded to barely a third of the messages, but Shen kept sending them anyway.
If anyone else had been sending him this stuff, even his younger sister, Brendon would be annoyed. But with Shen, he found it weirdly… endearing.
Which was a weird thought.
Shen was a fully grown man in his thirties, he shouldn’t be finding the man endearing.
John Shen: Hey, have you ever been to that Greek place down the street from the hospital? I think it’s called The Basement or something?
It seemed John was asking for another recommendation. What for? Brendon wasn’t sure, he remembered the last time he ran into Shen the man had said his sister finally went back home to Boston. Either way though, Brendon knew what restaurant Shen was asking about, and he had never been there.
Brendon Park: You mean the Cellar?
Brendon Park: I’ve never been there.
He had thought that would be the end of it. That if Shen texted him back, it would be about something different. Maybe a dog he ran into at the park or something. So he had been surprised when he read the next message.
John Shen: Oh, well do you want to go there with me?
Brendon blinked, and had to read the message over a couple of times.
“What’re you looking at your phone so interested for?” he heard Garcia ask as she just walked out of an OR.
He shut his phone off and put it in his pocket. “Nothing,” he said.
Garcia raised an eyebrow. “That doesn’t look like nothing,” she said.
“It’s nothing you need to worry about,” he said as he walked down the hallway toward his office.
“Who said I’m worried about you?” he heard Garcia ask as she began walking after him.
“Why do you even care?” Brendon asked.
“Was it Shen you were texting?” Garcia asked. For just a nanosecond, Brendon’s expression shifted, and it wasn’t missed by Garcia. “So it was,” she said as the smirk on her face grew.
“How do you even know him?” he asked.
“Oh, he might work the night shift, but I know all of the doctors down there,” she said. “The real question should be, how do you know him… especially well enough for him to be texting you?”
He really wanted to get away from Garcia, but it seemed she wanted to follow him directly back to his office for whatever reason that he didn’t want to know.
“I just find it interesting,” she said. “To most people you won’t listen to them talk for ten seconds unless its about a patient, but you’ll read over a hundred messages from Shen.”
Reaching his office, Brendon walked inside and sat at his desk. “You’re looking into things that aren’t there,” he said.
“You know,” Garcia said as she leant against the door to his office. “You’ve been rubbing that soulmark of yours a lot lately.”
He raised an eyebrow. That wasn’t something that had been unnoticed to him the last couple of months. In fact, it had been slightly annoying him. But he didn’t know anyone else had picked up on it, especially Garcia.
Well, she was one of the only people around here who knew where his soulmark was, so of course she would notice it.
“What are you trying to get at?” he asked.
“Do you know what Shen’s soulmark is?” she asked.
“No,” Brendon said. “Why would I know that?” And how did she seem to know it?
Soulmarks, while most people didn’t go out of their way to cover them, with the expanse of the human body, most people’s just naturally ended up being covered by their clothing. Like his, like he assumed Shen’s to be given he hadn’t seen it yet.
“It’s on his shoulder,” Garcia said, goading him. He kept his face neutral as he turned to look at his computer, scrolling through his work emails. “It’s a shark,” Garcia added after a moment.
Brendon finally looked away from his monitor to look at Garcia. She had one of those scheming grins on her face, obviously wanting to spark some sort of reaction by telling him this. “What are you trying to say by telling me this?” Brendon asked.
“Who said I’m trying to get anything?” Garcia asked.
“Because you’re you,” Brendon said. “You’re always looking for something.”
Garcia only hummed. “Lewts just say that I’m tired of seeing you all alone,” she said.
Brendon rolled his eyes. “Well I don’t need you to be doing anything about my personal life,” he said.
🦈 🦈 🦈 🦈 🦈
Maybe he had taken things a step too far, John thought as he chewed his bottom lip, one of his nervous habits he had been trying to break himself out of ever since his sister had pointed it out to him in middle school.
While she had given him good advice back when they were kids, he didn’t know why he continued to listen to her nowadays, all she had given him was advice that got him put into increasingly awkward situations.
Like how she had told him to give Park those cookies. And now apparently asking Park to join him in checking out the Greek restaurant John had been eyeing for a couple of weeks now.
He reached a hand up to the shoulder his soulmark was on, giving that a rub, another nervous habit he had, one he noticed himself doing a lot more recently.
John didn’t get a response from Park that day, or the next day before he went in for his next shift. As he stood in front of his locker, he debated sending Park another message. Maybe to tell him to forget about it if he didn’t want to get a meal with him, maybe just forget that and send him one of the pictures of the dogs he took earlier.
They were right in the middle of a back and forth conversation when he had asked if Park wanted to go to the Greek place with him, and it had been silent from Park ever since.
Instead of sending a message, he tossed his phone in his locker before shutting it and walking out on the floor. He could figure out what to do about Park tomorrow morning.
The shift had proceeded as nearly all night shifts did, they had their fair share of drunks, car accident victims, colds and flus, and people falling into unfortunate accidents right before going to bed.
Every task and procedure flowed into one after another, so seamlessly that John didn’t really have any time to think about Park and the response that he was still waiting for.
At least not until he walked out of one patient’s room to see Park standing in the hallway, looking like he was waiting for him.
“Park,” John said. “What brings you here?”
Park held up one of those reusable coffee travel mugs to him. “I was running early this morning,” he said. “Figured I’d give you this.”
John’s eyes lit up as he took it in his hands. “Thanks,” he said as he brought it up to his lips and took a sip, wondering if this was the real reason Park had found him down here. It couldn’t be after he left him on read, right? “It’s amazing, like always.”
Park huffed, giving John a small smile. “How are you going to be able to go to sleep after drinking that?” he asked. John glanced at his watch. It was already nearing 6:30 a.m. Shift change was coming soon and he hadn’t realized it.
John shrugged. “It’s never stopped me before,” he said. “As soon as my head hits the pillow, I’ll be out. Don’t even need those black out curtains to block out the sun or anything.”
“I’m sorry I never responded,” Park then said, making John lift an eyebrow. “Your text. It wasn’t my intention to leave you hanging like that.”
John raised his eyebrows in surprise, not expecting that answer. “Then what did take you so long?” John asked. “I’m assuming it wasn’t just you being busy?”
Park shook his head. “No it wasn’t.”
John waited, hoping that Park would elaborate more. And after a moment, he did.
“I assume you know what my nickname is around here?” he asked.
John nodded. “Yeah, I just found out about it the other day. The shark, right?” Park nodded. “To be honest, I don’t really get it.”
“What’s not to get?” Park asked. “Apparently I look like a shark when I walk through the halls.”
“From what I’ve heard, people say you don’t like it,” John said.
“I pretend I don’t like it,” he said. “But I do.”
“Why’s that?” John asked.
“Who wouldn’t want to be told they look like a shark?”
John chuckled. “I guess that’s fair, Park the Shark.”
“Call me Brendon,” Park said.
John paused, looking at Park’s - Brendon’s face. He saw… something that he couldn’t name. “Brendon?” he said. Brendon nodded. “Well then, you can call me John.”
“John,” Brendon repeated.
“So Brendon,” John said. “What does your nickname have to do with anything.”
Brendon was silent for a moment, John could see him debating something in his eyes, but he had no way of knowing what.
“I heard that your soul mark is a shark,” Brendon said.
John froze for a second, not expecting that. “Yeah, it is,” he said. “Do you want to see it?”
Before Brendon could answer, John was already turning his shoulder to the man and lifting the sleeve of his scrub top and undershirt. “Here’s the little tiger shark,” John said, showing it off.
Brendon ran his finger over John’s mark, tracing the outline of the shark. As much as this could probably be seen as a rather intimate gesture, John did nothing to stop him.
“I think I get it now,” Brendon said.
“Get what?”
“What mine is.”
John’s eyes lit up. “What is yours?” he asked.
Brendon looked around, seeing no one especially close to them, he reached down to his right hip and moved the bottom of his shirt up slightly. “Never really figured out what it was, but that’s it,” he said.
John squatted slightly and craned his head to get a better look at the mark. He hummed lightly as he took it in. “Kind of looks like a cup of coffee,” he said as he gave a small chuckle.
Brendon resisted the urge to roll his eyes at hearing John say that. Whenever anyone else said that, he couldn’t believe it. Though when John said it…
Maybe he had been looking at it wrong his entire life.
“It’s funny, you know?” John asked as he stood back up. “It’s almost like we’re-”
He stopped himself. There was no way that they were- that they were soulmates, was there?
“Almost like we’re soulmates?” Brendon finished.
“Yeah,” John said, giving a small nod. “That would be crazy, wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t think so,” Brendon said. “What’s the saying, opposites attract?”
John let out a small laugh. “You think we're opposites?” he asked.
Brendon motioned to the ED, that somehow hadn’t caught on to the rather private conversation they were having out in the open. “Just ask any of them,” he said.
“Maybe later,” John said, smiling.
He couldn’t believe it. He found his soulmate. He had known the man for a couple months now, but was just now realizing they were soulmates.
It was kind of crazy.
“So… what happens next?” John asked.
“I was going to ask you that,” Brendon said as he looked down at John, giving him a gentle smile.
One that John couldn’t help but return. “I think we have all the time in the world, right?”
Brendon chuckled. “Well, maybe later, I have a surgery in an hour.”
“Fair enough,” John said.