Work Text:
This is how Elenor saves Jackie's life.
--
O'Hara pushes the door open, paying little mind to the mousy intern or receptionist or God knows what that first alerted her to the problem. Some people have to pay for this kind of staff-wide obedience, and O'Hara isn't completely opposed to doing so if it comes up, but mostly, they know who she is. And they fear her appropriately, as do most of the serfs she meets. Oh, ha ha, so very feudal, and maybe O'Hara is a little bit on the edge of colonialism, but she's a goddamn giant leggy Brit in a world of sweatpants andCroc -clad Americans. If there has ever been a mandate for simply taking over a country, the horror she sees walking around the lobby is much more pressing than any of the gore in the O.R.
So when a child-sized intern-- she's decided it's an intern-- comes to her door and tells her that Jackie's locked herself in a room and there's no answer,O'Hara's first instinct is to be insulted that the intern is less frightened of her than of Jackie. That's just not fair. Ought to spend more time amongst the unwashed masses, terrifying them in person as Jackie does.
She doesn't expect, though, to find Jackie passed out on the floor with tiny vials of morphine scattered around her and her lips turning vaguely blue.
"Oh, for fuck's sake," O'Hara says, and she tries to make it out like she's furious with Jackie, but she really, really should have figured this out a long time ago. The intern is starting to run for it, but O'Hara catches her by the back of her scrubs with one beautifully manicured hand. "No, don't you even think about that. Go back upstairs and alert my team, have them back down here with a stomach pump andnaloxone hydrochloride, I don't care how much they bring, bring all of it, and if you say a word to anyone but my team, I will see you fired."
She must have snarled more than she thought because the intern sprints like all of Hell is after her. It's not.
Because all of Hell appears to be after Jackie, doesn't it? O'Hara drops to her knees and goes through all the motions, calculates how much morphine must have been swallowed, knows it was swallowed because there's no needle. Jackie's eyes are open, her pupils distant pinpricks in a distant galaxy. Breathing is minimal, just on this side of not even happening, but still, Jackie parts her lips and whispers, "Eddie knows now." Just as O'Hara begins to think she might have to scream, in comes her team.
If O'Hara has the rest of the hospital firmly under her thumb, her own team of hand-picked hospital staff is firmly in her grasp. They're well-trained, they're efficient, and they're incredibly discrete. She hadn't had the heart to risk them in hermaneuvering to get her mother into the hospital, but this is different. In this, she can use them as they're meant to be used, as fine and sharp instruments. They don't have to be told how delicate the situation is, even if the procedure is nothing more sophisticated than what goes on in the reduced-rate rehab clinics.
That's a relief, then, that she can step back and watch them work, blocking out the tiny window in the door so that no one can see inside. Privacy is one of the foundations on which O'Hara lives her life.
Unfortunately, not everyone lives that way.
There's a horrible, loud pounding at the door, and she knows in an instant who it is, and O'Hara takes a moment to steel herself, stiffen that upper lip before she goes out and says, "Hello, Doctor Cooper."
He's wide-eyed and sweaty and panting, and though she'd like to take it out on some sap that can be accused of telling him, she knows Coop is in disgusting, sloppy puppy love and probably keeps Jackie on his radar at all times. "Where's Jackie? Is Jackie okay? Someone said--"
"It's the flu, Coop," O'Hara says, carefully measuring her exasperation with some affection and familiarity, and that ought to settle him down. "She let herself get dehydrated and passed out. You know how Jacks is, works herself to the bone."
"Do you need some help here?" Coop asks, so obvious that it actually gives O'Hara a bit of a headache, really. She hates him in that moment, fucking detests the little man-boy who moons over Jackie like the woman doesn't already have enough to handle. It's hilarious, of course, that Jackie strings him along, yes, O'Hara thinks that, but it's all not quite fair either, and she sure as hell doesn't mean it's not fair to pretty boy Coop.
Instead of slapping him with her ring hand, O'Hara rearranges her features into those of concern. "If you could keep Zoey and Mo-Mo from coming down here, that would really be for the best. I don't want them panicking, and she's going to want to tear apart the first person she sees when she wakes up. You know," she says, stressing that last bit, pulling on that particular string, be it attached to Coop's heart or dick. "That's Jackie for you. She'll be just in a hot rage that anyone saw her weak for a moment."
There, and the truth will set you free. A few more carefully chosen facial expressions and she's got Coop scampering off to do her will.
"Doctor O'Hara," says the intern who set all of this in motion. "She's stable." As O'Hara turns, switching one persona to another, she decides the intern really isn't mousy, perse. She seems more like a sparrow that O'Hara's trapped under a glass bowl, ready to bang into the sides until she's stunned.
"Almost done, then," and O'Hara looks at the intern's name tag. "Madison. Good Lord, I don't know who names their child that. Stay here until I've come back."
She'll just take Jackie home with her.
--
There are nearly five thousand things to be done before O'Hara can finally sit down and properly glare at Jackie's sleeping form.
She has to call Kevin and tell him the story about the flu. She has to convince him that Jackie insisted on staying over to keep the girls from catching it. She has to say she slipping her a sedative, which Kevin accepts as the kind of necessity only a scary old British woman like herself could do to his whirlwind of a wife.
She has to talk on the phone with Grace for nearly fifteen minutes, assuring her that Casa O'Hara is in fact state of the art treatment.
She has to call down for food and threaten to get the place shut down on false charges of infestation and rudeness by waiters until they send a busboy to her with dinner. "Someone strapping, please," she says, and when the kid shows up, built like a fucking skyscraper and carrying their food, she gives him a fifty and Eddie's picture, which she's taken the liberty of lifting from its spot in his personnel folder. How helpful, really, of hospital administration to be so slow with that sort of thing. She tells the busboy to stay out of jail, but do what's necessary to ensure that Eddie pisses himself any time he even thinks about the hospital.
She has to undress Jackie, slowly peeling off her clothes and putting her into her own things. She has to force herself not to just throw Jackie's old clothes away and buy new ones.
She has to force herself not to linger on any of it, especially when she wets a washcloth in cool water and wipes away the antiseptic smell of hospital from Jackie's skin, or the chapped bits on Jackie's mouth.
She has to remember how this is her fault too, because here she is, the only person who knows all of Jackie, and she missed this.
Working so closely under the eyes of God and the saints, Elenor hardly ever feels the guilt that consumes her co-workers. It's not practical, productive, and it's not even fun.
But once she's done all she can do to pretend this is a normal night, Elenor puts on her nightclothes and climbs into bed with Jackie. She runs her fingers through Jackie's close-cropped hair. She lays down behind her and puts one arm over, taking her hand and feeling each finger like a bead on a rosary.
Instead of crying, she presses her nose into the back of Jackie's neck and thinks about how utterly irritated Jackie will be to wake up on fresh, clean sheets bought only yesterday for an ungodly amount of money, held by somebody who loves her.