#i don't know Where or at What Point nikolai might regain consciousness and/or if he would even end up in hospital in the first place but

[parameddic]

That, uh...

"TK." Captain Vega was on the ground still, waiting for TK to clear the dumpster wall so she could follow. TK jumped the rest of the distance into the blood and the garbage, beside the man he'd been spending nights with whenever they were both free and both in need for company. Nikolai was unconscious, wounds wrapped up in a way that made TK think amateur, his frame somehow seeming small in the thin fabric of his coat. A coat TK didn't recognise. He'd grown used to a certain style, certain way about Nikolai that he'd come to expect and here he was bleeding in a dumpster, discarded for dead.

They'd got a call about someone groaning down here, in this alley. The caller had thought it was probably the wind.

"Talk to me, TK. What are we dealing with?"

"Aaadult male, mid 30s, Cap. Multiple stab wounds. Looks like someone tried to wrap him up, probably kept him alive." TK knew what sort of deals went down, to end up here. He knew the sort of people who were left for dead in dumpsters, he'd lived very close to them at one point of his life, he'd wanted - needed... but that wasn't the guy he'd been sleeping with. Right? He'd seen the scars. Knew he had a habit of collecting injuries (a black eye) at 'work'. Had he just been very stupid? "Pulse is thready."

"Alright, let's get him out of there. Nancy, get the backboard. We can't work on him in the garbage."

"Hello?" was he conscious at all? TK checked his pupils, "Nikolai, can you hear me?"

"'Nikolai'?" The backboard appeared over the lip and TK had to move out of the way as Nancy lowered it down, so they could use it to lift Nikolai out of this thing. "You know him?"

"Barely." That had kind of been the idea. "I met him at a bar."

"Allergies?" Captain Vega. They hoisted Nikolai out of the dumpster, a smooth maneouvre around their conversation.

TK started a line, hands quick and practiced, the thought of who is this guy firmly set aside for the time being: he was a patient, TK's patient, and they needed to work on him or he would die. "It never really came up."

They got him on the gurney next, never not moving. "What, you didn't stop to ask his blood type before you got it on?"

"Nancy," Tommy warned her, but she only afforded her the single word of warning, "These wounds don't look deep. He's lost a lot of blood but I don't think they got anything important. TK," (he was already moving in the right direction, for the phone they kept up the front of the ambulance), "call the hospital, let them know they should prep an OR."

"Uh, Cap?" Nancy had been trying to find ID, health insurance info, someone to call - the sorts of things they looked for when the patient was relatively stable in the back of an ambulance, as Nikolai was now, but she held up the slim leather wallet that had been in the dumpster with him. Empty. TK didn't recognise it, either. It might not even have belonged to him. Either way, someone didn't want him easily identified, and had had the forethought to take his ID.

TK knew how this guy moaned, he did not know who he was. The stark distinction made him sort of... cold.

"He's Nikolai," Captain Vega took TK's word for it decisively, "And he's hurt, and right now he's our patient. Let's go."

@hvndredstories