Light Em Up ~Esme&&Graham~

[Deleted]

This shift had turned into a double, which meant that Graham had been at the hospital for over twenty-four hours straight. He had about three hours of sleep in that amount of time, but that was enough for him. He lived off the adrenaline of the operating room. So far, he had four surgeries. Two for car wrecks, one was a pedestrian hit by a car, and the other was a failed suicide attempt. Sometimes being in emergency medicine was tough, but he was used to it, since he started out operating in the battle field. He was used to tragic things happening and only focusing on the situation at hand. 

After his last surgery, he decided that he was going to go to the cafeteria and fuel up. He got a chicken sandwich, a salad without dressing, and a banana. He got a bottle of water, and he went to sit down at a booth. When he sat down, he let out a small sigh of relief. He never took sitting down for granite. When you were on your feet as much as he was, sitting down was one of the best feelings in the world. 

He opened his banana, starting with it. In between bites, he would take a sip of his water, praying that his beeper wouldn't go off while he was eating. All he needed was a few minutes of silence and Graham time. That's all he wanted out of the day. Would that be too much to ask?

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For:
Kim with Esme
Outfit:
Green scrubs
Words:
253
Notes:
Apparently, starting threads with Graham is not good...

[esme verity stapleton]

Esme glanced down at her blue scrubs and groaned. Blood she was used to, even before working in the ER, but she grew tired of changing out of her nursing attire several times during a shift whenever a major incident came through the doors. They made a bigger deal here about keeping everything, and everyone clean and sterile than Esme had been used to in the past. During her time as an army medic, all she wanted to keep clean was a wound so that it didn’t become infected. She hadn’t been too bothered about dirt on herself or blood staining her uniform. It wasn’t important when she was saving a life, but now there were other standards to keep up with and while the patient, now stabilised, was taken down up to be admitted to ICU, Esme moved through to strip out of her top and change into a fresh one. She pulled a new one from the locker, just as another nurse poked her head in to tell her it was time for the breaks to start and to ask if she wanted to go first.

Esme wasn’t really friends with the rest of the staff at the hospital. She was too vulgar for many of them, and wild. So many of them found her to be awful outside of her capabilities as a nurse, and even when she was working they noticed that she didn’t make much of a team player. Esme hadn’t been used to having a team before now though. She had been a lone medic, and her time in the field hospital had mostly been spent helping her fellow soldiers recuperate after she had dragged them back there. New York could be a lonely place, but Esme was plagued with far too many problems to be concerned with loneliness or worry about what people were whispering when her back was turned.

Leaving the clean top on the bench, Esme headed to the cafeteria in her black tank-top and scrub bottoms, grabbing a can of Coke from the vending machine along the way. Inside she snatched up the last of the salad bowls, even though she wasn’t particularly keen on them. She still had another eight hours left on this shift, since Esme was covering for someone who had called in sick after she wrapped up what ought to be her own shift in the ER. She was thankful of the long hours since going home and trying to sleep never resulted in anything good for Esme. Nightmares plagued her and the silence was unnatural in her apartment. She spotted the familiar face across the almost empty cafeteria and made her way over, slipping herself into the seat opposite Graham, pulling her knees up to her chest before she even started eating her good. “Why do they feed us this crappy rabbit food? We need sugar and a fistful of carbs.” Esme asked, not really expecting an answer, but she had sort of forgotten the art of conversation when it wasn’t arguing or based on army talk.

• • •

TAGGED! @grahamw
WORDS! 514!
OUTFIT! Ice Queen!
LYRICS! Universe - - Caroline Mullen
NOTES! <3

[Deleted]

Graham wanted to eat his food at a slower pace than he actually could. He wanted to be able to not get indigestion after eating. He wanted to be able to actually taste something as it slid down his throat. But, he had to sacrifice taste for nutrition at work. If they were serving something healthy yet disgusting, it didn't matter because he would barely taste it anyway. As he finished the banana and set the peel on a napkin beside him on the table, Esme sat down. He smiled at her. Most people avoided the girl, but Graham had embraced her. He knew from how she acted she had been in the field like he had. He knew that she had seen things that most people, even surgeons, had never seen or dreamed of. He knew she had seen her closest friends die. He knew exactly where she had been. 

"You know your body would crash soon after you ate those things, right?"

He told her. 

"You need protein and whole wheat to keep you going. And... what do you have?"

He looked at her food choice, grinning. He loved picking on everyone; it was how Graham was. He was a giant goofball around his friends. And even if Esme didn't consider him a friend, he considered her one. He also wanted to be an open ear for her if she ever needed anyone. He wanted to make sure she wasn't alone in New York or alone at work. He knew she put on the front of being hard and cold, but he felt that deep down, maybe there was a girl who was just begging for someone to talk to. He would never tell her that, of course. He was afraid she might punch him or something. 

"You have sugar and salad."

He told her, splitting his sandwich in half, handing half to her.

"Take it. You'll thank me later when your salad and sugar syrup wears off."

He told her with a smile. 


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For:
esme verity stapleton
Outfit:

Words:
336
Notes:
I feel like this post is all over the place. .-. I'm sorry...

[esme verity stapleton]

Esme never actually thought she’d be working in a hospital with actual patients and other doctors and nurses. That had never been part of her plan. Though, when she thought about things, Esme had never really had a plan. She did things as they came to her. That was how she had ended up in the army, no matter how many people told her differently over the years. It had seemed like a good idea at the time and she had never lived to regret it. At least, not until she had fallen in love with her captain and let emotions get in the way of everything she ought to be doing. She was a mess, even back in England, and now she had brought that mess to New York where she had hoped to regain some control over her life. Who was she kidding? There was no medicine or doctor in the world who could fix what was wrong with her. And chasing a sister who she still wasn’t sure if she wanted to meet definitely wasn’t going to make all the horrors go away. Still, lying to herself brought small comforts on lonely nights.

Gulping back a quarter of the can of Coke, Esme hiccupped and rolled her eyes at his words. “But it would get me through another shift in this hellhole. After that my body is quite okay to crash.” More often than not she got home and passed out on top of her bed still wearing whatever she had arrived home in. If she was really lucky she might have pulled her shirt off, but that was usually as best as it got for her. Esme didn’t really look after herself too well, but she wasn’t about to admit that to anyone, and even if they saw it for themselves she’d still fight them to the end of the earth to insist otherwise. She was stubborn and hurting, but none of that mattered. She had to be strong; that was all she cared about projecting. “When have I ever thanked you for anything?” She asked around a mouthful of the half sandwich Graham gave her. Esme had lost many of her manners somewhere in the Middle East, much to her mother’s dismay. Her adoptive parents had raised her beautifully, but Esme had lost herself in the military and came back a whole new person; someone she loved a hell of a lot more, even if she was haunted by the things she had seen and dispised by so many others these days.

• • •

TAGGED! @grahamw
WORDS! 431!
OUTFIT! Ice Queen!
LYRICS! Universe - - Caroline Mullen
NOTES! <3

[Deleted]

<sub>In a way, Esme reminded Graham of Luci. No, Graham wasn't in love with Esme; he was in love with Luci. But they did have similar personalities, though Luci was warmer than Esme was. Luci was a nurse in the war, and though Graham hadn't heard from Luci since their shared explosion over seas, he had a gut feeling she was still alive. He hoped she was, anyway. He couldn't bear the thought of losing another person he loved, especially when he thought Luci was the one. Graham wasn't one to believe in mushy love things like having a soul mate, but when he had spent more time with Luci, he had grown to realize that maybe there were soul mates in this world. Maybe there was more to life than just sleeping around with women and hoping you didn't have to be forced into marriage by a child. Luci had been kind, yet she had been pushy. She had pushed Audrey and Graham to go and be the best people they could be. She was tough, and she could have been a drill sergeant with how crass and rude she could be. But she was kind and loving. She was someone you could cuddle up with at night, and you wouldn't be afraid of them stabbing you to death. 

Though Graham had hope that she was still alive (and a gut feeling), he knew he couldn't just live his life waiting around for her. He knew he had to keep going out there and dating women. He wasn't sure if he wanted to date his coworkers or not. He was kind of afraid of what would happen if something happened between them and then ended badly. He also didn't want people in the hospital to think poorly of him if he dated someone in the workplace. Plus, all of the women he had met here were too easy, too eager. Well, except for Esme, but Graham didn't see her that way. He saw Esme as a little sister or a fellow army member he had grown close to. 

"Ah, yes, but what if your surgery runs long, and you end up having to stay over another three hours. Then you would crash before you could make it to your bed."

He told her, being a smart-ass about everything. That was one of Graham's specialties: being a smart-ass. 

"You have a point there, but I will take you shoving the sandwich down your throat as a thank-you."

He told her with a small smile before eating his portion of the sandwich. 

"How long have you been here, anyway? I've been working all day, and I think you were here before I was."</sub>

[esme verity stapleton]

Esme hadn’t always been cold. There had been a time in her life when she was reasonably popular and well liked. She could make people laugh, flirted with the local boys, went out on the weekends…her life in London had been great. Everything back then had been simple. Then she discovered that her best friend was a backstabbing bitch, and her boyfriend was scum, and all of that pushed her towards the army recruitment day at college. London held nothing for her, so why stick around? After that she trained, she fought hard to prove herself, and she ended up enduring some of the worst moments of her life for some of the best. Then it all went to hell. She fell in love with someone she never should have, and ultimately it drove her out. Esme didn’t leave the same person she had been, and there was no way of claiming that girl back. She was gone forever, instead replaced by the cold, hostile woman she was today.

Of course, she wasn’t that way all the time. It just seemed to be most of the time. There was a lot to work through and Esme’s story wasn’t a simple one. It never would be. There was too much there to try to understand. She also wasn’t going to give her time to a shrink to try to solve her problems. To Esme, there was no one but the men she had served with who would understand her and what she had seen. Those men had seen it, too, and right now she was only in touch with them whenever they were on leave, and even they knew that there was more going on that they hadn’t been told about.

“I don’t crash. I can get over that.” There was a snappy edge to Esme’s voice now. Sleep for her was often riddled with nightmares and she wasn’t keen on willingly giving herself to the sandman’s curse. She could be exhausted and still push on. She had trained to do that long before she was a nurse in the ER and she could do it now, especially without a lecture about nutrition. “Twelve hours. Another four to go.” She shrugged lightly. Esme did this and then had two days off which she didn’t like having, but had been told repeatedly it was policy, and she was one of the few who would work the long shifts.

• • •

TAGGED! @grahamw
WORDS! 410!
OUTFIT! Ice Queen!
LYRICS! Universe - - Caroline Mullen
NOTES! <3