"You've been such a trooper today," Juliette smiled widely at the young girl splayed out on the stretcher. She was just a little over six and had taken a tumble off of her new bike, which she had explain had no training wheels, that resulted in a trip to the hospital for stitches. Juliette had just finished applying the last bandage over the stitches in her forehead, which would certainly leave a scar.

Juliette stepped out of the little area that was warded off by a thin blue curtain and removed the latest pair of latex gloves that covered her hands, throwing them quickly into a trash can. She walked over to the desk and propped her head up on her arm, her smile having disappeared. She was beyond tired, but she refused to let any patients see it. What she really needed was a nap, or perhaps some energy.

She looked around cautiously at the light fixtures that hung around the crowded E.R. Would there be a way for her to absorb some without being seen? Probably not, she decided. It was better not to risk it than to have to face the consequences of being outed as a mutant.

Juliette picked up a clipboard kept just out of sight behind the nurse's station. She scanned the page, forcing her weary eyes to take in the information. Then, she scanned the room, looking for the next patient. Her eyes fell on one and she pointed to them, "you can follow me."

Xavier's Sister School for Gifted and Talented Youth had its own in-house healer. A mutant, of course. An astounding man: he could heal anything short of death itself. Jiri had visited him regularly in the year he'd been a student.

DocProf was a good man. A good, good man, with an interesting side-effect to his power: when he healed, he saw exactly how an injury occurred.

Jiri had a possibly dislocated shoulder, a definitely broken nose, and a suspiciously effeminate bite mark on his right hand, complete with trace remains of lipstick. Also, hair that had been spray painted a vengeful pink. Also, no shirt.

In short: he was never speaking of this again. Ever. That vow was up to and including mutant healers who couldn't help being nosy.

“ 'Hank you,” Jiri woozed, his nose tipped in the air. The bloody rag he was using to keep his shnoz in check was, to the astute observer, a Cafas Johnson fan club t-shirt. Also pink. Size: women's small.

Never. Speaking. Of this. Again.

And never interviewing a celebrity live on the internet again, for that matter. Not without checking the rabies tags on his fan girls (...and boys).

The Iranian teen followed the nice nurse, and worked hard at repressing his memories. Also, at suppressing a yawn. It had been approximately… oh, forty-two hours, give or take, since he'd last slept. Still, he was about 62% sure this was really happening.

Juliette watched the young teen that stood up as after she spoke. At first glance, his appearance was slightly concerning. The E.R. was often full, and it was often a cesspool of strange people with strange stories. Teenagers coming in from a night of drinking or a fight were also frequent, but hardly ever on a Tuesday at 3am. Whether it was the pink hair, the blood streaming down his face, or the pink shirt he was holding, she couldn't be sure, but something about the boy peaked her interest.

Her eyes ran over his appearance, making snap judgements about his injuries. The way he held his shoulder indicated that it was dislocated, and she knew that if he turned at all she would be able to see the joint out of place. She  couldn't see his nose from behind the shirt, but figured that it was likely broken. Then, she saw the bite mark. Dog bites were common, but this one was different. It looked distinctly human. What had this boy been doing? She wondered to herself.

She turned and motioned for the boy to follow her through the crowded room as she began to walk quickly, expertly avoiding run-ins with the people in every which direction. Juliette walked to a little area that was sectioned off by a curtain, nearly identical to the one she had just left. This one, however, was unoccupied.

The brunette looked back at the teen and nodded to the little stretcher in front of her. "Take a seat, please." She instructed as she read over his information, "Jiri, is it?"

The most uncomfortable part wasn't his injuries. No, those were just painful, in a sort of half-awake way that meant he should really get some caffeine in him before he accidentally possessed a doctor doing open heart surgery. No, the uncomfortable part wasn't his shoulder or nose or hand, or even the chill of hospital air on his bare chest.

The uncomfortable part was having the nurse look him up and down. There were some clear judgments being made behind those eyes of hers, and the teen couldn't help but wonder if some of them went beyond merely medical.

“Jiri O'Leary at your service,” the curly haired teen confirmed, somewhat muffled, like a clown speaking through its rubber nose. They went into a little room. Room was a… generous term. More like 'they went behind a piece of tissue paper for privacy.' There was a bed there, which was also a generous term.

He missed DocProf's office. No lines, comfy beds, instant healing.

He didn't miss it enough to let anyone at the Mansion see him like this.

“Do me a favor,” Jiri said, “Tell me I'm not the craziest thing you've seen in here.”

Juliette nodded as Jiri spoke, and checked off some boxes on the form. She could see how uncomfortable he was in the little area as they entered, and she understood completely. The 'rooms' were hardly private. Unfortunately, they were what the hospital could afford.

"Do me a favour, tell me I'm not the craziest thing you've seen in here," Jiri had asked her. Juliette chuckled and thought back.

"No, I can promise you that you're not," Juliette grinned as images flashed in her mind. Her mere year and a half of experience provided her with enough weird stories to publish a book. She decided to take the safer route and not gross him out with hospital horror stories. "You wouldn't believe how many people come in here with things stuck up their butt."

Took the shirt from Jiri gingerly and handed him a wad of gauze. "Here, this will work better. I'm just going to give you a look-over before the doctor comes by."

A definitive guide on how to make a teenage male blush
Step 1: Be a reasonable cute, just-out-of-achievable-range female nurse
Step 2: Mention things up the butt.

The seventeen year old flushed a pink as violent as his new hair color. He traded his balled up shirt for the offered gauze (ignoring the sort of peeling-bubbling noise his nose made as he took the crumpled shirt off it).

“Yours is a truly rewarding profession, I see.” He attempted a grin, which quickly turned into a wince. Noses… weren't supposed to make a grating nose, were they?

And yet, somehow, he also manage to yawn again. That was… probably not a good sign.

“Hey. Umm. Can I get some coffee? I've got a medical condition.” That sounded like a joke. How did he make that not sound like a joke? Well, there was always the direct approach. “Umm, that's not actually a joke. It's a, ah, genetic condition.”

...He wasn't supposed to just come out and say that, was he? Crap. It had been a long time since he'd really set foot off Mansion grounds. Long enough that he was forgetting minor details like 'don't mention magic to the muggles.'

"Yes, rewarding indeed," Juliette grinned and shook her head as her hand moved down the form. She looked back up and winced slightly at the noise of his nose, sympathetic to the pain. If there was one thing that could ruin her day, it was the sound of bone on bone. There was a reason she had chosen not to work in the orthopaedic ward.

As he talked about his 'genetic condition', however, her interest peaked. "Can I ask what it is?" Juliette asked him curiously. She couldn't think of any genetic conditions that would require coffee. Insomnia, perhaps, but that was hardly a genetic disorder. Although, it had been argued that certain genes have you a predisposition towards it. Several things ran through her mind at that moment. Drugs, a sleep disorder, and a mutation.

"A genetic disorder might affect your treatment and the drugs you receive. Don't worry, though, everything is confidential," Juliette explained to him, watching closely for his reaction. She knew the number of the on-call psychiatrist quite well, and was ready to call him if necessary.

He wasn't quite sure she'd caught his meaning. What slang had he called it by, when he'd still thought he was human? Genetically special had been the term kids would snicker over when they weren't being all that serious, the same way they'd use special to mean retarded around teachers who cared about that kind of thing. Freak was the more serious one. What you'd actually hear in the halls, used just as casually as fag. Stop being such a freak.

Freak. Mutie. Defect.

He didn't think about it often, because his parents had shipped him off to Xavier's as soon as they'd figured out what was going on. AKA: As soon as he was out of the psych ward. But normal kids could be real dicks.

Normal adults could be, too.

“Just, ah, your usual caffeine addiction,” Jiri tried to laugh off his earlier comments. “I'd rather not have a migraine on top of the rest of this.”

It wasn't like he would do anything special if he didn't get some coffee in him. Like, say, start treating people's brains like stepping stones. What kind of freak would do that?

Juliette pursed her lips and held the clipboard against her chest. It was clear that Jiri was hiding something. She studied him for a moment before responding. As she searched his face, she noticed his eyes clearly for the first time. They were bloodshot and puffy, a sign of exhaustion, although, that would hardly take a qualified nurse to notice. How long had it been since he last slept, she wondered.

She wanted him to tell her the truth, and even considered telling her own secret. She quickly decided against it, figuring she would never regain the boy's trust if he didn't share in her genetic differences. Instead, she decided to play along.

"I can't do that, I'm afraid. We may have to use anesthesia to relocate your shoulder, which means you can't eat or drink anything before that. If it's not serious enough to require that, though, I'm sure there won't be a problem. We just need a doctor's opinion and some x-rays." Juliette told him seriously. She had had that conversation with patients many times. They were often unhappy to hear the news, especially the younger ones.

She sat down on the little rolling stood beside the bed and began to examine his hand. The bite wasn't all that deep, she decided, but there was one puncture that would need a few stitches. The rest would be fine with just a cleaning and a bandage. After all, one could never be sure what they would find in a human mouth.

The woman was looking at him. Like, really looking at him. Peering into his green eyes, plumping the depths of his soul for lies sort of looking. Awkward-pausing looking. Teenage-boy-squirming-where-he-sat looking.

Squirming sort of hurt his shoulder. But probably not as much as it should. That was the truly wonderful thing about sleep deprivation: after awhile, everything got nice and distant, like watching through a TV.

A TV that needed coffee.

“I would rather have coffee than anesthetic,” the Iranian teen deadpanned, as the woman turned his hand this way and that.

“...Do I really need x-rays? On TV they always make it seem so easy. Like, every man and his burly bromance friend can pop back in a shoulder and keep on fighting.”

He may have made a mistake in coming here.

“How long is this all going to take to heal?”

What he really meant, and what might have crept into his voice, was this: how long does it take for you poor mortals without an insto-healer on staff to recover from mere non-fatal flesh wounds like this?

Juliette frowned at him and rolled her chair back slightly. Teenage boys always felt the need to make things more difficult than they had to be. She considered just forcing him to get the x-ray, but she really wasn't up to dealing with an argument.

"Look, my shift's almost older, so I'll make a deal with you. No x-ray and I'll pop your shoulder back in right here, but then you need to go home and get some sleep. No more partying, capeesh?" Juliette looked at him with her least friendly glare; one that had been known to stare down even the most troublesome of patients. "And, you need to tell me how all this happened. If I know how you did it, then it's easier to know if there will be any further damage done."

>>“How long is this all going to take to heal?”

"A couple of days, maybe more," Juliette informed him. "It's really all based on pain level, but you'll likely get a prescription for an anti-inflammatory that will speed up the process. Your hand is definitely going to need stitches, though. Those take a bit longer to heal and you'll need to see a doctor to get them removed."

She reached leaned over and began to clean the wound on his hand, prepping it for stitches.

“Yes please and thank you.” Visible slump of relief: this teen had one. “People can't know about this. Really. The bite I could just write off to babysitting--” what kind of babysitting came with bites as hazard pay, he didn't say “--but the shoulder would have been too much.”

Actually, come to think of it, the shoulder could be written off as babysitting, too. And the nose. Because Mansion kids. But it not going to DocProf to get healed? That was the dead giveaway to end all giveaways. Walking around with a serious injury in the Mansion was tantamount to saying, I have seen things too embarrassing for words to describe.

He fwumped a little as she demanded an explanation. “Ever insulted a mutant on the internet?” He asked, rather rhetorically. “Don't. At least, not one with fan girls. Fan girls who know where you live.”

The Mansion: not exactly a hard place to find. Jiri, aka InvasionOfTheBS, host of a mutant AMA: not exactly as anonymous as he'd thought he was. Like with many things, he blamed Ghost: someone had taken the moment when she'd tried to brain him with his own computer and photo-enhanced the frame to get a blurry image of a curly-headed Iranian teen with green eyes. Not many of those in the school.

She was cleaning his hand now. Oww? Yeah. Oww.

“Stingly,” Jiri commented. A genius combination of stingy and tingly that yes, he had just come up with, and yes, he was proud of.

The woman blinked as she listened to his story. "I'll keep that in mind," she told him as she thought over his tale. It was pretty far fetched - there were mutant chat rooms? She needed to get out more - but then again, truth was stranger than fiction.

"Sorry," she said quickly, her exhaustion taking charge of her bed-side manner. "Just a little more and then it will be clean."

She finished and stifled a yawn, putting away the supplies. Since he had agreed to the manual relocation, she figured it would be best to get that out of the way. The stitches would have to wait.

She moved behind him and knelt on the bed with a hand on each side of his shoulder. She felt the joint carefully, running her hands over the circular shoulder blade. It wasn't too bad of a dislocation, but that didn't mean that it wouldn't still hurt like a ***** when it went back in.

"Alright, I'm going to put it back in place," Juliette told Jiri, more of as a courtesy than anything else. At that point, it needed to be done, and he didn't get much choice in the matter.

>> “Alright, I'm going to--”

This was the last thing Jiri clearly heard, or at least the last thing he clearly remembered hearing, before he was suddenly an eighty-year-old woman. The PA came on--Paging Dr. Jones--and her hearing aid screeched. He reached up, and fiddled with it until he found the direction for down.

Well.

That could have gone better.

Back in the exam room, the nurse had a very unconscious-and-non-responsive-to-any-outside-stimuli teenager on her hands. He was a bit floppy-like. That was a reassuring state for any medical professional, right?

Out in the waiting room, Jiri's arthritis was acting up. And possibly his hernia. Definitely his hip. Maybe his back? Yes. Yes definitely his back, as he discovered when he stood up. One crack of a fossilized spine later, he was ready to head off down the hall.

One.

Slow.

Walker-assisted.

Step.

At.

A.

Yeah screw it. If it was going to take this long to get back to his own body anyway, he was at least getting coffee on the way.

Juliette had barely finished counting to three before she popped his shoulder back in. However, Jiri slumped down, passed out. He nearly knocked her over as his body fell backwards into hers. She made a noise of protest as she was forced off the little stretcher and tumbled into the curtain behind her.

She stood up and dusted herself off before tending to the teen in front of her. "Jiri?" She asked quickly.

No response.

She pulled out her little flashlight and checked his pupils.

Responsive.

Then, she moved her fingers over his jugular and checked for a pulse.

Faint, but definitely present.

Good, at least she hadn't killed her supposedly easy case with a dislocated shoulder. She sighed and turned his body around into the recover position in case he decided to wake up and puke. She looked around for someone else on staff that she could hand the case over to. There was no way she was staying any longer past when her shift was already over to wait for him to wake up.

She stood up, stretched, and then handed the file over to another nurse. On her way to the staff room, she noticed an elderly woman struggling down the hall. In exchange for her giving up on the teen, she decided to help the woman instead.

"Ma'am? Can I give you a hand at all?" She asked the woman, laying a hand carefully on her back to steady her.