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Reagan and Brett both stared at the x-ray, mouths set into matching thoughtful scowls as they studied it.
“I thought J.R. was joking,” Reagan murmured, tilting the x-ray closer to the bench top light. “He says he microchips everyone who’s a company asset, but it’s mostly just to unsettle people and keep them in line. He said it would be a waste of money to microchip everyone, with Cognito’s turnover.”
Brett winced as he reached out to touch the X-ray. He drew back and carefully covered the bandage across his upper arm, hidden beneath his suit jacket. “Is that supposed to be flattering?” he asked.
Reagan snorted. “That’s optimistic. If anything, it just means J.R.’s a dick for marking you as a valuable asset and an unpaid intern.”
“That was temporary,” Brett protested, but his tone was mild as he studied the x-ray film, too preoccupied to squabble over J.R.. “At least something good came from my family insisting on that urgent care?”
“Except that the urgent care staff saw this too. The cleanup crew is probably done with them by now,” Reagan added. Brett sighed but didn’t argue. He sank down into his usual seat in the lab. He started to gently coax his suit jacket off, easing it carefully over the bullet wound. Reagan remained still at the bench, tracing the bright chip on the x-ray, close to being cut off at the top of the exposure.
“You’re lucky the bullet didn’t strike bone. You still have the pharmacy bag, don’t you? It’s almost time for the antibiotics again—“ Reagan set down the X-ray and turned around, freezing as her eyes met Brett’s. He had shed the ruined suit jacket and was now unbuttoning his shirt, revealing a wall of muscle. “Why are you taking your clothes off?” she demanded. Her eyes flicked downwards for just a moment to confirm that yes, her best friend was casually peeling his clothes off in the middle of their conversation.
Brett stopped with two buttons left to go, looking bewildered. “You’ve seen me naked before.”
Reagan spluttered, turning red. “That’s not— that doesn’t explain why you’re stripping down in my lab now!”
A sudden puff of breath, not quite a scoff, as if Brett was surprised that his mind had skipped ahead of hers. “So we can take the chip out,” he said simply.
Reagan’s eyes widened. “You want me to— absolutely not.”
Brett folded his ruined shirt before setting it on top of his bloodied jacket. “I can’t do it myself and I can’t just wander around with a tracking device in my body,” he said matter-of-factly. “Even if Cognito already knows where I live and everywhere where I like to go, it’s— it’s not okay! I need to be able to at least pretend to have some privacy. I have to get it out. Now.”
Reagan crossed her arms. “Look, I’m all for this “setting reasonable boundaries” and “being decisive” thing you’re working on, but I’m not doing amateur surgery on you. Wait until Andre comes back—you let him cut off your face, he can handle this.”
“Come on, he’s not going to be back until next week! I can’t stand thinking of it stuck inside me, pinging away!”
“Andre actually knows what he’s doing! I let him take out mine!” Reagan said, unfastening the top few buttons to shimmy her shirt down enough to expose her shoulder blades. There was a small line of a scar, just under an inch long and faded to a purpled pink. “He joked that he was going to stitch his initials into me but I checked in the mirror and he actually did a nice job of it.” Despite the confidence in her voice, she twisted her head as if to check again.
“Please, Reagan?”
His hands were knotted together, but his gaze was steady as it met hers.
She buttoned her shirt back up, smoothing the front down absently and glancing away from Brett. Eye contact still wasn’t her favorite activity, even with Brett, and his pleading eyes made her feel skittish. “I never studied anatomy,” she admitted. “And it’s been years since I dissected a frog.”
Brett smiled hesitantly. “Good thing I’m not a frog?”
“I might fuck it up,” she said, a sickly rush of adrenaline flooding through her chest at the idea.
Brett nodded slowly, considering. She held her breath.
“I trust you.”
Reagan let out an exasperated groan, but she returned her gaze to Brett’s. “This is a terrible idea,” she said, “but ride or die. Let’s do this before I chicken out.”
Brett grinned. “Ride or die.”
-
They relocated to Andre’s lab, bringing Brett’s ruined clothes, the X-ray, and a bottle of grain alcohol.
“At first I thought the grain alcohol was for sterilizing something,” Brett said, perched on the operating table. He took another swig directly from the bottle and grimaced, checking the volume to see how much he had already downed. “So that’s what it tastes like before it goes into Jungle Juice,” he mused.
Reagan’s gloved hands hovered over the tools she had carefully laid out. A few sizes of scalpels, tiny packages of gauze, rubbing alcohol swabs, forceps, a few syringes she had preloaded with lidocaine, and a handful of butterfly bandages. “I’ll have to take your word for it,” she said with an amused grin. “For some odd reason, no one wants to invite a preteen to a college rager.”
Brett laughed, then covered his mouth as if he could hide his grin. “Oh! Sorry, I forgot, you’ve always been a super genius, robot Doogie Howser.”
“Don’t worry, I’ve made up for lost time and then some. Gimme,” she said, gesturing for the bottle.
Brett held up a finger, taking another swallow and coughing.
She carefully pried the bottle from him and took a shot. “I should probably stop my surgeon from drinking before cutting me open, right?” Brett mused, holding onto the edge of the table before swaying back and forth. “Which number shot was that?”
“For me? Just the one, trying to override the little voice telling me this is a terrible idea. Well, I had a little to calm down at the urgent care. You know, after watching my best friend jump in front of a bullet, kinda sets the nerves on edge,” she said, reaching over to playfully smack his forehead.
Brett beamed at her. “You were worried about me? Aww. Come here,” he said, flinging his arms wide for a bear hug, yelping a little from his injured arm.
Reagan rolled her eyes but she couldn’t help matching Brett’s smile as she stepped forward into his embrace. She rested her cheek against his hair. He had eased up on the Axe after one of Myc’s snide remarks, and by the end of the day it wasn’t so strong anyway. And it was a novelty to feel taller than him, she thought.
“Of course I was worried about you,” she admitted. “For a second I thought he actually killed you. I couldn’t tell where you actually got hit, and then you were lying on the ground.” His hugs were like truth serum, like a concentrated dose of whatever aura he radiated during Movie Night, the one that let her ramble her stream-of-consciousness without over analyzing each word’s impact. “I know it wasn’t for very long but it was…” she trailed off, uncertain of how to describe the wave of sickening dread that had flooded her at the moment.
Brett hummed, rubbing her back. “I promise to try to stop jumping in front of literal bullets,” he said earnestly against her shoulder.
Reagan appreciated the olive branch of a joke, letting her off the hook of emotional vulnerability. She chuckled. “You’d better. It would have been a shame if you died saving your dickhead of a brother.”
Brett gave her another squeeze before letting go. “Aww. That was heartwarming right up until the end there,” he said with a drunken giggle.
Reagan turned back to check over the tray of instruments again. She had taped the X-ray to a sheet of paper, and the ominously bright chip seemed to be staring at her. Well, she wasn’t going to get more confident in her surgical abilities just sitting here. She put her hands on her hips. “Alright! Are you shitfaced yet?” Reagan asked brightly.
Brett laughed. “Dr. Ridley, are you trying to get me drunk?” he asked, lowering his voice to a faux-seductive tone. “Because yes, I’m drunk so it’s working.” He gasped dramatically, clasping his hands in front of his naked chest. “Is this how you wooed the mysterious Ronald… Whatever-his-last-name-is? How scandalous!”
“No, no, no, we’re not talking about Ron right now, not when you’re drunk off your ass and I’m going to be poking around inside you.”
He let out a bark of delighted laughter at the double-entendre, a deepening shade of pink darkening his skin past the mild buzz blush. “You know what I meant, dickhead!” Reagan insisted, turning red as well. “You’re being a terrible patient right now!”
“You’re being a terrible patient right now,” Brett retorted, then he reconsidered his words. “Yeah, that’s probably drunk enough.” He laid himself out on the operating table, rolling over onto his stomach and clutching a balled-up sweatshirt as a pillow. Reagan heard him mutter something about a Yelp review and chuckle to himself.
Reagan put a surgical gown and gloves on. “Okay, remember to warn me if you have to sneeze, and that if this is too much, we can totally wait for Andre,” she said, resting her hand on his shoulder.
Brett closed his eyes. “Yup. I’ll hold still.”
She took a few steadying breaths. The grain alcohol looked tempting, but she was already nervous about her hands trembling from adrenaline. She swabbed the spot just beside his shoulder blade, fanning it gently with the wrapper. Setting her jaw in a determined clench, she carefully injected the lidocaine. Brett grunted but remained still.
“Okay, that should do it. Feel this?” Reagan asked, poking him with a fingernail.
“It’s numb,” Brett said.
“Good. Okay.” She picked up the scalpel and hovered over him. “Okay. Get in and get out. You can do this. You’ve got this.”
Before Brett could comment on her pep talk, Reagan made the first cut. Her stomach rolled as she realized she needed to apply more pressure, and she murmured, “Okay okay okay this is okay” to herself as she worked, trying to find a rhythm between the scalpel and gauze. Cut, blood, dab it away, check for metal, again. Brett’s breath came in more sharply than when she started.
“Okay okay okay— Brett, doing alright?” Reagan asked, grabbing for the overhead light and dragging it closer. She grimaced at the fingerprints of blood she left on its handle.
“I’ve had better Saturday nights,” Brett said, looking a little paler than normal. He seemed to be decidedly staring forward, and Reagan worried he was about to vomit. “Is there any more lidocaine? The surface is okay but… yeah.” Brett returned to pressing his forehead into the table, letting out a frustrated grunt but not pulling away. “Feels weird,” he complained, his voice muffled.
She grabbed another syringe and repeated the inject/poke test until Brett nodded.
They were both silent for another minute as Reagan worked and Brett tried to not focus on her work. There was only the quiet sound of their breathing until Reagan gasped and blurted, “It’s here, I can see it.”
“Oh, thank god,” Brett said.
Reagan carefully picked at the edge of the chip until she had a firm grip. She pulled the chip gently with the forceps, trying and failing not to dry-heave at the wet sound it made. Her eyes watered.
Brett tried to twist around without moving his shoulders. “Are you gagging right now?” He demanded frantically.
“No!” Reagan said, gagging. “Definitely not— stop moving!”
“If you’re going to throw up, you were right, we should just wait for Andre to do it—“ Brett tried, before sympathetically retching as well. “Oh my god!”
Reagan’s stomach flipped again and she fought it down, refusing to give in to the feedback loop. “I went to MIT, if those tree-hugger Biology majors can do it, so can I! I’ll go on the count of three—“
Brett turned to look back to her. “Wait, this isn’t like the thing where you say that but you go on two because—“
Reagan grimaced. “Yeah, sorry. Three!” she cried as she yanked the chip free.
“Motherfucker!” Brett yelped, before twisting back around to continue swearing into the balled-up sweatshirt pillow.
“Oh, shit— it’s out, I’ve got it,” Reagan exclaimed, briefly holding her trophy aloft in triumph before dropping it back onto the tray because Brett’s eyes were still clenched shut. “Sorry. that’s how Andre did it and it seemed like the better alternative than just wiggling it out and gagging about the sound.” She pressed gauze to the incision, grimacing in sympathy with Brett’s hiss of pain. With her free hand she reached back and grabbed the bottle of grain alcohol, and she took a well-deserved swig. Or three.
Brett was still breathing deeply beneath her hands, and she listened to the steady rhythm as she cleaned the incision as best as she could. The idea of poking stitches through his skin made her stomach heave again, so she did her best to tightly close the wound with butterfly bandages.
“Okay, I don’t think we’re going to need superglue to close it, but maybe no working out until it scabs?” Reagan suggested, applying one more layer of gauze and taping it down firmly. “How are you doing? Hopefully you’re not traumatized for life?” she asked, peeling off the gloves and surgical gown before crouching down to be face-to-face with Brett. “Are we okay?”
He still looked much more ashen than Reagan preferred. After a few careful breaths, he cautiously pushed himself up to sitting and leaned his head against his left hand. Reagan stood up quickly to hold him by the shoulders—very gently—and she frowned as she studied his slightly bewildered expression.
“Well, I’m glad it’s out,” he started, swaying very slightly forward and back. Reagan wasn’t sure he was aware he was doing it. He cautiously drummed his fingers against his knees, flexing his hands open and closed to test that they were still working. “I feel received—relieved? That’s it, there it is. I’m relieved it’s out. Thank you, Reagan,” he slurred.
She smiled slightly, reaching up to gently smooth his hair back. “You’re hammered,” she said simply.
He snorted. “That was the goal, right?”
“Sure. But I’m going to need a few more shots to forget that I just did amateur surgery.” She hesitated for a moment before asking again, “But we’re good? It’s not weird now that I went Frankenstein and cut up your shoulder?”
Brett smiled before lurching forward to his feet unsteadily. Reagan cried out, throwing her arms around him to keep him from faceplanting, but then as his left arm wrapped around her, she realized that he was aiming for a drunk, injured hug. “Of course we’re good!” he slurred. “BFFs forever!”
Reagan laughed as Brett leaned even more of his body weight into the hug, making them both stagger. “BFFs forever,” she echoed.