oh, doctor doctor, tag jo and xander

WHAT DAY IS IT? AND IN WHAT MONTH? THIS CLOCK NEVER SEEMED SO ALIVE.
i can't keep up and i can't back down, i've been losing so much time.
ALL OF THE THINGS THAT I WANT TO SAY JUST AREN'T COMING OUT RIGHT. I'M TRIPPING ON WORDS.
you've got my head spinning. i don't know where to go from here.
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Dean couldn’t count the injuries that he’d had throughout his life. He’d been a kid when he went on his first hunts and there were times that he wound up seriously injured and it was always either his dad or Sam that helped patch him up again. It was rare that it was serious enough for him to end up in a hospital. He had better have broken bones or in a state where only medical attention would keep his heart beating. Otherwise, there was no way in hell he was stepping foot in a hospital. And Dean’s body was plenty scarred from every fight he had been in. Well, at least over the last few years. When he came back from Hell, everything had been fixed. There were no scars on him, no aches in injured limbs that might not have healed properly and no sign that he had broken his fingers God knows how many times. Hunting was a dangerous job. You were bound to get injured now and then. And Dean was used to it. It wasn’t to say that he didn’t feel the pain, because he did. And he could vouch that a lot of injuries hurt like a bitch. And he would groan and whine if it was bad enough. Hell, even he’d been called a baby before, but because he whined or grumbled about a particular injury or the rough handling of it. For instance, it was damn hard to stop from grumbling when someone was digging a bullet out of you. You learned to hold back the pain, became accustomed to injuries and as a hunter, you didn’t show pain that easily. Dean especially didn’t. He held it back, kept it down and most people he knew did the same. It was the hunter way.

But to scream out in pain? Sure, Dean had screamed out before, but it was when something was tearing him apart, rather than something as little as a dislocated shoulder. Yeah, those hurt like a bitch. He knew that and had dealt with one before, but you grit your teeth, groaned and let it get reset. At least that was how he handled it and how he saw other hunters deal with it. “Sure, and my best friend’s a friggin’ cheeseburger.” Humans were food for vampires. They weren’t their friends and the only reason they pretended to be was for some other agenda. Dean wasn’t sure what it was and he had no proof of this assumption, but it was there all the same. Why else would they need to be public? They were gaining their trust for a reason. Dean didn’t have all of the answers, but he was sure it wasn’t in order to be their friends and equals. And he recognized that the guy was sounding less and less like a random guy that had a run-in with a vampire. But, since he was playing doctor, he wasn’t about to comment on it. It was better if he said as little as possible and got out of there as quick as he could. They didn’t need to be caught pretending to be doctors. He wasn’t sure what would happen to them if they were caught, but odds were it wouldn’t be good. And he wasn’t looking to go to jail or have to run for it too quickly. It would be better if they could get out, slip out of the lab coats and slip out like they hadn’t been there to begin with. Had this been a direr patient, they would have had to react differently. But, it wasn’t.

“Dude, you pretty much just yelled like a girl,” A glance was sent at Jo, as if realizing his own mistake, given that Jo was clearly a girl. “It’s not that bad.” He replied. “Are you gonna take ‘em? They work. Believe me, takes the edge right off.” Dean insisted, and he thought he would be smart to take the pills. They were legitimate, at least. Not everyone carried around a bottle with them, but you never knew when you might need it, especially not when you hunted and Dean had his share of being roughed up recently. To Jo, he nodded, agreeing completely. Their cover was blown, so they needed to get out of there. There was no other option at that point. Though at his question, he sighed. “Hunters, all right? We help people.” Dean replied, not sure if he was going to know what he meant by it. But, hey, he asked what they were and Dean decided at that point, it wouldn’t hurt to answer. If he was going to call security then they weren’t going to be any worse off now. He still edged towards that door, ready to get out of there if he had to run. Dean was hoping that wouldn’t be the case and that by answering him that he would have some idea of what they were and wouldn’t be too ready to yell for someone to arrest them because they were impersonating doctors. They might not have had the best bedside manner and they might not have been medically trained, but they had helped and the pair did know how to set a shoulder. So, he didn’t think he could be too outraged with them. Then again, he knew better than to trust people’s reactions, even if you helped them out.

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THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT YOU I CAN'T QUITE FIGURE OUT. AND I DON'T KNOW WHY
i can't keep my eyes off of you.
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tag; jo & xander
music; you and me - lifehouse
word count; 911
credit; La-La-Lia from caution
notes;If anything needs fixing, let me know.

Pretending to be a doctor was all well and good until somebody asked you something medically related, and then you were pretty much screwed. Jo could fix up injuries no problem. She'd patched together more hunters than she could count, in the Roadhouse, because they seemed to figure that it was better to drag themselves there than to end up in a hospital where too many questions would be asked, and she'd become quite the expert at digging out bullets or shell fragments, and stitching up wounds. It was never as clean as a hospital, sure, but Jo did her best, and there was always alcohol to numb the pain. Hunters sucked it up, anyway, they weren't going to yell or cry just because something hurt like a bitch, and she had become used to that, in all honesty, in patching up people who were tough, and had no desire to let their pain show through. It was kind of weird to be in a place where people actually were kicking up a fuss, in all honesty; hunting was a dangerous job, and sometimes you got hurt, it was as simple as that. Jo had had her fair share of scars from hunts, before she'd died, and while her body had been good as new when she'd been brought back to life, she was already amassing a collection again. It was just the way that it worked, wasn't it? If you fought, you were going to get hurt, and of course it wasn't particularly fun, but alcohol numbed the pain, and adrenaline kept you going through the next fight even if you weren't quite up to full strength again. And eventually you'd die. It sucked, but it was the truth; nobody came into hunting expecting to reach their hundredth birthday, that was without a doubt. Jo hadn't wanted to die so young, but she'd known that it was a possibility – and hey, she bet that there wasn't a real doctor in this place who could explain away the fact that she wasn't dead when she should have been. Being a hunter was more useful, sometimes. Just...not when it came to dealing with injuries.

She didn't really know what she was doing here. She'd reset shoulders before, sure, it was a fairly common injury, but it was usually on somebody who was used to dealing with pain. You got thrown about by something stronger than you enough times, and eventually banging into things stopped hurting so bad, it was as simple as that. It was one of those occupational hazards, unfortunately, and Jo couldn't say that she liked it, but she didn't even think about it, most of the time. Sure, she knew if a hunt was likely to be more dangerous than was normal, but she didn't go into a hunt wondering how she was going to get hurt this time; she just knew that it was a possibility, and did everything that she could to make sure that she wasn't hurt too badly, because nobody wanted to go through that. But thank God that this guy only had a dislocated shoulder, really, because if he'd had something more serious, there was no way in hell that she and Dean would have been able to do anything to help; they weren't doctors, and she wasn't about to pretend that she was, either, because that was likely to just end with someone being more hurt than they needed to be. Maybe their way of fixing shoulders wasn't the way that someone in the medical profession would have done it, but it worked, didn't it? It was a tried and tested method, just as were all the other ways that they dealt with their injuries. Hunters got hurt, but they generally stuck around, and something had to go really wrong for them stitching themselves up not to work all that well. They weren't going to stop doing that, because they couldn't go to hospitals. There'd be too many questions that they didn't want to answer, and it would probably only lead to bad things. “Well, they shouldn't be,” she muttered in reply – speaking of bad things, and all that.

And also speaking of bad things, their covers had been blown, and sticking around here longer than was necessary to make sure that this guy wasn't going to tell on them was really not a good idea; they didn't want to be forced into treating another patient, after all, someone who was worse off than just being a baby about the pain of a dislocated shoulder. Jo wasn't going to be pretending to be a doctor again any time soon, that was for sure, because this really hadn't turned out all that well, had it? “You don't have to scream about it,” she replied, giving Dean a look for his girl comment, but not commenting on it herself; she wouldn't yell like that, that was for sure, but there were more important things to get annoyed about now than something like that. It happened, and Jo was well aware that she was used to more pain than most girls her age, just because of what her profession was. She sighed, nodding in agreement to Dean's explanation of what they were, stepping back and taking off the lab coat, folding it up into a small enough bundle that it wasn't completely obvious what it was. “We gotta go,” she repeated, because the longer they were here the more change there was that they'd be found out by someone other than just this guy, and then the police would get involved and they'd have to break out of jail and that was the last thing that either of them wanted, really, since it was a whole load more hassle than they needed. “Look...we helped you, alright, it'll feel better soon. You don't need to call us out.” That was the last thing they needed. They'd helped, that was what mattered, right?

“Well, they shouldn't be”

Yeah, Xander totally agreed with that. Vampires were already a huge pain in the collective ass, mankind didn't need them to turn all psychotic all of the sudden too. It didn't take a huge genius to know that vampires were way less of a threat when they were their normal selves. Some of the species he had only learned about after the Great Reveal had souls to keep their actions in check but even when it came down to the vampires he was used to deal with in Sunnydale, the ones who only got a soul when they got cursed or wanted to impress a girl, Xander was pretty sure that they had some kind of self control that made them use a little judgment before leaping at the throats of whoever walked past them on the street. Just what the hell would suddenly make all the vampires and demons go psychotic anyway? If Giles couldn't figure that one out until now, Xander was convinced that he had no chance in the universe of doing it. He called himself half Watcher for a reason: he lack the genius level intellect and knowledge half that was in the job description. Not being able to figure it out, though, didn't mean that he have to stop thinking about it. Hey, it was a good distraction from the pain in his shoulder! Too bad it didn't take it away too. ”Your best friend is a cheeseburger?”, he repeated Dean's words, chuckling a little at them – he couldn't chuckle too hard because that would have made his shoulder hurt more than it already did. ”Thanks for the mental images.” It looked like the morphine was having some effects on him, even if they weren't the ones which he would have wished for. He got the point of what Dean was saying. Vampires and humans as friends was as ridiculous as cheeseburgers being friends with humans.

Another ridiculous thing: people pretending to be doctors. Sure, kids did it on the playground but grown ups doing it? In an actual hospital? Inside a very real emergency room filled with people that needed real doctors to look at them and fix them up? Man, that wasn't only ridiculous, it was stupid and dangerous too. Were these two crazy? They could have killed someone with their little role playing. What if he had been more seriously wounded – thank God he hadn't – and would have needed a more complicated intervention? He didn't even want to go that far with the thought. Xander was already pretty annoyed with the way in which they fixed his shoulder because, for now, it just felt like they did more harm than good: the pain was double, maybe even more than double. The one-eyed man couldn't really think ahead and focus on the long term benefits for now. ”You guys did something I told you not to do. I was so not ready for it. I would appreciate it if you stopped making fun of me for it. Not exactly a fan of excruciating pain after having my eye popped out of my socket with a thumb.” So maybe he could have spared them the gruesome story behind his eye patch but he felt that the two doctor wannabes needed to know that he wasn't a wuss. Xander thought that he would have reacted better if he expected Dean to do what he did. The Watcher eyed the bottle of pills a little suspiciously but the pain pushed him to throw logic aside and reach out for it. As best as he could with his good hand, Xander opened it, taking a couple of pills and swallowing them dry. ”Thanks”, he told Dean, offering the pill bottle back.

“Hunters, all right? We help people.”

”Hunters?” The word made Xander frown a little. A little pompous for a title, if you asked him, and he could bet that he heard it before. ”Oh! Giles mentioned meeting one of you guys at one point. So that's how you knew so much about how vampires are supposed to be...” His voice trailed off and he took a very deep breath. Was he imagining things or was the pain really starting to wear off? Xander turned towards the young woman whose name he didn't catch and shook his head. ”I'm not planning to. You might have done something crazy and mocked my yelling skills but you helped. Thanks.” His head turned from Jo to Dean and he lost himself in thought for a couple of moments. ”You said you help people, right?”, Xander asked after a bit. ”Would you help me get out of this place before the real doctors show up?” They did set his shoulder back in place (though he didn't approve of the method) so there was no real reason for him to stay there. Besides, once the real doctors came by, he was going to have to explain how his shoulder got fixed and he didn't know how to explain that without getting into details about Dean and his friends having been there.