Chapter Text
Dr. Tony Stark paused at the entrance to the hospital’s walk-in clinic and surveyed the row of patients lining the wall. He suppressed a groan as he took note of their ailments, which were quite frankly far below his pay grade. Feverish-looking toddler on her mother’s lap, sniffling. Middle-aged man openly reaching into his shirt to scratch a large rash on his chest and neck. A very green-looking teenage girl who looked on the verge of vomiting any minute. A thirty-something man in a leather jacket with a Zune in his hand who was standing up despite the large number of empty chairs available. Rectal foreign body, probably, judging by the look of pure mortification on his face.
Great.
He knew Pepper was just trying to annoy him by making him take clinic hours. And forcing him to wear a stupid lab coat while he did it. She’d said it was because he now had three residents to take some of the workload off his shoulders, meaning he had no excuse to get out of clinic duty anymore.
But that wasn’t it. First of all, he hadn’t asked to be given a team of interns. Sure, they were all very talented and quick to do his bidding, but they were also kind of annoying. Parker was a nice kid, but too eager, like a puppy dog. Jones kept to herself, and was totally unreadable, which irked Tony to no end. And Keener was almost as snarky as Tony himself, and he couldn’t abide such an ego on his team.
“Dr. Stark,” came Dr. Rhodes’s voice from behind him. “You’re late. For your first day.”
“Oh hey Rhodey.”
Rhodey leaned on the doorframe beside Tony and fixed him with an exasperated look. “Dude, we’ve talked about this, it’s ‘Dr. Rhodes’ in here. I’m your supervisor when you’re on clinic duty.”
“Yeah. Still don’t know how that happened. You supervising…anyone,” Tony teased.
“Oh, you wanna go there?” Rhodey teased back. “We were in med school together, I know what you were like. If I told Pepper half of the things you got up to, she never would have let you supervise three residents.”
“Maybe you should tell her then. I kinda liked working alone.” Tony pulled out his bottle of vicodin from his lab coat pocket and dropped one of the white pills into his palm.
Rhodey frowned. “That bottle is pretty full. You got your prescription refilled already?”
Tony was not in the mood for an interrogation this early in the morning. “Lay off, alright? I’ve got a bum arm, remember?” He held up his left hand, which was trembling slightly. “Infarction? Muscle death? Almost killed me?”
Rhodey rolled his eyes. “No shit. I was there, remember?”
Tony softened a little. He did remember. Remembered how Rhodey had been with him when he realized something was wrong and had rushed him to the hospital. How it had taken three days for a diagnosis thanks to the incompetence of the doctors, who had initially suspected him of drug seeking. How, by the time they landed on the right diagnosis, the severity of the infarction had already started to cause muscle death in his bicep and the doctor had recommended immediate amputation to save his life. Rhodey had been the only one on Tony’s side when he’d opted instead for a radical arterial bypass treatment to save the arm, which had required him to spend days in an induced coma to cope with the post-op pain.
But most of all, he remembered Rhodey being there when he woke up, and how he’d explained that Pepper, convinced that the procedure would kill him, had overridden his wishes and sent him to surgery for removal of the damaged muscle. As Tony’s medical proxy, the call was hers, and she’d done what she thought was best. It had left Tony with chronic pain and a permanently weakened right arm.
That had been the beginning of the end of his relationship with the esteemed Dr. Potts.
“But you’re not a brain surgeon, Tones,” Rhodey continued, snapping Tony out of his reverie. “You don’t exactly need two perfectly-functioning arms for clinic duty.” He gestured to the various patients across the waiting room. “The toddler needs some baby Tylenol and a pep talk for Mom. Itchy dude reeks of cologne, and the rash is right where he would have applied it, so it’s probably an allergic reaction. Pukey just needs a few tests but my money’s on food poisoning.” He looked at the man who wouldn’t sit down and paused.
“Aha,” said Tony. “Foreign body guy is looking at an extraction. Two fully-functioning hands required.”
“I was going to take him—”
Tony quickly popped his pill into his mouth and swallowed it dry. “Leather jacket, you’re with me!” he shouted, walking into the waiting room and shuffling through the charts at the registration desk until he found the one for the patient in question.
As he led the stiffly-walking man to exam room one, Tony glanced back at Rhodey who was greeting the woman with the toddler. Suddenly it occurred to him that he’d just been played. He was about to spend the next thirty minutes wrist-deep in a rectum out of spite while Rhodey handed out baby Tylenol and cortisone cream.
Rhodey’s wink as he caught Tony’s eye confirmed it.
Bastard.
He ushered the patient into the exam room and closed the door before turning back to face him.
“So. Whatcha got in there?” he asked with no preamble.
The man looked surprised for a second at how easily Tony had deduced his problem, but then he recovered and launched into an obviously rehearsed explanation.
“I—ugh. Okay, I can explain. It was the most freakish coincidence. I was walking backward and I tripped—”
Tony held up his hand. “Nope. Uh uh. We’re not doing this, not before my third coffee. Why do you rectal foreign body guys always try to play me for an idiot? Listen…” He consulted the patient’s chart for his name. “…Star-Lord?”
The man shrugged at Tony’s quizzical expression. “It’s my screen name in my online gaming account. I didn’t want to use my real name.”
Tony scrubbed a hand over his face. “Whatever. Mr.…Lord. Help me out here. You didn’t trip; you got bored and horny, and then you got adventurous. Happens to the best of us. Trust me. God when I was in pre-med I—” No. He did not want that story going beyond himself and Rhodey. “Anyway. Just tell me what it is so I can figure out if you need an X-ray or if I can just get the forceps right now.”
For a moment, Star-Lord looked like he wanted to argue, to finish reciting his prepared story. But he just let out a defeated sigh and looked at the floor. “It’s…a flip phone.”
Tony’s professionalism kept him from laughing. But he couldn’t resist uttering the quip that jumped to his lips. “You know that’s not what people mean when they say ‘butt dial,’ right?”
“Ha, ha,” said Star-Lord with a frown.
“Sorry,” said Tony quickly, suppressing a smirk. He took out his own smartphone and handed it to him. “Could you pull up a photo of it? I need the dimensions.”
Star-Lord did a google search and handed the phone back to Tony to examine the photo. It was a smaller model and had no antenna to present complications. Extraction should be pretty straightforward.
“Forceps it is,” he declared.
Still, as he instructed the patient to strip from the waist down and get onto the exam table on all fours while he turned his back and prepared a syringe with local anesthesia, Tony couldn’t help but hope that the teenager with food poisoning was vomiting all over Rhodey’s shoes right about now.