Chapter Text
Sigrid Bowman loved her job. She loved her clinic, she loved her coworkers, and she loved her patients. What she didn’t love was having to appeal prior authorizations.
“She’s blind! I don’t know how else I can say it. She cannot see! How is she supposed to use a regular glucometer?” she fumed, attacking her PB&J with a fury.
Across the table her friend Ori frowned. “So what was the reasoning for the rejection?”
“They wanted her to try an audio meter first, one that will read out the number? But here’s the kicker 一 they don’t want to cover that either!” She sighed. “Even if we got her one of those, I just think she’ll be safer if she gets an alert BEFORE her blood sugar is down to 40. I mean call me crazy I guess.”
“So crazy,” Ori teased. “I’m sure this is how you imagined your life going when you started pharmacy school.”
Sigrid had been a clinical pharmacist for a little over two years now. It had been a long road. Four years of undergrad, another four of grad school and two years of residency that nearly broke her. But now things were finally getting settled. She’d found a cute little apartment close to the waterfront (though, alas, facing downtown instead), only about 20 minutes from the primary care clinic at which she worked.
“I gotta get going,” Sigrid said, “my patient is here already.”
So she wiped her face with the last clean edge of her crumpled napkin, swept the crumbs off the table, and headed back to her desk. The doctors, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners had staff to “room” the patients - get vitals, confirm medications, etc - but Sigrid was on her own, so every minute counted. She grabbed a tablet from the workstation behind her. She needed to get an interpreter on video, as no one had been available for an in-person job. It wasn’t surprising.
Her clinic’s mission specifically focused on refugees, migrant workers, and other undervalued folks. After the fires ravaged through Lake Town, Dale, and up to Erebor, folks had come in droves with hopes of employment rebuilding the cities. Things were never that simple of course, but it did result in the majority of her clinic’s patients not speaking Westron at all. As a result, she was well-practiced at utilizing interpreters.
After punching in the patient’s information and requesting Khûzdul, she grabbed a cart with an automated blood pressure cuff and swung into her exam room. While the system waited for an interpreter to pick up the job she logged into the computer, pulled up her patient’s chart, and took a deep breath to settle herself.
“一L, S, one-seven-seven. How can I help you today?”
“Sorry interpreter,” Sigrid said automatically. “Sound cut out there at the start.” It always did. “Can I have your name and ID code again?” She looked down at the screen to find a young-looking dwarf wearing an over-ear headset, sitting in front of a blank white wall.
“Of course. My name is Khima, interpreter ID is C, L, S, one seventy-seven.”
“Thanks Khima.” She jotted down the info at the top of her note and looked back to her. She tried to be friendly to the interpreters at the start and end of visits since their role, when done well, kept them in the background with the patient at the forefront. She wanted them to know she was appreciative. “Today we’re meeting with Munokh to discuss their diabetes. He’s still in the waiting room so I’ll run out and get him, you can introduce yourself, and we’ll get on with the visit.”
Forty-five minutes later, Sigrid put everything away, returned to her desk, and sighed. It had been a tough visit. The patient was quite hard of hearing, and it seemed his hearing aids needed new batteries. The interpreter spoke too quickly, and both she and the patient had to request she repeat herself. Sigrid tried to coach the interpreter towards slower speech but it didn’t work; she merely added long, patronizing pauses in between each rapidly-spoken phrase. Halfway through, the interpreter had lost patience and had tried to maneuver Sigrid into ending the visit early but she had refused, mostly out of spite. In theory Sigrid could file an incident report but it felt like more work than was worth the effort.
Looking out the window towards the Lonely Mountain, she saw tell-tale signs that autumn was beginning. Yellows and reds tinged the edges of leaves in the foothills, and in the foreground a strip mall’s worth of stores advertised pumpkin spiced items galore. It was rewarding, the work she did, and most of the time she had no issue working with interpreters. Perhaps it was inevitable that she’d eventually land on a bad one.
“What are you doing tonight?”
Sigrid spun in her chair to find Ori with his phone out. “What, can’t get enough of me?”
“Oh baby don’t you know it,” he replied in a deadpan tone. Then he smiled and looked up from the screen. “No, my cousins and I are going out tonight, I’m wondering if you want to come with us. I think you’d like them!” He slipped his phone back in his pocket and leaned against the wall next to Sigrid’s desk. “My mom will want family dinner but after that, what do you say? Prancing Pony for drinks, then see where the night takes us?”
“Oh I’d love to,” Sigrid sighed, “but my sister made me promise to take her to that new movie tonight. Rain check?”
Ori gave her a look. “Okay, but no weaseling out next time. Let me set you up!”
“With your cousin?”
“Yeah!” Ori grinned. “I do really think you’d like him. Trust me!”
Sigrid shook her head and leaned back in the chair. “No way. I don’t do blind dates.” As much as she trusted Ori, she was not remotely interested in meeting someone she knew nothing about.
“All right, all right,” he capitulated with his hands up in surrender. “Just promise me you’ll spend time with some people your own age sometime soon?”
“I promise I’ll try?”
“I promise to keep giving you crap until you prove to me you’ve got a life.”
A notification lit up on her monitor. Her next arrival. Sigrid rolled her eyes and waved off her friend. “I hear you, I hear you. Now go away, I have patients to see.”
Her next patient was new to her, also requiring a Khûzdul interpreter. She steeled herself as she pressed “Connect,” hoping the young woman from earlier didn’t pick up the job. It was uncommon to get the same person back-to-back, but it did happen occasionally. Luckily for her, a blonde Dwarf in a buffalo-plaid flannel came onto the screen instead. His long hair was pulled back from his face behind the headset he wore, braids dangled from his mustache and beard, and his eyes crinkled as he smiled at her.
“Hello, my name is Fíli, I’ll be your Khûzdul interpreter. How can I help you today?”
Oh, he was cute. She hoped he was also competent.
“Hello Fíli. let me just get your ID number, and we’ll begin.”
It was amazing how much more smoothly this visit went compared to the last. Fíli asked clarifying questions of Sigrid, restated things in different ways when the patient was confused, and kept a steady tone of voice when the patient started describing some particularly embarrassing symptoms she’d noticed lately. When the visit concluded, Sigrid moved back into the frame and beamed.
“Thanks so much for your help today, Fíli, that went really smoothly!”
“Of course, my pleasure. If there’s nothing else, I thank you for using our services. Have a good day.”
Normally Sigrid would mash the End Call button and flip the cover closed before she made it out of the exam room, but she hesitated a moment. Fíli remained on the screen though his focus was off camera. She took a moment to study him. Before, she hadn’t noticed the twists of braids from his temples tucked into his ponytail, or the sparkle in his light bluish eyes when he smiled. It looked like he was listening to someone; after a moment he chuckled quietly, shaking his head as if exasperated. Beads clacked in his hair as he pulled his headset off. “No, you little goat, I was一”
Sigrid ended the call, a flush racing up her neck. Clearly Fíli had no clue the video was still live. She hadn’t meant to steal that moment, but there was something magnetic about him that had pulled her right out of her senses. As she strode back down the hallway of exam rooms, she chided herself. “Absolutely ridiculous. One decent looking, halfway competent person crosses your path and you’re mooning.” She slumped into her desk and tapped her password in with a bit more force than necessary. “Maybe Ori’s right. I do need to get out more.”
~~*~~
“No, you little goat, I was finishing up a call. You know, one of us has to work for a living.”
She’d been cute, that doctor. The camera had pointed at the patient the whole time but in the few short minutes saying “Hi” and “Bye” her grey-blue eyes had caught his. Fíli tossed his headset onto his desk and grabbed his cane, then headed out to the kitchen.
Huh. It was pretty unusual these days for him to notice someone like that. But he found he’d rather missed that “Oh, hello there” feeling. Perhaps he’d unpack that later; first he had to scold his brother for interrupting him at work.
His brother stood at the stove, pushing what smelled like onions around in a pan. He was in sweatpants and no shirt, but an apron covered in cartoon pin-up girls hung around his neck to protect his chest. This was probably wise, Fíli thought, as it sounded like the heat was turned up too high. A loud pop, and he was proven right.
“Ah, shit!”
“Turn your heat down,” Fíli tutted. He opened the fridge door and scanned the contents. There was nothing that was easy and quick. Maybe a frozen pizza? Kíli might offer to share whatever he was making but burnt onions just weren’t calling to him today. “So what did you want?”
Kíli dumped a package of ground beef into the pan and pressed it down firmly. He did not, Fíli noticed, turn the heat down. “I wanted to ask you how long you’re planning on working from home.”
Fíli frowned and opened the fridge again, as if the contents might have magically changed in the 20 seconds since he last looked. They had not. He bent down with a grunt to grab a block of cheese, leaned his cane against the cupboard, and bought himself some time. “Well, the original plan had been for six months or until I graduated from PT.” A press of the knife, and a slice of cheese fell to the cutting board. “It’s been four months since I got home. I still haven’t gotten behind the wheel.”
Kíli softened, finally turning the heat down under his pan so he could turn the full force of his caring attention towards Fíli. “I know,” he replied gently. Ah, fuck. The puppy eyes were starting to emerge.
Fíli kept his eyes on the cutting board. It was kind of hard to believe it had been nearly four months now since he was discharged from the rehab facility. He’d spent over two months there after the three weeks’ time in the orthopedic wing of the hospital. Him and all the old ladies with broken hips. They’d all tutted over him whenever he passed them in the hall 一 he’d never have believed it if someone had tried to warn him about how damn horny they all would be with a younger man in their midst.
The grannies had all slipped on the ice, or tripped over a rug, or whatever. His car had been forced off the road by a driver so blasted out of his mind on drugs and booze that he claimed not to remember being on that highway at all. Fíli had suffered a heinously broken leg, severe concussion, and a punctured lung from one of his three ribs that broke after a tree branch blasted through the windshield. He still wasn’t sure exactly how many surgeries he’d had.
He’d seen the pale, bald giant just once at the arraignment, which had thrown him into a panic attack severe enough his lawyer advised him to just stay home for the rest of the proceedings. In the end, the guy walked away with court-assigned addiction recovery classes and a couple years in jail. It would be two months of intensive physical therapy until Fíli could walk at all.
“I just think you’re spending too much time cooped up here.” Kíli shrugged. “I’m not saying you need to go crazy, but maybe we should go back to the Mountain for a weekend. You can practice driving out there, on slower roads in smaller towns.”
Fíli furrowed his brow, thinking. The idea had some merit. He didn’t have to go on the freeway, or try and navigate the hellish web of One Ways and Dead Ends the hills of Dale had to offer. He could take it as slow as he needed to.
“And Mum would be over the moon.”
And of course, their Mum would be over the moon. “Did Dís put you up to this?”
The pan hissed as Kíli added tomato paste and water. Mahal bless him, but Kíli might have saved his meal after all. “No,” he answered. “Maybe. A little. She told me that some of the cousins are going up there and I think she wants a Quiplash rematch.” Kíli picked up a bundle of herbs and tossed half towards Fíli. “And you bailed on us the other night, so if you think about it, you kinda owe us.” A pause as Fíli pretended not to know what the greenery was for. “If you’re going to eat, you’re going to work. Strip those stems.”
While he hadn’t planned on it, a third venture to the fridge had produced no more food than the first two visits, so he shrugged and started picking leaves off of stems. They worked silently side by side for a few minutes as the sauce burbled and popped on the stove. A big pot of water simmered, and the intense normalcy of it all settled over Fíli like a blanket. “I don’t know what she’s so worried about,” he mumbled after a moment. “I’m fine.”
“Okay, you’re fine,” Kíli capitulated in a quiet voice, sweeping a pile of green and garlic into the sauce. “But you could be great.”
Fíli declined to respond to that. But his heart clenched at the care in his brother’s tone.
“I’m totally free this weekend and I know you are too. Just think about it.” He nudged Fíli with his hip and shoulder affectionately. “Now put that pasta in the water.”