Chapter Text
Shinobu was overworked, tired, and should have gone to bed hours ago—that was it. There was no other logical reason as to why her mind was playing tricks on her like this.
That was right, the last time her back had touched a proper mattress and her body had gotten any proper rest was, if she did even remember correctly, three days ago. It was a Sunday night, and she did recall some friends asking if she wanted to head out to some ill-sounding-themed get together she “did not want to miss”, but Shinobu had pulled up her chair behind the small desk in her dorm and started working on her lab report for Monday, only choosing to lay down on her bed after a throbbing headache started to form at the back of her head, and the lamp above her looked hazy.
Naturally, the next morning she discovered that she only had an hour to get ready for class, her lab reports were unfinished, and the throbbing in the back of her head from the night before never disappeared. And as she walked to class, she cursed herself for wasting such a good sleep, knowing that she was not going to get another one anytime soon.
She sighed, blowing strands of her long bangs away from her face. Her fingers found the keyboard once again, typing.
It was just another job at the clinic, shadowing the physician she had been appointed to. As rotating medical students weren't allowed to tackle patients head on (after that case some three years ago in another institution where a med student administered the wrong dose of epinephrine on neonatal resuscitation and ended up getting sued), she, and her many friends, were stuck on administrative duty most of the time, which included copying down patients’ medical records onto a shared database. This allowed easier access if the patient were to move to another city, or to visit a different hospital someday, and god bless technology, was all Shinobu could say. However, as the words started swimming in her eyes, she wasn't sure she should even continue typing all these patients’ personal files and health records at the risk of mixing them up at this point.
She blinked once, and then another, longer, hoping the indescribable blur in front of her corneas would just go away.
“Tired?”
Shinobu looked up, head popping above the height of the monitor, suddenly alert at the sound of the voice echoing in the otherwise quiet room.
She swiftly shook her head, ducking back under the monitor, “Just two more.”
The physician she was shadowing today hummed slightly, her red-painted lips pursed ever so slightly.
Doctor Tamayo was not at all like the lecturer Shinobu encountered in her second year. Maybe it was the way she dressed, elegant and clean, and sophisticated, clearly drawing the interests of not only herself, but also many of her classmates. The doctor specialized in emergency medicine—toxicology to be more specific—but in her day to day life, when she wasn't analyzing some kind of new active substance she discovered in a plant, writing papers, teaching preclinical students, and publishing scientific articles, she sat behind a desk in a small clinic owned by herself and handled patients on her own, much more humble than Shinobu had initially thought.
Shinobu's small group of rotating clinical students were currently stuck in the emergency medicine rotation, led by dr. Tamayo herself, at their university hospital. They don't meet her often, just her very tired, very overworked residents, but in the off-chance that she would invite one of the rotating students to visit her clinic after long days at the emergency department, Doctor Tamayo would put them on administrative duty so they could “learn proper handle and care of each diagnosis by reading medical records”—exactly what she was letting a very fortunate Shinobu to do at the moment.
“It's a Wednesday, so I'll be here for much longer than usual.”
Shinobu suppressed a yawn and offered a smile instead, “I'd love to stay, doctor.”
She heard her teacher chuckle, “And I wasn't expecting you to leave either.”
Shinobu muttered a small “Oh,” her smile faltering.
“Why don't you take a break, though? Get some lunch and coffee outside and go for a walk,” the attending physician suggested, “I feel like you need a little dose of sunshine.”
Shinobu thought “a little dose of sunshine” would be enough to evaporate her, and that she was perfectly content with where she was, but she really couldn’t deny that she hasn’t had anything since the stale bread in her dorm this morning, consumed in haste. Besides, she had seen a cozy-looking coffee shop just a few blocks away when she first arrived and made a mental note earlier, she needed to stop by, at least for a latte.
She pushed herself away from the borrowed desk she was sitting behind and nodded. Shinobu could vividly hear how her kneecaps both cracked in protest as she stood after having sat too long, but she couldn't care less to be embarrassed at this point.
“What time should I come back, doctor?” she asked.
Doctor Tamayo hummed a little, “One PM sharp should do,” she replied, gentle eyes finally meeting Shinobu’s, before continuing, “There's a patient with an appointment later today whose case you might want to present for morning reports tomorrow.”
She nodded. An hour was more than enough time to get lunch and a coffee—and some sunshine, and if her attending physician was going to recommend a good case for her reports tomorrow, she was going to be there for it.
Promising to herself—and, in her heart, to her attending physician as well—that she was going to finish typing in those records as soon as she came back, Shinobu took her time pulling on a jacket over her green scrubs. She already had a few places she could stop by in mind, maybe a panini or a salad for lunch, since heavier meals on busy days were just going to make her sick. Whichever one she decided to choose, Shinobu decided that she first needed to prioritize getting caffeine into her system, unless she wanted to fall asleep and faceplant onto the scorching sidewalk outside.
After swiftly bidding her attending goodbye, she left the small building.
It was late August now, not quite summer, but not quite fall. The world was suspended in this strange limbo, an afterglow of summer that was still much too early for yellowing leaves and gloomy weathers. She felt a little warm in her jacket, being under the sun, but the breeze was nice, not quite as polluted as it was near the center of the city. She could feel it blowing the small strands of hair that did not make it into her small bun, pinned with a hair clip, tickling her nape a little.
The walk was quaint, with not many people outside. Doctor Tamayo seemed to have chosen a more quiet environment for her clinic, somewhere close to her home. Shinobu was a person who preferred working in busy environments like large hospitals herself, but in the larger scale of things, she did have to agree that smaller clinics that can reach more remote areas were a much better way to return to society.
It reminded her of her parents’ hometown, the countryside, although not quite. She could feel herself smiling just slightly as she finally made it to the coffee shop she had been eyeing since she arrived.
The door didn’t have a chiming bell when she opened it, only silence spare the sound of the door clicking back shut as she stepped in. She reluctantly walked inside with one hand shoved inside her jacket pocket to dig for her phone. The smell of coffee only made the headache behind her eyes throb harder ever so slightly, as if her nerves just could not wait another second for the stimulant. She swiftly eyed the barista standing behind the cashier—not currently taking any customers—and walked up to them.
“Hi, what can I get for you?”
“An iced latte, please. Don’t add any sugar,” she smiled, repeating an order she has known for as long as she drank coffee.
“Will that be for here or to go?”
The coffee shop Shinobu frequented back in the city would just serve everything in paper or plastic to-go cups regardless of the customer dining in or not, so she was a little taken aback. She replied with a, “For to go, please.”
“Okay, anything else?” the barista asked.
Shinobu paused, “Actually, can you add an extra shot to that?”
The barista nodded, inputting her order on the screen in front of her, “Of course. Anything else I can help you with?”
“No, that’s it, thanks,” she said.
“Alright, I’ll help with your payment, and you can wait at one of the tables. We’ll call you for your order when it’s ready.”
Shinobu chose one of the seats near the window, where the sunshine hit it just right, as her attending physician intended, making her giggle a little to herself. It was just the perfect table too, not too far from the bar so she could hear the barista when they call for her order. Finally settling into her seat, Shinobu pulled out her phone from her pocket, reading some notifications.
One came in from her roommate, saved under the contact name mitsuri 🍡. Her fingers itched to open the notification right away, only managing to read a glimpse of the fully-charged, high-energized text written completely in capital letters, when she heard the barista call:
“I have an oat milk latte for Giyuu!”
Her head snapped to the direction of the bar so fast, Shinobu was surprised she didn’t break her cervical vertebrae and ended up at the ER.
She was lucky she wasn’t still typing those medical records for her attending’s patients, though, she thought. Had she been microsleeping on the job and mixed up important data among patients or mistyped something, it would’ve been a much more serious problem for her and her degree.
Hallucinating that her ex boyfriend, who she has not contacted in two years, was at a small coffee shop on the outskirts of town, ordering an oat milk latte, was an entirely different, somewhat more manageable problem.
She blinked once, and then another, much longer, willing herself to wake up. She has never been so drowsy to the point of hallucination before, but she was a firm believer that there was a first chance for everything.
But as if to prove that she was in fact, not hallucinating, the barista called again, “Oat milk latte for Giyuu?”
Shinobu wasn’t sure if she should be relieved that she was perfectly mentally capable and not hearing things out of thin air.
The man who seemed to have placed the order for the oat milk latte walked up to the bar. Any hope that she was hearing things or it might have been a different person was easily thrown out the window when she caught sight of him.
He never really changed, but neither did Shinobu, if she was being honest. His hair was still unruly and messy, even though she only saw him from behind. His posture was tall and his shoulders were wide, and he walked swiftly, like he had places to be, anywhere but here. He stood straighter, though, as if there was a newfound confidence in him that she has never seen before. The voice he used to thank the barista was gentle, but even, laced with certainty.
They locked eyes when he turned, and Shinobu cursed herself for picking a table so close to the bar.
She didn’t know what to say for a while, or how to feel.
He blinked, momentarily breaking eye contact.
Shinobu blinked twice, free from the haze, clearing her throat, “Hey,” she said, “Want to sit down?”
She wasn’t sure why she asked if he would like to sit down. She wasn’t sure she was going to have enough time for that chicken pesto panini she had been imagining while she waited for her coffee. She wasn’t sure if the baristas were going to side-eye her for saying she was ordering her coffee to go, but ended up staying and dining in instead. She wasn’t even sure if he was going to say yes to her offer.
He eyed the empty seat in front of her. Never a man of much words, he pulled the chair back and sat down.
She smiled to the table, eyes refusing to meet his, “It’s been too long,” she started, “How have you been?”