Tormented | LisRene AU

Chapter 6

Irene awoke to the sounds of sirens and, for a moment, she thought she had fallen asleep during her shift. But this was not the break room or an on-call room. She was in her apartment. The sirens were coming from the street below and she had nothing to do with it.

She decided that it would be impossible to fall back to sleep now. The shower was too hot, but it soothed her aching muscles. Irene got dressed and headed down to the hospital. They could always use an extra set of hands. She had nothing else to do anyway. Working was the best distraction she had.

"What the hell are you doing here, Bae?" a nurse asked.

"Overtime," Irene replied with an easy grin.

Irene was almost one hundred percent sure that everyone knew she was here because she could not bear sitting in their empty apartment. She had no idea how she was going to handle another two months of Lisa being deployed. This was the first time she had been deployed since they started dating. Lisa had tried to warn her about how spouses normally felt but Irene thought she was stronger than that. Turns out, Irene could barely function without Lisa now. That scared her.

When Irene was alone for too long, she would start to think about Lisa getting hurt. There was a high chance of something happening to Lisa but, thankfully, she was only stationed in Germany. They were doing special training. Lisa had sworn to Irene that Germany was so much safer than anywhere else.

"Irene?" Bambam asked as he entered from the ambulance bay. "What are you doing here on your day off?"

Irene shrugged. "Better than sitting around at home, I guess," she replied.

There was no shortage of emergencies that night. Irene stayed busy and distracted. Things were not the same without Rosé and Lisa. There were no random shouting fits when Lisa brought up Rosé losing a boxing match. There was no one there to wink at her and not-so- subtly suggest they sneak off into one of the supply closets.

"You want to go on lunch together?" Bambam asked.

They walked down to the café together. It was empty as it always was during the nights, but they could still sit at one of the tables to eat the food they brought. The change in scenery was welcome.

"Have you talked to Lisa recently?" he asked.

Irene would rather talk about anything else, but she knew that Bambam missed them too.

"A few weeks ago," she said.

"Signals are terrible in Afghanistan," Bambam said.

"They're in Germany this time," Irene said, sighing. "I just have to wait for her to call me on the communal phone."

Bambam almost choked on his food and nodded quickly. "Right, yeah," he said.

The two returned to the trauma floor and were greeted with two new emergency patients. They performed one more surgery for the night. Once they were done, their shift was over. Irene took her time changing out of her scrubs.

"Irene," Bambam said. "Let me know if you hear anything, okay?"

"Of course," she replied.

Irene spent a lot of time in the gym when she was not working or sleeping. She visited her parents a lot more. They loved when she came over for dinner. Irene really loved talking about Lisa with them. She told them about Lisa performing an emergency surgery on the side of the room when a man's aorta began to tear. She also told them about a boy who came into the ER with odd symptoms. No one knew what was going on until Lisa suggested that he was 'dry drowning.' It made perfect sense. The boy had been swimming earlier that day.