Team Spirit - a Reed900 fanfiction

Drinks (bonus story)

Author's note: This started as a small idea, and turned into a 3.000 word short story. I hope Nines will forgive for my bad attempt at humor. :-)

***

Nines frowned at his phone. Beside him, Gavin looked up from his tablet.

"What's the matter? Did you lose at Dr. Mario?"

"No..." Nines elaborated when he saw the question mark in his lover's expression. "My colleagues have asked me out for..." He hesitated for a second. "Drinks."

"That's a good thing," Gavin said, flicking him across the nose. "No need to look so sour about it!"

"I don't know if I should do it." Nines looked over the message again. It was sent to him specifically, not just a shout out in the group app that had a notification bubble with double digits every day. He had not dared to put the thing on mute yet, not when he only worked there for three weeks, him being added to the group chat a few days after that. The chat was supposed to be used to conveniently trade shifts and to inform everyone of meetings and stuff; instead, it was more of a social thing, he discovered. Every little thing that couldn't be discussed when there were patients around or when things got too busy in the ER - like, all the time - got thrown in the group chat.
Too late, he realised Gavin was talking to him. "I'm sorry, what did you say?"

The man rolled his eyes, though he repeated his words good-naturedly. Or a summary of it, at least. "Going out for drinks with your co-workers is a great way to get to know them. Didn't you say just last week that you felt like you hardly knew anybody?"

Nines sighed softly. He had indeed said that. After his initial training period in different wards of the hospital, even some weeks on the ambulance, he now finally had his desired spot on the ER team. It was one of the most frantic places in the hospital, which made it a little hard to get to know the people he worked with. Sure, he knew pretty soon which nurses had a way of handling drunkards, and he knew who to call when a little kid was brought in, but he knew nothing of their lives outside of the hospital. It was not that odd, if he thought about it, because he sometimes felt he hardly had a life outside the hospital himself. Like now, when he had to set his alarm and put his phone away, because he had to get up at an ungodly hour.

Gavin took his reading glasses off and placed them on the bedside table. He reached out with his other hand, cupping the back of Nines' neck, softly scratching the short hairs with his thumb. "Don't overthink it, dummy. Just say you'll go and go the fuck to sleep. You've got an early shift tomorrow, remember?"

A few minutes later Nines settled in next to his partner, who had his reading glasses back on and was scrolling through some news websites with one hand. The other hand was back in Nines' neck, rubbing slow, absent minded circles.

The police detective would wake up the following morning to a post it note on his pillow, written in Nines' narrow script. 'I'll be going out for drinks after work. See you tonight?'

***

When Nines got out at the bus stop, he looked around to check if he was on the right street. Despite living within the vicinity of Detroit for most of his life, he rarely visited the city. He had his own apartment now, to be closer to his job, yet he still had to get to know his way around downtown. Another downside of the hours that he put in: he didn't have much free time, and what he had was spent with Gavin, if their hours off matched up anyway. Yesterday they had not even two hours together before Nines had to hit the sack. Today, if he wanted to see Gavin, he had to wait until the man crawled next to him in bed in the middle of the night. If he did, maybe the detective would sleep at his own home, as that was closer to the precinct.