Yo-Ho-Ho and a Bottle of Wine

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Summary: A patient visits Mineral Town Clinic with an unusual affliction. Rated for immaturity and disgustingness.

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Disclaimer: I don't own 'em, and I'll be surprised if they don't skip the suing and put a price on my head after this one.

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There are bad days, and then there arebad days. Days so glaringly, unbelievably, jaw-droppingly horrible as to be nearly epic in their proportions of sheer unpleasantness.

For Dr. Timothy Cuthbert of Mineral Town Clinic, it had started out as the first sort of day, when he had wandered into his assistant's bedroom at an inopportune moment to remind her of something that had to be done today, mishearing the muffled wait from the other side of the door as okay. Even now, he couldn't for the life of him recall what he had been going to tell her – it had promptly exited his brain at the sight of Elli creeping reluctantly out of bed, and the revelation tht she didn't hold with this pyjama or nightgown nonsense. Much shrieking and scrambling and hurried apologizing had followed, while Tim, in something of a daze, had attempted a sip of his scalding hot coffee and sort of...missed.

The situation had almost redeemed itself when Elli's nursing instinct had overwhelmed her proper-young-lady instinct, and he had found himself stripped of his coffee-soaked shirt and labcoat by a girl wrapped haphazardly in a quilt and nothing else.

It had almost salvaged itself; after all, the coffee had been hot, and the burn marks streaking the better parts of his chest and stomach damn well hurt.

It had gone beyond merely a bad day and ventured into the hazy middle ground between bad and bad when Jeff had come by, on a day that wasn't even Tuesday, and tied up the better parts of the morning insisting that the headache he'd had since his four-hour session with the Supermarket's budget records last night was a symptom of brain cancer. At the one-hour mark, he'd started to get impatient, drumming his fingers on the desk and barely muffling his yawns. At the two-hour mark, he'd been on the verge of barking at the man to go home and take a bloody Advil, stopped only by Elli's reproachful eye.

The afternoon had held little better: a junk-food-stuffed, nausea-plagued Ann, who had proceeded to relieve nausea and upend junk-food all over his desk; a one-sided gossip fest with Manna, whose throat infection had made no impact whatsoever; another visit from Jeff; and a rousing session of bone-setting with Cliff, whose foot had become intimately accquainted with a particularly large and heavy carboy.

But despite all this, Tim's day had not yet achieved the epic proportions of bad.

Until, at five minutes from the blessed, much-anticipated closing time, the little bells above the front door jingled merrily.

There was nothing particularly terrifying, painful, or disgusting about the bells themselves, nor the sound they made when the door was open. Nor was it the first time that a patient decided to meander in at five minutes to six. Usually, it was to refill a prescription, pick up some bandages, or kidnap his nurse, and they were on their way.

Today, however, the jingle was accompanied by a continuous roar of pain and an equally continuous chorus of very creative profanity that rather suggested the mysterious newcomer's problem would not be resolved in time for the six o' clock news.

Now feeling that his day was teetering precariously on the brink of bad, Tim didn't even try to muffle his groan of dismay when, three minutes later, Elli bolted into his office, her pretty face awash with sympathy and tight with concern.

“Doctor! We have a problem!”

“So I gathered,” he said flatly. At Elli's horrified expression, he sighed. “Alright, what is it?”

“It's Karen. Sasha just carried her in – I don't think she could walk right now if she tried, and I'm pretty sure she really shouldn't.”

Already repenting his cavalier attitude toward the pain of another, particularly in light of Elli's obvious alarm for her friend, he climbed hurriedly from his desk.

“Is it a broken bone? What have the young people around here been doing lately?”

Elli bit her lip nervously, and Tim, frowning bewilderedly, could have sworn that she was blushing, of all things.

“It—it's not a fracture. But she's in a lot of pain right now. She has...um, shards of bottle glass in somewhere really unpleasant.”

He stared blankly.

“What?”

“Glass shards. In her...um, womany place. There are several minor laccerations, and at least one that might cause a problem. I've removed most of the glass, did a general flushing out of the area, and disinfected the bigger cuts – and let me tell you, I'm lucky to be alive! – and now she would really, really like it if you would prescribe some painkillers.”

He continued to stare blankly.

“Bottle glass? In...uh, down there? How in the blue hell did she manage that?”

Elli's blush deepened.

“Well, the story was a little incoherent, and I don't think she wanted to talk about it in front of her mother, but from what I could piece together, she was...well, being intimate with a wine bottle, and it broke. Which means that it was either a very flimsy wine bottle, or she was getting a little too excited considering her partner, and now that I think about it, I hope I never find out.”

Now with absolutely no doubt that his day had progressed from bad to bad, Tim bowed his head in despair.

“Anything else?”

“Yes,” Elli replied promptly. “There are also several small cuts around the exterior and interior of the mouth, because after the bottle broke, she tried to drink the rest of the wine.”

A long, heavy silence followed. Finally, Tim shrugged out of his labcoat – his spare, since his first was balled up in a coffee-soaked mass in the laundry basket – and draped it about Elli's shoulders. Then he pulled off his headlamp and strapped it carefully around her forehead.

“Um...what are you doing, Doctor?”

“Just Tim,” he corrected. “Congratulations, Dr. Greene; as of this moment, you are now the owner and sole operator of the Mineral Town Clinic.”

She blinked.

“Okay...and what are you going to do?”

He smiled.

“I'll be pursuing my lifelong dream of a life as a hermit.”

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End Notes: That was dumb. Very dumb. Inspired by many a (equally dumb) "Rick screws chickens, haw haw haw!" raving over at Ushi no Tane.