"Searching, for that something that I'll never find,
In another place another time"

»«

"Dana, Leroy Hastings in room 2036 just got out of surgery, and Kim called in sick. Could you check on his vitals every hour?"

The girl nodded, pulling the patient file and glancing at it. "Appendectomy?"

"Yes." Nurse Darby confirmed. "Dr. Stevens has plenty of staff in his ward, so he's letting me pull you for a moment."

The young nurse laughed. "It's fine by me. Just as long as I'm getting my hours in." She tucked the file under her arm. "How's ER?"

"Quiet, so far. But it's only 11:00." June sighed. "Rush hour won't hit until later."

"Well, I wish you the best of luck." Dana smiled softly before walking off, arm wrapped around the folder.

Leroy Hastings, age 35, recently admitted for appendicitis and just got out of surgery, prognosis good. Stepping into his room, Dana was greeted with a clean-shaven man, wisps of grey already tainting his black hair. His grey eyes followed her every move, and his pale cheeks had a bit of color to them. He was still recovering.

"Hello, Mr. Hastings." She smiled. "Everything okay?"

He looked at her for several moments, finally speaking.

"Ich spreche Deutsch." He barked in the German language, his tone rather rough. "Ich verstehe kein Englisch."

Dana blinked for several seconds, recognizing the words only vaguely, holding the folder a little tightly as she tried to roughly translate and figure out what to do. She gazed at the man for a long time.

Suddenly, he broke out into a grin, and laughed. "Ah, I vas just messing vith you! I speak Englisch."

"Oh." She laughed with relief. "You had me all sorts of confused for a second. So, I see you're in a good mood."

"Yes." He smiled. "I veel much bettzer after ze surgery."

"Good, good." She opened his file, still smiling, as she began to copy what she saw on the monitors. "How is the pain?"

He shrugged. "Not nearly az much az it vas bevore ze surgery." Leroy paused for a moment as he contemplated what he was truly thinking. "It iz a manageable pain, az long az I don't move."

"I can get you something stronger, if you'd like." The nurse offered.

"I zink it vill be all'vight." Her patient very gently tapped the incision point. "Zey vill give me something before I go."

Dana only nodded. "If you insist." She checked his file one last time to make sure she didn't miss anything. "Now, I'm going to be back every hour for the next, oh, I'd say twelve hours, if not a little less or a little more, just to see how you are doing. If you need anything and can't wait until I get there, then go ahead and press the call button, okay?"

He flashed her a smile, his teeth straight and a beautiful white. "Ov course. I vill look forvard to seeing you."

Simply smiling, she bid him goodbye before leaving him be for the moment. As attractive as he was, and an accent to boot, he was thirty-five years old, seventeen her senior. And a patient.

She sighed. Why do all the good ones have to be old or from the work place?

Though she tried to dismiss it as him being nice. It was another alternative she was willing to look at; not every man was out to get her. She shouldn't flatter herself and believe that she was a girl everyone wanted. In fact, she wasn't really wanted by anyone, considering no one had ever asked her out before, or made any advances toward her.

Hey, focus. You got work to do.

Putting his file back where it belongs she began to do her brief rounds, checking in on the few patients she was assigned to in Dr. Stevens' department, the Neuroscience wing. She hoped to one day become a traveling nurse, taking contracts around the states and living in places she never had the chance to ever see before. Even better, she wanting to be an OR nurse, specifically in the Neuroscience field, but she would take whatever she could get if it meant moving and traveling. Her parents weren't the fond of the idea, and Nursing school was expensive, but her heart and mind was into this gig. She wanted it, badly.

But as of right now, she was the gopher. What the older nurses didn't want, she would get. Thankfully this time around it was a few rowdy patients, but she could handle those. She got a lightly sadistic sweet revenge on Nancy, an older and slightly condescending nurse, who happened to get a patient with a certain enjoyment in fecal matter; and Dana was never around to clean up the mess.

At break time, she checked her phone. No updates. Miko had texted the group chat about detention, and Jack updated them on his work schedule, but there was nothing about Optimus. Sighing, she dialed a number and waited patiently for the recipient to pick up.

"What?" Ratchet asked, his tone a bit snappish.

"Hey." She remained calm, reclining against the lockers of the locker room and making annoyed eye contact at any other nurse that tried to look at her and silently weigh in on the conversation. "Any updates on the search?"

"No. If there was, I'd call you." He huffed, the faint sound of his digits hitting the keys in the background. "Is there any other reason you called?"

She shrugged. "I'm just on break, and I wanted to make sure you were okay." She sighed, looking off in the distance. "I know this is really hard for you. And I want him back just as much as everyone else. But we need to stay calm, and stay focused. He wouldn't want us to overlook something just because we're all in panic mode."

"Dana, it's been almost three months since Optimus was . . . Taken. Stolen from us." Her guardian argued. "If we don't find him in time, Megatron could kill him, or worse, turn him into a Decepticon."

Giving another eavesdropping nurse a glare, she pushed herself off of the lockers and made her way to a more private area to talk, checking the time and seeing she had quite a while before she really needed to get back. "Listen, Ratch. Orion Pax became an Autobot once, what's to say he won't do it again? Primus chose him because his spark was pure. And I'm willing to bet you that hasn't changed. We'll find him. And perhaps we could use Vector Sigma to restore his memories."

"That's another problem." Ratchet growled, seeming to ignore the first part of what she said. "To get to Vector Sigma, we'd need to get to Cybertron. And we don't have the means."

"We'll find a way." She insisted. "Somehow, some way, we will find him, and get him back. You just gotta have faith."

There was silence on the end of the line for a while, Ratchet letting out a long ex-vent. "I wish I could have the optimism of a human."

A smile graced her lips. "And I wish I had the skill sets of a Cybertronian. But we work with what we got, don't we?"

"That we do." Another pause. "I need to go. The others are reporting in. Do I need to pick you up?"

"Nah, I've got my car. I'll probably be around at 5:30-ish, depending on how bad the traffic is. And depending on how brutal work gets." She continued to smile. "I'll see you then."

"Goodbye."

Snapping her phone shut to hang up, she stored it back in her locker and let out a long breath. "Rush hour" was approaching, or the time when there were more accidents coming in than any other time in the ER. Hopefully she wouldn't be roped into too many trauma-related activities. She wanted to be in the operating room, not a fast-paced emergency room. That was not the kind of place she felt inclined to be in.

Washing her hands carefully, she mentally prepared herself for the work ahead. Being a nurse was rough enough, being an ER nurse was something fierce.

Good luck, June. She thought.