Chapter Text
Winters in Chicago are usually bitter. The wind bites into the skin and latches on like an angry rabid animal. It certainly doesn’t help when the beautiful architecture, something the city promotes to tourists, seem to be laid out to maximize wind tunnels at every block. In January, the skies stay gray for most of the daylight hours which Levi usually misses anyway. The sun is yet to rise when he takes the L to work, dressed in two layers of knits and a puffer jacket that goes all the way down to his calves. It’s already evening by the time he goes home. For the first time this winter, Levi stares up into the blank gray skies as he waits on the station platform, sandwiched between other waiting passengers, eager for the warmth of packed trains.
“It’s not bad today, huh?” a teenager says to his friend as he bounced on his heels.
“Yeah, last year was worse. Twenty-eight degrees is actually comfortable now,” his friend replies, his breath coming out in a thick fog. Levi glances at them from the side. Both boys wore hoodies and parkas, backpacks slung on their young shoulders. He rolled his eyes and rushed into the train car when it arrived to take a seat far from the doors.
Levi arrives at Trost Memorial Hospital twenty minutes before his appointment. Beads of sweat had gathered at the back of his head by the time he finishes checking in at the counter and he waits for his turn to be called to an examination room with his coat folded on his arms. The waiting room was large, well lit with large windows, lined with chairs for waiting patients. Levi inhales deeply and smiles a little to himself. Hospitals are havens to him. They’re so clean, so sterile, so properly kept.
Several minutes later, Levi stares at himself in a light green patient’s gown and a pair of socks on a small mirror across from him. He sits on an examination room within a smaller room with his legs dangling underneath him. The room was warm and the warmth was a welcome sensation to his freezing toes. Levi thinks back to the examination rooms in his hometown, the same one he had been ushered in for the past 30 or so years for his yearly physical exam. It was a dingy shoebox compared to this one. The old one didn’t have a small counter with a sink, a blood pressure monitor and thermometer holster on the wall, a computer, or even decent lighting that didn’t make him look worse than he actually was.
Levi thinks moving to a new city as a complete stranger is a good idea.
“Levi?” a deep, pleasant voice called from outside with a gentle knock.
“Yeah, I’m good,” Levi said, pulling on the gown to make sure his doctor doesn’t get an eyeful of him as a first impression. He didn’t know what kind of doctor Erwin Smith was. Only that according to his profile on the hospital website he accepts Levi’s insurance, he is in internal medicine, specializes in men’s health, and that patients rated him with four stars, whatever that meant.
The door opened and out came a tall, stocky blond with a strong jaw and brilliant blue eyes. He wore a light blue shirt, red tie, and a white coat. A pair of wire rimmed glasses rested on his aquiline nose, perfectly proportioned to his strong cheekbones, and nestled under prominent eyebrows.
Those eyebrows. Levi could recognize them from anywhere.
“Dr. Collins?” Levi blinks.
The man blinks back at him, jaw slightly ajar. He catches the expression before it registers in Levi’s mind.
“Ah, I’m sorry, you must’ve mistaken me for someone else,” the man smiles. “I’m Erwin Smith. You must be Levi.”
Levi nods. The man who calls himself Erwin Smith sounds sincere but he knows he isn’t mistaken. That man is James Collins. His doctor from his hometown. From when he was a toddler. He watches Erwin sit in front of the computer with his charts on hand, putting in information into the computer station. Levi cocks his head to the side at the hint of an amused line of Erwin’s lips, as if he’s keeping a joke.
“So, Levi,” Erwin turns to face him but keeps his eyes on Levi’s charts. “Here for a physical. Any pains, discomforts, or irregularities you’ve been experiencing lately?”
“No,” Levi responds. Even the doctor’s voice, deep, gentle and always sounding like a smile, definitely belongs to Dr. James Collins. This Erwin Smith is an exact copy.
Erwin keeps asking him routine questions. Does anyone in your family have cancer, hypertension, diabetes? No. Do you use intravenous drugs? No. Smoke? Occasionally. How often do you drink? Once a week. How often do you exercise? Five times a week, usually. Are you sexually active? Yes. Vaginal, oral, or anal sex?
"Oral and anal."
Erwin finally looks up at Levi’s response and meets a pair of clear gray eyes narrowed at him, scrutinizing every line and curve of his face.
“I assure you, Levi, the last time I checked, I am a Smith, not Collins,” he chuckles.
The same pair of gray eyes follow him as he takes the blood pressure monitor of the holder on the wall and wraps it around Levi’s arm. Levi doesn’t tell him that the nurse that ushered him in already took his blood pressure. In fact, the nurse already asked him all the questions Erwin just did. But he lets the doctor take his blood pressure anyway to get a closer look at his face.
It is just as he remembered it as a child of three or four, with his mother sitting with him on the examination table as Dr. Collins gave him a shot on his arm and smiled wide and genuine smiles at him as he puckered his face into a glare with dry eyes at the pricking pain. He has same golden blond hair, well-kept and parted to the side and combed to smooth perfection. Even the scent is as he remembers it. Clean, no fragrance, fresh. Erwin has the same angular face with a jaw that made him look powerful and bright blue eyes that shone.The same eyes looking directly at him now as the doctor touches his shoulder with large hands to lean forward so he can place the stethoscope on his bare back.
Erwin’s voice carries pleasantly in the room as he asks Levi more questions. Each and every sentence punctuated with Levi’s name. Levi has never thought his name to be particularly notable but with Erwin’s voice, it was both familiar and refreshing. Attractive even. Yet he can’t convince himself otherwise that this person is a different person from Dr. Collins.
“Levi,” Erwin starts. “I’m going to have you bent over the examination table here. Hands on the table please. I’m going to start with the prostate exam.”
Levi averts his glance to side as he gets off the table. At 35, he figures it was a good time to start getting these despite the fact it’s recommended to start at 45. He would’ve started earlier but he had only recently lost all shame about his asshole after recognizing the fact that he’s never really been into women much his whole life. Once he started sleeping with men, he figured a finger up his ass for medical purposes can’t be so bad.
Except, as he offered his butt to Erwin, he could feel his face instantly warming up. The sound of lube being squeezed out must have some kind of classical conditioning effect on Levi. It reminded him of what usually comes next which he tries hard not to picture as Erwin places his hand on the small of Levi’s back, as a notice.
“Okay, let me know if you get uncomfortable, Levi,” Erwin says.
“Takes more than that to get me uncomfortable,” Levi snorts and elicits a warm chuckle from Erwin.
Levi can’t help but notice how warm and soft Erwin’s bare hand feels against his skin. His hand is large enough to touch a good portion of Levi’s back and it’s becoming difficult not to lean in to the touch. Or picture Erwin’s azure eyes on his ass. Would his jaw clench, would he smile when he starts?
Levi closes his eyes and turns to the side, holding his breath, when he feels Erwin’s finger prod his entrance. It was almost too gentle to be medical, like asking for permission from a lover. Levi shakes the thought off. Erwin must just be a decent doctor. That thought slips right out of his mind when Erwin slips his finger in, gentle, warm, thick, and straight to Levi’s goddamn prostate.
“Ngh!” Levi blushes at the sound in his throat and purses his lips tightly.
“Just a little bit more, please bear it, Levi,” Erwin says. There is a hint of a smile in his voice but it wasn’t the good-natured smile of the pediatrician Dr. Collins anymore. It was smooth, slightly smoky. All Dr. Erwin Smith this time.
Levi hangs his head between outstretched arms as Erwin hits his prostate again. A bright red tint paints his face with terrible embarrassment. Levi, a grown man, cannot seem to find any control to keep himself from clenching around his doctor’s finger or to keep his throat closed long enough to stop another grunt from escaping, laced with too much pleasure. Luckily, Erwin takes off his finger from Levi’s sweet spot soon enough, but doesn’t pull out his finger just yet.
There is a moment of doubt with Levi. Erwin’s hand on his back slides almost imperceptibly up his back and he wonders if it’s legal to rut himself back against his doctor’s hand. He could. If one finger can get him making sounds like that, imagine two. Or three. Is Dr. Smith proportioned everywhere? Levi fights back and debates in his head that it’s completely inappropriate to arch his back at this very moment and, Jesus Christ, he has more self-control than that.
Before the debate in his mind ends, Erwin stands beside him, discarding a lubed glove in the waste bin beside the examination table. He looks at Levi, face flushed, exhaling heavily out his slender nose, knuckles white against the edge of the table, eyes shut tightly.
“Are you okay, Levi?”
“Huh? Yeah. Yeah, I’m good,” Levi opens his eyes and realizes he had just developed a boner for his pediatrician.
He sits back on the table with his hand over his crotch and watches Erwin enter a few more things in the computer.
“Everything looks good so far,” he says to Levi. “I’ll have Greg take your blood when you’re dressed, so please come out when you’re ready. We’ll send the results for the blood test in about a week via the online chart system which I see you’re enrolled in already. Aside from that, do you have questions for me, Levi?”
Levi swallows. He doesn’t trust his voice when he cradles a boner under his hands. “You look exactly like my doctor. James Collins. I swear. You’re twins. Same hair, eyes, same eyebrows. You know him?”
Erwin holds Levi’s charts under his arm and smiles at Levi from the doorway, already halfway out. It is the same genuine, somewhat impressed, knowing smile that Dr. Collins gave Levi as a small child who refused the candy he gave him after the giving him a shot.
“I don’t, Levi. Besides, I highly doubt you’d remember someone that clearly from such a young age. Have a good one now.”
Levi raises a hand to wave.
He freezes halfway to the sound of the door clicking shut. Levi never mentioned Dr. Collins was his pediatrician.