Chapter Text
6:40 AM
text me if you’re going in today
8:22 AM
i don’t know why i said “if” as if i don’t know you
10:47 AM
i’m gonna tattle, you said you wanted to try staying
home this year and use your emdr somatic therapy shit
Short staffed isn’t something the Pitt can afford to be. Like with most deficits, the consequences are compounding and unfortunate. Like with most deficits, they happen regardless.
And besides, only people who are fucked in the head volunteer to work holidays.
But what would she even be doing at home, alone, today?
“Take a day off, Samira.” Dana breezes past her at the hub, integrating some maternal affection into the cacophony of multitasking that her job demands.
Samira doesn’t bother to look up; she already knows the look on Dana’s face. It’s the same look Robby gave her when she walked through the doors at 11 AM. Nimble fingers applying themselves deftly to the keyboard at her workstation, she mutters under her breath, “Many have tried, few have succeeded.”
Dana stops in her tracks.
“Ah. You’re playing chicken.”
Allowing her eyes to rise and then track to Dana’s line of vision, Samira glances briefly at the object of her concern stepping out of Trauma 1 and stripping off a pair of gloves. She’d decided to come to work after the third text Jack didn’t reply to. She knew where he was even without opening up Find My Friends to track his location. (Something she’s come to realize he didn’t know she had, having shared locations once when she was driving home during a particularly violent thunderstorm.) There’s only one place Jack would be on the Fourth of July, besides drugged and in bed.
“I’ll go home when he goes home,” she murmurs.
Which means she won’t be going home any time soon.
Dana’s approach comes replete with the full complement of Dana sounds—non slip shoes gripping the high-traffic rated linoleum, the clack of her teeth as she chews her gum, the click of her hair clip as she repositions it on her head. “You know, you’re an attending now. You could just—” Dana raises her eyebrows and smiles.
Is she that obvious? Samira grimaces.
“Thanks.”
Tucking her tablet under her ribcage, Dana folds herself over the counter to force Samira to look her in the eye. “I’m just saying. There are ways to convince a man.”
Samira can feel the flush burning on her cheeks, deepening her face to a burnished copper across the top of her cheekbones.
As if she hasn’t imagined the ways—
“Thank you, Dana,” she replies, adopting a wry tone. “I’ve been an attending three days.”
A finger appears in her face.
“So you don’t deny it,” Dana says, far too gleeful for someone missing out of her family’s annual backyard party for this hot mess menagerie.
“I may be hopeless, but I’m not a liar. I suck at it.” At least she sucks at lying to Dana; extracting truth and compliance from patients and doctors alike is a critical skill for a charge nurse. Leaning up on her tiptoes, Samira tracks the glint of silver in Jack’s hair as he snaps on another pair of gloves, heads into another patient’s room. “Is he as bad as last year?”
“Hmm… worse. Not quite as bad as a few years ago, though. And nothing will ever beat 2019.”
That would have been his second year at the Pitt, two years after losing a third of his leg at Mohmand Valley, two years after losing his wife. Samira’s face scrunches up, a bolt of despair settling and then dissolving into the lining of her stomach. “Do I even want to know?”
Dana blinks off into the distance again, attention pulled by a small commotion out in Chairs. After a second, she refocuses, shaking her head as if she’s decided it’s none of her business.
“Eh, probably better that you don’t,” she says, kind as ever, patting Samira’s hand. “I’ve got money in the betting pool I don’t want to forfeit.”
Right.
Wait.
“What does that even mean? ”
Jack Abbot has worked himself until he dropped every Independence Day since he started working at the Pitt as a Senior Attending in early 2018. Robby has tried to stop it, tried to send him home, tried to talk some sense into him—but this is one act of masochism that he doubts Abbot will ever give up, therapy and mood stabilizers be damned.
Not that Robby minds, particularly. Abbot has the peer-to-peer certifications from the VA that none of them will ever have the qualifications to complete, let alone the free seventy-five hours to do the training.
Enough suicidal vets walk through their doors on a good day.
“I didn’t put her on the schedule,” Robby says, glasses slipping down his nose as Samira Mohan deliberately doesn’t make eye contact with him from across the room. “She’s not working tonight, is she?”
Dana crosses her arms, leaning back against the North hub until her back cracks. “She’s not.”
Then leans back even further, not bothering to hide as she gestures her head towards Abbot, moving through North like a bottled up tornado. Robby thinks that instead of the Enhanced Fujita scale, they should measure the critical mass of an ED caseload by how curly Jack’s hair has gotten. The more chaotic the hair, the wilder the day. Like an EF-5, you know shit’s fucked when everything is flattened out.
They’re at a two right now, Robby thinks. Not bad for the middle of the afternoon.
Then, two synapses in his tired brain connect.
“Oh.” His eyes widen of their own accord. “Oh. Gotcha.”
Dana scoffs at him.
“Yeah, they’re both doing a good job of pretending to avoid each other right now.”
“He does know she’s not a resident anymore, right? We’ve made sure he knows that? Someone has made sure that he knows that?” His tone exists on the razor-thin edge between sarcasm and affection. She doesn’t take it personally—he lost his portion in the betting pool when Abbot and Mohan didn’t find their way into the same car home the moment Gloria wouldn’t try to write them up about it.
Rolling her eyes, Dana pulls up the status of OR 4. It’s a rough day to have appendicitis. “Well yeah, he was at the bar when she opened the email with the official offer letter.”
They’d even hugged, one of those lovely, all-consuming hugs where Robby could tell that Abbot was finding exactly how far he could wrap his arms around her and she was burying her face in his neck trying to memorize the smell of his cologne. The kind of hug that exists in the details of it, never more than a firm sketch, lines traced and re-traced until at last, someone finally lets go.
Robby really thought Abbot was gonna kiss her, faces hovering inches apart.
And Abbot did. On the forehead.
“Pining,” Robby sighs.
“Repressing.”
“Yearning.”
A beat.
“It was three days ago,” Dana says, laughing. Either at him or with him, possibly both.
Robby scrubs his hands over his face. “Most excruciating three days of my life.”
If they take much longer, he’s going to have to corner Jack after they’ve had a few whiskeys and surgically excise a confession.
Dana smacks him on his shoulder. “Oh, you’re a fuckin’ liar.”
There’s not even a conscious thought process attached—she finishes up with her two-for-one juvenile pneumonia cases, heading for the break room praying that coffee’s already been made. And there he is, pouring from the carafe into a hastily-rinsed mug, staring at it like it’s going to be the thing that finally makes him feel normal.
Or as normal as Jack Abbot gets, anyway.
Not a single thought in her head, she takes the cup from his hand. He startles, a hey what the fuck glare softening to something closer to of course it’s you in an entertaining series of facial expressions as she dumps in cream and sugar.
“Hey—I needed that,” he protests.
It’s the first time she’s heard his voice today—and it’s rough, worn thin by emotion and exhaustion and there is not enough melatonin in the world to overcome the punk college kids who live down the block setting off mortar fire in the middle of the street into the small hours of the morning.
“Abbot,” she says, steam curling up into her face.
She makes direct eye contact, and sips.
He’s tired enough to actually look it, freckles standing out against pale skin, purple stamps of exhaustion settling in under his eyes. But still, he spares a smile for her.
(She used to count them, on shift, how many she could tease out of him. It became a game, tallying smirks and bared teeth and the gentle quirk of the corner of his mouth. Always so restrained, so disciplined, so methodological.
But never sparse with praise. Never with her.
Voice low, eyes dancing.)
“Mohan.”
“I won’t bother asking you how long it’s been since you slept, but I’m also not gonna let you drink any more coffee.”
She doesn’t know where they stand, except in the breakroom. Except that three nights ago, they stood in the middle of a crowded dive bar, holding onto each other for dear life, as he whispered earnest praise in her ears. As she preened in response, as he tightened his grip.
“You’re not the boss of me,” he protests mildly, running a hand through his hair.
“And isn’t HR relieved?”
Looking at her through hooded eyes, he leans against the counter, head lolling against the upper cabinet. If there wasn’t obvious tension thrumming through every muscle in his body, he’d look relaxed.
“Maybe you should be,” he muses.
“Someone should be in charge of you.”
She means for it to come out as a murmur; it comes out a lot huskier than that.
Another smile—two in two minutes. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Her eyes trace the sharp line of his jaw; watch his teeth clench and unclench. Allowing their eye contact to break, she takes another long sip of coffee. “Yeah,” she says breezily, “just a regular day.”
His hands realize they’ve been idle for too long, patting himself down for his phone in his pocket, his notebook, his ID, his pens. Samira wonders if it’s a function of distracting himself from the hypervigilance he’s drowning in… or from her.
“Absolutely.” A third smile, a little wry.
“Need help with anything?” she asks, pointed.
“Nope, I’m good. Great, even. Perfect.”
“Is that why you just snapped the clip off your pen cap there?”
With a quick look that communicates well that might as well happen, he looks down at the ballpoint pen he’s fidgeting with in his hand. He stops fidgeting with it, sliding it back into the pocket of his scrub top.
And there’s that eye contact again.
“Mmhm.”
Maintaining eye contact, she grabs the least grubby glass out of the drying rack, and fills it with water. One eyebrow aloft, she presses it into his hand until he takes it. With an uneven exhale he drinks it down.
He’s mentally fragile, she tries to tell herself, but watches the lines of his throat contract as he swallows. He’s mentally fragile, and he needs a hug more than he needs her to be yearning for him in the breakroom.
“Therapist know you’re here?” she asks.
She knows the answer. She’s going to make him say it anyway.
Abbot wipes his lips with his hand, exhales another shaky breath; if she was anyone else, if she was Robby or Ellis or Shen, she thinks he might tell her to go fuck herself. “Oh you know I don’t listen to him.”
They threaten to fire each other as practitioner and patient often enough, but Jack’s standing appointment with Mason Tolliver is older than most HIPAA compliant scheduling apps. He may go through psych NPs like tissue paper, but Samira is fairly certain that if Jack didn’t show up for a session with Mason, it’d be because he was dead or dying.
“Alright.” She decides to let it go, for now. “Well, let me know if you need anything.”
She wants to touch his arm, or his chest, brush the backs of her fingers down his cheek. But he looks painfully brittle, eyes shining like a lightbulb in the seconds before it shorts out.
“You bet.”
For just a moment, she thinks he might not have minded if she shattered him with her touch.
2:23 PM
I didn’t mean to blow you off
Promise
2:26 PM
you’re not legally required to text me back
2:31 PM
Ehhhh I should probably text somebody back this week
No reason it can’t be you
2:37 PM
you flatter me
2:39 PM
Nah, you’ll know when I’m doing that
I make it pretty obvious
2:41 PM
you sure do, cowboy
heyyy can you help me? vascular’s busy and this guy is down a finger
somehow managed to shred ulnar AND radial arteries
we’re gonna be babysitting him awhile
It’s always a delight for her to watch her little R1s and R2s realize that despite the poise and the intensity, that Dr. Abbot is the calmest and the most calming attending in the department. Tightly wound, but never without warmth. Collected and composed, but never dispassionate.
Even today.
If this is Jack Abbot at the end of the bell curve, she wonders what he was like in his youth, Battalion Field Surgeon for the 75th—a man who trained hundreds of combat medics and field surgeons and clinicians, a man who saved lives under fire and in complete darkness, who jumped out of helicopters and made MASH units out of muddy fields.
The man whose life unspooled on itself over the course of eight months, seven years ago.
She’s heard the story in clipped, gossipy pieces at the nurse’s station.
She’s seen the photos of his wife in his home, sandwiched between glass in mismatched frames tucked into dusty shelves. Jen Abbot—young, and beautiful, and dead.
And yet, he still decided to come to a teaching hospital. Samira has spent enough time with a therapist of her own to know that her own neuroses—old and faithful, tried and true—come from begging and pleading and wanting so desperately for anyone to listen, for her father to live, for him to breathe again. That something nascent and burgeoning broke in her that day, something that was supposed to shape the way she viewed the things she desired. The belief that she was allowed to want things, but never allowed to have them.
The belief that things are safer that way.
But once upon a time, Jack Abbot had everything.
And then he lost it.
“Good save, he might be able to keep some of his forearm,” he tells her, peeling off a bloodied gown and shoving it into the bin. With a circular motion of his index finger, he prompts her to turn around so he can untie her own. “I’m putting out a tip jar for the next person who comes in after blowing a finger off.”
“You’re gonna have to help them get the cash out of their wallet.”
He pauses. “Maybe Venmo.”
“You know what Venmo is?” she teases. “I’m so proud.”
When he replies, his mouth is closer to her ear than she anticipated. “I know what Venmo is, Dr. Mohan.”
“I just assumed you never let me pay you back for lunch because it’d involve figuring out another app.”
And if his hands linger at her waist, she can ignore it today. Because today, she wants it too much. Because he won’t make her plead, or beg, or bargain for it. He’ll give it to her freely—and that’s too much to reckon with.
Today.
“The day TigerText allows cash transfers, I’ll consider it. Until then, consider your lunch covered.”
She pulls her arms out of the sleeves of the gown, wadding the fabric up into a ball. “I make big girl money now. I could buy you lunch.”
“Ah, but then how would I maintain the illusion that you’re only spending time with me for a free meal?”
When his hands land on her waist again, she nearly jumps. But then, steady as his hands always are, he spins her around so he can pluck the safety glasses from her face.
She has never, once, seen him touch another woman the way he touches her.
“We wouldn’t want to take money out of Mason’s pocket,” she replies, her mouth working before her brain. “He works hard to keep you just the right blend of enigmatic and vexed.”
Another smile—the shape of this one not entirely truthful, closer to forced than she’d prefer.
She’s up to four.
“How else would he pay the bills?”
3:50 PM
Where are you sleeping tonight?
3:53 PM
Wait, Dana just said you’re not even working this weekend
3:59 PM
Please come save me, these youths are trying to film a TikTok
He does not wish to speak to Robby. He does not wish to be nice to Robby.
Wishing has never meant anything of substance. Robby finds him camped out, finishing up his procedure note for Mohan’s exploded hand. He doesn’t have a favorite part of July Four, he barely gets through them without launching himself into a massive PTSD episode, but he’s never had a fondness for amputations done via ordinance.
He’s been awake for too long. He blew Samira off this morning. He’s been awake for too long. He’d almost gotten to sleep when Ellis shot a rubber band at his face, letting him know that paramedics were bringing in a multi-substance overdose with cardiac abnormalities in a hypotensive crisis.
It wasn’t until they were in the middle of a second gastric lavage and preparing for ECMO that he paid attention to anything besides the medical needs of the patient, and realized that he recognized his tattoos.
Never feels great when another member of the Veteran Suicide Prevention Counsel is the one being resuscitated on your table.
“You know Jack, as good as it is to see you during daylight hours—”
“I got some time in an on-call room earlier,” he bites out.
“You see, those are for people who are on-call. Not us. Usually we get to go home at the end of our grueling, nightmare-inducing shifts, to our own beds.” Robby is painfully jovial. “It’s the residents and interns who we stick with the doubles.”
“I don’t think my own bed fits into my schedule.” Lying alone in the dark in the middle of a PTSD episode, trying to sort out auditory hallucinations from fireworks, getting pissier and pissier by the minute as his meds do nothing—
It’s easier to be here, than to be alone.
It’s easier to be here, than to—
And he knows. He does. He sees the way she watches him, the way she lingers under his touch, the way she flushes when she praises her, all the lines of her body diffuse with praise. He likes to make her happy—and even worse, he likes to make her want him.
As if she doesn’t already have him.
Which would have been worse, and she wouldn’t have understood how that would have been worse, for her to be soft, and kind. As if it still doesn’t haunt him, last year on the roof.
Her hands in his hair. His head in her lap.
Eyes screwed shut, holding onto her leg.
He can’t accept that from her. He can’t need that from her. He can’t do that to her. This is as close as he gets.
Robby either doesn’t notice, or doesn’t heed his continued existential crisis. “I do—pencil it in during the time you use to torture yourself over everyone you love dying.”
He knows, but fuck you.
“Cutting to the chase this year.”
“I don’t think I’ve seen your eye stop twitching the entire time I’ve been here,” Robby points out helpfully.
“It’s less of a nervous tic now and more of a constant companion.”
“Speaking of torturing yourself—”
“I wasn’t, you were.” Jack endeavors to focus on his procedure note. It was a good procedure. They were able to give a father of two a solid chance at a below the elbow amputation.
“Mohan…”
He fucking hates Robby. He hates Robby, who is happy with Collins, who has a baby at home with Collins. Robby, who got to unfuck all of his mistakes and graduate from therapy in eighteen months and smiles all the goddamned fucking time now.
“What about Dr. Mohan?” He keeps his voice from descending into a growl, but just barely.
“She’s a board-certified attending ER physician,” he says, voice taking on an infuriatingly gleeful slant. “That drops a whole lotta HR-sanctioned on top of some shit now.”
In a distant sort of way, Jack wonders if he should strangle Robby now or later.
“You certainly have a way with words.”
“You, looking at her. Her, looking at you.” Robby rocks back and forth on his heels, fingers steepled together under his chin, insufferably proud of himself—like a child expecting to receive accolades for puzzling out that two plus two equals four. “Literally, right now. Don’t look, it’ll be too obvious.”
Abbot looks, just to be contrary. He regrets it the moment he sees Samira duck her head in embarrassment, shoulders sloping downward with guilt.
Robby sighs. “That was obvious.”
“She’s a friend.”
He struggles to remain deadpan. He struggles to remain a lot of things today, this week, this year. Struggles, when he knows what the mousse she puts in her hair smells like, when it’s all over the pillows in his guest room. Struggles, when he knows what pajamas she sleeps in. Struggles, when he knows what she looks like when she first wakes up, pliant and yawning and heavy-footed. When he knows that she prefers a buttery chardonnay to an oaky one, that she drinks coffee in the morning and matcha in the afternoon, that she likes her eggs over easy and with a crack of black pepper.
“She has a key to your house.”
He does not need to be reminded.
“Well, sorry you don’t have better friends,” he mutters, phrasing and re-phrasing what he wants to say in the patient's chart. The screen goes blurry, then clears.
“Ouch, okay.” Robby holds up his hands in surrender.
“She’s younger than me, and also very importantly, not insane.”
“Well I don’t know about that,” Robby drops into the seat next to him, the wheels squeaking as they scuttle over uneven tile. “She goes to spin class twice a week. Spin class, that thing that gives people rhabdo. We don’t know why she does it.”
It only adds further credence to how fucking exhausted Jack is that he responds to that.
“I know why.”
Robby crosses his arms, spinning in a circle. Jack wishes for the triage phone to ring, for the screech of ambulance tires in the bay, for a fight to break out in Chairs. For literally anything to get Robby’s attention off him. “Oh yeah, why do you?”
“Because we go to the same gym.”
So does half the faculty and staff of PTMC.
“Is that on purpose, or…”
“It’s the gym closest to the hospital,” he answers, eyes narrowed. “She played D1 field hockey in college. She’s always done cycling for conditioning.” He wishes he could stop talking. He doesn’t know why he can’t stop talking, but he imagines it’s related to how his palms keep itching and his ears keep ringing. “Come on, man. This is the dumbest interrogation I’ve ever been on the receiving end of.”
Robby stops spinning. “Alright, alright. Just keep in mind—I’m on your side, Jack.”
Jack presses the heels of his hands into his eyes.
“Eat glass, Michael.”
4:05 PM
Can I kill Robby?
4:08 PM
no
it would make heather sad
4:10 PM
He’s especially annoying today
Ramped up to a particular degree of Robbyness
4:14 PM
ignore him
its what i do :)
but seriously, do you need me to tell him to lay off?
Doing his best kicked puppy impression, Robby comes to her and asks for her guidance and her assistance.
Naturally, Dana laughs directly in his face. Then, she grabs a cold water bottle and a turkey sandwich and hunts Abbot down like a prey animal.
(Where’s Whitaker when you need him?)
“Hey, you eat lunch? Or dinner? Anything at all?”
She’s found him standing in front of the board, with the most textbook closed-off body language she has ever seen in real life. “I’ve evolved past the need for food.”
“Interesting. Running on sexual frustration alone?”
A particularly high octane blend, from what she’s observed.
“It worked for Robby for long enough.” He’ll exorcise a bad attitude on Robby, but not on her. Jack Abbot has never been anything but a man who’ll go to the mat for his nurses.
Sometimes literally, depending on how quickly security manages to get to their feet.
It means she’s willing to forgive a lot of things, like having to stitch up her still fairly new coworker after he’d crumpled and hit his head in the ambulance bay at the sound of a car backfiring.
“Seriously, dude. What’s the hang up?”
Any other day and she’d bump her hip against his. Not today.
“She doesn’t need to be swept up in the never-ending existential crisis that is my general state of being.”
Oh, he’s cute.
Sometimes she can almost forget that he’s been married before, that he was married for over a decade. That he’s been a husband. That he’s already been the combat veteran husband fucked up on trauma and damage. Inclining her head, she can see it all—the lines on his face, the tension in his roping, corded musculature, the expressions surfacing on his face as quickly as he can squash them.
That’s how the story ended, last time.
The last time he did this, he was in the worst kind of hell anyone could be in. And then she was hit by a drunk driver.
Gently, making sure he sees her hand before it lands on his shoulder, she catches his eye. “I think you can already consider her well and fucking truly swept, champ. She don’t care. She wants you.”
“But why?”
The way his voice breaks, even at the bottom of his register, makes her fingers crave the weight and warmth of a cigarette.
“Oh honey, stop looking for this shit to make sense. It’s not gonna. If it did, people would stop trying to blow themselves up over some freezer-burned hotdogs and hamburgers.”
She feels for the weight of her lighter in the pocket of her scrub pants.
“You can say that again,” he says, voice almost a whine.
Squeezing his shoulder again, she makes him look at her. Really look at her.
She’s never known Jack Abbot to avoid eye contact.
Dana comes to her conclusion quickly: she’s going to have to have a talk with Samira. Someone really needs to take him home before the sun sets. She just hopes that she’s not going to have to get him sent home.
“Mohan, I need you!”
She’s not in charge of the sound that punches out of her throat.
Gowning hastily, she follows him into the trauma bay, accepting a pair of nitrile gloves from a travel nurse whose name she’s been trying to learn all day.
“What have we got?” she asks, eyes catching up with assessment. First assessment: bad. Not that she expects anyone landing in one of their trauma rooms to be doing well, but she hasn’t seen a skull in so many pieces since the cadaver lab. “Hmm. That’s unfortunate.”
“One could say,” he replies, droll but pleased. Abbot doesn’t look up, a phased array probe in his hand with the cord wrapped around his wrist. “He’s a transfer. Family is following behind. Alert and restless upon initial presentation, but now hypoxic and tachy. No response to pain.”
Dropping into a squat, she pulls out her pen light, taking over the examination of the head and neck. Her lower back aches, and she feels the overly cushioned soles of her running shoes compensate as she shifts her weight between her legs. “Who did the crike? This isn’t your work.”
Incision unforgivably large, blood pooling in the wound, he’ll aspirate on his own blood, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars.
“West Penn.”
They share a look that deftly says of course it was.
“Systolic?”
“Eighty-four,” the travel nurse—she really needs to ask for her name after this—replies. “Asystole in the ambulance, but they got him back after an amp of epi.”
“GCS?”
“Nine when he presented, down to a three upon repeat.” She can see him doing the same trauma calculus in his brain as she is. “EFAST is negative.”
“Extensive injury to his forehead, frontal head, and orbits. Exposed facial bones.” Seizure and stroke are what will kill this guy in the next hour. She moves to examine his eyes, pursing her lips when she lifts the first lid. There’s not much left of the second. “Burn to the right cornea. Left eye is ruptured. Is Head and Neck in the building?”
They’ll just have to assume there’s a subdural.
“They’re still with our last amateur pyrotechnician.”
“Ophthalmology?”
“Already called, but he’s driving from his in-laws’ in Hampton.”
She chokes out a disbelieving sound. “We don’t keep Ophthalmology in the building for the Fourth of July?”
Of course, she already knows his answer before he says it.
“Budget cuts.”
“Of course.” After PittFest, she’s taken to keeping her own go bag as well. Not that she can spare an extra four grand on a mobile ultrasound unit with a battery strong enough to power a car, but a couple more attending paychecks and a couple more student loan payments and she’ll start buying cool shit of her own that Gloria won't put in their budget. “It’s pouring out. Looks like he’s got extensive facial fractures involving the paranasal sinuses, nasal orbital ethmoidal complex, planum sphenoidale, left greater wing of the sphenoid. Neurosurgery?”
“Busy, they’re calling in Casey from Presby.”
“She still has privileges here?”
“Yeah, at least while McLauren is on maternity leave.”
That’ll have to do.
“Let’s do dilantin for seizure prophylaxis.”
“Two of ancef.”
She runs her gloved finger through the gapes in his scalp, clearing clots. And here she thought she might be able to get away without running her sneakers through the washing machine this week. “We're gonna assume any bleeder is gonna decompress through the skull fractures?”
“We’re gonna have to. He’s not stable enough for a CT, and it’s gonna take Casey an hour to get here and an OR to become available.”
They’re both running through the rolodexes in their minds, rapidly sorting and categorizing case reports and conference talks and webinars, deciding which rules and protocols can be broken to stop the cascade of complications that could happen in the next hour.
“What intubation meds are on board?” Samira asks, trying to blow an errant strand of hair out of her face.
Abbot stops, blinking hard.
His eyes are hazel, and bright, and familiar.
“Paramedics said etomidate and sux.”
Nodding, she pushes herself back up, stretching out her neck and shoulders. “Okay then, let’s do this. He’s gonna live long enough to feel like a moron in the PACU.”
He exhales a derisive sort of sound. “He sure is.”
There’s this thing that he does, that he’s aware of, that Mason fights him tooth and nail on. And if compartmentalization wasn’t such a tremendous part of his life for literal decades maybe he’d been more incentivized to let it go, but—
It’s not even a military thing anymore. It’s just who he is. How he keeps himself walking in a straight line, how he keeps himself breathing through burning lungs, how he keeps himself being flattened by the sleep paralysis and the nightmares and the flashbacks.
There isn’t a situation he can’t find that he can’t drop a hundred rules on.
In a situation where there is no control you substitute what you can. Even on the nights that have ended with him on the wrong side of the railing up on the hospital roof, it’s been there. Rules, structure. Aphorisms of trauma.
Don’t kill yourself where there are people.
You are safe here.
This feeling cannot kill you.
You are safe to feel like this.
Where do you feel this emotion in your body?
You don’t operate in an active warzone without developing an overactive sense of pattern recognition.
Without rules. Without structure.
Or without deep, abiding control over your impulses. But compulsions, on the other hand. Sometimes those keep you alive.
The trick is figuring out which is which.
He breaks just about every rule he’s ever made about how Samira Mohan is to be treated in the workplace when he wraps a single escaped ringlet around his middle finger, lets himself feel the soft strands against his skin for a moment, and then tucks it behind her ear.
“Solid work, Mohan.”
Her mouth opens in a shape of pleasant surprise, eyes widening slightly. “Not too shabby yourself, Abbot.”
“I could go for hours.”
This is the most like himself he’s felt in days. He has enough adrenaline in his system that he might even feel normal for the next ten minutes, before the crash.
“We could have just gone to Kennywood if that’s what you needed,” she says, a joke but not a joke. He knows that if he’d given the merest suggestion of the thought, she’d be putting on her shoes and getting in the car.
(They’ve been, once. Ridden all the rollercoasters, even the ones he wasn’t supposed to ride with a prosthetic leg.
She’d gotten the schedule mixed up, once. Well, more than once, but it’s always the first time that’s most important for things like this.
Limbs buzzing with anxiety, she loped down the stairs to his kitchen and found him as unperturbed as always, as if she was always to be found drinking his coffee, wearing mismatched socks. The sound of her feet coming down the stairs felt like a good dream; the familiarity of it crowding him a way that felt nice. Rough night? he’d asked.
Feel like I fought a bear. Kinda feel like I’m still fighting that bear.
He grinned, and spoke before he could second guess himself. I have something I do on days like that. )
“Ah, but where’s the fun in that?”
“Rollercoasters, cotton candy, people watching.” People watching is a kind word for it—working in emergency medicine means, for them at least, that their judgments of people are quick, rapid, and generally correct. “Three of your favorite things.”
“But I love watching you work.”
She’d bullied him into buying two different ride photos. They’d shared a bucket of cotton candy on the drive home, sugar melting on their fingers, her heart beat finally steady and calm. And God, her fucking smile—
“You keep flirting with me like that and you’re gonna make me fall in love with you, Dr. Abbot.”
“Is that a threat or a promise?”
You can’t look straight at the sun—he struggles with the summer, even working nights. It’s bright, and bleary, and even with blackout curtains over all his windows and doors he can never fucking sleep. But the moon.
She’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.
And for just half a second, he thinks he might not ruin her.
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”
What he likes about rollercoasters is that you know the exact moment the drop is coming.
Before he can even understand what his instincts are responding to, time tightens, seconds coming to a halt in a single contraction.
All the details flood in at once—Robby and one of the new interns rushing in with a combative patient on a gurney. Large man, one wrist in a soft restraint. Stained backpack resting between his legs, one strap torn. Paramedics shouting over the patient’s yells, reporting blown pupils, rapid heart rate, temperature in the field of 102. Then the smell hits—meth lab. Ammonia, ether, cat urine. Not the dealer, probably the runner. Probably homeless, trying to get enough money to eat something or sleep somewhere tonight.
Then Robby does something he’s scolded him about a hundred times, maybe a hundred more.
He unzips the patient’s backpack, going to dump it out. With a small yelp, Robby jerks his hand back as Jack’s central nervous system processes the familiar sound of ignition.
He doesn’t think.
There’s no time. Muscles speak to subconscious behavior, and before Samira can even turn to look, he’s cradling her head in his hands and dragging them to the floor.
When the first roman candle explodes less than two feet from his head, he doesn’t feel the burn at all. His knees don’t feel the knock to the floor. His lungs don’t feel the air that escapes them as gravity does its work.
By the time smoke floods the Emergency Department and the fire alarms start going off, Jack Abbot isn’t there at all.
Okay.
Triage.
The Pitt is definitely on fire.
That is not her primary concern—over the din of the fire alarms, she hears the whoosh and rapid depressurization of groaning pipes as the sprinklers kick on. There’s yelling, quick footfalls. Cursing. Definitely a lot of cursing.
All of her big joints hurt—knees, elbows, hips. But she knows the body covering her, the hands that kept her head from smacking onto the floor. Big, warm, rough—but always with impeccably clean fingernails.
“Holy shit,” she mutters, inhaling a deep breath full of smoke and immediately coughing it back out.
Jack’s hands begin to tremble, and then he lets go of her, and rolls off her body.
Immediately, she feels plunged into chaos. Her blood pressure takes a dizzying dip and then surges, vision swimming. Her skin doesn’t know what to make of the sprinkler raining down on her. Before she can even pull herself to her hands and knees, she misses his comforting weight. Still woozy, bile pushing up into her throat, she rolls over onto her back.
She’s never seen a pair of eyes so far away.
She wonders where he is right now. When he is. If he experiences dissociation like she does, like her hands are too far away from her brain. Or if he feels outside his body entirely, watching from the ceiling above. If he even knows this is really happening at all.
“Hey. Jack?” she rasps.
Even without the light of recognition, he reaches back for her. Gently, fingers half-numb, she reaches for his wrist to put his hand back on her cheek.
His fingers skate through her hair, palm cupping the base of her skull.
“Jack,” she whispers. Nothing. “Abbot. Dr. Abbot.”
They need to move. She knows they need to move. The Fire Department will be here any second. She can hear the different pitch of the siren; the deeper thrum of the engine. They need to get out of people’s way.
“Captain,” she tries.
He doesn’t even blink. Swallowing hard, she catalogs the injuries on his face. She counts a scalp lac that will need a few stitches, blood drenching his ear and throat. Two more that will be fine with a strip of glue. The skin over his cheekbone burnt and split open. Butterfly bandages, more comfortable with the swelling that will result.
Samira clears her throat, steadies her voice. “Medic.”
She despises how quickly his brain chemistry reorients, swirling back into cognition. His mouth opens and shuts multiple times in quick succession, panic fleeting on his features.
“Hey, I’m okay.” She cups his cheek, rolling more of her weight onto her side. Left side. Stabilize her blood pressure. She’s going to have to get them up. She can do this. “You’re okay. I’m okay. You kept us safe. We’re safe.”
He makes a noise of disagreement, frame wracking with fear as he curls towards her.
Distantly, she registers offers of help. Robby, smoke caked to his face, dropping to his knees. Dana, in the midst of throwing fire blankets over the computers, dropping a stack of shock blankets near her head. Half a dozen others giving them a wide berth as patients are moved out of the area.
“I know, I know,” she says, throat closing up around a ball of emotion. Forcing herself to ignore his distress, she slowly sits up. Holds out her hand. “I do. It doesn’t feel like it,” she continues. Looks around. The Hub has been emptied out. The display on the big board distorts and warps, but manages to stay online. She thinks they can get under the countertop. “Can you hold my hand? I don’t need you to do anything else. Just hold my hand.”
Making another sound that she hesitates to classify as pathetic—done in, perhaps—he reaches for her wrist, pads of his fingers brushing along the delicate skin stretched over arterial flow. Then, lacing his fingers with hers, allows himself to be tugged along.
“Yup, just like that. I’m just gonna sit here with you.” His skin is pale, verging on grey. Clammy, and cold. Right on cue, his eyes get wild, breathing labored. “I know, I do. People are so damn stupid.” Squeezes her fingers around his, presses his hand between both of hers in a tight clasp. “We’re just gonna hang out here for a minute.”
Scanning the chaos, she makes the decision in a split second—she’s not leaving his side.
Possibly never again.
In a pique of impulse, or maybe madness, she brings their enjoined hands up to her chest. Rests them over her restless heart.
“Don’t worry, everyone else is too busy with the sprinklers,” she says, forcing her breaths to slow. “This is our spot for a little bit, at least until the Fire Department is done.”
For the first time, she looks at the wall where the fireworks made impact. In the gap between security and Pittsburgh FD, she sees the scorched hole in the drywall, the last gasps of smoke puffing out as firefighters dump more suppressant on the flames.
Well. There go 21 and 22 West.
Nostrils full of acrid smoke, eyes burning, she turns to look at Jack again.
And finds him already looking at her.
He knows, of course, exactly how he’s looking at her.
Like she’s his lone solemn leash to reality. Dark eyes like hooks, pulling him into her orbit.
There was no one moment of clarity, no big revelation. She’s always had his good opinion, but it wasn’t until the calamity of PittFest that he realized he was hungry for hers. Like a man starved, he wanted the pink stretch of her lips over a smile, her unwavering attention, her sharp, bright laugh.
He’s delirious for it, really, this thread that’s turned into rope into an unbroken chain.
Her own trauma bleeds into her practice as a doctor, and he knows about Slow-Mo and the ribbing, gentle and not-so-gentle. The chiding. The metrics. Administration, always breathing down their necks about billing and insurance and the ED doesn’t turn a profit, and why the fuck should it? He’s Army trained, perhaps too stoic at times and too irreverent, fuck the money and fuck the odds, always willing to take the risk for the good of the body in front of him and—
Never for himself.
But he knows the story. Googled her father’s obituary in the New Jersey Star Ledger’s web archive. Read the dedication to him in Samira’s dissertation.
She doesn’t talk about it much, but it spills over everywhere. He’s heard the complaints about her patient turnover, but good God, he’s also heard of everything she’s caught, the lives saved, the trauma mitigated by someone who just fucking cares.
Jack wonders what it would feel like to have that all pointed at him. It’s happened in passing, in pieces, but Samira is so full of kindness and caring that it’s brimming over and he can hardly take that personally.
Pulse hammering in his ears, he realizes that her lips are moving.
Holding his chin between her forefinger and thumb, she stops herself from stroking along the line of his jaw, from seeking out the sensation of stubble over her fingertips.
But only just.
“Can you hear me?” she asks him, again. Feels his soft exhalation of air as his eyes refocus, countenance glassy. “We’re gonna move,” she whispers, now that the fire alarm has stopped going off. “We’re gonna get to a room. Dana?”
Still moving at a pace between a jog and a run, Dana gives the board the barest of glances before answering.
“Six East is free, sweetie.”
“Thanks.” The bitter taste of adrenaline gathers in the back of her throat, but she knows that if she doesn’t get to her feet right now, neither of them will. “Come on Jack, keep holding my hand,” she tells him, gripping his hand tight. “Up you get.”
Hesitation flashes across his face, the vasculature under his forearms rippling over hard, corded muscle.
He rubs his thumb over the back of her hand.
“I’m stronger than I look,” she says, unsure if she’s reminding him or reminding herself. She lifts patients heavier than him every day. In the moments after the words feel her lips, she knows; she’s never felt more certain about anything in her life than her ability to take care of Jack Abbot right now, right in this moment. “You’re good.”
With a small huff, he allows her to pull him to his feet.
A flash of pain startles across his face, the bad leg refusing to take weight for a second. He shifts his weight onto his other foot, which appears to have protestations of its own.
“There we go, good and steady,” she murmurs, towing him along. Six East is just a few feet away. “Just look at me.” And he does, a little helplessly. She should not be able to drag this institution of a man around by the soft weight of her hand. “Don’t focus on anything else. Look at me.” The pneumatic hiss of the door permits them inside; the first thing she does is switch off the lights. The second is to pull the privacy curtain. “See? That’s better.”
The tension he’s holding in his body begins to present as the shivers. Shaking his head slowly, he splays his fingers over the plasticky blue gurney. Then, as if unsure of how his own feet work, a patient at the beginning of learning how to walk, rotates on the non-prosthetic foot a full 180 degree turn, landing down heavily on the mattress.
Gulping down any last doubts in her mind, she steps towards him, until her body is positioned in the open space between his knees.
“Can I sit next to you? Yes or no?” she asks, finally giving life to the schoolgirl fantasy of threading her fingers through his hair, waiting for his response.
What she doesn’t expect is for him to clutch at her sides, anchoring his fingers in her scrubs, burying his face into her belly.
“Okay, this is fine too. I’ve got you.” The plaintive groan that comprises his response is unlike anything she’s heard from him before. Unable to do anything else, she shushes him. Familiarizes herself with his curls, searching his scalp for lacerations and abrasions. “I’ve got you.”
All she can do now is breathe, deep and intentional and slow, and wait for his lungs to fall in time with hers.
“Sorry.” His voice sounds like he’s swallowed gravel.
But he also doesn’t let her go.
“Don’t worry,” she replies, astonished at how calm she sounds. “I’m not under the impression you’re enjoying yourself.”
“Fuck.”
He barks a laugh, shoulders shaking.
“There we go.” One of her hands leaves his hair, skating up and down what she can reach of his back. “Laughter’s the best medicine.”
Not that she can tell if he’s laughing, or crying, or both.
Possibly both.
Someone shot off fireworks in the Pitt, that’s fucking absurd.
The door pushing open spooks them both—Samira clutches him tighter. Dana pokes her head in, a bin of suture kits and bandages and everything she could possibly need in her hands.
“You kids doing okay in here?” she asks, deliberately ignoring Jack as he wraps both arms around her fully, face making a home in her abdomen.
“Yeah,” Samira replies, nodding more sharply than she means. She tries a reassuring smile on her face, but she’s not sure how far it goes. “Thanks.”
Dana’s eyes never leave her face, still holding out the supplies. Samira spots fluids, an IV kit, butterfly bandages, cold packs, hot packs, antiseptic—her body floods with gratefulness. Rigidity that she didn’t realize she was holding between her shoulders disperses along her arms, down her hips.
An unwelcome soreness slams into her body.
“I’m just gonna leave these here,” Dana says. “Holler if you need anything.”
Taking another deep breath, Samira licks her chapped lips, and nods.
“I will.”
“Promise?”
Dana gives her a no-nonsense look that reminds her that she also just had a mortar launched directly at her head. It takes a second for the thought to fizzle, fully-formed into her head, but Samira realizes that at no point did she feel unsafe. The thought never entered her brain, before, during or after, that she should be afraid.
Even when she realized what was happening, even when she saw the burn marks and calculated the arc of its path.
She’s not sure when she fully integrated the belief that Jack Abbot would never let anything bad happen to her, but there it was.
Nodding, Samira holds Dana’s gaze.
“Promise.”
Not that Dana Evans is ever one to count her chickens before they hatch—or her gambling money before she wins—but she thinks she might be taking her husband out to eat at a very nice restaurant on this one.
Stepping back out of Six East, she finds Robby standing at the workstations, trying to bore a hole through the privacy curtain drawn in the room. Or maybe he’s manifesting x-ray vision—that would be a mite more helpful, all things considered.
“Well, if he manages to get to the roof now,” she says, crossing her fingers as she boots another computer back up. If she has to switch to paper charting tonight, she really will quit. “I’ll be really impressed.”
Tension leaks out of Robby’s frame.
“The death of tradition.”
Dana rolls her eyes. Go home, she wants to tell him, but she refuses to be the only one explaining what the fuck just happened here to the night shift. No, he’s in this bullshit with her until the end.
“I don’t think she’s letting him go anywhere.” Although, it really looked like the reverse was the truer statement, in the exam room. From her point of view, Abbot was clinging to Mohan like a drowning man clings to a buoy. “She’ll hide his leg before she lets him out of her sight.”
“Of that I have no fuckin’ doubt.”
Squinting at him over her glasses, it takes her a moment to remember that Robby was the one who found them on the roof last year. Who silently asked Mohan if she needed any help, and then wisely backed the fuck off when she waved him away.
Dana can appreciate that Robby is the kind of man to not snitch to HR about an intimate moment.
She can also, probably more than she can say, appreciate that Abbot is the kind of man who won’t fuck up a girl’s professional reputation.
“You know, they both coulda just stayed home today,” she mutters, crossing herself as the computer strains, but manages to turn itself off. “But no, they had to be weird and codependent about it.”
Robby laughs, tired and anxious and worn thin and a thousand other things—the laugh of a new parent. Dana does not envy him for starting a family in his late forties. “They could have stayed home, but then it would have taken them five more years, moving at a glacial fucking pace—”
“He moved pretty fast back there just now.”
She’s never gonna unsee it, just like she’s never gonna unsee the time he put that jagoff in an arm bar for groping a RT.
“Talk about instinct.” It takes her about three times to type in her password correctly, eventually slowing her fingers down enough to pick the correct letters out on the keyboard. Thirty years in the Pitt, and some asshole essentially brings in an IED in his backpack. What the ever-loving-fuck?
Re-opening all the programs she needs, Dana wonders how it’s gonna feel for Jack that he couldn’t save his own leg from an explosive, but he did save Mohan’s life from one. She’d ask about PTSD and corrective experiences, but Psych always hates to see her coming, as her daughter would say.
“I really thought they were done for,” she says, shaking her head. “My heart fell into my ass.”
She won’t let it linger—you can’t, and be a charge nurse in this emergency department, not for very long—but she lets the reality of it seep in for a second. The sudden fizz, whistle, bang of the explosive, the plume of smoke and sparks, the look of sheer terror and resolve on Abbot’s face in the split-second before he dropped him and Mohan to the floor.
The damage gets done.
“Tell me about it,” Robby replies, blinking hard.
Patting him on the arm, she lets her hand wait on his bicep as the system populates what she needs. Then, she starts the process of getting an unlisted patient into the queue. The four thousand pop ups related to TriCare try to stop her, but at this point she’s become inoculated to the web browser bureaucracy that the administration forces on her.
Robby huffs down next to her, still staring into the curtain as if anything will change.
Dana checks her phone, no orders yet. Tries to remember how to print out a patient wristband without speaking to the clerk. Fails. Decides it doesn’t matter, she wouldn’t be able to get him to wear one anyway.
“What was it he said that one time we all got shitcanned at that conference in Philly? You don’t need two feet to fuck? ”
How does Robby remember this shit? Or better yet, how?
“He’s bleeding from his head, I don’t think he’s in any shape—”
Seriously, what is it with men? The guy probably hasn’t figured out that he’s not back in Afghanistan, give him a minute.
“He’s a retired Army Ranger, I wouldn’t count him out. Feral little—” Like divine intervention, his phone rings. “Ah yes, here’s the phone call, right on time.” Dana smirks, wondering what that email from the weekend admin looked like. Gloria must be shitting a brick.
Grimacing, Robby answers the call.
“Hi Gloria… yeah, you heard right. It does always have to be something with EM. Just send in EVS with hairdryers, we’ll get it handled.” She can’t quite hear what Gloria is saying, but she can hear that it is loud. Robby carries on, tranquil as can be. “No, no, no reason to come in. You enjoy that barbeque.” He flinches, pulling his phone away from his ear. “I think she just told me to go fuck myself.”
Most likely.
“In so many words.”
A four day old baby intern shouts for Robby from Chairs. Right on time—someone coming in with a stick, marshmallow still attached, pierced through their cheek.
“You got an eye on them?” he confirms.
“Yeah, I’m getting him put into the system. Hopefully she’ll talk him into some sedation. Maybe a coma.”
Robby groans. “Is there an EAP for that now? How do I sign up?”
Wouldn’t they all like to know.
“Go do your job. The furries from AnthroCon who need their stomachs pumped should be here any minute. They'll keep you occupied til seven.”
It’s almost unbearably intimate, for Dr. Mohan—Mohan— Samira (he doesn't understand the difficulty here; he's called her Samira more than he's called her Mohan for months) to be touching him without a pair of blue gloves. His thoughts feel like he’s thinking them through something the viscosity of jello.
Which may just be, in fact, grey matter and the damage that the PTSD has done to his amygdala.
“Alright,” she says as she finishes cleaning up and addressing the burn on his face. “Do you want to pick your poison or is it my call?”
Her hands—small, soft, gentle, not covered in nitrile—crack open a single-use ice pack, and holds it softly against his cheek, cups his chin in her hand. He considers letting her choose for him, wonders what fucked up part of his brain is currently lighting up at the idea of letting her decide how to sedate him. He’d let her do pretty much anything to him right now.
“Diazepam,” he replies.
This isn’t his first, second, or third rodeo.
“We’ll start with five, I’ll keep five in reserve,” she looks at him to confirm, waiting for his nod. “Zofran and Propranolol?”
“Oh how you know me.”
There were no revelations in his first marriage—they met in college, they were friends for a period of time, and they got married in-between undergrad and his first year of medical school at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. They grew up together, in all the ways that matter by the time you’re thirty. He was never surprised by being known, or by knowing her. They kept each other steady through deployments and re-assignments and her graduate studies and his time at the Ranger Academy.
And close to eight years on, the phantom pain of losing Jen still stings. There will never be another person who knew him quite so well during those years of his life.
He’s spent many years trying to make the second half of his life make as much sense as the first.
And then entered Samira Mohan, whip smart and beautiful and more intelligent than the rest of them combined, decompressing a stoner’s skull with an EZ IO drill in the middle of a mass casualty event. It wasn’t love that he felt, when Emery reported back to the Red Zone on that particular maneuver—but it was damn close.
It was that phantom pain again, formed in flesh: hey, I know you.
And that’s how he’s spent every moment in her company since: hey, I know you.
“Do you need an antacid?” she asks, as if she hadn’t just spent several minutes rubbing tight circles in his back as he emptied stomach acid into an emesis bag as his adrenaline bottomed out.
“No,” he replies, perfunctory. Thinks again: “Yes.”
“I’ll put in the orders and have Dana start an IV.”
“No. You.” He can’t bear the thought of anyone else touching him right now.
“She’s better than I am,” Samira protests.
There’s something wrong with his brain (there is a lot wrong with his brain; he could go into specifics) that keeps him from letting go of her hand. Apparently unfazed by this development, she types one-handedly at the computer. Desperation, his old friend, rises and threatens to overwhelm.
There’s something wrong with his brain; he can’t stop replaying the moment in his mind. Can’t stop hearing the mortar fire crossing paths with where they’d just been standing. Can’t stop feeling the sparks landing on his head. There’s not an ounce of him that doesn’t ache. An ounce of him that doesn't want to fight something.
“Samira, please. It’s not the pain that’ll bother me,” he says, voice barely rising above a whisper. He wants to crawl inside her body. He wants to never stop holding her. He wants to always feel the thump of her heart against his cheek.
He wants the rush and release of knowing that she will oblige him.
And she does.
Jack Abbot is not a man who has the habit of seeking comfort and receiving it; when she brushes her thumbs over the hinges of his jaw, humming softly as she seeks out the halter of muscle to apply pressure, he thinks she could ask him to do just about anything right now.
His vigilance clicks back on like an engine turning over when Dana drops off the medication Samira ordered. But Dana doesn’t look, doesn’t talk.
He wonders what dumb name she’s come up with this time to put him in the system under.
Samira—he wonders vaguely if she’s ever gone by a nickname, Sam or Sammy or Mira, but after getting tagged with Jackrabbit for the duration of his career in the Rangers, he only ever calls people by the name they introduce themselves by—starts to extract herself from his grip.
He only just realizes that he was holding onto her waist again, worrying his thumbs into the curve of her iliac crests.
“No, please keep doing that,” he says, fingers tightening into soft flesh.
“Okay,” she replies, assessing him. “How’s your leg?”
Briefly, he considers lying. And then he remembers that would be really fucking stupid. “Hurts like a bitch. My back won’t stop spasming, but the diazepam’ll take care of it.”
“Yeah, I can feel it.“ Her touch still soft and soothing, she moves down to his trapezius muscles, deltoids, latissimus dorsi, his lumbar fascia. Palpates gently, counting down his spine, before applying her point and middle fingers to a pressure point so divine that he chokes off a moan into her shoulder. “That helping at all?”
“Where did you learn that?”
“I have my secrets,” she says with a sigh. Slowly, she shifts the angle of her hand, decompressing the disk threatening to crumble to dust between L3 and L4. Suddenly, his femoral nerve comes back online, and his right hip—made largely of surgical steel and aftermarket parts—hurts the least it has all day. “I attended a seminar on non-opiate pain relief for chronic lumbar and pelvic pain. You’ve had a Trendelenberg gait all day. Your piriformis and adductors have been bothering you since way before some asshole decided to light off a roman candle in the hub.”
She pulls back, looking at him— you are known.
She tries to step away again, but only gets so far as engaging the muscles necessary to walk.
“Shh… stay here a minute longer. I need to look at you.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
And then she does the one thing that could heal him, it turns out; Samira Mohan kisses his forehead, and her lips are just as pliable as he’s dreamed.
“You’re not actually on shift, are you?” It’s probably time that he established the baseline of how ridiculous he’s been. It’s important to know that before you get knocked out by a very pretty doctor who is so far out of your league that she may as well exist in another galaxy, lest you wake up without knowing how insane you’ve been.
“No.” She smirks. “Neither are you.”
“I really appreciate that you haven’t called me an idiot yet.” Finally, with a solitary squeeze, he lets her go.
“Oh, we’ll get there.” He finds ease in watching her unpack her supplies. Everything she does, no matter the pace, always carries the weight of intentionality. “But right now I’m just really glad we’re both alive. That was you, by the way, if that hasn’t sunk in yet.” Dropping down onto the rolling stool, she grabs his chin again. “You saved my life.”
A shiver runs down his spine.
“Next year we’re going out into the middle of the woods. Ten miles from any people. I’m gonna find a cabin no one’s ever heard of. Maybe a bunker.”
“Oh, we? I’m invited?” She drags the tray over to her, laying out the IV start kit. He’s pleased to see the grin forming on her lips. “Do I get to drive the Jeep?”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
It means he wouldn’t be able to watch her throw her head back, singing along with the radio. Wouldn’t be able to reach over to touch the bare skin of her thigh where her shorts have ridden up.
“I still can’t believe you drive a manual.”
“It’s easier. The prosthetic doesn’t have to be as sensitive on the clutch as it does on the gas or brake.” It’s also what he learned to drive on, in the fucking sticks of New Hampshire. What he had to drive in the military. He re-learned enough things after losing the bottom third of his leg; he wasn’t going to learn how to drive a fucking automatic.
“Okay, then you can drive. But the doors have to be off,” she negotiates, choosing her vein, scrubbing the little alcohol pad over his forearm. “Little poke.”
It’s better than when he does it to himself; but still, he has to tease.
“Maybe I should have let Dana do it.”
“Oh shut up.” She knows not to take him seriously anymore. “When was the last time you slept?”
If her eyebrows weren’t pinched together, he’d take her question as curiosity. Instead, he suspects it’s going to impact the course of his next few days.
She hangs the fluids, goes back for the medications.
“Night before you got your board exam results. I was trying to sleep when Robby called me telling me to get my ass to the bar. Was kinda hoping to be less fucked up for that, but the neighbors started blowing shit up early this year. Didn’t even wait for it to be July to get festive.”
But still, he’d rolled out of bed. Got dressed, brushed his hair and teeth, put on the leg. Walked the fifteen minutes it took to get to the shitty little dive bar the Pitt staff congregated in after shift change. And God, if Samira didn’t immediately turn to look at him as he walked in the door, the condensation from her whiskey ginger coating the palm of her hand, in the prettiest yellow dress he’d ever seen. Her face lit up and he'd wanted to die just so it would be her that killed him.
Anything to make her happy.
God, he loves to see her happy.
“You liked my dress,” she says, pulling the needle and checking the catheter before hooking him up to the bag.
“I did like your dress. It was a good dress.”
It was an excellent dress. Butter yellow and cotton soft, with little blue and pink flowers. The top was tight and fitted to her waist, the skirt flouncing to her mid-thigh. One strap draped off her shoulder. He wanted to pull it down further with his teeth. She’d hung onto him and his name for longer than necessary, flicking the t in Abbot against the back of her incisors as she bounded over to him, slinging her arms around his neck and holding on tight.
“Pushing zofran first, then diazepam. I’ll put the propranolol and famotidine in the bag.” The benzo hits blissfully fast, the pain melting out of his back. With one finger on his chest, she pushes him to lay down on the bed. “Leg on or off?”
“Off. Please.”
He realizes, with the last of his brainpower, that she’s watched him take it off enough times to know how to find the release button for the locking mechanism through his pants.
“So polite,” she says, leaning it against the wall. “You could have kissed me, you know?”
It took him every ounce of his well-honed sense of personal discipline not to.
“I didn’t want to usurp your night,” he says, trying to pick apart the knots on his boot and failing. Lips quivering into a small smile, she lifts his leg, bracing the sole of his shoe against her thigh, making quick work of the laces. She shouldn’t be doing this for him, but he doesn’t have anywhere near the energy to stop her. “Samira Mohan, MD, PhD, BCEM. That’s what that night was about. I know how to wait for the things I really want. But fuck, that dress.”
The look she gives him in return makes him almost blush.
“Yeah, I wanted you to see me in it,” she says, unfolding blankets—straight from the warmer, Dana is a saint—over him. “You could have kissed me a year ago.”
The sound he makes is musing, and tired. “Then you’d be the resident who was sleeping with an attending, in her own department nonetheless. No matter what happened next. Whether we… if you and I… you deserved better than that. I won’t tolerate anyone disrespecting you.”
He gave up on concealing the venom in his voice when Robby did it, even before he and Samira were really friends.
Slow-Mo. Who the fuck tags their own resident with that?
“Stop making decisions for me,” she says, clicking the rail of the gurney on one side in place, before climbing in on the other side of the bed.
Any residual tension in his body vacates immediately.
“I’ll take that under consideration.”
“Asshole.”
“Will you stay?” he asks, already rolling onto his stomach to loop his arms around her waist, press his face into her leg. He could stay like this forever, tucked up against her.
“Yeah, Jack. I’ll stay.” Her hand returns to his hair.
“Thanks. I’m gonna keep trying to make you fall in love with me,” he says, muffled against her thigh.
She toys with a curl at the nape of his neck. “Won’t have to work too hard.”
“Hmm?” He lifts his head; she pushes it back down.
“Go to sleep. We’ll talk about it later.”
Breathing deep, he feels sleep rushing up to meet him for the first time in days, weeks, months. Maybe even years.
“Why do you want to take care of me? I hate taking care of me. It’s the fucking worst.”
And this is the last thing he hears before the rest of it slips away, his mind holding onto it, that last tether to waking:
“Not for me.”
Robby waits until the end of his shift to come check on them, and honestly, Samira wants to text Heather and let her know that he’s finally figured out the concept of restraint.
“He’s out?” he asks, nodding his head at Jack drooling on her pant leg.
“For a couple hours at least.”
Lazily, without giving much thought to the motion of her hand, she traces the shell of his ear. It’s absurd, how easily she can touch him like this, how her hands want the feel of his warm skin under her hands, the coarse stubble on his cheek.
“You good here?” he asks, collapsing into the visitor’s chair.
“Yeah, I’ve got editing to do. Dana brought me my laptop,” she replies, gesturing to her computer on the rolling hospital table pulled up against the side of the gurney. She can edit with one hand. She’s a millennial with two terminal degrees—Microsoft Word hotkeys are secondary nature.
Robby nods, and then adopts a look on his face that suggests that he’s trying to be delicate, and not act like an over-exuberant German Shepherd. “What do you want to do when he wakes up? He can’t go home alone, people aren’t going to stop setting off fireworks for at least a few more days. Neither of us want to see him in BH.”
Nodding slowly, Samira closes the lid of her laptop.
“I’m off for two more days. I’ll DC him with more diazepam. He’s got propranolol and prazosin at home. I’ve overnighted some specialized ear plugs and a better white noise machine than the one he has. I’ll just drug the hell out of him tonight.”
If that doesn’t work, she’ll think of something else. Drag a mattress down into his basement. Find a hotel.
“You go home with him, you can’t write a script for him ever again.”
It’s not condemnation, or judgment. Just a simple boundary that asks her declare where the line in their relationship is, and if they are stepping over it.
“Yeah, I know,” she murmurs.
Even in sleep and under heavy sedation, the muscles of Jack’s face twitch. Rubbing small circles at his temple, she waits for them to ease.
When she looks back up, it’s to Robby smiling at her, clearly satisfied.
“Okay, then… good. I agree with your treatment plan.” Leaning forward, he takes the hand that has just abandoned her keyboard. “You okay? Have anything need looking at?”
“Nah, just some contusions.” She’s been holding an ice pack to a nasty one coming up on her knee. “My hair reeks of smoke. I’ll take a shower once I get to Jack’s.”
She spent so much time there earlier in the month that there must be at least a hundred of her flashcards sitting on the different surfaces in his house. She thinks she’ll never forget the look of betrayal on his face when she let him know that the oral part of the board exam had been discontinued.
Last week, she didn’t want to be an imposition. She already left too much of her shit in his house anyway, had too many opinions on his coffee and his dish soap and his shitty cop procedurals.
She should have been an imposition.
“How did that even start?” Robby asks, still smiling. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
To her mild surprise, she finds that she doesn’t.
“That blizzard MLK weekend last year. I finished my double and tried to go home. My car wouldn’t start. And with two feet of ice and snow…” her voice trails off, remembering how cold she was, teeth chattering in her Camry as the engine strained and strained, but refused to turn on. “I was about to head back inside to find a couch to crash on when he saw me.” She leaves out the part where she was crying, eyes burning, furious and exhausted. “Wouldn’t take no for an answer when he offered his guest room.” She pauses. “In a nice way. I’d been there before, sometimes I’d walk over to have a cup of coffee before or after shift on his days off.”
God, Frank had been shitty about that one when he came back. He’d been prickly and defensive after his return a year ago, resenting himself for having to repeat R4 and aiming that self-hatred anywhere but at himself.
Oh, you and Abbot have a cute little coffee club now?
But then Mel had looked at him with disappointment in her eyes, and he’d shut up about it.
“I’d go through his hoard of textbooks and journals, we’d talk about case reports and insane shit we’d read about on forums. That started after PittFest.” Not long after that godawful night, Langdon committed himself to ninety days in rehab and the entire resident workforce got shifted. Samira started working nights more often, first in line to volunteer, almost frenzied for the chance to feel the confidence that Jack had made her feel. “We’d just… talk. He’s a good cook, you know? We’d take turns cooking for each other.”
But neither of them will cook alone, she found.
“He has shit taste in beer, but he knows about wine.” He nimbly blamed the military on the former, and gave his late wife credit for the latter. “He left to head back to the hospital before I woke up. He left me a key,” she explains haltingly. She’s never said any of this out loud before. Not even to herself. “I never gave it back and he never asked for it back.”
Shaking her head, Samira laughs at herself.
It sounds so stupid. She knows it sounds stupid. It’s the most meaningful thing anyone has ever done for her in her adult life.
“Yeah, that sounds like a Jack Abbot courtship technique,” Robby says, grin cracking open wide. “You crash there often?”
“Depends on the shift. The weather. My research. Therapy sessions. Studying for boards.” Then, because if it’s important to him, it can be important to her: “Always in the guest bed.”
Robby releases her hand, scrubs his own over his beard.
“How did I miss it?”
For a long time, there was nothing to notice.
“Because—and I do understand the irony in saying this right now—he makes me feel sane. Helps me find a way to keep my head screwed on. Sometimes, the way he looks at me…”
His gaze can stretch from all the way across the other side of the Pitt. His gaze makes her feel warm, and trusted, and never rushed. His gaze never doubts her. His gaze always gives her patience, gives her courage.
“He’s told me more than once that you’re the smartest one here.”
Inhaling slowly, she waits to see if Robby will give her any context.
He doesn’t.
“He believes in me. Maybe too much. But it’s always kept me coming back here, even when I don’t believe in myself.”
Robby heaves a sound out of his chest that’s halfway between a laugh and a groan.
“Ah, I can’t give you shit about that.”
“Oh, I’m sure you’ll find a way sooner or later,” she replies good-naturedly. The expression that slides onto his face tells her that he will, and it’ll be good. He’ll work for it, and make her laugh about it.
Craning her head, she tries to try to catch a sliver of the department past the curtain.
“How’s it going out there?”
“Eh, moderately damp,” he replies with a shrug. Shoves his hands into the pockets of his hoodie. “Sprinklers cleared Chairs out pretty good, so I can’t complain too much. EVS has the dehumidifiers and fans out, we should be back to normal before the big rush after the sun goes down."
Fireworks and fursuits, another yearly Pitt tradition.
“You’re sure you don’t need me?” she asks.
She doesn’t mean it. She wouldn't stay, even if he asked.
Robby gives her a small shake of his head.
“I don’t—but I think he does.”
It doesn’t occur to him to ask what actually happened until he’s getting his prosthesis re-attached, feeling more human than he has all week.
The Pitt is not a warzone. Things do not just explode here.
“What happened?” he asks, stretching his neck until the joints pop and crack.
Samira tidies up her things into her backpack, then hands him his own. He holds out his hand, intending it as an offer to carry her bag. Instead, she threads their fingers together, briefly rests her head against his shoulder.
“Patient was homeless, had a can of butane and a camping stove in his bag,” she says, resigned in the retelling. “Couple of roman candles too, the kind they sell at those pop-up stands. Butane was still hooked up to the stove. Robby went to dump the backpack—”
“And it went off.”
Lip curled into a grimace, Samira nods. “Like the Fourth of July.”
Lifting their joined hands, he brushes his lips across her knuckles.
“Can we go home?”
He watches a myriad of expressions flit across her face—hesitation, desire, resilience, and then one of his favorites, brilliant impulsivity. Narrowing her eyes at him, she presses closer, holding their hands between them. The moment before she does it, Jack realizes what she’s about to do.
When she kisses him—soft, but still somehow unyielding—his mind hears silence.
And if on their way out the door, hands still laced together, Dana plucks her post-it note off a whiteboard hidden in the stairwell and holds it proudly aloft—
Well, there are other things to care about.