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Monday
When Trinity emerges from treating a nasty kid’s equally nasty broken arm, Whitaker is posted up behind the intake desk chatting with Mateo. Which would be unremarkable were it not Dennis’s day off. She is scanning him for injury before she can stop herself, before she realizes she’s doing it. He seems fine. He’s laughing at some story Mateo is telling, wearing that look of amused disbelief which frequently accompanies their ED horror stories. She shoves her hands in her pockets as she approaches, trying to look unbothered. Casual.
“Huckleberry, you okay?” she calls as she approaches.
Whitaker looks up, Mateo following his gaze. He gives her a shy smile. “Hey, Trin.”
“You okay?” she repeats.
He looks confused for a while, until the pieces finally click. “Oh! No, I’m fine. I was in the area, um. Running errands? And I noticed your shift was almost over, so I thought I’d… yeah.”
He seems to almost shrink in on himself. She fights the smile lurking somewhere in her features, ignores the warmth in her chest. She folds her arms across her chest.
“Sure,” she says. “Let me get my bag.”
She turns and walks away before he can say anything else. Something about his embarrassment. Something about the smile on Mateo’s face as he glances between the two of them.
When she returns a few minutes later, bag slung over one shoulder, Mateo is gone. Whitaker is standing in the same place, watching one of the TVs in the corner. She falls in beside him, bumps her shoulder against his.
“Ready?” she says, and he smiles.
They make their way to the doors, weaving around stray wheelchairs, crash carts, and someone’s toddler. Santos gives a lazy salute to Robby on the way out, and he nods back. And then they are home free, loose on the streets of Pittsburgh. Whitaker shoves his hands in the pockets of his hoodie and watches his feet as though he’s afraid of tripping on something.
“How was it?” he says.
She laughs. “Chaotic.”
“Yeah,” he says.
“God, I had this one kid. He was probably nine years old. Maybe ten. I don’t know. Anyway, he fell during basketball practice and fucking shattered his arm. And the whole time we were talking to him, he was asking when he could get back to playing basketball. Apparently he thinks if he can’t play for a month this other kid Henry is gonna take his spot on the team. So finally McKay tells him he’ll be in the cast for six weeks, and he can’t play until it’s off. And no shit, the kid starts screaming. Like, top of his lungs, no words expressed, just shrieking his little lungs out. As if we’ll tell him he can have it off sooner to get him to stop. And when he finally stops, McKay is trying to, like, calm him down, you know? So she’s like, ‘don’t worry, it’ll be over before you know it,’ all that, you know? And what does the kid do?”
“Start screaming again?”
“That’s exactly what he fucking does! And the whole time his dad is just sitting there, not doing anything. Just looking at us, totally dead-eyed. Like this happens all the time.”
Whitaker laughs, shakes his head.
“I mean seriously,” she says. “If I had done that when I was a kid my mom would have smacked me right there in front of the doctors.”
“Oh God, yeah,” he says. There is something very sad behind his eyes.
She elects to change the subject. “Hey, Huckleberry. Were you really running errands down here?”
Wrong thing to say. He goes beet red, and his eyes drop to the floor. She is strategizing on how exactly she will extricate her foot from her mouth this time when he smiles sheepishly and says, “No.”
This time, she decides to think before she opens her mouth again. But, of course, she can’t think of a single fucking thing to say, so she bumps his shoulder again and tries to ignore the fact that she too is beaming.
Tuesday
“Huck, you’re making me insane here.”
“Alright, alright! Is it… the tiles on the floor?”
“No.”
“Is it my shoes?”
“No.”
“Is it that stripe on the wall?”
“Yes!”
“Oh, thank God.”
“Your turn.”
“This is ridiculous.”
“I said it’s your fucking turn.”
“Fine. I spy with my little eye something… white.”
“Is it the floor tiles?”
“Yes. Your turn.”
“You’re so lame. I spy with my little eye… something grey.”
“We’ve done grey.”
“No we haven’t. We’ve done blue, and we’ve done white, and we’ve done black, but we haven’t done grey.”
“What exactly are you two doing?”
Robby is leaning in the doorway of the staff room, arms folded, a wry half-smile hidden poorly behind a stern expression on his face. Whitaker’s head spins around so fast he nearly topples off his chair. Trinity takes a sip of Diet Coke to hide the way her mouth quirks.
“... Playing I Spy,” says Whitaker.
“In a hospital?”
“... Yeah.”
“Having much luck?”
“... No.”
His eyes flick to Santos. “Can I borrow you for an extubation?”
“Sure,” she says. She sets the can down beside Whitaker’s arm. “Watch that for me,” she says as she stands, and follows Robby out into the hall.
She aims a glance at her attending’s face as they make their way toward the ED. He is characteristically stoic, but as she watches, a glint in his eye and a half-laugh escape from beneath the mask.
She smiles to herself as well. She can’t wait to tell Dennis.
Wednesday
Whitaker is watching House when she gets back, laden with groceries. She tosses him the bag of peanut M&Ms she bought for him on a whim, then stands in the doorway watching along with him. Four posturing TV doctors stand around a patient, completely stupefied as to what might be ailing the man in bed. One of them orders an LP.
“It’s encephalitis,” she says. “This guy’s an idiot.”
Dennis turns to look at her, an almost unbelieving look on his face. God, she thinks, you’ve ruined it. Would it kill you to shut the fuck up for once in your life? Her father’s voice, unbidden: Nobody likes a smartass, Trinity.
But all Whitaker says is, “A handful of M&Ms if you’re right. If you’re wrong, you owe me coffee.”
And then he pauses the TV and helps her unpack groceries.
And when 30 minutes later House realizes his patient is suffering from encephalitis induced by alcohol withdrawal, he silently tips what she would deem slightly more than a handful of M&Ms into one palm and pokes her in the arm until she accepts them.
Thursday
The guy bearing down on her in the waiting room is incandescent with rage. Trinity holds her ground, looking him square in the eye. She’s right and she knows it. Sure, she could have phrased her criticism of his attitude toward his wife slightly differently. But the fact remains that she is right. He is a bully, and it’s about time someone puts him in his place.
The man’s wife cowers in one corner, also staring at Trinity, eyes begging her to just back down, to smooth things over with him for her own good. But Trinity has done too much of that in her lifetime, and she’s fucking sick of it.
So she angles her chin up and keeps looking the guy dead in the eye. Robby stands in front of the man, trying to talk him down, but the guy is not even looking at him. He has his eyes locked on Trinity, like a bull about to charge.
“We’re here to help you,” Robby says, trying to soothe. She laughs a little despite herself, more nerves than anything else. And the guy’s eyes light up with a malevolence she hasn’t yet seen from him. In one movement, he is shoving Robby to one side, half-running to Trinity, speech somewhere between a stream of obscenities and a hollow bellow. She braces herself for impact. Big fucking man. Come and get me.
And then another figure stands between her and the man, and its sudden presence pulls the man up short. He blinks a few times, breathing hard.
It’s Whitaker. His shoulders are tense, and he’s cowering just a little, but his feet are planted and he’s not moving.
“Don’t touch her,” he says, quiet. So quiet she almost doesn’t hear him.
The man blinks. And then he is being hauled toward the exit. Robby is tailing him, making sure he gets all the way out the door. Dana has a hand on her arm, asking her if she’s alright. And Whitaker hasn’t moved.
So she reassures Dana, gives her a cocky grin, shouts at a few rubbernecks, and goes to Dennis’s side. Moves into his sightline. Inches her way toward him and takes his elbow, making sure he’s tracking her movements. His breathing is stuttered and he’s blinking owlishly. “I got him,” she says to the room, and begins to steer him out back to the ambulance bay.
She tries to make him sit on the curb, but he won’t move, arms folded across his chest, staring at something in the distance. So she stands beside him, idly watching movement across the street.
“Huck,” she says after a minute. Glances over at him. He hasn’t moved. “Dennis. Come on, man, give me something.” Nothing, save for a twitch in his neck. She sighs. “Thanks. For standing up for me.”
For whatever reason, that does it. He bursts into tears. Pushes his face into her shoulder with such force that she has to take a few steps back. But if there’s one thing she’s good at, it’s pushing back. She puts an arm around his shoulders and over his head, as though she’s shielding him from something falling from the sky. His arms stay wrapped around his middle, and she pushes down with all her strength. Keeping him from going supernova with her bare hands.
He reemerges after a few minutes, swiping at his face until she unearths a tissue from her pocket to hand to him. He does what damage control he can on his face and offers her a weak smile. She takes the tissue from his hand and shoots it like a basketball to the nearest trash can. It bounces off the side.
“Fuck!” she yells, so loud a gaggle of nearby EMTs look up at her. But it works. He laughs.
She goes over and picks it up, puts it where it’s actually supposed to go. Then she goes back, hands stuffed in her pockets, and stands beside him again. They don’t talk.
After another minute, she says, “Ready to go in?”
He nods, face still pale, eyes still red. Takes a deep breath.
“On second thought,” she says. “Maybe we can hang out here for another minute. They can deal.”
He smiles. Reaches out, takes her hand, and squeezes. She squeezes back.
Friday
“So, do you think they’re fucking?” Trinity says from her perch on the kitchen table.
Whitaker looks up, startled, from the pan he’s been watching obsessively, wooden spoon still poised. “Who?”
“Robby and Dr Abbot.”
He blinks at her owlishly. “Can we not talk about this?”
“Come on, Huckleberry, it’s not like I’m going to tell ‘em.” Whitaker stirs his onions compulsively. “I think they are.”
“You do?”
“Oh, totally. At the very least some hand stuff.”
“Trinity.”
“What?”
“That’s so gross.” But he’s gone beet red, and something about the counter suddenly requires his full attention.
She can feel the slow smile creeping across her face. She laughs, a huff of breath that struggles to compete with the sound of Whitaker fumbling around in a cabinet.
“Oh my God,” she says. “Are you jealous?”
He whirls around. “What? No. I’m not—Jealous? What the fuck, Trin?”
“You so are.”
“Anything else. Can we please talk about literally anything else?”
“You want to be in the middle of that old man sandwich!”
“Trinity—” He wields the spoon in her direction.
“Relax, Huck,” she says. “I won’t tell anybody.” He squints at her. She holds up three fingers in a Scout’s salute. “Promise. Those onions are burning.”
He whirls back around to the pan, stirring manically.
“Although,” she says to his back. “If you need a wingwoman, you know who to call.”
“Yeah,” he fires back. “Javadi.”
She throws her head back laughing. “Goddamn, Huck. That smarts.”
They sit in companionable silence for a few minutes, allowing the sounds of Whitaker moving about the kitchen and the mumbling stereo in the windowsill to fill the space between them.
Taking the onions off the stove, Whitaker says casually, “So. How’s Dr Garcia?”
Saturday
She knows as soon as she hears the front door shut that it’s been a rough one. She’s in her room when she hears him come in, not quite slamming the door behind him but letting the noise ring in a way he doesn’t usually. She hears him shuffle down the hall past her room, open and shut his own bedroom door. Hears the thump of his bag hitting the floor. It’s quiet for a few minutes. She waits to hear him shuffle back out into the hall toward the bathroom. He always showers as soon as he gets home from a shift. But instead there is silence.
At the 20-minute post-arrival mark, she puts her phone down beside her and hauls herself to her feet, trying her best to move quietly toward the kitchen in case he’s asleep. She hears a quiet sniffle as she passes his door, which bursts that particular bubble of hope spectacularly. So she moves to the kitchen and puts music on the stereo quietly, not so loud that it becomes grating but loud enough that there are signs of life.
She regards the fridge with a look almost calculating in its intensity. From Whitaker’s room, a muffled sob. Fuck it. She’s making tinola.
It is, she will freely admit, kind of a rush job. She uses leftover chicken to cut down on time and realizes at the last second that there is no way in hell they have moringa lying around, so she ends up with a pot of half-Caucasian monstrosity. But it tastes pretty fucking similar to what her dad used to make, so she counts it as a win.
She leaves a bowl outside Whitaker’s door, knocks once so he knows that it’s there, and takes the rest with her to the living room. She puts on an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, but it’s no fun to watch without Dennis there to make fun of it with her, so she turns it off and scrolls listlessly on her phone instead.
When she goes to put her bowl back in the kitchen and start on the dishes, she sees Whitaker’s bowl is in the same place she left it. But it’s empty. She smiles, wider than she’d ever admit to being capable of smiling, and grabs it on her way by.
As she’s about to fall asleep several hours later, she thinks she can hear the shower turn on.
Sunday
She doesn’t get up the next morning until well after 11. Whitaker is usually gone by this time, off to church. She used to worry he’d start to make noise about her going too, but he never has. Hasn’t even mentioned it outside of letting her know where he’s disappeared to at 9am on a weekend.
He usually brews a pot of coffee before he goes, which delights her because it means she can steal and reheat what he doesn’t drink. And sure enough, as she shuffles into the kitchen there is half a pot left. Her favorite mug is on the counter as well, positioned atop a sticky note. She frowns at it. Did she leave it out last night?
When she gets close enough, though, she recognizes Whitaker’s handwriting on the note.
Trin - Gone to church. Thanks for the soup. Huck.
She smiles, rolls her eyes a little. Then she pours a cup of coffee, sticks it in the microwave, and brings the sticky note into her room. She puts it on the wall above her desk. Then she goes back to sit at the table and drink her coffee before the day well and truly starts. She’s got laundry to do.