Chapter Text
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart;
I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
- Jorge Luis Borges (1934)
It was always easier for the one who left.
Langdon had scoffed when he first heard this in a therapy session, merely a week out of inpatient rehab. “Easier?” His laugh was all hollow and jagged, “You think this is easier?”
This, obviously, was the trembling of his always steady physician hands, the vomiting, the sweating, the unanswered phone calls and texts and voice messages; his skin feeling too hot and not nearly hot enough at the same time; him in a fetal position on that flimsy bed with his attending’s name fixated between his lips like an abandoned mantra.
This was the white-hot need, the guilt, the shame, and the sore ache that had nestled permanently in his mediastinum.
This was the whispers echoing inside his skull, tempting him to take the easy way out.
His therapist didn’t know any of this because Langdon, for once, had resolutely kept his mouth shut. So he felt a little - alright, a lot, after his emotions had stopped running high - bad about it.
But really, Langdon had reasoned, negotiated, argued, fought, and prayed, prayed, prayed for that statement to be false. Because whatever was harder than what he went through, Robby was doing it alone. And that was a thought Langdon wouldn’t dare to touch.
It was his second shift back, the day after the shift where, within 8 hours, Robby went from essentially telling him he was no longer wanted in the Pitt to looking at him as if he was worth something again and telling him, “Nice job”. Less than an hour in, Langdon was standing near the Hub, patient’s CT in hand, at a loss for what to do. He hadn’t felt this off-track since, well, ever. Even as an intern who knew practically nothing, he was never disoriented. Mostly because he was busy following Robby around like an overzealous border collie. Seriously, he’d even overheard Perla tell Dana she could see his tail wagging. And now, Frank Langdon, second-time Emergency Medicine senior resident, was cast adrift in a Robbyless ED.
Well, shit. Guess he owed his therapist an apology.
Nevertheless, Dana was right, as she always was. The Pitt was bigger than one person. Samira had regained her footing under Dr. Al-Hashimi whose attitude towards Langdon had softened around two weeks in. Cassie had taken on mentoring the student doctors. He’d watched, encouraged, and sometimes even pushed Mel to become more assertive while growing closer with her, even getting invited to the King sister’s night out. Working with Santos still felt wrong - guilt - and Whitaker worse - jealousy mixed with the lingering fear of being replaced.
Langdon was back on complicated trauma cases, hands once again steady on the scalpel, Dana looking at him approvingly. He was quick to speak up whenever someone even hinted at threatening a fellow staff member. No longer the cocky asshole but the R4 everyone imagined R4s to be. He had long stopped text-bombing Robby. He set himself a quota: only reaching out on days that were significant. Like when he had performed the Adamson Special retrograde intubation alone. He didn’t even try to feel embarrassed about the way he launched himself of bed when the thumbs-up emoji appeared above the blue bubble, almost spraining his ankle. Three days later, when he had received the postcard sent from the American-Canadian border with nothing but his attending’s sprawling signature, he swore he could’ve singlehandedly propelled himself to the Sun. Oxygen be damned.
All in all, things had been good. Unrealistically good. Definitely beyond what he deserved. So what if he needed to repeatedly slap his sobriety wristband hard enough to leave marks beneath his sleeves? What if his days off were spent at the gym or the park, running until his lungs were one breath away from exploding? And what if, on the nights he couldn’t sleep (which were most nights), he felt as if there was a hole in his right ventricle and he was quietly bleeding out?
Langdon was moored at sea, drifting further and further from the world he once knew. Alone. All alone. He desperately needed something, someone, to get him out. Out of what exactly? He didn’t know.
Until his mentor from when he was a student doctor, an experienced ER physician, called and asked if he would go on an expat mission for Médecins Sans Frontières.
“C’mon, Frankie,” Even after all these years, Dr. Andy Ashren’s voice hadn’t changed. “It’s only for six weeks. You’d be back in Pittsburgh before you know it.”
Langdon really didn’t have a good reason to say yes but plenty of reasons to say no. He had weekly NA meetings, biweekly therapy, and Robby would be back in a month. He must’ve blacked out, because even as he handed Dana the MSF invitation he still hadn’t figured out why on earth he said yes.
“MSF? Really, Frank? Bit too young for a midlife crisis?” Dana stared at him over the rim of her glasses. He felt like he was 4 again, being caught by his mother doing God-knows-what. “Robby will be back before your assignment ends.”
He fought the urge to slap his wristband. That was when he found a perfectly good answer. “Then he wouldn’t have to deal with me on his first shifts back.” There you go. Perfect. He rewarded himself by biting the inside of his bottom lip until he could taste the metal.
Dana’s look could drill through his skull. “You boys will be the death of each other.” She tsked before pinning the invitation to the hub. “This will stop the gossip.” Langdon wanted to hug her and immediately retracted the thought when she held out her hand, “Gimme your just-in-case letter.”
He gaped.
“Frank, letter.”
“I…I was gonna put it in my locker.”
“You really think they’ll leave that locker untouched for 6 weeks?” If only disapproving looks could kill, Langdon’s life would be so much easier. “Unless you want everyone in the Pitt to have read it by tomorrow night, give me the letter.”
Fair. Everyone in the Pitt was nosy as hell to make up for the lack of a personal life. Langdon pulled the envelope out of his bag. In the top right corner, his shaky handwriting read: To Robby.
“Promise me that you won’t give this to him unless I…?”
“Of course.” Her face was doing the thing that made Langdon want to bury his head into her neck and ugly cry. She tucked the letter under the pile of files in her personal drawer, grabbed Langdon by the shoulder, and pulled him into her arms. “Don’t die, kid. Please.”
Working in a war zone felt like a PittsFest shift on loop. Except it never ended. Pittsburgh had its fair share of violence and yet Langdon was sure he had treated more trauma and burns in the past month than he had in the past two years, not counting his 10-month hiatus. There were two other doctors in Dr. Ashren’s team: Dr. Thomas Callahan, a trauma surgeon, and Dr. Murphy Brandybuck, a neurosurgical R7. All four of them were working 16 to 18 hours everyday: Langdon and Dr. Ashren doing triage and stabilizing before sending patients to the makeshift OR. Not that different from the Pitt.
The key difference, however, was that triage now meant saving those with the greatest chance of survival, not those with the most severe injuries. This had kept Langdon wide awake for the first two nights. By the third, he passed out the second his head hit the pillow, too tired to ruminate whether he was acting as a doctor or an executioner.
It shouldn’t have mattered but Langdon was beyond relieved to find himself liking his co-workers. He had warmed up to Murphy almost immediately. A proper genius (honestly, how many 27-year-old R7s are there?). She was quiet, quick-witted and fierce in her own reserved way. Langdon hadn’t been able to stop himself from applauding after she had put two condescending soldiers in their place, never once raising her voice. She was also the only one Dr. Callahan would listen.
As for Dr. Callahan (“Just T, please. Dr. Callahan is my father.”), Dr. Ashren had declared more than once that if he had lost all his hair, it would all be T's fault. T was an all-bets-are-off kind of guy and despite being the most skilled surgeon Langdon had ever met, his blatant disregard for protocol was staggering even for a war doctor. Langdon had assisted T cut open the chest for a resuscitative thoracotomy on a Humvee-turned ambulance traveling at 60 miles per hour. Whenever T reached for a scalpel to set up an autotransfusion, he could almost hear Robby’s annoyed sign.
Speaking of whom, Langdon hadn’t contacted Robby since leaving. He hadn’t received a single text either. Even on the day Robby was scheduled to return, when Robby had for sure found out about his absence, when Dana had texted him saying Robby was furious and really worried, he hadn’t heard from the man himself.
So Langdon spent his days suturing, intubating, resuscitating, doing REBOA, assisting in amputation, damage control vascular surgery and decompressive craniectomy. He went to bombsites with T, saving whomever he could save. He performed another closed reduction for a uni-facet cervical dislocation and several more retrograde intubations. He smiled when Dr. Ashren called him Attaboy and squeezed his shoulders, attempting not to squirm. He texted Dana and Mel daily, telling them he was still alive. He drew smiley faces and butterflies and rainbows on children’s casts. He laughed, on rare occasions the bombing had stopped, when Dr. Ashren told T and Murphy stories from his clerkship, about how, even then, he was arrogant but somehow eager to please. He was only a little jealous when after a transoral spinal surgery had gone horribly wrong, T had held Murphy tightly, so tight that it must’ve hurt. He secretly wondered what it was like to have the person you love love you back. He slept in the sweatshirt he stole after spending a night at Robby’s townhouse so it was easier to imagine his attending’s arms around him.
He spent every second of his free time trying not to think about Robby. And he was failing every second.
Dr. Ashren’s question was “If you were dead, what would people think caused your death?”.
And Langdon had answered, “OD.”
Maybe he was too tired, stressed, sleep-deprived, Robby-deprived. Maybe he just needed to tell someone, someone without a personal stake in this whole fiasco, the truth. So he did. He sat with his old mentor on the operating table and told the elder man everything. His back pain, benzos, Louie, Librium, Santos, PittFest, rehab, and, most of all, Robby. It was like a dam had been opened and all those thoughts Langdon had been stifling kept tumbling out, despite his better judgement. He talked and talked until he couldn’t, tears clogging his sensors.
Dr. Ashren stood up wordlessly. Instead of leaving like Langdon thought he would, he pressed Langdon’s head into his chest.
“That is some fucked-up shit, kid.” And wasn’t this the understatement of the year.
“If I were Dr. Robinavitch, I would be mad too. Furious. Unconsolable. But I’m not so it wouldn’t be fair for me to judge him. However, what I do wish to say is that I believe in second chances. We are doctors. Believing in second chances is literally in the job description. I meant it when I said you were one of the best students I had met over the years and I still mean it now. Going to rehab takes courage. I am proud of you for taking this step.”
Langdon wanted to laugh, cry, and say thank you a million times all at once. What had come out of his throat, instead, was a guttural choking sound not unlike a wounded animal.
It should have been an easy one. Airway secured. Tube in cleanly. Good enough to move. Langdon signaled to T as they set to lift the gurney into the ambulance. T climbed in first to steady the patient. He stayed behind for final adjustments when he heard it. A tiny click. Neither loud nor crisp. Just wrong. He turned around.
Instinct could be a terrible thing.
The impact came a fraction later. He heard it more than he felt it - something fast and brutal slamming square into his chest. For a moment, there was no pain, just confusion. He took half a step back. Or tried to. He wondered why neither his breathing nor his balance was working. He gave another shot at inhaling. It came back broken, shallow, incomplete. A pressure - deep, internal, alien - was blooming under his sternum.
Chest.
Center
Mediastinum.
Right ventricle sits anterior.
The thought slid into place so smoothly that Langdon would have laughed. But air was scarce.
There was a voice calling his name. There were hands on him, pressing, dragging him. He felt warm in a place that shouldn’t feel warm. His heart rate was too fast to be normal.
You need a thoracotomy.
Another thought arrived fully formed, completely uninvited, and unmistakably in Robby’s voice. That, more than anything, almost annoyed him.
“Gunshot - Frank is hit -!”
He recognized T’s shouting. Too loud, he thought, shut up please. His head hurt. His chest hurt. Everything hurt. Everything was wrong and moving too fast.
So this is how it goes.
The thought came without drama. Just a simple conclusion reached ahead of his body, ahead of everyone else, ahead of modern medicine.
He grabbed the collar of T’s scrub with barely responding fingers, speaking through the liquid iron in his mouth. His voice felt like pounded meat. “No benzos.”
And then, just when the world started to narrow in static, as if it weren’t enough, his stupid brain refused to let go -
Robby is going to receive the goddamned letter.