Chapter Text
Samira
Samira Mohan never believed she cared too much.
She had a teacher early on in med school throw those exact words at her, like they were barbed and burnished things, aimed to cut her down to size. Meant as an insult. When you care too much, that’s what’ll fuck you in the end. You can’t care too much, Ms. Mohan. You won’t survive. Before Samira could respond, could try and defend her reasoning, the teacher had moved on entirely. Condescending men were not new to her, but this teacher’s words struck her deeply; her cheeks had flamed in embarrassment. But also in anger.
When the class ended, Samira made a promise to herself: she would never stop caring. Because caring was her superpower, her default setting. Her father always said she was born with a heart three times the normal size. Maybe that’s why his loss felt like an unfixable crack in her very foundations; when there’s more of something there’s more to break.
So she graduated and never saw that teacher again, even though his words stuck with her like a pebble in her shoe–making every step forward uncomfortable. Despite pain and loss and uncertainty, she still cared. She still loved. It was her weathervane, her rudder, guiding her towards the places where she could do the most good. Places where caring wasn’t always doled out in spades.
Places like emergency rooms.
In big cities.
With horrendous wait times and patient satisfaction scores.
Caring was very much a part of the PTMC. It wasn’t always flashy amidst the monotony and the drowning, the chaos and the challenges. But you weren’t there unless you cared to some degree. In the beginning, Samira was certain that a few of them wouldn’t know caring if it smashed them right in the teeth. It didn’t take her long to realize that her assessment had been slightly uncharitable; hearts came in all shapes and sizes, after all.
A moment of silence after a patient died.
A cup of reheated break room coffee, unasked for.
An extra protein bar packed just in case.
A shift ending, but sitting with someone’s family instead of going home.
Little things…and things not so little.
No matter how far down someone’s heart may at first seem–even those that felt way, way down–each one beat with the same rhythm: the rhythm of machines beeping and antiseptic smells and snapping gloves and stethoscopes and fluorescent lights. They were all there because they cared.
Even on her hardest days, Samira never believed she cared too much. Never.
Until today.
Today, when Jack Abbott went down across the Hub, hard. His head cracking against the unforgiving floor, lying bonelessly in a heap, too still amidst the disarray.
The rest of the room faded around her, a high pitched ringing assaulted her ears. She felt like she was going to be sick. All Samira could focus on was a familiar head of greying curls, tanned skin washed out by the fluorescent lights, and then beneath it an expanding pool of–
Blood.
Only then did Samira think her teacher might actually have been right.
If you care too much, you won’t survive.
If you care too much, you’re fucked.
Jack
It had been an easy day—well, not an easy day, but as easy of a shitshow circus you would get in a May heat wave kind of day—which should have been the first clue.
The second should have been the rising voices near the ambulance bay doors.
Jack Abbott missed both of them.
He would blame the heat wave in retrospect for this lapse. And the fact that he had wrapped up his second double shift in three days. And that his prosthetic was chaffing, as it always did during the warmer months, and it was bothering him more than he’d planned for.
While each one was a contributing factor to be certain, none were the true reason.
Because the true reason boiled down to shitty fucking luck.
Goddamned shitty ass luck.
An hour to shift change and Jack was running on fumes. He’d made a beeline for the Hub, overcompensating in his stride to mask his limp, fully intending to sit for five minutes. Five. Full. Minutes. Just long enough to relieve the grating ache of his prosthesis, to allow the raw skin he knew he’d find beneath the protective sleeve a chance to not turn into anything worse. But not long enough for anyone to notice his discomfort. It was a tiny fucking needle to thread.
He quickly noticed that the good chair with no squeaky wheels and actual good padding was unoccupied. If he wasn’t so bone-deep weary he might have smiled. And if he wasn’t painfully lapsed, he might have thanked the Almighty herself.
Not a foot from the work station, though, he paused. His fingers twitched. Muscles tensing, hands unclenching to hang ready at his sides, eyes flicking up to scour his surroundings. His body was reacting before his brain fully caught up to…to…
There. Shouting. By the ambulance doors. Shouting that had shifted just past the line of civil. Poised on the knife's edge of dangerous.
Comfy chair and five minutes abandoned, Jack made his way calmly but surely towards the doors. It was a small group, four of them facing one another in pairs: Jesse had his hands raised in a placating gesture, a security guard—Ahmad, the name jumped to his mind—was next to him and speaking towards the other two. Strangers, male, agitated. Large builds.
A muscle in Jack’s jaw twitched as he placed himself next to Jesse. He reached behind the nurse and tugged his scrub top backwards gently, pulling him to stand just a bit further away from the two men. The eye contact he made with Ahmad was brief.
Jack inhaled steadily through his nose.
“Getting a little loud over here,” Jack interrupted, eyeing each stranger in turn, “why don’t we take this outside?”
“We were just telling these assholes we don’t want to go outside!”
The taller of the two men, who stood about five inches above Jack, jabbed a finger towards Jesse and Ahmad. Fury simmered on his harsh features. Stormy green eyes, a flattened nose that had to have been broken at least once, a long scar running down the side of his face from his temple to his jaw. Jack knew exactly what kind of man he was. The second stranger, stockier and shifty, glanced nervously between everyone, dancing on the balls of his feet.
He was wearing a hoodie, Jack noted from his periphery. In a heat wave.
Jack’s face hardened. And the day had been going so well. This spat was yet to devolve into a major issue; if he could get these two idiots out of the ER and away from staff and patients, it’d be a simpler scenario. Remaining inside was not an option; too many variables in play, too many people to account for, possible containment challenging. Jack nudged a bit in front of Jesse and squared his shoulders.
“Nothing’s getting solved by yelling at us.” Jack pointed an open palm towards the ambulance bay doors. The taller of the two, Angry Idiot, took a small step backwards, blinking quickly. Affronted by the authoritative delivery. “So. Outside.”
“Who the fuck are you, man?” He spit at Jack.
Out of the corner of his eye Jack caught the Shifty Idiot fiddling in his front pocket.
“The guy in charge,” Jack replied coolly. He jerked his chin towards the doors. “So whatever you two were asking my colleagues about, I can help. The louder you are, though, the more of a scene you cause, the less likely I am to give that help. And the more likely I am to pass you right over to Security.”
The Angry Idiot’s face was reddening. A vein throbbed in his forehead. And Shifty Idiot was no longer shifty—he’d gone still, brownish-black eyes fixed on Jack.
Jack felt the energy shift in an instant. The hair on the back of his neck stood up as time seemed to slow around him. Ahmad glanced down at his walkie, prepping to call for reinforcements, while Jessie took a step forwards next to Jack, in an effort to help move the two men outside.
And in that split second, it all went to absolute shit.
Angry Idiot threw a left hook at Jessie, who managed to dodge the majority of the hit, but the punch still connected sickeningly with his jaw. He fell back, away from the fight. Shifty Idiot kicked out towards Ahmad, catching the guard on his knee cap. Ahmad staggered backwards, too, with a cry of pain.
And then Jack was moving.
He used Angry Idiot’s momentum from his punch against him, catching the guy’s fist and turning his wrist.
“Agh!” Angry Idiot twisted into Jack’s movement to alleviate the discomfort. He kept shifting, following Jack’s lead, to avoid a broken wrist; it took less than ten seconds for Jack to have the guy’s arm pinned behind his back and pulled uncomfortably upwards. Jack’s other hand had a firm hold on Angry Idiot’s shoulder.
He figured he had another few seconds to shove this guy away towards the bay doors and turn to help Ahmad and Jesse with Shifty Idiot.
It, however, was a miscalculation. His attention had been on the angry stranger. It turned out he wasn’t the biggest threat.
The air behind and to his left displaced, and Jack felt someone move close.
He tried to pivot away from the unknown peril, get the other guy into his line of sight, but he wasn’t fast enough. The discomfort of the day finally caught up to him, his prosthetic not moving the way he wanted. He just wasn’t fast enough.
Jack caught a flash of metal in the hospital lights. He instantly let go of Angry Idiot’s shoulder and tossed his hand out towards the object, knowing whatever was about to happen was going to fucking suck.
And it did.
Sharp pain flared across his palm and up his arm before notching terribly in his side.
Jack spared a grateful thought that the metal was a knife of some sort and not a gun. The realization didn’t do him much good as his right-handed grip on Angry Idiot weakened. Over the rush of blood in his ears, Jack could swear he heard people shouting, rushing towards them, someone screaming.
But then Angry Idiot shoved his head backwards, lashing out to try and free his captured wrist.
Skull connected with nose. There was a nasty snapping sound, something cracked in Jack’s face, and he stumbled.
He tried to catch himself but his right leg buckled beneath him, pain flaring sharp in his residual limb, and Jack fell. The sharp tang of adrenaline still sat on his tongue, his vision blurring. He wondered if the knife was still in his side.
When Jack’s head hit the tile floor, everything went black.