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7eaven11ven

Mar 16

tvseries-writings

Rooftop

TW: a lot, suicidal thoughts, sh, panic attack, OCD

Fandom: The Pitt

Trinity Santos x Yolanda Garcia x reader (Platonic!Dana x reader)

Reader really has a shitty day and the hospital’ rooftop is too tempting

You had crossed the gates of the Pitt at exactly seven that morning and you still hadn’t come back home. You pull out your phone from your jacket pocket, glancing at the screen for a brief instant. It’s six in the evening, your shift ended more than two hours ago, but you still haven’t had the courage to go back home. Just below the time, written in bold letters above YOUR photo — set as your wallpaper more than two months before — there are about twelve messages from the group chat “Some3.”

You turn off the screen, letting the phone slide back into its place in your jacket pocket, without bothering with the messages. They’re probably looking for you; you should already be at home with them by now; instead, you’re on the hospital rooftop, staring with melancholy at the asphalt a few dozen meters below you, with a lit cigarette held tight between your trembling lips. You inhale some smoke and then blow it out, mesmerized by the little gray cloud rising toward the ever-darkening sky as night approaches. You cough a couple of times before your lungs finally give you a break, then you inhale the smoke again. Your asthma isn’t very happy right now, and the inhaler abandoned in your jacket pocket — not the one with the phone, the other one — is proof of it.

You hear the phone ring and then the voicemail kick in; you don’t need to pull it out to know who’s calling you. The only real doubt that could arise is which of the two of them has actually worried enough to call you. Well, maybe you know that answer too. You finish the cigarette and stub it out on the cement beneath you; as you do, your fingertip barely scrapes against the cement and that faint pain numbs you completely, along with the cold air and the sound of the traffic below. You glare with resentment at the empty pack of cigarettes in your pocket and a small huff leaves your lips. You settle yourself more comfortably on the ledge, not paying much attention — as if you weren’t literally one step away from death.

A small, melancholic smile curls your lips and a jolt of pain strikes your right cheek; by now a bruise has surely formed, no doubt about it. You don’t need to have studied medicine for ten years to figure that out, and you don’t need a mirror either. You feel it in every facial movement you make; every single crease of the skin reminds you coldly of what happened today and the reason you find yourself on this rooftop.

It’s not the first time a patient has thrown a punch at you, but it is the first time that the father of a child — John, six years old, with a cardiac malformation for which you could do nothing except fifteen desperate minutes of cardiac massage on your part — screams at you that it’s your fault his child is dead, punches you in the face, and then, according to the evening news, throws himself off the nearest bridge to the hospital. Dead on impact. Only Dana had recognized the man on the news, and her gaze had settled on you with a sweetness and a concern that only that woman was capable of. But, as was your habit, you had downplayed it and reassured her and, above all, you had begged her not to tell anyone.

Not that anyone knew about your relationship. A relationship involving three people is never an easy confession, and in a workplace? A nightmare.

Everyone in the ER knew about THEIR relationship, but you stayed in the shadows, with fleeting quickies, stolen kisses, and a shared apartment twelve minutes by car from your workplace.

You had started working at the Pitt alongside Trinity, and gradually she had grown close to a certain surgeon, and then, well, the duo had become a trio. With Yolanda’s hands roaming over your body while your mouth found warm shelter between Trinity’s legs. Before long, your casual relationship had grown more serious until you decided to move in together, and you fit together so well that it seemed a shame not to have met them sooner; a sacrilege, almost. Trinity had opened up about her scars, you about the depression that had consumed you for most of your life, and Yolanda about her battle with — and eventual victory over — the obsessive-compulsive disorder that, over the years, had transformed into the control she so often displayed in the operating room. You were imperfect, but you loved and accepted one another completely in a way you had only ever dreamed of.

You slide your fingertip over the wheel that strikes the lighter’s flame; it takes three tries for the fire to rise and for the empty cigarette box, resting on the cement of the ledge, to catch fire.

You’ve been up here for hours by now; you don’t know what you want to do, you don’t know if you want to take a step forward and end all of this forever or take a step back and return to the arms of your partners, at home. John isn’t the first child you’ve lost, but you had grown attached to him like you never had to anyone else. In one month, you had seen that little human being more than most of your own family; he had made you laugh, cry, have fun; he had drawn you a beautiful picture: three figures holding hands in front of a building with an asterisk drawn on top, at the center of which was a serpent coiled around a staff. One night, while you were checking his vitals, you had told the little one that you loved two people and not just one, like other people. You had told him that everyone says you can only love one person at a time, and that they said it because they had never met two extraordinary people at the same time.

The next day, when you had entered his room for the routine checkup, you had found him sitting on the bed — surrounded by machines that a child shouldn’t even have to see, at his age — clutching triumphantly, in his tiny little hands, that piece of paper. He had handed it to you with the biggest smile you had ever seen him make, and in a proud voice he had said that he too loved many people: his father, his cousin, his teacher… and he understood what it meant to love more than one person. You had cried that day, because a child had explained and understood what many people couldn’t even conceive of.

The world had lost a beautiful person today.

It wasn’t your fault, you know that; rationally, you know that you did — that all of you did — everything you were capable of doing. But grief… grief is never rational.

What remains of the pack is a little pile of ash; you brush it away with the back of your hand, letting the wind carry it off with a gust. The way you too would like to fly away, without the weight of everything you feel on your shoulders right now.

“To jump or not to jump, that is what I wonder”… you chuckle bitterly at the thought; after all, the great Shakespeare would not be very pleased with this butchered quotation.

The phone rings again, three, four, five times. And then, the rooftop door opens with a creak.

You don’t even turn around, you don’t feel the need and even less the desire. Whether it’s one of your colleagues or one of your partners doesn’t matter; you don’t owe explanations to anyone, everyone comes up here, whether for the view or for other reprehensible reasons is beside the point.

“Hey kiddo, I haven’t seen you come down in a while. The night shift has arrived and Lena too, finally. I can’t wait to get home to my boys. Maybe it’s time for you to do the same.”

The unmistakable voice of the head nurse rings through the noisy silence of the roof, drowning out the hum of car horns dozens of meters below. You hear the click of a lighter, and without turning around, you understand she has just lit a cigarette.

You don’t answer. You don’t turn. The sound of her steps approaches slowly, unhurriedly, as if she had all the time in the world — and perhaps, in a way, she does. Dana isn’t the type of person who rushes you; she’s the type of person who sits down next to you, on the cold cement, a meter from the edge, and smokes in silence as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“I lied for you today, you know? Santos called me, about an hour ago,” she says, after a long drag. Her voice is flat, free of judgment. “I told her you were still at the hospital, that you were finishing some charts. She pretended to believe me.”

Your stomach drops. Not because of the lie itself, but because Dana had had to construct it, think it through, make it believable. For you. Because you hadn’t had the courage to answer the phone.

“You didn’t have to,” you murmur.

“I didn’t have to, but the alternative was telling her the truth, and I don’t know if I was ready for that conversation.”

You don’t ask what the truth is according to Dana. You don’t need to. You saw her watching you walk out of the family room with the bruise already forming on your cheek and your eyes hollow.

“I’m not going to jump, Dana,” you sigh, but not even you believe your own words because, as a matter of fact, a very large part of you would just like to have the guts to take that last step.

“I didn’t suggest that, kid, but I’m definitely not going down from this roof without seeing you get off that ledge first. You’ve been up here for hours and I doubt it’s just to admire the view.”

You hear a long breath and then a little cloud of smoke rises to your right. The woman has probably moved closer, without you noticing.

You swallow. The metallic taste of smoke scratches your throat and the inhaler in your pocket weighs like an accusation.

“It was a bad day, Dana. Nothing more.”

“A bad day…” Dana chuckles bitterly, weighing every single word and shaking her head a couple of times before tossing the cigarette on the ground and crushing it with the toe of her shoe.

For a few seconds, the only sound surrounding you is your breathing, the wheeze in your bronchi that you are trying with all your might to silence. Your abs ache from how hard you’re straining not to cough, but from the gaze you feel burning against your back, you understand it’s futile.

“How much,” she says. A single word, dry as a slap.

“Dana—”

“How much did you smoke, y/n.”

“A pack.”

Dana drags a hand over her face. From bottom to top, slowly, pressing her fingers against her closed eyes as if she were trying to erase something from her own sight. You’ve seen her make that gesture only after the worst shifts — the ones after which you find yourself in the parking lot staring at the steering wheel for twenty minutes before you can turn the key.

“A whole pack,” she repeats, and her voice trembles now. Not with anger. With something deeper, rawer. “You’re asthmatic. You’re asthmatic, for fuck’s sake, y/n, and you’re a doctor, you know what it does to your lungs, and the wheeze I can hear in your breathing is proof of it. Where’s your inhaler? Christ…”

Out of the corner of your eye, you see her turn toward the city for a second, toward the lights flickering on one after another in the growing darkness. You see her hesitate, open her mouth and then close it again as if she were afraid of what she’s about to say might cause. You’ve never seen her doubt anything.

“Santos and Garcia won’t be happy about this, you know that, right?”

An icy chill runs down your spine, and it’s not from the cold.

“W-what?”

“I’ve worked in the ER for twenty years and I notice everything that happens inside it. You’re the only person Santos doesn’t vent to during a shitty shift, and the other day I saw Garcia adjusting the stethoscope around your neck with a smile I’d only ever seen her direct at Santos. It didn’t take me long to figure it out… and it’s fine, I’m not judging you, kid. I’m not judging any of you three, and actually, I’m glad you’ve found someone to talk to. You don’t need a medical degree to see that you love each other.”

Dana smiles and, slowly, takes a step toward you, and only when she’s sure you won’t make any sudden moves does she rest her hand on your arm.

You can’t speak. Your throat has closed and it’s not the asthma, this time. You had guarded that secret so jealously that now, hearing someone else say it out loud is like being stabbed right in the chest. You had been so careful; you had told everyone that you and Trinity had moved in together — for financial convenience, obviously — and the relationship between her and Yolanda was common knowledge by now. You never would have thought that your glances would give you away.

“I don’t care, Y/n. I’ve never cared. Who you love, how many people you love, how you love them… that’s your business. What I care about is that two people who love you are a few minutes’ drive from here and they’ve been looking for you for hours. They’re looking for you and you’re up here, alone, in the cold, with a pack of cigarettes in your veins and a bruise on your face and a deafening wheeze in your lungs. Punishing yourself.” Her voice cracks, barely, on the last word. “Punishing yourself for something that isn’t your fault.”

“I know you know it but knowing it and believing it are two different things, kid,” the knot in your throat tightens, “and until you believe it, you can’t be up here alone. I don’t trust your choices right now.”

“Well… I don’t trust myself right now either.”

Dana squeezes your arm as another coughing fit strikes you.

“That child was special,” she says, and her voice has changed again, lower, softer. “Every time I walked past his room and saw you in there telling him things, making him laugh, checking the machines pretending everything was normal… every time I thought that boy was incredibly lucky to have you as his doctor.” Pause. “And today the world lost something irreplaceable. But not because of you, Y/n. Not because of you.”

You don’t answer. You can’t. Your eyes burn and your throat is a tight knot and if you open your mouth now you know what will come out is a strangled sound, a cry of pain that you don’t want Dana to hear — not here, not now.

“It’s time to get off that ledge, y/n. Go home to your girls.”

A long silence settles between you. The traffic below continues as always — indifferent, constant, stupidly normal — and the sky has gone completely black now, without that orange strip on the horizon left to hide behind. Dana is standing, less than two meters from you. She hasn’t moved closer but she hasn’t moved away either. She guards that space the way one guards a border.

“You know what he told me, once?” you say, and you don’t know why you’re saying it, you don’t know where it comes from, but the words come out before you can stop them. “John. One evening, while I was checking his vitals and he couldn’t sleep, he asked me why I became a doctor.”

Dana doesn’t move, doesn’t speak. She listens.

“I told him I became a doctor because I wanted to help people and make them feel better. And he looked at me with those big eyes that were impossible to say no to, Dana, and he said: ‘But then why do you cry when you leave my room?’” Your voice breaks, you can’t help it, as the memory of that sweet child invades your mind with force.

You bite your lower lip so hard you taste blood.

“A six-year-old child… and he noticed I was crying. He noticed that every time I left his room I leaned against the corridor wall and cried because I knew — I knew, Dana, from the very first day — that he wasn’t going to make it. That every probability I had studied in my medical textbooks testified to how his story would end. And he knew I was crying and he never said anything until that evening when he asked me and I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t know how to explain to a child that I was crying because—”

You stop. The sob takes your throat like a hand and squeezes. You lean forward, your hands on the cold cement, and for one horrible second the world tilts — the edge is right there, less than a few centimeters away, and your body weighs too much and the void pulls —

Dana’s hand grabs your arm with force. So hard that you feel every single finger through the fabric of your jacket. She pulls you back and for a moment you find yourself with your back against her chest, her arm around your shoulders and her heart pounding against your back.

Not the calm heartbeat of a woman who has everything under control, but the terrified heartbeat of someone who has just seen what could have happened.

“Don’t move,” she says, and her voice is unrecognizable. Hoarse, broken, stripped of all professionalism, of all distance, of every role. “Don’t move, y/n. Stay here, stay still.”

Her arms tremble around you.

Yours tremble against her body.

And you stay like that for a time you can’t measure — seconds, maybe, or minutes, or hours compressed into a heartbeat — until Dana drags you off the ledge, setting you with your back against the cement you were sitting on just moments ago.

“He answered me himself, you know,” you whisper, and your voice is a whisper, the thinnest thread barely audible, the ghost of a sound. “I apologized for not knowing how to answer him and he said: ‘Maybe you cry because you care about me. My dad cries too and I know he loves me.’”

Dana doesn’t answer, but her arm tightens around you and her breathing becomes irregular, short, broken — like the breathing of someone fighting not to cry and succeeding by the thinnest margin.

“And he was right,” you say. “I was crying because I cared about him. And now I’m crying because he’s gone and his father is gone and I’m on this fucking roof wondering if—”

“Enough.”

Dana lets you go. She shifts, moves in front of you; kneeling on the cement, her hands on your shoulders, her face thirty centimeters from yours, and in her eyes you see something you’ve never seen in twenty years of emergency room condensed in that woman: fear. Pure, naked, total fear.

“Enough,” she repeats, and her voice trembles but holds. “Listen to me. That child loved you. His father was destroyed by grief and did the things that grief makes people do. And you’re here, alive, with a bruise and a heart that hurts too much, but you’re here. You’re here, Y/n. And I need you to stay here.”

She takes your face in her hands. Her fingers are cold and rough against your skin.

“I need you to use that inhaler. I need you to get up from this cement and come down from this roof and let me drive you home and let those two women hold you tight tonight. I need these things, Y/n. I need them. Can you do them for me, if you can’t do them for yourself?”

You don’t answer. Not with words. But your fingers find the jacket pocket — the one without the phone — and pull out the inhaler. The metal is ice-cold. You bring it to your mouth. Press. Inhale. Hold for a few seconds.

The bronchi open. Air flows in and the wheeze, finally, fades.

Dana nods. She releases your face. She sits next to you, shoulder to shoulder, and for a full minute you stay in silence, seated on the cement with your backs against the ledge you were sitting on just moments ago.

“That child is the reason you get up from this roof,” Dana says. “Not for me. Not for your job. Because that child — you are not allowed, y/n, do you hear me? — you are not allowed to turn that child into a memory of something that was lost.”

You stand up.

Your legs tremble, your knees protest, and for a second the world spins, darkness closing in at the edges of your vision, but Dana quickly grabs you by the elbow to keep you from falling.

“Easy, kid,” she says. “Easy.”

She holds your elbow a few seconds longer than necessary, until she’s sure your legs can hold on their own, and then lets go — but doesn’t move away. She walks at your side toward the roof door, half a step behind, close enough to catch you if you fall and far enough not to make you feel like an invalid.

“My keys are in the locker,” you say, your voice hoarse. “I need to—”

“Oh, you don’t actually think I’m going to let you drive, do you?” She turns to you as if you had just told her you’d removed a lung from a healthy patient, arching her right eyebrow.

“Dana—”

“I’m driving you home. End of discussion. Your car will get some rest.”

You don’t have the strength to argue. You don’t have the strength to do anything, really. The adrenaline left a long time ago and what remains is an exhaustion so total that it feels like you’re moving underwater. You follow Dana through the ER — emptied out at this hour, thanks to some divine miracle — until you reach outside, the parking lot, where the cold night air makes you shiver.

The drive home is blurred, the warmth of the car lulls you and the devastating emotions of the day drain you so much that you think you closed your eyes at some point. You don’t even remember telling Dana where you live, actually; and yet, when you open your eyes you recognize the façade of your apartment building.

You turn toward her. In the darkness of the car, her face is lit in flashes by the orange streetlight and her dark circles seem deeper, her gaze more tired. She spent her evening on a roof, in the cold, for you. She should be home with her boys by now, and instead she’s here.

“Dana.”

“Tell me.”

“Why did you come up?”

She looks at you for a few seconds and then, with a tired smile, answers, “Because I don’t only have two children to look after, but also many other doctors just like you, kid — Santos and Mohan and Javadi and Whitaker. You’re all my godchildren, and I have to make sure my godchildren are safe.”

“Thank you,” you say, and the word is so inadequate, so small compared to what it contains, that you’re almost ashamed to say it.

Dana huffs a half-laugh — dry, tired, real — and then hugs you.

“This pain will pass, y/n, but until then, turn to the people who love you.”

She gives you one last squeeze and then gets out of the car to open your door for you, walks you to the entrance and waits patiently while you find the keys inside your jacket. The head nurse waits until you’re inside the building and then, with one final nod, walks away.

“I expect not to see you at work tomorrow, and when you come back, we’ll have a talk about what happened tonight. It’s not optional.”

Dana closes the front door, with you inside, and heads toward the car. You hear her start the engine only after you step into the elevator and the doors close behind you.

You arrive in front of your door without realizing it; you slip your hand into your jacket pocket to pull out the keys again and open the door.

The smell hits you first. Lavender — Trinity’s detergent. Coffee — Yolanda. Something burnt — the toaster, probably, forgotten somewhere in the chaos of the day by Trinity; Yolanda keeps everything under control, after all. Home. The sound of that word in your head hurts in a way you didn’t expect.

“Finally.”

Yolanda’s voice comes from the living room. The tone is the exasperated one she uses when you come home late; irritated, a bit annoyed, but fundamentally calm. The tone of someone who thinks they already know what happened: long shift, charts, the usual delay. You hear the sound of the couch deforming under the weight of someone getting up and then her footsteps — barefoot, quick — in the hallway.

Yolanda appears from the doorframe; she’s wearing your gray sweatshirt, sweatpants, and her hair is tied up. She’s gripping the phone in her hand and slipping it into her pocket with the automatic gesture of someone who has just stopped checking the screen.

“I know you were finishing charts, but you could have at least—”

She stops.

The words die in her mouth. You see it happen in real time: the sentence fading, the lips remaining half-open, the eyes moving from your eyes to your right cheek. And staying there, pinned.

Her face changes and the irritation vanishes, the relief vanishes. What remains is something bare, sharp, surgical.

“Y/n.”

Your name sounds different from how you’ve heard her say it a thousand times. It sounds like an alarm sounds.

“What the hell happened.”

It’s not a question. You know her well enough to know that when Yolanda phrases things like that — flat, dry, without a question mark — she’s not asking. She’s demanding an answer.

“Trinity.”

She says it without turning around, without taking her eyes off yours, raising her voice just enough for it to reach the living room. Trinity’s name spoken in that sharp, urgent, clinical tone is the same one she uses in the operating room when something goes wrong and she needs another pair of hands.

You hear Trinity get up from the couch, her hurried steps in the hallway, and then you see her appear behind Yolanda, with the blanket still clutched in one hand and the expression of someone expecting a complaint about the lateness who finds something else entirely.

She looks at you, her gaze quickly finds the bruise on your face and stops there. The hand gripping the blanket opens and the fabric falls to the floor without a sound.

“Who,” she says. A single syllable. Low, hoarse, charged.

“Can we sit down? I’ll explain everything, but—”

“Who the fuck did that to your face, y/n.” Trinity has taken a step forward. She’s in the hallway now, less than a meter from you, and her eyes haven’t left the bruise for a single second. Her hand rises toward your cheek — slow, controlled, with the gentleness of someone handling something broken — and her fingers stop a centimeter from the skin. She doesn’t touch. She feels the heat of the inflammation through the air.

“Close the door,” says Yolanda, behind you. You hadn’t realized it, but the front door is still open, flung wide onto the landing. You push it. It closes. The sound of the lock clicking shut is final. For one single instant you had the temptation to run away, but it wouldn’t solve anything now. If anything, it would only make things worse.

Trinity takes your chin between her fingers and turns your face toward the hallway light. Her lips tighten. You see her clench her jaw once, twice; a gesture she makes when examining victims of violence.

“It’s not a fall,” she says. “It’s not a locker. It’s not a cabinet door. It’s a punch, y/n. Someone punched you.”

Silence. That she was good, you already knew, but this…

“Why didn’t you answer the phone?” Yolanda speaks. She has come closer now, and you feel her to your left. Her tone is low, careful, controlled with a visible effort, like someone walking on a glass floor. “We called. Messages. Dana said charts. But you weren’t answering. Why?”

“Because I couldn’t.”

“Couldn’t or wouldn’t?”

The difference, right now, seems irrelevant to you.

Trinity releases your chin. She takes your hand — the right one, the one with the fingertip scraped by the cement, which fortunately she doesn’t notice — and guides you to the living room. She sits you on the couch and then sits beside you, so close that her thigh touches yours, and she doesn’t let go of your hand. Her fingers are warm. Yours, on the contrary, are ice-cold.

Yolanda stays standing. Arms crossed, leaning against the TV cabinet, facing you. The news is still on — the volume low, images scrolling across the screen — and for a second your eyes fall there, on the screen, and you pray they’re not replaying the bridge story because if they see it now, before you—

“Turn that thing off,” Trinity says to Yolanda, and from the tone you can tell it’s not because of the noise. She noticed your gaze. She saw where you were looking. She doesn’t know why yet, but she saw it.

Yolanda picks up the remote and turns it off. Silence. Only the refrigerator humming, the bathroom faucet dripping, your breathing.

“Talk,” says Yolanda.

You look at them. Both of them. Trinity is at your side, with your hand in hers and her eyes fixed on you — those eyes you’ve learned to read like an open book and that are now full of something that oscillates between fear, fury, and anguish. Yolanda stands before you, arms crossed, with the expression of someone performing an emotional triage.

“John died this morning.”

A shadow passes over Trinity’s face. She knew — they both probably knew, departments talk — but hearing it from your mouth, in your broken voice, is different. Her hand squeezes yours.

“Cardiac malformation. Fifteen minutes of cpr. He didn’t make it.” The clinical chart tone; the wall every doctor hides behind, with great effort and very often without great results. “His father was in the family room. I went to notify him of the death. He… let’s say he didn’t take it well.”

“The bruise,” says Yolanda. Hers is not a question.

“He screamed at me that it was my fault, that I had killed his son, and then he punched me.” You gesture toward your cheek with a nod. “Outside the room. No one was around.”

Trinity’s hand contracts in yours. A reflex, a jolt; the body reacting before the mind. Her breathing has changed — it’s shorter, quicker, her chest rising and falling in jerks.

“And you didn’t tell us,” says Trinity.

“That’s not all.”

Yolanda pushes off the cabinet, takes a step toward you. Her arms have uncrossed and her hands are at her sides, open, and there’s something in her posture that reminds you of the way she approaches the operating table when she already knows the surgery is going to be long and complicated and isn’t going to go the way it should.

“He… left the hospital after hitting me. He jumped from the bridge on Eighth. Died on impact.” You swallow. “They reported it on the evening news, in the afternoon. Dana recognized him… she’s the one who brought me home.”

The silence that follows is not silence. It’s the sound of two people processing information too large, too heavy, too full of implications to be absorbed in a single breath. Yolanda has stopped moving; she stands in the middle of the living room, two steps from the couch, with an expression you’ve seen only once — in the operating room, when she lost a patient on the table and took off her gloves and set them in the bin with a calm that had frightened everyone. Trinity, beside you, has closed her eyes.

“The charts,” says Yolanda. And the word falls into the living room like something heavy, something dirty. “Dana told us you were finishing charts.”

“Dana lied for me. I had asked her not to say anything.”

“And where were you.” Yolanda whispers, her gaze concealing the need for a denial that, however, doesn’t come.

“On the roof.”

One second.

“On the roof,” Trinity repeats, and opens her eyes. “For how long.”

“Since four. Maybe earlier. I don’t know.”

“Four hours,” says Yolanda, and her voice trembles. “Four hours on the hospital roof without answering the phone, after a man punched you in the face and jumped off a bridge.” She inhales. “Were you on the ledge?”

You don’t answer. But the way you avoid her gaze is answer enough.

“God.” The word leaves her like an exhalation. She brings her hands to her face, presses them against her eyes, drags them down slowly, and when her eyes reappear they’re glistening. Glistening in a way you’ve never seen. Glistening in a way that frightens you more than anything that has happened today, because Yolanda doesn’t cry — she never cries. “Y/n… You were on the ledge.”

“I wasn’t going to—”

“You weren’t going to?” Trinity stands up, and her voice rises with her. “You don’t know if you were going to or not. You don’t sit on a ledge for four hours when you know what you want to do, y/n!”

She’s right. She’s right and you know it and she knows it and the silence that follows is the proof.

“The charts,” says Trinity, and her voice has changed. It’s fragile, wounded. She takes her hands from her face and her eyes are red and wet and full of a desperation that devastates you. “We believed it. I believed it, Y/n. Dana said you were finishing charts and I said ‘ok, she’s doing charts’ and I stopped calling because I thought you were working and you were on the ledge. For half an hour longer I didn’t look for you because someone told me a lie and I believed it and you were—”

Her voice breaks. She turns her back on you and takes three steps toward the kitchen before stopping with her hands pressed on the tabletop, arms straight, head bowed. Her breathing is loud, ragged — the breathing of someone trying to hold the pieces together by sheer force of will. It’s the breathing you’ve heard her do many times before… just before a panic attack.

“Trinity, sweetheart—” you stand up.

“Sit down.” Yolanda. She isn’t looking at you. She’s looking at Trinity and then, with three quick steps, reaches her. She places a hand on her sternum and presses gently, to make her feel her presence. She presses softly, with an open palm, a gesture that both of you use to help your girlfriend — to give her something physical to focus on when her breath escapes her.

Trinity inhales, once, twice. Slowly, fighting against the panic rising in her chest. Her hands are still on the table, knuckles white with the effort and arms trembling under the weight of a body that wants to give in.

You stay on the couch, motionless, while guilt devours you. Not only for everything that happened today but also for this. For the fact that Trinity, one of the two women you love with all your heart, is having a panic attack in your living room, and the cause is you.

“Breathe, love,” Yolanda murmurs; her voice is calm, low, steady… completely different from the one she just used with you. It’s the voice she reserves for Trinity in the worst moments. “Look at me. Breathe in with me. That’s it. Good.”

Trinity raises her head. Her eyes find Yolanda’s and cling there, like an anchor. She inhales when Yolanda inhales. She exhales when Yolanda exhales. They do it three times, four, five, until the rhythm stabilizes and Trinity’s hands on the table finally stop trembling.

“I’m sorry.”

You say it from the couch, with your hands on your knees and your voice trembling like a child’s. You say it looking at them and the inadequacy of those two words crushes you.

Trinity pulls away from the table. She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, with a rough, almost angry gesture, as if the tears were a personal offense. She inhales once, deeply, and then crosses the living room and comes back to you.

She kneels on the floor in front of the couch, and her hands take your knees. She looks up at you from below and her face is devastated and furious and full of love, and all these things together shouldn’t be able to coexist on the same face, yet on Trinity’s they do — they always have.

“I’m not done,” she says. Her voice is still hoarse, still unsteady. “I’m not done being angry with you. I’m not done being afraid. I’m not done—” She stops. Swallows. “But first I need to know one thing. And I need you to tell me the truth, love — not the version you think is less painful. The truth.”

You nod.

“On the ledge. For four hours.” Her fingers tighten on your knees. “At any point during those four hours, did you think about jumping? I’m asking you if the thought crossed your mind, even for one second.”

The living room is so silent you can hear your own heartbeat in your ears. Yolanda stands at the kitchen entrance, motionless, arms at her sides and eyes fixed on you. She waits. They both wait.

And you could lie, you could say “no, never” with the same ease you said “I’m fine” to Dana this morning. You could protect — again, still, always — and add another layer of lies between yourself and the people you love.

But you stopped lying tonight. You’re tired, and you can’t do it with their eyes on you.

“Yes.”

A single syllable, so brief and yet the heaviest you have ever spoken.

Trinity closes her eyes. She doesn’t move, doesn’t pull away, doesn’t remove her hands from your knees, but her face does something that destroys you: it contracts, for a second, as if she had received a physical blow — a real, bodily pain — and then recomposes itself. When she opens her eyes there are tears, but beneath the tears there is something else — something hard, determined, unshakable.

“Ok,” she says. “Ok.” She’s shaken, visibly shaken, but she’s trying to process somehow the bomb you’ve just dropped.

Yolanda has moved. You didn’t hear her, but now she’s behind you, on the couch, and her hands are on your shoulders. The weight of her hands on your tense muscles is warm and steady and says: I’m here, I’m not going anywhere.

“And Dana?” asks Yolanda, from behind you. Her voice is controlled, but her fingers on your shoulders tremble, just barely, betraying everything else. “Dana knew? That you were on the ledge?”

“She came up. She found me there and — she pulled me down.”

A sound escapes Yolanda’s throat. It’s not a word; it’s a strangled sob. Her fingers tighten on your shoulders, once, hard, and then relax. She leans down, leaves a kiss in your hair, and you feel her hands stiffen slightly.

“You smoked.”

“I—”

“Goddammit, y/n,” Yolanda whispers, her voice still trembling, but with anger now.

Trinity doesn’t react — not immediately, at least. Her face stays motionless, perfectly still, for three whole seconds, and then something breaks. You see her rise from her knees, sit next to you on the couch, and rest her head against the backrest, eyes on the ceiling. She inhales. Exhales. Inhales again.

“You’re asthmatic,” she says, to the ceiling. As if she were telling the universe and not you.

“I know.”

“You know.” A pause. “You know, and you smoked.”

There’s no anger in her voice. There’s something worse: there’s weariness. The exhaustion of someone who spent hours fighting against imaginary scenarios and now discovers that reality was worse than all of them.

Yolanda has moved. She’s no longer behind you; she’s gone to the bathroom to get something. When she returns, she has the stethoscope gripped in her hands, along with your backup inhaler — the emergency one, with the corticosteroid and not just the bronchodilator.

“Yolo—” you sigh.

“Don’t piss me off more than I already am right now, please.”

She sits to your right and makes you turn toward her; she slides the bell first across your chest and then your back, ordering you to breathe in and out when she tells you to.

“I can still hear the wheeze. Take a puff.”

You grab the inhaler; her look brooks no argument, and you’re not sure how much further you can push the rope before it snaps, so you follow her orders to perfection, and when, a few minutes later, she checks again, she’s satisfied enough to put the stethoscope away.

She lets herself fall onto the couch, at your side, and her arms wrap around you, together with Trinity’s; the surgeon rests her forehead against your shoulder, and her body trembles. You feel something warm and wet soaking through the fabric of your shirt where her cheek is pressed, and you realize she’s crying. Yolanda is crying. In silence, without a sound, with tears falling without permission, and you’ve never seen her cry in your life, and the fact that she’s doing it now, here, against your shoulder, tells you everything there is to know about what you’ve done to her tonight.

You stay like that.

You don’t know for how long. Time stopped mattering the moment you stopped lying, and now all that exists is this: three bodies on a couch, three broken breaths trying to find each other again, the living room that smells of lavender and cold coffee, and the world outside the window going on without you.

It’s Trinity who moves first.

She stands — eyes swollen, red, but her gaze steady, present — and removes your jacket. She does it slowly, sliding it off your arms one side at a time, and the smell of stale smoke rises from the fabric like an animal waking up. She folds it with care — too much care for a jacket that should just be tossed in the corner — and takes it to the hallway. When she comes back, her hands return quickly to you, to your face; she touches you as if that could anchor you, in her mind.

Trinity sits next to you again. She takes your chin between her fingers and turns your face toward the lamp. She examines the bruise, with light, professional fingers — the touch of a doctor assessing a trauma. As if she weren’t assessing the battered face of the woman she loves.

“Ice won’t do much good at this point,” she says, softly. “Tomorrow it’ll be worse. But nothing’s broken.”

“I know.”

“I know you know.” A shadow of something crosses her lips. “But you don’t get to decide, today.”

Yolanda’s eyes are still glistening but she’s no longer crying; her breathing has stabilized — not as controlled as usual, but certainly better than before.

“Tomorrow we talk,” she says. “About everything. The cigarettes. The asthma. Dana. The roof. The ledge. The phone. About how we make sure this never happens again.” Pause. “I can’t go through another evening like this, y/n. I can’t do it. Not a second time.”

“Neither can I,” says Trinity, from the other side, quietly.

“Tomorrow,” you say. It’s all you have. Your voice emptied out, your body exhausted, and their bodies at your sides, and the blanket — picked up from the floor by one of them, at some moment you didn’t register — around your shoulders.

You don’t promise anything. You don’t say “it won’t happen again” because you don’t know if that’s true and you’ve stopped lying tonight. You rest your head against the backrest, close your eyes, and let the weight of your body give in toward them. Toward Trinity, on your left, who takes your hand under the blanket and laces her fingers with yours. Toward Yolanda, on your right, who squeezes your arm and presses her cheek against your bicep.

You surrender. To them. To this. To the fact that you are alive and you are here and it hurts and tomorrow it will hurt again, but at least you won’t be alone.

Three figures holding hands.

All three of them standing.

Just like in John’s drawing.

Heyy, sooo… It’s been a while uh? At least, I was really inspired for this one. I hope u liked it and yes, I fell in love with Santos and Garcia (what I have to say, toxic yuri is my kryptonite). Anyway, requests are open (as always) and have a great day!

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