♡ synopsis. trinity santos basks in her friendship with her new roommate, dennis whitaker.
♡ pairing. platonic whitsantos.
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Trinity wasn’t paying much attention to Whitaker’s droning.
She sat, legs crossed, knees aching dully as her weight pressed into their bend. Her back arched forward gently, head sagging on her neck, arms idly positioned in her lap. She held herself absentmindedly, as if subconsciously seeking the comfort she was too afraid to ask for. Dennis continued on, voice gentle amidst the midnight silence of their apartment complex. He spoke of Amy, and baby Leo, and a lady from Trauma Bay 2 that kept flirting with him today. Trinity didn’t nod, nor look his way — she stopped pretending to listen around 20 minutes ago.
Dennis knew she wasn’t alert enough to pay attention to him. Still, he persisted. He subtly scooted closer, crossing one leg over the other so her bare knee brushed the fabric of his plaid pyjama pants. His voice remained soft as velvet, a sheen of tenderness crackling through the hustle of their dishwasher’s gurgling. The sound of it was oddly rough and arbitrary, a mixture of mechanical decay and rattling cutlery, battling Dennis’s comfortable domesticity. The apartment was otherwise noiseless.
Perhaps it was the routine of it that kept Whitaker from stopping. They’d drive home — sometimes together, sometimes not — and eat dinner with one another, watching something rather brainless on the television to keep them company as they cooled off from work. After they supped, it was obscenely late, the clock often creeping into the early hours of the morning. Then, if they still weren’t tired enough to crash, they’d stay up chatting dumbly about things that shouldn’t matter.
But it always did matter, didn’t it?
Amidst being so thick-skinned and tough all of the time, Trinity tended to crave a sense of closeness that nobody typically cares enough to give her. After her situation with Yolanda Garcia, a tragedy that hurt Trin’s feelings more than anyone expected, she made a decision.
Trinity Santos was going to stop giving people chances. She was going to stop opening the door to her heart.
Somehow, the homeless bisexual she decided to take in because he looked like a scared rabbit always managed to wander in the moment she left the door askew. Ironic, isn’t it?
And while Dennis doesn’t fill Yolanda’s place, nor soothe the conflicting (and strangely erotic) feelings she has surrounding their new senior attending physician, he curls up in a smaller sect of Trinity’s chest. His frail body takes up the whole thing, writhing and jabbing and massaging the bloodstained flesh around him as Trin battles the negative thoughts in her brain. Dennis aches with her, sees with her, and helps her see with him too.
When the Earth takes Trinity Santos, and the worms climb into empty eye sockets, gnawing at rotting flesh, they’ll find something fresh — something sweet.
When the bugs eat at Trinity’s heart and find Whitaker’s Corner, they’ll taste fruit, summer, and the feeling of being loved. They’ll taste sisterhood, as well as brotherhood, and the acclimation of two platonic soulmates who defy the odds of what it means to love someone wholly.
The grass will wrap around Trinity’s wrists and ankles, and climb up her thighs. And when they reach the site that she once unleashed her wrath upon, a flower’s nectar prepared to heal the damaged skin, Earth will find a vessel. That vessel will have traveled through her stomach, under solid bone and twisted around tendons.
As Earth follows the abrupt turns of the makeshift vein, it’ll find itself back at Whitaker, still curled in the pocket he picked for himself. He bears her scars now, too.
Trinity imagines it, her purpling corpse laid upon wet grassland, a tiny, lovesick Dennis harboring her pain so she wouldn’t have to go through it alone. She pictured stitches around the Yolanda-shaped hole in her chest, binding Trinity back together with the stem of a honeysuckle. Trinity’s hand came up to trace over it gently — no stitches, no outline, no actual Dennis sitting in her heart and soothing her mind.
But he was still there, in essence. Physically, right beside her, now yabbering about how unfairly they’re treating Melissa (she’s getting sued, long story). Trinity crooned her neck and curled to her right, her temple landing on Dennis’s shoulder. He didn’t tense. He didn’t stop talking, either.
Trinity smiled and let her eyes flutter shut. The ache in her knees came to a halt, and the strain of her muscles ceased.
Perhaps Trinity would never fall in love.
Suddenly, in this apartment, with Dennis Whitaker’s soft pulse bouncing in her ear like a therapeutic drum, that thought didn’t sound all that bad.
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