| 19 years old, he/they | Requests Open
- I write for male and GN readers, my OCs and can attempt to write character x character.
- I do NOT write smut, but I can write foreplay or aftercare, just not the sex itself.
- This blog can and will contain dark themes, including: Suicide, death, graphic descriptions of violence and self harm.
VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED
| DNI | Transphobes, Homophobes, racists, MAGA Aligned people, people who make their opinion the "standard", overall generally unlikable people.
| MASTERLIST |
| Old Intro |
| Fandoms |
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (OG and Reboot)
The Pitt
Criminal Minds
A lot of Anime!
About me!
As said, I am 19 years old and male. I have AuDHD, therefore take any insensitive comments with a grain of salt. I rarely want to come off as rude, and if I do it's most likely by accident.
I love to draw and write, and I grew the confidence to share it with you all. I have several original characters, and I will add a link to my OCs.
I curse a lot, but I couldn't care less about that.
Chapter 2: m.A.A.d city
An oc x canon fic
Song used: m.A.A.d city
Summary:
Is it really PTSD? It can't be it, that would make Zion weak.
Notes:
The date used in the story follows the real date of riots and protests in Compton and LA county after the outrageous death of George Floyd, who was killed due to police brutality.
Zion would've had attended the protests in all its duration (Almost 2 months of riots) if he was real. If he had a sign, it'd be "N.W.A. Tried to tell y'all in '88" (Seen as a real sign)
This chapter has a lot of musical references! I'll put it in the end notes what for references I made.
Fun fact: the university of California in LA, the medical school allegedly gave preference to Black and Hispanic students in the 3 last admission cycles!
Memories are an interesting thing, aren't they? They slowly get distorted through the process of time, but when a memory is traumatic you'll either remember every single detail or remove it from existence. The former is the truth for Zion.
"Seen a light-skinned nigga with his brains blown out
At the same burger stand where [beep] hang out
Now this is not a tape recorder sayin' that he did it
But ever since that day, I was looking at him different"
Back in Compton the life of poverty was common, especially among the circle that Zion's family was around. Poverty often leads to crime which makes the life amongst violence horrifyingly common for people like him. His friends ended up either dead, in prison or traumatized. In hindsight, it's a good thing that Zion didn't stick with his friends for long. Sure, it might come to bite him in the ass, but no one except God can judge Zion.
May 29, 2020
Zion was 21 at the time of protests. He was in downtown LA, having had a homie pick him up and get some bandanas for them. The day was chaotic.
Some people threw rocks on establishments and passing vehicles, others had set off fireworks which hit several buildings. Zion participated in looting and vandalizing of buildings and almost got caught by the 5-0's but thankfully got away in time.
A few of his acquaintances got in a fight with police which set off the use of batons and rubber bullets, and sadly Zion was shot not once, but twice. It hurt like a bitch, but didn't deter Zion from continuing to attend protests and riots.
May 30, 2020
Fairfax District. The same friend helped Zion get there. Thousands of protesters gathered and spread out. Zion was mainly vandalizing police cars and he miraculously didn't get arrested again. He didn't participate in any of the vandalism of synagogues, because Zion has morals. They're twisted but there.
June 7th, 2020
Compton. Finally a peaceful protest. Zion was there, still mad and seething but calming down. He still doesn't understand how some people can say that there is no problem. Those people are the problem!
March 16th, 2018
Zion was getting higher education then, attending the University of California in LA. At first he considered engineering, but he thought his parents would be happier if he chose medicine. It wasn't something Zion particularly liked, but he appreciated the knowledge of human body. He chose emergency medicine because it matters the most, at least to him.
There was the one time he and some of his friends got falsely accused and arrested for murder, and that scared Zion. But he didn't show it.
October 9th, 2014
Zion was coming back from school, excited as he got a copy of "Hell Can Wait" by Vince Staples, hoping to listen through it. What the then fifteen-year-old didn't expect is to be stopped by police who had their guns drawn on him.
"Put your hands in the air!" The officer shouted, gun pointed at Zion. The boy sneered at the officer, considering if he should run or not. But the threat of being popped by a .9 didn't sound appealing. So slowly, Zion put his hands up.
"Turn around and walk towards me!" The officer continued. Zion complied, albeit reluctantly.
Then he's getting harshly put to the ground, cuffs placed too tightly.
October 22nd, 2012
The 13-year old Zion was forced to watch as his older brother got arrested, his home searched and world flipped. At the time Zion wasn't sure why black people hated the police so much, but that day he found out why. How dare they take his brother away?! He's not like those criminals, he gets them food and pays the bills!
Zion remembers yelling, lots of it. His parents were yelling at each other for letting their eldest son use 'dirty money' to pay for their expenses. Zion sided with his father, who said that as long as the family survives it's fine.
The boy's mother didn't want a criminal growing up under their roof, finding it a disgrace to the family. After that Zion doesn't remember much, but he knows that dad ended up with a few bruises.
He doesn't remember where they're from.
|-|
Zion comes to finally. He doesn't see anything or hear anything at first, just feels the cold concrete beneath him and the stale air.
After that comes the smell of sweat and abandonment.
He doesn't taste anything, so the next sense to activate is sight.
Zion opens his eyes after a long time contemplating the choice and Jesse greets him, standing over him with a concerned expression. The nurse's lips are moving but Zion doesn't register any sound.
Where is he? What happened?
"-He'll get us attorneys, for sure." Zion was confused, what was Jesse talking about? Who will get them attorneys and what for?
"What?" the Hispanic man asked, trying to remember anything of use. Jesse looks over at him. "Did you hit your head? Any nausea?" He questions, his cuffed hands coming over to check Zion's head for any injury. Wait, why are Jesse's hands in the front and Zion's in the back?
"N-No, I just... Don't remember anything." He answered, genuinely confused as to what is going on. It's surprising that Zion didn't have a panic attack, knowing the fact that he's in a cell and doesn't know what he did to get here.
Jesse frowns. That is concerning. "Nothing? What is your latest memory?" Zion thinks for a moment, then tilts his head slightly. "I remember talking to Parker as the shifts changed." He answered, but that is not sufficient to why he's in jail.
Jesse shifts to sit on his heels, pondering if he should tell what happened. Then decides that, fuck it, he'll learn about it anyway. "Zion. ICE Agents came to detain a patient, you and I persisted on the woman needing medical care. You stilled for a moment, which genuinely scared me," Jesse explains, trying his best to not mince any words, "after that you reacted violently, assaulting the agents-"
After that Zion didn't hear anything other than sirens and yelling. He was back in downtown LA, taking cover behind a vandalized cop car after getting shot with rubber bullets.
The pain is so real, there's no way this is real. It's a dream, a hallucination. Jesse van Horn doesn't exist and Zion is still in third year of medical school. He still lives in Compton, California and never moved to Pittsburgh.
"Zion. Zion! ZION!" The man is taken out of the sudden disassociation episode by Jesse shaking him. Zion has tears rolling down his cheeks, which brings great shame to him. It feels pathetic. "Zion, you're fine, you're with me," Jesse reassured. If he could, the silver-haired man would pull Zion in for a hug, but with their current predicament it seems hardly possible. Instead Jesse brings Zion's head to the crook of his neck.
The younger man just breaks down. All the fear and anger melts into salty tears.
The two men sit like that for a moment or ten, the reality of the situation setting in. Out of nowhere, Zion yanks his head away from Jesse's embrace, sniffling before standing up (which isn't that hard, even with your hands cuffed behind your back.) and heading to the lower bunk, since he can't climb the top one.
He settled in, ignoring how the silver fox behind him is staring at Zion's back with concern.
What is wrong with me? Why am I so weird when it comes to police? The thoughts don't answer themselves as sleep takes Zion under, the ER lifestyle catching up with him.
Notes:
Firstly, the chapter's title is from the album "good kid, m.A.A.d city" by Kendrick Lamar and a title of a single.
Then the lyrics in the beginning come from the single "m.A.A.d city"
Then it's 2Pac's "Only God Can Judge Me" song from his hit album "All Eyez On Me"
March 16th is the release date of XXXTentacion's album "?"
Following is the EP "Hell Can Wait" by Vince Staples, referenced by name.
October 22nd, 2012 is the release date of the album "good kid, m.A.A.d city"
You and Dennis were best friends. You were more than friends. No one knew; until everyone knew. When your family kicked you out, you thought maybe Dennis would help, he would explain it to them, but he shunned you liked the rest of them. Let you take the blame because Dennis Whitaker could never be gay.
Years later, you find yourself in Pittsburgh. In Pittsburgh, you find Dennis, and his... Boyfriend.
Baby's first time writing for the Pitt 🥲
Major trigger warnings: Sexual intercourse between two teenagers described at the beginning, internalized homophobia (strongly presented in Dennis, slightly more subtle with reader beginning, then vice versa later), use of slurs (fag, faggot, directed mostly at Reader by his family, Dennis' family, and by Dennis once), Reader gets kicked out by their family
content warnings/non-serious warnings: Conservative religion written by a non-conservative, non-religious person, my attempt at writing Nebraska and Pittsburgh
But please, proceed with caution, and do let me know if there's anything I should tag/warn more clearly!
---- indicates a time skip
------------ indicates a POV switch
Dennis's old family truck rocks back and forth lightly, like a warm summer’s breeze is passing through the empty field it’s parked in. But this cool, breezeless autumn night, the rocking is caused by the people inside.
Your thrusts are inexperienced, uncertain, and so nervous that someone may walk by, and notice the blasphemy happening behind the fogged up windows. No one will; the wheat fields have grown tall enough that the truck is nearly completely hidden. Your head falls against Dennis's shoulder, head tilted slightly as if to try and kiss him. You never do, though.
Kissing is too real; a seal on the letter of sin you and Dennis have been writing for the past several months. You’d seal the letter a thousand times over, stick it with a stamp, and send it out to the world. Dennis refuses- for good reason, your families would hardly be accepting of… Whatever it is you and Dennis are.
Dennis's breath flutters your hair, and his hands claw at your back, red lines surely being left behind. Red lines that will surely be there in the morning, ones you’ll treasure in the mirror, relish in the burn you feel when you hide them beneath a shirt. Red lines- red lights flash in the corner of your eyes, then blue, breaking through the window.
“Denny, you in there?” John Whitaker’s (Dennis's second older brother) voice follows shortly after a knock on the window.
“S-shoot,” Dennis shoves you off him harshly, your head bouncing off the passenger seat. “Hide yourself!”
“Where?” You hiss back, ducking your head when John brings his flashlight up to the window. “Not exactly many places to shove myself under!”
“Just--” Dennis glares at you, a look of distress, and guilt. You can’t tell if it’s guilt from being caught, or him snapping at you. He grabs his jeans, tossing it over your head.
“Dennis, I know it’s you, I can see Pa’s lucky rabbit’s foot hangin’ on the rearview! Who’ve you got in there?” John taunts, knocking on the window again. “Is it Elizabeth? I saw her making eyes at you durin’ church the other day!”
“Joooohnnn,” Dennis grows, clutching his shirt to his chest, scooting forward to crank the window down. “Why’re you out here?”
“Pretty sure that’s my question, Denny boy,” you don’t dare try to look up, holding your breath to keep from being noticed. “I was doing my rounds, saw Pa’s truck in the field, and was worried some thief got to it. I was being a good cop, and a great son! You are out past curfew with a girl.”
“Please don’t tell Mama, and Pa,” Dennis begs, his voice wavering slightly. The leather creaks as Dennis moves, presumably to keep John from trying to steal looks into the truck. “I’ll do your chores for the rest of the year, I promise.”
“Calm down, Dennis. I’m not gonna tell. I think it’s good yer breaking loose, you goody two shoes,” John snorts, his utility belt clacking with the shift of his weight, still trying to see who Dennis is rendezvousing with. “Well!... Get home. Now, and be a gentleman, and drop the lady off at home too, huh?”
There’s a shift in his tone that you can’t place, a flatness that wasn’t there before. The relief you feel when you hear him turn away, then a car door opening and shutting, overshadows anything that nags at the back of your mind.
“Crazy, right?” You laugh awkwardly, crawling over the center console into the passenger seat. “Dennis?” At his lack of response, you turn around, finding him staring out the window where John’s car just was. “Dennis?”
“What?” His head whips over to you, eyes owlishly wide. “S-sorry. We should go,” he mumbles, maneuvering into the driver’s seat, avoiding any physical contact with you.
“Yeah… We should.” You nod, pulling your shirt on. Your breathing shudders as he pulls out of the field, heart beating in time with the old, sputtering air conditioning.
Dennis stops driving around a half mile away from your house. The truck jerks, and Dennis isn’t looking at you when unbuckle. “Not gonna walk me to the front door, Denny?”
The looks he gives you suggests that you just ran over his prized calf instead of making a fun little joke. “Why would I walk you to the door? I’m not your boyfriend, this is a secret! We can’t- I’m not. I’m not gay!”
“I didn’t say you were, Dennis! I was jokin’!” You scoff, taken aback by Dennis's defensiveness. “I’ll--”
“You shouldn’t be joking about stuff like this! Do you know what would’ve happened if John had seen you!? W-we coulda been taken to jail, or he coulda told our parents, and who knows what they’d do to us!” Dennis's arms are flailing about, his voice growing higher, more desperate. “We are sinning! We’re going to go to hell b-because that’s where all the… All the fags go! And you’re here jokin’ that I should be walking you to your house?”
Your bottom lip wobbles as Dennis continues with his tirade, all words you’ve heard from your parents, his parents, the people in town. None of the vitriol was even directed at you, and it was already fear inducing. You don’t want to know what would happen if it was directed at you.
“I’m sorry, Dennis… It was a bad joke,” you stammer, biting at the dry skin on your lip until you taste blood. “I’ll walk the rest of the way to my house.”
“Good! Get out,” Dennis cries, pursing his lips, and turning his head away from you. “Get out,” he whispers, softer this time.
You don’t say anything else, gathering the jeans you still haven’t put on, leaving the car. You barely have time to close the door before Dennis is peeling away; you watch the back of his truck get smaller, then disappear completely down the hill. The Whitaker farm isn’t far from yours, close enough you can hear the truck backfire when Dennis makes the sharp turn into their driveway.
A cool breeze ruffles the foliage around you, goosebumps pricking your skin. Your entire body feels mechanical as you pull your jeans on, feet moving on their own to bring you to your house. The front door winces open, in time with your own. You’d go through your window, but the last time you did that, you popped the frame out, and had to make up an excuse about a dislocated shoulder you didn’t have the day before.
It’s not like you have to worry about your parents waking up; Papa wouldn’t wake up if a tornado was at his head, and anything Mama would be able to hear gets drowned out by Papa’s snoring. It makes for an easy in and out. There’s still precautions you take, of course: avoiding the creaky boards, slowly shutting the door, no lights. The basics.
“Where’ve you been?” Your papa’s voice comes from behind you, lights flooding the room.
Your heart sinks like a lead weight in freshwater. There’s a tremor in your hands as you release the doorknob, and it turns full body as you turn around. “I-I was… I was out.”
“Past curfew?” Mama’s voice is tight, shriller than usual. “Were you with someone?”
“No, Ma’am. I just went for a walk, by myself,” you fib, forcing yourself to keep looking at them. The moment you look away, they’ll know you’re lying. They already do, you’re sure. “It was just a walk, I swear it.”
“He says he was just out for a walk, Teresa,” Papa shrugs, fingers curling around his arm, staring right into the depths of your soul. “A walk--”
“You’re lying!” Mama cries, slamming her hand down on the table. “John Whitaker came here and told us! You were with Dennis. You were sinning, and you dare lie to us? Have this devil no mercy on your soul?” Her voice has raised to a pitchy shriek, eyes as wild as her untamed hair.
The world is spinning around you, too fast for you to handle. It’s all happening too fast. They weren’t supposed to find out, they weren’t supposed to know!
“Do you have anything to say for yourself?” Mama is in front of you now, grabbing your arms tighter than necessary. “What did we do wrong? We raised you right, we raised you good and well. How has a demon managed to possess our sweet boy? How did the devil take hold of you?”
“I’m not a demon, Mama. T-there is no devil in me!” You try to pry her off, but she’s stuck on you. Papa finally moves, encroaching behind Mama. “Please, Mama!”
“That’s the devil speaking,” she hisses, blunt nails digging into your skin. “How long have you and Dennis been sinning?”
“Mama, we haven’t--”
“Don’t lie to me!” She yells, rattling you around like a ragdoll. “You are a demonic child! I should’ve known. I should’ve known our only son had something wrong with him. I don’t know how this happened, I don’t know how you became a faggot. We didn’t raise you this way.”
“You can’t stop the devil’s doings, Teresa,” Papa finally speaks again, setting a hand on Mama’s shoulder, pulling her away from you like you’re the one that’s going to hurt her. “But we cannot condone this. You need to leave. Now.”
“No,” you shake your head, “No, please. Papa, I swear. I’m good. I’m not the devil!”
Mama is crying into Papa’s chest, wailing loudly with her hand curled around her cross. “Be gone.”
There’s an emptiness to his eyes, no hint of love, not an ounce of recognition. It’s like he’s looking at a stranger, and not his own son. His only son. They’re just throwing you out. Just like that.
“I don’t get to go get my things?” You ask, voice wavering slightly. That’s the least they can do, give you something!
“We bought those things for our son, and no faggot is a son of ours.” His words are resolute, brooking not even a chance for argument, no place for pleading.
You can only find it in yourself to nod, backing up to the door without breaking eye contact with the man in front of you. You hear the lock slide into place when you close the door, and the doorknob doesn’t move when you twist it. This is really happening. You need to go tell Dennis.
Dennis. If John told your parents, then surely he told his own. You don’t feel the shake in your bones as you take off down the road, boots kicking up loose rocks in the road. The lights are on in the Whitaker house, which is more than enough to confirm it. You bang on the front door frantically, trying to peer into the windows.
John is the one to answer the door, like he’d been expecting you. There’s a smug, almost victorious smile on his face, evil and malicious. John Whitaker (Dennis's father) grabs John by the scruff, shoving him away. Mr. Whitaker is an intimidating man, tall and burly, and judgemental. He’s never liked you, finding you to be a bad influence on Dennis, always distracting him from his chores.
“You’re not welcome here,” he gruffs, standing in front of the door to keep you from daring to enter. “You need to leave our property.”
“Please, Mr. Whitaker, I need to talk to Dennis, please,” you beg, standing on your toes to try and steal a glance over his shoulder. “I can explain. I can explain everything. Let me explain.”
“Dennis has already explained everything,” Mr. Whitaker says, stepping to the side to reveal Mrs. Whitaker holding Dennis to her chest. He’s crying, you can tell. “He told us everything. Left nothing out.”
Dennis explained it, and his parents didn’t kick him out. This is good news. Maybe if you can just talk to Dennis, he can convince them to let you stay. “He told us how you manipulated him into sinning. You corrupted him with your faggot ways.”
“What?” You can barely hear your own voice over the ringing in your ears. The world spins under your feet, and you nearly stumble. “No, no. That’s not true.”
Dennis wouldn’t do that to you. He wouldn’t blame you for everything. He wouldn’t; he loves you- even if it’s just as a friend. He does. “No, Dennis, please. Please, Dennis, let me talk to you.” You’re crying now, pleading with him. “Dennis, at least look at me! Please! P-please.”
“Y-you tried to corrupt me,” Dennis insists, lifting his head to make eye contact with you. The guilt in his eyes hits you like a freightrain. He really is doing this. “You’ve got demons in your soul, and you’re tryna get me to join you. I-I’m not gay, I’m not like you.”
Like you. Is that what Dennis believes? Is it all that he sees when he looks at you? “No, Dennis. No, please. Don’t do this,” you beg, stepping forward with your eyes fixed on him, and only him. “Don’t let them--”
The last thing you see before the door is slammed in your face is Dennis burying his face into his mother’s chest. The first sob doesn’t tear from your throat until you’re miles down the road, your knees giving out beneath you. You don’t know what to do: no family, nothing to your name… No Dennis. Nothing, and nobody, and nowhere to go.
You look at your arms, the lines of your mother’s nails burning red hot on your skin. You clutch your arms against your chest, hands pushing down on your shoulders. Your skin stings as your fingers press against your back. You press harder, relishing in the sting Dennis left.
------------
Dennis can’t look as his pa shuts the door in your face. He did this to you, he’s just like his parents, and your parents, casting you away like you mean nothing to him. All for the sake of not suffering the same fate that’s met you.
“There’s some children even God can’t reach,” his mother whispers to him, rubbing his arms consolingly. “I’m just glad he didn’t drag you with him, my sweet boy.”
God? God!? He has nothing to do with this. It’s not God’s fault, it’s not the devil’s fault, it’s their fault. It’s your family’s fault. It’s his fault. He shouldn’t have thrown you under the bus, he should’ve admitted it, and gone with you. He’s a coward, just like the god that can’t accept someone who’s different.
He wakes up the next morning, and he marches to your house. The trashcans on the corner are full… with your stuff. He recognizes your clothes, your knick-knacks, everything. Your parents didn’t even have the decency to bag it, just tossing it right into the bin. He drops to his knees, gravel digging into his skin.
Dennis grabs a flannel that’s on the ground, pulling it to his chest. He has a million like it, so do you. No one will notice if he takes it, no one will notice if he tucks it into his dresser. He will, though. This one smells like you, it’s the only thing he has left of you.
Dennis sobs into the fabric, burying his face into it the same way he did in his mother’s chest last night. He doesn’t know how long he sits there, but his tears have long stopped falling when he gets up, dragging himself into town. Townsfolk stare at him, and he stares back, just long enough to look at their faces, hoping to find yours.
Maybe you didn’t leave town, someone might’ve been nice enough to let you stay in their house. With the looks Dennis is receiving, though, he doubts it. Word travels quickly in Broken Bow, as both of you learnt last night.
Dennis searched everywhere, listened to every bit of gossip when he heard people whispering around him. They don’t know where you went; there’s rumors: ‘a bus to California’ ‘he checked himself into the nearest institution’ ‘eaten by coyotes after spending the night on the streets’. All more ridiculous, and devastating than the last. You’re really gone.
Dennis feels empty, his heart ripped out, and gone with you. His best friend… Maybe there’s a little consolation. You got away, right? You always talked about it: leaving. Dennis always clammed up when you mentioned it; it’s just another thing that scares him. He’s never been out of Broken Bow, let alone Nebraska, like you dreamed about.
Maybe this is better for you. Or maybe it’s just how he’s trying to rationalize you being gone, Dennis isn’t sure. The fabric of your flannel warms him, tightening around him uncomfortably. He doesn’t take it off, though. He can’t. He won’t.
Dennis finds himself wandering back to your house, slinking up the front door. He knows your father is working in your family’s field, and your mother is likely in town, so he can enter freely. You don’t have any siblings to ruin your life.. And someone else’s. He slinks in through the front door, creeping up the stairs.
He stands in the middle of your empty room, his mind unable to make sense of the room he once knew so well being completely stripped. It keeps trying to fill in the blanks: an unmade bed with mismatched sheets, clothes strewn across the floor, and haphazardly tossed in a basket, picture frames and wood carvings on the top of your dresser. He remembers everything, all of it, but it’s not there.
Come this Friday, it won’t exist at all, and with your belongings, you. The town will pretend you never existed, not unless they need to gossip in hushed tones about the devil boy who tried to corrupt the Whitaker’s youngest son. The worst part is, they’ll never know it was Dennis's fault: he started it, he initiated it, and he was the one who couldn’t give you up.
Dennis carries the weight with him everyday. Every time you don’t interrupt his daily chores, when you aren’t sitting a hair too close to him in church, everything. There’s times he wakes up and expects you to be there. The guilt eats at him until there’s nothing left, wearing him down to the bone, and when he builds himself back up, there’s still something lacking.
----
Dennis finds himself pressed between Trinity and Javadi at some club, the glass tabletop he’s leaning against slightly sticky- it might also just be his sweat-slicked skin. Even as scantily clad as he is in the fishnet top Trinity insisted he had to wear, he’s still overheating. From dancing on the packed floor, obviously, and not the fact that Dr. Robby is sitting across from him in a t-shirt that’s just a size too small.
“Stare harder, he hasn’t noticed yet,” Trinity snorts under her breath, jabbing her elbow into Dennis's arm in what she likes to call a loving, and playful manner. “Seriously, you’re going to burn holes into him.”
“Stop, I haven’t been staring at him,” Dennis mumbles, forcing his eyes away from Robby to glare at Trinity. “He’s just in front of me, hard not to look at him when I’m looking straight.”
Trinity pauses, drink half to her lips, and looks Dennis up, then down, then up again. “Huckleberry, nothing about you is looking straight right now.”
“That is not what I meant, and you know it,” Dennis huffs, smacking Trinity’s shoulder. “I just.. I.. I’m not staring at him!”
“Riiiight, and I’m ‘not’ about to go flirt with the bartender over there.” The finger quotes she does when she says ‘not’ makes Dennis roll his eyes. “Craaaash, let’s go get you refill!”
“But I don’t need a--” Trinity gives her a pointed look, waving an incredibly discreet hand between Dennis and Robby. “Ooooh, I do need a refill. Yes, let’s go!”
“I need a refill too!” Dennis raises his voice over the blasting music, holding his empty glass in the air.
“Huh? Can’t hear you!” Trinity spins around, shrugging with a smirk before disappearing into the crowd.
Dennis shakes his head, sighing deeply as he sets his glass back down. He does need a refill if he’s going to be dealing with Trinity’s antics all night, and if he wants enough confidence to broach talking to Robby.
“You need a drink, Whitaker?” Robby’s voice drags Dennis out of his own thoughts, and Robby holds out the whiskey he’s been nursing for the past ten minutes. “I don’t mind sharing.”
“I.. uhm.. A-are you sure?” Dennis can feel his cheeks heat up, gingerly reaching for the crystal tumbler. “Thank you,” he mumbles sheepishly, taking a sip of the whiskey, face screwing up at the slight burn.
“Not a fan of whiskey there, kid?” Robby snorts, leaning back in the tall, leather-lined chair he’s in, tongue absentmindedly running over his bottom lip.
“Reminds me of home,” Dennis coughs, passing the glass back over to Robby. “S-since whiskey is commonly made with corn, and corn is.. Y’know.”
“Nebraska, right?” Robby nods, watching Dennis intently. “Doesn’t answer the question, though. Not a fan?”
“Yeah, Nebraska,” he confirms, scooting ever-so-slightly closer to Robby’s side of the table. “... It’s not my favorite, I guess. It’s good! Just not my favorite.”
“It can be an acquired taste, you kinda get used to it after a while,” Robby leans forward again, tilting his head slightly. “What’s Nebraska like, aside from.. Corny?”
Dennis can’t help the snort that leaves him, “That’s horrible,” he laughs, rubbing the back of his neck. “I mean, it is pretty corny… But it’s home. I’m not sure how to describe it other than that.”
“Do you miss it?”
Yeaaah, Dennis really needs that refill now. The last thing he expected was for Robby to start asking about home. Figures, the one time they're alone together and Robby has Dennis talking about stupid Broken Bow, Nebraska.
“Some things, yeah. People mostly,” he answers vaguely, looking over the railing, down at the dancefloor on the first level of the club. “My parents, my brothers.” There’s a name that lingers in the back of his mind, the same of that always does when he thinks about home; he can’t bring himself to say it aloud, though. Hasn’t for years.
“Family’s pretty important,” Robby agrees, standing up with a deep groan. “No friends though?.. No girlfriends?”
“No, no girlfriends,” Dennis laughs nervously, watching Robby come closer.
“No boyfriends?” Robby pries, stopping when his shoulder presses against Dennis's.
“... N-no. No boyfriends.” It’s true, he never had a boyfriend. “Broken Bow’s not exactly the most accepting place.”
“Pittsburgh must be quite a relief then.” Robby looks Dennis over, sucking air sharply through his teeth. “... It’s nice seeing you loosen up.”
“Dr. Robby, are you flirting with me?” Dennis asks, head tilting slightly. Please say yes, please say yes.
“What if I am?” Robby asks back, head tilting the same way Dennis has his. “Is that a problem, Dr. Whitaker?”
Dennis giggles--like giggles--his head spinning slightly. Maybe he didn’t need another drink; attention is doing plenty to intoxicate him. “Not at all.” Dennis sinks his teeth into his bottom lip, feeling a surge of confidence as he strokes Robby’s arms.
Robby grins, leaning closer to whisper in Dennis's ear when Trinity’s voice breaks through the crowd, “Huckleberry! You’re never going to believe this!”
Dennis squints, trying to see why exactly Trinity is barreling through the crowds like a crazy person, “Someone just me and Javadi drinks, right? Yeah, I know, obviously they would, we’re cute as fuck- anyway, get this! He’s from Nebraska, maybe you guys know each other!”
The grin on her face suggests that she knows exactly what Dennis is about to say: “Not everybody from Nebraska knows each other,” he sighs. Trinity does this constantly: any midwestern state is ‘you guys must know each other!’.
“Well, Vicky is bringing him over anyway. He’s cute.. For a guy,” she snickers, curling a lip up. “You can see!”
“I’m kind of…” Dennis trails off, looking between Trinity and Robby, widening his eyes at her to try and get the point across.
“Vicky-dicky-doo-dah, bring the corn husker!” Trinity, who Dennis realizes is going to be hogging the bathroom tonight, and probably tomorrow morning, cheers.
Dennis groans, head dipping down in embarrassment. Poor Robby, and poor random stranger that happens to be from Nebraska- and poor HIM! He was just getting into a vibe with Robby. It was finally happening!
“Meeeet your fellow Nebraskan!” Javadi giggles, fluttering her fingers at the man who Dennis refuses to look up and meets the eyes of out of pure shame.
“I am soooo sorry, I don’t know these people at all, actually.” Dennis says, lifting his head to glower at Trinity, and to finally look at the poor soul they’ve kidnapped. “I’m Den--”
------------
You weave through the crowd, trying to surf your way to the bar. It’s your first night out since you’ve gotten to Pittsburgh, and it’s… Different. People here are loud, and expressive- unabashedly themselves, and proud about it. It reminds you of if New Jersey and San Francisco had a baby (both cities you’ve traveled through in the past decade).
Somebody shoulder checks you without apology, knocking you into someone who squeals. “Ope, I am so sorry,” you gasp, setting your fingers over your lips. “Are you alright?”
“Yes I’m fine--”
“Dude! Major party foul!” A much more offended lady grabs the one you bumped into, pulling her into her side. “Seriously!”
“I’m sorry, again. I’ll buy you a round,” you promise, wincing at her raised tone. “I’m--”
“You shoulda lead with that guy! Free drinks,” the black haired lady wiggles her shoulder, bumping the other one. “I’m Trinity, this is Crash, aka Javadi, aka Vicky!”
“Just Javadi is fine,” Javadi giggles, shrugging away Trinity. “It’s okay, you really don’t have to buy us drinks,” she says, waving her hands through the air.
You laugh as Trinity elbows her, introducing yourself. “No, I insist, I’ve got y’all covered,” you laugh, waving down a bartender. He’s handsome, and based on the way he looks you over, you figure he feels the same way about you; his eyes on you makes your skin crawl a little. “Another round for these two.. Please?”
“Anything for you,” he nods, quickly sliding two bright, umbrellaed drinks in front of them. “What about you? You want anything, babe?”
“No. No, thank you,” you deny, sitting down on one of the glittery, leather chairs.
“You don’t drink?” Trinity asks, slinging an arm over your shoulders. “Lameeee-o, but respectable.”
“Not in unfamiliar places, no, I don’t,” you tell her, shoulders easing under the weight of her arm.
“You’re not from the big PA?” Trinity questions, turning slightly to look at you.
“No, haha. I’m from the small NE- Nebraska,” you clarify, regaining Javadi’s attention, and making Trinity’s eyes go wide as dishplates.
“NO WAY! We have a friend from Nebraska, maybe you know him!” You snort at her, grunting as her hands come down heavily on your shoulders. “He’s super cute, and a doctorrrr. We are too- not yet technically, we’ve still got a few years of residency. Which is booooo.”
“Very ‘boooo’,” Javadi chimes in with a heavy nod, leaning over to join the conversation. “What do you do? Are you a farmer?”
“No, no, not a farmer. Left my corn husking days behind forever ago. I just… Drift, I guess? I’ve travelled a lot, nowhere’s stuck.”
“No place like home?” Jadavi asks, her lips slightly pursed, downturned in thought, almost.
“No place like home,” you acquiesce quietly, staring at the sparkling blue glass top. “Anywayyy! I do like it here, in Pittsburgh, it’s nice. Been here a few weeks, think I’ll be staying a while.”
“Well, you have two new friends, sooooo I hope you do stick around,” Javadi comes around to your other side, squeezing you tightly between them. “And you might have more, we should go introduce you to the others! Our other coworkers are somewhere around here, Joy, and Emma- she’s a sweetie.”
“Yesss, let’s go introduce you to our huckleberry! We’ll see if you know him!” Trinity claps, disappearing into the crowd.
You and Javadi laugh, watching her leave; you don’t have long before she’s pulling you out of your stool, dragging you along with her at the sound of Trinity’s voice. “You’ll like him! He’s super sweet.”
You bump into her again when she stops, “Meeeet your fellow Nebraskan!” Javadi giggles, fluttering her fingers all around you.
“I am soooo sorry, I don’t know these people at all, actually.” The man groans, face hidden by his hands. “I’m Den--”
“Dennis.”
You can’t breathe as you meet blue eyes that are all too familiar. Except they're not familiar, not really. There’s a sparkle in his eyes that you’d never once seen, a warmth in his smile that was always so dim.
“... Hi.”
“Hi.”
Your lips part to say something, but you don’t. What can you? ‘I missed you’? ‘How have you been?’ ‘I hate you for what you did’? ‘Why are you here in Pittsburgh?’
“I--”
“You do know each other! See? I knew it, everybody knows everybody in Nebraska,” Trinity shrugs, jerking your attention away from Dennis. “How do you guys know each other?”
“We were best--”
“We grew up down the street from each other, Broken Bow’s a small town,” Dennis interjects, looking at you, then Trinity, then the man next to him, and back to you. He frowns slightly, biting the inside of his cheek. “Our families were close.”
“Yeah… Our families,” you mumble, now focused on the man who has his arm around Dennis. Is he why Dennis just lied? Is he ashamed of you- or himself?
“Well, a friend of Whitaker’s is a friend of mine. Michael Robinavitch,” the man Dennis is tucked into finally speaks, leaning forward with his hand outreached. “You can call me ‘Robby’, though. Everyone does.”
“Nice to meet you, Robby. Do you work with Trinity and Javadi?” You ask, forcing a smile on your face as you shake his hand.
“I do, yes. I’m one of the senior attendings at PTMC. So, I’m like their boss,” Robby laughs lightly, pulling his hand away from yours to settle it back onto Dennis's shoulder, squeezing it firmly. “Dennis is my favorite. Don’t tell everyone else.”
“What?” A.) You have no clue what ‘PTMC’ is. B.) Why would Dennis be Robby’s favorite? That implies Dennis works with Trinity and Javadi, which would mean he’s.. A doctor.
“I’m a doctor, at the ER- or an ER. Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center.” Dennis answers, avoiding your eyes. “I’m a year one resident this year.”
“Oh. T-that’s great, Dennis,” you breathe out, heart skipping a beat. He’s a doctor. He got out of Broken Bow, he got out. “Really great. Congratulations.”
“Thank you,” he whispers, meeting your eyes. They’re dimmer, like you’ve dimmed him by being around.
“So! You and Dennis clearly need to do some catching up, why don’t you sit?” Robby offers, gesturing at the empty side of their table. “You can tell me all about Dennis when he was a kid. I’m sure you’ve got loads of embarrassing stories.”
The way Robby grins at Dennis makes your heart clench. The way Dennis lights up, laughing and elbowing him, makes you a little sick. “I think I should go, actually. I don’t want to impose, this is obviously some sort of coworkers night out!” Just coworkers. Only coworkers.
“It’s no worries, at all,” Robby promises, waving a hand at the chairs again. “Please.”
“No, I really--”
“Stay.. Please?” Dennis catches your wrist, stopping you in your tracks. “Please?” He pleads again, tugging on your sleeve.
Your hands tremble slightly, but you nod, “I can stay.” You shouldn’t, but you’re going to. All because Dennis asked. Just like before.
“Fantastic!” Trinity chirps, cozying into the chair next to you. “Tell us about little Huckleberry, what was he like? Was he an evil twerp?”
Dennis groans in embarrassment, scrunching his nose up at you like you’re sharing an inside joke. “I wasn’t, thank you very much!”
“No, he was a goody two-shoes,” you snort, shifting uncomfortably in the chair. “He really was.”
“Pssh, lame. I’m gonna go catch up with the others if there’s nothing funny to hear about Huck Finn,” Trinity sighs, standing right back up with a groan. “Have fun!”
That slight moment of reprieve dissipates the moment Trinity is gone, leaving you, Dennis, and Robby in an awkward silence. Or you in awkward silence while Dennis and Robby whisper to each other in a way that suggests a little more than ‘coworkers’.
“Dennis really has no stories?” Robby asks, turning to you once more. “No broken vases, late night hang outs, nothing?”
“No, nothing. Dennis was as good as they come. Not a sin to his name.” The pause Dennis has makes you immediately regret the wording. It’s true, though. You were always the sinner.
“Not like you,” Dennis snorts, rolling his eyes, “Breaking your leg tryna climb up our barn.”
“Hey! You were on the roof too!” You gasp in mock offense, narrowing your eyes at him.
“I had a ladder!” Dennis reminds you, throwing his hands up, crossing them over his chest.
“I knew that… eventually!” You laugh, sticking your chin up at him. You wanted to hang out with Dennis while he tried to fix the barn’s roof, and instead of asking Dennis for help, you decided to try and scale the Whitaker barn. It ended with you on your ass, and your leg bent unnaturally. “Took six-fucking-weeks to heal.”
“You two sound awfully close,” Robby pipes in, an amused smile on his face. No jealousy, no accusations, just an observation, but Dennis clams up anyway.
“I guess,” he shrugs, cuddling closer to Robby. They’re incredibly close, closer than Dennis would ever sit next to you, ever.
“So do you guys,” you comment, quite the opposite tone from Robby. You’re jealous of Robby, of how Dennis just leans into him, in public, like there’s nothing he wants to hide. “How long has Dennis been at the P.. PMTC?”
“PTMC.” Robby corrects, twisting his finger into one of Dennis's curls. “Two years. He came to the Pitt as a year-4, and has stayed with us for his first year of residency.”
“That’s great. How long do you plan on staying at ‘The Pitt’, Dennis?” You ask, genuinely curious. Does Dennis plan on going back to Nebraska? Is he going to go somewhere else?
“How long do you?” Dennis retorts, face blank as he stares at you. “How long have you been in Pittsburgh to begin with?”
“I’m not sure, Dennis. Do you have a problem with me living here?” You question, brows furrowing slightly. “A few weeks, almost a month. Came down from Maine.”
------------
Maine. Why were you in Maine? Dennis wants to ask, he wants to ask a lot of things, he has so many questions for you, but no idea how to ask them without words he doesn’t mean spilling out.
“No, I don’t have a problem with you living here. I just don’t know why you do. You never mentioned wanting to live in Pittsburgh,” Dennis explains, clearly getting defensive. He doesn’t mean to, but here he is.
“That’s nice, are you settling in well?” Robby asks, drawing Dennis back in. He’s so sweet. If only he knew.
“Fantastically,” you grit out, still staring at Dennis. He swears you’re trying to burn holes into his already damned soul.
“Do you have a job?- If you ever need one, we could always use more nurses,” Robby jokes, jostling Dennis slightly.
“I’ve got a job,” you laugh awkwardly, smiling at Robby the same way you used to smile at your guy's pastor. Dennis recognizes it all too well. “Even if I didn’t, I don’t think I could handle being a nurse.”
“Considering you passed out the first time my pa had you around to help with calving, probably not,” Dennis mutters, sipping on his--or Robby’s, technically--whiskey.
“A fainter, huh? Don’t worry, we’ve got one of our own,” Robby hums, jutting his head in the direction Javadi last was.
Dennis watches the gears in your head turn, before it finally clicks. “... Crash.”
“Yeah, that’s what Trin’ likes to call her,” Dennis confirms, staring at the golden liquid.
“Speaking of Trinity, it’s getting late, so I’m gonna go find her, so I can get everyone another round,” Robby says, dragging a finger over Dennis's neck, bringing his head up with a sly smirk. “I’ll get you something a little lighter than the whiskey,” Robby whispers to Dennis, leaning down, so his breath fans over Dennis's lips. “Don’t move.”
------------
Watching Robby kiss Dennis is torture, but seeing the pure happiness on Dennis’s face afterwards is worse. You’re happy for him. You are… You are. “You guys are together?”
“We’re just.. I don’t know what we are,” Dennis admits, chewing on his bottom lip. “I’m sorry, he shouldn’t have.. I shouldn’t- kissing in front of you was inappropriate.”
“It’s fine, Dennis. Really,” you tell him, crossing your arms over your chest. Neither of you say anything else, just looking at each other the same. exact. way you did that night. When you were begging Dennis to explain to them. “Do you love him?”
“I like him,” Dennis answers quietly. “A lot.”
“Enough to kiss him, obviously. Must’ve not liked me at all then,” you laugh softly, tearily. “I’m gonna go now. Tell Robby it was nice meeting him. Trinity and Javadi too.”
“I will,” Dennis nods, and he doesn’t try to stop you from leaving this time. You can feel his eyes on you; you don't look back to meet them.
------------
“Where’d your friend go?” Trinity asks, returning with a tray of drinks, alongside all their friends.
“He had to go,” Dennis tells her, eyes fixated on the seat you were just in. He just let you walk away… Again.
“Dang, we didn’t get his number,” Javadi pouts, plopping in the seat he’s looking at. “You don’t have his number, do you?”
“You could always try and catch him in the parking lot,” Joy points out, casually sipping a very bright and obnoxious drink that does not at all match her.
“Ooh! Yeah, I’ll go--”
“I’ll go,” Dennis stands up a little too quickly, nearly knocking the chair backwards. “I’ll see if I can stop him.”
You’re standing at the curb when Dennis leaves the club, staring out at the streets that are too busy for this time of night.
“... I loved you,” Dennis calls out, stopping a few feet away from you.
You don’t look at him, and for a second he wonders if you didn’t hear him. “Ain’t gotta lie to me, Dennis. I’m an adult, I can take it,” you respond after a beat, tucking your hands in your pockets.”
You don’t believe him, of course you don’t. He can’t blame you. No one does what he did to the people they love. Except your own parents, and his parents… Maybe he doesn’t have the best idea of what love really is.
“I did. I loved you. You were my best friend.” Dennis says, swallowing thickly.
“Your ‘best friend’,” you look at him, and the bright lights from the club reflect on your glassy eyes, and allow him to see the wavering of your smile. “Is that all I was?”
“I was scared, is that what you want me to say? I was a coward, and what I did to you was wrong. I regretted it every day.” Dennis tilts his head up, exhaling slowly. “Every day.”
------------
‘Every day’ he says. He regretted it. How sweet. Just like you remembered it, every day you didn’t wake up in your bed, in Broken Bow with everyone you’d ever known.
“You don’t anymore?” You inquire, head tipping to the side slightly.
“I do.”
“But?”
“But I wouldn’t be here--where I am today--if I went with you.”
There it is. Dennis was never going to take the fall with you, no matter how much you begged, or pleaded with him. Dennis got to be with his family every day because he wasn’t gay. Now he gets to be a doctor with his friends, and his boyfriend.
“I’m glad you’re happy, Dennis. Truly, I am.”
“I hope you find yours.”
You won’t. It drowned in a sea of blue and red a long time ago.
BREAKING NEWS: Here's the reveal for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. This entry involves a North Korean invasion of South Korea. Coming out October 23rd.
Pairing: Dr. Jack Abbot x Reader
Reader: resident/combat medic!reader, amputee!reader, ex-military!reader, widow!reader
Summary: After being honourably discharged from the Army, you arrive in Pittsburgh with a half-finished residency, a body you are still learning how to live in, and a past you have no intention of unpacking. Dr. Jack Abbot is supposed to be a professional contact, nothing more. But he notices too much, understands things he should not understand, and carries himself with a familiarity you cannot quite place. What begins as professional tension slowly becomes something harder to ignore.
Word Count: 11K (ish)
Masterlist
Warnings: **This chapter specifically is pretty heavy with emotion**
age gap, mentor/mentee relationship, medical trauma, military trauma, PTSD symptoms, grief, spouse death, widowhood, amputation, prosthetic limb adjustment, survivor’s guilt, emotional repression, panic/nightmare episodes, captivity/torture references, violence, blood/injury, medical procedures, concussion, alcohol/smoking, age gap, complicated healing, eventual smut, swearing
Author's Note: I just wanted to say thank you again, genuinely. The likes, the reblogs, the comments, I was not expecting any of it and it just makes me so happy that people are excited to see what is coming next. It is a strange and vulnerable thing, putting a story out like this, and you have all been so kind about it. Feedback, comments, and reactions of any kind are always welcome <3
Now. Without further ado...
You gave Dr. Abbot the details. Most of them, anyway.
You told him about Kalista going down and the man who hit her. You told him about the ambulance, the airway being compromised, the septal hematoma, the way you had demanded Kowalski give you the needle. You answered the questions he asked directly and avoided the ones he didn't.
You left out the part where you could not quite remember how long you had been hitting that man before someone pulled you off. You left out the part where, for a few seconds, you had not been in Pittsburgh at all.
Something told you he noticed the omissions. The way his eyes had stayed on you a beat too long after each answer, reading the negative space around your words instead of the words themselves.
But he let you have them.
For now.
He cleared you eventually. Mild concussion, dressed temple wound, cleaned knuckles, and discharge instructions you had no intention of following with any particular discipline.
"Someone is at home to check on you every few hours?" He held the discharge papers with the practised stillness of a man who had asked this question a thousand times and still meant it every time.
"Yes," you said.
Lie.
The only person who could have checked on you was Kalista, and Kalista was currently somewhere beyond a set of doors you were not allowed through. He told you that her next of kin had been contacted. She was going to imaging as a precaution. She was being cared for.
You asked to stay.
He said you were not family.
It was delivered without cruelty, the way most impossible things were delivered in hospitals, as plain fact dressed in professional courtesy. You understood that. You had said the same thing yourself, on the other side of that conversation, more times than you could count. Understanding it did not make it easier to hear.
She was somewhere you could not follow and there was no version of sitting in a waiting room under fluorescent lights that you were capable of managing right now. Not after tonight. Not like this. So when the opportunity to leave came, you took it.
You walked through the ED doors with your jacket pulled close, one hand already in your pocket reaching for your keys.
Then you stopped.
Oh. Fuck.
Your car was still at the bar.
For a moment you stood in the ambulance bay, staring at nothing in particular. Then you pulled out your phone and opened Uber, typing your new address with more force than the app deserved.
Eight minutes.
A short, humourless sound left your chest.
Ironic.
The air outside was cold enough to cut through the heat still trapped under your skin. The adrenaline had burned off somewhere between the paperwork and the discharge signature, and without it your body had started reporting every ache–all at once. Your face ached. Your knuckles pulsed. Your left hip was tight and overworked from compensating too long, the socket having shifted during the fight, and with each step a pinch ran high along your inner thigh that made you set your jaw.
You checked the time.
6:06 a.m.
There had to be somewhere to sit. You looked left, then right, and found the designated smoking area tucked off to the side of the ambulance bay. A concrete ledge ran along the wall, just wide enough. Apparently the irony had no plans to let up.
You made your way toward it carefully. By the time you lowered yourself onto the ledge the relief was immediate, weight coming off your leg, your eyes briefly closing on their own. You let out a breath you had not realised you were holding.
For a few minutes, you sat there and did nothing at all.
The city was waking up around you. Traffic thickened on the road beyond the hospital. A truck somewhere nearby reversed with a slow, flat beep. The streetlamps overhead clicked off one by one as the sky began to change.
The dark pulled back from the roofline. That blue-black edge of night retreated, giving way to a thin wash of gold along the horizon. Early sun caught the windows across the street and turned them briefly into something warm.
And then you heard them.
Birds.
Small and ordinary and alive, somewhere in the trees beyond the parking structure. Not the desert birds you had learned to tune out at Salerno, picking at scraps near the base perimeter and scattering at the first sound of machinery. Not distant wings and nothing more. Just birds in a city morning, uninterrupted.
You tipped your face up toward the light.
You had loved the sun across every deployment, every base, every theatre. At Salerno it had been ruthless at its peak, the kind of heat that pressed down until it felt personal, that turned the dirt pale and made the air shimmer above the perimeter road. You had learned to work through it regardless. But in the early mornings, before the heat crested, and in the evenings when it finally relented, the light had been extraordinary. Burnt orange bleeding into the sky still vivid with that particular blue that only exists in the last moment before it surrenders to the sun. The air at that hour carried a dry, mineral quality that you had breathed in thousands of times until it had become part of how you understood the word evening.
You had never once missed a sunrise or a sunset you could get to. Even running on two hours of sleep and whatever you had managed to eat. Even when the day ahead, or the one just behind you, was too heavy to look at directly.
Adam had understood that without being told.
He would appear at your shoulder without announcement, drop down beside you on whatever stretch of wall or ledge or step you had claimed, and say nothing for a while. Just watch it with you. The silence with him had always been the comfortable kind.
Here in Pittsburgh the morning sun was gentler. Softer through the urban haze, less demanding. You closed your eyes and turned your face toward it, thousands of kilometres of travel ending right there, warm against your skin, and for one small second it felt exactly the same.
You could almost smell the dry heat of the desert, the particular gritty quality of air with no moisture in it. Almost feel the fine grain of it against your skin. And somewhere behind your closed eyes, so vivid it stopped your breathing for a full second, you could almost hear his voice. Low and near, coming over your shoulder the way it always had.
"Hey, you."
Your phone buzzed against your thigh.
Your Uber had arrived.
You opened your eyes. You stood carefully and walked to the car.
The ride was quiet. The driver offered a brief greeting and you returned it and then leaned your head against the window, watching Pittsburgh pass in soft early fragments. Brick buildings. A traffic light cycling to yellow. A woman walking a dog with the purposefulness of someone who had been awake for hours already.
Your building came up faster than you expected. You thanked the driver and got out carefully.
The lobby was empty. The elevator was empty. The hallway on your floor stretched ahead of you, long and overhead-lit and silent.
You stopped outside Kalista's door.
"Hi, my name is Kalista Reid. I'm 28. I live in the apartment across the hall. Unit 601."
For a moment, you just looked at it.
She had helped you carry a trunk upstairs less than two weeks ago. She had called herself your first friend in Pittsburgh and meant it. She had made you buy throw pillows. She had sent seventeen opinions about the silver top before you even left the apartment. She had dragged you out because she thought you needed to feel like a person for one night.
And she had been hit hard enough to need surgery because you had not been paying close enough attention.
You looked away.
You went inside, the door clicked shut behind you. The silence was immediate. Too large. Too clean. Too much space for one person to fill at six in the morning after the kind of night that ended with discharge papers.
You pulled out your phone and opened Kalista's contact. You tried to keep it short. Something simple she could read when she woke up.
Hey. I'm home. I tried to stay but they wouldn't let me through. I am not family. I hated leaving.
I'm so sorry about tonight. I wasn't paying close enough attention and I should have been, and I don't really have anything better than that. I'm just sorry.
I'll be there the second you can have visitors.
Also! You were right about the silver top. For what it's worth, it was a very solid call on your part.
Then you crossed the living room toward the bedroom and stopped.
The photo albums sat in chronological order across two shelves of the bookshelf, the habit of a photographer's daughter. Sawyer's package was still only half unpacked. The loose four-by-sixes were sorted in careful piles across the lower shelf and the floor in front of it, no longer arranged by date, waiting for a permanent home you had not been ready to give them. The large tan envelope stamped:
CONFIDENTIAL SGT. A. HANDSCOMBE
sat where you had placed it the day the package arrived. Sawyer's letter, still sealed, beside it.
You had not opened either.
Not yet.
Your eyes found one stack with a photo on top, and before you had consciously made the decision your hands had already reached for it. The whole stack. Maybe fifty photos. The one sitting on top was a polaroid.
Adam. Standing dead centre, hands clasped in front of him. A professional smile, full of pride and entirely unable to contain it. That had always been his particular way of being proud of something. He did not perform. He simply held it, and it showed through anyway.
You remembered taking this photo. You remembered exactly where you were standing.
The day he made Corporal.
You turned the photo over.
On the back, in your own handwriting:
Corporal Handsome, 2016
Below the words, the outline of your lips. A shimmering pink print, barely-there lip gloss surviving years and deployments and oceans and a move across the country.
You flipped it back.
You walked a few steps toward the window where the morning light was stronger, held the photo flat and parallel to your eyes, and tilted it gently, maybe thirty degrees outward, scanning the surface slowly.
There.
The ghost of a print in the gloss of the image. His lips. Just the impression of them, oil residue on a surface that had held it quiet and patient all this time.
He had kissed this photo.
"Say cheese."
You had one eye closed and the camera pressed to the other, grinning already, trying to hold the shot steady through it.
"Cheeeeese." His smile was controlled, proud, just barely holding back something larger underneath.
Click. Flash. The camera whirred. The film began to slide out from the bottom.
He had just made Corporal, and it showed. Not in the way vanity showed, but in the way earned things showed. He had worked for it through deployments and rotations that never fully made it into official reports, worked for it the way his father had worked and his grandfather before that. Men who had gone to war and come back whole, who had passed something intact down the line. Adam had come from a stable home and a proud lineage, and the Army had seen something in him early that most people were still catching up to.
Half a second after the flash he had unclapsed his hands and pulled you in. Arms all the way around, the kind of hug that accounted for all of you at once, his chin resting easily on the top of your head. He exhaled against your hair. One hand shifted from your shoulder to the back of your neck, and then he pulled back just enough to look at you.
"I couldn't have done this without you."
He absolutely could have gotten here on his own. But it was still fun to take credit.
"I know," you told him, "because I was the one who talked you up to Sawyer."
He laughed. You laughed. Somewhere in the middle of it you looked down and realized the polaroid had finished printing.
You held it up between you, turning it toward him so he could watch it develop, your eyes still on his over the top of the photo. Absently, without thinking, you let it rest against your lips. The paper was cool against your mouth. Your own breath came back warm against your face from the surface of it.
Then he leaned in and kissed you through it.
You felt the pressure of his lips against yours through the thin film, and despite the photo between you, despite not being able to see exactly where your lips were, he found them perfectly. Like he could have done it without looking at all.
You had not been expecting it. You closed your eyes for the flutter of a second that it lasted.
Then it was over.
When he pulled back there was something in his eyes you had not seen before. Something quiet and full, like a sentence he had decided not to finish yet.
You turned the photo over in your hands. Then back again. The faint stain of your lip gloss on the paper. The ghost of his lips pressed into the gloss on the front.
"Now you can never throw that one away," he said.
"Was that the plan?" you asked.
He smiled.
"That was absolutely the plan."
That night, on your way to drop the photo at his bunk, you had written Corporal Handsome, 2016 on the back. Somewhere in the ten feet between your hand and his door, the photo slipped. Or perhaps you let it slip. It landed face-up on the ground directly in front of three members of his squad who had been sitting against the corridor wall.
A beat of silence.
Then someone said, very slowly, "Corporal Handsome?"
The name was in circulation within the hour. By the end of the week it had crossed two squads. A Staff Sergeant from Third Platoon clapped Adam on the back using it. He wore the name with the easy dignity of a man who was not particularly displeased with how events had unfolded.
He never called it an accident.
Neither did you.
You could not look at a photo of him without wanting him back. Not as a concept. Not as a comfort. You wanted him here, in this apartment, in this specific moment, taking up the space that was too large for one person. You wanted the weight of his arm across your shoulders. You wanted to hear him say something that made you laugh and watch him be quietly pleased about it for the next twenty minutes. You wanted to show him the throw pillows Kalista had made you buy and hear what he said.
You wanted proof that he had been real.
The photos were proof. That was what they were for. That was why your father had never put his camera down, and why you had kept the habit, and why Adam had kept a camera sewn into his vest against regulation and called it harmless.
So that proof existed.
So it could not be taken.
You gathered the stack and carried it into the bedroom, setting the photos carefully on the nightstand. The polaroid you set apart from the others, propped gently against the base of the lamp. Then you looked at the stack for one second too long and decided that the grime of the night was sitting on you in a way you could no longer ignore.
You went to shower.
A relief came when you took off the prosthetic.
The release of pressure was almost enough to make your vision swim. Your residual limb was aching in a way that was specific and deep, red at the socket line, the skin tender from hours of heat and impact and a fit that had been off since the fight. You stood at the bathroom counter and gripped the edge of it, breathing through the first hot pulse of returning circulation.
You hated that it felt good to take it off. You hated needing relief from something designed to help you.
The shower chair was folded in the hallway closet. Your physical therapist in Washington had used her careful, practical, firm voice when she told you to get one.
"It is not a failure. It is an adaptive tool."
You nodded at the time and bought one. You had put it in the closet the day you moved in and had not touched it since.
You were a grown woman. You had treated blast injuries in tents. You had cross-clamped bleeders by headlamp. You had held people together with your hands and gauze and pressure and sheer refusal to let go.
You could wash your own hair without sitting in a plastic chair like a patient.
You turned the shower on and waited for the water to heat, then approached the tub.
The problem with the shower chair being in the closet was that the tub edge was a fixed obstacle that required a fixed solution, and you were currently missing one leg below the knee.
You pressed your knee to the ledge of the tub and rolling your weight over it in a way you could not have replicated intentionally, catching the wall as you went, and ultimately surrendering to the shower floor rather than any version of standing.
The water was hot. That was something.
You sat with your back against the tub, right knee bent into your chest, left knee stretched straight because bending it to your chest still pulled in a way that felt like a protest, and you washed slowly. Everything you needed was on the lower shelf of the tub ledge, which you had worked out early was the only arrangement that actually functioned.
Reach. Shift. Brace. Rinse. Don't slip. Don't think about how none of this used to require thinking.
That was the part no one had prepared you for. Not the pain. Pain made sense and could be managed. It was the logistics. The constant, humiliating logistics of being alive in a body that no longer moved the way your brain expected it to. A towel out of reach. A crutch in the wrong room. The mental accounting of every single movement before you made it.
By the time you shut off the water and managed your way back over the tub edge and onto the bathmat, you were shaking, and you could not have said with any certainty whether it was exhaustion or anger or some precise combination of both that had no name.
You reached for the towel on the bar and dried off as best you could while still on the floor.
Then you looked toward the bathroom door. The crutches were not there. You had left them in the bedroom. Something in your chest shifted, moved, and snapped.
"Fuck."
You gripped the counter edge and tried to pull yourself up. Your palm slid on the wet surface. Pain cracked through your hip, sharp and immediate, and you dropped back down hard enough that the impact moved through your spine.
"Fuck."
Louder.
You looked down at your leg. At the scar tissue. At the shape of something that had been repaired and healed and was supposedly functional.
Your hand found the nearest thing on the lower shelf and threw it.
The bottle of lotion hit the wall hard enough to crack and burst open across the tile.
Still on the floor, you reached up and swept your arm across the counter. Toothbrush. Hairbrush. A small glass jar. Moisturiser. A folded washcloth. Everything went off the edge. The glass jar hit the floor and shattered.
"FUCK!" Your fist found the cabinet door.
Once. Twice. You didn't count after that. You just kept going, kept hitting, the pain in your knuckles building past the point where it registered as pain and becoming something else entirely, something that had been compressing for months and had finally run out of room and needed somewhere to go.
When you finally stopped you pulled your hands back and looked at them.
Blood across your knuckles. A smear on the cabinet door, and below the smear, a dent that had gone almost all the way through. You had done that. With your hand. On the floor of your bathroom at six in the morning in an apartment in a city where nobody was coming.
The sob came from somewhere so deep it didn't sound like you.
The towel slipped and fell and you let it. It didn't matter. There was no one here. It made you furious. Furious at the wet tile cold against your skin. Furious at the glass on the floor. Furious at the crutches in the other room. Furious at your body for surviving the unsurvivable and still managing to make every single ordinary thing impossible.
Because you had survived. That was the thing no one tells you about survival. It was not a conclusion. It did not hand you something livable in exchange. You had survived Adam's death and everything that had happened in the weeks before that you still could not think about directly. You had survived the infection. The surgery. The amputation. Discharge. Rehabilitation. Washington. The flight to Pittsburgh. The apartment. A bar on a Friday night.
But you could not get off the bathroom floor.
That was what broke you.
Not the war. Not the loss.
The bathroom floor.
The sobs were violent, the kind that forced your shoulders inward and curled your whole body toward itself. You pressed both hands over your mouth curled like a child on the floor--but it made no difference. The sound came through anyway, broken and beyond your control.
And the silence of the apartment around it, the absolute zero-reaction of being alone in a room you had just destroyed with no one to hear it and no one coming, made it worse.
It was not just Adam you had lost. That grief was enormous and specific and lived in a separate room from this one. The friends overseas who had tried to visit the hospital and been turned away because you could not stand to be seen that way. You had lost them too. Lost the life that existed only in those places, that did not translate, that you had left behind without being given the chance to say goodbye to it properly. The belonging that had no equivalent here.
The only "visitor" allowed in your hospital room was Sawyer, because she outranked everyone in it and walked through the door without asking permission. You had pushed everyone else away and called it healing, and now the healing was a city of one and an apartment that was too large and walls that did not react when you fell apart inside them.
You pressed your forehead to the cold tile and stayed there.
After a while the crying stopped because your body simply ran out of whatever it had been using to sustain it. You lay on the floor for a long time after. Long enough that the tile no longer felt cold against your cheek. Long enough that what had been wet on your face had dried.
The shower was still dripping. The glass was still on the floor.
Move.
Not standing. Not yet. You cleaned the glass first, because some part of you was still a doctor, still practical, still aware that bare skin and broken glass had one predictable outcome. You used a dry section of the towel, folded carefully over on itself, and cleared what you could reach. Then you set it aside.
After that, you moved to the door.
On the floor. Backwards. Because that was what was available.
It was humiliating--but there were no eyes to see. You catalogued it and kept moving.
You pulled open the bottom dresser drawer from the floor, you grabbed underwear, shorts and a T-shirt. Getting dressed took longer than it should have. You did not look at your leg. If you caught a glimpse in your peripheral vision you redirected your gaze just enough to miss it. You had done it enough times by now that it was nearly automatic.
When you reached the bed, you gripped the mattress edge and hauled yourself up.
You sat there for a moment. Just breathing.
There. Done.
The photos were still on the nightstand. Adam's face looked up at you from the bottom of the lamp. You reached for the photos before you had consciously decided to, and lay back, and began to go through them slowly.
Your squad, arms around each other, squinting into the same familiar sun. Photos from Adam's perspective, his squad arranged in the loose, easy formation of people who had learned to trust each other completely.
Then the photos that had not existed for you until Sawyer's package arrived.
Amber's photos.
Amber was your closest frien over there, the one who had seen everything and said nothing until she was given permission. She had known you loved Adam long before you said it out loud, and she had known about your habit of documenting everything, and she had quietly taken it upon herself to document you back, mostly without your knowledge. She had that kind of love for the people close to her. Generous and steady.
There were photos here you had never seen.
You and Amber of you sitting side by side on a supply crate, not touching but close enough that your shoulders were nearly brushing, both looking at something off-frame. A photo of you laughing at something Adam had said, your head tipped back, his face in three-quarter profile already pleased with himself. A photo of you asleep against the wall of the medical centre corridor waiting for a shift to start, and beside you, not asleep, watching you with an expression on his face you could not look at directly for too long.
Then, near the bottom of the stack, a photo that made you go still.
The camera was angled upward, catching yours and Adams faces against the sky. The perimeter wall below you. Early morning, the two of you half-asleep, shoulders touching, watching the sunrise from the spot that had been yours almost from the beginning. The burnt orange you admire cut across the retreating dark above the base. His mouth was slightly open in a way he would have absolutely hated if he had known about it.
You laughed. Just once. It broke halfway through.
Then you were crying again, but quietly this time. Not the bathroom kind. That had been rage and exhaustion and walls that didn't answer. This was different. This was longing, patient and enormous and without anywhere to go.
You missed him in a way that made your whole body feel hollow. The weight of him beside you. The sound of his voice saying your name. The warmth of someone who had known the difference between the silence that meant you were fine and the silence that meant you were not, and who had never once required you to explain which one you were in.
You missed being someone who had him.
You lay back without meaning to, photos spread across the sheets, one still held loosely between your fingers.
The sun had come fully up while you were on the bathroom floor, and it was filling the room now in long, slow lines. Gold across the floorboards. Gold over the edge of the bed. Gold over his face in the photograph beside your hand.
The polaroid sat propped against the base of the nightstand lamp, his lip print barely visible on the gloss.
Waiting to be framed.
You did not notice when you fell asleep.
Jack's POV
I pulled into the driveway at 9:33 a.m.
The number sat on the dashboard with the quiet authority of a fact I had not asked for.
The shift had run long enough to start losing its edges. Faces, charts, vital readings. One drunk with a fractured orbital floor. One broken nose. One woman with bloody knuckles and a precise, unblinking stare that had followed me through the rest of the night without my permission.
I sat in the car after shutting off the engine. I was not a man who needed to collect himself in his own driveway. But if I was honest about what I was doing, I would have had to be honest about what I was thinking about, and I had not yet decided to do that.
Abbott. Two T's.
I exhaled and got out.
The house held the quiet of a place that had learned to accommodate one person without comment. I dropped my bag near the door. It hit the floor with a dull, heavy sound.
Close enough.
In the kitchen I took the container of leftovers from the second shelf of the fridge and left it on the counter to reheat after I showered. No point running the microwave now. I was going to be in the bathroom longer than the food could stay warm.
The bathroom was ready. That was the right word for it. After enough years there was nothing worth performing about it. Grab-bar in the right place. Non-slip mat. Shower chair in position. Crutches leaning at the exact angle my hand would find them when I was ready to exit. Towel within reach.
I had learned, once, what happened when things were not where they needed to be. Everyone who needed to learn it did, eventually. The ones who adjusted fastest were the ones who stopped calling it compromise and started calling it a system.
I sat on the tub edge and released the prosthetic. The familiar shift happened immediately, pressure giving way, the limb settling back into itself. I ran a hand along the socket line out of habit. Redness where it had pressed too long. Nothing open. Nothing that required more than time.
Maintenance. Not the word anyone preferred. People liked recovery, or adjustment, or adaptation. Clean, forward-moving words. Maintenance was less flattering. Maintenance was what actually kept you walking.
I moved through the rest of the routine without needing to think about it, which was the entire point of having a routine.
The shower ran hot. I sat under it longer than necessary, elbows on my knees, head forward, and let the water do what water did after a long shift. Work through the tension in my shoulders, loosen the muscles along the back of my neck, take the smell of the hospital off my skin. Eventually the night stopped feeling like it was still happening to me.
Then I got back up.
Not dramatically. Not slowly. Hand on the grab bar, weight checked and redistributed, one careful movement at a time. There was nothing inspiring about it. It was just how it worked.
I dried off, dressed in a T-shirt and sweatpants, and balanced in front of the mirror.
Grey at the temples, more than last year. Dark circles under my eyes which were not new. A crease between my brows that had decided somewhere around 40 that it was permanent and had never thought to ask permission.
I looked at myself for a moment. Not critically. Just looked.
There were other versions of this face that could have formed over the last twenty-five years, other directions the whole thing could have gone, and I had been aware of that for a long time. Somewhere along the way the awareness had shifted from something unsettling into something closer to gratitude. I recognized the man in the mirror. I had not always been able to say that. It had taken years of work.
That counted for more than I ever said out loud.
"Not bad," I told the mirror. "For an old man."
I fit my prosthetic back on, because navigating the kitchen without it would be a harder task I did not have the energy for.
I reheated the leftovers, ate at the counter, rinsed the container and put it in the dishwasher.
By the time I reached the bedroom my lower back and right hip were making their case. The deep muscle above the knee that contracted after too many hours on my feet had been pulling for the last hour, and the socket had been on long enough that what was left of my leg wanted out. I sat on the edge of the bed, released the prosthetic, and set it beside me at the angle my hand would find in the morning. Then I got under the covers and let everything go quiet.
Routine. Maintenance. Survival, if I wanted to be dramatic about it, which I generally tried not to be.
I closed my eyes.
The world began to soften, thought starting to lose its edges.
Then my phone buzzed.
Once.
Ignore it.
Twice.
I reached for it. I looked at the name on the screen:
SAWYER
"Well," I said to no one. "There's a ghost."
I picked up.
"Holy shit," I said. "Is this Frances Sawyer, or have I finally started hallucinating from sleep deprivation?"
The laugh that came back was immediate and enormous, the kind that filled more space than the person producing it.
"Jack Abbot," she said. "Still charming. Still dramatic."
"Only with people who call me after a night shift."
"Night shift got you soft."
"Night shift got me old."
"You were old at twenty-four."
"And were unbearable."
"Yet you adored me."
"I tolerated you because you outranked me."
"You tolerated me because I saved your ass."
I closed my eyes that one landed somewhere old and familiar.
White. Then dirt against my face before I understood what had happened. Then the ringing, flat and total, the kind that pressed in from every direction at once and made everything else sound like it was happening underwater.
Sawyer's voice somewhere above me, miles away and right there at the same time. "Stay awake, Abbot. Stay awake."
I tried.
I opened my eyes.
"Did you ever get that peg leg I sent for Christmas?" she asked.
"It must have gotten lost in transit. I've been limping around on my own like an idiot."
"Well shit. I paid extra for the pirate finish."
"I knew I felt underdressed."
She laughed again, but the laugh shifted. A pause, half a beat too long for nostalgia. Sawyer had never called out of nothing. She called with a purpose, and the purpose was always something she had already settled on before she dialled.
"What do you need?" I asked.
"That obvious?"
"We haven't spoken in half a decade. Either someone's dead, someone's dying, or you want something."
She exhaled.
"Yeah," she said. "I want something."
I waited.
"About 11 months ago," she started, "there was an incident tied to one of our forward surgical units. Salerno initially. The situation developed across multiple locations over the following weeks. Eight people were captured."
I sat up slightly.
Weeks?
"Three made it back," she said.
The line went quiet for a moment.
"Only one of them survived."
I did the arithmetic the way you did automatically when someone gave you numbers like that. Eight. Three. One.
"She made it back. She developed a severe soft tissue infection. Septic, moving fast. We couldn't save the limb." Another pause, deliberate in a way that meant she had chosen the next words carefully. "Left leg. Below-knee amputation."
My hand, which had been loose on the sheet, went still.
Left. Below the knee.
Sawyer would not have said it the way she said it if she didn't know what it would do.
"Close enough to be a mirror," she said, quieter.
The silence between us had weight to it. The kind built from knowing someone across too many years and too many specific things to need much explaining.
I broke it first.
"How long had she been serving?"
"Enlisted at eighteen on an HPSP scholarship. Medical school through the Army. Combat track, trauma surgery. She was most of the way through her residency when everything happened. I was the one who pushed her toward medicine. I saw it in her from the start." A brief pause. "She's twenty-eight now."
"How far does that put her into residency?"
"Functionally R3. The paperwork is complicated by the deployment structure."
"Paperwork is always complicated."
"Her situation is uglier than the paperwork."
"What else?"
"She spent several months in Washington. Rehabilitation unit. Prosthetic fitting. Physical therapy." A pause. "She hated every second of it."
"That's not unusual."
"In a way I recognize," Sawyer said. "In a way you would recognize."
I looked toward the window. Something was forming in the back of my mind, quiet and unhurried, not yet a complete thought.
"She's not adjusting," Sawyer continued. "She's functioning. She's managing. She performs and keeps everything else in a very small, locked room and calls it control." A brief silence. "There's a difference."
"I know the difference."
"I know you do."
I ran a hand over my face.
"Where is she now?"
"Pittsburgh... I sent her there," Sawyer said, with the particular tone of someone fully aware of what they are doing and entirely comfortable with it. "I directed her to housing near PTMC. I've spoken with Gloria."
"Sawyer."
"She's signed off. Limited duties, supervised. It's not a full position yet but the door is open. The girl needs somewhere her training is not wasted."
"She needs a trauma therapist."
"She has one."
"She needs time."
"She won't take it."
"Then she needs someone to make her take it."
"That worked beautifully on you, if I recall."
I almost smiled. Almost.
"She wants the work back," Sawyer said. "Not deployment. Medicine. She thinks if she can just get back to being useful, everything else will settle around it."
"It won't."
"I know that. You know that... She doesn't know it yet."
Yes she does. She just won't stop moving long enough to face it.
"You want me to take her on," I said.
"I want you to consider it."
"No. You want me to take her on."
"I want someone on the ground who understands the medicine, the military background, the leg, and the specific brand of productive self-destruction that looks impressive on a resume until it isn't." She let the silence sit for a moment. "That's you, Jack."
"That's a very specific description."
"It's an accurate one."
I stared at the ceiling.
"When did I become the designated landing place for traumatised doctors?"
"Probably around the same time you stopped pretending you weren't one yourself."
"I'm an attending physician."
"You're an attending physician who spent almost two decades in the Army and still stands like it." A pause. "Don't be modest. It's unbecoming."
I almost laughed.
"How long has she been in Pittsburgh?"
"About a week and a half. She doesn't know anyone. No family." Sawyer's voice roughened slightly, just at the edges. "She made a friend, a neighbour, from what I can gather. But that's very new. She's alone, Jack. She's probably sitting in that apartment right now with more grief than she knows what to do with and no one to interrupt it."
My jaw tightened.
"What aren't you telling me?"
Sawyer was quiet for a moment. A different quality of quiet.
"The rest is hers," she said finally. "It's not mine to give."
"Is she safe to be around?"
"She says she is."
"That's not what I asked."
"No," Sawyer said. "It's not." A measured pause. "She wouldn't hurt anyone without reason. But she will run herself into the ground if no one interrupts the pattern."
"What's her name?" I asked.
A silence. Just long enough to be deliberate. Then Sawyer made a small, contained sound, clearly working to hold something back.
"Here's the thing," she said. "It's kind of funny, actually."
My eyes opened fully.
No. Fucking. Way.
"Y/N Abbott."
I stared at the ceiling.
"Spells it with two T's," I said.
Sawyer went quiet for half a second too long.
"Wait," she said, and it was the first time all night she sounded genuinely caught off guard. "You know her?"
That unformed thought in the back of my mind had resolved itself, detailed and specific. Bloody knuckles tucked carefully behind a back in the trauma bay. A woman sitting on the edge of a hospital bed with the stillness of someone deciding whether the room deserved her full attention. "Is she dead?" Delivered with the calm of a person who had already made their peace with whatever came next.
I shifted upward and leaned against the headboard.
"Unfortunately," I said, "I met her tonight."
There was a beat of silence.
Then Sawyer laughed so hard I had to pull the phone away from my ear.
"This is outstanding."
"No."
"This is divine intervention."
"It is not."
"This is the funniest thing that has happened to me in months."
"She performed an unsanctioned procedure in the back of an ambulance."
"Was it clinically necessary?" The laughter was still in her voice, barely contained.
"She drained a septal hematoma with an eighteen-gauge in a moving rig."
"So yes." I could hear the grin. "That is my girl."
"She also put a man in my ED looking like he had lost an argument with a wall. Repeatedly."
"Was he asking for it?"
I paused.
"Does it matter? She lost control of herself. Whatever happened in that parking lot, she was not entirely in Pittsburgh when it was happening."
She didn't say anything. She couldn't say anything.
"She said things got away from her."
"They will again," Sawyer said. "That's what I'm telling you. She is brilliant and she is broken and she will keep going until something stops her, and I need the thing that stops her to be structure and not a catastrophe."
I rubbed at my eyes.
"You sent me a liability."
"I sent you a doctor."
"You sent me a doctor with combat trauma, a recent amputation, no support system, and an apparent willingness to practice emergency medicine in moving vehicles without privileges or anaesthesia."
"She needs guidance," Sawyer said. "She needs someone who will not give her a pass simply because of what she's been through, and who understands what she's been through well enough to know exactly what a pass would cost her." Another pause. "That is not a long list of people."
She is not wrong.
"Gloria has already signed off," Sawyer said. "Credentialing still needs to clear but the position is there when it does. Observation first, limited duties, supervised. No independent procedures until the paperwork is clean and you're satisfied she's ready."
"She'll hate that."
"Yes."
"She may make my life difficult."
"Almost certainly."
"She told me I wasn't paying attention in medical school."
Nothing came back for a second.
"Jack," Sawyer said, very carefully, "I am trying so hard not to laugh."
"In my trauma bay."
"In your trauma bay," she repeated, and I could hear her losing the battle with it.
I waited.
"She's had a hard year. Go easy on her Jack," she said, once she had pulled herself together. Quieter now. The joke gone out of her voice.
I looked at the ceiling. Thought about the woman standing in my trauma bay with her hands hidden behind her back and her chin up like defiance was the last clean thing she owned.
"Yeah," I said. "I know."
The line held.
"If you have to... go medium," Sawyer said finally. Almost to herself.
Something in my chest had gone tight in a way I was not going to examine right now.
"Sure," I said. "Medium."
I could hear her smile through the phone, then she was gone. The text came through a few seconds after I hung up. An address.
She had been at home alone for hours with no one to check on her. She had lied about it, and I had suspected it at the time and let it go, and I was not particularly interested in examining the reason I had done that.
I reached for the prosthetic.
I had removed it twenty minutes ago and had not planned on putting it back on for several hours, and my body registered this change of plan in its own specific and unhurried way as I fitted the socket. I found my jacket.
This is a professional follow-up. A concussed patient who lied on discharge. That is all this is.
"Go medium," I said to the empty bedroom.
I grabbed my keys and went.
Your POV
Your hip hit the ground first. Then your shoulder. Then your cheek pressed into the asphalt hard enough that grit worked its way between your teeth and you tasted blood.
Your ears were ringing.
You could not hear anything clearly. Dull yelling somewhere above and around you, voices layered over each other in a language you recognised but could not process through the noise. Through the panic.
Something was pulled over your head, shrouding you in darkness. Rough fabric dragged against your face every time you moved. It smelled like gasoline, dust, wood smoke, and sweat. The air underneath it was hot and already used.
Was that an explosion? Where is Adam? Which way is up?
You were being pulled in more than one direction. Before you could form a complete thought, before you could get any kind of bearing, your wrists were yanked behind your back and someone forced you onto your knees.
You tried to pull away and they shoved you forward. With your hands tied there was nothing to catch yourself with. Your chest hit the ground then your face, the impact bright and immediate through the bag.
A sound left you. Not a word. Not even a scream. Just a low groan, involuntary, your body making room for pain that had not had time to locate itself yet. Your teeth had chipped. You were almost certain of it.
The bag came off.
Light hit you all at once.
You blinked, blinded. For half a second everything was only shapes. Sky. Dust. A figure crouching low in front of you, their outline a black silhouette against the glare, face invisible against the light.
They did not speak.
A cloth was forced into your mouth.
You tried to jerk back. A second set of hands held your head in place. Rope between your teeth, pulled tight, tied at the back of your skull. Your jaw screamed around it.
You tried to breathe but you couldn't get enough air.
Then the bag went back over your head.
The world shifted. Not all at once. In stages, like something folding over on itself slowly. The dirt became concrete. The sun became a weak yellow bulb. The air stayed hot.
You were in a room.
Dark. Damp. Humid enough that every breath came thick. Something dripping in the corner, steady and slow.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Your arms were tied behind the back of a chair. The gag still in your mouth. The bag gone. Cement walls. Cement floor. Cement ceiling. No windows. Weak yellow light bleeding around a doorframe somewhere, throwing pale shapes across the wet patches on the walls.
You turned your head as far as it would go. There was another chair behind you. Another body. You could not see who.
"Mmmhpk!"
Nothing.
"MMMHPK!"
Nothing.
Your pulse slammed against the rope at your wrists.
Then a sound from outside the room.
Clunk.
You went completely still.
Clunk.
Metal against metal. Getting closer.
Clunk.
Your chest tightened so hard there was no room left in it. The room felt smaller than it had a second ago. The dripping continued, indifferent.
No.
Clunk.
No. No. No.
Clunk.
The sound came again, louder, and every molecule of oxygen seemed to leave the room at once. You were gasping, fighting the gag, the sounds coming from your throat barely qualifying as human.
What is happening? What the fuck is happening?
A door you hadn't seen swung opened.
Your eyes snapped open.
You gasped. Air hit your lungs real and immediate and there, and before you could finish your first breath a shriek had escaped.
You jolted upright. Sweat everywhere. The sheet twisted around your waist. Photos slid off the bed in a cascade of glossy paper. Your chest heaved.
For several seconds you did not know where you were.
You were in the room. In the chair. You were at the perimeter wall and the light was wrong and you were on your knees in the dirt.
Then the crack in the blinds. Daylight through it, sharp and gold.
Pittsburgh.
Your apartment.
Your bed.
You dragged in one breath. Then another. Your heart was still running too fast.
Bang. Bang.
You froze.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Someone was at the door.
Kalista.
You threw the blanket back. Photos scattered. You had forgotten they were there. You had forgotten falling asleep.
Where was your prosthetic? There, rolled just out of reach while you were sleeping.
"Shit."
Bang. Bang. Bang.
"I'm coming!" Your voice came out rough, half-strangled. "One second!"
You slid to the floor and reached for it, dragging it back with one hand while gripping the bed frame with the other. Adrenaline already moving through your system before you had time to process being awake. You got the liner wrong on the first attempt and swore again as you corrected it.
Another knock. Harder.
"Okaaaay!"
You forced the prosthetic on quickly. Too quickly. The socket did not seat right. You knew immediately. The pinch returned high on your inner thigh, sharp enough that your vision briefly flared at the edges.
You powered through it. You stood, took one step, and nearly went down.
"Fuck."
You caught yourself on the bedpost and pushed off it. Walking hurt. Hopping was faster. You crossed the bedroom in an undignified half-lurch on your right leg when the left became too unreliable to trust.
By the time you reached the front door you were breathing hard.
You grabbed the handle, leaned your weight into it, and pulled it open.
"Kalista, I was so—"
The words stopped.
Dr. Jack Abbot looked back at you.
For a moment, neither of you said anything.
He was not in scrubs. Sweats, a plain T-shirt and a jacket over it like he had not planned to be out long. His hair was slightly damp at the edges, silver threaded through it at the temples. He looked tired in a way that made him seem more human and, somehow, more irritating for it.
The T-shirt did not leave much to the imagination. The fabric pulled across his shoulders and chest in the way that happened when someone had built that breadth through actual use rather than habit, and he was broader than you had registered in the trauma bay. Broader, and stiller, and looking at you with an expression that was working very hard to stay neutral and landing just slightly to the left of it.
His eyes moved over your face once.
Not lingering. Assessing.
You became immediately and violently aware that you were standing behind a half-open door in sleep shorts and a T-shirt, hair damp with sweat. Your saving grace was that the door was covering the prosthetic completely.
"What are you doing here?"
Your voice came out sharper than you intended.
His gaze did not drop below your face.
"Before you think I'm a creep," he said, "I got a call from an old friend. Frances Sawyer."
You stared at him.
Then, before you could stop it: "How do you know Sawyer?"
His mouth shifted slightly. "Served alongside her. Late nineties. Same rotation for a long time." Then his eyes came back to yours, direct. "She called me last night. Said there was a physician in Pittsburgh, recently separated from the Army, who might need a professional hand." He let the air between us hang. "The description sounded familiar."
Something inside you tightened.
"What did she tell you?"
"Enough."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you're getting from me at your front door." He held your gaze, steady, making no move toward you and no move to leave. Then his eyes dropped, briefly and deliberately, from your face to the hand you had wrapped around the doorframe.
Your knuckles. Split open again, stitches torn, dried blood along the breaks.
"Your stitches are gone," he said.
"I noticed."
"When."
You did not answer.
"You need those closed again."
"I'll manage."
"With which hand?"
Your eyes met his, neither of you moved.
"I have a suture kit," he said. "It's in my car."
"You don't have to—"
"You have a concussion, you're alone, and only one of those hands is your dominant one." His voice was not unkind. It was simply direct, in the way that did not leave much room for argument. "Accept the help."
You looked at your knuckles. The dried blood and the scabs were cracking along the gaps where the stitches had been. You knew, from both professional and very recent personal experience, that stitching your non-dominant hand would be a miserable exercise in stubbornness that your body would fight you through from start to finish.
"Fine," you said. "The door will be unlocked."
He nodded once and turned for the stairwell. That must have been how he got up here. You had not buzzed him in.
The second his back was to you, you moved.
Not rushing. Rushing led to falling, and you were not falling in front of him. But you moved with purpose, down the hall, into the bedroom. You let the sleep shorts drop and stepped into the baggiest pair of track pants you owned, working them up and settling them at your waist, the leg of the left side sitting loose and full over the socket. Socks, pulled high. Back out into the hallway.
The apartment was clean. Military clean, the habit too deep to shake regardless of what else was falling apart. The photo albums on the bookshelf. The stacked loose prints. Sawyer's two envelopes, still sealed, sitting where you had placed them. Your room was another matter entirely, but the door was closed and it was staying that way.
The bathroom door was also closed.
Do not think about the bathroom.
The prosthetic was pinching with every step, the blister along the socket line that had almost certainly torn somewhere on the bathroom floor burned. You settled onto the couch and adjusted your position until the pressure dropped from sharp to merely present.
The front door opened.
He came in quietly, the way attentive people moved through spaces that were not theirs. The suture kit was a small sealed case, the kind that lived in emergency bags and car compartments and suggested a person who did not go far without being prepared for contingencies.
He sat in the armchair across from you and opened the kit on the coffee table between you.
His eyes moved around the room the way they had in the trauma bay. Not intrusively. Just taking things in a beat longer than most people did. They moved across the bookshelf, across the stacked albums and loose prints on the lower shelf, across the two sealed envelopes. They slowed there for just a second.
He did not say anything. He opened a packet of saline and began cleaning your right hand.
"Any vomiting?"
"No."
"Vision changes since discharge?"
"No."
"Headache worse?"
"Not really."
He glanced up. Something in his expression noted the answer and filed it.
"Dizziness?"
When you were on the bathroom floor, yes.
"No."
He looked at you. Not at your words, exactly. Past them, at the space around them. Then he looked back down at your hand and kept working.
"Did you lose consciousness at any point?"
"I was sleeping."
"That's not what I asked." He waited with the patience of a man who had nowhere else to be and was not going to fill the silence for you.
"No," you said. "I did not lose consciousness."
"Good." He worked for a moment in quiet. You watched his hands. Precise. Practiced. Nothing needed adjusting.
Then, without looking up, he said, "Sawyer tells me you're starting at PTMC."
The words did not arrange themselves into meaning immediately.
"What?"
That got a reaction. His eyes came up, and you could see, very briefly, the recalibration of a man who had just realised he was the first person to deliver news he had not been given permission to deliver.
"She didn't tell you."
"No."
"When did you last check your email?"
You thought about it genuinely.
"I'm not sure," you admitted. "Months, maybe. It slipped my mind."
The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite amusement. Something adjacent to it. He looked back down at your hand.
"Admin has signed off on preliminary discussions," he said, working through the suture. "Observation period first. Limited duties, supervised. Credentialing will take time because your training history was complicated by the deployment structure, but it's workable." He clipped the thread on the last stitch of the first hand and moved to the second.
You were still processing.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Centre. The Pitt. It was not the field. Not deployment. Not Salerno. Not the thing you had lost and had been trying to claw your way back to for months through sheer wanting. But it was medicine. Real medicine, in a real facility, with real equipment and a full staff and all the particular aliveness of a trauma centre running at capacity.
Something was trying to open in your chest. You recognised the shape of it and pressed it carefully back down before it could get any larger. It was not a job yet. It was preliminary discussions and limited duties and credentialing paperwork. You had been disappointed before by things that sounded like they were finally going right.
But Sawyer had told you to trust her, and you had, and here it was.
He finished the second hand and clipped the thread.
"I owe you an apology," you said.
He looked up, "for what?" His voice had a quality that suggested he already knew but wanted to hear it.
"For implying you weren't paying attention in medical school."
"You more than implied."
"You were being condescending."
"I was asking standard triage questions."
You looked at him. He looked at you. Something in the space between you was trying to become amusement and not quite getting there yet.
"We were apparently trained under some of the same conditions," he said.
"Apparently." You considered him for a moment. "Though I imagine your charts were done by candlelight with an ink and quill."
His mouth shifted. "Charts. On a good night I had a headlamp and a prayer."
"Bosnia?" The question came out before you had decided whether or not to ask.
He looked at you steadily, "Kosovo," he said, "mostly."
"The war nobody talked about."
"No ticker tape parades," he agreed, quietly.
It sat there between you for a moment. That particular acknowledgement. The kind that did not require elaboration.
Then he set the kit aside and looked at you directly.
"I know," you said.
"I know you know."
"Knowing versus doing," you said it flat like it was going in one ear and out the other. "Separate skill sets. You've mentioned that."
"I'll keep mentioning it."
"I assumed," you scoffed.
He stood, suture kit in hand, and moved toward the kitchen. You meant to follow him immediately, but your first attempt at rising from the couch met a moment of resistance you had not accounted for, your weight shifting onto the left leg before the prosthetic had confirmed it was ready for that, and you dropped back down before you caught yourself.
His back was turned. He had not seen it.
Your second attempt was clean. You stood, rolled your shoulders back by habit, and followed him into the kitchen.
Like he had been here before, he went straight to the trash bin and disposed of the kit without comment.
It was as he was turning toward the hallway that you noticed it.
A slight shift in how he held himself when he changed direction. A barely-there compensation through the hip, a specific and practised redistribution of weight that most people would read as nothing more than a confident stride.
You did not read it as nothing. You had seen it, and you could not unsee it. Something in your chest had shifted in a way you did not yet have words for.
She opened the door and he stepped out into the hallway. Then he stopped and turned back to look at her.
"Thank you," you said. "Genuinely."
Something in his face settled, easier than it had been at any point since he had appeared in your doorway.
"For the stitches. And for coming." It was harder to say than it should have been, but you said it. "I know you didn't have to."
"Don't tear them again."
"I'll do my best."
"Check your email."
"I will."
"Today."
"Today."
At the corner of his mouth, a twitch. A small, contained smile that arrived like it had somewhere specific to be. Not the controlled expression from the trauma bay. Something else. It did not soften him exactly. He did not seem like a man who softened by accident. But it settled the tired set of his eyes into something warmer, and it changed the whole geography of his face in a way that was, against your will, quite something to look at.
He has a good smile. Do not. He is your future attending physician and he is obviously much older than you and you need to stop thinking about that.
You shelved the thought so fast it barely had time to breathe.
"I'll see you in The Pitt," he said. Simply, like a thing already decided. "Goodbye, Dr. Abbott," he added. "Two T's."
You rolled your eyes. He turned and started down the hallway. You held onto the doorframe.
"Dr. Abbot." It felt weird calling your own name but for someone else.
He stopped and turned just enough to look back at you.
"What exactly did Sawyer tell you about me?"
He was quiet for a moment, considering.
"She told me you were worth the trouble," he shrugged. "Past that, she said the rest was yours to give."
You held his gaze and nodded once. He nodded back, then turned away.
He walked to the elevator. You stood in your doorway with one hand on the frame, your prosthetic pinching, your knuckles neatly stitched, something cautious and unfamiliar sitting just below your sternum that you were not going to look at too directly.
The elevator doors closed.
You stepped back from the door and closed it, resting your back against it.
Quiet. Odd, almost--not just the apartment but your own head. You were not used to that.
You stood in it and let the last hour move through you. The strange, clarifying quality of someone who had looked straight at you without looking away. Who had not offered you a pass or a consolation. Who had walked the same terrain and come out the other side and somehow, without saying any of it directly, made you feel like that was something you were also allowed to do. Who had sat across from you and stitched your hands and spoken to you like a colleague rather than a casualty.
Then:
Oh, fuck. My car.
You let your head fall back against the door with a soft thud, eyes closing, a long slow breath leaving your chest.
And just like that, the quiet was gone.
AN: Thank you again! This is so surreal to me. Having people read my work and like it enough to come back genuinely means so much. I really do appreciate it more than I can say.
I've also attempted to make a taglist for those who asked! If you'd like to be added just let me know and I'll do my best. Comments, reblogs, and thoughts are always welcome <3
Pairing: Dr. Jack Abbot x Reader
Fandom: The Pitt
Reader: resident/combat medic!reader, amputee!reader, ex-military!reader, widow!reader
Summary: After being honourably discharged from the Army, you arrive in Pittsburgh with a half-finished residency, a body you are still learning how to live in, and a past you have no intention of unpacking. Dr. Jack Abbot is supposed to be a professional contact, nothing more. But he notices too much, understands things he should not understand, and carries himself with a familiarity you cannot quite place. What begins as professional tension slowly becomes something harder to ignore.
Word Count: 11K
Masterlist
Warnings: age gap, mentor/mentee relationship, medical trauma, military trauma, PTSD symptoms, grief, spouse death, widowhood, amputation, prosthetic limb adjustment, survivor’s guilt, emotional repression, panic/nightmare episodes, captivity/torture references, violence, blood/injury, medical procedures, concussion, alcohol/smoking, age gap, complicated healing, eventual smut, swearing
Author’s Note: Hi :) This is my first time posting on here, so please be kind. I’m still figuring things out, but this story has been rattling around in my head for a while and I finally decided to just start getting it out. I’m mostly posting this for myself, but I hope at least one person enjoys it too. I tried to research the medical and military details, but I’m definitely not an expert, so please forgive any inaccuracies.
Oh! Also, this first part is very foundation-heavy, the reader doesn’t meet Jack right away. I wanted the emotional groundwork to feel earned, so I tried to keep the story detailed, thoughtful, and rooted in reality where I could. This is a slooooow burn. Enjoy!
"Hey, thank you so much for helping me with that." You let out a heavy sigh as you drop the trunk onto the elevator floor. It was way too big for one person to carry alone. You'd known that the second you tried to wrestle it through the lobby doors, and you'd done it anyway. Your neighbour had appeared out of nowhere and grabbed the other end without being asked.
"Thanks again," you trail off, waiting for her to fill in her name.
"Kalista," she finishes, then looks around the apartment with an expression caught somewhere between impressed and amused. "So. Not a lot of stuff?"
It was almost comical, you had to admit. Nine large boxes covered in dust with god knows what inside. Three duffels and two backpacks full of clothes and miscellaneous hygiene products. A disassembled bed frame with no mattress. An L-shaped olive green velvet couch that came with the apartment. The massive trunk Kalista had just helped you drag upstairs. And a few other odds and ends sitting static in a living space that was, by any measure, far too large for what you'd brought to fill it.
The apartment was nice, genuinely nice. A long hallway from the entrance opened through a wide arch into the living room. The kitchen and eating area sat beyond that, and covering the entire back wall was a gigantic semi-circle of windows that caught the afternoon light in a way that had sold you on this place before you'd even finished the tour.
You loved the sun. It gave you a kind of peace you couldn't fully articulate, just a steadiness, like being reminded the world was still turning. Large windows had been your only non-negotiable when you were searching. The balcony was through the sliding glass doors, and on a clear day you imagined you could stand out there and feel almost normal.
There were two bedrooms. The master had an ensuite. The second sat on the opposite end of the apartment with its own bathroom and a standing shower. Both had decent closets. Laundry was in-suite. You could walk a straight line from the front door all the way through to the balcony without turning.
You liked it. You did. But it felt strange, all this space, just for you. You weren't used to that. You weren't sure you'd ever been used to that.
"I just got back," you say, setting your keys on the kitchen counter. "I've been away for a while. Couldn't carry much with me on the road."
You look at the girl still standing in your doorway. Light brown hair, blue eyes, olive skin. A few dainty floral tattoos running up her forearms, nothing heavy, just delicate lines and small blooms. She was dressed in blue denim and a fitted white top with ARMY printed across the chest in block letters.
Ironic.
Something stirred in you that you didn't want to name. A small, irrational heat moving up through your chest. You recognized it before it could get any further. Your therapist had a word for it, something about intrusive emotional responses, about how the brain codes certain stimuli as threats long after the actual threat is gone. You knew the theory. That didn't always make it easier.
Unjustified. She doesn't know. You have no right to be upset with her for wearing a shirt.
Before it can build, you breathe in through your nose and let it go slowly. You scan the room the way Dr. Osei had taught you. One, boxes. Two, duffels. Three, the grey walls. Four, the balcony door. Five, the kitchen counter. You feel your pulse settle.
"You said you just got back?" Kalista interrupted your thoughts, tilting her head. "From where?"
Your mouth moved a half-second before your brain caught up. "Afghanistan. Iraq. Kuwait for a stretch. South Sudan. Most recently Syria." You paused. "I spent the last three years doing my residency embedded with a forward surgical team. It's like a Forward Operating Base. Salerno was my primary, but we moved around a lot. Combat medicine, mostly trauma." You glanced down. A breath snagged somewhere in your chest. "I got sent home."
"Sent home?" She said it carefully, like she wasn't sure she was allowed to ask.
"I was a medical intern when I deployed… made it through two and a half years of my physician residency." You kept your voice even. "Then I was involved in an incident and I lost it a little." A short, humourless sound escaped you that wasn't quite a laugh. "Honourably discharged. Sent home three-quarters of the person I used to be." You felt the tears threaten the back of your eyes and looked deliberately past her until the feeling passed. "My sergeant major, she's the one who convinced me to come to Pittsburgh. Said she had connections here, that she'd find me something. So here I am."
"So you're a doctor," she said slowly, "and a soldier." Her eyes had gone wide, the way people's eyes went when they were recalibrating everything they thought they knew about a conversation. "What happened to you?"
And then, before you could even form a beginning, she pulled it back.
"I'm so sorry, I didn't mean, I--" She was already backtracking, hands up, eyes apologetic. She'd clearly clocked something in your face you'd been trying to hide.
"It's okay," you said, and meant it, more or less. "You're the first person I've actually talked to in this city. Aside from the airport clerk at baggage claim and a taxi driver."
True. Completely true.
You didn't have anyone in Pittsburgh. You didn't have anyone anywhere, not anymore. Not after--
"Are you okay?" she asked. "Now, I mean." A beat. "You don't have to answer that either."
You considered it honestly. Were you okay? Right now, at this moment, you were distracted by the moving, by the boxes, by the task of standing in a new city in a new apartment and figuring out what came next. That counted for something.
"I think so?" It came out more like a question than a statement. "I'm still adjusting." You reached down and lifted the hem of your left pant leg, just enough. The prosthetic caught the light, cool gunmetal, carbon fibre casing below the knee, a replacement for what had been amputated eight months ago on the second worst day of your life.
"Woah--" Her eyes went wide. "Sorry, I didn't mean to--"
"It's okay," you cut her off, not unkindly. "That's the look I give it too."
She was quiet for a moment. Then something shifted in her face, not pity exactly. Something more like recognition of the weight of it, without pretending to understand the specifics. You appreciated that more than you could explain.
Kalista was the first person, outside of medical staff and your commanding officer, who knew about the leg. And that small honesty, those two sentences and a lifted hem, was probably the most vulnerable you'd allowed yourself to be in months. You weren't sure why you'd done it. Maybe because she'd helped carry your trunk without being asked. Maybe because the city felt enormous and you had no one in it.
You didn't notice the tears until you felt her arms around you. Quick and warm and a little fierce, like she'd decided and acted before she could second-guess herself.
"Sorry if that was weird," she said, already pulling back. "I just thought you might need a hug." She looked at you then, direct and unhesitating. "Okay, listen. You're new to the city. You're clearly an incredibly cool human being. You're a doctor and a soldier and--" she gestured at you in a way that managed to be both sincere and ridiculous, "honestly you're a little intimidating to look at. And I know what it's like to show up somewhere alone and not know a single person." She held her phone out. "Give me your number. Text me. Let's be friends."
You let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "I don't need a pity friend."
"Not a pity friend. Your first friend in Pittsburgh." She smiled, wide and bright and genuinely warm.
"I don't even know your last name."
"Okay, fine." A dramatic sigh. "Hi. My name is Kalista Reid. I'm 28, I live in unit 601 across the hall, and I am currently offering you my very limited and highly sought-after friendship." She looked at you expectantly.
The wall you'd been quietly reinforcing for months, the one you'd rebuilt piece by piece since the field hospital, since the flight home, since all of it, gave a single, audible crack.
"Hi," you said. "My name is Y/N. I'm 28. I live in unit 600." The corner of your mouth moved against your will.
"So you don't have a last name?" Her eyebrow lifted.
"Y/N Abbott."
"Y/N Abbott." She grinned. "It's very nice to meet you."
Four Days Later
Over the next few days, you and Kalista got to know each other with the particular intensity of two people who had stumbled into each other's orbit at exactly the right moment. She told you about working her way up through Pittsburgh's restaurant kitchens over the last decade, starting at the bottom, learning every station, building the kind of skill that only repetition and stubbornness could produce. She was a sous chef now at a place downtown that she described as "fancy but not pretentious, there's a difference." She told you about her family, her exes, her running roster of hobbies, and the exhaustive, occasionally unhinged details of her most recent love affair, which had ended with her walking out of a restaurant mid-entree and not looking back.
"So I couldn't take it anymore and I left him," she finished, landing the story with the satisfaction of someone who had told it several times and still enjoyed it.
"I would have left too," you said, still laughing.
The more you learned about her, the more it became clear that you could not have been more different. Her life was spontaneous and colourful and moved fast, with a particular kind of warmth that filled whatever room she was in. Yours had been structured and precise and governed by protocol for so long that you'd nearly forgotten what the alternative felt like. Maybe that was what made it easy. She was unlike anyone you'd spent real time with in years.
Four days in, you'd unpacked almost everything. A mattress had arrived. Kalista had strong opinions about throw pillows and had escorted you, somewhat against your will, to a home goods store where she'd made several executive decisions on your behalf.
The apartment was starting to look inhabited.
She stood up from the couch and wandered toward the last unpacked box, sitting near the far wall.
"You still haven't touched this one?"
"It's just books," you said, a little too quickly. You gestured for her to leave it.
"I like to read." She picked it up. It was heavier than it looked, and you knew that. She set it down closer to you, just out of arm's reach, and opened the flaps.
Everything in you went still.
Your heart rate spiked before your brain had time to explain why. The room began to contract slightly at the edges. You could hear your pulse in your ears, low and fast and rhythmic. The urge to reach over and close the box, to put your body between Kalista and whatever was inside it, rose up so sharply it took real effort to stay seated.
"These are so cute," she said, already lifting one of the photo books. "Is this baby Y/N?"
Breathe.
"Yeah," you said. "Baby Y/N." You reached out and pulled the cardboard gently toward yourself. Inside were at least fifteen photo albums, stacked in neat rows. A careful, chronological documentation of a life. "Oh, look at this one, you're naked!" She turned the book around, and there was a two-year-old version of you sitting in a bathtub with a rubber duck, completely unabashed.
The laugh that came out of you was real. "My dad never put his camera down. He was a photographer." You dug through the box, dug was generous, you knew exactly where it was, and found a photo of him taking a picture of himself in a mirror, grinning at his own reflection.
"Aw, that's your dad?" Kalista's face softened. "He looks nice. Where does he live?"
The smile left your face before you could catch it.
You stood up, shifted your weight, you still caught yourself compensating with the prosthetic when you moved too quickly, and walked to your room. You came back with a small box, the size of something you could hold in both hands. Solid dark oak, hinged at the back, with ABBOTT engraved across the lid in clean block letters surrounded by delicate filigree work. You set it on the cushion between you and unclasped the lid.
Red velvet lining. Three small urns, each a different size, sitting in fitted recesses. Nestled beside them, a small photo book, normal paperback size, worn at the corners, filled with pictures from before. Before everything. And beside that, a small chocolate brown leather box.
"Kalista," you said quietly, "this is my family. My mom, my dad, and my brother."
"Y/N--"
"My parents died when I was nine. Car accident." You said it the way you'd learned to say it, evenly, without pausing, because pausing let other people's grief into the room and you didn't always have space for it. You opened the small photo book and began turning pages slowly as you talked, not really seeing the images, just needing something to do with your hands. "A drunk driver ran a red light and hit us hard." You could close your eyes and still be there, upside down in the back seat, the airbags deflating around you, the smell of gasoline and something metallic, glass covering what should have been the ceiling. "My mother died on impact. My dad survived the crash itself but a steel rod had come through the windshield. It tore through his diaphragm, the left lobe of his liver, his stomach, his pancreas." A pause. "The abdominal aorta. I know now that he could never have survived that kind of injury. Nobody could."
Kalista had gone very still.
"My brother Hunter was fourteen. He woke up before I did. I don't know how long he was conscious in that car before anyone came." You turned a page. Hunter at seven, squinting into the sun. "He was never quite the same after. There were good stretches, real ones, where he felt like himself again. But he got into drugs." A slow exhale. "When I was sixteen, his girlfriend called me. She said he wasn't moving. I didn't have a car so I got on my bike and rode as fast as I could. I don't know why she didn't call 911, maybe she panicked, maybe she was scared because of the drugs, but he was gone by the time I got there." You reached the last page. The four of you, smiling, in a photo taken by a stranger outside some restaurant you couldn't remember the name of. You closed the cover. "I'd seen him come back from an overdose before. Not this time."
"Fuck," Kalista said softly. A tear ran down her chin.
"Yeah." You looked at the small wooden box. "But I've got them all here." You pressed your hand flat against the centre of your chest.
She hugged you again, tighter this time, like she was trying to hold something together. This time, you let yourself lean into it. Just slightly. Just enough.
She sniffed, swiped at her face, and looked deliberately at the stack of photo books with the energy of someone actively choosing to change the temperature of the room. "Okay. What about all of these? Are these all from the military?"
"Some." You pulled a few toward you and passed her one. "Military, university, med school, residency. A lot of years."
You flipped through pages slowly, giving her the shorthand version of each face. Your first squad, the five of you in a circle shoulder to shoulder like you're a football team huddling in between downs. The commanding officer, Sergeant Major Sawyer, who'd cornered you after a particularly gruelling week in your second year and told you flatly that you were too smart to be doing what you were doing and that if you didn't apply for the HPSP scholarship she would personally make your life difficult until you did. Pages and pages filled with years of memories with friends who'd become family across three deployments.
Then you turned a page and stopped.
The photo was taken outside in harsh midday sun, both of you in full kit. Operational camouflage pattern. Modular Scalable Vest loaded with ballistic plates, MOLLE-mounted magazine pouches, a radio pouch, an IFAK strapped along his side. His combat helmet was on the ground at your feet, discarded, technically against protocol, and absolutely characteristic. Your med kit sat next to it, enormous and overstuffed. Both of you had M4 carbines hanging on two-point slings across your chests. He was bent toward you and you were on your toes. Most of his face was turned away from the camera, but what was visible was enough, a jaw, the line of a neck, the particular way his whole posture changed when he was looking at you.
"Who," Kalista said slowly, "is THAT."
"It's a sensitive subject," you said, the words coming out before you'd made any conscious decision to speak.
"Oh, I'm sorry, you don't have to--" She was already pivoting, alarmed that she'd pulled on something load-bearing.
The doorbell rang.
You both looked up.
"Be right back." You got up carefully and crossed to the door.
A delivery driver stood in the hallway, scanner in hand. "Package for Abbott?"
"That's me."
"First name?"
"Y/N."
"Sign here." He handed over the clipboard. You scrawled your name and took the box from him. The size of a briefcase, heavier than it looked. You turned it over in your hands, searching for a return address, and found the sender's name printed in the top left corner in black block letters.
F. SAWYER.
Your sergeant major.
You stood in the hallway for a moment, just holding it.
You passed back through the living room and went to the kitchen, looking for scissors. Your hands were steady. That was something.
"Who is it?"
"A package from... an old friend."
"Ooooh, is it the old friend in that picture?" Kalista's voice carried around the corner, and you could hear the raised eyebrow in it.
"No, he was..." you trailed off, finding the scissors and cutting the tape. "Not the same person." You carried the box to the couch and sat down.
You folded back the cardboard.
A breath you hadn't known you were holding left your body all at once.
The tears came before anything else. Not the slow, manageable kind, the kind that blur everything immediately, that make the walls feel closer and the air feel thinner. Your pulse was in your ears again. A high thin ringing started up somewhere behind your eyes.
And then, just as fast, you shut it down.
Not here. Not right now.
You pulled each feeling back as it surfaced and pushed it down into the place you kept things like this, deep in the pit of your stomach, that quiet abyss where you could put the things that would break you if you gave them room. You sealed it. Breathed. Wiped your face with the back of your hand.
When you exhaled, you were steadier. You looked at Kalista, who was watching you with the careful expression of someone who understood she was witnessing something she hadn't been given the full context for yet.
"Holy shit," she said quietly, leaning in.
The box was packed with photographs. Hundreds of them, four-by-six glossy prints, stacked in loose rows, sorted into stacks. In the centre on top of all the photos sat two envelopes. One large tan envelope, stamped:
CONFIDENTIAL SGT. A. HANDSCOMBE
The other a letter-sized white envelope with your name written on the front by hand. Sawyer's handwriting, tight and slanted and unmistakable.
You picked both envelopes up and held them together. Something slid loose from between them and landed on top of the photographs.
A small clear plastic bag. Inside it, a ring. White gold, plain textured band, solid and unadorned.
"Oh my god--" Kalista stopped herself.
You reached up and found the chain around your neck, thin white gold, and pulled it out from beneath your shirt. Hanging from the end of it, a marquise-cut diamond in a white gold setting, delicate, distinctive, completely itself.
A perfect match for the ring sitting in the bag.
Kalista didn't say anything. She didn't need to.
"I'll give you the short version," you said, before she could ask.
And so you told her about him.
Adam Handscombe. Everyone who'd served with him for more than a week called him Corporal Handsome, a nickname that had attached itself to him when he was promoted to E-4 and refused to leave even after he'd made Sergeant. He'd introduced himself by the wrong name, or so you'd thought, the very first week you enlisted.
You met him at eighteen. He was twenty, two years in, already PFC and moving fast. He was assigned to show new arrivals around the FOB.
"Private Handsome?" You'd stared at him.
"Hands-combe." He'd said it the way you said things to someone who'd asked you to repeat themselves three times, efficient, not unkind, with the particular cadence of a man who had corrected this exact misunderstanding many times before. "But it doesn't hurt the ego either way."
You'd laughed. You weren't sure why, except that something in his delivery had been so entirely, disarmingly certain of itself.
You were flipping through photographs with Kalista as you talked. Sawyer had organized them, of course, dated on the back, sorted chronologically.
You'd always documented your life the way your father had, snapping pictures and getting them printed, building a physical record the way other people kept journals. You hadn't met anyone who understood that impulse until Adam. He'd kept a small digital camera in a pocket he'd sewn into the inside of his vest, completely against regulation, a rule he'd made peace with on the grounds that he wasn't photographing anything "classified". He'd photograph the sun going down over the base perimeter, the way the light turned everything amber at a certain angle. He'd photograph you looking at that same sunset, unaware, and you wouldn't find out until later.
You hadn't looked at most of these pictures in a very long time.
Then you turned to a spread and there the two of you were, surrounded by soldiers, white confetti paper thrown in the air, both of you laughing in the middle of all of it. Married. You looked at the place on your hand where the rings used to sit, the engagement ring now on the chain at your throat, the wedding band in the small chocolate brown leather box inside the oak box with your family.
"How did he..." Kalista started, and couldn't finish it.
"We didn't work together directly," you said carefully. "The Army discourages married couples from serving in close proximity, but in practice it didn't mean much. He was a Ranger with the 75th, I was attached to the forward surgical unit, our days rarely crossed." You paused. "He came by the medical centre at the end of his shift. We'd been married for seven days." You stopped. Swallowed. "He'd gotten hold of a small bouquet of flowers somewhere. I still don't know how, out there. Maybe a dozen, wrapped in brown paper. He called it a seven-day anniversary. We left through a back exit and walked toward a section of the perimeter wall that wasn't heavily monitored, hard to approach from the road, off to the side. We used to go there in the evenings sometimes. Just to talk." Another pause. "It was the perfect spot for an ambush."
"So, Mrs. Handscombe," he'd said, pulling himself up onto the wide ledge at the top of the gate, laughing as he said it.
"I haven't changed it yet," you told him, taking the hand he offered. "I love Abbott. I don't want to lose it."
"Then don't change it." He said it simply, like it was the easiest decision in the world. "We can be Sergeant Handscombe and Resident Physician Abbott, the perfect team that everyone is jealous of."
Then he kissed you. His hand came up to your jaw, tilting your face to his, and his lips met yours with the kind of certainty that never got old, soft at first, then fuller, like a sentence that started quietly and meant everything by the end. You felt it the way you always felt it with him: the particular warmth that moved through your chest, the way the rest of the world went a little quieter. You'd been in love with this man for years and it still felt like the first time someone had decided to choose you, completely, without reservation.
You loved him.
The thought moved through you clean and simple and enormous.
And he loved you back. You had never doubted that, not for a single day. He knew you the way very few people ever get to know another person: the way you thought before you spoke, the thing you needed before you asked for it, the difference between the silence that meant you were okay and the silence that meant you weren't. You knew him just the same. You were the same shape, the two of you, just made differently.
"I love you," you said, into the space between you.
"I love you too." He pressed his forehead to yours, that wide ridiculous smile breaking across his face. "Okay, I have to tell you what happened with Rosenberg today. We were out in the--"
BANG.
One tear fell from your face and landed on the photograph in front of you. Adam on one knee, brown leather ring box in his right hand, digital camera angled upward in his left, documenting the moment from both sides at once, because of course he was. The next photo was his, taken from below, looking up at your face. Ring box in the lower frame. Your expression: a smile so wide it had taken over everything else, tears already streaming, clearly mid-yes.
That had been one of the best days of your life.
You and Kalista sat together for a long time after that. You told her stories about Adam, about the life that had existed before FOB Salerno and everything that happened there. At some point food was ordered and wine was opened, and somehow, without either of you quite deciding it, you had found yourself in a real friendship.
You didn't mind.
Three Days Later
Kalista had, through what you could only describe as a sustained campaign of low-grade social pressure, convinced you to go out.
You had agreed reluctantly, conditionally, with the caveat that you weren't going to wear anything that made you feel like a different person.
She took one look at your wardrobe and vetoed the entire premise. "We're going to my place first," she said, already walking across the hall.
She found you a pair of low-rise flared black leather jeans that sat just right, no chance of the prosthetic showing unless you lifted the pant leg, and a shimmering silver top that fell a couple of inches above the waistband and caught the light when you moved. Black leather jacket over the top. Your Docs already on your feet, needing no intervention.
"Okay," she said, stepping back to look at you, "I need you to know that you are genuinely unfair to look at."
You laughed and grabbed your keys before leaving the apartment complex.
You drove. You weren't planning on drinking much.
The bar was loud and close and warm in the way bars got when they were packed, bodies everywhere, music you could feel in the floor more than hear through your ears, the particular energy of a Friday night in a city that took its Fridays seriously. You'd been to a bar maybe four times in medical school, most leaving before midnight. This was different. Kalista moved through it like she'd been coming here for years, which she probably had.
For a while, it was good. Better than you'd expected. You had a drink in your hand and your mind was occupied in the way it only got when there was enough sensory noise to crowd out the other things. You stood at the edge of the dance floor for a while, watching. A couple grinding against each other like they'd already decided where the night was ending. A group of women taking photos. A very large man being walked out by a bouncer with the resigned expression of someone who had done this many times tonight.
Kalista reappeared through the crowd with two drinks.
"I don't know if I should," you said, leaning in to be heard. "I drove."
"A couple of drinks won't kill you," she said, touching the bottom of your glass and tilting it upward. "Chug."
You didn't question it. You chugged. Cold and sweet, ice hitting your teeth at the end.
Somehow you ended up on the dance floor. Your body moved to the beat and for a while your brain was mercifully, completely quiet. A fine layer of sweat started at the back of your neck. You didn't know how much time had passed. You danced, you drank, you let go--just for a second. Eventually, Kalista tilted her head toward the exit and you followed her out through the front doors into the night air.
It hit you all at once, cold and clean, and you both stood there for a second, breathing it in.
"Oh my god you're so fun," Kalista said, arms spread wide, face tipped to the sky. She turned to you. "I am so happy you moved into my building."
"Me too," you said. And meant it.
To the left, a designated smoking area. A small cluster of people. You hadn't smoked since... you caught yourself. In a long time. The craving arrived the way it always did: specific and patient and completely uninterested in being reasoned with.
Kalista had already spotted someone. "Any chance we could bum a couple?" she asked, and a guy produced two without hesitation.
You thanked him quietly, lit yours, took a slow drag.
The nicotine moved through you in one clean wave.
Fuuuck. You'd missed that.
You weren't listening to the conversation next to you. You were just standing in it, watching the ember at the end of the cigarette, letting your mind go silent for the first time in days. That was the thing about cigarettes, the thing nobody liked to admit: they forced you to stop. To stand still. To breathe on a count.
"Shut the fuck up."
The words ripped you back instantly.
You turned just in time to hear the crack, the hard flat sound of a fist connecting with a face, and see Kalista go down.
You didn't think. That was the truth of it, and you would examine that truth later in the quiet of your apartment with a certain amount of unease. You didn't think. You just moved.
Kalista was on the ground, hands to her face. The man was enormous, well over six feet, broad through the shoulders, clearly drunk, which meant slower but also less predictable. You'd had a a few drinks, you'd been dancing for you don't know how long, and the adrenaline flooding your system was now at a concentration that made the alcohol irrelevant.
"Hey -- what the FUCK."
You hit him centre mass with your shoulder, driving your weight into his ribs. He staggered, more than you expected. His arms came up to push you back but you followed his arms and ripped them down before he could get the leverage, a defensive manoeuvre as automatic as breathing. He was stronger than you and you couldn't stay in a stationary grapple with someone this size. He recovered faster than you wanted. His fist came back and connected across the side of your face. You turned your head with it, an old reflex that saved you from the worst of it, but it still landed hard.
You saw red.
You hit his face. You drove a short jab to his midsection targeting the liver, then a sharp cross to his kidney. You couldn't feel the skin on your knuckles tearing apart as you hit him, blow after blow. He was drunk, which was the only reason this "plan" worked even slightly in your favour. You took him to the ground. You were on top of him, and somewhere between the first hit and the last you stopped counting, stopped thinking, stopped being in Pittsburgh entirely.
Someone grabbed you from behind, both arms around your torso, hauling you upright. You kicked and swung on pure reflex and they let go immediately. You could hear sirens under the ringing in your ears.
Kalista.
You ran to where she was sitting on the pavement, knees pulled to her chest.
"Let me look," you said, crouching beside her, two fingers tilting her chin upward. Doctor's hands now, steady, efficient, separated from everything else. Her nose had taken the full force of it. Deviated, visibly swollen, already darkening at the bridge. The shape was wrong. "We're going to need to go to the hospital," you told her, as gently as you could manage.
Behind you: "The one in the leather pants?"
A female officer. Calm, professional, expression giving nothing away. She had the particular stillness of someone who'd seen a lot of nights like this one.
"Ma'am. Can you come with me, please."
You stood and followed. Before she could start, you asked for the paramedics to go to Kalista first and gave them your initial assessment in a dozen words. Then you turned back to the officer.
"I can explain what happened."
"I'd appreciate that."
"We were in the smoking area. He started talking to her. I wasn't paying close enough attention." You kept your hands loose at your sides, your weight centred, your voice level. Your split and bloodied knuckles turned discreetly away. "I turned around when I heard him scream and she was already on the ground. I'm a combat physician. I reacted before I thought it through and I'm aware of that. But he broke her nose."
The officer looked at you, not at your face, but at the way you were standing. The way your weight was distributed. The way your hands were positioned. She'd seen this posture before, you could tell.
"Walk me through the part where you took down a man twice your weight and beat him bloody."
"He hit her. I reacted. I lost track of where I was for a moment." A pause. "That's not an excuse. It's what happened."
She studied you for a long beat. Then she glanced at your face, the bruising already darkening around your eye where his fist had landed, and something in her stern expression shifted. Not softness. Recognition.
"You took a hit too," she said, less like an observation and more like she was making a decision. "You should get that looked at."
"I'll be fine."
"You'll get it looked at," she said, and it wasn't a suggestion. She looked at the ground for a moment, working something through. "Multiple witnesses all put him as the one who threw first and her as the one who went down." She chose her next words carefully. "My read is he won't want to complicate this for himself. Not with that many people watching."
"That's not fair to her."
"No," the officer agreed, quietly. "It's not."
A pause.
"Am I being arrested?"
"Not tonight." She held your gaze for a moment. "Thank you for your service."
You nodded once and turned away.
Your feet didn't move immediately. You stood there, shoulders square, feet at shoulder width, hands loose at your sides. Alert. Waiting for a command that wasn't coming.
At ease.
You weren't sure if she'd said it or if you'd just needed to hear it. Either way, it was enough.
You made yourself walk to where the ambulance had pulled up. Kalista was on a gurney, pressing gauze to her face, looking simultaneously miserable and deeply unimpressed with how the evening had gone.
"Hey," you said, resting your hand on the edge of the stretcher. "How are you doing?"
"I'b been beder," she said, nasally, through the gauze.
You turned to the paramedic to her left. "Can I ride with her?"
He nodded. You climbed in.
The ambulance moved through downtown Pittsburgh, lights going, and you watched the paramedics work without interfering. You checked Kalista's vitals on the monitor, heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, all within acceptable range, and let yourself exhale slowly.
Then you looked at her again.
Something was slightly wrong.
Not wrong in the way that showed up on a monitor. Wrong in the way you had learned to read in places where the monitors weren't always available, where you had trained yourself to look at a person and take the information directly. The subtle asymmetry in her chest rise. The way she kept tilting her chin fractionally forward without seeming to notice.
Compensation.
Her airway was narrowing.
"Can you breathe okay?" you asked.
"Ib fine," she said.
"Kalista. Is your nose blocked on one side or both?"
A pause. "Both."
There it is.
"I need a penlight," you said to the paramedic on your right.
He looked at you properly for the first time. "Sorry, who are you exactly?"
"I'm her friend, who also happens to be a doctor. Something is wrong. I need a light."
He crossed his arms. "We're eight minutes out. Whatever you're thinking, it can wait until we're at the ED."
"It actually cannot wait." You kept your voice flat, clinical. "She's compensating. Her airway is narrowing. I can see it. Penlight. Please."
He looked to his partner looking for an answer, and you took action.
Fine.
You reached past him, pulled a pair of gloves from the dispenser on the wall, and snapped them on. "I'm going to need an 18-gauge needle and an angiocath when you're ready to be helpful." You didn't wait. You used your own phone light, leaning in to check the inside of Kalista's nose, pressing gently along the septum.
There.
A dark, taut, blood-filled swelling just inside the nasal passage on both sides. A septal hematoma, and a growing one. Another couple minutes and she'd have no airway left before they reached the ED.
"She has a septal hematoma," you said, turning to him. "A blood clot forming inside the nose that's pressing on her airway. I need an 18-gauge needle. Now."
"That is not a procedure we perform in the rig--"
"Now!" You held his gaze. "I'm asking you to hand me a needle. I've drained these in a tent in the desert with a headlamp and no backup. I will take every ounce of responsibility. Hand me the needle or stand there and watch this get worse when it doesn’t have to. Your call."
He looked at you, at the blood stains peaking through the blue latex of the glove, at the bruise forming around your eye, at the expression on your face that had nothing uncertain in it.
He handed you the needle.
You worked quickly and gently, the kind of efficiency that doesn't look like speed but gets everything done. A clean puncture, the pressure releasing in seconds. Kalista made a small involuntary sound and then exhaled through both sides of her nose for the first time since she'd been hit.
"Oh," she said, blinking. "Oh, that's so much better."
"I know." You pressed a small piece of gauze into place. "Don't touch it."
The paramedic on your right was quiet for a moment. Then: "We're supposed to wait for the ED on something like that."
"Sometimes you have to think about the life in front of you and not the rules," you said. "That's how we did it over there. Quick and dirty, whatever keeps the patient breathing."
He nodded slowly, like something had been filed away.
The ambulance pulled into the bay. As the doors opened and the gurney came out, he turned back to you.
"This is going to be a lot of paperwork."
"Yeah," you said. "It usually is."
The paramedics handed Kalista off to the ED staff, rattling off vitals and status, and she disappeared through the doors on the gurney. You trailed behind, knowing you couldn't follow her into the trauma bay. You stopped at the threshold and watched her go.
The paramedic who was driving appeared at your shoulder. "You good?" He was looking at your face, specifically at the bruising around your eye and the cut at your temple, which you hadn't thought much about until right now. You lifted your hand to it and your fingers came back wet.
Oh. He'd hit you hard enough to break skin.
You genuinely hadn't noticed. You looked down at your knuckles, split and still faintly seeping. You tried to remember what the guy looked like by the end and found you mostly couldn't.
That is not good.
"Yeah, I'm fine," you said, unconvincingly even to yourself. "I'll get a bandage or something."
"You should check in at the front desk." He gestured toward the waiting room doors.
"Yeah." You peeled away and turned left, and then your knee buckled.
Not all the way. You caught yourself on the way down, one hand out, taking a knee like you'd stumbled on uneven ground. And you were already pushing back up before you'd fully registered what had happened, both hands pressing off your right leg, forcing yourself upright through sheer stubbornness.
You'd be damned.
The prosthetic had slipped slightly in the socket, too much impact, too much movement, and somewhere in all of it you'd forgotten for a second that it was there. The paramedic was already at your elbow.
"Hey, are you sure you're alright?"
"Yeah." You locked your knee, felt the fit settle. "Just, yeah. I'm--."
"Who? Where is she."
The voice cut through the ED like something thrown hard at a wall. Sharp, loud, carrying the particular authority of someone who didn't raise their voice often and meant it when they did.
Both your head and the paramedic's snapped toward it.
Across the bay, near the nurses' station, a small crowd had formed. You could see the other paramedic from the ambulance talking rapidly to an older man, late forties maybe, with salt and pepper hair that curled slightly at the ends. His face was stoic. His jaw was set, his brow sharp, his posture absolutely squared. He was built like someone who had earned it over a long time and then kept it. Handsome in a way that caught you slightly off guard given the grey at his temples, the kind of face that had lived in it.
Wait. Did you just--
The thought dissolved because he was already moving toward you, and the paramedic beside you was making the face of a man who had just remembered somewhere else he urgently needed to be.
"Good luck," he said, and walked away before you could respond.
The man crossed the bay in firm, deliberate strides, not storming exactly, but with the kind of momentum that made people step aside without being asked. Something about the way he moved reminded you of Sawyer. The authority of it. The way his presence arrived just before he did.
Without thinking, you rolled your shoulders back. Feet--
Foot.
Shoulder width apart. Hands behind you, right clasped over left.
He stopped in front of you. He looked you over in one full pass, head to toe and back up--assessing, cataloguing, and landing finally on your eyes.
"You were the one who drained a septal hematoma in a moving ambulance?" His words were measured. He was sizing you up, you could feel it, the same way you were sizing him up.
"Yes," you said. "And I would do it again."
Direct. No qualifier, no apology. He'd expected defensive and gotten something else entirely.
"And who gave you the authority to do that?"
You have to be kidding me.
"I did," you said, "when I saw her compensating while we were still eight minutes out from the ED with a narrowing airway." You held his gaze.
Something shifted in his face. Barely. You'd have missed it if you weren't watching.
"You saw her compensating," he repeated, flat. Testing whether you'd move.
You didn't. "She's my friend. What was I supposed to do, sit there and watch her struggle to breathe?"
He was angry, you could see it contained behind his eyes, carefully managed, the anger of someone who ran a tight ship and didn't appreciate unplanned variables. But he didn't blow.
"And you think," he said, "in this state—" he gestured, briefly, at your face, at the clear bruising forming around your eye— "you were making sound medical decisions?
You almost laughed. "Is she dead?"
He didn't answer right away.
You didn't let the silence sit. "No. She's not. Because I performed a clean field drainage of a septal hematoma." You held his gaze. "In a moving ambulance." You took one step toward him, ignoring the dull ache at your residual limb that you'd deal with later. "I knew exactly what I was doing and I can walk you through every decision I made. Or maybe," a beat, short and deliberate, "you weren't paying attention in medical school."
That landed. You could see it in the fraction of a second where his expression went from controlled to genuinely caught off guard.
He is attractive thou-- Stop. Absolutely not. Move on.
You held your ground. He held his. The two of you stood close enough that you could feel the air between you shift slightly. Neither of you looked away.
"Do not leave this hospital." He said it quietly, which was somehow worse than loud. He turned his head slightly without breaking eye contact. "Ellis."
A woman appeared just behind his left shoulder, a small smile already on her face like she'd been watching this unfold with great personal enjoyment.
"What's up."
"Take her to South 7. Check her out." Still not looking away from you. "Don't let her leave. Come get me when you're done." A brief pause. "And don't forget the knuckles."
How did he?
Your hands were behind your back. He couldn't have seen them. You kept your face perfectly still.
"Yeah, no problem." Ellis looked at you. You clocked her in your peripheral vision but didn't break eye contact. "Wanna follow me?"
You inhaled through your nose, slow and deliberate, and let it out the same way. One more second. Then you let it go, turned, and followed her.
The ED at night was its own world. As you followed Ellis through the bay you took it in without meaning to, gurneys lined against the walls, monitors beeping in overlapping rhythms, the low constant murmur of medical shorthand passing between staff. A full trauma centre, stocked and staffed and humming. You passed a medication cart that alone probably held more than your entire FOB pharmacy at Salerno. Supply closets with closed doors that you knew, without opening them, were full.
People here would not believe what we were working with over there.
You tucked it away.
Ellis held a door open and gestured to the bed inside. You sat, your feet dangling off the edge.
One foot. One... fucking atrocity.
"So," she said, turning to you with an expression that was openly, cheerfully curious. "You want to tell me what happened?"
"I got hit," you said. "And things got away from me."
She moved closer, tilting your face toward the light, probing carefully around your temple and cheekbone with two fingers. "That hurt?"
"Yeah."
She pressed gently at the back of your skull. "That?"
"Less."
"Follow my finger." She held up her index finger and moved it slowly left, then right. You tracked it. "Any nausea? Ringing in the ears?"
"Some ringing earlier. It's mostly gone."
"Blurry vision at any point?"
"No."
She made a small sound and reached for a dressing from the cabinet, pressing it carefully over the cut at your temple. "Looks like a mild concussion. Nothing alarming but nothing to dismiss. Someone should be checking on you every couple of hours tonight. Is there someone?"
"Yes," you said, a lie. You know concussion protocol and you know what happens if you say no, and you were in no mood to sit in a hospital hallway all night.
She turned to her supplies. "I'd hate to see the other guy."
That made you laugh, a real one, small but genuine. "I think he actually beat me here."
You looked down at your hands, made two loose fists, watched the split skin across your knuckles where scabs were trying and failing to form. "Big white guy. Over six feet. Dragon tattoo on his neck. Drunk."
Ellis went very still. Then she turned around slowly, gauze in hand, and stared at you. "No. No way." She shook her head with the delighted disbelief of someone whose night had just become considerably more interesting. "I think I know exactly who you're talking about. He came in maybe five minutes before you, looked like he'd been through a car wash face-first."
That sat in your chest in a way that wasn't entirely comfortable. Even if he deserved it. Even if some part of you, somewhere dark and unfamiliar, had wanted to. You weren't someone who hurt people.
"Like I said," you said quietly. "It got away from me."
She worked while you talked, cleaning the cut at your temple, assessing your knuckles, asking questions in the easy unhurried way of someone skilled at making people forget they're being examined. You told her about Kalista. About the bar. About the ambulance.
"Okay, I have to ask," she said, not looking up from your hand. "How did you drain a septal hematoma in a moving ambulance?"
"I've done scarier procedures with less," you said. "It needed to be done. So I did it."
"Now I am hoping... you're a doctor?"
"Technically an R3." You looked at the ceiling for a second.
She glanced up. "Technically?"
"I was completing my residency overseas. Afghanistan, Syria, a few others. I was on track to specialize in surgical trauma, combat medicine." You watched her close a small stitch across your knuckle. "Plans change."
"So you're back here now." She was quiet for a moment, reading what you didn't say. "Does that mean you were discharged?"
You let the silence answer for her. She got the message.
"Okay." She didn't push. "So what's next? Big plans for Pittsburgh?"
"No. I landed about a week ago. I've been setting up my apartment. Before that I was in Washington for a few months." The VA hospital in DC, the rehabilitation unit, the physical therapy ward where you'd learned to walk again, twice. You didn't say any of that. "My sergeant major told me to come here. Said she had connections. I'm hoping that turns into something."
"Something… meaning work?"
"Something meaning work."
Ellis looked out through the room's interior window into the bay for a moment, something turning over behind her eyes. "Because," she said, with the careful casualness of someone floating an idea they're pretending is a joke, "these jokers out there are getting predictable, and I have about fourteen follow-up questions about what happened to that guy in North 17." She turned back to you. "If you're an R3 and you know the right people, you might be able to get a position here. Theoretically."
You looked at her. She looked at you. Neither of you said anything for a second.
"What is this place called?" you asked.
She stood, set down her supplies, and performed a small formal bow. "Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Centre." She said it with ceremony. "But everyone calls it The Pitt."
You let out a breath that was close to a real laugh. "I like that."
She moved toward the door, then paused with her hand on the frame. "Seriously though, I was told to not let you leave. Can I trust you to stay put?"
"Yes." You looked at her, and she raised an eyebrow, and you raised your right hand. "Scout's honour."
She laughed.
"I am waiting for the doctor I upset earlier, right?"
"He's a good guy," she said, and she meant it. "You just caught him on a bad night. And whatever you said to him out there, definitely hit a nerve." She shook her head, still smiling. "Okay. I need to start you a chart. What's your name?"
"Y/N," you said.
"Last name?"
"Abbott." You spelled it out of habit. "A-B-B-O-T-T."
She didn't move right away. A smile was forming on her face, slow, like she was trying to hold something back.
"A-B-B-O-T-T?" she repeated.
"Yeah."
"Your… Dr. Abbott?"
"...Yeah? Why?"
"No reason," she said, too fast. Then she walked out the door, and you watched through the window as she made it approximately six steps before she started laughing.
You stared after her.
What on earth was that about?
Jack Abbot's POV
It had been a bad night before the ambulance pulled in.
It had been a bad day before that, if I was being honest, which I generally tried not to be when the alternative was getting through a shift. The ED was running at capacity, one of my attendings was out sick, and somewhere around hour nine I'd made a call I wasn't entirely sure about and had been quietly replaying it ever since, the way you did when you knew the outcome was fine but couldn't stop examining the path that got you there.
I was at the nurses' station when Kowalski came in off the rig.
I watched him approach and clocked immediately that he had something on his face. Not urgency. Something closer to preemptive apology.
"What," I said.
"So the patient we're bringing in has a broken nose, possible fracture… and a drained septal hematoma."
"Drained?" I said, turning to the chart.
"We drained it in the rig."
I looked up.
"Eighteen-gauge," Kowalski said. "Clean drainage, gauze in place, patient's airway is clear."
"And tell me why you would drain a septal hematoma in the rig."
"It wasn't me."
I put the chart down. "What do you mean it wasn't you."
"There was a woman with the patient. Friend of hers. She saw the compensation pattern before I did, before Jackson did, and she asked for the needle."
"You gave a civilian--"
"She said she was a doctor."
"You gave someone who said she was a doctor--"
"She knew what a septal hematoma was, she saw the compensation, she asked for specific equipment by gauge size, and she drained it clean in under thirty seconds in a moving vehicle." Kowalski paused. "I didn't exactly let it happen. She grabbed the gloves before I'd finished deciding. She saw it first. If she hadn't done anything--"
"Who." I cut him off. "Where is she."
Kowalski pointed.
I looked.
There was a woman standing with her back to me, talking to the other paramedic off the rig. Young, mid-to-late twenties. Dressed up, which meant she hadn't been working, which meant she was exactly the civilian I'd feared. She was bleeding on my floor, I noticed, a slow drip from her hands pooling faintly on the tile. I tracked it up: her knuckles.
Alright, Rocky.
Then my eyes went back to her posture. The way she was standing. Something registered that I didn't have words for immediately, just a small internal flag, the kind you made when a detail in a chart didn't fit the pattern and you didn't yet know why it mattered.
She had the posture of someone who'd been trained to have it.
My feet were moving before I'd consciously decided to move. She turned as I got close, and when she squared up to face me I saw the rest of it. Black eye, already darkening. A cut at the temple. Someone had hit her tonight, and by the look of those knuckles she'd returned the favour.
I also noticed, the way I noticed things I didn't mean to, that she was--
Stop.
"You were the one who drained the septal hematoma in a moving ambulance?" I kept my voice measured and looked her over once, head to toe, clinical, logging.
"Yes," she said. "And I would do it again."
Direct. No qualifier, no apology in it.
"And who gave you the authority to do that?"
"I did," she said, "when I saw her compensating while we were still eight minutes out with a narrowing airway."
She saw her compensating.
I let that sit for exactly one second. Specific phrase, used correctly, by someone who knew what it meant.
"You saw her compensating," I repeated, testing the edge of it.
"She's my friend," the woman said, and there was no apology in that either. "What was I supposed to do, sit there and watch her struggle to breathe?"
I was angry. I was aware of being angry and aware that some percentage of that anger was not entirely about this specific situation. I kept it behind my teeth.
"And you think," I said, gesturing briefly at her face, "in this state, you were making sound medical decisions?"
She looked at me with an expression I had not anticipated.
"Is she dead?"
The question hit the air and sat there.
Who the hell does this girl think she is talking to me like that.
I knew the answer, obviously I knew the answer, but she wasn't waiting for me to give it.
"No. She's not. Because I performed a clean field drainage of a septal hematoma." Behind her gaze was a burning she was trying to hard to hide. "In a moving ambulance." She took a step toward me. I don’t step back. "I knew exactly what I was doing and I can explain every decision I made if you'd like. Or maybe," a beat, short and deliberate, "you weren't paying attention in medical school."
I stared at her.
She did not just say that to me.
I had been a lead attending physician in this ED for several years. I had been told difficult things, wrong things, offensive things, things designed to rattle me and things not designed to rattle me that did anyway. I could count on one hand the number of times someone had genuinely caught me off guard.
She was looking at me with the absolute stillness of someone who had nothing left to lose and had made a kind of peace with that. It was not performance. I'd seen performance. This was something else, a particular quality of calm that lived in the eyes and didn't waver.
She stands the way I stand.
The thought arrived before I could stop it. Not a memory. Not a comparison to anyone else. Just the plain, clear observation: the squared shoulders, the weight distributed exactly right, the hands, the particular stillness that wasn't passivity but its opposite, something coiled and learned and earned.
She holds herself like I do. Did she-- Wh--
I shut down my thoughts before it could go any further.
I was still angry. I was also, beneath that and more quietly, something close to impressed, which I had absolutely no intention of showing her.
"Do not leave this hospital." I said it once, quietly, which was how I said things I meant. I turned my head slightly without breaking eye contact. "Ellis."
Ellis materialised at my shoulder with the expression of someone who had watched this whole exchange with barely concealed enjoyment and was going to be insufferable about it later.
"What's up."
"Take her to South 7. Check her out. Don't let her leave. Come get me when you're done." I pause. "And don't forget the knuckles."
I could see that the woman's face registered something at that, a fractional shift, there and gone. She walked away before she could comment on it.
I was forty minutes further into the night when Ellis reappeared.
I was standing at the board when I heard her laughing across the bay near the admit desk, where Mateo was saying something with his hands and the wide grin he wore when he'd found something he couldn't keep to himself. Ellis covered her mouth. Mateo was shaking his head like he couldn't believe it either.
I watched with the patience of a man who had learned his staff generally arrived at the point if you waited long enough.
Ellis clocked me watching and peeled off from Mateo, crossing toward me still holding down a smile that was losing the fight.
"She's fine," Ellis said, leading with business. "Temple cut is dressed, mild concussion, knuckles cleaned and closed. Nice bruise forming around the eye but nothing structural."
"Good."
"She's a doctor," Ellis said. "R3. Residency overseas, Afghanistan and Syria, combat trauma surgery. Army. Discharged, from the sounds of it."
I looked up from the board. "Army?"
"Army," Ellis confirmed.
There it is. She holds herself like a soldier--like me.
I held her gaze for a moment, then looked back at the board.
"Also," Ellis said, with the careful timing of someone who has been waiting to deliver the main event, "she's the one who put the guy in North 17 in the condition he's currently in."
I set the marker down. "She did that."
"Apparently he was the one who broke her friends nose, and then things, quote, got away from her." Ellis's expression was doing something complicated. "She’s got some crazy strength that guy outweighs her by at least what, like, eighty pounds?"
Eighty, maybe ninety pounds. He was a big guy--she wasn’t that big.
"And," Ellis continued, pressing her lips together briefly, "her name is Abbott."
I took the chart from her. I looked at the name for a moment longer than was strictly necessary.
"Abbott." Ellis pointed at her name. There it was in clean block letters: ABBOTT, Y/N. "She spelled it out for me. A-B-B-O-T-T. Two T's."
Abbott.
Not a common name. Not a coincidence I could file away and ignore.
I handed the chart back.
"She has no idea," Ellis said, watching me carefully. “She does not know your name yet." I pause for just a second too long. "You should go talk to her. And I don't mean for documentation purposes."
"I intend to talk to her," I said. "It is for documentation purposes. She performed an unsanctioned field procedure on a civilian patient."
"Absolutely," Ellis said pleasantly.
"I need the incident on record."
"Of course you do." She tilted her head. "Go on then, Dr. Abbot, one T. Go introduce yourself to Dr. Abbott, two T's.” Her eyes widen and she releases a laugh, “Abbot squared." She was already turning away, raising her voice just enough for Mateo to catch it. "I'm telling everyone, by the way."
"You're not telling anyone."
"I'm telling everyone," she said cheerfully, and was gone.
I stood at the board.
Abbott. Two T's. Army. I would put my money on combat physician. Eight minutes out and she saw the compensation pattern before a trained paramedic did. And she beat the shit out of a man nearly twice her size.
I set the marker down. I looked at the chart I was supposed to be reviewing, and set that down too.
Then I turned and walked toward South 7.
The door to the room was open. I knocked on the frame anyway.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her feet dangling off the side. She turned when she heard me. Something moved across her face, not quite the wariness from earlier, not quite a smile. Something in between. She was reassessing, same as me.
"I owe you an apology," I said, which was not what I'd planned to open with, but it was true so it came out first. "I came at you hard out there without the full picture."
She watched me for a moment. "You had enough of the picture."
"I had Kowalski's version."
"Which was…"
"Which was accurate," I let that settle. "Your friend is going to be fine. They've got her in imaging now, precautionary, but the nose is straightforward. She was asking about you."
Something moved through her face at that, soft and fast and gone as soon as it appeared.
I pulled the chair from the corner of the room and sat, which I could tell surprised her. I'd intended to stay standing. I wasn't entirely sure why I'd sat down, except that this felt like a conversation that deserved it.
"I'm Jack Abbot," I said. "Attending physician. I run the ED."
She looked at me. Then she looked at the name badge clipped to my coat, which she clearly hadn't clocked until this moment.
A-B-B-O-T.
One T.
"You're kidding me," she said.
"I'm not."
The corner of her mouth moved. Not a smile exactly, but the beginning of one. "Y/N Abbott," she said. "Two T's."
"I noticed."
"Of course you did." A quiet exhale through her nose that might, in another life, have been a laugh. "Of course the man who yelled at me in the middle of a trauma bay is named Abbot."
"I didn't yell."
"You raised your voice."
"It's a loud room."
She looked at me with an expression that was both tired and faintly, reluctantly amused. I found that I didn't entirely mind being on the receiving end of it.
"It's been a long night," I said, which was the closest I was going to get to explaining myself.
"Yeah," she said. "It really has."
We sat with that for a moment, the particular quiet of two people deciding whether a bad first impression was going to be the whole story.
“You know you’ve set off a domino effect of paperwork for me to complete tonight between your friend's broken nose, your impromptu procedure in the ambulance and the sad sap in North 17.”
“Are you looking for my official statement?” There is a slight smile on her face, amused.
I look at the forms in front of me on her chart and click my pen in an exaggerated way ready to report the events of tonight, “I’m ready when you are.”
AN: Thank you for reading if you made it this far. I’m still figuring this out, but comments, reblogs, or any thoughts are always appreciated <3
Guys I had another Idea up for grabs.
Reader being in the bar, all alone. All the seats were occupied except the one next to you. Ghost who was tired as fuck after a mission, decided that it is worth it. He sat down next to you and asked for a drink. When he noticed the bandage on your face he got a tad bit curious, but didnt ask about it. The only problem that he stared. like STARED. You asked him if he wanted to know what happened but he only responded with a grunt. fast forward a bit, when you were healed, he sees you on base among the sergeants he has to work with. You notice him (because who wouldnt) and ask if he is lieutenant Ghost. It comes out that you were the one sergeant that was injured because of him, on the last mission.
Taiji Hitorie.
Text from top to bottom: Taiji Hitorie
During an Agni Kai Taiji couldn't redirect the lightning. His ear got obliterated (misspelled on the drawing lol)
(all the way on the left) He's ~70% black!
Looks older than he is.
Kanji for intelligence (or 'wisdom' and 'reason') (That's the family's 'crest')
Lightning proficiency.
@banco000 :D This is my OC for the story! I genuinely head canon that at some point in his childhood he was forced into an Agni Kai and almost lost, and in the process got injured. Therefore he's also hard of hearing on one side.
I followed the inspiration you posted and the in-story description, but simplified it a bit because it's not a full body shot.
An oc x canon.
Playlist for fic
Song used: Wesley's Theory by Kendrick Lamar
Chapter 1: El Hielo
It was supposed to be a normal day, but Zion gave up on believing that a day can be normal a long time ago.
Whether it be as a child or as an adult, a day usually finds a way to screw the black man over.
Zion clocked in on the shift earlier than normal, having been in a pretty good mood as of late. He had as usual one earbud in, playing hip-hop softly. It helped when things got too quiet, but wasn’t loud enough to interfere with work.
“They want us to bowDown to our kneesAnd pray to the GodWe don’t believe” Dana was already at the desk, offering Zion a warm smile. “Good morning, Zion. What are you listening to today?” she asked, and Zion gave a small smile back. “Some Kendrick Lamar, the usual,” he responds, leaning over the table. “I got a bad feelin’ today” he begins, monologuing again. “Feels like something’s gonna happen, but I don’t know what.”
Dana nods slowly, not questioning the sudden monologue or the sudden intuition. It’s something people get used to around the man. “I get that feeling every day and I’m right, so you shouldn’t worry too much.” Zion shrugs in response, deciding to ignore the feeling.
“The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice The blacker the berry, the bigger I shoot” Soon the other people from the dayshift came, greeting the night shift workers and taking over the few patients that needed care. Zion chatted up with Parker, talking about what they’re up to in their free time.
Zion was going to visit his brother back in Long Beach, California, trying to re-establish some connection with his siblings.
Being the middle child is the worst.
The morning was as hectic as expected.
Someone slipped and fell while making breakfast, bumping their head against a corner of the table. How unfortunate.
Work-related injuries which were so preventable it hurts the doctors’ heads.
Zion was in the zone, but also dissociating during work. Why did he even choose the medical field? It wasn’t like he was interested in it that much, just needed something to make his parents pay some attention to him, notice how good he was. It didn’t help.
Zion went from trauma to trauma, not remembering any conversations or interactions with other staff members. That was rare for him, but at least he didn’t stop talking to himself. It helped calm the patients down. People like knowing what is going on, that’s how psychology works – people are afraid of the unknown.
When Zion came to he was in the break room, getting pulled aside by Robby. The man had worried look in his eyes, which is unusual. Did he do something wrong?
“Zion. You doing okay?” The attending asked and Zion nodded, maybe too quickly to be genuine. “Y-Yeah. Just zoned out. Won’t happen again,” he responded, rubbing the back of his neck and fidgeting with his afro.
Robby was quiet for a moment, then nodded. “Good, we need your head in the game.”
With that he went back to work. This time it was a Hispanic woman who had problems communicating with her poor English, so Santos called Zion in. “Hey, fleahead! Could you lend yourself? Need some Spanish speaking help” she called out, using the terrible nickname she gave Zion, who groaned in response. But it was better than dealing with a person with food poisoning.
As he comes over Zion gives Santos a playful shove and takes over the case.
“¿Qué pasó?” (What happened?) You asked, checking over the chart that was on the patient’s bed. The patient, who’s name is Valeria, beamed at being spoken to in her native language. “Tuve un accidente de coche” (I was in a car accident) Valeria began, animatedly using her hands to emphasize her emotions.
“Iba a baja velocidad, pero el lado del conductor recibió el impacto. Un momento estaba bien y al siguiente me dolía el brazo como una perra.” (I was going slowly, but the driver's side took the hit. One minute I was fine, and the next my arm was killing me.)
Zion hummed, going through a mental checklist on what to do. "¿Puedes mover el brazo?" (Can you move your arm?) Zion asked, gently holding Valeria's arm. The woman clicked her tongue, "No, duele." (No, it hurts.) Zion hummed, stepping away and turning to Jesse, who was passing by. "Jesse! Could you help me get an X-Ray for a patient?" Jesse perks up, nodding and coming over. "Of course!"
Zion turned back to the patient, giving a consoling smile. "Te vamos a hacer una radiografía para ver si está roto o fracturado," (We're going to take an x-ray to see if it's broken or fractured) he explains, humming a melody.
The x-ray is being taken and in the meanwhile Zion is laughing at Trinity's misfortune of dealing with Zion's original patient. "Zion. You could have warned me that I would get almost sniped with vomit by the patient." She scolded, even though Zion is a year above her in residency. Sticking his tongue out wasn't considered particularly respectful, but Zion isn't the type of man to give a fuck. "You shouldn't have had switched in the first place, then" he replied, not at all regretful of putting his friend through the wringer.
The moment is sadly interrupted by Jesse coming back with Valeria who has a splint now holding her arm together. Zion immediately snaps back into focus, giving Trinity a pat on the shoulder in solidarity before following Jesse. "I'll get the sling," Zion says, jogging through the ED to get the item.
That's when the day went from bad to worse.
Zion passed an ICE agent and immediately turned away, hoping that the agent is here for an injury and not to do something. So he speed walked to get the sling, speed walked back with a look like he saw a ghost.
Jesse looked concerned at how his coworker looked, and grew even more concerned when the sound of heavy footsteps comes towards them. "Come on, she's cleared to go," a voice says, and Zion is immediately on edge. "Hold on! She needs a sling!" Zion replies, protectively stepping in front of the patient. Jesse also takes a step forward, but not contributing much.
"We should never gave
We should never gave niggas money
Go back home, money, go back home (everybody get out!)"
The ICE agent steps forward and grabs Valeria by her uninjured arm, thank God for small blessings, and Jesse comes up in the agent's face. "Hey man, you're hurting her," the nurse says and that doesn't end well. One moment he's still in the agent's personal space and the other he's being put down on the ground, hands behind his back.
Zion uses the moment to give Valeria the sling, putting it on hastily but still with precision that is surprising for someone his age. "Te conseguiremos un abogado, no te preocupes" (We'll get you a lawyer, don't worry) Zion reassures, even though he himself is on the verge of a panic attack.
"Robby!" Cassie calls out as she was passing by, Javadi by her side recording everything.
A second ICE agent comes to Zion, roughly grabbing the doctor by the shoulder. "¡Hijo de puta!" (Son of a bitch) Zion hisses, trying not to freak out.
Why is he grabbing me? I didn't do anything illegal, right?
"Stop moving, black boy," the agent said, twisting Zion's arm behind his back and forcing Zion to the hospital floor.
Panic settled in. The past is coming back rapidly like a mean right hook. Zion froze (pun not intended). Memories, memories, memories. It's too much.
"D-Don't touch me..!" It came out as a whisper more than a shout. The man's, no, the boy's voice gave out at the press of past experiences. The agents didn't listen, if anything they just got more rough.
Jesse was already being escorted out of the hospital, Robby talking to him hastily. The cuffs slid on and the panic increased tenfold.
"I didn't do it! I swear on God, I didn't do it!" The younger Zion screamed, trying to get out of the grasp of an unjust arrest. He was going back from school at that moment when a police cruiser pulled up, yelling at the teenager to raise his hands in the air. One moment led to another and Zion was getting arrested because 'he resembled the suspect'.
The cold metal of the handcuffs bit into Zion's skin, adjusted too tightly. He hears yelling. Who's yelling? Possibly his younger brother, or maybe it's his mother?
He's hauled into a vehicle. Zion closes his eyes. Memories.
