Summary : He’s cold, older, and always in control. You’re the intern who just outplayed him in front of a billion-dollar client. Now you work late nights under his watch, daring him to look. He keeps his distance. You want to ruin his composure.
The tension isn’t the only thing growing between you.
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The conference room gleamed with glass and polished tension. Suits filled every seat around the oval table, sleeves creased, smiles taut. Someone poured still water into tall glasses without ever making eye contact. The city burned behind the floor-to-ceiling windows, but inside, everything felt colder. The kind of cold that came with money.
You sat at the far end. Quiet. Watching.
Across the room, James Buchanan Barnes, adjusted his cufflink with mechanical precision. He didn’t glance at anyone once since walking in. Only focus at his client. His voice, when it came, was low and clipped, made to be obeyed. This was your boss. The one and only. The reason you chose this place to work.
“Our firm understands that Rawlston doesn’t just want results,” Bucky said, pacing. “You want impact. Visibility. Scale.” He clicked the remote. The slide changed. His jaw was set so tight you could see the tension from across the room.
The client, a younger executive named Doyle, leaned back in his chair. Restless. Flashy watch. Legs crossed too easily. He was new money, no doubt, with the sharp instincts of someone who’d built his way out of nothing. He didn’t look convinced.
“I know your portfolio,” Doyle said. “And it’s clean. Polished. But we want something that bleeds a little. The old rules don’t thrill people anymore. Give me something with an edge. I want my competitors to be nervous.”
The room shifted. A few glances. Silent calculations. Bucky, to his credit, didn’t flinch.
“We’re prepared to scale back-end logistics and maximize exposure through exclusive markets. The numbers are conservative but strong. You’ll lead with strength.”
Doyle tilted his head. “That’s nice. But I don’t want to be nice. I want adrenaline.”
Your pulse flicked. Maybe it was the word. Maybe it was the silence that followed, wide and heavy like a held breath.
You leaned forward.
“Then take the risk,” you said.
Every head turned.
You felt the weight of the room twist toward you, like the wind suddenly changing direction. Bucky stilled mid-stride.
You didn’t blink.
“Scale now. Fast and loud. Don’t wait for safe margins. Corner the Southeast market and flood socials with strategic leaks before you finalize anything. You’re not selling polish. You’re selling disruption.”
Doyle sat up. “Finally. Now that sounds like a move.” He smirked. “And who are you?”
You smiled. “Just the intern.”
Laughter broke the surface. Doyle laughed loudest. “Give her a raise. That’s the first honest pitch I’ve heard today.”
Bucky didn’t move. His hands were clasped behind his back, a pose too clean to be natural. He let Doyle shake his hand, jaw locked in a smile so tight it might have cracked bone. And when Doyle reached to shake yours too, Bucky stepped half a second too late to intercept. Too late to stop Doyle from saying, “Bring her along next time.”
Then the door closed behind the client, and the room emptied like someone had cut the air out. Silence returned. And it was heavier this time.
You could feel him before you saw him.
“You think that was smart?” Bucky’s voice cut from behind. He didn’t sound angry. Not exactly. He sounded quiet in the way fire is before it explodes.
You turned, slowly. He was standing by the window now, hands still behind his back, spine straight like a blade. You could see his reflection in the glass. Not looking at you. Not yet.
“How dare you. That wasn’t your place.”
The words dropped like stone. No inflection. Just steel.
You crossed your arms. “The client liked it.”
“He liked the idea,” Bucky said, turning now, “because he’s young, cocky, and new. He wants fire. Fine. But most clients don’t. They want control. You gamble like that in front of anyone else, and they’ll laugh us out the door.”
You shrugged. “Then let them. Maybe we should stop pitching to people afraid of new.”
“You’re an intern.” His voice sharpened. “Not a partner. You don’t get to dictate risk. You observe. You learn. You do not interrupt. And you definitely do not undercut me in the middle of a billion-dollar meeting.”
Your stomach turned, but your face didn’t show it. You stared at him instead, letting silence stretch too long. He hated that. Hated the way you wouldn’t back down.
“This is not a game,” he said again, lower now. “This is real life. And we play with billions.”
You studied him. His tie was perfect. His voice was crisp. His control was still intact.
Mostly.
He didn’t expect you to smile. So you did.
“Perhaps this is the game I want to play.”
The line slipped out quieter than you intended. And still, it cracked something.
Bucky stared at you. Fully, finally. Something in his expression changed—only for a second—but enough to notice. His mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. Not quite a warning. You couldn’t tell which one you preferred.
His jaw clenched. “Since you’re the one who proposed the idea, give me the proposal as quick as possible.”
You met his stare. “Okay, boss.”
You turned first.
Didn’t look back. But your spine burned as you walked to the door, each step echoing louder than it should in the hollow quiet.
When the latch clicked shut behind you, you didn’t breathe. Not for a second.
Then, finally, you exhaled—and it came out jagged. Heat pooled beneath your skin. Not just nerves. Not even pride. It was fire.
You’d finally gotten his attention.
Not just as an intern. Not as someone they sent to fetch coffee or organize calendars. He’d seen you today. Really looked. And you saw it in the way his mask cracked, barely, when you smiled. You saw it in the pause—one beat too long—when your words landed.
You weren’t wrong about the client. Doyle didn’t want polish. He didn’t want a folder of safe numbers and recycled slogans. He wanted adrenaline. And you gave it to him. Because you knew. You’d read his profile, his press history, his pattern of aggressive acquisitions and his obsession with being the loudest man in the room.
Bucky hadn’t underestimated the client. He never did. But he played the long game. Controlled. Measured. Always playing safe, like the company trained him to.
You weren’t like that.
And neither was Doyle.
So you took the risk. You stepped into the fire and let the whole room see you. And now—now—you’d caught the attention of both the client and the man you’d been watching since the first day you walked through this building.
Bucky.
Your boss.
The man who never raised his voice. Never lost control. Who never even looked at you unless he had to.
Until now.
You made your way back through the corridor, past glass offices and blurred silhouettes. The heels of your shoes clacked sharper now, like a drumbeat. Your fingers tingled.
Your desk was tucked near the back corner of the floor, a little too close to the copy room. Temporary. Disposable. Like most interns. But tonight, it felt like a base camp before a war.
You dropped your blazer over the chair and rolled up your sleeves. Pulled open your laptop. There was a faint scratch of your breath as you powered through your bookmarked tabs, client briefings, market trend forecasts, and Doyle’s business history. You’d already prepared most of it. You always did. You’d been waiting for a moment like this.
If you had to stay here until dawn, you would. If you had to miss the last train, fall asleep on your desk, run on nothing but vending machine coffee and spite, you would.
Because this wasn’t about the proposal anymore.
This was about him.
About the way his voice tightened when he said your name. The way his eyes sharpened—not with anger, but something buried deeper, something more dangerous—when you challenged him. You saw it. In his posture. In the way his jaw ticked. The way his control slipped for half a second.
He noticed you.
And God, you wanted more.
You opened a blank document and titled it Doyle Pitch: High-Risk Expansion Strategy. Your fingers hovered over the keyboard.
But not you.
You weren’t just doing this to impress the client. You were doing this for the man behind the glass office with the door you still weren’t allowed to knock on.
'Finally, Bucky, my handsome boss. You notice me.'
You wanted him to see what you could do.
You could’ve worked anywhere after graduation. Columbia, cum laude, top of your class. Offers lined up like dominoes.
But no. You wanted this firm. His floor. And the only opening?
Internship.
Damn Bucky. The things you’d do for him.
You sighed and clicked open a blank document. Time to make a billion-dollar proposal. Or die trying.
You wanted to make him lose that control he guarded like armor.
So you typed. Faster. Sharper. Every word is a message. Every strategy is a challenge. And outside the glass, the lights of the city bled against the night like fire on water.
To get his attention, you won’t play safe.
***************
His headache was a slow throb behind the eyes. Too much noise in that boardroom. Too much heat in your voice.
Bucky sat alone in his office, the city a quiet smear of lights behind him. He reached for the aspirin tucked inside the drawer beside a stack of contracts and unopened HR memos. He rarely needed them. Today was an exception.
The folder on his desk was your intern profile.
He flipped it open. Your credentials were solid. Too solid for someone just getting coffee. Dean’s List. Research assistant. Fluent in Mandarin and sarcasm, apparently, if he factored in how you looked at him.
Then his eyes landed on the last line: Alma mater: Columbia University.
His brows furrowed.
Same as him.
He hadn’t made the connection earlier. He stared at the name longer than he needed to, his jaw tightening.
That’s why you went easy on him? Why you smiled like you knew something about him no one else did?
He leaned back in the chair and reached for his phone.
“Steve Rogers,” the voice answered after the first ring, still clear, still too chipper for a tenured professor working at night.
“Steve. It’s Bucky.”
“Bucky. You’re alive. I thought you’d finally been consumed by one of your three-piece suits.”
“Not tonight,” Bucky said dryly. “I’m calling about an intern.”
There was a pause on the line.
“I didn’t think you talked to your interns.”
“I don’t,” Bucky muttered. “But this one… She cut me off in front of a client.” He gave Steve your name.
Steve laughed. Full-hearted. “She have sharp eyes, little smile? Smarter than everyone in the room and knows it?”
Bucky froze. “Yeah.”
“Of course I know her. She’s a menace. I’m glad she graduated. Finally, some peace.”
There was a beat of silence. Then Bucky blinked, shook his head. “Why?”
“Because she doesn’t sit still. She doesn’t wait her turn. Every class was a war zone. She’d poke holes in my syllabus for sport. Refused to accept anything just because I said so.” Steve exhaled, then softened. “But she’s brilliant. Relentless. If she’s in your office, watch her. She’ll either burn the building down or save it.”
Bucky rubbed his temple. “Both seem likely.”
“Yeah, well. I always said she reminded me of someone.”
“Don’t start,” Bucky said.
“I’m just saying,” Steve chuckled, “if she makes you nervous, it’s probably because she reminds you of the version of yourself before you became allergic to feelings.”
Bucky hung up before Steve could say anything else. He stared at the call log for a second too long, then set the phone down carefully. Deliberately.
He didn’t like the mess of it. The unpredictability. The way you hadn’t even looked scared when you interrupted him.
No intern had ever challenged him like that.
No intern had ever made him feel like they were watching him before he could watch them.
He turned toward the glass wall of his office.
You were still at your desk.
Everyone else had gone home. But not you.
You had your legs tucked under you like you forgot this was a billion-dollar firm. Head bowed over your screen, hair falling over your cheek. Fingers moved fast. Eyes sharper than ever. Focused. So focused it almost unnerved him.
He watched the way your lips pressed together when you were thinking. The way you moved without hesitation. Like you belonged here more than anyone.
His headache hadn’t left. But now it had changed. It throbbed differently. Lower. Deeper. Like something waking.
He knew what this was.
It was the beginning of trouble.
And he couldn’t look away.
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FLASHBACK
It was hot. Not the kind of heat people complained about. The kind that simply existed, heavy and relentless, pressing down on him until breathing felt like its own small effort. The fans overhead rattled, pushing the same hot air back and forth without doing much of anything that he could feel.
No one spoke much. Not today.
Jack sat against the canvas wall, knees drawn up, his body aching with the kind of exhaustion that came from too many hours awake. His eyes burned. He hadn't slept. Every time he closed them he saw Gabriel laughing at something stupid, making fun of somebody across the mess tent, completely alive.
Then not.
Across the tent a soldier stepped out from behind the partition and wiped a hand across his face. Jack looked up.
"Is it done?"
The soldier glanced back the way he'd come. "She needs a minute."
Of course she did.
Jack already knew without being told that you'd been in there nearly an hour. Long after everything that needed doing had been done. Long after Gabriel had been cleaned and prepared, long after the paperwork, long after everyone else had said what they needed to say and stepped back out into the heat. He knew because he'd been watching the curtain the whole time, waiting for it to move, and it hadn't.
He stood and crossed the tent slowly. When he stepped through he found you beside the transfer case, gloves off, hands clean but trembling, your eyes red in a way that had nothing to do with dust. He'd seen you exhausted before. This was different. This was the kind sleep couldn't touch.
Clark stands quietly beside you. "Kid."
"His collar wasn't straight." Your voice cracked on the last word. "I fixed it."
Jack didn't say anything. He understood exactly what you meant and exactly what you didn't. The collar had never been the problem. You weren't ready to let him go, and there was nothing in his training, nothing in any of his years out here, that told him what to do with that.
He stepped closer anyway. It hurt him to watch you standing there, frozen, unable to move toward the door. He kept his voice low, the only thing he knew to offer. "His family's waiting for him."
Your body flinched. "Right. Yes." You took a breath and finally stepped back. "I'm sorry."
Jack gave Clark a small nod. The signal that it was clear.
A few minutes later the transfer case was brought out into the heat, and the tent went completely silent around it. Six soldiers stepped forward to carry it. Jack was one of them. Clark too. He focused on his hands, on the weight, on keeping his steps even, because if he thought about anything else right now he wasn't going to make it across the compound.
Outside the sunlight was blinding after the dim canvas interior. The helicopter pad sat in the distance, the transport aircraft waiting beyond it. The camp had gathered along the path without anyone telling them to. Nobody spoke. Jack didn't expect them to.
When the case reached the vehicle, the soldiers stopped and stepped back into formation. Jack moved to one side. Clark stood beside him. Across from them you stood with your spine straight and your chin level, holding a stillness that Jack recognized immediately, because it was costing you everything you had left and he knew exactly what that looked like from the inside.
For a moment nobody moved.
Then Clark raised his hand in salute.
Jack's came up with it, automatic, trained, and it was returned down the line by every soldier present, the only sound the wind and somewhere distant the low building hum of the aircraft's engines. His throat tightened as he held the position. Across from him you were still standing at attention, perfect posture, perfect form, and he understood that you were holding it together through nothing but sheer will, because that was the only thing keeping you upright at all.
The vehicle began to move.
Only then did your hand lower. Only then did Gabriel actually start to leave, the case disappearing slowly up the ramp while the camp watched a piece of itself go with it.
That was when you broke.
Jack saw your shoulders drop first. Then your knees seemed to lose whatever certainty had been holding them, and the sound that came out of you was quiet and raw, the sound of someone who had held the wall up for exactly as long as duty required and not one second longer.
He was already moving before he'd decided to. He reached you in two steps and pulled you in, wrapping both arms around you, one hand coming up to rest against the back of your head without him thinking about it at all.
You didn't pull away. You pressed your face into his shoulder and let it come.
Jack didn't say anything. There was nothing true enough to say, and he'd learned a long time ago not to insult grief with empty words. He just held on, steady, while the engines spun up behind you both and somewhere over your shoulder Clark stood with his hand still raised, watching the two people he had left from that tent try to hold each other together in the middle of everything that had just been taken from them.
******
After Gabriel's transfer ceremony, the aircraft disappeared into the horizon. Yet somehow his presence stayed everywhere. In the empty chair near the mess tent. In the half-finished deck of cards still sitting on a crate. In the silence that followed every conversation now, the particular gap where his voice used to fill the space. In the jokes nobody told anymore.
War kept moving. It always did. Orders still came down, patrols still happened, the camp still woke up the next morning whether anyone was ready for it or not.
Jack hated that. Part of him wanted the world to stop, just for a day, just long enough for everyone to fully acknowledge that Gabriel was gone. Instead soldiers reported for duty, vehicles rolled out, radios crackled with the same routine traffic, and life continued like one man hadn't left a hole in the middle of all of them.
So Jack did what everyone else did. He kept moving. Checking equipment, checking ammunition, checking routes that didn't need checking. Volunteering for patrols, for sweeps, for anything that kept his hands and his attention occupied. Because the second he stopped moving, he started thinking, and every thought led back to Gabriel. Every single one.
Across camp you weren't much different. You worked every shift available, took every patient, stayed longer than necessary, found reasons to be useful long after the necessary work was done. The two of you were doing the exact same thing. Just in different uniforms.
A few days later Jack was checking his gear when your voice cut through the quiet.
"You volunteered."
Not a question.
Jack didn't look up. "Yeah."
"You don't have to go."
"I'm going."
"You just got back."
He kept adjusting a strap that didn't need adjusting, checking a weapon he had already checked twice.
"Jack."
Nothing.
"Look at me."
Slowly he lifted his head, and the second he did he knew you could see straight through him. You always could. Not physically exhausted, not really. Something colder than that. Like part of him had shut down after Gabriel died and simply never bothered switching back on.
"Don't go," you said.
His jaw tightened. "It's a sweep."
"You volunteered." You stepped closer. "And you haven't rested properly in days."
He almost laughed. The irony would have been funny if it weren't so depressing. "You too."
A tired breath escaped you. "True." You folded your arms. "But if I pass out, at least there's a hospital bed waiting for me."
A small smile pulled at the corner of his mouth, the first one in days. Then it disappeared, because the truth came out before he could stop it.
"To make sure nobody else ends up like Gabriel."
Silence settled between you. There it was. The thing he hadn't said out loud yet. The thing everybody already knew without needing it confirmed.
You stared at him. Then slowly closed the distance. "But what about soldiers like Jack Abbot?"
The question hit harder than he expected. For a second he couldn't answer, because the truth was ugly. The truth was that he hadn't thought about himself at all. Not since the explosion. Not since watching Gabriel die. Not since watching you cry.
A muscle jumped in his jaw. His eyes dropped away. "The day I signed up," he said, voice rough, "the day I got on that plane." A pause. "I stopped putting myself first."
You shook your head immediately. "No."
"Yeah."
"No." The anger in your voice surprised him. "You think Gabriel would've wanted this?"
Jack barked out a laugh with no humor in it at all. "Gabriel would've volunteered before me."
That hurt because it was true. Gabriel would have been first through the door, first on the helicopter, first running toward danger without a second thought. Which was exactly why he wasn't here anymore. The thought settled heavily between you.
"Jack."
He looked at you. Really looked. And suddenly you didn't seem angry anymore. Just tired. Heartbroken. Scared.
Your voice dropped, quiet and small and entirely honest. "I don't want you to go."
Something cracked inside his chest. The silence that followed felt endless.
Then you whispered, "Please stay."
Your eyes glistened. And for the first time since Gabriel died, Jack wanted to. God, he wanted to. If it had been anyone else asking he would have walked away without hesitation. But it wasn't anyone else. It was you.
For one terrible second he imagined dropping the bag. Telling command no. Staying. Choosing himself. Choosing you.
Instead he stepped forward, wrapped his arms around you, and pulled you close. The hug was brief and tight, the kind soldiers gave before deployment, the kind neither of you actually wanted but both needed anyway. His voice came low against your hair.
"I'll come back."
You closed your eyes. "This is weird."
He huffed softly. "What is?"
"The first time we haven't argued."
That finally earned a real chuckle, small and tired. "That means hell froze over."
You didn't laugh. Somehow that felt worse.
When you pulled back your eyes searched his face. "Promise me you'll come back in one piece."
Jack froze. Because he should have promised. He should have lied. He should have given you something, anything, to hold onto. Instead, "I won't promise that."
The hurt that flashed across your face followed him for weeks afterward.
He squeezed your shoulder once. Then picked up his gear and walked away. He didn't look back. Because he knew if he did, he wasn't leaving.
******
The location looked abandoned. A cluster of damaged buildings sat beneath the afternoon sun, broken walls, collapsed roofs, too quiet. Jack hated quiet. Quiet usually meant somebody was waiting.
The team moved carefully through the compound, weapons raised, eyes scanning every doorway, every window, every shadow. Jack's instincts were screaming. Something was wrong.
Then gunfire erupted. The first shots shattered the silence and soldiers dove for cover, more shots following in rapid succession until the entire compound dissolved into chaos.
"Contact left!"
"Move!"
Jack returned fire, called positions, directed movement as the team pushed forward. Then someone screamed.
He turned. One of the younger soldiers was down, hit, bleeding out fast. Without thinking he moved, exactly the way Gabriel would have, exactly the way Gabriel always had. He sprinted toward the soldier, dropped beside him, grabbed his vest, and started dragging him toward cover while bullets cracked overhead and concrete exploded somewhere close. Somebody was yelling. Jack barely heard them, because all he could think was not again, not another one, not today.
Then somebody shouted a warning.
Too late.
The world turned white.
The explosion hit with enough force to lift him off the ground entirely. Pain erupted everywhere at once. His ears rang, his vision blurred, the sky spun above him in a way that made no sense. For a second there was no sound at all. No gunfire, no shouting. Nothing. Just darkness.
And then a voice. Familiar. Terrified.
"Jack!"
The darkness shifted.
"Jack! Don't you dare leave me!"
Again. Closer. Louder.
"Jack!"
*********
PRESENT TIME
Jack woke up with a sharp inhale.
For a second he didn't know where he was. The darkness of his bedroom slowly replaced the battlefield, the walls and ceiling and silence settling into place where dust and gunfire had been a moment ago. Pittsburgh. His chest rose and fell heavily, sweat clinging to his skin, his heart hammering against his ribs while the phantom ringing from the explosion still echoed somewhere behind his ears.
He dragged a hand across his face. "Jesus Christ."
His head hurt. The familiar ache behind his eyes that only ever showed up after nightmares. Nightmares he hadn't had in years. He thought he'd buried that day, buried Gabriel, buried the explosion, buried your scream along with everything else.
Apparently not.
A sudden stab of pain shot through his prosthetic side and he tensed immediately. "Ugh." The ache spread upward, deep and persistent. His residual limb always acted up when the weather changed, or when stress got bad, or when old memories decided to crawl out of the grave uninvited. Today, apparently, checked every box at once.
"Fuck."
He sat on the edge of the bed for a minute, waiting it out. The pain didn't leave. He groaned and dropped backward onto the mattress, staring at the ceiling like it owed him an explanation.
He grabbed his phone from the nightstand.
Jack: Gonna take sick leave.
The reply came faster than expected.
Robby: You?
Jack snorted.
Jack: My leg hurts.
The three dots appeared immediately.
Robby: Say no more, brother.
Honestly, that was more than enough explanation. Jack tossed the phone onto his chest and closed his eyes again. Sleep wasn't happening. Neither was work.
At the Pitt, Robby took off his reading glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Abbot can't come in today."
Dana looked up from her chart. "That sudden?"
"His leg's acting up."
Her expression softened immediately. "Oh." A pause. "He should come here instead."
Robby raised an eyebrow.
Dana shrugged. "We literally have all the medicine."
Robby laughed. "I'll tell him."
"You should." She pointed toward the floor. "We're not letting him win Employee of the Month while sick at home."
"He has never once cared about Employee of the Month."
"Exactly my point."
Princess, who happened to be passing the desk at precisely the wrong moment, heard the entire exchange. Which was unfortunate for everyone involved. Her eyes widened and her phone appeared in her hand before either of them had finished the sentence.
Thirty seconds later, the Pitt group chat lit up.
Princess: 🚨 BREAKING NEWS 🚨
Princess: Dr. Abbot called in sick.
The three dots appeared instantly. Then another set. Then five more in quick succession.
Shen: impossible
Ellis: impossible
Javadi: impossible
Garcia: impossible
Princess: apparently his leg hurts
Shen: old man disease
Ellis: did he finally discover he's fifty
Garcia: he's not fifty
Shen: spiritually he is
Princess: should we send flowers
Ellis: send him a walker
Javadi: send him a retirement brochure
Across the hospital phones buzzed one after another in a chain reaction that spread faster than most actual trauma alerts. And just like that, the entire Pitt knew Jack Abbot had taken a sick day, which was somehow bigger news than anything that had happened in the trauma bay all week.
A few floors above the ER, you were in the middle of surgery.
The operating room was quiet except for the steady beep of monitors and the occasional request for instruments. Your focus was absolute. Scalpel. Suction. Clamp. Every movement precise, every decision deliberate.
Garcia stood across from you, assisting. For several minutes neither of you spoke. Then, casually, as if discussing the weather, "Abbot called in sick."
You didn't look up. Your eyes stayed on the surgical field. "Okay."
Garcia narrowed her eyes behind her mask. "He never calls in sick."
"Sounds like a personal achievement."
The scrub nurse bit back a smile. Garcia wasn't discouraged.
"His leg's acting up," she said.
Your hands kept moving, steady and controlled, exactly the same as before. Not a single hesitation. Nothing in your posture shifted at all.
Garcia glanced toward the anesthesiologist. The anesthesiologist looked at the circulating nurse. The circulating nurse shrugged. Nobody in that room could read you when you were operating, which was one of the many reasons you were good at this.
The surgery continued. Sutures, final checks, closure. A little while later you stepped away from the table.
"Good work, everyone."
The team began their post-op routine. You stripped off your gloves, then your gown. A few minutes later you stood at the scrub sink washing your hands. Garcia moved beside you and did the same. For a moment neither of you spoke. Water ran over your hands. You dried them carefully.
Then, finally, "I'll go out for a while."
Garcia didn't even try to hide her grin. "Yes, boss."
You shot her a look. It only made the grin wider.
She tilted her head. "You know his address?"
You looked at her slowly. A smirk pulled at the corner of your mouth. "I'm not that ignorant."
Garcia burst out laughing. "Oh my God."
You tossed the paper towel into the bin. "Don't start."
"Too late." She pointed at you. "You pretended not to care for an entire surgery."
"I didn't pretend anything."
"You absolutely did."
You started walking toward the door. Garcia called after you, "Tell him the Pitt survived without him."
Without turning around, you lifted a hand. "I'll let him know."
The second the door closed behind you, Garcia turned to the rest of the staff. "Told you."
The anesthesiologist sighed. "We all knew she was going."
The scrub nurse nodded. "Honestly, it would've been weirder if she didn't."
"By the way," the circulating nurse said, peeling off her own gloves, "did the Pitt make a bet on whether she'd go visit him?"
Garcia froze for a second. "Damn it. We're too late to join."
*******
Later, you showed up at his apartment.
Jack opened the door and went completely still. He hadn't been expecting anyone. Especially not you.
"You're supposed to be resting."
"I am."
"You look terrible."
"Thank you."
"You should moisturize."
"Get out."
He let you in anyway, and eventually he sat down on the couch with the particular care of someone managing pain he wasn't admitting to. You noticed him rubbing the stump absentmindedly, his thumb pressing into the same spot over and over.
"Still hurts?" you asked.
He shrugged. "Sometimes."
It was a lie. It hurt a lot, and you both knew it, but you didn't push. You sat down beside him without saying anything else and reached for his leg.
He let you.
You looked down at his leg. Hesitated. Then slowly reached for it.
Jack raised an eyebrow. "What are you doing?"
"Checking."
"Checking?"
"Do you want my help or not?"
That shut him up.
Carefully you rested your hands against his leg. You weren't entirely sure what you were doing, not because you didn't understand the injury, you knew exactly what you were looking for and where the tension would be sitting. It was harder because this was Jack, and somehow that made every step of it feel different than it should.
Your fingers pressed lightly against the tight muscle along the residual limb, working slow circles into the spots where the strain had built up.
"Still hurts?" you asked.
"Sometimes," he admitted. "If I have the nightmares."
You didn't answer immediately.
Your fingers kept moving, carefully working through the tension gathered in the muscles.
"I should've bought you that bike the day we met."
You rolled your eyes. "I would've said no."
"No, you wouldn't have."
"I absolutely would have."
"You accepted one now."
"Because you're annoying."
"And persistent."
"Mostly annoying."
"And handsome."
You shook your head and kept massaging his leg, your fingers steady and methodical. Then, quieter, "I'm sorry I couldn't save it."
Jack looked at you for a long moment. The thought sat in his chest before he said it out loud. "Hey. I never blamed you. It wasn't your fault."
"I know. Still." You didn't look up from his leg. "In my head, every time I see you, there's a million different ways I run it back. Trying to make it work out differently."
He reached down and covered your hand with his, stopping the motion gently. "Hey," he said again, softer this time. "Look at me."
You did.
"You did everything right," he said. "I'm still here. I'm still standing. That's because of you, not in spite of you."
You held his gaze for a moment, and something in your chest loosened slightly, the old guilt shifting just enough to breathe around.
"You're still annoying," you said finally.
"I know." The corner of his mouth curved upward. "Mostly annoying. Handsome, too."
You scoffed.
"Didn't deny it, huh?"
Jack looked entirely too pleased with himself.
Like he'd just won an argument nobody else knew was happening.
****
FLASHBACK
The medic tent was chaos. Blood, dust, shouting. Stretchers coming in one after another faster than anyone could process them.
Then they brought in Jack.
For a second your heart stopped. His uniform was soaked through, dark and wet in a way that told you everything before you'd even looked at the wound. His face had gone pale, that particular gray that meant his body was already starting to shut down peripheral systems to protect the core. The lower half of his leg was barely recognizable.
You moved before you'd finished registering what you were looking at. Airway. Pulse. Blood pressure. You ran the checks the way your hands had been trained to, on autopilot, because the part of your brain that wanted to stand still and stare was not allowed in the room right now.
"You can't panic." Clark's voice cut through the noise beside you. "We need to save him."
"Yes, sir." Your voice came out steadier than you felt.
The next few minutes blurred into a single continuous motion. Assessment, medication, blood transfusion, everything moving faster than you could fully track. You worked the line, you called for supplies, you watched the monitor with one part of your brain while the other part screamed at you to look at his face, to confirm he was still in there.
Then came the leg.
You stared at the wound and then at the imaging once it came back, and you felt something in your chest go very still. The damage to the blood supply. The crush injury extending higher than you'd hoped. Tissue that had already started dying from lack of perfusion, the kind that didn't come back no matter how skilled the hands trying to save it were.
"No," you said.
Clark looked at you. "The leg lost the golden hour."
"There has to be another way." You said it too fast, the words tumbling out ahead of the part of you that already knew the answer.
"There isn't."
"There is." You pointed at the scan, at the section of tissue that was still pink, still arguably viable if you moved fast enough, if you were good enough, if the universe gave you one single break today. "We can try."
Clark's expression didn't change. "Kid."
"We can try." Your voice cracked slightly on the second word and you hated that it did.
"We're out of time." His voice hardened, not unkind, just final. "You know what this looks like as well as I do."
You looked down at Jack. Unconscious, pale, alive, the rise and fall of his chest the only thing in the room that mattered right now. Then back at the scan. Then back at him again, and your chest tightened so hard it was difficult to draw a full breath.
"There has to be something," you said, quieter now, the fight starting to drain out of the sentence even as you said it.
Clark was silent for a moment. Then, "Amputate."
You shook your head immediately. "No."
"Amputate."
"No." You said it again like saying it louder would change the anatomy in front of you. Like refusing hard enough could rebuild a blood supply that no longer existed.
For the first time Clark's voice hardened completely. "With or without you, this surgery happens. The only question is whether you're the one doing it."
The words landed harder than anything else in the room. Because suddenly it wasn't your decision to make at all. It never had been, not really, not once the tissue had died the way it had died. You had been arguing with biology and biology did not negotiate.
You looked at Jack again. Unconscious. Bleeding. Alive. You hated this. You hated the choice in front of you, hated that there even was a choice, hated that every version of this ended with you taking something from him that he hadn't agreed to lose. You hated, more than anything, that saving him meant losing part of him, and that you were the one who was going to have to be the hands that did it.
You closed your eyes. Took a breath. Then another, slower this time, the kind you used to talk yourself back into the work when your body wanted to fall apart and didn't have the time for it.
When you opened your eyes again the surgeon had come back online behind them, pushing the rest of you down where it couldn't interfere.
"Get him to surgery ," you said. What mattered right now is to keep his heart beating through the next hour.
If Jack Abbot was going to survive, you were going to be the one standing there when he did. Even if it meant being the one who had to take the leg to do it.
******
PRESENT TIME
Jack leaned back against the couch and let out a slow breath.
"The next thing I remember." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I woke up in the States."
You nodded. "You needed further treatment. That's why Clark sent you back."
Jack snorted. "Could've at least warned me." His gaze drifted toward the window, somewhere past it. "I wake up, look around, and suddenly I'm surrounded by strangers." A pause. "Didn't even know where the hell I was."
Then his eyes came back to you. Softer this time.
"At least—" He stopped.
You already knew where the sentence was going. At least there had been you. At least one familiar face. At least someone.
Your expression shifted before he could finish it. The teasing dropped away.
"I didn't know you were transferred," you said.
Jack frowned. "What?"
You looked down at your hands. The memory still sat uncomfortably even after all these years, a part of the story you hadn't told him because it had never felt necessary until right now.
"I found out afterward."
"What do you mean afterward?" His voice had gone careful.
You hesitated, then sighed. "I fainted."
Jack blinked. "You what?"
*******
FLASHBACK
After Jack's surgery, something inside you broke.
You had saved his life. Everyone kept telling you that. But every time you looked at the empty space where his leg used to be, it didn't feel like a victory. It felt like a debt you'd paid with someone else's currency.
So you worked. One shift became two. Two became three. Patients came and went and you barely remembered their names, just the blood, the sutures, the next emergency, the next life. Because if you stopped moving, you'd think what you could’ve done to save Jack.
People started noticing. A medic quietly handed you water you forgot to drink. Someone told you to sit down and you didn't.
Then Clark found you.
You were halfway through another chart when his shadow fell over your shoulder.
"Get out."
You didn't look up. "I can still work."
"Get out."
"I'm fine."
"Get out before I ban you from this tent."
That made you look at him, because you knew he meant it. You stood, your body heavier than it should have been, and the moment you stepped outside the heat hit you like a wall. Two steps. Three. Then the world tilted sideways and the last thing you heard was someone shouting for a doctor.
When you woke up everything hurt. Your head, your neck, your pride. A canvas ceiling. An IV in your arm. The cot creaked when you shifted.
"Good. You're awake."
Clark sat nearby, arms crossed.
"How long was I out?"
"Two days."
"What?"
"Congratulations. You finally beat everyone else's record."
You stared at him. "Two days?"
"You collapsed. Your body decided to remind you that you're human, not a machine that runs on coffee and stubbornness."
You groaned, which made your headache worse. "How is he?"
Clark's expression shifted, just slightly. Enough that you sat up straighter.
"How is Jack?"
He rubbed his thumb against his palm, thinking before he answered. "You can't see him. I transferred him back to the States. He needs treatment we don't have here."
The words landed harder than you expected. "I didn't even get to say goodbye."
“It’s better this way.” Clark was quiet for a moment. Then, "Because I've seen soldiers like him before. He's drowning right now. No mission, no team, no leg. He doesn't know what his life looks like anymore."
"I could help him."
Clark studied you for a long moment, and something about it made you feel eighteen again, sitting in front of a commanding officer who saw straight through you.
"That," he said quietly, "is exactly what scares me."
"What does that mean?"
He leaned back. "Kid. You have a habit of trying to save everyone. You spend every day fighting death in that tent." His voice was gentle. "You don't need to turn a man into another project."
That hurt more than it should have. "I care about him."
"I know you do."
A beat passed. Then you muttered, "Did you separate us, because he's older than me?"
Clark sighed dramatically. "No." A pause. "Maybe a little."
You laughed despite yourself. "My parents have an age gap."
"Your parents met during peacetime." That shut you up, because he wasn't wrong. War changed people. Sometimes permanently. He looked out toward the camp. "And Abbot. War already took too much from him."
You thought about the nightmares, the exhaustion, the silence you'd already seen settle into him. "I could still help."
"And what happens if he leans too hard on you?" Clark asked. "What happens if you lose yourself trying to hold him together?"
You didn't have an answer.
Clark sighed, and for the first time he looked less like your commanding officer and more like family. "I already see you as my own kid," he said. "You're talented. Far too selfless for your own good. You fight the angel of death every day." A faint smile. "And somehow you keep making it wait."
"I don't know about that."
"I do. We all do." He leaned forward. "When this contract ends, what are you going to do?"
You shrugged. "Vacation. Therapy."
"Both good answers." He pointed at you. "I want you back in school. Another specialty."
"Me?"
"I'll write the kind of recommendation letter universities fight over."
"Why?"
He looked genuinely confused by the question. "Because someone with your talent shouldn't stop here. And because you saved my soldiers."
"It wasn't just me." You smiled faintly. "Abbot taught me a lot."
"He did." A grin. "He's the anchor of this unit. I'm still the leader though."
That earned a real laugh, the first one in days.
Months later, your contract ended. Your bags sat beside you on the tarmac, the transport plane waiting in the distance. The future felt wide open and uncertain in a way that made your chest tight.
Clark walked up beside you while you stared at the runway.
"Go out there," he said. "Travel. See the world." His eyes narrowed slightly. "Meet someone."
Your chest tightened immediately, because you already knew exactly who he meant.
He studied you for a moment. "If after all of that, you still think about him." A pause. "Then go see him."
The words hurt, but not because he was dismissing what you felt. The opposite. He was treating it like it mattered, like it might survive time, like it might survive everything you'd both been through.
Then he snapped his fingers. "Oh."
A soldier appeared behind him carrying a very familiar puppy. Your eyes went wide. "Riot?"
The puppy squirmed immediately, trying to reach you.
"Can I?"
Clark looked offended. "Of course."
The moment Riot landed in your arms he started licking your face, and you laughed for the first time in days. Clark watched with quiet satisfaction.
"Kid's already attached to you anyway," he said.
Riot barked happily, like he completely agreed.
***********
PRESENT TIME
Jack stared at you for a second. Then groaned. "I'm gonna kill Clark."
You laughed. "He'll beat you first."
He looked genuinely offended. "You underestimate me?"
"He's eighty."
"Exactly."
You raised an eyebrow. "That's not helping your argument."
"It helps mine."
"You realize he could still throw you across a room?"
Jack thought about it for a second. Then sighed. "Yeah. Probably."
That earned another laugh from you, and the sound settled something warm in his chest. For a moment neither of you spoke. Then he leaned back against the couch and the amusement faded from his face.
"I blame him sometimes," he said.
You glanced over. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "But he had more experience than both of us." A pause. "And he was right."
You stayed quiet, letting him take his time with it.
Jack stared at the ceiling. "I pushed people away." His voice was calm. Too calm, the kind that only came from years of sitting with the same thought until it stopped hurting and started just being true. "I couldn't accept it." His hand rested unconsciously on his thigh, or where his thigh used to end. "I couldn't accept that I lost part of myself."
Your chest tightened. You remembered. The angry version of him. The distant one. The one everyone warned you about later, the one who shut doors before anyone could walk through them, who refused help, who disappeared into rehabilitation and therapy and silence and didn't come back out for a long time.
Jack let out a quiet huff of a laugh. "I was an asshole."
You smiled slightly. "A little."
"A little?"
"A lot."
"That's fair." The corner of his mouth twitched. Then his gaze drifted toward the coffee table, toward a frame sitting beside it.
You followed his eyes and froze.
The photograph. Old, slightly faded, taken with your Polaroid camera years ago. Gabriel in the middle, grinning like he owned the frame. Clark pretending to look annoyed. Riot small enough to fit under one arm. Jack looking irritated because he'd complained about pictures five seconds before it was taken. And you, laughing behind the camera, caught mid-motion in the background reflection of the tent's metal trunk.
"You still have that?" you asked.
Jack glanced at it and nodded. "Of course." His voice softened. "It was sent to me during therapy."
That made you look at him directly. He was already watching you, carefully, too carefully.
"Was it you?" he asked.
"What?"
"The nurse." His gaze didn't move from yours. "The one who gave it to her."
Your stomach dropped. "Oh."
He tilted his head. "I noticed things changed after that."
You looked away, suddenly very interested in absolutely nothing on the wall.
He kept going anyway. "My pain medication changed." Silence. "The grape juice disappeared." More silence. "They started giving me apple juice."
You pressed your lips together.
Jack almost smiled. "I hate grape juice."
"I know." The words escaped before you could stop them.
The room went quiet. His smile widened immediately. "Exactly."
You closed your eyes. Damn it. He had you.
"There were only a few people who knew that," he said, his voice gentle now, not teasing, not pushing, just warm. "You were one of them."
You bit the inside of your cheek and twisted your fingers together in your lap, because the apartment suddenly felt smaller, quieter, more intimate than it had five minutes ago.
Jack kept looking at you, patient, like he already knew the answer and was simply waiting for you to be ready to give it to him. Which, honestly, he probably did.
You finally sighed. "I left instructions."
His expression softened immediately. "You did."
********
FLASHBACK
After you got back to the States, you secretly visited. Not once. Not twice. More times than you were willing to admit, even to yourself.
The rehabilitation center was almost an hour away from your apartment. You learned the route by memory. The receptionist eventually stopped asking questions. The nurses started recognizing you. But you never signed in as a visitor. Never walked into his room. Never knocked on the door.
You stayed where he couldn't see you. The hallway. The observation window. The corner near the physical therapy room. Close enough to know he was alive. Far enough to leave when it hurt too much.
And it always hurt.
The first time you saw him standing on the prosthetic, he fell. Hard. The therapist tried to help him up and Jack shoved the hand away immediately. You almost walked into the room. Almost. Instead you gripped the edge of the observation window until your knuckles went white.
The second time, he threw the prosthetic across the room. The metallic crash echoed down the hallway and several patients looked over. Jack didn't care. He sat there breathing hard, angry, humiliated, broken in a way you hadn't seen on him before. You left before he could see the tears in your eyes.
Another time you heard him yelling at a therapist through the door.
"Just leave me alone."
The therapist stayed calm. Jack got louder.
"I said leave me alone."
You froze outside the door, listening. Not because you wanted to. Because you couldn't make yourself walk away.
The therapist said something too quiet to hear. Jack laughed, a bitter, ugly sound that didn't sound like him at all.
"My friend's dead." Silence. "My leg's gone." Another silence. "So tell me exactly what I'm supposed to be positive about."
Your chest tightened, because suddenly it wasn't about the leg. Maybe it never had been. He wasn't fighting rehabilitation. He was fighting everything. Gabriel. The explosion. The future. The guilt.
The realization followed you home that night, and every night after.
One afternoon you were standing in your usual spot outside the therapy room when a familiar voice appeared beside you.
"How long have you been standing here?"
You didn't need to look. Clark. Of course. That man noticed everything.
You kept your eyes on the glass. Said nothing.
Clark followed your gaze. Inside, Jack was practicing walking again. One step. Another. Another. The therapist beside him, ready to catch him if he fell.
"You come every week."
Still no answer.
Clark sighed. Not annoyed. Just tired, the kind that came from watching too many people hurt for too long.
"You're waiting for him to become himself again," he said quietly.
Your throat tightened, because he was right. That was exactly what you were doing. Waiting for the old Jack. The one before the explosion, before the funeral, before the nightmares. The Jack who laughed easier. The Jack who believed he could save everyone. The Jack who had two legs.
Silence stretched between you.
Then Clark said the thing you would remember for years.
"He won't."
Your breath caught. You finally looked at him. His expression wasn't cruel or cold. It was sad, because he understood exactly what he was taking from you by saying it.
"The old Jack is gone." He let that sit for a second. Then looked back toward the therapy room. "So is the old you."
That hurt even more, because he wasn't wrong. War had taken pieces from all of you. Gabriel was gone. Jack came back different. And somewhere along the way, without quite noticing it happening, you had changed too.
Clark folded his arms. "Staying here won't save him. He has to want to get better."
Inside the room Jack took another step. Then another. His jaw was clenched, his face pale with the effort of it, still fighting, still refusing to quit even when every part of him wanted to.
Clark watched him for a moment. Then looked back at you.
"And right now," he said, his voice softening, "that's a fight he has to win himself."
For the first time since the war ended, you didn't argue. Because deep down you already knew. You just weren't ready to let go yet.
"Leave," Clark said finally. "While he's fixing himself and fighting his own demons, you go fix yourself. Improve your skills. Become better than the version of you that's standing in this hallway right now."
You looked at him. "And just leave him?"
"Not forever." He held your gaze steadily. "One day, perhaps, the two of you could work together again. But not like this. Not you hiding in hallways and him throwing prosthetics across rooms. That's not a reunion. That's two people drowning next to each other and calling it support."
Something in that landed. You felt it settle, slow and certain, the way truth did when it finally arrived after you'd spent weeks circling it.
"I will," you said.
You stood, and before you could think too hard about it you leaned over and pressed a quick kiss to Clark's cheek. "I'll see you again, sir."
He crossed his arms, but something in his expression had gone soft around the edges. "Make me proud, kid."
************
PRESENT TIME
"You were there," Jack said, staring at you. "You were there, and I pushed everyone away so hard I didn't even realize it."
You looked down. "There wasn't much to realize."
He laughed quietly. "I thought I was alone."
"You were never alone."
His eyes lifted to yours. "Then why didn't I see you?"
You swallowed. "Because I was dealing with my own grief too."
The answer seemed to hit him harder than he expected. "Huh." A small smile appeared. "You were close." His voice softened. "I didn't know."
Then he rested his head against your shoulder. For once neither of you joked. Neither of you moved away. The silence felt comfortable, the kind that didn't need filling.
"You know," Jack said quietly, "Clark was right."
You raised an eyebrow. "That's a dangerous sentence."
"He'd love hearing that."
"He absolutely would."
Jack chuckled. Then his gaze lifted toward you at the same moment you looked down, and the conversation stopped without either of you deciding it should. Your faces were closer than either of you had realized, close enough to notice the tiredness still sitting in his eyes, close enough to notice where his gaze kept drifting.
The moment settled between you. Neither of you looked away. Neither of you moved.
Just a little closer. Just enough.
Then your phone rang.
Both of you blinked. Reality crashed back in at full volume. You looked at the screen. Emergency.
Jack sighed dramatically and dropped his head backward against the couch. "I hate this hospital."
You laughed, already standing. "I need to go."
For one brief second he wanted to ask you not to. Just stay. Five more minutes. Ten. An hour. Anything. But he knew better, because this was you, and you would never ignore a patient for anything, least of all him.
So instead he nodded. "Go."
You stood and reached for your bag. Then Jack suddenly held out a key.
You frowned. "What's that?"
"My house key."
You stared at him. "Your house key?"
He shrugged, trying very hard to look casual about it. "My leg still hurts."
"Uh-huh."
"I need someone to check on me."
"Uh-huh."
"In case I fall asleep and can't open the door."
You narrowed your eyes. "That is the worst excuse I have ever heard."
"It got you to take the key."
You opened your mouth. Closed it. Then pointed at him. "You are impossible."
"And yet you're taking it."
With a sigh you slipped the key into your pocket. "I'll give it back."
"No rush." The corner of his mouth lifted.
Your pager buzzed again. You headed for the door.
"Try not to die," you said.
Jack scoffed. "Pretty sure that's your job."
You shook your head and left.
The apartment fell quiet. Jack stared at the closed door for a moment, then at the empty spot beside him on the couch where you'd been sitting a minute ago.
A slow smile appeared.
Because for the first time in a very long time, when you left, he knew you were coming back.
Summary : What if Jack Abbott ends up with a rich wife instead of being the provider?
Character: Jack Abbot x rich wife!reader
Words Count: 7,560
Chapter 1 , Chapter 2 , Chapter 3
A/N: This is supposed to be a headcanon idea, but it ended up turning into a long paragraph.
More Jack Abbot stories :2nd Masterlist
The night shift at the Pitt was in its usual state of surreal chaos. Mateo was busy de-escalating a patient who believed he was a sentient radio, while Shen worked on a local mime who refused to break character, even while getting stitches. It was the kind of unpredictable atmosphere where the staff expected the weird—but they didn't expect the arrogant.
The double doors hissed open as a man swept in, draped in an expensive charcoal suit that was just wrinkled enough to suggest a long lunch that had devolved into several rounds of scotch. The scent of high-end whiskey trailed behind him like a physical wake, clashing sharply with the sterile, antiseptic air. He didn’t wait to be called; he marched straight to the triage desk, his lip curling at the sight of the linoleum floors.
“I’ve been waiting ten minutes,” he snapped, his voice booming across the quiet area. He adjusted his silk tie with a sneer. “Do you know who I am?”
Ellis didn’t look up from her monitor. Her fingers moved with practiced efficiency as she reached for a blood pressure cuff. “I don’t,” she said, her voice flat. “But I do know your blood alcohol content is likely higher than your IQ right now. Arm, please.”
He scoffed, yanking his arm back. “I don’t sit in waiting rooms with... these people. Move me to the front of the line. One call from me, and I can personally ensure the massive donation my company is about to make to this hospital disappears. I am from Ardentis Holdings.”
Ellis paused. Just for a second. She finally looked up, her eyebrows migrating toward her hairline. “Ardentis Holdings? Really?”
“Does that name sound familiar now?” he sneered. “I suggest you start acting faster.”
Ellis didn't look intimidated. If anything, she looked like she’d just found a very interesting bug on the sidewalk. She turned toward the doorway and called out, “Jack, could you come here for a second? We have a... VIP.”
Jack stepped into the room, his expression the picture of clinical boredom. He scanned the chart briefly before his eyes settled on the drunk man in the expensive suit. “Problem?”
“This gentleman is asking for priority treatment,” Ellis said, a small, dangerous smile playing at the corners of her mouth. “He says he’s from Ardentis Holdings.”
Jack’s eyebrows lifted. A flicker of recognition crossed his face, but it wasn't the groveling respect the patient was looking for. It was more like mild amusement.
“Oh,” Jack said, tilting his head. “My wife works there.”
The man let out a short, bark-like laugh. He looked Jack up and down—from his sensible shoes to his stethoscope—with pure disdain. “Your wife? What does she do, handle the filing? Clean the breakroom?”
Jack didn't flinch. “Y/N,” he said simply. “Do you know her?”
The man snorted, leaning back and crossing his arms. “Know her? She’s the CEO of Ardentis Holdings. She’s the most powerful woman in the sector. And you’re telling me you’re married to her?” He laughed again, a wet, arrogant sound. “Please. In what universe?”
Without a word, Jack pulled his phone from his pocket. He tapped the screen once and set it on the counter, angling it toward the man. The call connected almost instantly.
“Yeah?” Your voice came through the speaker—crisp, authoritative, and clearly focused on a dozen other things.
Jack leaned against the counter, looking completely relaxed. “Hey. Quick question. Do you happen to know a manager who is currently in my ER?”
There was a brief, sharp silence on the other end. “I know which one isn't at the board meeting he's supposed to be at,” you said, your voice dropping an octave. “He told my assistant he had a family emergency. Why?”
Jack turned the phone slightly, the camera capturing the man’s face.
The man went from flushed red to a ghostly, sickly white in three seconds flat. The smugness evaporated, replaced by a look of sheer, unadulterated terror. He was looking straight at his boss—and she was looking back.
“Oh,” you said quietly. It wasn't a shout. It was worse. It was the sound of a closing door. “Did you forget this meeting only happened because of your mistakes?”
“Ma’am,” he stammered, his voice cracking as he tried to straighten his wrinkled suit. “Ma’am, there’s been a massive misunderstanding—”
“He also mentioned,” Ellis piped up from the corner, “that he could cancel the company’s donation if we didn't give him special treatment.”
“Did he?” you asked. The air in the room seemed to turn to ice. “Be in HR at nine a.m. tomorrow. Don't bother bringing your briefcase.”
The man sat paralyzed, his world crumbling into the glowing screen. Before Jack could pull the phone away, your voice drifted through the speaker one last time.
“Oh, and Jack?”
Jack brought the phone back to his face, his expression softening instantly. “Yup.”
“Since I’ve already found someone to take the blame,” you said, your tone losing its icy edge for something warm and intimate, “I’m coming home as soon as I can.”
A rare, genuine smile broke across Jack’s face. “Can’t wait,” he murmured, ending the call.
The man stared, breathless. He had seen you dismantle boardrooms with a single glance, but he had never heard the "shark" speak with such gentleness—let alone to an E.R. doctor.
The call ended with a definitive click.
Jack slipped the phone into his pocket, his face returning to clinical boredom as he clicked his pen. “Let’s finish your vitals.”
“Well,” Ellis said, breaking the quiet with a satisfied sigh. “That solved triage. You’re back to being a ‘Level 4’ priority. Sit tight.”
The man didn’t argue. He sat perfectly still, eyes fixed on the floor, while Jack checked his vitals with methodical precision.
“…How did you even meet her?” he muttered after several minutes, his voice small and defeated. “She’s a shark. She’s always working. No one gets close to her.”
Jack paused for a fraction of a second, his pen hovering over the paper. “She’s stubborn,” Jack said quietly. “A workaholic.”
He clicked his pen.
“So am I.”
********
Flashback
The first time Jack met you.
The ER was unusually quiet. Jack was at the station, flipping through charts, when a nurse waved him over. "Got a walk-in. Abdominal pain," she noted. Jack nodded and stepped into the exam room.
You were sitting on the bed, one hand pressed lightly against your stomach. Your posture remained rigid, as if you were refusing to acknowledge the discomfort. Jack glanced from your face to the clipboard. "What do we have here?"
"Stomachache," you replied, exhaling slowly. "Probably gastric. I don’t have medicine at home."
"Probably?" he echoed, snapping on his gloves. He stepped into your personal space, calm and focused. "When did it start?"
"A few days ago."
"Pain level?"
"Manageable."
He raised a brow. "That’s not a number."
You gave him a dry look. "Fine. Five."
Jack didn’t push, but his hands were already moving. "Any nausea? Vomiting?"
"A little nausea. No vomiting."
He pressed lightly on your abdomen. "Tell me if it hurts."
It did. Your fingers tightened against the bedsheet, but you didn't make a sound. Jack’s eyes flicked to your hands—he noticed. He always noticed. "You work?" he asked, continuing the exam.
"Yeah. Office work."
"Hours?"
"Flexible."
He glanced up, meeting your eyes. "That usually means long."
A small, weary smile touched your lips. "I work better at night."
Jack let out a quiet breath, a faint smile mirroring yours. "Same. Night shift."
The ease of the gesture caught you off guard. "...So you get it," you murmured.
"I do." He stepped back, pulling off his gloves. "And you rest during the day?"
"Yes," you answered, perhaps a second too fast.
Jack didn’t call you out. He just looked at you for a moment longer than necessary—not judging, just noting the truth you were hiding. "Alright. Sounds like gastritis, maybe an early ulcer. It can be serious if you keep ignoring it."
He began writing on a prescription pad. "I’ll give you something to reduce the acid. But you need to eat regularly. And actually rest."
"I'll try," you said, though the words felt hollow.
"You don't sound convincing," Jack remarked, handing you the paper.
You looked at him properly then, curious. "Are you always like this with your patients?"
"Only when I think they’ll come back," he replied.
A beat of silence passed between you. You slid off the bed slowly, smoothing your clothes. "I won't."
"Hope you're right."
You reached for the prescription, your fingers brushing his for a brief, unintentional second. The air in the small room suddenly felt heavy.
"Thanks, doctor," you said, stepping toward the door.
"Abbott," he corrected quietly. "Jack Abbott."
After you left. He never thought this first meeting could lead to another.
The second time Jack met you
Same week. Different day.
Jack stepped into the exam room and stopped for half a second, the chart already in his hand. “You again.”
You were already sitting on the bed, one hand pressed to your stomach, your posture still stubbornly straight. “Don’t sound too excited, doctor.”
“I told you to follow the plan,” he said, his voice dropping into that calm, authoritative register.
“I did.”
Jack gave you a long, skeptical look as he pulled on fresh gloves. “No, you didn’t.”
You exhaled, shifting slightly to get comfortable. The movement cost you—a sharp flicker of discomfort that made your breath hitch—and he caught it. He always did.
“When did the pain get worse?” he asked, moving into your personal space.
“Last night.”
“Pain level.”
You hesitated, looking at the sterile white tiles of the floor. “…Seven.”
He didn’t comment, but his jaw tightened. “Lie back.”
You did as you were told. He pressed gently along your abdomen, his touch clinical yet oddly grounding. You flinched this time—not a subtle movement—and his hands paused for a fraction of a second before continuing.
“Still eating irregularly?” he asked, his focus entirely on the exam.
“Yes.”
“Sleeping?”
“A little.”
He exhaled through his nose, a sound of quiet frustration. He straightened up, snapping his gloves off. The movement pulled the fabric of his scrubs tight across his chest and forearms, revealing the quiet strength in his veins. It was annoyingly noticeable. You found yourself looking away first, clearing your throat.
“You need labs and imaging,” Jack said. “Blood work, and I want a CT scan. Now.”
You frowned. “That sounds excessive for a stomachache.”
“It’s not,” he replied calmly. “Your symptoms are progressing, and I’m not interested in guessing.”
“I just need stronger meds.”
He crossed his arms, leaning back against the counter. The posture was casual, but his eyes were sharp. “Is your boss the problem? We see a lot of patients who are scared to take time off because of a demanding superior.”
Shen, passing by the open door, leaned in with a helpful nod. “We can advocate for you if that’s the case. No job is worth a perforated gut.”
You blinked, caught off guard by the genuine concern. “Oh—no. It’s not like that. It’s… complicated.”
Jack didn’t move. “Complicated how?”
You exhaled, the weight of the company and the board meetings suddenly feeling very heavy. “…Family business.”
Something shifted in Jack’s expression. It wasn’t sympathy—he didn't seem like the type to offer pity—but it was a cold, hard understanding that this wasn't just about a paycheck.
Time passed in a blur of needles and the sterile hum of the CT machine. When Jack finally returned with the results, he didn't sit down. He didn't soften the blow.
“You have a peptic ulcer,” he said. “And it’s worsening. If this continues, it will bleed or perforate.”
A beat of heavy silence followed.
“You need surgery.”
You shook your head immediately, the instinct to protect your position at the firm overriding the pain. “Not now.”
Jack’s expression didn’t change, but his eyes darkened. “It’s not optional.”
“I can’t,” you said, your voice firmer, your eyes locking onto his. “I can’t risk my position. Not this week.”
Jack studied you, his gaze tracing the lines of exhaustion and defiance on your face. “If you delay this, it gets worse. The recovery gets longer. The risk gets higher.”
The irritation rose in your chest because he was right, and you hated being managed. “I’ll hold it,” you said, your voice tight. “Dr. Jack Abbott.”
That made him pause. Not because of the refusal, but because of the way his name sounded coming from you—a mix of a challenge and an acknowledgement.
Jack nodded once. “Then you’ll be back,” he said.
You didn't rebuke him. You couldn't, because deep down, you felt the truth in his words.
As you walked out of the Pitt, clutching your side, Shen watched your retreating figure. He turned to Jack, scratching his head. “Where does she even work? I wonder what kind of evil boss she has to be that terrified of taking a sick day.”
Jack didn’t answer. He just watched the doors close behind you, his thumb tracing the edge of your chart. “The worst kind,” he murmured to himself. “The kind that doesn't know when to stop.”
The third time Jack met you
A sharp screech of tires shredded the night. Inside the pit, Mateo and Shen sprinted toward the sound while Jack stayed focused, his hands moving with surgical precision over a teenager’s arm.
Outside, a sleek black sedan was skewed across the ambulance bay. Your assistant, Greg, scrambled out and threw open the rear door. "Please, help her!"
You were slumped against the leather, knuckles white as you clutched your abdomen. When Shen reached for you, your eyes flickered open, hazy with pain. "Just... an injection," you whispered, the words strained. "I need to get back."
"You again?" Shen muttered, recognizing you. Mateo shook his head, already pulling out a wheelchair. "We can’t treat you in a car. Let's move."
Inside, the ER hummed to life. Vitals were taken, IVs started. Shen palpated your stomach, his expression darkening. "Pain level, one to ten?"
"Ten," you choked out, your usual composure shattered.
"We need a CT scan immediately," Shen said.
You looked up, eyes wide with genuine fear. "How long? I... I have a meeting. I just need to stop the hurting." You weren't barking orders anymore; you were desperate. "Please, just tell me if I can leave."
Greg hovered at the curtain, his voice trembling. "Boss, the paracetamol didn't work. You can't just keep going like this."
You didn’t look at either of them. Your gaze was fixed on the ceiling, your voice low and dangerously clear. “If I don’t get the results fast,” you said, “I will drive that car out of here myself.” A heavy pause hung in the air. Then, your eyes flicked to Greg. “And I’ll fire you before I hit the exit.”
There was an awkward moment. Shen didn’t waste time and went outside. “Abbott, I need you.”
Jack peeled off his gloves, his expression neutral. “What’s up?”
“Your gastritis patient is back,” Shen said, already mid-stride toward the trauma bay. “Same one. Still stubborn, still refusing surgery.”
Jack exhaled, a shadow of frustration crossing his face. Of course it was you. He followed, but Shen glanced back, a strange look in his eye. “I think you’ll be surprised by who she actually is.”
They reached the door where Mateo stood waiting, tapping a video on his phone. He held it up—a TikTok clip of fast cuts and aggressive headlines featuring your face. “The one percent,” Mateo said. “Executive Director of Ardentis Holdings.”
“Now I get the stress,” Shen muttered.
“It’s not just the job,” Mateo added, lowering his voice. “Succession rumors. Apparently, her father wants to hand the empire to his mistress.”
“It’s not a rumor,” a voice cut in. Greg stepped forward, looking frayed. “It’s happening. That’s why she won't stop.”
Jack remained silent, absorbing the information. He wasn't looking at the headlines; he was looking at the clinical reality. “Does she eat?”
Greg let out a dry, hollow breath. “Crackers and coffee. Maybe once a day if I’m lucky.”
“Sleep?”
“Barely.”
Jack’s jaw tightened. The damage finally made sense—it wasn't just an illness; it was a slow-motion collapse.
“Please talk to her, Doctor,” Greg pleaded. “I practically had to kidnap her to get her here.”
“Didn’t she just threaten to fire you?” Shen asked, raising a brow.
“She says that every Tuesday,” Greg waved it off. “I’m the only one who can deal with her.”
Ellis approached then, the CT results gripped in her hand. She handed the films to Jack. He scanned them once, then again, his focus narrowing until the rest of the room faded away.
“Yeah,” Jack said, his voice dropping into a grave, final register. “She needs surgery. Right now.”
A heavy silence fell over the group.
“Who’s telling her?” Shen asked, looking around.
No one spoke. They all just looked at Jack. He handed the chart back to Ellis, his expression hardening into the one he used when a patient’s life was on the line.
“Of course,” he said.
He reached out and pushed the door open.
*******
Jack stepped into the trauma bay. You were lying back now, looking smaller than you had in the car. You were paler than before, a light sheen of sweat across your temples. One hand was still clamped over your abdomen, your knuckles white with tension.
You looked at him immediately, your gaze sharp even through the haze of agony. “What’s the result, doc?”
Jack didn't tower over you. He pulled a chair closer and sat down—not rushed, not distant. Just steady. “You need surgery,” he said. “Appendectomy. Today.”
“I’ll accept the surgery,” you said, your breath coming in tight hitches. “But can it be postponed until next week? There’s a project I need to finish. A board meeting I can't miss.”
Jack leaned forward slightly, his forearms resting on his knees. “Look,” he said calmly, “I know about the internal conflict in your company.”
Your eyes narrowed. “My noisy assistant.”
“You need this surgery now,” Jack continued, ignoring the deflection. “If you delay it, it will rupture. Then recovery won’t be one week of light work.”
You held his gaze, trying to find a loophole. “How long?”
“Up to three months,” he said. “Especially considering you haven’t been eating properly or sleeping. Your body is running on fumes.”
You let out a quiet scoff, though the movement clearly cost you. “Eight hours of sleep is for weaklings,” you rasped. “I can’t lose everything to that mistress. If I’m not there, she wins.”
On the monitor, your heart rate spiked. The beeping picked up pace, a frantic rhythm echoing your internal panic. Your grip on your abdomen tightened as another wave of pain hit, sharper and more demanding than the last.
Jack moved immediately. “Alright,” he said, his voice dropping into a soothing, authoritative register. “Easy.”
He reached for the IV line, his hands moving with practiced grace. He adjusted the flow and added a medication to the line—controlled, precise. “A small dose of morphine,” he said. “This will take the edge off.”
As the drug entered your system, the world seemed to soften at the edges. You exhaled slowly, your shoulders finally dropping an inch. Silence settled between you for a long second.
Then, Jack spoke again.
“He’s an idiot.”
You blinked, the morphine making the words feel like they were coming from far away. “…Who?”
“Your dad,” Jack said, as matter-of-factly as if he were reading a lab report. “You’re clearly the better choice for the company. Safer than whoever he’s trying to put in. Any doctor can see you’ve put your life into that place.”
“Huh…”The comment caught you completely off guard. No hesitation. No platitudes. Just the truth, delivered by a man who didn't even know who your father was. Ruthless and heartless even to his own daughter.
For the first time, the corporate mask cracked. It wasn't weakness that showed through, but a raw, startled realization. You almost laughed, but the movement pulled at your side, so you stopped, your breath catching in your throat.
“…Thanks,” you whispered instead, a small, genuine smile forming despite the circumstances.
Jack’s expression softened, just a fraction. “Yeah. Does she have the same mind for it that you do?” Jack asked, his tone casual, though his eyes remained sharp. “The mistress. Is she as smart as you?”
You let out a sharp, derisive scoff, “Yeah, right. The only way she made it into the executive suite was because she slept her way through the board. Strategy isn't exactly her forte.”
“Then you’ve got nothing to worry about. You have the brain. She doesn't.” he assured you that weirdly work on you “You could win the battle with your eyes closed.”
“I suppose you’re right,” you murmured, your voice losing its defensive edge.
He straightened up, returning to his professional posture. “So, for the surgery—I need your consent. Do you want to proceed?”
You looked at him. Really looked this time. Not at the white coat or the stethoscope, but at the steady man sitting in the plastic chair.
“Fix me up, doctor.” you kinda dragging the doctor because you want to know his name. “I trust you.”
That words was enough. Jack stood up, checked the monitors one last time, and stepped out of the room.
Greg was waiting right outside the door, pacing a hole into the floor. He stopped the moment Jack appeared. “Did she... did she agree? Did she want the surgery?”
Jack didn't stop walking toward the scrub sinks, but he gave a single, definitive nod. “Yup.”
Greg let out a breath so long it sounded like a deflating balloon. “Thank goodness.”
The fourth time Jack met you
By the time Jack made his way upstairs, the chaos of the ER had faded into the quieter rhythm of recovery floors. He hadn’t planned to come, or at least that’s what he told himself, but he still stopped outside your room.
The door wasn’t fully closed, and your voice slipped through, steady but impatient. “Greg, give me the laptop.”
“No,” Greg said, unusually firm. “Post-op orders. You just had surgery. You’re not working.”
A brief silence followed, the kind that meant you were deciding whether to argue or override him. Jack pushed the door open before you could.
You were propped up against the pillows, pale but composed, IV line taped to your arm. Even after surgery, you looked like you were still in control. Your eyes shifted to him, and for a second, you said nothing.
“You should be resting,” Jack said, glancing at the monitor, then back at you. “Eat, sleep, repeat. That’s how you recover faster.”
You went quiet.
Greg blinked. “See? I told you.”
Jack ignored him. His focus stayed on you. “You pushed too far,” he said, calm but firm. “Ulcers don’t get that bad overnight. Next time, you stop earlier.”
“There won’t be a next time,” you replied.
“Good.”
A pause settled between you.
“And don’t lose,” he added.
Your brows knit slightly. “Lose to what?”
“The pressure. Your father. The mistress.” His gaze stayed steady. “I put my bet on you.”
That caught you off guard.
“A bet?”
“Are you going to win or not?”
You leaned back, studying him. “Is this a challenge?”
He didn’t answer. Just checked his watch.
“My shift’s over. Focus on recovering.”
Then, almost as an afterthought, “I don’t like losing bets.”
He walked out like it was nothing.
The room felt quieter after he left. Greg lingered nearby, watching you like he was waiting for you to snap back and ask for the laptop again.
You didn’t.
You stayed where you were, one hand resting lightly over the bandage, your eyes still on the door he had just walked through.
A bet.
You let out a slow breath, then finally glanced at Greg. “Did he just challenge me?”
Greg gave a small shrug. “I guess?”
A faint smile pulled at your lips, almost against your will. “Oh, I’m going to show him.”
You adjusted your blanket to go back to sleep. "Send gifts to the doctors who handled my case in the ER," you commanded, your professional tone back in place.
Greg nodded, tapping into his tablet. "Yes, boss. Of course. All of them?"
You didn't look at him. "All of them."
A beat of silence followed. "And make sure it’s appropriate," you added. "Nothing over the top, but let them know the quality of care was... noted."
"Understood." Greg hesitated, his stylus hovering over the screen. "...Do you want to include Dr. Abbott separately? Maybe something personal?"
"No," you said, your voice steady. "Make it the same as the others."
Few days later, the discharge papers were signed. The hospital room, once a sanctuary of quiet, now felt too small, too restrictive. You stood by the window, dressed in a sharp, tailored suit that felt like armor. You straightened your sleeves, the familiar weight of your old life settling back onto your shoulders.
"Can I leave tonight instead?" you asked, checking your watch. "The evening air is better for travel."
Greg checked the itinerary. "If we want to land in Sweden and get ahead of her before the morning session, we really need to be on the afternoon flight."
You hesitated. Just for a fraction of a second, your fingers brushed the edge of the hospital bed—the place where you’d actually found a moment of peace.
"...Fine," you conceded.
Greg glanced at you, then added with a mischievous tilt of his head, "You know, if you want... I could probably get his number. For follow-up questions. Medical ones."
You turned your head sharply, your eyes narrowing. "Shut up, Greg."
"Yes, boss." But there was a hint of a smile he couldn't quite hide as he grabbed your bags.
As you stepped out of the room and headed toward the elevator, you didn't look back at the trauma bay or the quiet halls. But as you walked, your pace slowed—just a fraction. You weren't rushing. You weren't vibrating with the need to be somewhere else.
For the first time in a very long while, you weren't thinking about the company. Not entirely. Somewhere in the back of your mind, a steady, low voice lingered, grounding you.
Eat. Sleep. Repeat.
Back in the ER, the frantic energy of the night shift had smoothed out into the steady, mechanical rhythm of a Tuesday morning. The monitors hummed, footsteps squeaked against the polished linoleum, and the air smelled of fresh floor wax and stale coffee.
Shen looked up from a clipboard as Jack walked in, shrugging off his heavy jacket to reveal his scrub top.
“Your patient got discharged this morning,” Shen said, his voice carrying a teasing lilt.
Jack paused, one arm still caught in his sleeve. He hesitated for only half a second before continuing. “Hmm?”
“The princess of Ardentis Holdings,” Shen smirked, leaning back against the nurse's station. “Left in a motorcade about two hours ago.”
Jack let out a quiet breath, finally draping his jacket over the back of a chair and reaching for the chart rack. “She’s not a princess,” he muttered, his voice low and distracted.
Shen didn’t bother to argue the technicality; the smirk remained firmly in place.
“We got really good food the whole time she was here,” Ellis chimed in, leaning her elbows on the counter. There was a faint, satisfied look on her face. “Catering from places I can’t even afford to look at. The day shift was absolutely jealous of us.”
Mateo nodded in fervent agreement. “I had a lobster roll for a ‘snack’ at 3:00 a.m. I don’t think I can go back to vending machine granola bars, Jack.”
Jack flipped through a chart, his expression entirely unimpressed. “So that’s what you took from this case. A refined palate for seafood?”
Ellis shrugged, unbothered. “I’m just saying. High-standard patient, high-standard perks.”
“Don’t tell me you guys are hoping she comes back,” Jack said, glancing up briefly from his paperwork, his eyes narrowing slightly.
Ellis and Mateo exchanged a quick, knowing look before both letting out a chuckle.
“Not like that, doc,” Mateo said, holding up his hands in mock surrender as he began to back away toward a trauma bay.
“Relax, Doctor Abbott,” Ellis added with a wink, heading off to check on a fresh admission. “The drama was just a nice break from the usual drunks.”
Shen, however, stayed. He stepped a little closer, lowering his voice so it didn't carry across the pit.
“…Don’t you?” Shen asked.
Jack looked at him, one brow slowly crawling toward his hairline. “Don’t I what?”
Before Jack could press him, Mateo suddenly reappeared, his phone already out and glowing. “There’s an update,” he said, his voice dropping into a conspiratorial whisper. “Next week will be the decision. Swedish investors. Board control. It’s all going down right now.”
Jack frowned slightly, his pen pausing over a prescription pad. “How do you even know all of this, Mateo? Don't you have patients?”
Mateo rolled his eyes, as if the answer were obvious. “I follow an account. ‘The 0.1%.’ They track people like her—the moves, the scandals, the power shifts. It’s better than any soap opera.”
Jack didn’t comment. He just picked up his pen again, tapping it rhythmically once, twice against the edge of the metal clipboard. He looked back down at his work, his face a mask of clinical indifference.
“…So?” Jack asked quietly.
Mateo looked up, surprised by the prompt. Jack met his eyes, his expression as calm and steady as the day they’d met.
“Tell me when it’s decided,” Jack said, his voice barely audible over the hum of the ER.
A small, stunned pause followed. Mateo blinked once, a slow grin spreading across his face.
“Tell me who wins,” Jack added.
Mateo’s grin widened into a triumphant beam. “Yes, sir.”
The fifth time Jack met you
A few months later, the room was bathed in the glow of a hundred crystal chandeliers.
Soft gold lighting bounced off champagne flutes and silk gowns. It was a sea of people dressed in the kind of tailored luxury that signaled true power. Conversations were layered, voices kept to a practiced, elegant hum over the quiet swell of a string quartet. This wasn’t just a victory party; it was a statement.
The war was over. The board was yours, and the mistress had been removed—cleanly, efficiently, and without a single drop of blood spilled on the corporate carpet.
You stood at the center of the room, a glass of vintage sparkling water in your hand. You were calm, composed, and entirely untouchable.
Lilly, your closest friend and director of marketing, looped her arm through yours, a triumphant grin on her face. “You really did it. You actually pulled it off.”
You took a slow, deliberate sip. “Of course I did.”
Lilly laughed, ready to make a toast, but suddenly her posture stiffened. Her hand dropped to her stomach, her fingers digging into the expensive fabric of her dress.
“…Okay,” she whispered, her face draining of color. “That’s not good.”
You turned immediately, your focus shifting from the room to her in a heartbeat. “What’s wrong?”
She forced a tight smile, though her grip on your arm was becoming a vice. “Probably just the new diet. It’s brutal.”
You weren’t convinced. You had seen this look before—the pale sweat, the shallow breathing. You were already shaking your head. “We’re going to the ER.”
“What? No—this is your night,” she hissed through gritted teeth. “The things we do for beauty, right?”
“Greg,” you called out, your voice low but carrying that unmistakable edge of command. “Prepare the car.”
“I have medicine in my bag—” Lilly started.
“No,” you cut her off, already guiding her toward the side exit. “We’re going. Now.”
Greg, who had been hovering nearby with a watchful eye, squinted at Lilly. He looked from her to you, a slow, knowing expression crossing his face. “…Suspicious,” he muttered under his breath.
“Shut up, Greg,” Lilly groaned, leaning heavily into you as the pain spiked.
“Yeah,” you added, pushing through the heavy oak doors. “Shut up, Greg.”
The ER doors hissed open with that familiar, pneumatic sound.
The smell was the same—antiseptic and floor wax. The lighting was the same—stark and uncompromising. But this time, the reason was different.
Shen looked up from the nurse's station and immediately a smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Oh. The queen is back.”
You frowned, not missing the irony. “What?”
“I’m dying here,” Lilly groaned beside you, her head lolling against your shoulder.
You pointed at her without a moment’s hesitation. “Stomach pain. High stress. New diet. Fix her.”
Shen was already moving, grabbing a wheelchair. “Of course it is. It’s always the diet.”
The machinery of the hospital picked up speed around you. Vitals were taken, questions were barked out, and Lilly was whisked toward a trauma bay. Then, the curtains parted, and Jack stepped in.
He looked exactly as he had months ago—sleeves rolled up, stethoscope around his neck, an expression of unshakable, quiet focus. He didn't react to your designer gown or the fact that you looked like you’d just stepped off a magazine cover. To him, you were just a person in a room.
“Ellis, IV line. Matteo, get me labs. Let’s not assume it’s the diet until we see the blood work,” Jack said, his hands already moving to assess Lilly’s condition.
“Yes, doctor,” Ellis replied.
Within seconds, the team had Lilly stabilized and moving toward imaging. The chaos receded, the curtains were pulled, and suddenly, the room felt much larger.
It was just you and him.
Jack pulled off his gloves, tossing them into the bin with a flick of his wrist. He turned to you properly, leaning back against the metal counter. A brief, quiet pause stretched between you.
“You look great,” he said. It wasn't a line. It was a clinical observation, delivered with a hint of genuine warmth.
You held his gaze, feeling the tension of the last few months finally start to ebb away. “Thank you.”
Another beat passed.
“Oh,” Jack added, as if it had just occurred to him. “And congrats. You won the battle.”
You tilted your head slightly, a flicker of amusement in your eyes as you remembered. “Right. So that means you won the bet too?”
“Yup.”
A real smile almost formed. “Glad I didn’t make you lose.” You paused, then added, “How did you even know?”
Jack shrugged lightly, leaning one shoulder against the counter, completely at ease. “Hard to miss,” he said, his voice dropping into that steady tone you remembered.
“After all… you were my patient.”
With a small nod, he pushed himself off the counter and walked toward the trauma bay, already shifting his focus to the next case.
You stayed where you were, silk gown catching the harsh fluorescent light, watching him leave. His movements were calm, unhurried, like none of the chaos around him mattered. Like your world didn’t touch his at all.
Without thinking, you caught your lower lip between your teeth, your gaze lingering on the doorway long after he disappeared.
Across the room, Lilly, still half-sprawled on the bed but far more awake now, exchanged a slow, knowing look with Greg.
They nodded at the same time.
“Yeah,” Lilly muttered, voice weak but satisfied. “I knew it.”
Greg adjusted his glasses, completely in agreement. “Exactly.”
The sixth time Jack met you
A few weeks later, the ER felt different.
It was cooler. Literally. Even the patients were shocked and unprepared with the coldness.
Mateo walked through the double doors, froze directly under a ceiling vent, and closed his eyes. He looked like a man who had just found religion.
“Is that... actual air conditioning?” he breathed, the faint hum of a powerful, brand-new HVAC system purring above him.
Ellis didn’t even bother to look up from her paperwork, though the lack of sweat on her brow spoke volumes. “Don’t question a miracle, Mateo. Just enjoy the fact that we aren't melting into our scrubs anymore.”
Shen leaned back in his chair, a rare, relaxed posture for a Tuesday afternoon. “The waiting room, too. Finally, No more broken chairs or flickering lights.”
Robby walked in, hands shoved deep into his pockets, glancing around at the subtle but expensive upgrades. The walls were freshly painted, the floors gleamed with a high-grade finish, and the equipment at the triage station was top-of-the-line.
“Donations came through,” Robby said casually, though his eyes were dancing with a certain knowing light.
Mateo smirked, finally stepping away from the vent. “Yeah. We know who.”
No one said your name. They didn’t need to. The precision of the renovation, the efficiency of the delivery, and the sheer quality of the materials had your signature written all over it.
Robby’s gaze shifted across the room, landing on Jack. As usual, Jack was leaning against the counter, focused on a chart as if the world hadn't just been upgraded around him.
Robby walked over and leaned against the opposite side of the desk. “We should thank her.”
Jack didn’t look up. “You’re the Head of E.R, Robby. You can.”
Robby shook his head, a small, knowing smile tugging at his lips. “No. It’s you who should thank her.”
That made Jack pause. Just for a second. The pen in his hand stilled over the paper. He slowly raised his head, his expression as unreadable as ever. “…Why me?”
Robby gave him a long, pointed look. “Don’t pretend you don’t know, Jack.”
Jack closed the chart. Slowly. Methodically. “I don’t.”
Robby let out a quiet breath, a sound somewhere between amusement and exhaustion. “Yeah,” he said, tapping the counter before walking away. “You do.”
Later that night, a rare, quiet moment descended upon the pit. The rush of the evening had bled out into a midnight lull.
Jack stepped out into the crisp night air to clear his head, but his gaze was immediately pulled to the parking lot. The black luxury sedan was back, and Greg was leaning against the hood. Greg caught Jack’s eye and gave a small, meaningful nod toward the hospital lobby.
He headed back inside, his boots echoing on the newly polished floors. He found you standing in the center of the lobby, head tilted back as you oversaw the progress of the renovation you had funded.
He approached, his steps unhurried and steady. “You’re doing inspections now?”
You turned toward him, showing no surprise at his sudden appearance. “Just making sure it works.”
His gaze flicked briefly to the new vents above—the ones currently pumping perfectly chilled, sterile air into the wing—then settled back on you. “It does.”
A beat of silence followed, the kind that usually felt awkward in a hospital but felt different between the two of you. “You didn’t have to do this,” he added, his voice a low rumble.
You held his gaze, your expression as calm and unreadable as ever. “It’s called gratitude, Dr. Abbott.”
Gosh. Every time his name slipped from your lips, it sent a sharp, electric tingle racing down his spine. He cleared his throat. “For the hospital?”
“For the people in it,” you corrected him. You took a half-step closer, the professional distance beginning to blur. “You helped me. And you helped my friend. Consider this a closing of the account.”
Jack studied you for a long second, his head tilted slightly as if he were deciding whether to accept that answer or look for the one you weren't saying. The silence that settled between you wasn't empty; it was close, heavy with the shared history of that frantic night in the ER.
“You’ve been eating properly?” he asked suddenly, falling back into the role of the doctor, though his eyes suggested he was looking for more than just a medical update.
You exhaled a light, weary breath. Of course he would bring it back to that. “Yes. Greg is a professional micromanager.”
“And sleeping?”
The question caused a pause. You shifted your weight slightly, your gaze drifting toward the darkened windows for a fraction of a second before returning to his steady, unblinking eyes. The air between you tightened, the hum of the new AC the only sound in the quiet lobby.
“I have trouble sleeping,” you said.
That got his attention. Jack’s eyes lifted from the chart, settling on you with quiet, undivided focus. “Since when?”
“Since a long time ago.” You tilted your head slightly, watching him. “Probably because my bed is too cold. Maybe you could fix that.”
Something in his expression shifted. He wasn't surprised or even particularly amused; he was just suddenly, intensely aware. “Cold bed,” he repeated, his voice dropping an octave. His gaze didn’t leave yours. “You're saying that’s the problem?”
“It’s one of them.” Your chin lifted a fraction, meeting his scrutiny.
He studied you for a long second, then gave a small nod, accepting the answer without pushing. “You don’t look like someone who waits around for problems to fix themselves,” he noted.
“I don’t.”
“Good.”
The silence that followed wasn’t awkward. Instead, it seemed to tighten the space between you, pulling the air taut. You crossed your arms slowly, the movement deliberate this time. “Then what would you suggest, doctor?”
Jack didn’t answer right away. He just looked at you, steady and measuring, as if calculating a dose. “Warm shower,” he said finally. “Magnesium. No phone thirty minutes before bed.”
Your brow lifted. “That’s it?”
“That’s what works.”
You tilted your head, still watching him, refusing to let him off the hook. “And if I’m still not tired?”
There was a brief, heavy pause. His gaze dropped for a second, tracing the line of your throat before returning to your face. “You should have someone who makes you stop,” he said, his voice calm and certain. “Someone who drags you to bed.”
The words landed heavier than they should have. You felt it in the sudden hitch of your pulse. “Do you give that advice to all your patients?” you asked, your voice dropping to a whisper.
He shook his head once. “No.” He let the word hang there for a beat. “Just you.”
He turned slightly, acting as if he were done, as if the line had already been crossed and he wasn’t going to linger on the edge. “If it’s still a problem,” he added almost casually, “you know who to call.”
You watched him, the sharp edges of your corporate persona shifting into something softer, more intrigued. “I didn’t know you had this in you.”
That made him glance back, looking just over his shoulder. “You don’t know much about me yet.” He paused, his eyes dark. “But you could.”
Now he turned fully, stepping closer. He wasn't near enough to touch, but he was close enough to change the atmosphere between you. “There’s a bar down the street,” he said. “If you want to fix the sleep issue properly.”
You narrowed your eyes slightly, a flicker of surprise crossing your face. “You’re skipping your shift?”
His mouth curved, just a little. “I’m stepping out.” He took another step, his voice dropping into a low, private register. “I’m not letting the biggest donor of this hospital go home alone and pretend she’s fine.”
It wasn’t a tease. It was a statement of pure intention. You held his gaze for a second longer, the weight of the night and the hospital falling away, before letting a small smile slip through.
“Lead the way, Dr. Abbott.”
Since that night, it didn’t stay just one night.
What started as something simple turned into a pattern neither of you questioned. You showed up after his shifts. He started expecting you there. Some nights you waited in the car, some nights you walked straight into the ER like you belonged there.
People noticed. The quiet way you stood near him. The way he always looked up when you entered, even in the middle of work.
You stopped going home alone. He stopped leaving without you.
Thank you to everyone who has read this chapter. Leave a Comment and Reblog, please. I'd love to hear your thoughts. ❤️
FLASHBACK
It was hot. Not the kind of heat people complained about. The kind that simply existed, heavy and relentless, pressing down on him until breathing felt like its own small effort. The fans overhead rattled, pushing the same hot air back and forth without doing much of anything that he could feel.
No one spoke much. Not today.
Jack sat against the canvas wall, knees drawn up, his body aching with the kind of exhaustion that came from too many hours awake. His eyes burned. He hadn't slept. Every time he closed them he saw Gabriel laughing at something stupid, making fun of somebody across the mess tent, completely alive.
Then not.
Across the tent a soldier stepped out from behind the partition and wiped a hand across his face. Jack looked up.
"Is it done?"
The soldier glanced back the way he'd come. "She needs a minute."
Of course she did.
Jack already knew without being told that you'd been in there nearly an hour. Long after everything that needed doing had been done. Long after Gabriel had been cleaned and prepared, long after the paperwork, long after everyone else had said what they needed to say and stepped back out into the heat. He knew because he'd been watching the curtain the whole time, waiting for it to move, and it hadn't.
He stood and crossed the tent slowly. When he stepped through he found you beside the transfer case, gloves off, hands clean but trembling, your eyes red in a way that had nothing to do with dust. He'd seen you exhausted before. This was different. This was the kind sleep couldn't touch.
Clark stands quietly beside you. "Kid."
"His collar wasn't straight." Your voice cracked on the last word. "I fixed it."
Jack didn't say anything. He understood exactly what you meant and exactly what you didn't. The collar had never been the problem. You weren't ready to let him go, and there was nothing in his training, nothing in any of his years out here, that told him what to do with that.
He stepped closer anyway. It hurt him to watch you standing there, frozen, unable to move toward the door. He kept his voice low, the only thing he knew to offer. "His family's waiting for him."
Your body flinched. "Right. Yes." You took a breath and finally stepped back. "I'm sorry."
Jack gave Clark a small nod. The signal that it was clear.
A few minutes later the transfer case was brought out into the heat, and the tent went completely silent around it. Six soldiers stepped forward to carry it. Jack was one of them. Clark too. He focused on his hands, on the weight, on keeping his steps even, because if he thought about anything else right now he wasn't going to make it across the compound.
Outside the sunlight was blinding after the dim canvas interior. The helicopter pad sat in the distance, the transport aircraft waiting beyond it. The camp had gathered along the path without anyone telling them to. Nobody spoke. Jack didn't expect them to.
When the case reached the vehicle, the soldiers stopped and stepped back into formation. Jack moved to one side. Clark stood beside him. Across from them you stood with your spine straight and your chin level, holding a stillness that Jack recognized immediately, because it was costing you everything you had left and he knew exactly what that looked like from the inside.
For a moment nobody moved.
Then Clark raised his hand in salute.
Jack's came up with it, automatic, trained, and it was returned down the line by every soldier present, the only sound the wind and somewhere distant the low building hum of the aircraft's engines. His throat tightened as he held the position. Across from him you were still standing at attention, perfect posture, perfect form, and he understood that you were holding it together through nothing but sheer will, because that was the only thing keeping you upright at all.
The vehicle began to move.
Only then did your hand lower. Only then did Gabriel actually start to leave, the case disappearing slowly up the ramp while the camp watched a piece of itself go with it.
That was when you broke.
Jack saw your shoulders drop first. Then your knees seemed to lose whatever certainty had been holding them, and the sound that came out of you was quiet and raw, the sound of someone who had held the wall up for exactly as long as duty required and not one second longer.
He was already moving before he'd decided to. He reached you in two steps and pulled you in, wrapping both arms around you, one hand coming up to rest against the back of your head without him thinking about it at all.
You didn't pull away. You pressed your face into his shoulder and let it come.
Jack didn't say anything. There was nothing true enough to say, and he'd learned a long time ago not to insult grief with empty words. He just held on, steady, while the engines spun up behind you both and somewhere over your shoulder Clark stood with his hand still raised, watching the two people he had left from that tent try to hold each other together in the middle of everything that had just been taken from them.
******
After Gabriel's transfer ceremony, the aircraft disappeared into the horizon. Yet somehow his presence stayed everywhere. In the empty chair near the mess tent. In the half-finished deck of cards still sitting on a crate. In the silence that followed every conversation now, the particular gap where his voice used to fill the space. In the jokes nobody told anymore.
War kept moving. It always did. Orders still came down, patrols still happened, the camp still woke up the next morning whether anyone was ready for it or not.
Jack hated that. Part of him wanted the world to stop, just for a day, just long enough for everyone to fully acknowledge that Gabriel was gone. Instead soldiers reported for duty, vehicles rolled out, radios crackled with the same routine traffic, and life continued like one man hadn't left a hole in the middle of all of them.
So Jack did what everyone else did. He kept moving. Checking equipment, checking ammunition, checking routes that didn't need checking. Volunteering for patrols, for sweeps, for anything that kept his hands and his attention occupied. Because the second he stopped moving, he started thinking, and every thought led back to Gabriel. Every single one.
Across camp you weren't much different. You worked every shift available, took every patient, stayed longer than necessary, found reasons to be useful long after the necessary work was done. The two of you were doing the exact same thing. Just in different uniforms.
A few days later Jack was checking his gear when your voice cut through the quiet.
"You volunteered."
Not a question.
Jack didn't look up. "Yeah."
"You don't have to go."
"I'm going."
"You just got back."
He kept adjusting a strap that didn't need adjusting, checking a weapon he had already checked twice.
"Jack."
Nothing.
"Look at me."
Slowly he lifted his head, and the second he did he knew you could see straight through him. You always could. Not physically exhausted, not really. Something colder than that. Like part of him had shut down after Gabriel died and simply never bothered switching back on.
"Don't go," you said.
His jaw tightened. "It's a sweep."
"You volunteered." You stepped closer. "And you haven't rested properly in days."
He almost laughed. The irony would have been funny if it weren't so depressing. "You too."
A tired breath escaped you. "True." You folded your arms. "But if I pass out, at least there's a hospital bed waiting for me."
A small smile pulled at the corner of his mouth, the first one in days. Then it disappeared, because the truth came out before he could stop it.
"To make sure nobody else ends up like Gabriel."
Silence settled between you. There it was. The thing he hadn't said out loud yet. The thing everybody already knew without needing it confirmed.
You stared at him. Then slowly closed the distance. "But what about soldiers like Jack Abbot?"
The question hit harder than he expected. For a second he couldn't answer, because the truth was ugly. The truth was that he hadn't thought about himself at all. Not since the explosion. Not since watching Gabriel die. Not since watching you cry.
A muscle jumped in his jaw. His eyes dropped away. "The day I signed up," he said, voice rough, "the day I got on that plane." A pause. "I stopped putting myself first."
You shook your head immediately. "No."
"Yeah."
"No." The anger in your voice surprised him. "You think Gabriel would've wanted this?"
Jack barked out a laugh with no humor in it at all. "Gabriel would've volunteered before me."
That hurt because it was true. Gabriel would have been first through the door, first on the helicopter, first running toward danger without a second thought. Which was exactly why he wasn't here anymore. The thought settled heavily between you.
"Jack."
He looked at you. Really looked. And suddenly you didn't seem angry anymore. Just tired. Heartbroken. Scared.
Your voice dropped, quiet and small and entirely honest. "I don't want you to go."
Something cracked inside his chest. The silence that followed felt endless.
Then you whispered, "Please stay."
Your eyes glistened. And for the first time since Gabriel died, Jack wanted to. God, he wanted to. If it had been anyone else asking he would have walked away without hesitation. But it wasn't anyone else. It was you.
For one terrible second he imagined dropping the bag. Telling command no. Staying. Choosing himself. Choosing you.
Instead he stepped forward, wrapped his arms around you, and pulled you close. The hug was brief and tight, the kind soldiers gave before deployment, the kind neither of you actually wanted but both needed anyway. His voice came low against your hair.
"I'll come back."
You closed your eyes. "This is weird."
He huffed softly. "What is?"
"The first time we haven't argued."
That finally earned a real chuckle, small and tired. "That means hell froze over."
You didn't laugh. Somehow that felt worse.
When you pulled back your eyes searched his face. "Promise me you'll come back in one piece."
Jack froze. Because he should have promised. He should have lied. He should have given you something, anything, to hold onto. Instead, "I won't promise that."
The hurt that flashed across your face followed him for weeks afterward.
He squeezed your shoulder once. Then picked up his gear and walked away. He didn't look back. Because he knew if he did, he wasn't leaving.
******
The location looked abandoned. A cluster of damaged buildings sat beneath the afternoon sun, broken walls, collapsed roofs, too quiet. Jack hated quiet. Quiet usually meant somebody was waiting.
The team moved carefully through the compound, weapons raised, eyes scanning every doorway, every window, every shadow. Jack's instincts were screaming. Something was wrong.
Then gunfire erupted. The first shots shattered the silence and soldiers dove for cover, more shots following in rapid succession until the entire compound dissolved into chaos.
"Contact left!"
"Move!"
Jack returned fire, called positions, directed movement as the team pushed forward. Then someone screamed.
He turned. One of the younger soldiers was down, hit, bleeding out fast. Without thinking he moved, exactly the way Gabriel would have, exactly the way Gabriel always had. He sprinted toward the soldier, dropped beside him, grabbed his vest, and started dragging him toward cover while bullets cracked overhead and concrete exploded somewhere close. Somebody was yelling. Jack barely heard them, because all he could think was not again, not another one, not today.
Then somebody shouted a warning.
Too late.
The world turned white.
The explosion hit with enough force to lift him off the ground entirely. Pain erupted everywhere at once. His ears rang, his vision blurred, the sky spun above him in a way that made no sense. For a second there was no sound at all. No gunfire, no shouting. Nothing. Just darkness.
And then a voice. Familiar. Terrified.
"Jack!"
The darkness shifted.
"Jack! Don't you dare leave me!"
Again. Closer. Louder.
"Jack!"
*********
PRESENT TIME
Jack woke up with a sharp inhale.
For a second he didn't know where he was. The darkness of his bedroom slowly replaced the battlefield, the walls and ceiling and silence settling into place where dust and gunfire had been a moment ago. Pittsburgh. His chest rose and fell heavily, sweat clinging to his skin, his heart hammering against his ribs while the phantom ringing from the explosion still echoed somewhere behind his ears.
He dragged a hand across his face. "Jesus Christ."
His head hurt. The familiar ache behind his eyes that only ever showed up after nightmares. Nightmares he hadn't had in years. He thought he'd buried that day, buried Gabriel, buried the explosion, buried your scream along with everything else.
Apparently not.
A sudden stab of pain shot through his prosthetic side and he tensed immediately. "Ugh." The ache spread upward, deep and persistent. His residual limb always acted up when the weather changed, or when stress got bad, or when old memories decided to crawl out of the grave uninvited. Today, apparently, checked every box at once.
"Fuck."
He sat on the edge of the bed for a minute, waiting it out. The pain didn't leave. He groaned and dropped backward onto the mattress, staring at the ceiling like it owed him an explanation.
He grabbed his phone from the nightstand.
Jack: Gonna take sick leave.
The reply came faster than expected.
Robby: You?
Jack snorted.
Jack: My leg hurts.
The three dots appeared immediately.
Robby: Say no more, brother.
Honestly, that was more than enough explanation. Jack tossed the phone onto his chest and closed his eyes again. Sleep wasn't happening. Neither was work.
At the Pitt, Robby took off his reading glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Abbot can't come in today."
Dana looked up from her chart. "That sudden?"
"His leg's acting up."
Her expression softened immediately. "Oh." A pause. "He should come here instead."
Robby raised an eyebrow.
Dana shrugged. "We literally have all the medicine."
Robby laughed. "I'll tell him."
"You should." She pointed toward the floor. "We're not letting him win Employee of the Month while sick at home."
"He has never once cared about Employee of the Month."
"Exactly my point."
Princess, who happened to be passing the desk at precisely the wrong moment, heard the entire exchange. Which was unfortunate for everyone involved. Her eyes widened and her phone appeared in her hand before either of them had finished the sentence.
Thirty seconds later, the Pitt group chat lit up.
Princess: 🚨 BREAKING NEWS 🚨
Princess: Dr. Abbot called in sick.
The three dots appeared instantly. Then another set. Then five more in quick succession.
Shen: impossible
Ellis: impossible
Javadi: impossible
Garcia: impossible
Princess: apparently his leg hurts
Shen: old man disease
Ellis: did he finally discover he's fifty
Garcia: he's not fifty
Shen: spiritually he is
Princess: should we send flowers
Ellis: send him a walker
Javadi: send him a retirement brochure
Across the hospital phones buzzed one after another in a chain reaction that spread faster than most actual trauma alerts. And just like that, the entire Pitt knew Jack Abbot had taken a sick day, which was somehow bigger news than anything that had happened in the trauma bay all week.
A few floors above the ER, you were in the middle of surgery.
The operating room was quiet except for the steady beep of monitors and the occasional request for instruments. Your focus was absolute. Scalpel. Suction. Clamp. Every movement precise, every decision deliberate.
Garcia stood across from you, assisting. For several minutes neither of you spoke. Then, casually, as if discussing the weather, "Abbot called in sick."
You didn't look up. Your eyes stayed on the surgical field. "Okay."
Garcia narrowed her eyes behind her mask. "He never calls in sick."
"Sounds like a personal achievement."
The scrub nurse bit back a smile. Garcia wasn't discouraged.
"His leg's acting up," she said.
Your hands kept moving, steady and controlled, exactly the same as before. Not a single hesitation. Nothing in your posture shifted at all.
Garcia glanced toward the anesthesiologist. The anesthesiologist looked at the circulating nurse. The circulating nurse shrugged. Nobody in that room could read you when you were operating, which was one of the many reasons you were good at this.
The surgery continued. Sutures, final checks, closure. A little while later you stepped away from the table.
"Good work, everyone."
The team began their post-op routine. You stripped off your gloves, then your gown. A few minutes later you stood at the scrub sink washing your hands. Garcia moved beside you and did the same. For a moment neither of you spoke. Water ran over your hands. You dried them carefully.
Then, finally, "I'll go out for a while."
Garcia didn't even try to hide her grin. "Yes, boss."
You shot her a look. It only made the grin wider.
She tilted her head. "You know his address?"
You looked at her slowly. A smirk pulled at the corner of your mouth. "I'm not that ignorant."
Garcia burst out laughing. "Oh my God."
You tossed the paper towel into the bin. "Don't start."
"Too late." She pointed at you. "You pretended not to care for an entire surgery."
"I didn't pretend anything."
"You absolutely did."
You started walking toward the door. Garcia called after you, "Tell him the Pitt survived without him."
Without turning around, you lifted a hand. "I'll let him know."
The second the door closed behind you, Garcia turned to the rest of the staff. "Told you."
The anesthesiologist sighed. "We all knew she was going."
The scrub nurse nodded. "Honestly, it would've been weirder if she didn't."
"By the way," the circulating nurse said, peeling off her own gloves, "did the Pitt make a bet on whether she'd go visit him?"
Garcia froze for a second. "Damn it. We're too late to join."
*******
Later, you showed up at his apartment.
Jack opened the door and went completely still. He hadn't been expecting anyone. Especially not you.
"You're supposed to be resting."
"I am."
"You look terrible."
"Thank you."
"You should moisturize."
"Get out."
He let you in anyway, and eventually he sat down on the couch with the particular care of someone managing pain he wasn't admitting to. You noticed him rubbing the stump absentmindedly, his thumb pressing into the same spot over and over.
"Still hurts?" you asked.
He shrugged. "Sometimes."
It was a lie. It hurt a lot, and you both knew it, but you didn't push. You sat down beside him without saying anything else and reached for his leg.
He let you.
You looked down at his leg. Hesitated. Then slowly reached for it.
Jack raised an eyebrow. "What are you doing?"
"Checking."
"Checking?"
"Do you want my help or not?"
That shut him up.
Carefully you rested your hands against his leg. You weren't entirely sure what you were doing, not because you didn't understand the injury, you knew exactly what you were looking for and where the tension would be sitting. It was harder because this was Jack, and somehow that made every step of it feel different than it should.
Your fingers pressed lightly against the tight muscle along the residual limb, working slow circles into the spots where the strain had built up.
"Still hurts?" you asked.
"Sometimes," he admitted. "If I have the nightmares."
You didn't answer immediately.
Your fingers kept moving, carefully working through the tension gathered in the muscles.
"I should've bought you that bike the day we met."
You rolled your eyes. "I would've said no."
"No, you wouldn't have."
"I absolutely would have."
"You accepted one now."
"Because you're annoying."
"And persistent."
"Mostly annoying."
"And handsome."
You shook your head and kept massaging his leg, your fingers steady and methodical. Then, quieter, "I'm sorry I couldn't save it."
Jack looked at you for a long moment. The thought sat in his chest before he said it out loud. "Hey. I never blamed you. It wasn't your fault."
"I know. Still." You didn't look up from his leg. "In my head, every time I see you, there's a million different ways I run it back. Trying to make it work out differently."
He reached down and covered your hand with his, stopping the motion gently. "Hey," he said again, softer this time. "Look at me."
You did.
"You did everything right," he said. "I'm still here. I'm still standing. That's because of you, not in spite of you."
You held his gaze for a moment, and something in your chest loosened slightly, the old guilt shifting just enough to breathe around.
"You're still annoying," you said finally.
"I know." The corner of his mouth curved upward. "Mostly annoying. Handsome, too."
You scoffed.
"Didn't deny it, huh?"
Jack looked entirely too pleased with himself.
Like he'd just won an argument nobody else knew was happening.
****
FLASHBACK
The medic tent was chaos. Blood, dust, shouting. Stretchers coming in one after another faster than anyone could process them.
Then they brought in Jack.
For a second your heart stopped. His uniform was soaked through, dark and wet in a way that told you everything before you'd even looked at the wound. His face had gone pale, that particular gray that meant his body was already starting to shut down peripheral systems to protect the core. The lower half of his leg was barely recognizable.
You moved before you'd finished registering what you were looking at. Airway. Pulse. Blood pressure. You ran the checks the way your hands had been trained to, on autopilot, because the part of your brain that wanted to stand still and stare was not allowed in the room right now.
"You can't panic." Clark's voice cut through the noise beside you. "We need to save him."
"Yes, sir." Your voice came out steadier than you felt.
The next few minutes blurred into a single continuous motion. Assessment, medication, blood transfusion, everything moving faster than you could fully track. You worked the line, you called for supplies, you watched the monitor with one part of your brain while the other part screamed at you to look at his face, to confirm he was still in there.
Then came the leg.
You stared at the wound and then at the imaging once it came back, and you felt something in your chest go very still. The damage to the blood supply. The crush injury extending higher than you'd hoped. Tissue that had already started dying from lack of perfusion, the kind that didn't come back no matter how skilled the hands trying to save it were.
"No," you said.
Clark looked at you. "The leg lost the golden hour."
"There has to be another way." You said it too fast, the words tumbling out ahead of the part of you that already knew the answer.
"There isn't."
"There is." You pointed at the scan, at the section of tissue that was still pink, still arguably viable if you moved fast enough, if you were good enough, if the universe gave you one single break today. "We can try."
Clark's expression didn't change. "Kid."
"We can try." Your voice cracked slightly on the second word and you hated that it did.
"We're out of time." His voice hardened, not unkind, just final. "You know what this looks like as well as I do."
You looked down at Jack. Unconscious, pale, alive, the rise and fall of his chest the only thing in the room that mattered right now. Then back at the scan. Then back at him again, and your chest tightened so hard it was difficult to draw a full breath.
"There has to be something," you said, quieter now, the fight starting to drain out of the sentence even as you said it.
Clark was silent for a moment. Then, "Amputate."
You shook your head immediately. "No."
"Amputate."
"No." You said it again like saying it louder would change the anatomy in front of you. Like refusing hard enough could rebuild a blood supply that no longer existed.
For the first time Clark's voice hardened completely. "With or without you, this surgery happens. The only question is whether you're the one doing it."
The words landed harder than anything else in the room. Because suddenly it wasn't your decision to make at all. It never had been, not really, not once the tissue had died the way it had died. You had been arguing with biology and biology did not negotiate.
You looked at Jack again. Unconscious. Bleeding. Alive. You hated this. You hated the choice in front of you, hated that there even was a choice, hated that every version of this ended with you taking something from him that he hadn't agreed to lose. You hated, more than anything, that saving him meant losing part of him, and that you were the one who was going to have to be the hands that did it.
You closed your eyes. Took a breath. Then another, slower this time, the kind you used to talk yourself back into the work when your body wanted to fall apart and didn't have the time for it.
When you opened your eyes again the surgeon had come back online behind them, pushing the rest of you down where it couldn't interfere.
"Get him to surgery ," you said. What mattered right now is to keep his heart beating through the next hour.
If Jack Abbot was going to survive, you were going to be the one standing there when he did. Even if it meant being the one who had to take the leg to do it.
******
PRESENT TIME
Jack leaned back against the couch and let out a slow breath.
"The next thing I remember." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I woke up in the States."
You nodded. "You needed further treatment. That's why Clark sent you back."
Jack snorted. "Could've at least warned me." His gaze drifted toward the window, somewhere past it. "I wake up, look around, and suddenly I'm surrounded by strangers." A pause. "Didn't even know where the hell I was."
Then his eyes came back to you. Softer this time.
"At least—" He stopped.
You already knew where the sentence was going. At least there had been you. At least one familiar face. At least someone.
Your expression shifted before he could finish it. The teasing dropped away.
"I didn't know you were transferred," you said.
Jack frowned. "What?"
You looked down at your hands. The memory still sat uncomfortably even after all these years, a part of the story you hadn't told him because it had never felt necessary until right now.
"I found out afterward."
"What do you mean afterward?" His voice had gone careful.
You hesitated, then sighed. "I fainted."
Jack blinked. "You what?"
*******
FLASHBACK
After Jack's surgery, something inside you broke.
You had saved his life. Everyone kept telling you that. But every time you looked at the empty space where his leg used to be, it didn't feel like a victory. It felt like a debt you'd paid with someone else's currency.
So you worked. One shift became two. Two became three. Patients came and went and you barely remembered their names, just the blood, the sutures, the next emergency, the next life. Because if you stopped moving, you'd think what you could’ve done to save Jack.
People started noticing. A medic quietly handed you water you forgot to drink. Someone told you to sit down and you didn't.
Then Clark found you.
You were halfway through another chart when his shadow fell over your shoulder.
"Get out."
You didn't look up. "I can still work."
"Get out."
"I'm fine."
"Get out before I ban you from this tent."
That made you look at him, because you knew he meant it. You stood, your body heavier than it should have been, and the moment you stepped outside the heat hit you like a wall. Two steps. Three. Then the world tilted sideways and the last thing you heard was someone shouting for a doctor.
When you woke up everything hurt. Your head, your neck, your pride. A canvas ceiling. An IV in your arm. The cot creaked when you shifted.
"Good. You're awake."
Clark sat nearby, arms crossed.
"How long was I out?"
"Two days."
"What?"
"Congratulations. You finally beat everyone else's record."
You stared at him. "Two days?"
"You collapsed. Your body decided to remind you that you're human, not a machine that runs on coffee and stubbornness."
You groaned, which made your headache worse. "How is he?"
Clark's expression shifted, just slightly. Enough that you sat up straighter.
"How is Jack?"
He rubbed his thumb against his palm, thinking before he answered. "You can't see him. I transferred him back to the States. He needs treatment we don't have here."
The words landed harder than you expected. "I didn't even get to say goodbye."
“It’s better this way.” Clark was quiet for a moment. Then, "Because I've seen soldiers like him before. He's drowning right now. No mission, no team, no leg. He doesn't know what his life looks like anymore."
"I could help him."
Clark studied you for a long moment, and something about it made you feel eighteen again, sitting in front of a commanding officer who saw straight through you.
"That," he said quietly, "is exactly what scares me."
"What does that mean?"
He leaned back. "Kid. You have a habit of trying to save everyone. You spend every day fighting death in that tent." His voice was gentle. "You don't need to turn a man into another project."
That hurt more than it should have. "I care about him."
"I know you do."
A beat passed. Then you muttered, "Did you separate us, because he's older than me?"
Clark sighed dramatically. "No." A pause. "Maybe a little."
You laughed despite yourself. "My parents have an age gap."
"Your parents met during peacetime." That shut you up, because he wasn't wrong. War changed people. Sometimes permanently. He looked out toward the camp. "And Abbot. War already took too much from him."
You thought about the nightmares, the exhaustion, the silence you'd already seen settle into him. "I could still help."
"And what happens if he leans too hard on you?" Clark asked. "What happens if you lose yourself trying to hold him together?"
You didn't have an answer.
Clark sighed, and for the first time he looked less like your commanding officer and more like family. "I already see you as my own kid," he said. "You're talented. Far too selfless for your own good. You fight the angel of death every day." A faint smile. "And somehow you keep making it wait."
"I don't know about that."
"I do. We all do." He leaned forward. "When this contract ends, what are you going to do?"
You shrugged. "Vacation. Therapy."
"Both good answers." He pointed at you. "I want you back in school. Another specialty."
"Me?"
"I'll write the kind of recommendation letter universities fight over."
"Why?"
He looked genuinely confused by the question. "Because someone with your talent shouldn't stop here. And because you saved my soldiers."
"It wasn't just me." You smiled faintly. "Abbot taught me a lot."
"He did." A grin. "He's the anchor of this unit. I'm still the leader though."
That earned a real laugh, the first one in days.
Months later, your contract ended. Your bags sat beside you on the tarmac, the transport plane waiting in the distance. The future felt wide open and uncertain in a way that made your chest tight.
Clark walked up beside you while you stared at the runway.
"Go out there," he said. "Travel. See the world." His eyes narrowed slightly. "Meet someone."
Your chest tightened immediately, because you already knew exactly who he meant.
He studied you for a moment. "If after all of that, you still think about him." A pause. "Then go see him."
The words hurt, but not because he was dismissing what you felt. The opposite. He was treating it like it mattered, like it might survive time, like it might survive everything you'd both been through.
Then he snapped his fingers. "Oh."
A soldier appeared behind him carrying a very familiar puppy. Your eyes went wide. "Riot?"
The puppy squirmed immediately, trying to reach you.
"Can I?"
Clark looked offended. "Of course."
The moment Riot landed in your arms he started licking your face, and you laughed for the first time in days. Clark watched with quiet satisfaction.
"Kid's already attached to you anyway," he said.
Riot barked happily, like he completely agreed.
***********
PRESENT TIME
Jack stared at you for a second. Then groaned. "I'm gonna kill Clark."
You laughed. "He'll beat you first."
He looked genuinely offended. "You underestimate me?"
"He's eighty."
"Exactly."
You raised an eyebrow. "That's not helping your argument."
"It helps mine."
"You realize he could still throw you across a room?"
Jack thought about it for a second. Then sighed. "Yeah. Probably."
That earned another laugh from you, and the sound settled something warm in his chest. For a moment neither of you spoke. Then he leaned back against the couch and the amusement faded from his face.
"I blame him sometimes," he said.
You glanced over. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "But he had more experience than both of us." A pause. "And he was right."
You stayed quiet, letting him take his time with it.
Jack stared at the ceiling. "I pushed people away." His voice was calm. Too calm, the kind that only came from years of sitting with the same thought until it stopped hurting and started just being true. "I couldn't accept it." His hand rested unconsciously on his thigh, or where his thigh used to end. "I couldn't accept that I lost part of myself."
Your chest tightened. You remembered. The angry version of him. The distant one. The one everyone warned you about later, the one who shut doors before anyone could walk through them, who refused help, who disappeared into rehabilitation and therapy and silence and didn't come back out for a long time.
Jack let out a quiet huff of a laugh. "I was an asshole."
You smiled slightly. "A little."
"A little?"
"A lot."
"That's fair." The corner of his mouth twitched. Then his gaze drifted toward the coffee table, toward a frame sitting beside it.
You followed his eyes and froze.
The photograph. Old, slightly faded, taken with your Polaroid camera years ago. Gabriel in the middle, grinning like he owned the frame. Clark pretending to look annoyed. Riot small enough to fit under one arm. Jack looking irritated because he'd complained about pictures five seconds before it was taken. And you, laughing behind the camera, caught mid-motion in the background reflection of the tent's metal trunk.
"You still have that?" you asked.
Jack glanced at it and nodded. "Of course." His voice softened. "It was sent to me during therapy."
That made you look at him directly. He was already watching you, carefully, too carefully.
"Was it you?" he asked.
"What?"
"The nurse." His gaze didn't move from yours. "The one who gave it to her."
Your stomach dropped. "Oh."
He tilted his head. "I noticed things changed after that."
You looked away, suddenly very interested in absolutely nothing on the wall.
He kept going anyway. "My pain medication changed." Silence. "The grape juice disappeared." More silence. "They started giving me apple juice."
You pressed your lips together.
Jack almost smiled. "I hate grape juice."
"I know." The words escaped before you could stop them.
The room went quiet. His smile widened immediately. "Exactly."
You closed your eyes. Damn it. He had you.
"There were only a few people who knew that," he said, his voice gentle now, not teasing, not pushing, just warm. "You were one of them."
You bit the inside of your cheek and twisted your fingers together in your lap, because the apartment suddenly felt smaller, quieter, more intimate than it had five minutes ago.
Jack kept looking at you, patient, like he already knew the answer and was simply waiting for you to be ready to give it to him. Which, honestly, he probably did.
You finally sighed. "I left instructions."
His expression softened immediately. "You did."
********
FLASHBACK
After you got back to the States, you secretly visited. Not once. Not twice. More times than you were willing to admit, even to yourself.
The rehabilitation center was almost an hour away from your apartment. You learned the route by memory. The receptionist eventually stopped asking questions. The nurses started recognizing you. But you never signed in as a visitor. Never walked into his room. Never knocked on the door.
You stayed where he couldn't see you. The hallway. The observation window. The corner near the physical therapy room. Close enough to know he was alive. Far enough to leave when it hurt too much.
And it always hurt.
The first time you saw him standing on the prosthetic, he fell. Hard. The therapist tried to help him up and Jack shoved the hand away immediately. You almost walked into the room. Almost. Instead you gripped the edge of the observation window until your knuckles went white.
The second time, he threw the prosthetic across the room. The metallic crash echoed down the hallway and several patients looked over. Jack didn't care. He sat there breathing hard, angry, humiliated, broken in a way you hadn't seen on him before. You left before he could see the tears in your eyes.
Another time you heard him yelling at a therapist through the door.
"Just leave me alone."
The therapist stayed calm. Jack got louder.
"I said leave me alone."
You froze outside the door, listening. Not because you wanted to. Because you couldn't make yourself walk away.
The therapist said something too quiet to hear. Jack laughed, a bitter, ugly sound that didn't sound like him at all.
"My friend's dead." Silence. "My leg's gone." Another silence. "So tell me exactly what I'm supposed to be positive about."
Your chest tightened, because suddenly it wasn't about the leg. Maybe it never had been. He wasn't fighting rehabilitation. He was fighting everything. Gabriel. The explosion. The future. The guilt.
The realization followed you home that night, and every night after.
One afternoon you were standing in your usual spot outside the therapy room when a familiar voice appeared beside you.
"How long have you been standing here?"
You didn't need to look. Clark. Of course. That man noticed everything.
You kept your eyes on the glass. Said nothing.
Clark followed your gaze. Inside, Jack was practicing walking again. One step. Another. Another. The therapist beside him, ready to catch him if he fell.
"You come every week."
Still no answer.
Clark sighed. Not annoyed. Just tired, the kind that came from watching too many people hurt for too long.
"You're waiting for him to become himself again," he said quietly.
Your throat tightened, because he was right. That was exactly what you were doing. Waiting for the old Jack. The one before the explosion, before the funeral, before the nightmares. The Jack who laughed easier. The Jack who believed he could save everyone. The Jack who had two legs.
Silence stretched between you.
Then Clark said the thing you would remember for years.
"He won't."
Your breath caught. You finally looked at him. His expression wasn't cruel or cold. It was sad, because he understood exactly what he was taking from you by saying it.
"The old Jack is gone." He let that sit for a second. Then looked back toward the therapy room. "So is the old you."
That hurt even more, because he wasn't wrong. War had taken pieces from all of you. Gabriel was gone. Jack came back different. And somewhere along the way, without quite noticing it happening, you had changed too.
Clark folded his arms. "Staying here won't save him. He has to want to get better."
Inside the room Jack took another step. Then another. His jaw was clenched, his face pale with the effort of it, still fighting, still refusing to quit even when every part of him wanted to.
Clark watched him for a moment. Then looked back at you.
"And right now," he said, his voice softening, "that's a fight he has to win himself."
For the first time since the war ended, you didn't argue. Because deep down you already knew. You just weren't ready to let go yet.
"Leave," Clark said finally. "While he's fixing himself and fighting his own demons, you go fix yourself. Improve your skills. Become better than the version of you that's standing in this hallway right now."
You looked at him. "And just leave him?"
"Not forever." He held your gaze steadily. "One day, perhaps, the two of you could work together again. But not like this. Not you hiding in hallways and him throwing prosthetics across rooms. That's not a reunion. That's two people drowning next to each other and calling it support."
Something in that landed. You felt it settle, slow and certain, the way truth did when it finally arrived after you'd spent weeks circling it.
"I will," you said.
You stood, and before you could think too hard about it you leaned over and pressed a quick kiss to Clark's cheek. "I'll see you again, sir."
He crossed his arms, but something in his expression had gone soft around the edges. "Make me proud, kid."
************
PRESENT TIME
"You were there," Jack said, staring at you. "You were there, and I pushed everyone away so hard I didn't even realize it."
You looked down. "There wasn't much to realize."
He laughed quietly. "I thought I was alone."
"You were never alone."
His eyes lifted to yours. "Then why didn't I see you?"
You swallowed. "Because I was dealing with my own grief too."
The answer seemed to hit him harder than he expected. "Huh." A small smile appeared. "You were close." His voice softened. "I didn't know."
Then he rested his head against your shoulder. For once neither of you joked. Neither of you moved away. The silence felt comfortable, the kind that didn't need filling.
"You know," Jack said quietly, "Clark was right."
You raised an eyebrow. "That's a dangerous sentence."
"He'd love hearing that."
"He absolutely would."
Jack chuckled. Then his gaze lifted toward you at the same moment you looked down, and the conversation stopped without either of you deciding it should. Your faces were closer than either of you had realized, close enough to notice the tiredness still sitting in his eyes, close enough to notice where his gaze kept drifting.
The moment settled between you. Neither of you looked away. Neither of you moved.
Just a little closer. Just enough.
Then your phone rang.
Both of you blinked. Reality crashed back in at full volume. You looked at the screen. Emergency.
Jack sighed dramatically and dropped his head backward against the couch. "I hate this hospital."
You laughed, already standing. "I need to go."
For one brief second he wanted to ask you not to. Just stay. Five more minutes. Ten. An hour. Anything. But he knew better, because this was you, and you would never ignore a patient for anything, least of all him.
So instead he nodded. "Go."
You stood and reached for your bag. Then Jack suddenly held out a key.
You frowned. "What's that?"
"My house key."
You stared at him. "Your house key?"
He shrugged, trying very hard to look casual about it. "My leg still hurts."
"Uh-huh."
"I need someone to check on me."
"Uh-huh."
"In case I fall asleep and can't open the door."
You narrowed your eyes. "That is the worst excuse I have ever heard."
"It got you to take the key."
You opened your mouth. Closed it. Then pointed at him. "You are impossible."
"And yet you're taking it."
With a sigh you slipped the key into your pocket. "I'll give it back."
"No rush." The corner of his mouth lifted.
Your pager buzzed again. You headed for the door.
"Try not to die," you said.
Jack scoffed. "Pretty sure that's your job."
You shook your head and left.
The apartment fell quiet. Jack stared at the closed door for a moment, then at the empty spot beside him on the couch where you'd been sitting a minute ago.
A slow smile appeared.
Because for the first time in a very long time, when you left, he knew you were coming back.
Thank you to everyone who has read this chapter. Leave a Comment and Reblog, please. I'd love to hear your thoughts. ❤️
FLASHBACK
It was hot. Not the kind of heat people complained about. The kind that simply existed, heavy and relentless, pressing down on him until breathing felt like its own small effort. The fans overhead rattled, pushing the same hot air back and forth without doing much of anything that he could feel.
No one spoke much. Not today.
Jack sat against the canvas wall, knees drawn up, his body aching with the kind of exhaustion that came from too many hours awake. His eyes burned. He hadn't slept. Every time he closed them he saw Gabriel laughing at something stupid, making fun of somebody across the mess tent, completely alive.
Then not.
Across the tent a soldier stepped out from behind the partition and wiped a hand across his face. Jack looked up.
"Is it done?"
The soldier glanced back the way he'd come. "She needs a minute."
Of course she did.
Jack already knew without being told that you'd been in there nearly an hour. Long after everything that needed doing had been done. Long after Gabriel had been cleaned and prepared, long after the paperwork, long after everyone else had said what they needed to say and stepped back out into the heat. He knew because he'd been watching the curtain the whole time, waiting for it to move, and it hadn't.
He stood and crossed the tent slowly. When he stepped through he found you beside the transfer case, gloves off, hands clean but trembling, your eyes red in a way that had nothing to do with dust. He'd seen you exhausted before. This was different. This was the kind sleep couldn't touch.
Clark stands quietly beside you. "Kid."
"His collar wasn't straight." Your voice cracked on the last word. "I fixed it."
Jack didn't say anything. He understood exactly what you meant and exactly what you didn't. The collar had never been the problem. You weren't ready to let him go, and there was nothing in his training, nothing in any of his years out here, that told him what to do with that.
He stepped closer anyway. It hurt him to watch you standing there, frozen, unable to move toward the door. He kept his voice low, the only thing he knew to offer. "His family's waiting for him."
Your body flinched. "Right. Yes." You took a breath and finally stepped back. "I'm sorry."
Jack gave Clark a small nod. The signal that it was clear.
A few minutes later the transfer case was brought out into the heat, and the tent went completely silent around it. Six soldiers stepped forward to carry it. Jack was one of them. Clark too. He focused on his hands, on the weight, on keeping his steps even, because if he thought about anything else right now he wasn't going to make it across the compound.
Outside the sunlight was blinding after the dim canvas interior. The helicopter pad sat in the distance, the transport aircraft waiting beyond it. The camp had gathered along the path without anyone telling them to. Nobody spoke. Jack didn't expect them to.
When the case reached the vehicle, the soldiers stopped and stepped back into formation. Jack moved to one side. Clark stood beside him. Across from them you stood with your spine straight and your chin level, holding a stillness that Jack recognized immediately, because it was costing you everything you had left and he knew exactly what that looked like from the inside.
For a moment nobody moved.
Then Clark raised his hand in salute.
Jack's came up with it, automatic, trained, and it was returned down the line by every soldier present, the only sound the wind and somewhere distant the low building hum of the aircraft's engines. His throat tightened as he held the position. Across from him you were still standing at attention, perfect posture, perfect form, and he understood that you were holding it together through nothing but sheer will, because that was the only thing keeping you upright at all.
The vehicle began to move.
Only then did your hand lower. Only then did Gabriel actually start to leave, the case disappearing slowly up the ramp while the camp watched a piece of itself go with it.
That was when you broke.
Jack saw your shoulders drop first. Then your knees seemed to lose whatever certainty had been holding them, and the sound that came out of you was quiet and raw, the sound of someone who had held the wall up for exactly as long as duty required and not one second longer.
He was already moving before he'd decided to. He reached you in two steps and pulled you in, wrapping both arms around you, one hand coming up to rest against the back of your head without him thinking about it at all.
You didn't pull away. You pressed your face into his shoulder and let it come.
Jack didn't say anything. There was nothing true enough to say, and he'd learned a long time ago not to insult grief with empty words. He just held on, steady, while the engines spun up behind you both and somewhere over your shoulder Clark stood with his hand still raised, watching the two people he had left from that tent try to hold each other together in the middle of everything that had just been taken from them.
******
After Gabriel's transfer ceremony, the aircraft disappeared into the horizon. Yet somehow his presence stayed everywhere. In the empty chair near the mess tent. In the half-finished deck of cards still sitting on a crate. In the silence that followed every conversation now, the particular gap where his voice used to fill the space. In the jokes nobody told anymore.
War kept moving. It always did. Orders still came down, patrols still happened, the camp still woke up the next morning whether anyone was ready for it or not.
Jack hated that. Part of him wanted the world to stop, just for a day, just long enough for everyone to fully acknowledge that Gabriel was gone. Instead soldiers reported for duty, vehicles rolled out, radios crackled with the same routine traffic, and life continued like one man hadn't left a hole in the middle of all of them.
So Jack did what everyone else did. He kept moving. Checking equipment, checking ammunition, checking routes that didn't need checking. Volunteering for patrols, for sweeps, for anything that kept his hands and his attention occupied. Because the second he stopped moving, he started thinking, and every thought led back to Gabriel. Every single one.
Across camp you weren't much different. You worked every shift available, took every patient, stayed longer than necessary, found reasons to be useful long after the necessary work was done. The two of you were doing the exact same thing. Just in different uniforms.
A few days later Jack was checking his gear when your voice cut through the quiet.
"You volunteered."
Not a question.
Jack didn't look up. "Yeah."
"You don't have to go."
"I'm going."
"You just got back."
He kept adjusting a strap that didn't need adjusting, checking a weapon he had already checked twice.
"Jack."
Nothing.
"Look at me."
Slowly he lifted his head, and the second he did he knew you could see straight through him. You always could. Not physically exhausted, not really. Something colder than that. Like part of him had shut down after Gabriel died and simply never bothered switching back on.
"Don't go," you said.
His jaw tightened. "It's a sweep."
"You volunteered." You stepped closer. "And you haven't rested properly in days."
He almost laughed. The irony would have been funny if it weren't so depressing. "You too."
A tired breath escaped you. "True." You folded your arms. "But if I pass out, at least there's a hospital bed waiting for me."
A small smile pulled at the corner of his mouth, the first one in days. Then it disappeared, because the truth came out before he could stop it.
"To make sure nobody else ends up like Gabriel."
Silence settled between you. There it was. The thing he hadn't said out loud yet. The thing everybody already knew without needing it confirmed.
You stared at him. Then slowly closed the distance. "But what about soldiers like Jack Abbot?"
The question hit harder than he expected. For a second he couldn't answer, because the truth was ugly. The truth was that he hadn't thought about himself at all. Not since the explosion. Not since watching Gabriel die. Not since watching you cry.
A muscle jumped in his jaw. His eyes dropped away. "The day I signed up," he said, voice rough, "the day I got on that plane." A pause. "I stopped putting myself first."
You shook your head immediately. "No."
"Yeah."
"No." The anger in your voice surprised him. "You think Gabriel would've wanted this?"
Jack barked out a laugh with no humor in it at all. "Gabriel would've volunteered before me."
That hurt because it was true. Gabriel would have been first through the door, first on the helicopter, first running toward danger without a second thought. Which was exactly why he wasn't here anymore. The thought settled heavily between you.
"Jack."
He looked at you. Really looked. And suddenly you didn't seem angry anymore. Just tired. Heartbroken. Scared.
Your voice dropped, quiet and small and entirely honest. "I don't want you to go."
Something cracked inside his chest. The silence that followed felt endless.
Then you whispered, "Please stay."
Your eyes glistened. And for the first time since Gabriel died, Jack wanted to. God, he wanted to. If it had been anyone else asking he would have walked away without hesitation. But it wasn't anyone else. It was you.
For one terrible second he imagined dropping the bag. Telling command no. Staying. Choosing himself. Choosing you.
Instead he stepped forward, wrapped his arms around you, and pulled you close. The hug was brief and tight, the kind soldiers gave before deployment, the kind neither of you actually wanted but both needed anyway. His voice came low against your hair.
"I'll come back."
You closed your eyes. "This is weird."
He huffed softly. "What is?"
"The first time we haven't argued."
That finally earned a real chuckle, small and tired. "That means hell froze over."
You didn't laugh. Somehow that felt worse.
When you pulled back your eyes searched his face. "Promise me you'll come back in one piece."
Jack froze. Because he should have promised. He should have lied. He should have given you something, anything, to hold onto. Instead, "I won't promise that."
The hurt that flashed across your face followed him for weeks afterward.
He squeezed your shoulder once. Then picked up his gear and walked away. He didn't look back. Because he knew if he did, he wasn't leaving.
******
The location looked abandoned. A cluster of damaged buildings sat beneath the afternoon sun, broken walls, collapsed roofs, too quiet. Jack hated quiet. Quiet usually meant somebody was waiting.
The team moved carefully through the compound, weapons raised, eyes scanning every doorway, every window, every shadow. Jack's instincts were screaming. Something was wrong.
Then gunfire erupted. The first shots shattered the silence and soldiers dove for cover, more shots following in rapid succession until the entire compound dissolved into chaos.
"Contact left!"
"Move!"
Jack returned fire, called positions, directed movement as the team pushed forward. Then someone screamed.
He turned. One of the younger soldiers was down, hit, bleeding out fast. Without thinking he moved, exactly the way Gabriel would have, exactly the way Gabriel always had. He sprinted toward the soldier, dropped beside him, grabbed his vest, and started dragging him toward cover while bullets cracked overhead and concrete exploded somewhere close. Somebody was yelling. Jack barely heard them, because all he could think was not again, not another one, not today.
Then somebody shouted a warning.
Too late.
The world turned white.
The explosion hit with enough force to lift him off the ground entirely. Pain erupted everywhere at once. His ears rang, his vision blurred, the sky spun above him in a way that made no sense. For a second there was no sound at all. No gunfire, no shouting. Nothing. Just darkness.
And then a voice. Familiar. Terrified.
"Jack!"
The darkness shifted.
"Jack! Don't you dare leave me!"
Again. Closer. Louder.
"Jack!"
*********
PRESENT TIME
Jack woke up with a sharp inhale.
For a second he didn't know where he was. The darkness of his bedroom slowly replaced the battlefield, the walls and ceiling and silence settling into place where dust and gunfire had been a moment ago. Pittsburgh. His chest rose and fell heavily, sweat clinging to his skin, his heart hammering against his ribs while the phantom ringing from the explosion still echoed somewhere behind his ears.
He dragged a hand across his face. "Jesus Christ."
His head hurt. The familiar ache behind his eyes that only ever showed up after nightmares. Nightmares he hadn't had in years. He thought he'd buried that day, buried Gabriel, buried the explosion, buried your scream along with everything else.
Apparently not.
A sudden stab of pain shot through his prosthetic side and he tensed immediately. "Ugh." The ache spread upward, deep and persistent. His residual limb always acted up when the weather changed, or when stress got bad, or when old memories decided to crawl out of the grave uninvited. Today, apparently, checked every box at once.
"Fuck."
He sat on the edge of the bed for a minute, waiting it out. The pain didn't leave. He groaned and dropped backward onto the mattress, staring at the ceiling like it owed him an explanation.
He grabbed his phone from the nightstand.
Jack: Gonna take sick leave.
The reply came faster than expected.
Robby: You?
Jack snorted.
Jack: My leg hurts.
The three dots appeared immediately.
Robby: Say no more, brother.
Honestly, that was more than enough explanation. Jack tossed the phone onto his chest and closed his eyes again. Sleep wasn't happening. Neither was work.
At the Pitt, Robby took off his reading glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Abbot can't come in today."
Dana looked up from her chart. "That sudden?"
"His leg's acting up."
Her expression softened immediately. "Oh." A pause. "He should come here instead."
Robby raised an eyebrow.
Dana shrugged. "We literally have all the medicine."
Robby laughed. "I'll tell him."
"You should." She pointed toward the floor. "We're not letting him win Employee of the Month while sick at home."
"He has never once cared about Employee of the Month."
"Exactly my point."
Princess, who happened to be passing the desk at precisely the wrong moment, heard the entire exchange. Which was unfortunate for everyone involved. Her eyes widened and her phone appeared in her hand before either of them had finished the sentence.
Thirty seconds later, the Pitt group chat lit up.
Princess: 🚨 BREAKING NEWS 🚨
Princess: Dr. Abbot called in sick.
The three dots appeared instantly. Then another set. Then five more in quick succession.
Shen: impossible
Ellis: impossible
Javadi: impossible
Garcia: impossible
Princess: apparently his leg hurts
Shen: old man disease
Ellis: did he finally discover he's fifty
Garcia: he's not fifty
Shen: spiritually he is
Princess: should we send flowers
Ellis: send him a walker
Javadi: send him a retirement brochure
Across the hospital phones buzzed one after another in a chain reaction that spread faster than most actual trauma alerts. And just like that, the entire Pitt knew Jack Abbot had taken a sick day, which was somehow bigger news than anything that had happened in the trauma bay all week.
A few floors above the ER, you were in the middle of surgery.
The operating room was quiet except for the steady beep of monitors and the occasional request for instruments. Your focus was absolute. Scalpel. Suction. Clamp. Every movement precise, every decision deliberate.
Garcia stood across from you, assisting. For several minutes neither of you spoke. Then, casually, as if discussing the weather, "Abbot called in sick."
You didn't look up. Your eyes stayed on the surgical field. "Okay."
Garcia narrowed her eyes behind her mask. "He never calls in sick."
"Sounds like a personal achievement."
The scrub nurse bit back a smile. Garcia wasn't discouraged.
"His leg's acting up," she said.
Your hands kept moving, steady and controlled, exactly the same as before. Not a single hesitation. Nothing in your posture shifted at all.
Garcia glanced toward the anesthesiologist. The anesthesiologist looked at the circulating nurse. The circulating nurse shrugged. Nobody in that room could read you when you were operating, which was one of the many reasons you were good at this.
The surgery continued. Sutures, final checks, closure. A little while later you stepped away from the table.
"Good work, everyone."
The team began their post-op routine. You stripped off your gloves, then your gown. A few minutes later you stood at the scrub sink washing your hands. Garcia moved beside you and did the same. For a moment neither of you spoke. Water ran over your hands. You dried them carefully.
Then, finally, "I'll go out for a while."
Garcia didn't even try to hide her grin. "Yes, boss."
You shot her a look. It only made the grin wider.
She tilted her head. "You know his address?"
You looked at her slowly. A smirk pulled at the corner of your mouth. "I'm not that ignorant."
Garcia burst out laughing. "Oh my God."
You tossed the paper towel into the bin. "Don't start."
"Too late." She pointed at you. "You pretended not to care for an entire surgery."
"I didn't pretend anything."
"You absolutely did."
You started walking toward the door. Garcia called after you, "Tell him the Pitt survived without him."
Without turning around, you lifted a hand. "I'll let him know."
The second the door closed behind you, Garcia turned to the rest of the staff. "Told you."
The anesthesiologist sighed. "We all knew she was going."
The scrub nurse nodded. "Honestly, it would've been weirder if she didn't."
"By the way," the circulating nurse said, peeling off her own gloves, "did the Pitt make a bet on whether she'd go visit him?"
Garcia froze for a second. "Damn it. We're too late to join."
*******
Later, you showed up at his apartment.
Jack opened the door and went completely still. He hadn't been expecting anyone. Especially not you.
"You're supposed to be resting."
"I am."
"You look terrible."
"Thank you."
"You should moisturize."
"Get out."
He let you in anyway, and eventually he sat down on the couch with the particular care of someone managing pain he wasn't admitting to. You noticed him rubbing the stump absentmindedly, his thumb pressing into the same spot over and over.
"Still hurts?" you asked.
He shrugged. "Sometimes."
It was a lie. It hurt a lot, and you both knew it, but you didn't push. You sat down beside him without saying anything else and reached for his leg.
He let you.
You looked down at his leg. Hesitated. Then slowly reached for it.
Jack raised an eyebrow. "What are you doing?"
"Checking."
"Checking?"
"Do you want my help or not?"
That shut him up.
Carefully you rested your hands against his leg. You weren't entirely sure what you were doing, not because you didn't understand the injury, you knew exactly what you were looking for and where the tension would be sitting. It was harder because this was Jack, and somehow that made every step of it feel different than it should.
Your fingers pressed lightly against the tight muscle along the residual limb, working slow circles into the spots where the strain had built up.
"Still hurts?" you asked.
"Sometimes," he admitted. "If I have the nightmares."
You didn't answer immediately.
Your fingers kept moving, carefully working through the tension gathered in the muscles.
"I should've bought you that bike the day we met."
You rolled your eyes. "I would've said no."
"No, you wouldn't have."
"I absolutely would have."
"You accepted one now."
"Because you're annoying."
"And persistent."
"Mostly annoying."
"And handsome."
You shook your head and kept massaging his leg, your fingers steady and methodical. Then, quieter, "I'm sorry I couldn't save it."
Jack looked at you for a long moment. The thought sat in his chest before he said it out loud. "Hey. I never blamed you. It wasn't your fault."
"I know. Still." You didn't look up from his leg. "In my head, every time I see you, there's a million different ways I run it back. Trying to make it work out differently."
He reached down and covered your hand with his, stopping the motion gently. "Hey," he said again, softer this time. "Look at me."
You did.
"You did everything right," he said. "I'm still here. I'm still standing. That's because of you, not in spite of you."
You held his gaze for a moment, and something in your chest loosened slightly, the old guilt shifting just enough to breathe around.
"You're still annoying," you said finally.
"I know." The corner of his mouth curved upward. "Mostly annoying. Handsome, too."
You scoffed.
"Didn't deny it, huh?"
Jack looked entirely too pleased with himself.
Like he'd just won an argument nobody else knew was happening.
****
FLASHBACK
The medic tent was chaos. Blood, dust, shouting. Stretchers coming in one after another faster than anyone could process them.
Then they brought in Jack.
For a second your heart stopped. His uniform was soaked through, dark and wet in a way that told you everything before you'd even looked at the wound. His face had gone pale, that particular gray that meant his body was already starting to shut down peripheral systems to protect the core. The lower half of his leg was barely recognizable.
You moved before you'd finished registering what you were looking at. Airway. Pulse. Blood pressure. You ran the checks the way your hands had been trained to, on autopilot, because the part of your brain that wanted to stand still and stare was not allowed in the room right now.
"You can't panic." Clark's voice cut through the noise beside you. "We need to save him."
"Yes, sir." Your voice came out steadier than you felt.
The next few minutes blurred into a single continuous motion. Assessment, medication, blood transfusion, everything moving faster than you could fully track. You worked the line, you called for supplies, you watched the monitor with one part of your brain while the other part screamed at you to look at his face, to confirm he was still in there.
Then came the leg.
You stared at the wound and then at the imaging once it came back, and you felt something in your chest go very still. The damage to the blood supply. The crush injury extending higher than you'd hoped. Tissue that had already started dying from lack of perfusion, the kind that didn't come back no matter how skilled the hands trying to save it were.
"No," you said.
Clark looked at you. "The leg lost the golden hour."
"There has to be another way." You said it too fast, the words tumbling out ahead of the part of you that already knew the answer.
"There isn't."
"There is." You pointed at the scan, at the section of tissue that was still pink, still arguably viable if you moved fast enough, if you were good enough, if the universe gave you one single break today. "We can try."
Clark's expression didn't change. "Kid."
"We can try." Your voice cracked slightly on the second word and you hated that it did.
"We're out of time." His voice hardened, not unkind, just final. "You know what this looks like as well as I do."
You looked down at Jack. Unconscious, pale, alive, the rise and fall of his chest the only thing in the room that mattered right now. Then back at the scan. Then back at him again, and your chest tightened so hard it was difficult to draw a full breath.
"There has to be something," you said, quieter now, the fight starting to drain out of the sentence even as you said it.
Clark was silent for a moment. Then, "Amputate."
You shook your head immediately. "No."
"Amputate."
"No." You said it again like saying it louder would change the anatomy in front of you. Like refusing hard enough could rebuild a blood supply that no longer existed.
For the first time Clark's voice hardened completely. "With or without you, this surgery happens. The only question is whether you're the one doing it."
The words landed harder than anything else in the room. Because suddenly it wasn't your decision to make at all. It never had been, not really, not once the tissue had died the way it had died. You had been arguing with biology and biology did not negotiate.
You looked at Jack again. Unconscious. Bleeding. Alive. You hated this. You hated the choice in front of you, hated that there even was a choice, hated that every version of this ended with you taking something from him that he hadn't agreed to lose. You hated, more than anything, that saving him meant losing part of him, and that you were the one who was going to have to be the hands that did it.
You closed your eyes. Took a breath. Then another, slower this time, the kind you used to talk yourself back into the work when your body wanted to fall apart and didn't have the time for it.
When you opened your eyes again the surgeon had come back online behind them, pushing the rest of you down where it couldn't interfere.
"Get him to surgery ," you said. What mattered right now is to keep his heart beating through the next hour.
If Jack Abbot was going to survive, you were going to be the one standing there when he did. Even if it meant being the one who had to take the leg to do it.
******
PRESENT TIME
Jack leaned back against the couch and let out a slow breath.
"The next thing I remember." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I woke up in the States."
You nodded. "You needed further treatment. That's why Clark sent you back."
Jack snorted. "Could've at least warned me." His gaze drifted toward the window, somewhere past it. "I wake up, look around, and suddenly I'm surrounded by strangers." A pause. "Didn't even know where the hell I was."
Then his eyes came back to you. Softer this time.
"At least—" He stopped.
You already knew where the sentence was going. At least there had been you. At least one familiar face. At least someone.
Your expression shifted before he could finish it. The teasing dropped away.
"I didn't know you were transferred," you said.
Jack frowned. "What?"
You looked down at your hands. The memory still sat uncomfortably even after all these years, a part of the story you hadn't told him because it had never felt necessary until right now.
"I found out afterward."
"What do you mean afterward?" His voice had gone careful.
You hesitated, then sighed. "I fainted."
Jack blinked. "You what?"
*******
FLASHBACK
After Jack's surgery, something inside you broke.
You had saved his life. Everyone kept telling you that. But every time you looked at the empty space where his leg used to be, it didn't feel like a victory. It felt like a debt you'd paid with someone else's currency.
So you worked. One shift became two. Two became three. Patients came and went and you barely remembered their names, just the blood, the sutures, the next emergency, the next life. Because if you stopped moving, you'd think what you could’ve done to save Jack.
People started noticing. A medic quietly handed you water you forgot to drink. Someone told you to sit down and you didn't.
Then Clark found you.
You were halfway through another chart when his shadow fell over your shoulder.
"Get out."
You didn't look up. "I can still work."
"Get out."
"I'm fine."
"Get out before I ban you from this tent."
That made you look at him, because you knew he meant it. You stood, your body heavier than it should have been, and the moment you stepped outside the heat hit you like a wall. Two steps. Three. Then the world tilted sideways and the last thing you heard was someone shouting for a doctor.
When you woke up everything hurt. Your head, your neck, your pride. A canvas ceiling. An IV in your arm. The cot creaked when you shifted.
"Good. You're awake."
Clark sat nearby, arms crossed.
"How long was I out?"
"Two days."
"What?"
"Congratulations. You finally beat everyone else's record."
You stared at him. "Two days?"
"You collapsed. Your body decided to remind you that you're human, not a machine that runs on coffee and stubbornness."
You groaned, which made your headache worse. "How is he?"
Clark's expression shifted, just slightly. Enough that you sat up straighter.
"How is Jack?"
He rubbed his thumb against his palm, thinking before he answered. "You can't see him. I transferred him back to the States. He needs treatment we don't have here."
The words landed harder than you expected. "I didn't even get to say goodbye."
“It’s better this way.” Clark was quiet for a moment. Then, "Because I've seen soldiers like him before. He's drowning right now. No mission, no team, no leg. He doesn't know what his life looks like anymore."
"I could help him."
Clark studied you for a long moment, and something about it made you feel eighteen again, sitting in front of a commanding officer who saw straight through you.
"That," he said quietly, "is exactly what scares me."
"What does that mean?"
He leaned back. "Kid. You have a habit of trying to save everyone. You spend every day fighting death in that tent." His voice was gentle. "You don't need to turn a man into another project."
That hurt more than it should have. "I care about him."
"I know you do."
A beat passed. Then you muttered, "Did you separate us, because he's older than me?"
Clark sighed dramatically. "No." A pause. "Maybe a little."
You laughed despite yourself. "My parents have an age gap."
"Your parents met during peacetime." That shut you up, because he wasn't wrong. War changed people. Sometimes permanently. He looked out toward the camp. "And Abbot. War already took too much from him."
You thought about the nightmares, the exhaustion, the silence you'd already seen settle into him. "I could still help."
"And what happens if he leans too hard on you?" Clark asked. "What happens if you lose yourself trying to hold him together?"
You didn't have an answer.
Clark sighed, and for the first time he looked less like your commanding officer and more like family. "I already see you as my own kid," he said. "You're talented. Far too selfless for your own good. You fight the angel of death every day." A faint smile. "And somehow you keep making it wait."
"I don't know about that."
"I do. We all do." He leaned forward. "When this contract ends, what are you going to do?"
You shrugged. "Vacation. Therapy."
"Both good answers." He pointed at you. "I want you back in school. Another specialty."
"Me?"
"I'll write the kind of recommendation letter universities fight over."
"Why?"
He looked genuinely confused by the question. "Because someone with your talent shouldn't stop here. And because you saved my soldiers."
"It wasn't just me." You smiled faintly. "Abbot taught me a lot."
"He did." A grin. "He's the anchor of this unit. I'm still the leader though."
That earned a real laugh, the first one in days.
Months later, your contract ended. Your bags sat beside you on the tarmac, the transport plane waiting in the distance. The future felt wide open and uncertain in a way that made your chest tight.
Clark walked up beside you while you stared at the runway.
"Go out there," he said. "Travel. See the world." His eyes narrowed slightly. "Meet someone."
Your chest tightened immediately, because you already knew exactly who he meant.
He studied you for a moment. "If after all of that, you still think about him." A pause. "Then go see him."
The words hurt, but not because he was dismissing what you felt. The opposite. He was treating it like it mattered, like it might survive time, like it might survive everything you'd both been through.
Then he snapped his fingers. "Oh."
A soldier appeared behind him carrying a very familiar puppy. Your eyes went wide. "Riot?"
The puppy squirmed immediately, trying to reach you.
"Can I?"
Clark looked offended. "Of course."
The moment Riot landed in your arms he started licking your face, and you laughed for the first time in days. Clark watched with quiet satisfaction.
"Kid's already attached to you anyway," he said.
Riot barked happily, like he completely agreed.
***********
PRESENT TIME
Jack stared at you for a second. Then groaned. "I'm gonna kill Clark."
You laughed. "He'll beat you first."
He looked genuinely offended. "You underestimate me?"
"He's eighty."
"Exactly."
You raised an eyebrow. "That's not helping your argument."
"It helps mine."
"You realize he could still throw you across a room?"
Jack thought about it for a second. Then sighed. "Yeah. Probably."
That earned another laugh from you, and the sound settled something warm in his chest. For a moment neither of you spoke. Then he leaned back against the couch and the amusement faded from his face.
"I blame him sometimes," he said.
You glanced over. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "But he had more experience than both of us." A pause. "And he was right."
You stayed quiet, letting him take his time with it.
Jack stared at the ceiling. "I pushed people away." His voice was calm. Too calm, the kind that only came from years of sitting with the same thought until it stopped hurting and started just being true. "I couldn't accept it." His hand rested unconsciously on his thigh, or where his thigh used to end. "I couldn't accept that I lost part of myself."
Your chest tightened. You remembered. The angry version of him. The distant one. The one everyone warned you about later, the one who shut doors before anyone could walk through them, who refused help, who disappeared into rehabilitation and therapy and silence and didn't come back out for a long time.
Jack let out a quiet huff of a laugh. "I was an asshole."
You smiled slightly. "A little."
"A little?"
"A lot."
"That's fair." The corner of his mouth twitched. Then his gaze drifted toward the coffee table, toward a frame sitting beside it.
You followed his eyes and froze.
The photograph. Old, slightly faded, taken with your Polaroid camera years ago. Gabriel in the middle, grinning like he owned the frame. Clark pretending to look annoyed. Riot small enough to fit under one arm. Jack looking irritated because he'd complained about pictures five seconds before it was taken. And you, laughing behind the camera, caught mid-motion in the background reflection of the tent's metal trunk.
"You still have that?" you asked.
Jack glanced at it and nodded. "Of course." His voice softened. "It was sent to me during therapy."
That made you look at him directly. He was already watching you, carefully, too carefully.
"Was it you?" he asked.
"What?"
"The nurse." His gaze didn't move from yours. "The one who gave it to her."
Your stomach dropped. "Oh."
He tilted his head. "I noticed things changed after that."
You looked away, suddenly very interested in absolutely nothing on the wall.
He kept going anyway. "My pain medication changed." Silence. "The grape juice disappeared." More silence. "They started giving me apple juice."
You pressed your lips together.
Jack almost smiled. "I hate grape juice."
"I know." The words escaped before you could stop them.
The room went quiet. His smile widened immediately. "Exactly."
You closed your eyes. Damn it. He had you.
"There were only a few people who knew that," he said, his voice gentle now, not teasing, not pushing, just warm. "You were one of them."
You bit the inside of your cheek and twisted your fingers together in your lap, because the apartment suddenly felt smaller, quieter, more intimate than it had five minutes ago.
Jack kept looking at you, patient, like he already knew the answer and was simply waiting for you to be ready to give it to him. Which, honestly, he probably did.
You finally sighed. "I left instructions."
His expression softened immediately. "You did."
********
FLASHBACK
After you got back to the States, you secretly visited. Not once. Not twice. More times than you were willing to admit, even to yourself.
The rehabilitation center was almost an hour away from your apartment. You learned the route by memory. The receptionist eventually stopped asking questions. The nurses started recognizing you. But you never signed in as a visitor. Never walked into his room. Never knocked on the door.
You stayed where he couldn't see you. The hallway. The observation window. The corner near the physical therapy room. Close enough to know he was alive. Far enough to leave when it hurt too much.
And it always hurt.
The first time you saw him standing on the prosthetic, he fell. Hard. The therapist tried to help him up and Jack shoved the hand away immediately. You almost walked into the room. Almost. Instead you gripped the edge of the observation window until your knuckles went white.
The second time, he threw the prosthetic across the room. The metallic crash echoed down the hallway and several patients looked over. Jack didn't care. He sat there breathing hard, angry, humiliated, broken in a way you hadn't seen on him before. You left before he could see the tears in your eyes.
Another time you heard him yelling at a therapist through the door.
"Just leave me alone."
The therapist stayed calm. Jack got louder.
"I said leave me alone."
You froze outside the door, listening. Not because you wanted to. Because you couldn't make yourself walk away.
The therapist said something too quiet to hear. Jack laughed, a bitter, ugly sound that didn't sound like him at all.
"My friend's dead." Silence. "My leg's gone." Another silence. "So tell me exactly what I'm supposed to be positive about."
Your chest tightened, because suddenly it wasn't about the leg. Maybe it never had been. He wasn't fighting rehabilitation. He was fighting everything. Gabriel. The explosion. The future. The guilt.
The realization followed you home that night, and every night after.
One afternoon you were standing in your usual spot outside the therapy room when a familiar voice appeared beside you.
"How long have you been standing here?"
You didn't need to look. Clark. Of course. That man noticed everything.
You kept your eyes on the glass. Said nothing.
Clark followed your gaze. Inside, Jack was practicing walking again. One step. Another. Another. The therapist beside him, ready to catch him if he fell.
"You come every week."
Still no answer.
Clark sighed. Not annoyed. Just tired, the kind that came from watching too many people hurt for too long.
"You're waiting for him to become himself again," he said quietly.
Your throat tightened, because he was right. That was exactly what you were doing. Waiting for the old Jack. The one before the explosion, before the funeral, before the nightmares. The Jack who laughed easier. The Jack who believed he could save everyone. The Jack who had two legs.
Silence stretched between you.
Then Clark said the thing you would remember for years.
"He won't."
Your breath caught. You finally looked at him. His expression wasn't cruel or cold. It was sad, because he understood exactly what he was taking from you by saying it.
"The old Jack is gone." He let that sit for a second. Then looked back toward the therapy room. "So is the old you."
That hurt even more, because he wasn't wrong. War had taken pieces from all of you. Gabriel was gone. Jack came back different. And somewhere along the way, without quite noticing it happening, you had changed too.
Clark folded his arms. "Staying here won't save him. He has to want to get better."
Inside the room Jack took another step. Then another. His jaw was clenched, his face pale with the effort of it, still fighting, still refusing to quit even when every part of him wanted to.
Clark watched him for a moment. Then looked back at you.
"And right now," he said, his voice softening, "that's a fight he has to win himself."
For the first time since the war ended, you didn't argue. Because deep down you already knew. You just weren't ready to let go yet.
"Leave," Clark said finally. "While he's fixing himself and fighting his own demons, you go fix yourself. Improve your skills. Become better than the version of you that's standing in this hallway right now."
You looked at him. "And just leave him?"
"Not forever." He held your gaze steadily. "One day, perhaps, the two of you could work together again. But not like this. Not you hiding in hallways and him throwing prosthetics across rooms. That's not a reunion. That's two people drowning next to each other and calling it support."
Something in that landed. You felt it settle, slow and certain, the way truth did when it finally arrived after you'd spent weeks circling it.
"I will," you said.
You stood, and before you could think too hard about it you leaned over and pressed a quick kiss to Clark's cheek. "I'll see you again, sir."
He crossed his arms, but something in his expression had gone soft around the edges. "Make me proud, kid."
************
PRESENT TIME
"You were there," Jack said, staring at you. "You were there, and I pushed everyone away so hard I didn't even realize it."
You looked down. "There wasn't much to realize."
He laughed quietly. "I thought I was alone."
"You were never alone."
His eyes lifted to yours. "Then why didn't I see you?"
You swallowed. "Because I was dealing with my own grief too."
The answer seemed to hit him harder than he expected. "Huh." A small smile appeared. "You were close." His voice softened. "I didn't know."
Then he rested his head against your shoulder. For once neither of you joked. Neither of you moved away. The silence felt comfortable, the kind that didn't need filling.
"You know," Jack said quietly, "Clark was right."
You raised an eyebrow. "That's a dangerous sentence."
"He'd love hearing that."
"He absolutely would."
Jack chuckled. Then his gaze lifted toward you at the same moment you looked down, and the conversation stopped without either of you deciding it should. Your faces were closer than either of you had realized, close enough to notice the tiredness still sitting in his eyes, close enough to notice where his gaze kept drifting.
The moment settled between you. Neither of you looked away. Neither of you moved.
Just a little closer. Just enough.
Then your phone rang.
Both of you blinked. Reality crashed back in at full volume. You looked at the screen. Emergency.
Jack sighed dramatically and dropped his head backward against the couch. "I hate this hospital."
You laughed, already standing. "I need to go."
For one brief second he wanted to ask you not to. Just stay. Five more minutes. Ten. An hour. Anything. But he knew better, because this was you, and you would never ignore a patient for anything, least of all him.
So instead he nodded. "Go."
You stood and reached for your bag. Then Jack suddenly held out a key.
You frowned. "What's that?"
"My house key."
You stared at him. "Your house key?"
He shrugged, trying very hard to look casual about it. "My leg still hurts."
"Uh-huh."
"I need someone to check on me."
"Uh-huh."
"In case I fall asleep and can't open the door."
You narrowed your eyes. "That is the worst excuse I have ever heard."
"It got you to take the key."
You opened your mouth. Closed it. Then pointed at him. "You are impossible."
"And yet you're taking it."
With a sigh you slipped the key into your pocket. "I'll give it back."
"No rush." The corner of his mouth lifted.
Your pager buzzed again. You headed for the door.
"Try not to die," you said.
Jack scoffed. "Pretty sure that's your job."
You shook your head and left.
The apartment fell quiet. Jack stared at the closed door for a moment, then at the empty spot beside him on the couch where you'd been sitting a minute ago.
A slow smile appeared.
Because for the first time in a very long time, when you left, he knew you were coming back.
To be reading this before bed is a cruel form of self-punishment 😭 cuz now idk what to do with these feels and how to sleep them off!!
On a serious note though—finally pivoting to the reader's POV, only for it to be about things she registers about others, is a brilliant narrative choice!! So much of this story is shaped by how Jack perceives the reader and their relationship, so it's striking that the rare times we do get her perspective, it's almost never introspective. She recounts these incidents beat by beat, or filtered through how they affected the people around her—like she never feels safe enough, or comfortable enough, to acknowledge her own pain directly.
There's so much grief in this chapter, right from the start. But even when Jack talks about Gabriel, losing a limb, the aftermath, his anger at Clark—all of it feels self-motivated, rooted in his experience. And then I realized: the moment the reader is put in a position to recount something similarly painful, she does it entirely through what the people around her meant to her—how guilt-driven her recollection becomes, how self-martyred (but god forbid anyone actually points that out to her, lol).
And the shift between past and present is so seamless! the way the two bleed into each other felt genuinely punchy in how the protagonists were experiencing it. My heart was literally going out to them as I read 😭 Ugh, I'm just so glad they made it to where they are despite everything they've had to go through.
But the ending though 👀 omfg, I see you, romance—peeking around the corner, trying to shine. I see you.
I am so pumped to see what their reconciliation looks like and what that might lead to!!!!
(Just realized this has, yet again, fully turned into another shameless rant. Fully apologizing for how long these end up getting 😭🙏 gotta check myself sometimes!)
First of all, never apologize for the long comments because every time I see your username I know I'm about to get a free literary analysis.
Also excuse me while I scream because your observation about the reader's POV just hit me like a truck.
Because YOU'RE RIGHT.
She really does keep talking about everyone except herself 😭
Gabriel this. Jack that. Clark this. Patient that.
Girl will perform emotional parkour before admitting she's suffering.
And now that you pointed it out, I can't unsee it.
"God forbid anyone points that out to her" is also painfully accurate because she would immediately change the subject and go save another patient.
Meanwhile Jack:
"I lost my leg."
Reader:
"That's terrible."
Jack:
"You almost worked yourself to death."
Reader:
"Anyway, let's talk about you."
😭😭😭
Also YES the romance finally crawled out from whatever cave it has been hiding in for six chapters.
I swear these two looked at each other for five seconds and suddenly everyone collectively went 👀
Thank you again for this comment. I genuinely love reading your thoughts because half the time you're out here discovering character traits before I do 😂❤️
Thank you to everyone who has read this chapter. Leave a Comment and Reblog, please. I'd love to hear your thoughts. ❤️
FLASHBACK
It was hot. Not the kind of heat people complained about. The kind that simply existed, heavy and relentless, pressing down on him until breathing felt like its own small effort. The fans overhead rattled, pushing the same hot air back and forth without doing much of anything that he could feel.
No one spoke much. Not today.
Jack sat against the canvas wall, knees drawn up, his body aching with the kind of exhaustion that came from too many hours awake. His eyes burned. He hadn't slept. Every time he closed them he saw Gabriel laughing at something stupid, making fun of somebody across the mess tent, completely alive.
Then not.
Across the tent a soldier stepped out from behind the partition and wiped a hand across his face. Jack looked up.
"Is it done?"
The soldier glanced back the way he'd come. "She needs a minute."
Of course she did.
Jack already knew without being told that you'd been in there nearly an hour. Long after everything that needed doing had been done. Long after Gabriel had been cleaned and prepared, long after the paperwork, long after everyone else had said what they needed to say and stepped back out into the heat. He knew because he'd been watching the curtain the whole time, waiting for it to move, and it hadn't.
He stood and crossed the tent slowly. When he stepped through he found you beside the transfer case, gloves off, hands clean but trembling, your eyes red in a way that had nothing to do with dust. He'd seen you exhausted before. This was different. This was the kind sleep couldn't touch.
Clark stands quietly beside you. "Kid."
"His collar wasn't straight." Your voice cracked on the last word. "I fixed it."
Jack didn't say anything. He understood exactly what you meant and exactly what you didn't. The collar had never been the problem. You weren't ready to let him go, and there was nothing in his training, nothing in any of his years out here, that told him what to do with that.
He stepped closer anyway. It hurt him to watch you standing there, frozen, unable to move toward the door. He kept his voice low, the only thing he knew to offer. "His family's waiting for him."
Your body flinched. "Right. Yes." You took a breath and finally stepped back. "I'm sorry."
Jack gave Clark a small nod. The signal that it was clear.
A few minutes later the transfer case was brought out into the heat, and the tent went completely silent around it. Six soldiers stepped forward to carry it. Jack was one of them. Clark too. He focused on his hands, on the weight, on keeping his steps even, because if he thought about anything else right now he wasn't going to make it across the compound.
Outside the sunlight was blinding after the dim canvas interior. The helicopter pad sat in the distance, the transport aircraft waiting beyond it. The camp had gathered along the path without anyone telling them to. Nobody spoke. Jack didn't expect them to.
When the case reached the vehicle, the soldiers stopped and stepped back into formation. Jack moved to one side. Clark stood beside him. Across from them you stood with your spine straight and your chin level, holding a stillness that Jack recognized immediately, because it was costing you everything you had left and he knew exactly what that looked like from the inside.
For a moment nobody moved.
Then Clark raised his hand in salute.
Jack's came up with it, automatic, trained, and it was returned down the line by every soldier present, the only sound the wind and somewhere distant the low building hum of the aircraft's engines. His throat tightened as he held the position. Across from him you were still standing at attention, perfect posture, perfect form, and he understood that you were holding it together through nothing but sheer will, because that was the only thing keeping you upright at all.
The vehicle began to move.
Only then did your hand lower. Only then did Gabriel actually start to leave, the case disappearing slowly up the ramp while the camp watched a piece of itself go with it.
That was when you broke.
Jack saw your shoulders drop first. Then your knees seemed to lose whatever certainty had been holding them, and the sound that came out of you was quiet and raw, the sound of someone who had held the wall up for exactly as long as duty required and not one second longer.
He was already moving before he'd decided to. He reached you in two steps and pulled you in, wrapping both arms around you, one hand coming up to rest against the back of your head without him thinking about it at all.
You didn't pull away. You pressed your face into his shoulder and let it come.
Jack didn't say anything. There was nothing true enough to say, and he'd learned a long time ago not to insult grief with empty words. He just held on, steady, while the engines spun up behind you both and somewhere over your shoulder Clark stood with his hand still raised, watching the two people he had left from that tent try to hold each other together in the middle of everything that had just been taken from them.
******
After Gabriel's transfer ceremony, the aircraft disappeared into the horizon. Yet somehow his presence stayed everywhere. In the empty chair near the mess tent. In the half-finished deck of cards still sitting on a crate. In the silence that followed every conversation now, the particular gap where his voice used to fill the space. In the jokes nobody told anymore.
War kept moving. It always did. Orders still came down, patrols still happened, the camp still woke up the next morning whether anyone was ready for it or not.
Jack hated that. Part of him wanted the world to stop, just for a day, just long enough for everyone to fully acknowledge that Gabriel was gone. Instead soldiers reported for duty, vehicles rolled out, radios crackled with the same routine traffic, and life continued like one man hadn't left a hole in the middle of all of them.
So Jack did what everyone else did. He kept moving. Checking equipment, checking ammunition, checking routes that didn't need checking. Volunteering for patrols, for sweeps, for anything that kept his hands and his attention occupied. Because the second he stopped moving, he started thinking, and every thought led back to Gabriel. Every single one.
Across camp you weren't much different. You worked every shift available, took every patient, stayed longer than necessary, found reasons to be useful long after the necessary work was done. The two of you were doing the exact same thing. Just in different uniforms.
A few days later Jack was checking his gear when your voice cut through the quiet.
"You volunteered."
Not a question.
Jack didn't look up. "Yeah."
"You don't have to go."
"I'm going."
"You just got back."
He kept adjusting a strap that didn't need adjusting, checking a weapon he had already checked twice.
"Jack."
Nothing.
"Look at me."
Slowly he lifted his head, and the second he did he knew you could see straight through him. You always could. Not physically exhausted, not really. Something colder than that. Like part of him had shut down after Gabriel died and simply never bothered switching back on.
"Don't go," you said.
His jaw tightened. "It's a sweep."
"You volunteered." You stepped closer. "And you haven't rested properly in days."
He almost laughed. The irony would have been funny if it weren't so depressing. "You too."
A tired breath escaped you. "True." You folded your arms. "But if I pass out, at least there's a hospital bed waiting for me."
A small smile pulled at the corner of his mouth, the first one in days. Then it disappeared, because the truth came out before he could stop it.
"To make sure nobody else ends up like Gabriel."
Silence settled between you. There it was. The thing he hadn't said out loud yet. The thing everybody already knew without needing it confirmed.
You stared at him. Then slowly closed the distance. "But what about soldiers like Jack Abbot?"
The question hit harder than he expected. For a second he couldn't answer, because the truth was ugly. The truth was that he hadn't thought about himself at all. Not since the explosion. Not since watching Gabriel die. Not since watching you cry.
A muscle jumped in his jaw. His eyes dropped away. "The day I signed up," he said, voice rough, "the day I got on that plane." A pause. "I stopped putting myself first."
You shook your head immediately. "No."
"Yeah."
"No." The anger in your voice surprised him. "You think Gabriel would've wanted this?"
Jack barked out a laugh with no humor in it at all. "Gabriel would've volunteered before me."
That hurt because it was true. Gabriel would have been first through the door, first on the helicopter, first running toward danger without a second thought. Which was exactly why he wasn't here anymore. The thought settled heavily between you.
"Jack."
He looked at you. Really looked. And suddenly you didn't seem angry anymore. Just tired. Heartbroken. Scared.
Your voice dropped, quiet and small and entirely honest. "I don't want you to go."
Something cracked inside his chest. The silence that followed felt endless.
Then you whispered, "Please stay."
Your eyes glistened. And for the first time since Gabriel died, Jack wanted to. God, he wanted to. If it had been anyone else asking he would have walked away without hesitation. But it wasn't anyone else. It was you.
For one terrible second he imagined dropping the bag. Telling command no. Staying. Choosing himself. Choosing you.
Instead he stepped forward, wrapped his arms around you, and pulled you close. The hug was brief and tight, the kind soldiers gave before deployment, the kind neither of you actually wanted but both needed anyway. His voice came low against your hair.
"I'll come back."
You closed your eyes. "This is weird."
He huffed softly. "What is?"
"The first time we haven't argued."
That finally earned a real chuckle, small and tired. "That means hell froze over."
You didn't laugh. Somehow that felt worse.
When you pulled back your eyes searched his face. "Promise me you'll come back in one piece."
Jack froze. Because he should have promised. He should have lied. He should have given you something, anything, to hold onto. Instead, "I won't promise that."
The hurt that flashed across your face followed him for weeks afterward.
He squeezed your shoulder once. Then picked up his gear and walked away. He didn't look back. Because he knew if he did, he wasn't leaving.
******
The location looked abandoned. A cluster of damaged buildings sat beneath the afternoon sun, broken walls, collapsed roofs, too quiet. Jack hated quiet. Quiet usually meant somebody was waiting.
The team moved carefully through the compound, weapons raised, eyes scanning every doorway, every window, every shadow. Jack's instincts were screaming. Something was wrong.
Then gunfire erupted. The first shots shattered the silence and soldiers dove for cover, more shots following in rapid succession until the entire compound dissolved into chaos.
"Contact left!"
"Move!"
Jack returned fire, called positions, directed movement as the team pushed forward. Then someone screamed.
He turned. One of the younger soldiers was down, hit, bleeding out fast. Without thinking he moved, exactly the way Gabriel would have, exactly the way Gabriel always had. He sprinted toward the soldier, dropped beside him, grabbed his vest, and started dragging him toward cover while bullets cracked overhead and concrete exploded somewhere close. Somebody was yelling. Jack barely heard them, because all he could think was not again, not another one, not today.
Then somebody shouted a warning.
Too late.
The world turned white.
The explosion hit with enough force to lift him off the ground entirely. Pain erupted everywhere at once. His ears rang, his vision blurred, the sky spun above him in a way that made no sense. For a second there was no sound at all. No gunfire, no shouting. Nothing. Just darkness.
And then a voice. Familiar. Terrified.
"Jack!"
The darkness shifted.
"Jack! Don't you dare leave me!"
Again. Closer. Louder.
"Jack!"
*********
PRESENT TIME
Jack woke up with a sharp inhale.
For a second he didn't know where he was. The darkness of his bedroom slowly replaced the battlefield, the walls and ceiling and silence settling into place where dust and gunfire had been a moment ago. Pittsburgh. His chest rose and fell heavily, sweat clinging to his skin, his heart hammering against his ribs while the phantom ringing from the explosion still echoed somewhere behind his ears.
He dragged a hand across his face. "Jesus Christ."
His head hurt. The familiar ache behind his eyes that only ever showed up after nightmares. Nightmares he hadn't had in years. He thought he'd buried that day, buried Gabriel, buried the explosion, buried your scream along with everything else.
Apparently not.
A sudden stab of pain shot through his prosthetic side and he tensed immediately. "Ugh." The ache spread upward, deep and persistent. His residual limb always acted up when the weather changed, or when stress got bad, or when old memories decided to crawl out of the grave uninvited. Today, apparently, checked every box at once.
"Fuck."
He sat on the edge of the bed for a minute, waiting it out. The pain didn't leave. He groaned and dropped backward onto the mattress, staring at the ceiling like it owed him an explanation.
He grabbed his phone from the nightstand.
Jack: Gonna take sick leave.
The reply came faster than expected.
Robby: You?
Jack snorted.
Jack: My leg hurts.
The three dots appeared immediately.
Robby: Say no more, brother.
Honestly, that was more than enough explanation. Jack tossed the phone onto his chest and closed his eyes again. Sleep wasn't happening. Neither was work.
At the Pitt, Robby took off his reading glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Abbot can't come in today."
Dana looked up from her chart. "That sudden?"
"His leg's acting up."
Her expression softened immediately. "Oh." A pause. "He should come here instead."
Robby raised an eyebrow.
Dana shrugged. "We literally have all the medicine."
Robby laughed. "I'll tell him."
"You should." She pointed toward the floor. "We're not letting him win Employee of the Month while sick at home."
"He has never once cared about Employee of the Month."
"Exactly my point."
Princess, who happened to be passing the desk at precisely the wrong moment, heard the entire exchange. Which was unfortunate for everyone involved. Her eyes widened and her phone appeared in her hand before either of them had finished the sentence.
Thirty seconds later, the Pitt group chat lit up.
Princess: 🚨 BREAKING NEWS 🚨
Princess: Dr. Abbot called in sick.
The three dots appeared instantly. Then another set. Then five more in quick succession.
Shen: impossible
Ellis: impossible
Javadi: impossible
Garcia: impossible
Princess: apparently his leg hurts
Shen: old man disease
Ellis: did he finally discover he's fifty
Garcia: he's not fifty
Shen: spiritually he is
Princess: should we send flowers
Ellis: send him a walker
Javadi: send him a retirement brochure
Across the hospital phones buzzed one after another in a chain reaction that spread faster than most actual trauma alerts. And just like that, the entire Pitt knew Jack Abbot had taken a sick day, which was somehow bigger news than anything that had happened in the trauma bay all week.
A few floors above the ER, you were in the middle of surgery.
The operating room was quiet except for the steady beep of monitors and the occasional request for instruments. Your focus was absolute. Scalpel. Suction. Clamp. Every movement precise, every decision deliberate.
Garcia stood across from you, assisting. For several minutes neither of you spoke. Then, casually, as if discussing the weather, "Abbot called in sick."
You didn't look up. Your eyes stayed on the surgical field. "Okay."
Garcia narrowed her eyes behind her mask. "He never calls in sick."
"Sounds like a personal achievement."
The scrub nurse bit back a smile. Garcia wasn't discouraged.
"His leg's acting up," she said.
Your hands kept moving, steady and controlled, exactly the same as before. Not a single hesitation. Nothing in your posture shifted at all.
Garcia glanced toward the anesthesiologist. The anesthesiologist looked at the circulating nurse. The circulating nurse shrugged. Nobody in that room could read you when you were operating, which was one of the many reasons you were good at this.
The surgery continued. Sutures, final checks, closure. A little while later you stepped away from the table.
"Good work, everyone."
The team began their post-op routine. You stripped off your gloves, then your gown. A few minutes later you stood at the scrub sink washing your hands. Garcia moved beside you and did the same. For a moment neither of you spoke. Water ran over your hands. You dried them carefully.
Then, finally, "I'll go out for a while."
Garcia didn't even try to hide her grin. "Yes, boss."
You shot her a look. It only made the grin wider.
She tilted her head. "You know his address?"
You looked at her slowly. A smirk pulled at the corner of your mouth. "I'm not that ignorant."
Garcia burst out laughing. "Oh my God."
You tossed the paper towel into the bin. "Don't start."
"Too late." She pointed at you. "You pretended not to care for an entire surgery."
"I didn't pretend anything."
"You absolutely did."
You started walking toward the door. Garcia called after you, "Tell him the Pitt survived without him."
Without turning around, you lifted a hand. "I'll let him know."
The second the door closed behind you, Garcia turned to the rest of the staff. "Told you."
The anesthesiologist sighed. "We all knew she was going."
The scrub nurse nodded. "Honestly, it would've been weirder if she didn't."
"By the way," the circulating nurse said, peeling off her own gloves, "did the Pitt make a bet on whether she'd go visit him?"
Garcia froze for a second. "Damn it. We're too late to join."
*******
Later, you showed up at his apartment.
Jack opened the door and went completely still. He hadn't been expecting anyone. Especially not you.
"You're supposed to be resting."
"I am."
"You look terrible."
"Thank you."
"You should moisturize."
"Get out."
He let you in anyway, and eventually he sat down on the couch with the particular care of someone managing pain he wasn't admitting to. You noticed him rubbing the stump absentmindedly, his thumb pressing into the same spot over and over.
"Still hurts?" you asked.
He shrugged. "Sometimes."
It was a lie. It hurt a lot, and you both knew it, but you didn't push. You sat down beside him without saying anything else and reached for his leg.
He let you.
You looked down at his leg. Hesitated. Then slowly reached for it.
Jack raised an eyebrow. "What are you doing?"
"Checking."
"Checking?"
"Do you want my help or not?"
That shut him up.
Carefully you rested your hands against his leg. You weren't entirely sure what you were doing, not because you didn't understand the injury, you knew exactly what you were looking for and where the tension would be sitting. It was harder because this was Jack, and somehow that made every step of it feel different than it should.
Your fingers pressed lightly against the tight muscle along the residual limb, working slow circles into the spots where the strain had built up.
"Still hurts?" you asked.
"Sometimes," he admitted. "If I have the nightmares."
You didn't answer immediately.
Your fingers kept moving, carefully working through the tension gathered in the muscles.
"I should've bought you that bike the day we met."
You rolled your eyes. "I would've said no."
"No, you wouldn't have."
"I absolutely would have."
"You accepted one now."
"Because you're annoying."
"And persistent."
"Mostly annoying."
"And handsome."
You shook your head and kept massaging his leg, your fingers steady and methodical. Then, quieter, "I'm sorry I couldn't save it."
Jack looked at you for a long moment. The thought sat in his chest before he said it out loud. "Hey. I never blamed you. It wasn't your fault."
"I know. Still." You didn't look up from his leg. "In my head, every time I see you, there's a million different ways I run it back. Trying to make it work out differently."
He reached down and covered your hand with his, stopping the motion gently. "Hey," he said again, softer this time. "Look at me."
You did.
"You did everything right," he said. "I'm still here. I'm still standing. That's because of you, not in spite of you."
You held his gaze for a moment, and something in your chest loosened slightly, the old guilt shifting just enough to breathe around.
"You're still annoying," you said finally.
"I know." The corner of his mouth curved upward. "Mostly annoying. Handsome, too."
You scoffed.
"Didn't deny it, huh?"
Jack looked entirely too pleased with himself.
Like he'd just won an argument nobody else knew was happening.
****
FLASHBACK
The medic tent was chaos. Blood, dust, shouting. Stretchers coming in one after another faster than anyone could process them.
Then they brought in Jack.
For a second your heart stopped. His uniform was soaked through, dark and wet in a way that told you everything before you'd even looked at the wound. His face had gone pale, that particular gray that meant his body was already starting to shut down peripheral systems to protect the core. The lower half of his leg was barely recognizable.
You moved before you'd finished registering what you were looking at. Airway. Pulse. Blood pressure. You ran the checks the way your hands had been trained to, on autopilot, because the part of your brain that wanted to stand still and stare was not allowed in the room right now.
"You can't panic." Clark's voice cut through the noise beside you. "We need to save him."
"Yes, sir." Your voice came out steadier than you felt.
The next few minutes blurred into a single continuous motion. Assessment, medication, blood transfusion, everything moving faster than you could fully track. You worked the line, you called for supplies, you watched the monitor with one part of your brain while the other part screamed at you to look at his face, to confirm he was still in there.
Then came the leg.
You stared at the wound and then at the imaging once it came back, and you felt something in your chest go very still. The damage to the blood supply. The crush injury extending higher than you'd hoped. Tissue that had already started dying from lack of perfusion, the kind that didn't come back no matter how skilled the hands trying to save it were.
"No," you said.
Clark looked at you. "The leg lost the golden hour."
"There has to be another way." You said it too fast, the words tumbling out ahead of the part of you that already knew the answer.
"There isn't."
"There is." You pointed at the scan, at the section of tissue that was still pink, still arguably viable if you moved fast enough, if you were good enough, if the universe gave you one single break today. "We can try."
Clark's expression didn't change. "Kid."
"We can try." Your voice cracked slightly on the second word and you hated that it did.
"We're out of time." His voice hardened, not unkind, just final. "You know what this looks like as well as I do."
You looked down at Jack. Unconscious, pale, alive, the rise and fall of his chest the only thing in the room that mattered right now. Then back at the scan. Then back at him again, and your chest tightened so hard it was difficult to draw a full breath.
"There has to be something," you said, quieter now, the fight starting to drain out of the sentence even as you said it.
Clark was silent for a moment. Then, "Amputate."
You shook your head immediately. "No."
"Amputate."
"No." You said it again like saying it louder would change the anatomy in front of you. Like refusing hard enough could rebuild a blood supply that no longer existed.
For the first time Clark's voice hardened completely. "With or without you, this surgery happens. The only question is whether you're the one doing it."
The words landed harder than anything else in the room. Because suddenly it wasn't your decision to make at all. It never had been, not really, not once the tissue had died the way it had died. You had been arguing with biology and biology did not negotiate.
You looked at Jack again. Unconscious. Bleeding. Alive. You hated this. You hated the choice in front of you, hated that there even was a choice, hated that every version of this ended with you taking something from him that he hadn't agreed to lose. You hated, more than anything, that saving him meant losing part of him, and that you were the one who was going to have to be the hands that did it.
You closed your eyes. Took a breath. Then another, slower this time, the kind you used to talk yourself back into the work when your body wanted to fall apart and didn't have the time for it.
When you opened your eyes again the surgeon had come back online behind them, pushing the rest of you down where it couldn't interfere.
"Get him to surgery ," you said. What mattered right now is to keep his heart beating through the next hour.
If Jack Abbot was going to survive, you were going to be the one standing there when he did. Even if it meant being the one who had to take the leg to do it.
******
PRESENT TIME
Jack leaned back against the couch and let out a slow breath.
"The next thing I remember." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I woke up in the States."
You nodded. "You needed further treatment. That's why Clark sent you back."
Jack snorted. "Could've at least warned me." His gaze drifted toward the window, somewhere past it. "I wake up, look around, and suddenly I'm surrounded by strangers." A pause. "Didn't even know where the hell I was."
Then his eyes came back to you. Softer this time.
"At least—" He stopped.
You already knew where the sentence was going. At least there had been you. At least one familiar face. At least someone.
Your expression shifted before he could finish it. The teasing dropped away.
"I didn't know you were transferred," you said.
Jack frowned. "What?"
You looked down at your hands. The memory still sat uncomfortably even after all these years, a part of the story you hadn't told him because it had never felt necessary until right now.
"I found out afterward."
"What do you mean afterward?" His voice had gone careful.
You hesitated, then sighed. "I fainted."
Jack blinked. "You what?"
*******
FLASHBACK
After Jack's surgery, something inside you broke.
You had saved his life. Everyone kept telling you that. But every time you looked at the empty space where his leg used to be, it didn't feel like a victory. It felt like a debt you'd paid with someone else's currency.
So you worked. One shift became two. Two became three. Patients came and went and you barely remembered their names, just the blood, the sutures, the next emergency, the next life. Because if you stopped moving, you'd think what you could’ve done to save Jack.
People started noticing. A medic quietly handed you water you forgot to drink. Someone told you to sit down and you didn't.
Then Clark found you.
You were halfway through another chart when his shadow fell over your shoulder.
"Get out."
You didn't look up. "I can still work."
"Get out."
"I'm fine."
"Get out before I ban you from this tent."
That made you look at him, because you knew he meant it. You stood, your body heavier than it should have been, and the moment you stepped outside the heat hit you like a wall. Two steps. Three. Then the world tilted sideways and the last thing you heard was someone shouting for a doctor.
When you woke up everything hurt. Your head, your neck, your pride. A canvas ceiling. An IV in your arm. The cot creaked when you shifted.
"Good. You're awake."
Clark sat nearby, arms crossed.
"How long was I out?"
"Two days."
"What?"
"Congratulations. You finally beat everyone else's record."
You stared at him. "Two days?"
"You collapsed. Your body decided to remind you that you're human, not a machine that runs on coffee and stubbornness."
You groaned, which made your headache worse. "How is he?"
Clark's expression shifted, just slightly. Enough that you sat up straighter.
"How is Jack?"
He rubbed his thumb against his palm, thinking before he answered. "You can't see him. I transferred him back to the States. He needs treatment we don't have here."
The words landed harder than you expected. "I didn't even get to say goodbye."
“It’s better this way.” Clark was quiet for a moment. Then, "Because I've seen soldiers like him before. He's drowning right now. No mission, no team, no leg. He doesn't know what his life looks like anymore."
"I could help him."
Clark studied you for a long moment, and something about it made you feel eighteen again, sitting in front of a commanding officer who saw straight through you.
"That," he said quietly, "is exactly what scares me."
"What does that mean?"
He leaned back. "Kid. You have a habit of trying to save everyone. You spend every day fighting death in that tent." His voice was gentle. "You don't need to turn a man into another project."
That hurt more than it should have. "I care about him."
"I know you do."
A beat passed. Then you muttered, "Did you separate us, because he's older than me?"
Clark sighed dramatically. "No." A pause. "Maybe a little."
You laughed despite yourself. "My parents have an age gap."
"Your parents met during peacetime." That shut you up, because he wasn't wrong. War changed people. Sometimes permanently. He looked out toward the camp. "And Abbot. War already took too much from him."
You thought about the nightmares, the exhaustion, the silence you'd already seen settle into him. "I could still help."
"And what happens if he leans too hard on you?" Clark asked. "What happens if you lose yourself trying to hold him together?"
You didn't have an answer.
Clark sighed, and for the first time he looked less like your commanding officer and more like family. "I already see you as my own kid," he said. "You're talented. Far too selfless for your own good. You fight the angel of death every day." A faint smile. "And somehow you keep making it wait."
"I don't know about that."
"I do. We all do." He leaned forward. "When this contract ends, what are you going to do?"
You shrugged. "Vacation. Therapy."
"Both good answers." He pointed at you. "I want you back in school. Another specialty."
"Me?"
"I'll write the kind of recommendation letter universities fight over."
"Why?"
He looked genuinely confused by the question. "Because someone with your talent shouldn't stop here. And because you saved my soldiers."
"It wasn't just me." You smiled faintly. "Abbot taught me a lot."
"He did." A grin. "He's the anchor of this unit. I'm still the leader though."
That earned a real laugh, the first one in days.
Months later, your contract ended. Your bags sat beside you on the tarmac, the transport plane waiting in the distance. The future felt wide open and uncertain in a way that made your chest tight.
Clark walked up beside you while you stared at the runway.
"Go out there," he said. "Travel. See the world." His eyes narrowed slightly. "Meet someone."
Your chest tightened immediately, because you already knew exactly who he meant.
He studied you for a moment. "If after all of that, you still think about him." A pause. "Then go see him."
The words hurt, but not because he was dismissing what you felt. The opposite. He was treating it like it mattered, like it might survive time, like it might survive everything you'd both been through.
Then he snapped his fingers. "Oh."
A soldier appeared behind him carrying a very familiar puppy. Your eyes went wide. "Riot?"
The puppy squirmed immediately, trying to reach you.
"Can I?"
Clark looked offended. "Of course."
The moment Riot landed in your arms he started licking your face, and you laughed for the first time in days. Clark watched with quiet satisfaction.
"Kid's already attached to you anyway," he said.
Riot barked happily, like he completely agreed.
***********
PRESENT TIME
Jack stared at you for a second. Then groaned. "I'm gonna kill Clark."
You laughed. "He'll beat you first."
He looked genuinely offended. "You underestimate me?"
"He's eighty."
"Exactly."
You raised an eyebrow. "That's not helping your argument."
"It helps mine."
"You realize he could still throw you across a room?"
Jack thought about it for a second. Then sighed. "Yeah. Probably."
That earned another laugh from you, and the sound settled something warm in his chest. For a moment neither of you spoke. Then he leaned back against the couch and the amusement faded from his face.
"I blame him sometimes," he said.
You glanced over. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "But he had more experience than both of us." A pause. "And he was right."
You stayed quiet, letting him take his time with it.
Jack stared at the ceiling. "I pushed people away." His voice was calm. Too calm, the kind that only came from years of sitting with the same thought until it stopped hurting and started just being true. "I couldn't accept it." His hand rested unconsciously on his thigh, or where his thigh used to end. "I couldn't accept that I lost part of myself."
Your chest tightened. You remembered. The angry version of him. The distant one. The one everyone warned you about later, the one who shut doors before anyone could walk through them, who refused help, who disappeared into rehabilitation and therapy and silence and didn't come back out for a long time.
Jack let out a quiet huff of a laugh. "I was an asshole."
You smiled slightly. "A little."
"A little?"
"A lot."
"That's fair." The corner of his mouth twitched. Then his gaze drifted toward the coffee table, toward a frame sitting beside it.
You followed his eyes and froze.
The photograph. Old, slightly faded, taken with your Polaroid camera years ago. Gabriel in the middle, grinning like he owned the frame. Clark pretending to look annoyed. Riot small enough to fit under one arm. Jack looking irritated because he'd complained about pictures five seconds before it was taken. And you, laughing behind the camera, caught mid-motion in the background reflection of the tent's metal trunk.
"You still have that?" you asked.
Jack glanced at it and nodded. "Of course." His voice softened. "It was sent to me during therapy."
That made you look at him directly. He was already watching you, carefully, too carefully.
"Was it you?" he asked.
"What?"
"The nurse." His gaze didn't move from yours. "The one who gave it to her."
Your stomach dropped. "Oh."
He tilted his head. "I noticed things changed after that."
You looked away, suddenly very interested in absolutely nothing on the wall.
He kept going anyway. "My pain medication changed." Silence. "The grape juice disappeared." More silence. "They started giving me apple juice."
You pressed your lips together.
Jack almost smiled. "I hate grape juice."
"I know." The words escaped before you could stop them.
The room went quiet. His smile widened immediately. "Exactly."
You closed your eyes. Damn it. He had you.
"There were only a few people who knew that," he said, his voice gentle now, not teasing, not pushing, just warm. "You were one of them."
You bit the inside of your cheek and twisted your fingers together in your lap, because the apartment suddenly felt smaller, quieter, more intimate than it had five minutes ago.
Jack kept looking at you, patient, like he already knew the answer and was simply waiting for you to be ready to give it to him. Which, honestly, he probably did.
You finally sighed. "I left instructions."
His expression softened immediately. "You did."
********
FLASHBACK
After you got back to the States, you secretly visited. Not once. Not twice. More times than you were willing to admit, even to yourself.
The rehabilitation center was almost an hour away from your apartment. You learned the route by memory. The receptionist eventually stopped asking questions. The nurses started recognizing you. But you never signed in as a visitor. Never walked into his room. Never knocked on the door.
You stayed where he couldn't see you. The hallway. The observation window. The corner near the physical therapy room. Close enough to know he was alive. Far enough to leave when it hurt too much.
And it always hurt.
The first time you saw him standing on the prosthetic, he fell. Hard. The therapist tried to help him up and Jack shoved the hand away immediately. You almost walked into the room. Almost. Instead you gripped the edge of the observation window until your knuckles went white.
The second time, he threw the prosthetic across the room. The metallic crash echoed down the hallway and several patients looked over. Jack didn't care. He sat there breathing hard, angry, humiliated, broken in a way you hadn't seen on him before. You left before he could see the tears in your eyes.
Another time you heard him yelling at a therapist through the door.
"Just leave me alone."
The therapist stayed calm. Jack got louder.
"I said leave me alone."
You froze outside the door, listening. Not because you wanted to. Because you couldn't make yourself walk away.
The therapist said something too quiet to hear. Jack laughed, a bitter, ugly sound that didn't sound like him at all.
"My friend's dead." Silence. "My leg's gone." Another silence. "So tell me exactly what I'm supposed to be positive about."
Your chest tightened, because suddenly it wasn't about the leg. Maybe it never had been. He wasn't fighting rehabilitation. He was fighting everything. Gabriel. The explosion. The future. The guilt.
The realization followed you home that night, and every night after.
One afternoon you were standing in your usual spot outside the therapy room when a familiar voice appeared beside you.
"How long have you been standing here?"
You didn't need to look. Clark. Of course. That man noticed everything.
You kept your eyes on the glass. Said nothing.
Clark followed your gaze. Inside, Jack was practicing walking again. One step. Another. Another. The therapist beside him, ready to catch him if he fell.
"You come every week."
Still no answer.
Clark sighed. Not annoyed. Just tired, the kind that came from watching too many people hurt for too long.
"You're waiting for him to become himself again," he said quietly.
Your throat tightened, because he was right. That was exactly what you were doing. Waiting for the old Jack. The one before the explosion, before the funeral, before the nightmares. The Jack who laughed easier. The Jack who believed he could save everyone. The Jack who had two legs.
Silence stretched between you.
Then Clark said the thing you would remember for years.
"He won't."
Your breath caught. You finally looked at him. His expression wasn't cruel or cold. It was sad, because he understood exactly what he was taking from you by saying it.
"The old Jack is gone." He let that sit for a second. Then looked back toward the therapy room. "So is the old you."
That hurt even more, because he wasn't wrong. War had taken pieces from all of you. Gabriel was gone. Jack came back different. And somewhere along the way, without quite noticing it happening, you had changed too.
Clark folded his arms. "Staying here won't save him. He has to want to get better."
Inside the room Jack took another step. Then another. His jaw was clenched, his face pale with the effort of it, still fighting, still refusing to quit even when every part of him wanted to.
Clark watched him for a moment. Then looked back at you.
"And right now," he said, his voice softening, "that's a fight he has to win himself."
For the first time since the war ended, you didn't argue. Because deep down you already knew. You just weren't ready to let go yet.
"Leave," Clark said finally. "While he's fixing himself and fighting his own demons, you go fix yourself. Improve your skills. Become better than the version of you that's standing in this hallway right now."
You looked at him. "And just leave him?"
"Not forever." He held your gaze steadily. "One day, perhaps, the two of you could work together again. But not like this. Not you hiding in hallways and him throwing prosthetics across rooms. That's not a reunion. That's two people drowning next to each other and calling it support."
Something in that landed. You felt it settle, slow and certain, the way truth did when it finally arrived after you'd spent weeks circling it.
"I will," you said.
You stood, and before you could think too hard about it you leaned over and pressed a quick kiss to Clark's cheek. "I'll see you again, sir."
He crossed his arms, but something in his expression had gone soft around the edges. "Make me proud, kid."
************
PRESENT TIME
"You were there," Jack said, staring at you. "You were there, and I pushed everyone away so hard I didn't even realize it."
You looked down. "There wasn't much to realize."
He laughed quietly. "I thought I was alone."
"You were never alone."
His eyes lifted to yours. "Then why didn't I see you?"
You swallowed. "Because I was dealing with my own grief too."
The answer seemed to hit him harder than he expected. "Huh." A small smile appeared. "You were close." His voice softened. "I didn't know."
Then he rested his head against your shoulder. For once neither of you joked. Neither of you moved away. The silence felt comfortable, the kind that didn't need filling.
"You know," Jack said quietly, "Clark was right."
You raised an eyebrow. "That's a dangerous sentence."
"He'd love hearing that."
"He absolutely would."
Jack chuckled. Then his gaze lifted toward you at the same moment you looked down, and the conversation stopped without either of you deciding it should. Your faces were closer than either of you had realized, close enough to notice the tiredness still sitting in his eyes, close enough to notice where his gaze kept drifting.
The moment settled between you. Neither of you looked away. Neither of you moved.
Just a little closer. Just enough.
Then your phone rang.
Both of you blinked. Reality crashed back in at full volume. You looked at the screen. Emergency.
Jack sighed dramatically and dropped his head backward against the couch. "I hate this hospital."
You laughed, already standing. "I need to go."
For one brief second he wanted to ask you not to. Just stay. Five more minutes. Ten. An hour. Anything. But he knew better, because this was you, and you would never ignore a patient for anything, least of all him.
So instead he nodded. "Go."
You stood and reached for your bag. Then Jack suddenly held out a key.
You frowned. "What's that?"
"My house key."
You stared at him. "Your house key?"
He shrugged, trying very hard to look casual about it. "My leg still hurts."
"Uh-huh."
"I need someone to check on me."
"Uh-huh."
"In case I fall asleep and can't open the door."
You narrowed your eyes. "That is the worst excuse I have ever heard."
"It got you to take the key."
You opened your mouth. Closed it. Then pointed at him. "You are impossible."
"And yet you're taking it."
With a sigh you slipped the key into your pocket. "I'll give it back."
"No rush." The corner of his mouth lifted.
Your pager buzzed again. You headed for the door.
"Try not to die," you said.
Jack scoffed. "Pretty sure that's your job."
You shook your head and left.
The apartment fell quiet. Jack stared at the closed door for a moment, then at the empty spot beside him on the couch where you'd been sitting a minute ago.
A slow smile appeared.
Because for the first time in a very long time, when you left, he knew you were coming back.
To be reading this before bed is a cruel form of self-punishment 😭 cuz now idk what to do with these feels and how to sleep them off!!
On a serious note though—finally pivoting to the reader's POV, only for it to be about things she registers about others, is a brilliant narrative choice!! So much of this story is shaped by how Jack perceives the reader and their relationship, so it's striking that the rare times we do get her perspective, it's almost never introspective. She recounts these incidents beat by beat, or filtered through how they affected the people around her—like she never feels safe enough, or comfortable enough, to acknowledge her own pain directly.
There's so much grief in this chapter, right from the start. But even when Jack talks about Gabriel, losing a limb, the aftermath, his anger at Clark—all of it feels self-motivated, rooted in his experience. And then I realized: the moment the reader is put in a position to recount something similarly painful, she does it entirely through what the people around her meant to her—how guilt-driven her recollection becomes, how self-martyred (but god forbid anyone actually points that out to her, lol).
And the shift between past and present is so seamless! the way the two bleed into each other felt genuinely punchy in how the protagonists were experiencing it. My heart was literally going out to them as I read 😭 Ugh, I'm just so glad they made it to where they are despite everything they've had to go through.
But the ending though 👀 omfg, I see you, romance—peeking around the corner, trying to shine. I see you.
I am so pumped to see what their reconciliation looks like and what that might lead to!!!!
(Just realized this has, yet again, fully turned into another shameless rant. Fully apologizing for how long these end up getting 😭🙏 gotta check myself sometimes!)
First of all, never apologize for the long comments because every time I see your username I know I'm about to get a free literary analysis.
Also excuse me while I scream because your observation about the reader's POV just hit me like a truck.
Because YOU'RE RIGHT.
She really does keep talking about everyone except herself 😭
Gabriel this. Jack that. Clark this. Patient that.
Girl will perform emotional parkour before admitting she's suffering.
And now that you pointed it out, I can't unsee it.
"God forbid anyone points that out to her" is also painfully accurate because she would immediately change the subject and go save another patient.
Meanwhile Jack:
"I lost my leg."
Reader:
"That's terrible."
Jack:
"You almost worked yourself to death."
Reader:
"Anyway, let's talk about you."
😭😭😭
Also YES the romance finally crawled out from whatever cave it has been hiding in for six chapters.
I swear these two looked at each other for five seconds and suddenly everyone collectively went 👀
Thank you again for this comment. I genuinely love reading your thoughts because half the time you're out here discovering character traits before I do 😂❤️
Thank you to everyone who has read this chapter. Leave a Comment and Reblog, please. I'd love to hear your thoughts. ❤️
FLASHBACK
It was hot. Not the kind of heat people complained about. The kind that simply existed, heavy and relentless, pressing down on him until breathing felt like its own small effort. The fans overhead rattled, pushing the same hot air back and forth without doing much of anything that he could feel.
No one spoke much. Not today.
Jack sat against the canvas wall, knees drawn up, his body aching with the kind of exhaustion that came from too many hours awake. His eyes burned. He hadn't slept. Every time he closed them he saw Gabriel laughing at something stupid, making fun of somebody across the mess tent, completely alive.
Then not.
Across the tent a soldier stepped out from behind the partition and wiped a hand across his face. Jack looked up.
"Is it done?"
The soldier glanced back the way he'd come. "She needs a minute."
Of course she did.
Jack already knew without being told that you'd been in there nearly an hour. Long after everything that needed doing had been done. Long after Gabriel had been cleaned and prepared, long after the paperwork, long after everyone else had said what they needed to say and stepped back out into the heat. He knew because he'd been watching the curtain the whole time, waiting for it to move, and it hadn't.
He stood and crossed the tent slowly. When he stepped through he found you beside the transfer case, gloves off, hands clean but trembling, your eyes red in a way that had nothing to do with dust. He'd seen you exhausted before. This was different. This was the kind sleep couldn't touch.
Clark stands quietly beside you. "Kid."
"His collar wasn't straight." Your voice cracked on the last word. "I fixed it."
Jack didn't say anything. He understood exactly what you meant and exactly what you didn't. The collar had never been the problem. You weren't ready to let him go, and there was nothing in his training, nothing in any of his years out here, that told him what to do with that.
He stepped closer anyway. It hurt him to watch you standing there, frozen, unable to move toward the door. He kept his voice low, the only thing he knew to offer. "His family's waiting for him."
Your body flinched. "Right. Yes." You took a breath and finally stepped back. "I'm sorry."
Jack gave Clark a small nod. The signal that it was clear.
A few minutes later the transfer case was brought out into the heat, and the tent went completely silent around it. Six soldiers stepped forward to carry it. Jack was one of them. Clark too. He focused on his hands, on the weight, on keeping his steps even, because if he thought about anything else right now he wasn't going to make it across the compound.
Outside the sunlight was blinding after the dim canvas interior. The helicopter pad sat in the distance, the transport aircraft waiting beyond it. The camp had gathered along the path without anyone telling them to. Nobody spoke. Jack didn't expect them to.
When the case reached the vehicle, the soldiers stopped and stepped back into formation. Jack moved to one side. Clark stood beside him. Across from them you stood with your spine straight and your chin level, holding a stillness that Jack recognized immediately, because it was costing you everything you had left and he knew exactly what that looked like from the inside.
For a moment nobody moved.
Then Clark raised his hand in salute.
Jack's came up with it, automatic, trained, and it was returned down the line by every soldier present, the only sound the wind and somewhere distant the low building hum of the aircraft's engines. His throat tightened as he held the position. Across from him you were still standing at attention, perfect posture, perfect form, and he understood that you were holding it together through nothing but sheer will, because that was the only thing keeping you upright at all.
The vehicle began to move.
Only then did your hand lower. Only then did Gabriel actually start to leave, the case disappearing slowly up the ramp while the camp watched a piece of itself go with it.
That was when you broke.
Jack saw your shoulders drop first. Then your knees seemed to lose whatever certainty had been holding them, and the sound that came out of you was quiet and raw, the sound of someone who had held the wall up for exactly as long as duty required and not one second longer.
He was already moving before he'd decided to. He reached you in two steps and pulled you in, wrapping both arms around you, one hand coming up to rest against the back of your head without him thinking about it at all.
You didn't pull away. You pressed your face into his shoulder and let it come.
Jack didn't say anything. There was nothing true enough to say, and he'd learned a long time ago not to insult grief with empty words. He just held on, steady, while the engines spun up behind you both and somewhere over your shoulder Clark stood with his hand still raised, watching the two people he had left from that tent try to hold each other together in the middle of everything that had just been taken from them.
******
After Gabriel's transfer ceremony, the aircraft disappeared into the horizon. Yet somehow his presence stayed everywhere. In the empty chair near the mess tent. In the half-finished deck of cards still sitting on a crate. In the silence that followed every conversation now, the particular gap where his voice used to fill the space. In the jokes nobody told anymore.
War kept moving. It always did. Orders still came down, patrols still happened, the camp still woke up the next morning whether anyone was ready for it or not.
Jack hated that. Part of him wanted the world to stop, just for a day, just long enough for everyone to fully acknowledge that Gabriel was gone. Instead soldiers reported for duty, vehicles rolled out, radios crackled with the same routine traffic, and life continued like one man hadn't left a hole in the middle of all of them.
So Jack did what everyone else did. He kept moving. Checking equipment, checking ammunition, checking routes that didn't need checking. Volunteering for patrols, for sweeps, for anything that kept his hands and his attention occupied. Because the second he stopped moving, he started thinking, and every thought led back to Gabriel. Every single one.
Across camp you weren't much different. You worked every shift available, took every patient, stayed longer than necessary, found reasons to be useful long after the necessary work was done. The two of you were doing the exact same thing. Just in different uniforms.
A few days later Jack was checking his gear when your voice cut through the quiet.
"You volunteered."
Not a question.
Jack didn't look up. "Yeah."
"You don't have to go."
"I'm going."
"You just got back."
He kept adjusting a strap that didn't need adjusting, checking a weapon he had already checked twice.
"Jack."
Nothing.
"Look at me."
Slowly he lifted his head, and the second he did he knew you could see straight through him. You always could. Not physically exhausted, not really. Something colder than that. Like part of him had shut down after Gabriel died and simply never bothered switching back on.
"Don't go," you said.
His jaw tightened. "It's a sweep."
"You volunteered." You stepped closer. "And you haven't rested properly in days."
He almost laughed. The irony would have been funny if it weren't so depressing. "You too."
A tired breath escaped you. "True." You folded your arms. "But if I pass out, at least there's a hospital bed waiting for me."
A small smile pulled at the corner of his mouth, the first one in days. Then it disappeared, because the truth came out before he could stop it.
"To make sure nobody else ends up like Gabriel."
Silence settled between you. There it was. The thing he hadn't said out loud yet. The thing everybody already knew without needing it confirmed.
You stared at him. Then slowly closed the distance. "But what about soldiers like Jack Abbot?"
The question hit harder than he expected. For a second he couldn't answer, because the truth was ugly. The truth was that he hadn't thought about himself at all. Not since the explosion. Not since watching Gabriel die. Not since watching you cry.
A muscle jumped in his jaw. His eyes dropped away. "The day I signed up," he said, voice rough, "the day I got on that plane." A pause. "I stopped putting myself first."
You shook your head immediately. "No."
"Yeah."
"No." The anger in your voice surprised him. "You think Gabriel would've wanted this?"
Jack barked out a laugh with no humor in it at all. "Gabriel would've volunteered before me."
That hurt because it was true. Gabriel would have been first through the door, first on the helicopter, first running toward danger without a second thought. Which was exactly why he wasn't here anymore. The thought settled heavily between you.
"Jack."
He looked at you. Really looked. And suddenly you didn't seem angry anymore. Just tired. Heartbroken. Scared.
Your voice dropped, quiet and small and entirely honest. "I don't want you to go."
Something cracked inside his chest. The silence that followed felt endless.
Then you whispered, "Please stay."
Your eyes glistened. And for the first time since Gabriel died, Jack wanted to. God, he wanted to. If it had been anyone else asking he would have walked away without hesitation. But it wasn't anyone else. It was you.
For one terrible second he imagined dropping the bag. Telling command no. Staying. Choosing himself. Choosing you.
Instead he stepped forward, wrapped his arms around you, and pulled you close. The hug was brief and tight, the kind soldiers gave before deployment, the kind neither of you actually wanted but both needed anyway. His voice came low against your hair.
"I'll come back."
You closed your eyes. "This is weird."
He huffed softly. "What is?"
"The first time we haven't argued."
That finally earned a real chuckle, small and tired. "That means hell froze over."
You didn't laugh. Somehow that felt worse.
When you pulled back your eyes searched his face. "Promise me you'll come back in one piece."
Jack froze. Because he should have promised. He should have lied. He should have given you something, anything, to hold onto. Instead, "I won't promise that."
The hurt that flashed across your face followed him for weeks afterward.
He squeezed your shoulder once. Then picked up his gear and walked away. He didn't look back. Because he knew if he did, he wasn't leaving.
******
The location looked abandoned. A cluster of damaged buildings sat beneath the afternoon sun, broken walls, collapsed roofs, too quiet. Jack hated quiet. Quiet usually meant somebody was waiting.
The team moved carefully through the compound, weapons raised, eyes scanning every doorway, every window, every shadow. Jack's instincts were screaming. Something was wrong.
Then gunfire erupted. The first shots shattered the silence and soldiers dove for cover, more shots following in rapid succession until the entire compound dissolved into chaos.
"Contact left!"
"Move!"
Jack returned fire, called positions, directed movement as the team pushed forward. Then someone screamed.
He turned. One of the younger soldiers was down, hit, bleeding out fast. Without thinking he moved, exactly the way Gabriel would have, exactly the way Gabriel always had. He sprinted toward the soldier, dropped beside him, grabbed his vest, and started dragging him toward cover while bullets cracked overhead and concrete exploded somewhere close. Somebody was yelling. Jack barely heard them, because all he could think was not again, not another one, not today.
Then somebody shouted a warning.
Too late.
The world turned white.
The explosion hit with enough force to lift him off the ground entirely. Pain erupted everywhere at once. His ears rang, his vision blurred, the sky spun above him in a way that made no sense. For a second there was no sound at all. No gunfire, no shouting. Nothing. Just darkness.
And then a voice. Familiar. Terrified.
"Jack!"
The darkness shifted.
"Jack! Don't you dare leave me!"
Again. Closer. Louder.
"Jack!"
*********
PRESENT TIME
Jack woke up with a sharp inhale.
For a second he didn't know where he was. The darkness of his bedroom slowly replaced the battlefield, the walls and ceiling and silence settling into place where dust and gunfire had been a moment ago. Pittsburgh. His chest rose and fell heavily, sweat clinging to his skin, his heart hammering against his ribs while the phantom ringing from the explosion still echoed somewhere behind his ears.
He dragged a hand across his face. "Jesus Christ."
His head hurt. The familiar ache behind his eyes that only ever showed up after nightmares. Nightmares he hadn't had in years. He thought he'd buried that day, buried Gabriel, buried the explosion, buried your scream along with everything else.
Apparently not.
A sudden stab of pain shot through his prosthetic side and he tensed immediately. "Ugh." The ache spread upward, deep and persistent. His residual limb always acted up when the weather changed, or when stress got bad, or when old memories decided to crawl out of the grave uninvited. Today, apparently, checked every box at once.
"Fuck."
He sat on the edge of the bed for a minute, waiting it out. The pain didn't leave. He groaned and dropped backward onto the mattress, staring at the ceiling like it owed him an explanation.
He grabbed his phone from the nightstand.
Jack: Gonna take sick leave.
The reply came faster than expected.
Robby: You?
Jack snorted.
Jack: My leg hurts.
The three dots appeared immediately.
Robby: Say no more, brother.
Honestly, that was more than enough explanation. Jack tossed the phone onto his chest and closed his eyes again. Sleep wasn't happening. Neither was work.
At the Pitt, Robby took off his reading glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Abbot can't come in today."
Dana looked up from her chart. "That sudden?"
"His leg's acting up."
Her expression softened immediately. "Oh." A pause. "He should come here instead."
Robby raised an eyebrow.
Dana shrugged. "We literally have all the medicine."
Robby laughed. "I'll tell him."
"You should." She pointed toward the floor. "We're not letting him win Employee of the Month while sick at home."
"He has never once cared about Employee of the Month."
"Exactly my point."
Princess, who happened to be passing the desk at precisely the wrong moment, heard the entire exchange. Which was unfortunate for everyone involved. Her eyes widened and her phone appeared in her hand before either of them had finished the sentence.
Thirty seconds later, the Pitt group chat lit up.
Princess: 🚨 BREAKING NEWS 🚨
Princess: Dr. Abbot called in sick.
The three dots appeared instantly. Then another set. Then five more in quick succession.
Shen: impossible
Ellis: impossible
Javadi: impossible
Garcia: impossible
Princess: apparently his leg hurts
Shen: old man disease
Ellis: did he finally discover he's fifty
Garcia: he's not fifty
Shen: spiritually he is
Princess: should we send flowers
Ellis: send him a walker
Javadi: send him a retirement brochure
Across the hospital phones buzzed one after another in a chain reaction that spread faster than most actual trauma alerts. And just like that, the entire Pitt knew Jack Abbot had taken a sick day, which was somehow bigger news than anything that had happened in the trauma bay all week.
A few floors above the ER, you were in the middle of surgery.
The operating room was quiet except for the steady beep of monitors and the occasional request for instruments. Your focus was absolute. Scalpel. Suction. Clamp. Every movement precise, every decision deliberate.
Garcia stood across from you, assisting. For several minutes neither of you spoke. Then, casually, as if discussing the weather, "Abbot called in sick."
You didn't look up. Your eyes stayed on the surgical field. "Okay."
Garcia narrowed her eyes behind her mask. "He never calls in sick."
"Sounds like a personal achievement."
The scrub nurse bit back a smile. Garcia wasn't discouraged.
"His leg's acting up," she said.
Your hands kept moving, steady and controlled, exactly the same as before. Not a single hesitation. Nothing in your posture shifted at all.
Garcia glanced toward the anesthesiologist. The anesthesiologist looked at the circulating nurse. The circulating nurse shrugged. Nobody in that room could read you when you were operating, which was one of the many reasons you were good at this.
The surgery continued. Sutures, final checks, closure. A little while later you stepped away from the table.
"Good work, everyone."
The team began their post-op routine. You stripped off your gloves, then your gown. A few minutes later you stood at the scrub sink washing your hands. Garcia moved beside you and did the same. For a moment neither of you spoke. Water ran over your hands. You dried them carefully.
Then, finally, "I'll go out for a while."
Garcia didn't even try to hide her grin. "Yes, boss."
You shot her a look. It only made the grin wider.
She tilted her head. "You know his address?"
You looked at her slowly. A smirk pulled at the corner of your mouth. "I'm not that ignorant."
Garcia burst out laughing. "Oh my God."
You tossed the paper towel into the bin. "Don't start."
"Too late." She pointed at you. "You pretended not to care for an entire surgery."
"I didn't pretend anything."
"You absolutely did."
You started walking toward the door. Garcia called after you, "Tell him the Pitt survived without him."
Without turning around, you lifted a hand. "I'll let him know."
The second the door closed behind you, Garcia turned to the rest of the staff. "Told you."
The anesthesiologist sighed. "We all knew she was going."
The scrub nurse nodded. "Honestly, it would've been weirder if she didn't."
"By the way," the circulating nurse said, peeling off her own gloves, "did the Pitt make a bet on whether she'd go visit him?"
Garcia froze for a second. "Damn it. We're too late to join."
*******
Later, you showed up at his apartment.
Jack opened the door and went completely still. He hadn't been expecting anyone. Especially not you.
"You're supposed to be resting."
"I am."
"You look terrible."
"Thank you."
"You should moisturize."
"Get out."
He let you in anyway, and eventually he sat down on the couch with the particular care of someone managing pain he wasn't admitting to. You noticed him rubbing the stump absentmindedly, his thumb pressing into the same spot over and over.
"Still hurts?" you asked.
He shrugged. "Sometimes."
It was a lie. It hurt a lot, and you both knew it, but you didn't push. You sat down beside him without saying anything else and reached for his leg.
He let you.
You looked down at his leg. Hesitated. Then slowly reached for it.
Jack raised an eyebrow. "What are you doing?"
"Checking."
"Checking?"
"Do you want my help or not?"
That shut him up.
Carefully you rested your hands against his leg. You weren't entirely sure what you were doing, not because you didn't understand the injury, you knew exactly what you were looking for and where the tension would be sitting. It was harder because this was Jack, and somehow that made every step of it feel different than it should.
Your fingers pressed lightly against the tight muscle along the residual limb, working slow circles into the spots where the strain had built up.
"Still hurts?" you asked.
"Sometimes," he admitted. "If I have the nightmares."
You didn't answer immediately.
Your fingers kept moving, carefully working through the tension gathered in the muscles.
"I should've bought you that bike the day we met."
You rolled your eyes. "I would've said no."
"No, you wouldn't have."
"I absolutely would have."
"You accepted one now."
"Because you're annoying."
"And persistent."
"Mostly annoying."
"And handsome."
You shook your head and kept massaging his leg, your fingers steady and methodical. Then, quieter, "I'm sorry I couldn't save it."
Jack looked at you for a long moment. The thought sat in his chest before he said it out loud. "Hey. I never blamed you. It wasn't your fault."
"I know. Still." You didn't look up from his leg. "In my head, every time I see you, there's a million different ways I run it back. Trying to make it work out differently."
He reached down and covered your hand with his, stopping the motion gently. "Hey," he said again, softer this time. "Look at me."
You did.
"You did everything right," he said. "I'm still here. I'm still standing. That's because of you, not in spite of you."
You held his gaze for a moment, and something in your chest loosened slightly, the old guilt shifting just enough to breathe around.
"You're still annoying," you said finally.
"I know." The corner of his mouth curved upward. "Mostly annoying. Handsome, too."
You scoffed.
"Didn't deny it, huh?"
Jack looked entirely too pleased with himself.
Like he'd just won an argument nobody else knew was happening.
****
FLASHBACK
The medic tent was chaos. Blood, dust, shouting. Stretchers coming in one after another faster than anyone could process them.
Then they brought in Jack.
For a second your heart stopped. His uniform was soaked through, dark and wet in a way that told you everything before you'd even looked at the wound. His face had gone pale, that particular gray that meant his body was already starting to shut down peripheral systems to protect the core. The lower half of his leg was barely recognizable.
You moved before you'd finished registering what you were looking at. Airway. Pulse. Blood pressure. You ran the checks the way your hands had been trained to, on autopilot, because the part of your brain that wanted to stand still and stare was not allowed in the room right now.
"You can't panic." Clark's voice cut through the noise beside you. "We need to save him."
"Yes, sir." Your voice came out steadier than you felt.
The next few minutes blurred into a single continuous motion. Assessment, medication, blood transfusion, everything moving faster than you could fully track. You worked the line, you called for supplies, you watched the monitor with one part of your brain while the other part screamed at you to look at his face, to confirm he was still in there.
Then came the leg.
You stared at the wound and then at the imaging once it came back, and you felt something in your chest go very still. The damage to the blood supply. The crush injury extending higher than you'd hoped. Tissue that had already started dying from lack of perfusion, the kind that didn't come back no matter how skilled the hands trying to save it were.
"No," you said.
Clark looked at you. "The leg lost the golden hour."
"There has to be another way." You said it too fast, the words tumbling out ahead of the part of you that already knew the answer.
"There isn't."
"There is." You pointed at the scan, at the section of tissue that was still pink, still arguably viable if you moved fast enough, if you were good enough, if the universe gave you one single break today. "We can try."
Clark's expression didn't change. "Kid."
"We can try." Your voice cracked slightly on the second word and you hated that it did.
"We're out of time." His voice hardened, not unkind, just final. "You know what this looks like as well as I do."
You looked down at Jack. Unconscious, pale, alive, the rise and fall of his chest the only thing in the room that mattered right now. Then back at the scan. Then back at him again, and your chest tightened so hard it was difficult to draw a full breath.
"There has to be something," you said, quieter now, the fight starting to drain out of the sentence even as you said it.
Clark was silent for a moment. Then, "Amputate."
You shook your head immediately. "No."
"Amputate."
"No." You said it again like saying it louder would change the anatomy in front of you. Like refusing hard enough could rebuild a blood supply that no longer existed.
For the first time Clark's voice hardened completely. "With or without you, this surgery happens. The only question is whether you're the one doing it."
The words landed harder than anything else in the room. Because suddenly it wasn't your decision to make at all. It never had been, not really, not once the tissue had died the way it had died. You had been arguing with biology and biology did not negotiate.
You looked at Jack again. Unconscious. Bleeding. Alive. You hated this. You hated the choice in front of you, hated that there even was a choice, hated that every version of this ended with you taking something from him that he hadn't agreed to lose. You hated, more than anything, that saving him meant losing part of him, and that you were the one who was going to have to be the hands that did it.
You closed your eyes. Took a breath. Then another, slower this time, the kind you used to talk yourself back into the work when your body wanted to fall apart and didn't have the time for it.
When you opened your eyes again the surgeon had come back online behind them, pushing the rest of you down where it couldn't interfere.
"Get him to surgery ," you said. What mattered right now is to keep his heart beating through the next hour.
If Jack Abbot was going to survive, you were going to be the one standing there when he did. Even if it meant being the one who had to take the leg to do it.
******
PRESENT TIME
Jack leaned back against the couch and let out a slow breath.
"The next thing I remember." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I woke up in the States."
You nodded. "You needed further treatment. That's why Clark sent you back."
Jack snorted. "Could've at least warned me." His gaze drifted toward the window, somewhere past it. "I wake up, look around, and suddenly I'm surrounded by strangers." A pause. "Didn't even know where the hell I was."
Then his eyes came back to you. Softer this time.
"At least—" He stopped.
You already knew where the sentence was going. At least there had been you. At least one familiar face. At least someone.
Your expression shifted before he could finish it. The teasing dropped away.
"I didn't know you were transferred," you said.
Jack frowned. "What?"
You looked down at your hands. The memory still sat uncomfortably even after all these years, a part of the story you hadn't told him because it had never felt necessary until right now.
"I found out afterward."
"What do you mean afterward?" His voice had gone careful.
You hesitated, then sighed. "I fainted."
Jack blinked. "You what?"
*******
FLASHBACK
After Jack's surgery, something inside you broke.
You had saved his life. Everyone kept telling you that. But every time you looked at the empty space where his leg used to be, it didn't feel like a victory. It felt like a debt you'd paid with someone else's currency.
So you worked. One shift became two. Two became three. Patients came and went and you barely remembered their names, just the blood, the sutures, the next emergency, the next life. Because if you stopped moving, you'd think what you could’ve done to save Jack.
People started noticing. A medic quietly handed you water you forgot to drink. Someone told you to sit down and you didn't.
Then Clark found you.
You were halfway through another chart when his shadow fell over your shoulder.
"Get out."
You didn't look up. "I can still work."
"Get out."
"I'm fine."
"Get out before I ban you from this tent."
That made you look at him, because you knew he meant it. You stood, your body heavier than it should have been, and the moment you stepped outside the heat hit you like a wall. Two steps. Three. Then the world tilted sideways and the last thing you heard was someone shouting for a doctor.
When you woke up everything hurt. Your head, your neck, your pride. A canvas ceiling. An IV in your arm. The cot creaked when you shifted.
"Good. You're awake."
Clark sat nearby, arms crossed.
"How long was I out?"
"Two days."
"What?"
"Congratulations. You finally beat everyone else's record."
You stared at him. "Two days?"
"You collapsed. Your body decided to remind you that you're human, not a machine that runs on coffee and stubbornness."
You groaned, which made your headache worse. "How is he?"
Clark's expression shifted, just slightly. Enough that you sat up straighter.
"How is Jack?"
He rubbed his thumb against his palm, thinking before he answered. "You can't see him. I transferred him back to the States. He needs treatment we don't have here."
The words landed harder than you expected. "I didn't even get to say goodbye."
“It’s better this way.” Clark was quiet for a moment. Then, "Because I've seen soldiers like him before. He's drowning right now. No mission, no team, no leg. He doesn't know what his life looks like anymore."
"I could help him."
Clark studied you for a long moment, and something about it made you feel eighteen again, sitting in front of a commanding officer who saw straight through you.
"That," he said quietly, "is exactly what scares me."
"What does that mean?"
He leaned back. "Kid. You have a habit of trying to save everyone. You spend every day fighting death in that tent." His voice was gentle. "You don't need to turn a man into another project."
That hurt more than it should have. "I care about him."
"I know you do."
A beat passed. Then you muttered, "Did you separate us, because he's older than me?"
Clark sighed dramatically. "No." A pause. "Maybe a little."
You laughed despite yourself. "My parents have an age gap."
"Your parents met during peacetime." That shut you up, because he wasn't wrong. War changed people. Sometimes permanently. He looked out toward the camp. "And Abbot. War already took too much from him."
You thought about the nightmares, the exhaustion, the silence you'd already seen settle into him. "I could still help."
"And what happens if he leans too hard on you?" Clark asked. "What happens if you lose yourself trying to hold him together?"
You didn't have an answer.
Clark sighed, and for the first time he looked less like your commanding officer and more like family. "I already see you as my own kid," he said. "You're talented. Far too selfless for your own good. You fight the angel of death every day." A faint smile. "And somehow you keep making it wait."
"I don't know about that."
"I do. We all do." He leaned forward. "When this contract ends, what are you going to do?"
You shrugged. "Vacation. Therapy."
"Both good answers." He pointed at you. "I want you back in school. Another specialty."
"Me?"
"I'll write the kind of recommendation letter universities fight over."
"Why?"
He looked genuinely confused by the question. "Because someone with your talent shouldn't stop here. And because you saved my soldiers."
"It wasn't just me." You smiled faintly. "Abbot taught me a lot."
"He did." A grin. "He's the anchor of this unit. I'm still the leader though."
That earned a real laugh, the first one in days.
Months later, your contract ended. Your bags sat beside you on the tarmac, the transport plane waiting in the distance. The future felt wide open and uncertain in a way that made your chest tight.
Clark walked up beside you while you stared at the runway.
"Go out there," he said. "Travel. See the world." His eyes narrowed slightly. "Meet someone."
Your chest tightened immediately, because you already knew exactly who he meant.
He studied you for a moment. "If after all of that, you still think about him." A pause. "Then go see him."
The words hurt, but not because he was dismissing what you felt. The opposite. He was treating it like it mattered, like it might survive time, like it might survive everything you'd both been through.
Then he snapped his fingers. "Oh."
A soldier appeared behind him carrying a very familiar puppy. Your eyes went wide. "Riot?"
The puppy squirmed immediately, trying to reach you.
"Can I?"
Clark looked offended. "Of course."
The moment Riot landed in your arms he started licking your face, and you laughed for the first time in days. Clark watched with quiet satisfaction.
"Kid's already attached to you anyway," he said.
Riot barked happily, like he completely agreed.
***********
PRESENT TIME
Jack stared at you for a second. Then groaned. "I'm gonna kill Clark."
You laughed. "He'll beat you first."
He looked genuinely offended. "You underestimate me?"
"He's eighty."
"Exactly."
You raised an eyebrow. "That's not helping your argument."
"It helps mine."
"You realize he could still throw you across a room?"
Jack thought about it for a second. Then sighed. "Yeah. Probably."
That earned another laugh from you, and the sound settled something warm in his chest. For a moment neither of you spoke. Then he leaned back against the couch and the amusement faded from his face.
"I blame him sometimes," he said.
You glanced over. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "But he had more experience than both of us." A pause. "And he was right."
You stayed quiet, letting him take his time with it.
Jack stared at the ceiling. "I pushed people away." His voice was calm. Too calm, the kind that only came from years of sitting with the same thought until it stopped hurting and started just being true. "I couldn't accept it." His hand rested unconsciously on his thigh, or where his thigh used to end. "I couldn't accept that I lost part of myself."
Your chest tightened. You remembered. The angry version of him. The distant one. The one everyone warned you about later, the one who shut doors before anyone could walk through them, who refused help, who disappeared into rehabilitation and therapy and silence and didn't come back out for a long time.
Jack let out a quiet huff of a laugh. "I was an asshole."
You smiled slightly. "A little."
"A little?"
"A lot."
"That's fair." The corner of his mouth twitched. Then his gaze drifted toward the coffee table, toward a frame sitting beside it.
You followed his eyes and froze.
The photograph. Old, slightly faded, taken with your Polaroid camera years ago. Gabriel in the middle, grinning like he owned the frame. Clark pretending to look annoyed. Riot small enough to fit under one arm. Jack looking irritated because he'd complained about pictures five seconds before it was taken. And you, laughing behind the camera, caught mid-motion in the background reflection of the tent's metal trunk.
"You still have that?" you asked.
Jack glanced at it and nodded. "Of course." His voice softened. "It was sent to me during therapy."
That made you look at him directly. He was already watching you, carefully, too carefully.
"Was it you?" he asked.
"What?"
"The nurse." His gaze didn't move from yours. "The one who gave it to her."
Your stomach dropped. "Oh."
He tilted his head. "I noticed things changed after that."
You looked away, suddenly very interested in absolutely nothing on the wall.
He kept going anyway. "My pain medication changed." Silence. "The grape juice disappeared." More silence. "They started giving me apple juice."
You pressed your lips together.
Jack almost smiled. "I hate grape juice."
"I know." The words escaped before you could stop them.
The room went quiet. His smile widened immediately. "Exactly."
You closed your eyes. Damn it. He had you.
"There were only a few people who knew that," he said, his voice gentle now, not teasing, not pushing, just warm. "You were one of them."
You bit the inside of your cheek and twisted your fingers together in your lap, because the apartment suddenly felt smaller, quieter, more intimate than it had five minutes ago.
Jack kept looking at you, patient, like he already knew the answer and was simply waiting for you to be ready to give it to him. Which, honestly, he probably did.
You finally sighed. "I left instructions."
His expression softened immediately. "You did."
********
FLASHBACK
After you got back to the States, you secretly visited. Not once. Not twice. More times than you were willing to admit, even to yourself.
The rehabilitation center was almost an hour away from your apartment. You learned the route by memory. The receptionist eventually stopped asking questions. The nurses started recognizing you. But you never signed in as a visitor. Never walked into his room. Never knocked on the door.
You stayed where he couldn't see you. The hallway. The observation window. The corner near the physical therapy room. Close enough to know he was alive. Far enough to leave when it hurt too much.
And it always hurt.
The first time you saw him standing on the prosthetic, he fell. Hard. The therapist tried to help him up and Jack shoved the hand away immediately. You almost walked into the room. Almost. Instead you gripped the edge of the observation window until your knuckles went white.
The second time, he threw the prosthetic across the room. The metallic crash echoed down the hallway and several patients looked over. Jack didn't care. He sat there breathing hard, angry, humiliated, broken in a way you hadn't seen on him before. You left before he could see the tears in your eyes.
Another time you heard him yelling at a therapist through the door.
"Just leave me alone."
The therapist stayed calm. Jack got louder.
"I said leave me alone."
You froze outside the door, listening. Not because you wanted to. Because you couldn't make yourself walk away.
The therapist said something too quiet to hear. Jack laughed, a bitter, ugly sound that didn't sound like him at all.
"My friend's dead." Silence. "My leg's gone." Another silence. "So tell me exactly what I'm supposed to be positive about."
Your chest tightened, because suddenly it wasn't about the leg. Maybe it never had been. He wasn't fighting rehabilitation. He was fighting everything. Gabriel. The explosion. The future. The guilt.
The realization followed you home that night, and every night after.
One afternoon you were standing in your usual spot outside the therapy room when a familiar voice appeared beside you.
"How long have you been standing here?"
You didn't need to look. Clark. Of course. That man noticed everything.
You kept your eyes on the glass. Said nothing.
Clark followed your gaze. Inside, Jack was practicing walking again. One step. Another. Another. The therapist beside him, ready to catch him if he fell.
"You come every week."
Still no answer.
Clark sighed. Not annoyed. Just tired, the kind that came from watching too many people hurt for too long.
"You're waiting for him to become himself again," he said quietly.
Your throat tightened, because he was right. That was exactly what you were doing. Waiting for the old Jack. The one before the explosion, before the funeral, before the nightmares. The Jack who laughed easier. The Jack who believed he could save everyone. The Jack who had two legs.
Silence stretched between you.
Then Clark said the thing you would remember for years.
"He won't."
Your breath caught. You finally looked at him. His expression wasn't cruel or cold. It was sad, because he understood exactly what he was taking from you by saying it.
"The old Jack is gone." He let that sit for a second. Then looked back toward the therapy room. "So is the old you."
That hurt even more, because he wasn't wrong. War had taken pieces from all of you. Gabriel was gone. Jack came back different. And somewhere along the way, without quite noticing it happening, you had changed too.
Clark folded his arms. "Staying here won't save him. He has to want to get better."
Inside the room Jack took another step. Then another. His jaw was clenched, his face pale with the effort of it, still fighting, still refusing to quit even when every part of him wanted to.
Clark watched him for a moment. Then looked back at you.
"And right now," he said, his voice softening, "that's a fight he has to win himself."
For the first time since the war ended, you didn't argue. Because deep down you already knew. You just weren't ready to let go yet.
"Leave," Clark said finally. "While he's fixing himself and fighting his own demons, you go fix yourself. Improve your skills. Become better than the version of you that's standing in this hallway right now."
You looked at him. "And just leave him?"
"Not forever." He held your gaze steadily. "One day, perhaps, the two of you could work together again. But not like this. Not you hiding in hallways and him throwing prosthetics across rooms. That's not a reunion. That's two people drowning next to each other and calling it support."
Something in that landed. You felt it settle, slow and certain, the way truth did when it finally arrived after you'd spent weeks circling it.
"I will," you said.
You stood, and before you could think too hard about it you leaned over and pressed a quick kiss to Clark's cheek. "I'll see you again, sir."
He crossed his arms, but something in his expression had gone soft around the edges. "Make me proud, kid."
************
PRESENT TIME
"You were there," Jack said, staring at you. "You were there, and I pushed everyone away so hard I didn't even realize it."
You looked down. "There wasn't much to realize."
He laughed quietly. "I thought I was alone."
"You were never alone."
His eyes lifted to yours. "Then why didn't I see you?"
You swallowed. "Because I was dealing with my own grief too."
The answer seemed to hit him harder than he expected. "Huh." A small smile appeared. "You were close." His voice softened. "I didn't know."
Then he rested his head against your shoulder. For once neither of you joked. Neither of you moved away. The silence felt comfortable, the kind that didn't need filling.
"You know," Jack said quietly, "Clark was right."
You raised an eyebrow. "That's a dangerous sentence."
"He'd love hearing that."
"He absolutely would."
Jack chuckled. Then his gaze lifted toward you at the same moment you looked down, and the conversation stopped without either of you deciding it should. Your faces were closer than either of you had realized, close enough to notice the tiredness still sitting in his eyes, close enough to notice where his gaze kept drifting.
The moment settled between you. Neither of you looked away. Neither of you moved.
Just a little closer. Just enough.
Then your phone rang.
Both of you blinked. Reality crashed back in at full volume. You looked at the screen. Emergency.
Jack sighed dramatically and dropped his head backward against the couch. "I hate this hospital."
You laughed, already standing. "I need to go."
For one brief second he wanted to ask you not to. Just stay. Five more minutes. Ten. An hour. Anything. But he knew better, because this was you, and you would never ignore a patient for anything, least of all him.
So instead he nodded. "Go."
You stood and reached for your bag. Then Jack suddenly held out a key.
You frowned. "What's that?"
"My house key."
You stared at him. "Your house key?"
He shrugged, trying very hard to look casual about it. "My leg still hurts."
"Uh-huh."
"I need someone to check on me."
"Uh-huh."
"In case I fall asleep and can't open the door."
You narrowed your eyes. "That is the worst excuse I have ever heard."
"It got you to take the key."
You opened your mouth. Closed it. Then pointed at him. "You are impossible."
"And yet you're taking it."
With a sigh you slipped the key into your pocket. "I'll give it back."
"No rush." The corner of his mouth lifted.
Your pager buzzed again. You headed for the door.
"Try not to die," you said.
Jack scoffed. "Pretty sure that's your job."
You shook your head and left.
The apartment fell quiet. Jack stared at the closed door for a moment, then at the empty spot beside him on the couch where you'd been sitting a minute ago.
A slow smile appeared.
Because for the first time in a very long time, when you left, he knew you were coming back.
Thank you to everyone who has read this chapter. Leave a Comment and Reblog, please. I'd love to hear your thoughts. ❤️
FLASHBACK
It was hot. Not the kind of heat people complained about. The kind that simply existed, heavy and relentless, pressing down on him until breathing felt like its own small effort. The fans overhead rattled, pushing the same hot air back and forth without doing much of anything that he could feel.
No one spoke much. Not today.
Jack sat against the canvas wall, knees drawn up, his body aching with the kind of exhaustion that came from too many hours awake. His eyes burned. He hadn't slept. Every time he closed them he saw Gabriel laughing at something stupid, making fun of somebody across the mess tent, completely alive.
Then not.
Across the tent a soldier stepped out from behind the partition and wiped a hand across his face. Jack looked up.
"Is it done?"
The soldier glanced back the way he'd come. "She needs a minute."
Of course she did.
Jack already knew without being told that you'd been in there nearly an hour. Long after everything that needed doing had been done. Long after Gabriel had been cleaned and prepared, long after the paperwork, long after everyone else had said what they needed to say and stepped back out into the heat. He knew because he'd been watching the curtain the whole time, waiting for it to move, and it hadn't.
He stood and crossed the tent slowly. When he stepped through he found you beside the transfer case, gloves off, hands clean but trembling, your eyes red in a way that had nothing to do with dust. He'd seen you exhausted before. This was different. This was the kind sleep couldn't touch.
Clark stands quietly beside you. "Kid."
"His collar wasn't straight." Your voice cracked on the last word. "I fixed it."
Jack didn't say anything. He understood exactly what you meant and exactly what you didn't. The collar had never been the problem. You weren't ready to let him go, and there was nothing in his training, nothing in any of his years out here, that told him what to do with that.
He stepped closer anyway. It hurt him to watch you standing there, frozen, unable to move toward the door. He kept his voice low, the only thing he knew to offer. "His family's waiting for him."
Your body flinched. "Right. Yes." You took a breath and finally stepped back. "I'm sorry."
Jack gave Clark a small nod. The signal that it was clear.
A few minutes later the transfer case was brought out into the heat, and the tent went completely silent around it. Six soldiers stepped forward to carry it. Jack was one of them. Clark too. He focused on his hands, on the weight, on keeping his steps even, because if he thought about anything else right now he wasn't going to make it across the compound.
Outside the sunlight was blinding after the dim canvas interior. The helicopter pad sat in the distance, the transport aircraft waiting beyond it. The camp had gathered along the path without anyone telling them to. Nobody spoke. Jack didn't expect them to.
When the case reached the vehicle, the soldiers stopped and stepped back into formation. Jack moved to one side. Clark stood beside him. Across from them you stood with your spine straight and your chin level, holding a stillness that Jack recognized immediately, because it was costing you everything you had left and he knew exactly what that looked like from the inside.
For a moment nobody moved.
Then Clark raised his hand in salute.
Jack's came up with it, automatic, trained, and it was returned down the line by every soldier present, the only sound the wind and somewhere distant the low building hum of the aircraft's engines. His throat tightened as he held the position. Across from him you were still standing at attention, perfect posture, perfect form, and he understood that you were holding it together through nothing but sheer will, because that was the only thing keeping you upright at all.
The vehicle began to move.
Only then did your hand lower. Only then did Gabriel actually start to leave, the case disappearing slowly up the ramp while the camp watched a piece of itself go with it.
That was when you broke.
Jack saw your shoulders drop first. Then your knees seemed to lose whatever certainty had been holding them, and the sound that came out of you was quiet and raw, the sound of someone who had held the wall up for exactly as long as duty required and not one second longer.
He was already moving before he'd decided to. He reached you in two steps and pulled you in, wrapping both arms around you, one hand coming up to rest against the back of your head without him thinking about it at all.
You didn't pull away. You pressed your face into his shoulder and let it come.
Jack didn't say anything. There was nothing true enough to say, and he'd learned a long time ago not to insult grief with empty words. He just held on, steady, while the engines spun up behind you both and somewhere over your shoulder Clark stood with his hand still raised, watching the two people he had left from that tent try to hold each other together in the middle of everything that had just been taken from them.
******
After Gabriel's transfer ceremony, the aircraft disappeared into the horizon. Yet somehow his presence stayed everywhere. In the empty chair near the mess tent. In the half-finished deck of cards still sitting on a crate. In the silence that followed every conversation now, the particular gap where his voice used to fill the space. In the jokes nobody told anymore.
War kept moving. It always did. Orders still came down, patrols still happened, the camp still woke up the next morning whether anyone was ready for it or not.
Jack hated that. Part of him wanted the world to stop, just for a day, just long enough for everyone to fully acknowledge that Gabriel was gone. Instead soldiers reported for duty, vehicles rolled out, radios crackled with the same routine traffic, and life continued like one man hadn't left a hole in the middle of all of them.
So Jack did what everyone else did. He kept moving. Checking equipment, checking ammunition, checking routes that didn't need checking. Volunteering for patrols, for sweeps, for anything that kept his hands and his attention occupied. Because the second he stopped moving, he started thinking, and every thought led back to Gabriel. Every single one.
Across camp you weren't much different. You worked every shift available, took every patient, stayed longer than necessary, found reasons to be useful long after the necessary work was done. The two of you were doing the exact same thing. Just in different uniforms.
A few days later Jack was checking his gear when your voice cut through the quiet.
"You volunteered."
Not a question.
Jack didn't look up. "Yeah."
"You don't have to go."
"I'm going."
"You just got back."
He kept adjusting a strap that didn't need adjusting, checking a weapon he had already checked twice.
"Jack."
Nothing.
"Look at me."
Slowly he lifted his head, and the second he did he knew you could see straight through him. You always could. Not physically exhausted, not really. Something colder than that. Like part of him had shut down after Gabriel died and simply never bothered switching back on.
"Don't go," you said.
His jaw tightened. "It's a sweep."
"You volunteered." You stepped closer. "And you haven't rested properly in days."
He almost laughed. The irony would have been funny if it weren't so depressing. "You too."
A tired breath escaped you. "True." You folded your arms. "But if I pass out, at least there's a hospital bed waiting for me."
A small smile pulled at the corner of his mouth, the first one in days. Then it disappeared, because the truth came out before he could stop it.
"To make sure nobody else ends up like Gabriel."
Silence settled between you. There it was. The thing he hadn't said out loud yet. The thing everybody already knew without needing it confirmed.
You stared at him. Then slowly closed the distance. "But what about soldiers like Jack Abbot?"
The question hit harder than he expected. For a second he couldn't answer, because the truth was ugly. The truth was that he hadn't thought about himself at all. Not since the explosion. Not since watching Gabriel die. Not since watching you cry.
A muscle jumped in his jaw. His eyes dropped away. "The day I signed up," he said, voice rough, "the day I got on that plane." A pause. "I stopped putting myself first."
You shook your head immediately. "No."
"Yeah."
"No." The anger in your voice surprised him. "You think Gabriel would've wanted this?"
Jack barked out a laugh with no humor in it at all. "Gabriel would've volunteered before me."
That hurt because it was true. Gabriel would have been first through the door, first on the helicopter, first running toward danger without a second thought. Which was exactly why he wasn't here anymore. The thought settled heavily between you.
"Jack."
He looked at you. Really looked. And suddenly you didn't seem angry anymore. Just tired. Heartbroken. Scared.
Your voice dropped, quiet and small and entirely honest. "I don't want you to go."
Something cracked inside his chest. The silence that followed felt endless.
Then you whispered, "Please stay."
Your eyes glistened. And for the first time since Gabriel died, Jack wanted to. God, he wanted to. If it had been anyone else asking he would have walked away without hesitation. But it wasn't anyone else. It was you.
For one terrible second he imagined dropping the bag. Telling command no. Staying. Choosing himself. Choosing you.
Instead he stepped forward, wrapped his arms around you, and pulled you close. The hug was brief and tight, the kind soldiers gave before deployment, the kind neither of you actually wanted but both needed anyway. His voice came low against your hair.
"I'll come back."
You closed your eyes. "This is weird."
He huffed softly. "What is?"
"The first time we haven't argued."
That finally earned a real chuckle, small and tired. "That means hell froze over."
You didn't laugh. Somehow that felt worse.
When you pulled back your eyes searched his face. "Promise me you'll come back in one piece."
Jack froze. Because he should have promised. He should have lied. He should have given you something, anything, to hold onto. Instead, "I won't promise that."
The hurt that flashed across your face followed him for weeks afterward.
He squeezed your shoulder once. Then picked up his gear and walked away. He didn't look back. Because he knew if he did, he wasn't leaving.
******
The location looked abandoned. A cluster of damaged buildings sat beneath the afternoon sun, broken walls, collapsed roofs, too quiet. Jack hated quiet. Quiet usually meant somebody was waiting.
The team moved carefully through the compound, weapons raised, eyes scanning every doorway, every window, every shadow. Jack's instincts were screaming. Something was wrong.
Then gunfire erupted. The first shots shattered the silence and soldiers dove for cover, more shots following in rapid succession until the entire compound dissolved into chaos.
"Contact left!"
"Move!"
Jack returned fire, called positions, directed movement as the team pushed forward. Then someone screamed.
He turned. One of the younger soldiers was down, hit, bleeding out fast. Without thinking he moved, exactly the way Gabriel would have, exactly the way Gabriel always had. He sprinted toward the soldier, dropped beside him, grabbed his vest, and started dragging him toward cover while bullets cracked overhead and concrete exploded somewhere close. Somebody was yelling. Jack barely heard them, because all he could think was not again, not another one, not today.
Then somebody shouted a warning.
Too late.
The world turned white.
The explosion hit with enough force to lift him off the ground entirely. Pain erupted everywhere at once. His ears rang, his vision blurred, the sky spun above him in a way that made no sense. For a second there was no sound at all. No gunfire, no shouting. Nothing. Just darkness.
And then a voice. Familiar. Terrified.
"Jack!"
The darkness shifted.
"Jack! Don't you dare leave me!"
Again. Closer. Louder.
"Jack!"
*********
PRESENT TIME
Jack woke up with a sharp inhale.
For a second he didn't know where he was. The darkness of his bedroom slowly replaced the battlefield, the walls and ceiling and silence settling into place where dust and gunfire had been a moment ago. Pittsburgh. His chest rose and fell heavily, sweat clinging to his skin, his heart hammering against his ribs while the phantom ringing from the explosion still echoed somewhere behind his ears.
He dragged a hand across his face. "Jesus Christ."
His head hurt. The familiar ache behind his eyes that only ever showed up after nightmares. Nightmares he hadn't had in years. He thought he'd buried that day, buried Gabriel, buried the explosion, buried your scream along with everything else.
Apparently not.
A sudden stab of pain shot through his prosthetic side and he tensed immediately. "Ugh." The ache spread upward, deep and persistent. His residual limb always acted up when the weather changed, or when stress got bad, or when old memories decided to crawl out of the grave uninvited. Today, apparently, checked every box at once.
"Fuck."
He sat on the edge of the bed for a minute, waiting it out. The pain didn't leave. He groaned and dropped backward onto the mattress, staring at the ceiling like it owed him an explanation.
He grabbed his phone from the nightstand.
Jack: Gonna take sick leave.
The reply came faster than expected.
Robby: You?
Jack snorted.
Jack: My leg hurts.
The three dots appeared immediately.
Robby: Say no more, brother.
Honestly, that was more than enough explanation. Jack tossed the phone onto his chest and closed his eyes again. Sleep wasn't happening. Neither was work.
At the Pitt, Robby took off his reading glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Abbot can't come in today."
Dana looked up from her chart. "That sudden?"
"His leg's acting up."
Her expression softened immediately. "Oh." A pause. "He should come here instead."
Robby raised an eyebrow.
Dana shrugged. "We literally have all the medicine."
Robby laughed. "I'll tell him."
"You should." She pointed toward the floor. "We're not letting him win Employee of the Month while sick at home."
"He has never once cared about Employee of the Month."
"Exactly my point."
Princess, who happened to be passing the desk at precisely the wrong moment, heard the entire exchange. Which was unfortunate for everyone involved. Her eyes widened and her phone appeared in her hand before either of them had finished the sentence.
Thirty seconds later, the Pitt group chat lit up.
Princess: 🚨 BREAKING NEWS 🚨
Princess: Dr. Abbot called in sick.
The three dots appeared instantly. Then another set. Then five more in quick succession.
Shen: impossible
Ellis: impossible
Javadi: impossible
Garcia: impossible
Princess: apparently his leg hurts
Shen: old man disease
Ellis: did he finally discover he's fifty
Garcia: he's not fifty
Shen: spiritually he is
Princess: should we send flowers
Ellis: send him a walker
Javadi: send him a retirement brochure
Across the hospital phones buzzed one after another in a chain reaction that spread faster than most actual trauma alerts. And just like that, the entire Pitt knew Jack Abbot had taken a sick day, which was somehow bigger news than anything that had happened in the trauma bay all week.
A few floors above the ER, you were in the middle of surgery.
The operating room was quiet except for the steady beep of monitors and the occasional request for instruments. Your focus was absolute. Scalpel. Suction. Clamp. Every movement precise, every decision deliberate.
Garcia stood across from you, assisting. For several minutes neither of you spoke. Then, casually, as if discussing the weather, "Abbot called in sick."
You didn't look up. Your eyes stayed on the surgical field. "Okay."
Garcia narrowed her eyes behind her mask. "He never calls in sick."
"Sounds like a personal achievement."
The scrub nurse bit back a smile. Garcia wasn't discouraged.
"His leg's acting up," she said.
Your hands kept moving, steady and controlled, exactly the same as before. Not a single hesitation. Nothing in your posture shifted at all.
Garcia glanced toward the anesthesiologist. The anesthesiologist looked at the circulating nurse. The circulating nurse shrugged. Nobody in that room could read you when you were operating, which was one of the many reasons you were good at this.
The surgery continued. Sutures, final checks, closure. A little while later you stepped away from the table.
"Good work, everyone."
The team began their post-op routine. You stripped off your gloves, then your gown. A few minutes later you stood at the scrub sink washing your hands. Garcia moved beside you and did the same. For a moment neither of you spoke. Water ran over your hands. You dried them carefully.
Then, finally, "I'll go out for a while."
Garcia didn't even try to hide her grin. "Yes, boss."
You shot her a look. It only made the grin wider.
She tilted her head. "You know his address?"
You looked at her slowly. A smirk pulled at the corner of your mouth. "I'm not that ignorant."
Garcia burst out laughing. "Oh my God."
You tossed the paper towel into the bin. "Don't start."
"Too late." She pointed at you. "You pretended not to care for an entire surgery."
"I didn't pretend anything."
"You absolutely did."
You started walking toward the door. Garcia called after you, "Tell him the Pitt survived without him."
Without turning around, you lifted a hand. "I'll let him know."
The second the door closed behind you, Garcia turned to the rest of the staff. "Told you."
The anesthesiologist sighed. "We all knew she was going."
The scrub nurse nodded. "Honestly, it would've been weirder if she didn't."
"By the way," the circulating nurse said, peeling off her own gloves, "did the Pitt make a bet on whether she'd go visit him?"
Garcia froze for a second. "Damn it. We're too late to join."
*******
Later, you showed up at his apartment.
Jack opened the door and went completely still. He hadn't been expecting anyone. Especially not you.
"You're supposed to be resting."
"I am."
"You look terrible."
"Thank you."
"You should moisturize."
"Get out."
He let you in anyway, and eventually he sat down on the couch with the particular care of someone managing pain he wasn't admitting to. You noticed him rubbing the stump absentmindedly, his thumb pressing into the same spot over and over.
"Still hurts?" you asked.
He shrugged. "Sometimes."
It was a lie. It hurt a lot, and you both knew it, but you didn't push. You sat down beside him without saying anything else and reached for his leg.
He let you.
You looked down at his leg. Hesitated. Then slowly reached for it.
Jack raised an eyebrow. "What are you doing?"
"Checking."
"Checking?"
"Do you want my help or not?"
That shut him up.
Carefully you rested your hands against his leg. You weren't entirely sure what you were doing, not because you didn't understand the injury, you knew exactly what you were looking for and where the tension would be sitting. It was harder because this was Jack, and somehow that made every step of it feel different than it should.
Your fingers pressed lightly against the tight muscle along the residual limb, working slow circles into the spots where the strain had built up.
"Still hurts?" you asked.
"Sometimes," he admitted. "If I have the nightmares."
You didn't answer immediately.
Your fingers kept moving, carefully working through the tension gathered in the muscles.
"I should've bought you that bike the day we met."
You rolled your eyes. "I would've said no."
"No, you wouldn't have."
"I absolutely would have."
"You accepted one now."
"Because you're annoying."
"And persistent."
"Mostly annoying."
"And handsome."
You shook your head and kept massaging his leg, your fingers steady and methodical. Then, quieter, "I'm sorry I couldn't save it."
Jack looked at you for a long moment. The thought sat in his chest before he said it out loud. "Hey. I never blamed you. It wasn't your fault."
"I know. Still." You didn't look up from his leg. "In my head, every time I see you, there's a million different ways I run it back. Trying to make it work out differently."
He reached down and covered your hand with his, stopping the motion gently. "Hey," he said again, softer this time. "Look at me."
You did.
"You did everything right," he said. "I'm still here. I'm still standing. That's because of you, not in spite of you."
You held his gaze for a moment, and something in your chest loosened slightly, the old guilt shifting just enough to breathe around.
"You're still annoying," you said finally.
"I know." The corner of his mouth curved upward. "Mostly annoying. Handsome, too."
You scoffed.
"Didn't deny it, huh?"
Jack looked entirely too pleased with himself.
Like he'd just won an argument nobody else knew was happening.
****
FLASHBACK
The medic tent was chaos. Blood, dust, shouting. Stretchers coming in one after another faster than anyone could process them.
Then they brought in Jack.
For a second your heart stopped. His uniform was soaked through, dark and wet in a way that told you everything before you'd even looked at the wound. His face had gone pale, that particular gray that meant his body was already starting to shut down peripheral systems to protect the core. The lower half of his leg was barely recognizable.
You moved before you'd finished registering what you were looking at. Airway. Pulse. Blood pressure. You ran the checks the way your hands had been trained to, on autopilot, because the part of your brain that wanted to stand still and stare was not allowed in the room right now.
"You can't panic." Clark's voice cut through the noise beside you. "We need to save him."
"Yes, sir." Your voice came out steadier than you felt.
The next few minutes blurred into a single continuous motion. Assessment, medication, blood transfusion, everything moving faster than you could fully track. You worked the line, you called for supplies, you watched the monitor with one part of your brain while the other part screamed at you to look at his face, to confirm he was still in there.
Then came the leg.
You stared at the wound and then at the imaging once it came back, and you felt something in your chest go very still. The damage to the blood supply. The crush injury extending higher than you'd hoped. Tissue that had already started dying from lack of perfusion, the kind that didn't come back no matter how skilled the hands trying to save it were.
"No," you said.
Clark looked at you. "The leg lost the golden hour."
"There has to be another way." You said it too fast, the words tumbling out ahead of the part of you that already knew the answer.
"There isn't."
"There is." You pointed at the scan, at the section of tissue that was still pink, still arguably viable if you moved fast enough, if you were good enough, if the universe gave you one single break today. "We can try."
Clark's expression didn't change. "Kid."
"We can try." Your voice cracked slightly on the second word and you hated that it did.
"We're out of time." His voice hardened, not unkind, just final. "You know what this looks like as well as I do."
You looked down at Jack. Unconscious, pale, alive, the rise and fall of his chest the only thing in the room that mattered right now. Then back at the scan. Then back at him again, and your chest tightened so hard it was difficult to draw a full breath.
"There has to be something," you said, quieter now, the fight starting to drain out of the sentence even as you said it.
Clark was silent for a moment. Then, "Amputate."
You shook your head immediately. "No."
"Amputate."
"No." You said it again like saying it louder would change the anatomy in front of you. Like refusing hard enough could rebuild a blood supply that no longer existed.
For the first time Clark's voice hardened completely. "With or without you, this surgery happens. The only question is whether you're the one doing it."
The words landed harder than anything else in the room. Because suddenly it wasn't your decision to make at all. It never had been, not really, not once the tissue had died the way it had died. You had been arguing with biology and biology did not negotiate.
You looked at Jack again. Unconscious. Bleeding. Alive. You hated this. You hated the choice in front of you, hated that there even was a choice, hated that every version of this ended with you taking something from him that he hadn't agreed to lose. You hated, more than anything, that saving him meant losing part of him, and that you were the one who was going to have to be the hands that did it.
You closed your eyes. Took a breath. Then another, slower this time, the kind you used to talk yourself back into the work when your body wanted to fall apart and didn't have the time for it.
When you opened your eyes again the surgeon had come back online behind them, pushing the rest of you down where it couldn't interfere.
"Get him to surgery ," you said. What mattered right now is to keep his heart beating through the next hour.
If Jack Abbot was going to survive, you were going to be the one standing there when he did. Even if it meant being the one who had to take the leg to do it.
******
PRESENT TIME
Jack leaned back against the couch and let out a slow breath.
"The next thing I remember." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I woke up in the States."
You nodded. "You needed further treatment. That's why Clark sent you back."
Jack snorted. "Could've at least warned me." His gaze drifted toward the window, somewhere past it. "I wake up, look around, and suddenly I'm surrounded by strangers." A pause. "Didn't even know where the hell I was."
Then his eyes came back to you. Softer this time.
"At least—" He stopped.
You already knew where the sentence was going. At least there had been you. At least one familiar face. At least someone.
Your expression shifted before he could finish it. The teasing dropped away.
"I didn't know you were transferred," you said.
Jack frowned. "What?"
You looked down at your hands. The memory still sat uncomfortably even after all these years, a part of the story you hadn't told him because it had never felt necessary until right now.
"I found out afterward."
"What do you mean afterward?" His voice had gone careful.
You hesitated, then sighed. "I fainted."
Jack blinked. "You what?"
*******
FLASHBACK
After Jack's surgery, something inside you broke.
You had saved his life. Everyone kept telling you that. But every time you looked at the empty space where his leg used to be, it didn't feel like a victory. It felt like a debt you'd paid with someone else's currency.
So you worked. One shift became two. Two became three. Patients came and went and you barely remembered their names, just the blood, the sutures, the next emergency, the next life. Because if you stopped moving, you'd think what you could’ve done to save Jack.
People started noticing. A medic quietly handed you water you forgot to drink. Someone told you to sit down and you didn't.
Then Clark found you.
You were halfway through another chart when his shadow fell over your shoulder.
"Get out."
You didn't look up. "I can still work."
"Get out."
"I'm fine."
"Get out before I ban you from this tent."
That made you look at him, because you knew he meant it. You stood, your body heavier than it should have been, and the moment you stepped outside the heat hit you like a wall. Two steps. Three. Then the world tilted sideways and the last thing you heard was someone shouting for a doctor.
When you woke up everything hurt. Your head, your neck, your pride. A canvas ceiling. An IV in your arm. The cot creaked when you shifted.
"Good. You're awake."
Clark sat nearby, arms crossed.
"How long was I out?"
"Two days."
"What?"
"Congratulations. You finally beat everyone else's record."
You stared at him. "Two days?"
"You collapsed. Your body decided to remind you that you're human, not a machine that runs on coffee and stubbornness."
You groaned, which made your headache worse. "How is he?"
Clark's expression shifted, just slightly. Enough that you sat up straighter.
"How is Jack?"
He rubbed his thumb against his palm, thinking before he answered. "You can't see him. I transferred him back to the States. He needs treatment we don't have here."
The words landed harder than you expected. "I didn't even get to say goodbye."
“It’s better this way.” Clark was quiet for a moment. Then, "Because I've seen soldiers like him before. He's drowning right now. No mission, no team, no leg. He doesn't know what his life looks like anymore."
"I could help him."
Clark studied you for a long moment, and something about it made you feel eighteen again, sitting in front of a commanding officer who saw straight through you.
"That," he said quietly, "is exactly what scares me."
"What does that mean?"
He leaned back. "Kid. You have a habit of trying to save everyone. You spend every day fighting death in that tent." His voice was gentle. "You don't need to turn a man into another project."
That hurt more than it should have. "I care about him."
"I know you do."
A beat passed. Then you muttered, "Did you separate us, because he's older than me?"
Clark sighed dramatically. "No." A pause. "Maybe a little."
You laughed despite yourself. "My parents have an age gap."
"Your parents met during peacetime." That shut you up, because he wasn't wrong. War changed people. Sometimes permanently. He looked out toward the camp. "And Abbot. War already took too much from him."
You thought about the nightmares, the exhaustion, the silence you'd already seen settle into him. "I could still help."
"And what happens if he leans too hard on you?" Clark asked. "What happens if you lose yourself trying to hold him together?"
You didn't have an answer.
Clark sighed, and for the first time he looked less like your commanding officer and more like family. "I already see you as my own kid," he said. "You're talented. Far too selfless for your own good. You fight the angel of death every day." A faint smile. "And somehow you keep making it wait."
"I don't know about that."
"I do. We all do." He leaned forward. "When this contract ends, what are you going to do?"
You shrugged. "Vacation. Therapy."
"Both good answers." He pointed at you. "I want you back in school. Another specialty."
"Me?"
"I'll write the kind of recommendation letter universities fight over."
"Why?"
He looked genuinely confused by the question. "Because someone with your talent shouldn't stop here. And because you saved my soldiers."
"It wasn't just me." You smiled faintly. "Abbot taught me a lot."
"He did." A grin. "He's the anchor of this unit. I'm still the leader though."
That earned a real laugh, the first one in days.
Months later, your contract ended. Your bags sat beside you on the tarmac, the transport plane waiting in the distance. The future felt wide open and uncertain in a way that made your chest tight.
Clark walked up beside you while you stared at the runway.
"Go out there," he said. "Travel. See the world." His eyes narrowed slightly. "Meet someone."
Your chest tightened immediately, because you already knew exactly who he meant.
He studied you for a moment. "If after all of that, you still think about him." A pause. "Then go see him."
The words hurt, but not because he was dismissing what you felt. The opposite. He was treating it like it mattered, like it might survive time, like it might survive everything you'd both been through.
Then he snapped his fingers. "Oh."
A soldier appeared behind him carrying a very familiar puppy. Your eyes went wide. "Riot?"
The puppy squirmed immediately, trying to reach you.
"Can I?"
Clark looked offended. "Of course."
The moment Riot landed in your arms he started licking your face, and you laughed for the first time in days. Clark watched with quiet satisfaction.
"Kid's already attached to you anyway," he said.
Riot barked happily, like he completely agreed.
***********
PRESENT TIME
Jack stared at you for a second. Then groaned. "I'm gonna kill Clark."
You laughed. "He'll beat you first."
He looked genuinely offended. "You underestimate me?"
"He's eighty."
"Exactly."
You raised an eyebrow. "That's not helping your argument."
"It helps mine."
"You realize he could still throw you across a room?"
Jack thought about it for a second. Then sighed. "Yeah. Probably."
That earned another laugh from you, and the sound settled something warm in his chest. For a moment neither of you spoke. Then he leaned back against the couch and the amusement faded from his face.
"I blame him sometimes," he said.
You glanced over. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "But he had more experience than both of us." A pause. "And he was right."
You stayed quiet, letting him take his time with it.
Jack stared at the ceiling. "I pushed people away." His voice was calm. Too calm, the kind that only came from years of sitting with the same thought until it stopped hurting and started just being true. "I couldn't accept it." His hand rested unconsciously on his thigh, or where his thigh used to end. "I couldn't accept that I lost part of myself."
Your chest tightened. You remembered. The angry version of him. The distant one. The one everyone warned you about later, the one who shut doors before anyone could walk through them, who refused help, who disappeared into rehabilitation and therapy and silence and didn't come back out for a long time.
Jack let out a quiet huff of a laugh. "I was an asshole."
You smiled slightly. "A little."
"A little?"
"A lot."
"That's fair." The corner of his mouth twitched. Then his gaze drifted toward the coffee table, toward a frame sitting beside it.
You followed his eyes and froze.
The photograph. Old, slightly faded, taken with your Polaroid camera years ago. Gabriel in the middle, grinning like he owned the frame. Clark pretending to look annoyed. Riot small enough to fit under one arm. Jack looking irritated because he'd complained about pictures five seconds before it was taken. And you, laughing behind the camera, caught mid-motion in the background reflection of the tent's metal trunk.
"You still have that?" you asked.
Jack glanced at it and nodded. "Of course." His voice softened. "It was sent to me during therapy."
That made you look at him directly. He was already watching you, carefully, too carefully.
"Was it you?" he asked.
"What?"
"The nurse." His gaze didn't move from yours. "The one who gave it to her."
Your stomach dropped. "Oh."
He tilted his head. "I noticed things changed after that."
You looked away, suddenly very interested in absolutely nothing on the wall.
He kept going anyway. "My pain medication changed." Silence. "The grape juice disappeared." More silence. "They started giving me apple juice."
You pressed your lips together.
Jack almost smiled. "I hate grape juice."
"I know." The words escaped before you could stop them.
The room went quiet. His smile widened immediately. "Exactly."
You closed your eyes. Damn it. He had you.
"There were only a few people who knew that," he said, his voice gentle now, not teasing, not pushing, just warm. "You were one of them."
You bit the inside of your cheek and twisted your fingers together in your lap, because the apartment suddenly felt smaller, quieter, more intimate than it had five minutes ago.
Jack kept looking at you, patient, like he already knew the answer and was simply waiting for you to be ready to give it to him. Which, honestly, he probably did.
You finally sighed. "I left instructions."
His expression softened immediately. "You did."
********
FLASHBACK
After you got back to the States, you secretly visited. Not once. Not twice. More times than you were willing to admit, even to yourself.
The rehabilitation center was almost an hour away from your apartment. You learned the route by memory. The receptionist eventually stopped asking questions. The nurses started recognizing you. But you never signed in as a visitor. Never walked into his room. Never knocked on the door.
You stayed where he couldn't see you. The hallway. The observation window. The corner near the physical therapy room. Close enough to know he was alive. Far enough to leave when it hurt too much.
And it always hurt.
The first time you saw him standing on the prosthetic, he fell. Hard. The therapist tried to help him up and Jack shoved the hand away immediately. You almost walked into the room. Almost. Instead you gripped the edge of the observation window until your knuckles went white.
The second time, he threw the prosthetic across the room. The metallic crash echoed down the hallway and several patients looked over. Jack didn't care. He sat there breathing hard, angry, humiliated, broken in a way you hadn't seen on him before. You left before he could see the tears in your eyes.
Another time you heard him yelling at a therapist through the door.
"Just leave me alone."
The therapist stayed calm. Jack got louder.
"I said leave me alone."
You froze outside the door, listening. Not because you wanted to. Because you couldn't make yourself walk away.
The therapist said something too quiet to hear. Jack laughed, a bitter, ugly sound that didn't sound like him at all.
"My friend's dead." Silence. "My leg's gone." Another silence. "So tell me exactly what I'm supposed to be positive about."
Your chest tightened, because suddenly it wasn't about the leg. Maybe it never had been. He wasn't fighting rehabilitation. He was fighting everything. Gabriel. The explosion. The future. The guilt.
The realization followed you home that night, and every night after.
One afternoon you were standing in your usual spot outside the therapy room when a familiar voice appeared beside you.
"How long have you been standing here?"
You didn't need to look. Clark. Of course. That man noticed everything.
You kept your eyes on the glass. Said nothing.
Clark followed your gaze. Inside, Jack was practicing walking again. One step. Another. Another. The therapist beside him, ready to catch him if he fell.
"You come every week."
Still no answer.
Clark sighed. Not annoyed. Just tired, the kind that came from watching too many people hurt for too long.
"You're waiting for him to become himself again," he said quietly.
Your throat tightened, because he was right. That was exactly what you were doing. Waiting for the old Jack. The one before the explosion, before the funeral, before the nightmares. The Jack who laughed easier. The Jack who believed he could save everyone. The Jack who had two legs.
Silence stretched between you.
Then Clark said the thing you would remember for years.
"He won't."
Your breath caught. You finally looked at him. His expression wasn't cruel or cold. It was sad, because he understood exactly what he was taking from you by saying it.
"The old Jack is gone." He let that sit for a second. Then looked back toward the therapy room. "So is the old you."
That hurt even more, because he wasn't wrong. War had taken pieces from all of you. Gabriel was gone. Jack came back different. And somewhere along the way, without quite noticing it happening, you had changed too.
Clark folded his arms. "Staying here won't save him. He has to want to get better."
Inside the room Jack took another step. Then another. His jaw was clenched, his face pale with the effort of it, still fighting, still refusing to quit even when every part of him wanted to.
Clark watched him for a moment. Then looked back at you.
"And right now," he said, his voice softening, "that's a fight he has to win himself."
For the first time since the war ended, you didn't argue. Because deep down you already knew. You just weren't ready to let go yet.
"Leave," Clark said finally. "While he's fixing himself and fighting his own demons, you go fix yourself. Improve your skills. Become better than the version of you that's standing in this hallway right now."
You looked at him. "And just leave him?"
"Not forever." He held your gaze steadily. "One day, perhaps, the two of you could work together again. But not like this. Not you hiding in hallways and him throwing prosthetics across rooms. That's not a reunion. That's two people drowning next to each other and calling it support."
Something in that landed. You felt it settle, slow and certain, the way truth did when it finally arrived after you'd spent weeks circling it.
"I will," you said.
You stood, and before you could think too hard about it you leaned over and pressed a quick kiss to Clark's cheek. "I'll see you again, sir."
He crossed his arms, but something in his expression had gone soft around the edges. "Make me proud, kid."
************
PRESENT TIME
"You were there," Jack said, staring at you. "You were there, and I pushed everyone away so hard I didn't even realize it."
You looked down. "There wasn't much to realize."
He laughed quietly. "I thought I was alone."
"You were never alone."
His eyes lifted to yours. "Then why didn't I see you?"
You swallowed. "Because I was dealing with my own grief too."
The answer seemed to hit him harder than he expected. "Huh." A small smile appeared. "You were close." His voice softened. "I didn't know."
Then he rested his head against your shoulder. For once neither of you joked. Neither of you moved away. The silence felt comfortable, the kind that didn't need filling.
"You know," Jack said quietly, "Clark was right."
You raised an eyebrow. "That's a dangerous sentence."
"He'd love hearing that."
"He absolutely would."
Jack chuckled. Then his gaze lifted toward you at the same moment you looked down, and the conversation stopped without either of you deciding it should. Your faces were closer than either of you had realized, close enough to notice the tiredness still sitting in his eyes, close enough to notice where his gaze kept drifting.
The moment settled between you. Neither of you looked away. Neither of you moved.
Just a little closer. Just enough.
Then your phone rang.
Both of you blinked. Reality crashed back in at full volume. You looked at the screen. Emergency.
Jack sighed dramatically and dropped his head backward against the couch. "I hate this hospital."
You laughed, already standing. "I need to go."
For one brief second he wanted to ask you not to. Just stay. Five more minutes. Ten. An hour. Anything. But he knew better, because this was you, and you would never ignore a patient for anything, least of all him.
So instead he nodded. "Go."
You stood and reached for your bag. Then Jack suddenly held out a key.
You frowned. "What's that?"
"My house key."
You stared at him. "Your house key?"
He shrugged, trying very hard to look casual about it. "My leg still hurts."
"Uh-huh."
"I need someone to check on me."
"Uh-huh."
"In case I fall asleep and can't open the door."
You narrowed your eyes. "That is the worst excuse I have ever heard."
"It got you to take the key."
You opened your mouth. Closed it. Then pointed at him. "You are impossible."
"And yet you're taking it."
With a sigh you slipped the key into your pocket. "I'll give it back."
"No rush." The corner of his mouth lifted.
Your pager buzzed again. You headed for the door.
"Try not to die," you said.
Jack scoffed. "Pretty sure that's your job."
You shook your head and left.
The apartment fell quiet. Jack stared at the closed door for a moment, then at the empty spot beside him on the couch where you'd been sitting a minute ago.
A slow smile appeared.
Because for the first time in a very long time, when you left, he knew you were coming back.
Thank you to everyone who has read this chapter. Leave a Comment and Reblog, please. I'd love to hear your thoughts. ❤️
FLASHBACK
It was hot. Not the kind of heat people complained about. The kind that simply existed, heavy and relentless, pressing down on him until breathing felt like its own small effort. The fans overhead rattled, pushing the same hot air back and forth without doing much of anything that he could feel.
No one spoke much. Not today.
Jack sat against the canvas wall, knees drawn up, his body aching with the kind of exhaustion that came from too many hours awake. His eyes burned. He hadn't slept. Every time he closed them he saw Gabriel laughing at something stupid, making fun of somebody across the mess tent, completely alive.
Then not.
Across the tent a soldier stepped out from behind the partition and wiped a hand across his face. Jack looked up.
"Is it done?"
The soldier glanced back the way he'd come. "She needs a minute."
Of course she did.
Jack already knew without being told that you'd been in there nearly an hour. Long after everything that needed doing had been done. Long after Gabriel had been cleaned and prepared, long after the paperwork, long after everyone else had said what they needed to say and stepped back out into the heat. He knew because he'd been watching the curtain the whole time, waiting for it to move, and it hadn't.
He stood and crossed the tent slowly. When he stepped through he found you beside the transfer case, gloves off, hands clean but trembling, your eyes red in a way that had nothing to do with dust. He'd seen you exhausted before. This was different. This was the kind sleep couldn't touch.
Clark stands quietly beside you. "Kid."
"His collar wasn't straight." Your voice cracked on the last word. "I fixed it."
Jack didn't say anything. He understood exactly what you meant and exactly what you didn't. The collar had never been the problem. You weren't ready to let him go, and there was nothing in his training, nothing in any of his years out here, that told him what to do with that.
He stepped closer anyway. It hurt him to watch you standing there, frozen, unable to move toward the door. He kept his voice low, the only thing he knew to offer. "His family's waiting for him."
Your body flinched. "Right. Yes." You took a breath and finally stepped back. "I'm sorry."
Jack gave Clark a small nod. The signal that it was clear.
A few minutes later the transfer case was brought out into the heat, and the tent went completely silent around it. Six soldiers stepped forward to carry it. Jack was one of them. Clark too. He focused on his hands, on the weight, on keeping his steps even, because if he thought about anything else right now he wasn't going to make it across the compound.
Outside the sunlight was blinding after the dim canvas interior. The helicopter pad sat in the distance, the transport aircraft waiting beyond it. The camp had gathered along the path without anyone telling them to. Nobody spoke. Jack didn't expect them to.
When the case reached the vehicle, the soldiers stopped and stepped back into formation. Jack moved to one side. Clark stood beside him. Across from them you stood with your spine straight and your chin level, holding a stillness that Jack recognized immediately, because it was costing you everything you had left and he knew exactly what that looked like from the inside.
For a moment nobody moved.
Then Clark raised his hand in salute.
Jack's came up with it, automatic, trained, and it was returned down the line by every soldier present, the only sound the wind and somewhere distant the low building hum of the aircraft's engines. His throat tightened as he held the position. Across from him you were still standing at attention, perfect posture, perfect form, and he understood that you were holding it together through nothing but sheer will, because that was the only thing keeping you upright at all.
The vehicle began to move.
Only then did your hand lower. Only then did Gabriel actually start to leave, the case disappearing slowly up the ramp while the camp watched a piece of itself go with it.
That was when you broke.
Jack saw your shoulders drop first. Then your knees seemed to lose whatever certainty had been holding them, and the sound that came out of you was quiet and raw, the sound of someone who had held the wall up for exactly as long as duty required and not one second longer.
He was already moving before he'd decided to. He reached you in two steps and pulled you in, wrapping both arms around you, one hand coming up to rest against the back of your head without him thinking about it at all.
You didn't pull away. You pressed your face into his shoulder and let it come.
Jack didn't say anything. There was nothing true enough to say, and he'd learned a long time ago not to insult grief with empty words. He just held on, steady, while the engines spun up behind you both and somewhere over your shoulder Clark stood with his hand still raised, watching the two people he had left from that tent try to hold each other together in the middle of everything that had just been taken from them.
******
After Gabriel's transfer ceremony, the aircraft disappeared into the horizon. Yet somehow his presence stayed everywhere. In the empty chair near the mess tent. In the half-finished deck of cards still sitting on a crate. In the silence that followed every conversation now, the particular gap where his voice used to fill the space. In the jokes nobody told anymore.
War kept moving. It always did. Orders still came down, patrols still happened, the camp still woke up the next morning whether anyone was ready for it or not.
Jack hated that. Part of him wanted the world to stop, just for a day, just long enough for everyone to fully acknowledge that Gabriel was gone. Instead soldiers reported for duty, vehicles rolled out, radios crackled with the same routine traffic, and life continued like one man hadn't left a hole in the middle of all of them.
So Jack did what everyone else did. He kept moving. Checking equipment, checking ammunition, checking routes that didn't need checking. Volunteering for patrols, for sweeps, for anything that kept his hands and his attention occupied. Because the second he stopped moving, he started thinking, and every thought led back to Gabriel. Every single one.
Across camp you weren't much different. You worked every shift available, took every patient, stayed longer than necessary, found reasons to be useful long after the necessary work was done. The two of you were doing the exact same thing. Just in different uniforms.
A few days later Jack was checking his gear when your voice cut through the quiet.
"You volunteered."
Not a question.
Jack didn't look up. "Yeah."
"You don't have to go."
"I'm going."
"You just got back."
He kept adjusting a strap that didn't need adjusting, checking a weapon he had already checked twice.
"Jack."
Nothing.
"Look at me."
Slowly he lifted his head, and the second he did he knew you could see straight through him. You always could. Not physically exhausted, not really. Something colder than that. Like part of him had shut down after Gabriel died and simply never bothered switching back on.
"Don't go," you said.
His jaw tightened. "It's a sweep."
"You volunteered." You stepped closer. "And you haven't rested properly in days."
He almost laughed. The irony would have been funny if it weren't so depressing. "You too."
A tired breath escaped you. "True." You folded your arms. "But if I pass out, at least there's a hospital bed waiting for me."
A small smile pulled at the corner of his mouth, the first one in days. Then it disappeared, because the truth came out before he could stop it.
"To make sure nobody else ends up like Gabriel."
Silence settled between you. There it was. The thing he hadn't said out loud yet. The thing everybody already knew without needing it confirmed.
You stared at him. Then slowly closed the distance. "But what about soldiers like Jack Abbot?"
The question hit harder than he expected. For a second he couldn't answer, because the truth was ugly. The truth was that he hadn't thought about himself at all. Not since the explosion. Not since watching Gabriel die. Not since watching you cry.
A muscle jumped in his jaw. His eyes dropped away. "The day I signed up," he said, voice rough, "the day I got on that plane." A pause. "I stopped putting myself first."
You shook your head immediately. "No."
"Yeah."
"No." The anger in your voice surprised him. "You think Gabriel would've wanted this?"
Jack barked out a laugh with no humor in it at all. "Gabriel would've volunteered before me."
That hurt because it was true. Gabriel would have been first through the door, first on the helicopter, first running toward danger without a second thought. Which was exactly why he wasn't here anymore. The thought settled heavily between you.
"Jack."
He looked at you. Really looked. And suddenly you didn't seem angry anymore. Just tired. Heartbroken. Scared.
Your voice dropped, quiet and small and entirely honest. "I don't want you to go."
Something cracked inside his chest. The silence that followed felt endless.
Then you whispered, "Please stay."
Your eyes glistened. And for the first time since Gabriel died, Jack wanted to. God, he wanted to. If it had been anyone else asking he would have walked away without hesitation. But it wasn't anyone else. It was you.
For one terrible second he imagined dropping the bag. Telling command no. Staying. Choosing himself. Choosing you.
Instead he stepped forward, wrapped his arms around you, and pulled you close. The hug was brief and tight, the kind soldiers gave before deployment, the kind neither of you actually wanted but both needed anyway. His voice came low against your hair.
"I'll come back."
You closed your eyes. "This is weird."
He huffed softly. "What is?"
"The first time we haven't argued."
That finally earned a real chuckle, small and tired. "That means hell froze over."
You didn't laugh. Somehow that felt worse.
When you pulled back your eyes searched his face. "Promise me you'll come back in one piece."
Jack froze. Because he should have promised. He should have lied. He should have given you something, anything, to hold onto. Instead, "I won't promise that."
The hurt that flashed across your face followed him for weeks afterward.
He squeezed your shoulder once. Then picked up his gear and walked away. He didn't look back. Because he knew if he did, he wasn't leaving.
******
The location looked abandoned. A cluster of damaged buildings sat beneath the afternoon sun, broken walls, collapsed roofs, too quiet. Jack hated quiet. Quiet usually meant somebody was waiting.
The team moved carefully through the compound, weapons raised, eyes scanning every doorway, every window, every shadow. Jack's instincts were screaming. Something was wrong.
Then gunfire erupted. The first shots shattered the silence and soldiers dove for cover, more shots following in rapid succession until the entire compound dissolved into chaos.
"Contact left!"
"Move!"
Jack returned fire, called positions, directed movement as the team pushed forward. Then someone screamed.
He turned. One of the younger soldiers was down, hit, bleeding out fast. Without thinking he moved, exactly the way Gabriel would have, exactly the way Gabriel always had. He sprinted toward the soldier, dropped beside him, grabbed his vest, and started dragging him toward cover while bullets cracked overhead and concrete exploded somewhere close. Somebody was yelling. Jack barely heard them, because all he could think was not again, not another one, not today.
Then somebody shouted a warning.
Too late.
The world turned white.
The explosion hit with enough force to lift him off the ground entirely. Pain erupted everywhere at once. His ears rang, his vision blurred, the sky spun above him in a way that made no sense. For a second there was no sound at all. No gunfire, no shouting. Nothing. Just darkness.
And then a voice. Familiar. Terrified.
"Jack!"
The darkness shifted.
"Jack! Don't you dare leave me!"
Again. Closer. Louder.
"Jack!"
*********
PRESENT TIME
Jack woke up with a sharp inhale.
For a second he didn't know where he was. The darkness of his bedroom slowly replaced the battlefield, the walls and ceiling and silence settling into place where dust and gunfire had been a moment ago. Pittsburgh. His chest rose and fell heavily, sweat clinging to his skin, his heart hammering against his ribs while the phantom ringing from the explosion still echoed somewhere behind his ears.
He dragged a hand across his face. "Jesus Christ."
His head hurt. The familiar ache behind his eyes that only ever showed up after nightmares. Nightmares he hadn't had in years. He thought he'd buried that day, buried Gabriel, buried the explosion, buried your scream along with everything else.
Apparently not.
A sudden stab of pain shot through his prosthetic side and he tensed immediately. "Ugh." The ache spread upward, deep and persistent. His residual limb always acted up when the weather changed, or when stress got bad, or when old memories decided to crawl out of the grave uninvited. Today, apparently, checked every box at once.
"Fuck."
He sat on the edge of the bed for a minute, waiting it out. The pain didn't leave. He groaned and dropped backward onto the mattress, staring at the ceiling like it owed him an explanation.
He grabbed his phone from the nightstand.
Jack: Gonna take sick leave.
The reply came faster than expected.
Robby: You?
Jack snorted.
Jack: My leg hurts.
The three dots appeared immediately.
Robby: Say no more, brother.
Honestly, that was more than enough explanation. Jack tossed the phone onto his chest and closed his eyes again. Sleep wasn't happening. Neither was work.
At the Pitt, Robby took off his reading glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Abbot can't come in today."
Dana looked up from her chart. "That sudden?"
"His leg's acting up."
Her expression softened immediately. "Oh." A pause. "He should come here instead."
Robby raised an eyebrow.
Dana shrugged. "We literally have all the medicine."
Robby laughed. "I'll tell him."
"You should." She pointed toward the floor. "We're not letting him win Employee of the Month while sick at home."
"He has never once cared about Employee of the Month."
"Exactly my point."
Princess, who happened to be passing the desk at precisely the wrong moment, heard the entire exchange. Which was unfortunate for everyone involved. Her eyes widened and her phone appeared in her hand before either of them had finished the sentence.
Thirty seconds later, the Pitt group chat lit up.
Princess: 🚨 BREAKING NEWS 🚨
Princess: Dr. Abbot called in sick.
The three dots appeared instantly. Then another set. Then five more in quick succession.
Shen: impossible
Ellis: impossible
Javadi: impossible
Garcia: impossible
Princess: apparently his leg hurts
Shen: old man disease
Ellis: did he finally discover he's fifty
Garcia: he's not fifty
Shen: spiritually he is
Princess: should we send flowers
Ellis: send him a walker
Javadi: send him a retirement brochure
Across the hospital phones buzzed one after another in a chain reaction that spread faster than most actual trauma alerts. And just like that, the entire Pitt knew Jack Abbot had taken a sick day, which was somehow bigger news than anything that had happened in the trauma bay all week.
A few floors above the ER, you were in the middle of surgery.
The operating room was quiet except for the steady beep of monitors and the occasional request for instruments. Your focus was absolute. Scalpel. Suction. Clamp. Every movement precise, every decision deliberate.
Garcia stood across from you, assisting. For several minutes neither of you spoke. Then, casually, as if discussing the weather, "Abbot called in sick."
You didn't look up. Your eyes stayed on the surgical field. "Okay."
Garcia narrowed her eyes behind her mask. "He never calls in sick."
"Sounds like a personal achievement."
The scrub nurse bit back a smile. Garcia wasn't discouraged.
"His leg's acting up," she said.
Your hands kept moving, steady and controlled, exactly the same as before. Not a single hesitation. Nothing in your posture shifted at all.
Garcia glanced toward the anesthesiologist. The anesthesiologist looked at the circulating nurse. The circulating nurse shrugged. Nobody in that room could read you when you were operating, which was one of the many reasons you were good at this.
The surgery continued. Sutures, final checks, closure. A little while later you stepped away from the table.
"Good work, everyone."
The team began their post-op routine. You stripped off your gloves, then your gown. A few minutes later you stood at the scrub sink washing your hands. Garcia moved beside you and did the same. For a moment neither of you spoke. Water ran over your hands. You dried them carefully.
Then, finally, "I'll go out for a while."
Garcia didn't even try to hide her grin. "Yes, boss."
You shot her a look. It only made the grin wider.
She tilted her head. "You know his address?"
You looked at her slowly. A smirk pulled at the corner of your mouth. "I'm not that ignorant."
Garcia burst out laughing. "Oh my God."
You tossed the paper towel into the bin. "Don't start."
"Too late." She pointed at you. "You pretended not to care for an entire surgery."
"I didn't pretend anything."
"You absolutely did."
You started walking toward the door. Garcia called after you, "Tell him the Pitt survived without him."
Without turning around, you lifted a hand. "I'll let him know."
The second the door closed behind you, Garcia turned to the rest of the staff. "Told you."
The anesthesiologist sighed. "We all knew she was going."
The scrub nurse nodded. "Honestly, it would've been weirder if she didn't."
"By the way," the circulating nurse said, peeling off her own gloves, "did the Pitt make a bet on whether she'd go visit him?"
Garcia froze for a second. "Damn it. We're too late to join."
*******
Later, you showed up at his apartment.
Jack opened the door and went completely still. He hadn't been expecting anyone. Especially not you.
"You're supposed to be resting."
"I am."
"You look terrible."
"Thank you."
"You should moisturize."
"Get out."
He let you in anyway, and eventually he sat down on the couch with the particular care of someone managing pain he wasn't admitting to. You noticed him rubbing the stump absentmindedly, his thumb pressing into the same spot over and over.
"Still hurts?" you asked.
He shrugged. "Sometimes."
It was a lie. It hurt a lot, and you both knew it, but you didn't push. You sat down beside him without saying anything else and reached for his leg.
He let you.
You looked down at his leg. Hesitated. Then slowly reached for it.
Jack raised an eyebrow. "What are you doing?"
"Checking."
"Checking?"
"Do you want my help or not?"
That shut him up.
Carefully you rested your hands against his leg. You weren't entirely sure what you were doing, not because you didn't understand the injury, you knew exactly what you were looking for and where the tension would be sitting. It was harder because this was Jack, and somehow that made every step of it feel different than it should.
Your fingers pressed lightly against the tight muscle along the residual limb, working slow circles into the spots where the strain had built up.
"Still hurts?" you asked.
"Sometimes," he admitted. "If I have the nightmares."
You didn't answer immediately.
Your fingers kept moving, carefully working through the tension gathered in the muscles.
"I should've bought you that bike the day we met."
You rolled your eyes. "I would've said no."
"No, you wouldn't have."
"I absolutely would have."
"You accepted one now."
"Because you're annoying."
"And persistent."
"Mostly annoying."
"And handsome."
You shook your head and kept massaging his leg, your fingers steady and methodical. Then, quieter, "I'm sorry I couldn't save it."
Jack looked at you for a long moment. The thought sat in his chest before he said it out loud. "Hey. I never blamed you. It wasn't your fault."
"I know. Still." You didn't look up from his leg. "In my head, every time I see you, there's a million different ways I run it back. Trying to make it work out differently."
He reached down and covered your hand with his, stopping the motion gently. "Hey," he said again, softer this time. "Look at me."
You did.
"You did everything right," he said. "I'm still here. I'm still standing. That's because of you, not in spite of you."
You held his gaze for a moment, and something in your chest loosened slightly, the old guilt shifting just enough to breathe around.
"You're still annoying," you said finally.
"I know." The corner of his mouth curved upward. "Mostly annoying. Handsome, too."
You scoffed.
"Didn't deny it, huh?"
Jack looked entirely too pleased with himself.
Like he'd just won an argument nobody else knew was happening.
****
FLASHBACK
The medic tent was chaos. Blood, dust, shouting. Stretchers coming in one after another faster than anyone could process them.
Then they brought in Jack.
For a second your heart stopped. His uniform was soaked through, dark and wet in a way that told you everything before you'd even looked at the wound. His face had gone pale, that particular gray that meant his body was already starting to shut down peripheral systems to protect the core. The lower half of his leg was barely recognizable.
You moved before you'd finished registering what you were looking at. Airway. Pulse. Blood pressure. You ran the checks the way your hands had been trained to, on autopilot, because the part of your brain that wanted to stand still and stare was not allowed in the room right now.
"You can't panic." Clark's voice cut through the noise beside you. "We need to save him."
"Yes, sir." Your voice came out steadier than you felt.
The next few minutes blurred into a single continuous motion. Assessment, medication, blood transfusion, everything moving faster than you could fully track. You worked the line, you called for supplies, you watched the monitor with one part of your brain while the other part screamed at you to look at his face, to confirm he was still in there.
Then came the leg.
You stared at the wound and then at the imaging once it came back, and you felt something in your chest go very still. The damage to the blood supply. The crush injury extending higher than you'd hoped. Tissue that had already started dying from lack of perfusion, the kind that didn't come back no matter how skilled the hands trying to save it were.
"No," you said.
Clark looked at you. "The leg lost the golden hour."
"There has to be another way." You said it too fast, the words tumbling out ahead of the part of you that already knew the answer.
"There isn't."
"There is." You pointed at the scan, at the section of tissue that was still pink, still arguably viable if you moved fast enough, if you were good enough, if the universe gave you one single break today. "We can try."
Clark's expression didn't change. "Kid."
"We can try." Your voice cracked slightly on the second word and you hated that it did.
"We're out of time." His voice hardened, not unkind, just final. "You know what this looks like as well as I do."
You looked down at Jack. Unconscious, pale, alive, the rise and fall of his chest the only thing in the room that mattered right now. Then back at the scan. Then back at him again, and your chest tightened so hard it was difficult to draw a full breath.
"There has to be something," you said, quieter now, the fight starting to drain out of the sentence even as you said it.
Clark was silent for a moment. Then, "Amputate."
You shook your head immediately. "No."
"Amputate."
"No." You said it again like saying it louder would change the anatomy in front of you. Like refusing hard enough could rebuild a blood supply that no longer existed.
For the first time Clark's voice hardened completely. "With or without you, this surgery happens. The only question is whether you're the one doing it."
The words landed harder than anything else in the room. Because suddenly it wasn't your decision to make at all. It never had been, not really, not once the tissue had died the way it had died. You had been arguing with biology and biology did not negotiate.
You looked at Jack again. Unconscious. Bleeding. Alive. You hated this. You hated the choice in front of you, hated that there even was a choice, hated that every version of this ended with you taking something from him that he hadn't agreed to lose. You hated, more than anything, that saving him meant losing part of him, and that you were the one who was going to have to be the hands that did it.
You closed your eyes. Took a breath. Then another, slower this time, the kind you used to talk yourself back into the work when your body wanted to fall apart and didn't have the time for it.
When you opened your eyes again the surgeon had come back online behind them, pushing the rest of you down where it couldn't interfere.
"Get him to surgery ," you said. What mattered right now is to keep his heart beating through the next hour.
If Jack Abbot was going to survive, you were going to be the one standing there when he did. Even if it meant being the one who had to take the leg to do it.
******
PRESENT TIME
Jack leaned back against the couch and let out a slow breath.
"The next thing I remember." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I woke up in the States."
You nodded. "You needed further treatment. That's why Clark sent you back."
Jack snorted. "Could've at least warned me." His gaze drifted toward the window, somewhere past it. "I wake up, look around, and suddenly I'm surrounded by strangers." A pause. "Didn't even know where the hell I was."
Then his eyes came back to you. Softer this time.
"At least—" He stopped.
You already knew where the sentence was going. At least there had been you. At least one familiar face. At least someone.
Your expression shifted before he could finish it. The teasing dropped away.
"I didn't know you were transferred," you said.
Jack frowned. "What?"
You looked down at your hands. The memory still sat uncomfortably even after all these years, a part of the story you hadn't told him because it had never felt necessary until right now.
"I found out afterward."
"What do you mean afterward?" His voice had gone careful.
You hesitated, then sighed. "I fainted."
Jack blinked. "You what?"
*******
FLASHBACK
After Jack's surgery, something inside you broke.
You had saved his life. Everyone kept telling you that. But every time you looked at the empty space where his leg used to be, it didn't feel like a victory. It felt like a debt you'd paid with someone else's currency.
So you worked. One shift became two. Two became three. Patients came and went and you barely remembered their names, just the blood, the sutures, the next emergency, the next life. Because if you stopped moving, you'd think what you could’ve done to save Jack.
People started noticing. A medic quietly handed you water you forgot to drink. Someone told you to sit down and you didn't.
Then Clark found you.
You were halfway through another chart when his shadow fell over your shoulder.
"Get out."
You didn't look up. "I can still work."
"Get out."
"I'm fine."
"Get out before I ban you from this tent."
That made you look at him, because you knew he meant it. You stood, your body heavier than it should have been, and the moment you stepped outside the heat hit you like a wall. Two steps. Three. Then the world tilted sideways and the last thing you heard was someone shouting for a doctor.
When you woke up everything hurt. Your head, your neck, your pride. A canvas ceiling. An IV in your arm. The cot creaked when you shifted.
"Good. You're awake."
Clark sat nearby, arms crossed.
"How long was I out?"
"Two days."
"What?"
"Congratulations. You finally beat everyone else's record."
You stared at him. "Two days?"
"You collapsed. Your body decided to remind you that you're human, not a machine that runs on coffee and stubbornness."
You groaned, which made your headache worse. "How is he?"
Clark's expression shifted, just slightly. Enough that you sat up straighter.
"How is Jack?"
He rubbed his thumb against his palm, thinking before he answered. "You can't see him. I transferred him back to the States. He needs treatment we don't have here."
The words landed harder than you expected. "I didn't even get to say goodbye."
“It’s better this way.” Clark was quiet for a moment. Then, "Because I've seen soldiers like him before. He's drowning right now. No mission, no team, no leg. He doesn't know what his life looks like anymore."
"I could help him."
Clark studied you for a long moment, and something about it made you feel eighteen again, sitting in front of a commanding officer who saw straight through you.
"That," he said quietly, "is exactly what scares me."
"What does that mean?"
He leaned back. "Kid. You have a habit of trying to save everyone. You spend every day fighting death in that tent." His voice was gentle. "You don't need to turn a man into another project."
That hurt more than it should have. "I care about him."
"I know you do."
A beat passed. Then you muttered, "Did you separate us, because he's older than me?"
Clark sighed dramatically. "No." A pause. "Maybe a little."
You laughed despite yourself. "My parents have an age gap."
"Your parents met during peacetime." That shut you up, because he wasn't wrong. War changed people. Sometimes permanently. He looked out toward the camp. "And Abbot. War already took too much from him."
You thought about the nightmares, the exhaustion, the silence you'd already seen settle into him. "I could still help."
"And what happens if he leans too hard on you?" Clark asked. "What happens if you lose yourself trying to hold him together?"
You didn't have an answer.
Clark sighed, and for the first time he looked less like your commanding officer and more like family. "I already see you as my own kid," he said. "You're talented. Far too selfless for your own good. You fight the angel of death every day." A faint smile. "And somehow you keep making it wait."
"I don't know about that."
"I do. We all do." He leaned forward. "When this contract ends, what are you going to do?"
You shrugged. "Vacation. Therapy."
"Both good answers." He pointed at you. "I want you back in school. Another specialty."
"Me?"
"I'll write the kind of recommendation letter universities fight over."
"Why?"
He looked genuinely confused by the question. "Because someone with your talent shouldn't stop here. And because you saved my soldiers."
"It wasn't just me." You smiled faintly. "Abbot taught me a lot."
"He did." A grin. "He's the anchor of this unit. I'm still the leader though."
That earned a real laugh, the first one in days.
Months later, your contract ended. Your bags sat beside you on the tarmac, the transport plane waiting in the distance. The future felt wide open and uncertain in a way that made your chest tight.
Clark walked up beside you while you stared at the runway.
"Go out there," he said. "Travel. See the world." His eyes narrowed slightly. "Meet someone."
Your chest tightened immediately, because you already knew exactly who he meant.
He studied you for a moment. "If after all of that, you still think about him." A pause. "Then go see him."
The words hurt, but not because he was dismissing what you felt. The opposite. He was treating it like it mattered, like it might survive time, like it might survive everything you'd both been through.
Then he snapped his fingers. "Oh."
A soldier appeared behind him carrying a very familiar puppy. Your eyes went wide. "Riot?"
The puppy squirmed immediately, trying to reach you.
"Can I?"
Clark looked offended. "Of course."
The moment Riot landed in your arms he started licking your face, and you laughed for the first time in days. Clark watched with quiet satisfaction.
"Kid's already attached to you anyway," he said.
Riot barked happily, like he completely agreed.
***********
PRESENT TIME
Jack stared at you for a second. Then groaned. "I'm gonna kill Clark."
You laughed. "He'll beat you first."
He looked genuinely offended. "You underestimate me?"
"He's eighty."
"Exactly."
You raised an eyebrow. "That's not helping your argument."
"It helps mine."
"You realize he could still throw you across a room?"
Jack thought about it for a second. Then sighed. "Yeah. Probably."
That earned another laugh from you, and the sound settled something warm in his chest. For a moment neither of you spoke. Then he leaned back against the couch and the amusement faded from his face.
"I blame him sometimes," he said.
You glanced over. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "But he had more experience than both of us." A pause. "And he was right."
You stayed quiet, letting him take his time with it.
Jack stared at the ceiling. "I pushed people away." His voice was calm. Too calm, the kind that only came from years of sitting with the same thought until it stopped hurting and started just being true. "I couldn't accept it." His hand rested unconsciously on his thigh, or where his thigh used to end. "I couldn't accept that I lost part of myself."
Your chest tightened. You remembered. The angry version of him. The distant one. The one everyone warned you about later, the one who shut doors before anyone could walk through them, who refused help, who disappeared into rehabilitation and therapy and silence and didn't come back out for a long time.
Jack let out a quiet huff of a laugh. "I was an asshole."
You smiled slightly. "A little."
"A little?"
"A lot."
"That's fair." The corner of his mouth twitched. Then his gaze drifted toward the coffee table, toward a frame sitting beside it.
You followed his eyes and froze.
The photograph. Old, slightly faded, taken with your Polaroid camera years ago. Gabriel in the middle, grinning like he owned the frame. Clark pretending to look annoyed. Riot small enough to fit under one arm. Jack looking irritated because he'd complained about pictures five seconds before it was taken. And you, laughing behind the camera, caught mid-motion in the background reflection of the tent's metal trunk.
"You still have that?" you asked.
Jack glanced at it and nodded. "Of course." His voice softened. "It was sent to me during therapy."
That made you look at him directly. He was already watching you, carefully, too carefully.
"Was it you?" he asked.
"What?"
"The nurse." His gaze didn't move from yours. "The one who gave it to her."
Your stomach dropped. "Oh."
He tilted his head. "I noticed things changed after that."
You looked away, suddenly very interested in absolutely nothing on the wall.
He kept going anyway. "My pain medication changed." Silence. "The grape juice disappeared." More silence. "They started giving me apple juice."
You pressed your lips together.
Jack almost smiled. "I hate grape juice."
"I know." The words escaped before you could stop them.
The room went quiet. His smile widened immediately. "Exactly."
You closed your eyes. Damn it. He had you.
"There were only a few people who knew that," he said, his voice gentle now, not teasing, not pushing, just warm. "You were one of them."
You bit the inside of your cheek and twisted your fingers together in your lap, because the apartment suddenly felt smaller, quieter, more intimate than it had five minutes ago.
Jack kept looking at you, patient, like he already knew the answer and was simply waiting for you to be ready to give it to him. Which, honestly, he probably did.
You finally sighed. "I left instructions."
His expression softened immediately. "You did."
********
FLASHBACK
After you got back to the States, you secretly visited. Not once. Not twice. More times than you were willing to admit, even to yourself.
The rehabilitation center was almost an hour away from your apartment. You learned the route by memory. The receptionist eventually stopped asking questions. The nurses started recognizing you. But you never signed in as a visitor. Never walked into his room. Never knocked on the door.
You stayed where he couldn't see you. The hallway. The observation window. The corner near the physical therapy room. Close enough to know he was alive. Far enough to leave when it hurt too much.
And it always hurt.
The first time you saw him standing on the prosthetic, he fell. Hard. The therapist tried to help him up and Jack shoved the hand away immediately. You almost walked into the room. Almost. Instead you gripped the edge of the observation window until your knuckles went white.
The second time, he threw the prosthetic across the room. The metallic crash echoed down the hallway and several patients looked over. Jack didn't care. He sat there breathing hard, angry, humiliated, broken in a way you hadn't seen on him before. You left before he could see the tears in your eyes.
Another time you heard him yelling at a therapist through the door.
"Just leave me alone."
The therapist stayed calm. Jack got louder.
"I said leave me alone."
You froze outside the door, listening. Not because you wanted to. Because you couldn't make yourself walk away.
The therapist said something too quiet to hear. Jack laughed, a bitter, ugly sound that didn't sound like him at all.
"My friend's dead." Silence. "My leg's gone." Another silence. "So tell me exactly what I'm supposed to be positive about."
Your chest tightened, because suddenly it wasn't about the leg. Maybe it never had been. He wasn't fighting rehabilitation. He was fighting everything. Gabriel. The explosion. The future. The guilt.
The realization followed you home that night, and every night after.
One afternoon you were standing in your usual spot outside the therapy room when a familiar voice appeared beside you.
"How long have you been standing here?"
You didn't need to look. Clark. Of course. That man noticed everything.
You kept your eyes on the glass. Said nothing.
Clark followed your gaze. Inside, Jack was practicing walking again. One step. Another. Another. The therapist beside him, ready to catch him if he fell.
"You come every week."
Still no answer.
Clark sighed. Not annoyed. Just tired, the kind that came from watching too many people hurt for too long.
"You're waiting for him to become himself again," he said quietly.
Your throat tightened, because he was right. That was exactly what you were doing. Waiting for the old Jack. The one before the explosion, before the funeral, before the nightmares. The Jack who laughed easier. The Jack who believed he could save everyone. The Jack who had two legs.
Silence stretched between you.
Then Clark said the thing you would remember for years.
"He won't."
Your breath caught. You finally looked at him. His expression wasn't cruel or cold. It was sad, because he understood exactly what he was taking from you by saying it.
"The old Jack is gone." He let that sit for a second. Then looked back toward the therapy room. "So is the old you."
That hurt even more, because he wasn't wrong. War had taken pieces from all of you. Gabriel was gone. Jack came back different. And somewhere along the way, without quite noticing it happening, you had changed too.
Clark folded his arms. "Staying here won't save him. He has to want to get better."
Inside the room Jack took another step. Then another. His jaw was clenched, his face pale with the effort of it, still fighting, still refusing to quit even when every part of him wanted to.
Clark watched him for a moment. Then looked back at you.
"And right now," he said, his voice softening, "that's a fight he has to win himself."
For the first time since the war ended, you didn't argue. Because deep down you already knew. You just weren't ready to let go yet.
"Leave," Clark said finally. "While he's fixing himself and fighting his own demons, you go fix yourself. Improve your skills. Become better than the version of you that's standing in this hallway right now."
You looked at him. "And just leave him?"
"Not forever." He held your gaze steadily. "One day, perhaps, the two of you could work together again. But not like this. Not you hiding in hallways and him throwing prosthetics across rooms. That's not a reunion. That's two people drowning next to each other and calling it support."
Something in that landed. You felt it settle, slow and certain, the way truth did when it finally arrived after you'd spent weeks circling it.
"I will," you said.
You stood, and before you could think too hard about it you leaned over and pressed a quick kiss to Clark's cheek. "I'll see you again, sir."
He crossed his arms, but something in his expression had gone soft around the edges. "Make me proud, kid."
************
PRESENT TIME
"You were there," Jack said, staring at you. "You were there, and I pushed everyone away so hard I didn't even realize it."
You looked down. "There wasn't much to realize."
He laughed quietly. "I thought I was alone."
"You were never alone."
His eyes lifted to yours. "Then why didn't I see you?"
You swallowed. "Because I was dealing with my own grief too."
The answer seemed to hit him harder than he expected. "Huh." A small smile appeared. "You were close." His voice softened. "I didn't know."
Then he rested his head against your shoulder. For once neither of you joked. Neither of you moved away. The silence felt comfortable, the kind that didn't need filling.
"You know," Jack said quietly, "Clark was right."
You raised an eyebrow. "That's a dangerous sentence."
"He'd love hearing that."
"He absolutely would."
Jack chuckled. Then his gaze lifted toward you at the same moment you looked down, and the conversation stopped without either of you deciding it should. Your faces were closer than either of you had realized, close enough to notice the tiredness still sitting in his eyes, close enough to notice where his gaze kept drifting.
The moment settled between you. Neither of you looked away. Neither of you moved.
Just a little closer. Just enough.
Then your phone rang.
Both of you blinked. Reality crashed back in at full volume. You looked at the screen. Emergency.
Jack sighed dramatically and dropped his head backward against the couch. "I hate this hospital."
You laughed, already standing. "I need to go."
For one brief second he wanted to ask you not to. Just stay. Five more minutes. Ten. An hour. Anything. But he knew better, because this was you, and you would never ignore a patient for anything, least of all him.
So instead he nodded. "Go."
You stood and reached for your bag. Then Jack suddenly held out a key.
You frowned. "What's that?"
"My house key."
You stared at him. "Your house key?"
He shrugged, trying very hard to look casual about it. "My leg still hurts."
"Uh-huh."
"I need someone to check on me."
"Uh-huh."
"In case I fall asleep and can't open the door."
You narrowed your eyes. "That is the worst excuse I have ever heard."
"It got you to take the key."
You opened your mouth. Closed it. Then pointed at him. "You are impossible."
"And yet you're taking it."
With a sigh you slipped the key into your pocket. "I'll give it back."
"No rush." The corner of his mouth lifted.
Your pager buzzed again. You headed for the door.
"Try not to die," you said.
Jack scoffed. "Pretty sure that's your job."
You shook your head and left.
The apartment fell quiet. Jack stared at the closed door for a moment, then at the empty spot beside him on the couch where you'd been sitting a minute ago.
A slow smile appeared.
Because for the first time in a very long time, when you left, he knew you were coming back.
Thank you to everyone who has read this chapter. Leave a Comment and Reblog, please. I'd love to hear your thoughts. ❤️
FLASHBACK
It was hot. Not the kind of heat people complained about. The kind that simply existed, heavy and relentless, pressing down on him until breathing felt like its own small effort. The fans overhead rattled, pushing the same hot air back and forth without doing much of anything that he could feel.
No one spoke much. Not today.
Jack sat against the canvas wall, knees drawn up, his body aching with the kind of exhaustion that came from too many hours awake. His eyes burned. He hadn't slept. Every time he closed them he saw Gabriel laughing at something stupid, making fun of somebody across the mess tent, completely alive.
Then not.
Across the tent a soldier stepped out from behind the partition and wiped a hand across his face. Jack looked up.
"Is it done?"
The soldier glanced back the way he'd come. "She needs a minute."
Of course she did.
Jack already knew without being told that you'd been in there nearly an hour. Long after everything that needed doing had been done. Long after Gabriel had been cleaned and prepared, long after the paperwork, long after everyone else had said what they needed to say and stepped back out into the heat. He knew because he'd been watching the curtain the whole time, waiting for it to move, and it hadn't.
He stood and crossed the tent slowly. When he stepped through he found you beside the transfer case, gloves off, hands clean but trembling, your eyes red in a way that had nothing to do with dust. He'd seen you exhausted before. This was different. This was the kind sleep couldn't touch.
Clark stands quietly beside you. "Kid."
"His collar wasn't straight." Your voice cracked on the last word. "I fixed it."
Jack didn't say anything. He understood exactly what you meant and exactly what you didn't. The collar had never been the problem. You weren't ready to let him go, and there was nothing in his training, nothing in any of his years out here, that told him what to do with that.
He stepped closer anyway. It hurt him to watch you standing there, frozen, unable to move toward the door. He kept his voice low, the only thing he knew to offer. "His family's waiting for him."
Your body flinched. "Right. Yes." You took a breath and finally stepped back. "I'm sorry."
Jack gave Clark a small nod. The signal that it was clear.
A few minutes later the transfer case was brought out into the heat, and the tent went completely silent around it. Six soldiers stepped forward to carry it. Jack was one of them. Clark too. He focused on his hands, on the weight, on keeping his steps even, because if he thought about anything else right now he wasn't going to make it across the compound.
Outside the sunlight was blinding after the dim canvas interior. The helicopter pad sat in the distance, the transport aircraft waiting beyond it. The camp had gathered along the path without anyone telling them to. Nobody spoke. Jack didn't expect them to.
When the case reached the vehicle, the soldiers stopped and stepped back into formation. Jack moved to one side. Clark stood beside him. Across from them you stood with your spine straight and your chin level, holding a stillness that Jack recognized immediately, because it was costing you everything you had left and he knew exactly what that looked like from the inside.
For a moment nobody moved.
Then Clark raised his hand in salute.
Jack's came up with it, automatic, trained, and it was returned down the line by every soldier present, the only sound the wind and somewhere distant the low building hum of the aircraft's engines. His throat tightened as he held the position. Across from him you were still standing at attention, perfect posture, perfect form, and he understood that you were holding it together through nothing but sheer will, because that was the only thing keeping you upright at all.
The vehicle began to move.
Only then did your hand lower. Only then did Gabriel actually start to leave, the case disappearing slowly up the ramp while the camp watched a piece of itself go with it.
That was when you broke.
Jack saw your shoulders drop first. Then your knees seemed to lose whatever certainty had been holding them, and the sound that came out of you was quiet and raw, the sound of someone who had held the wall up for exactly as long as duty required and not one second longer.
He was already moving before he'd decided to. He reached you in two steps and pulled you in, wrapping both arms around you, one hand coming up to rest against the back of your head without him thinking about it at all.
You didn't pull away. You pressed your face into his shoulder and let it come.
Jack didn't say anything. There was nothing true enough to say, and he'd learned a long time ago not to insult grief with empty words. He just held on, steady, while the engines spun up behind you both and somewhere over your shoulder Clark stood with his hand still raised, watching the two people he had left from that tent try to hold each other together in the middle of everything that had just been taken from them.
******
After Gabriel's transfer ceremony, the aircraft disappeared into the horizon. Yet somehow his presence stayed everywhere. In the empty chair near the mess tent. In the half-finished deck of cards still sitting on a crate. In the silence that followed every conversation now, the particular gap where his voice used to fill the space. In the jokes nobody told anymore.
War kept moving. It always did. Orders still came down, patrols still happened, the camp still woke up the next morning whether anyone was ready for it or not.
Jack hated that. Part of him wanted the world to stop, just for a day, just long enough for everyone to fully acknowledge that Gabriel was gone. Instead soldiers reported for duty, vehicles rolled out, radios crackled with the same routine traffic, and life continued like one man hadn't left a hole in the middle of all of them.
So Jack did what everyone else did. He kept moving. Checking equipment, checking ammunition, checking routes that didn't need checking. Volunteering for patrols, for sweeps, for anything that kept his hands and his attention occupied. Because the second he stopped moving, he started thinking, and every thought led back to Gabriel. Every single one.
Across camp you weren't much different. You worked every shift available, took every patient, stayed longer than necessary, found reasons to be useful long after the necessary work was done. The two of you were doing the exact same thing. Just in different uniforms.
A few days later Jack was checking his gear when your voice cut through the quiet.
"You volunteered."
Not a question.
Jack didn't look up. "Yeah."
"You don't have to go."
"I'm going."
"You just got back."
He kept adjusting a strap that didn't need adjusting, checking a weapon he had already checked twice.
"Jack."
Nothing.
"Look at me."
Slowly he lifted his head, and the second he did he knew you could see straight through him. You always could. Not physically exhausted, not really. Something colder than that. Like part of him had shut down after Gabriel died and simply never bothered switching back on.
"Don't go," you said.
His jaw tightened. "It's a sweep."
"You volunteered." You stepped closer. "And you haven't rested properly in days."
He almost laughed. The irony would have been funny if it weren't so depressing. "You too."
A tired breath escaped you. "True." You folded your arms. "But if I pass out, at least there's a hospital bed waiting for me."
A small smile pulled at the corner of his mouth, the first one in days. Then it disappeared, because the truth came out before he could stop it.
"To make sure nobody else ends up like Gabriel."
Silence settled between you. There it was. The thing he hadn't said out loud yet. The thing everybody already knew without needing it confirmed.
You stared at him. Then slowly closed the distance. "But what about soldiers like Jack Abbot?"
The question hit harder than he expected. For a second he couldn't answer, because the truth was ugly. The truth was that he hadn't thought about himself at all. Not since the explosion. Not since watching Gabriel die. Not since watching you cry.
A muscle jumped in his jaw. His eyes dropped away. "The day I signed up," he said, voice rough, "the day I got on that plane." A pause. "I stopped putting myself first."
You shook your head immediately. "No."
"Yeah."
"No." The anger in your voice surprised him. "You think Gabriel would've wanted this?"
Jack barked out a laugh with no humor in it at all. "Gabriel would've volunteered before me."
That hurt because it was true. Gabriel would have been first through the door, first on the helicopter, first running toward danger without a second thought. Which was exactly why he wasn't here anymore. The thought settled heavily between you.
"Jack."
He looked at you. Really looked. And suddenly you didn't seem angry anymore. Just tired. Heartbroken. Scared.
Your voice dropped, quiet and small and entirely honest. "I don't want you to go."
Something cracked inside his chest. The silence that followed felt endless.
Then you whispered, "Please stay."
Your eyes glistened. And for the first time since Gabriel died, Jack wanted to. God, he wanted to. If it had been anyone else asking he would have walked away without hesitation. But it wasn't anyone else. It was you.
For one terrible second he imagined dropping the bag. Telling command no. Staying. Choosing himself. Choosing you.
Instead he stepped forward, wrapped his arms around you, and pulled you close. The hug was brief and tight, the kind soldiers gave before deployment, the kind neither of you actually wanted but both needed anyway. His voice came low against your hair.
"I'll come back."
You closed your eyes. "This is weird."
He huffed softly. "What is?"
"The first time we haven't argued."
That finally earned a real chuckle, small and tired. "That means hell froze over."
You didn't laugh. Somehow that felt worse.
When you pulled back your eyes searched his face. "Promise me you'll come back in one piece."
Jack froze. Because he should have promised. He should have lied. He should have given you something, anything, to hold onto. Instead, "I won't promise that."
The hurt that flashed across your face followed him for weeks afterward.
He squeezed your shoulder once. Then picked up his gear and walked away. He didn't look back. Because he knew if he did, he wasn't leaving.
******
The location looked abandoned. A cluster of damaged buildings sat beneath the afternoon sun, broken walls, collapsed roofs, too quiet. Jack hated quiet. Quiet usually meant somebody was waiting.
The team moved carefully through the compound, weapons raised, eyes scanning every doorway, every window, every shadow. Jack's instincts were screaming. Something was wrong.
Then gunfire erupted. The first shots shattered the silence and soldiers dove for cover, more shots following in rapid succession until the entire compound dissolved into chaos.
"Contact left!"
"Move!"
Jack returned fire, called positions, directed movement as the team pushed forward. Then someone screamed.
He turned. One of the younger soldiers was down, hit, bleeding out fast. Without thinking he moved, exactly the way Gabriel would have, exactly the way Gabriel always had. He sprinted toward the soldier, dropped beside him, grabbed his vest, and started dragging him toward cover while bullets cracked overhead and concrete exploded somewhere close. Somebody was yelling. Jack barely heard them, because all he could think was not again, not another one, not today.
Then somebody shouted a warning.
Too late.
The world turned white.
The explosion hit with enough force to lift him off the ground entirely. Pain erupted everywhere at once. His ears rang, his vision blurred, the sky spun above him in a way that made no sense. For a second there was no sound at all. No gunfire, no shouting. Nothing. Just darkness.
And then a voice. Familiar. Terrified.
"Jack!"
The darkness shifted.
"Jack! Don't you dare leave me!"
Again. Closer. Louder.
"Jack!"
*********
PRESENT TIME
Jack woke up with a sharp inhale.
For a second he didn't know where he was. The darkness of his bedroom slowly replaced the battlefield, the walls and ceiling and silence settling into place where dust and gunfire had been a moment ago. Pittsburgh. His chest rose and fell heavily, sweat clinging to his skin, his heart hammering against his ribs while the phantom ringing from the explosion still echoed somewhere behind his ears.
He dragged a hand across his face. "Jesus Christ."
His head hurt. The familiar ache behind his eyes that only ever showed up after nightmares. Nightmares he hadn't had in years. He thought he'd buried that day, buried Gabriel, buried the explosion, buried your scream along with everything else.
Apparently not.
A sudden stab of pain shot through his prosthetic side and he tensed immediately. "Ugh." The ache spread upward, deep and persistent. His residual limb always acted up when the weather changed, or when stress got bad, or when old memories decided to crawl out of the grave uninvited. Today, apparently, checked every box at once.
"Fuck."
He sat on the edge of the bed for a minute, waiting it out. The pain didn't leave. He groaned and dropped backward onto the mattress, staring at the ceiling like it owed him an explanation.
He grabbed his phone from the nightstand.
Jack: Gonna take sick leave.
The reply came faster than expected.
Robby: You?
Jack snorted.
Jack: My leg hurts.
The three dots appeared immediately.
Robby: Say no more, brother.
Honestly, that was more than enough explanation. Jack tossed the phone onto his chest and closed his eyes again. Sleep wasn't happening. Neither was work.
At the Pitt, Robby took off his reading glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Abbot can't come in today."
Dana looked up from her chart. "That sudden?"
"His leg's acting up."
Her expression softened immediately. "Oh." A pause. "He should come here instead."
Robby raised an eyebrow.
Dana shrugged. "We literally have all the medicine."
Robby laughed. "I'll tell him."
"You should." She pointed toward the floor. "We're not letting him win Employee of the Month while sick at home."
"He has never once cared about Employee of the Month."
"Exactly my point."
Princess, who happened to be passing the desk at precisely the wrong moment, heard the entire exchange. Which was unfortunate for everyone involved. Her eyes widened and her phone appeared in her hand before either of them had finished the sentence.
Thirty seconds later, the Pitt group chat lit up.
Princess: 🚨 BREAKING NEWS 🚨
Princess: Dr. Abbot called in sick.
The three dots appeared instantly. Then another set. Then five more in quick succession.
Shen: impossible
Ellis: impossible
Javadi: impossible
Garcia: impossible
Princess: apparently his leg hurts
Shen: old man disease
Ellis: did he finally discover he's fifty
Garcia: he's not fifty
Shen: spiritually he is
Princess: should we send flowers
Ellis: send him a walker
Javadi: send him a retirement brochure
Across the hospital phones buzzed one after another in a chain reaction that spread faster than most actual trauma alerts. And just like that, the entire Pitt knew Jack Abbot had taken a sick day, which was somehow bigger news than anything that had happened in the trauma bay all week.
A few floors above the ER, you were in the middle of surgery.
The operating room was quiet except for the steady beep of monitors and the occasional request for instruments. Your focus was absolute. Scalpel. Suction. Clamp. Every movement precise, every decision deliberate.
Garcia stood across from you, assisting. For several minutes neither of you spoke. Then, casually, as if discussing the weather, "Abbot called in sick."
You didn't look up. Your eyes stayed on the surgical field. "Okay."
Garcia narrowed her eyes behind her mask. "He never calls in sick."
"Sounds like a personal achievement."
The scrub nurse bit back a smile. Garcia wasn't discouraged.
"His leg's acting up," she said.
Your hands kept moving, steady and controlled, exactly the same as before. Not a single hesitation. Nothing in your posture shifted at all.
Garcia glanced toward the anesthesiologist. The anesthesiologist looked at the circulating nurse. The circulating nurse shrugged. Nobody in that room could read you when you were operating, which was one of the many reasons you were good at this.
The surgery continued. Sutures, final checks, closure. A little while later you stepped away from the table.
"Good work, everyone."
The team began their post-op routine. You stripped off your gloves, then your gown. A few minutes later you stood at the scrub sink washing your hands. Garcia moved beside you and did the same. For a moment neither of you spoke. Water ran over your hands. You dried them carefully.
Then, finally, "I'll go out for a while."
Garcia didn't even try to hide her grin. "Yes, boss."
You shot her a look. It only made the grin wider.
She tilted her head. "You know his address?"
You looked at her slowly. A smirk pulled at the corner of your mouth. "I'm not that ignorant."
Garcia burst out laughing. "Oh my God."
You tossed the paper towel into the bin. "Don't start."
"Too late." She pointed at you. "You pretended not to care for an entire surgery."
"I didn't pretend anything."
"You absolutely did."
You started walking toward the door. Garcia called after you, "Tell him the Pitt survived without him."
Without turning around, you lifted a hand. "I'll let him know."
The second the door closed behind you, Garcia turned to the rest of the staff. "Told you."
The anesthesiologist sighed. "We all knew she was going."
The scrub nurse nodded. "Honestly, it would've been weirder if she didn't."
"By the way," the circulating nurse said, peeling off her own gloves, "did the Pitt make a bet on whether she'd go visit him?"
Garcia froze for a second. "Damn it. We're too late to join."
*******
Later, you showed up at his apartment.
Jack opened the door and went completely still. He hadn't been expecting anyone. Especially not you.
"You're supposed to be resting."
"I am."
"You look terrible."
"Thank you."
"You should moisturize."
"Get out."
He let you in anyway, and eventually he sat down on the couch with the particular care of someone managing pain he wasn't admitting to. You noticed him rubbing the stump absentmindedly, his thumb pressing into the same spot over and over.
"Still hurts?" you asked.
He shrugged. "Sometimes."
It was a lie. It hurt a lot, and you both knew it, but you didn't push. You sat down beside him without saying anything else and reached for his leg.
He let you.
You looked down at his leg. Hesitated. Then slowly reached for it.
Jack raised an eyebrow. "What are you doing?"
"Checking."
"Checking?"
"Do you want my help or not?"
That shut him up.
Carefully you rested your hands against his leg. You weren't entirely sure what you were doing, not because you didn't understand the injury, you knew exactly what you were looking for and where the tension would be sitting. It was harder because this was Jack, and somehow that made every step of it feel different than it should.
Your fingers pressed lightly against the tight muscle along the residual limb, working slow circles into the spots where the strain had built up.
"Still hurts?" you asked.
"Sometimes," he admitted. "If I have the nightmares."
You didn't answer immediately.
Your fingers kept moving, carefully working through the tension gathered in the muscles.
"I should've bought you that bike the day we met."
You rolled your eyes. "I would've said no."
"No, you wouldn't have."
"I absolutely would have."
"You accepted one now."
"Because you're annoying."
"And persistent."
"Mostly annoying."
"And handsome."
You shook your head and kept massaging his leg, your fingers steady and methodical. Then, quieter, "I'm sorry I couldn't save it."
Jack looked at you for a long moment. The thought sat in his chest before he said it out loud. "Hey. I never blamed you. It wasn't your fault."
"I know. Still." You didn't look up from his leg. "In my head, every time I see you, there's a million different ways I run it back. Trying to make it work out differently."
He reached down and covered your hand with his, stopping the motion gently. "Hey," he said again, softer this time. "Look at me."
You did.
"You did everything right," he said. "I'm still here. I'm still standing. That's because of you, not in spite of you."
You held his gaze for a moment, and something in your chest loosened slightly, the old guilt shifting just enough to breathe around.
"You're still annoying," you said finally.
"I know." The corner of his mouth curved upward. "Mostly annoying. Handsome, too."
You scoffed.
"Didn't deny it, huh?"
Jack looked entirely too pleased with himself.
Like he'd just won an argument nobody else knew was happening.
****
FLASHBACK
The medic tent was chaos. Blood, dust, shouting. Stretchers coming in one after another faster than anyone could process them.
Then they brought in Jack.
For a second your heart stopped. His uniform was soaked through, dark and wet in a way that told you everything before you'd even looked at the wound. His face had gone pale, that particular gray that meant his body was already starting to shut down peripheral systems to protect the core. The lower half of his leg was barely recognizable.
You moved before you'd finished registering what you were looking at. Airway. Pulse. Blood pressure. You ran the checks the way your hands had been trained to, on autopilot, because the part of your brain that wanted to stand still and stare was not allowed in the room right now.
"You can't panic." Clark's voice cut through the noise beside you. "We need to save him."
"Yes, sir." Your voice came out steadier than you felt.
The next few minutes blurred into a single continuous motion. Assessment, medication, blood transfusion, everything moving faster than you could fully track. You worked the line, you called for supplies, you watched the monitor with one part of your brain while the other part screamed at you to look at his face, to confirm he was still in there.
Then came the leg.
You stared at the wound and then at the imaging once it came back, and you felt something in your chest go very still. The damage to the blood supply. The crush injury extending higher than you'd hoped. Tissue that had already started dying from lack of perfusion, the kind that didn't come back no matter how skilled the hands trying to save it were.
"No," you said.
Clark looked at you. "The leg lost the golden hour."
"There has to be another way." You said it too fast, the words tumbling out ahead of the part of you that already knew the answer.
"There isn't."
"There is." You pointed at the scan, at the section of tissue that was still pink, still arguably viable if you moved fast enough, if you were good enough, if the universe gave you one single break today. "We can try."
Clark's expression didn't change. "Kid."
"We can try." Your voice cracked slightly on the second word and you hated that it did.
"We're out of time." His voice hardened, not unkind, just final. "You know what this looks like as well as I do."
You looked down at Jack. Unconscious, pale, alive, the rise and fall of his chest the only thing in the room that mattered right now. Then back at the scan. Then back at him again, and your chest tightened so hard it was difficult to draw a full breath.
"There has to be something," you said, quieter now, the fight starting to drain out of the sentence even as you said it.
Clark was silent for a moment. Then, "Amputate."
You shook your head immediately. "No."
"Amputate."
"No." You said it again like saying it louder would change the anatomy in front of you. Like refusing hard enough could rebuild a blood supply that no longer existed.
For the first time Clark's voice hardened completely. "With or without you, this surgery happens. The only question is whether you're the one doing it."
The words landed harder than anything else in the room. Because suddenly it wasn't your decision to make at all. It never had been, not really, not once the tissue had died the way it had died. You had been arguing with biology and biology did not negotiate.
You looked at Jack again. Unconscious. Bleeding. Alive. You hated this. You hated the choice in front of you, hated that there even was a choice, hated that every version of this ended with you taking something from him that he hadn't agreed to lose. You hated, more than anything, that saving him meant losing part of him, and that you were the one who was going to have to be the hands that did it.
You closed your eyes. Took a breath. Then another, slower this time, the kind you used to talk yourself back into the work when your body wanted to fall apart and didn't have the time for it.
When you opened your eyes again the surgeon had come back online behind them, pushing the rest of you down where it couldn't interfere.
"Get him to surgery ," you said. What mattered right now is to keep his heart beating through the next hour.
If Jack Abbot was going to survive, you were going to be the one standing there when he did. Even if it meant being the one who had to take the leg to do it.
******
PRESENT TIME
Jack leaned back against the couch and let out a slow breath.
"The next thing I remember." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I woke up in the States."
You nodded. "You needed further treatment. That's why Clark sent you back."
Jack snorted. "Could've at least warned me." His gaze drifted toward the window, somewhere past it. "I wake up, look around, and suddenly I'm surrounded by strangers." A pause. "Didn't even know where the hell I was."
Then his eyes came back to you. Softer this time.
"At least—" He stopped.
You already knew where the sentence was going. At least there had been you. At least one familiar face. At least someone.
Your expression shifted before he could finish it. The teasing dropped away.
"I didn't know you were transferred," you said.
Jack frowned. "What?"
You looked down at your hands. The memory still sat uncomfortably even after all these years, a part of the story you hadn't told him because it had never felt necessary until right now.
"I found out afterward."
"What do you mean afterward?" His voice had gone careful.
You hesitated, then sighed. "I fainted."
Jack blinked. "You what?"
*******
FLASHBACK
After Jack's surgery, something inside you broke.
You had saved his life. Everyone kept telling you that. But every time you looked at the empty space where his leg used to be, it didn't feel like a victory. It felt like a debt you'd paid with someone else's currency.
So you worked. One shift became two. Two became three. Patients came and went and you barely remembered their names, just the blood, the sutures, the next emergency, the next life. Because if you stopped moving, you'd think what you could’ve done to save Jack.
People started noticing. A medic quietly handed you water you forgot to drink. Someone told you to sit down and you didn't.
Then Clark found you.
You were halfway through another chart when his shadow fell over your shoulder.
"Get out."
You didn't look up. "I can still work."
"Get out."
"I'm fine."
"Get out before I ban you from this tent."
That made you look at him, because you knew he meant it. You stood, your body heavier than it should have been, and the moment you stepped outside the heat hit you like a wall. Two steps. Three. Then the world tilted sideways and the last thing you heard was someone shouting for a doctor.
When you woke up everything hurt. Your head, your neck, your pride. A canvas ceiling. An IV in your arm. The cot creaked when you shifted.
"Good. You're awake."
Clark sat nearby, arms crossed.
"How long was I out?"
"Two days."
"What?"
"Congratulations. You finally beat everyone else's record."
You stared at him. "Two days?"
"You collapsed. Your body decided to remind you that you're human, not a machine that runs on coffee and stubbornness."
You groaned, which made your headache worse. "How is he?"
Clark's expression shifted, just slightly. Enough that you sat up straighter.
"How is Jack?"
He rubbed his thumb against his palm, thinking before he answered. "You can't see him. I transferred him back to the States. He needs treatment we don't have here."
The words landed harder than you expected. "I didn't even get to say goodbye."
“It’s better this way.” Clark was quiet for a moment. Then, "Because I've seen soldiers like him before. He's drowning right now. No mission, no team, no leg. He doesn't know what his life looks like anymore."
"I could help him."
Clark studied you for a long moment, and something about it made you feel eighteen again, sitting in front of a commanding officer who saw straight through you.
"That," he said quietly, "is exactly what scares me."
"What does that mean?"
He leaned back. "Kid. You have a habit of trying to save everyone. You spend every day fighting death in that tent." His voice was gentle. "You don't need to turn a man into another project."
That hurt more than it should have. "I care about him."
"I know you do."
A beat passed. Then you muttered, "Did you separate us, because he's older than me?"
Clark sighed dramatically. "No." A pause. "Maybe a little."
You laughed despite yourself. "My parents have an age gap."
"Your parents met during peacetime." That shut you up, because he wasn't wrong. War changed people. Sometimes permanently. He looked out toward the camp. "And Abbot. War already took too much from him."
You thought about the nightmares, the exhaustion, the silence you'd already seen settle into him. "I could still help."
"And what happens if he leans too hard on you?" Clark asked. "What happens if you lose yourself trying to hold him together?"
You didn't have an answer.
Clark sighed, and for the first time he looked less like your commanding officer and more like family. "I already see you as my own kid," he said. "You're talented. Far too selfless for your own good. You fight the angel of death every day." A faint smile. "And somehow you keep making it wait."
"I don't know about that."
"I do. We all do." He leaned forward. "When this contract ends, what are you going to do?"
You shrugged. "Vacation. Therapy."
"Both good answers." He pointed at you. "I want you back in school. Another specialty."
"Me?"
"I'll write the kind of recommendation letter universities fight over."
"Why?"
He looked genuinely confused by the question. "Because someone with your talent shouldn't stop here. And because you saved my soldiers."
"It wasn't just me." You smiled faintly. "Abbot taught me a lot."
"He did." A grin. "He's the anchor of this unit. I'm still the leader though."
That earned a real laugh, the first one in days.
Months later, your contract ended. Your bags sat beside you on the tarmac, the transport plane waiting in the distance. The future felt wide open and uncertain in a way that made your chest tight.
Clark walked up beside you while you stared at the runway.
"Go out there," he said. "Travel. See the world." His eyes narrowed slightly. "Meet someone."
Your chest tightened immediately, because you already knew exactly who he meant.
He studied you for a moment. "If after all of that, you still think about him." A pause. "Then go see him."
The words hurt, but not because he was dismissing what you felt. The opposite. He was treating it like it mattered, like it might survive time, like it might survive everything you'd both been through.
Then he snapped his fingers. "Oh."
A soldier appeared behind him carrying a very familiar puppy. Your eyes went wide. "Riot?"
The puppy squirmed immediately, trying to reach you.
"Can I?"
Clark looked offended. "Of course."
The moment Riot landed in your arms he started licking your face, and you laughed for the first time in days. Clark watched with quiet satisfaction.
"Kid's already attached to you anyway," he said.
Riot barked happily, like he completely agreed.
***********
PRESENT TIME
Jack stared at you for a second. Then groaned. "I'm gonna kill Clark."
You laughed. "He'll beat you first."
He looked genuinely offended. "You underestimate me?"
"He's eighty."
"Exactly."
You raised an eyebrow. "That's not helping your argument."
"It helps mine."
"You realize he could still throw you across a room?"
Jack thought about it for a second. Then sighed. "Yeah. Probably."
That earned another laugh from you, and the sound settled something warm in his chest. For a moment neither of you spoke. Then he leaned back against the couch and the amusement faded from his face.
"I blame him sometimes," he said.
You glanced over. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "But he had more experience than both of us." A pause. "And he was right."
You stayed quiet, letting him take his time with it.
Jack stared at the ceiling. "I pushed people away." His voice was calm. Too calm, the kind that only came from years of sitting with the same thought until it stopped hurting and started just being true. "I couldn't accept it." His hand rested unconsciously on his thigh, or where his thigh used to end. "I couldn't accept that I lost part of myself."
Your chest tightened. You remembered. The angry version of him. The distant one. The one everyone warned you about later, the one who shut doors before anyone could walk through them, who refused help, who disappeared into rehabilitation and therapy and silence and didn't come back out for a long time.
Jack let out a quiet huff of a laugh. "I was an asshole."
You smiled slightly. "A little."
"A little?"
"A lot."
"That's fair." The corner of his mouth twitched. Then his gaze drifted toward the coffee table, toward a frame sitting beside it.
You followed his eyes and froze.
The photograph. Old, slightly faded, taken with your Polaroid camera years ago. Gabriel in the middle, grinning like he owned the frame. Clark pretending to look annoyed. Riot small enough to fit under one arm. Jack looking irritated because he'd complained about pictures five seconds before it was taken. And you, laughing behind the camera, caught mid-motion in the background reflection of the tent's metal trunk.
"You still have that?" you asked.
Jack glanced at it and nodded. "Of course." His voice softened. "It was sent to me during therapy."
That made you look at him directly. He was already watching you, carefully, too carefully.
"Was it you?" he asked.
"What?"
"The nurse." His gaze didn't move from yours. "The one who gave it to her."
Your stomach dropped. "Oh."
He tilted his head. "I noticed things changed after that."
You looked away, suddenly very interested in absolutely nothing on the wall.
He kept going anyway. "My pain medication changed." Silence. "The grape juice disappeared." More silence. "They started giving me apple juice."
You pressed your lips together.
Jack almost smiled. "I hate grape juice."
"I know." The words escaped before you could stop them.
The room went quiet. His smile widened immediately. "Exactly."
You closed your eyes. Damn it. He had you.
"There were only a few people who knew that," he said, his voice gentle now, not teasing, not pushing, just warm. "You were one of them."
You bit the inside of your cheek and twisted your fingers together in your lap, because the apartment suddenly felt smaller, quieter, more intimate than it had five minutes ago.
Jack kept looking at you, patient, like he already knew the answer and was simply waiting for you to be ready to give it to him. Which, honestly, he probably did.
You finally sighed. "I left instructions."
His expression softened immediately. "You did."
********
FLASHBACK
After you got back to the States, you secretly visited. Not once. Not twice. More times than you were willing to admit, even to yourself.
The rehabilitation center was almost an hour away from your apartment. You learned the route by memory. The receptionist eventually stopped asking questions. The nurses started recognizing you. But you never signed in as a visitor. Never walked into his room. Never knocked on the door.
You stayed where he couldn't see you. The hallway. The observation window. The corner near the physical therapy room. Close enough to know he was alive. Far enough to leave when it hurt too much.
And it always hurt.
The first time you saw him standing on the prosthetic, he fell. Hard. The therapist tried to help him up and Jack shoved the hand away immediately. You almost walked into the room. Almost. Instead you gripped the edge of the observation window until your knuckles went white.
The second time, he threw the prosthetic across the room. The metallic crash echoed down the hallway and several patients looked over. Jack didn't care. He sat there breathing hard, angry, humiliated, broken in a way you hadn't seen on him before. You left before he could see the tears in your eyes.
Another time you heard him yelling at a therapist through the door.
"Just leave me alone."
The therapist stayed calm. Jack got louder.
"I said leave me alone."
You froze outside the door, listening. Not because you wanted to. Because you couldn't make yourself walk away.
The therapist said something too quiet to hear. Jack laughed, a bitter, ugly sound that didn't sound like him at all.
"My friend's dead." Silence. "My leg's gone." Another silence. "So tell me exactly what I'm supposed to be positive about."
Your chest tightened, because suddenly it wasn't about the leg. Maybe it never had been. He wasn't fighting rehabilitation. He was fighting everything. Gabriel. The explosion. The future. The guilt.
The realization followed you home that night, and every night after.
One afternoon you were standing in your usual spot outside the therapy room when a familiar voice appeared beside you.
"How long have you been standing here?"
You didn't need to look. Clark. Of course. That man noticed everything.
You kept your eyes on the glass. Said nothing.
Clark followed your gaze. Inside, Jack was practicing walking again. One step. Another. Another. The therapist beside him, ready to catch him if he fell.
"You come every week."
Still no answer.
Clark sighed. Not annoyed. Just tired, the kind that came from watching too many people hurt for too long.
"You're waiting for him to become himself again," he said quietly.
Your throat tightened, because he was right. That was exactly what you were doing. Waiting for the old Jack. The one before the explosion, before the funeral, before the nightmares. The Jack who laughed easier. The Jack who believed he could save everyone. The Jack who had two legs.
Silence stretched between you.
Then Clark said the thing you would remember for years.
"He won't."
Your breath caught. You finally looked at him. His expression wasn't cruel or cold. It was sad, because he understood exactly what he was taking from you by saying it.
"The old Jack is gone." He let that sit for a second. Then looked back toward the therapy room. "So is the old you."
That hurt even more, because he wasn't wrong. War had taken pieces from all of you. Gabriel was gone. Jack came back different. And somewhere along the way, without quite noticing it happening, you had changed too.
Clark folded his arms. "Staying here won't save him. He has to want to get better."
Inside the room Jack took another step. Then another. His jaw was clenched, his face pale with the effort of it, still fighting, still refusing to quit even when every part of him wanted to.
Clark watched him for a moment. Then looked back at you.
"And right now," he said, his voice softening, "that's a fight he has to win himself."
For the first time since the war ended, you didn't argue. Because deep down you already knew. You just weren't ready to let go yet.
"Leave," Clark said finally. "While he's fixing himself and fighting his own demons, you go fix yourself. Improve your skills. Become better than the version of you that's standing in this hallway right now."
You looked at him. "And just leave him?"
"Not forever." He held your gaze steadily. "One day, perhaps, the two of you could work together again. But not like this. Not you hiding in hallways and him throwing prosthetics across rooms. That's not a reunion. That's two people drowning next to each other and calling it support."
Something in that landed. You felt it settle, slow and certain, the way truth did when it finally arrived after you'd spent weeks circling it.
"I will," you said.
You stood, and before you could think too hard about it you leaned over and pressed a quick kiss to Clark's cheek. "I'll see you again, sir."
He crossed his arms, but something in his expression had gone soft around the edges. "Make me proud, kid."
************
PRESENT TIME
"You were there," Jack said, staring at you. "You were there, and I pushed everyone away so hard I didn't even realize it."
You looked down. "There wasn't much to realize."
He laughed quietly. "I thought I was alone."
"You were never alone."
His eyes lifted to yours. "Then why didn't I see you?"
You swallowed. "Because I was dealing with my own grief too."
The answer seemed to hit him harder than he expected. "Huh." A small smile appeared. "You were close." His voice softened. "I didn't know."
Then he rested his head against your shoulder. For once neither of you joked. Neither of you moved away. The silence felt comfortable, the kind that didn't need filling.
"You know," Jack said quietly, "Clark was right."
You raised an eyebrow. "That's a dangerous sentence."
"He'd love hearing that."
"He absolutely would."
Jack chuckled. Then his gaze lifted toward you at the same moment you looked down, and the conversation stopped without either of you deciding it should. Your faces were closer than either of you had realized, close enough to notice the tiredness still sitting in his eyes, close enough to notice where his gaze kept drifting.
The moment settled between you. Neither of you looked away. Neither of you moved.
Just a little closer. Just enough.
Then your phone rang.
Both of you blinked. Reality crashed back in at full volume. You looked at the screen. Emergency.
Jack sighed dramatically and dropped his head backward against the couch. "I hate this hospital."
You laughed, already standing. "I need to go."
For one brief second he wanted to ask you not to. Just stay. Five more minutes. Ten. An hour. Anything. But he knew better, because this was you, and you would never ignore a patient for anything, least of all him.
So instead he nodded. "Go."
You stood and reached for your bag. Then Jack suddenly held out a key.
You frowned. "What's that?"
"My house key."
You stared at him. "Your house key?"
He shrugged, trying very hard to look casual about it. "My leg still hurts."
"Uh-huh."
"I need someone to check on me."
"Uh-huh."
"In case I fall asleep and can't open the door."
You narrowed your eyes. "That is the worst excuse I have ever heard."
"It got you to take the key."
You opened your mouth. Closed it. Then pointed at him. "You are impossible."
"And yet you're taking it."
With a sigh you slipped the key into your pocket. "I'll give it back."
"No rush." The corner of his mouth lifted.
Your pager buzzed again. You headed for the door.
"Try not to die," you said.
Jack scoffed. "Pretty sure that's your job."
You shook your head and left.
The apartment fell quiet. Jack stared at the closed door for a moment, then at the empty spot beside him on the couch where you'd been sitting a minute ago.
A slow smile appeared.
Because for the first time in a very long time, when you left, he knew you were coming back.
Thank you to everyone who has read this chapter. Leave a Comment and Reblog, please. I'd love to hear your thoughts. ❤️
FLASHBACK
It was hot. Not the kind of heat people complained about. The kind that simply existed, heavy and relentless, pressing down on him until breathing felt like its own small effort. The fans overhead rattled, pushing the same hot air back and forth without doing much of anything that he could feel.
No one spoke much. Not today.
Jack sat against the canvas wall, knees drawn up, his body aching with the kind of exhaustion that came from too many hours awake. His eyes burned. He hadn't slept. Every time he closed them he saw Gabriel laughing at something stupid, making fun of somebody across the mess tent, completely alive.
Then not.
Across the tent a soldier stepped out from behind the partition and wiped a hand across his face. Jack looked up.
"Is it done?"
The soldier glanced back the way he'd come. "She needs a minute."
Of course she did.
Jack already knew without being told that you'd been in there nearly an hour. Long after everything that needed doing had been done. Long after Gabriel had been cleaned and prepared, long after the paperwork, long after everyone else had said what they needed to say and stepped back out into the heat. He knew because he'd been watching the curtain the whole time, waiting for it to move, and it hadn't.
He stood and crossed the tent slowly. When he stepped through he found you beside the transfer case, gloves off, hands clean but trembling, your eyes red in a way that had nothing to do with dust. He'd seen you exhausted before. This was different. This was the kind sleep couldn't touch.
Clark stands quietly beside you. "Kid."
"His collar wasn't straight." Your voice cracked on the last word. "I fixed it."
Jack didn't say anything. He understood exactly what you meant and exactly what you didn't. The collar had never been the problem. You weren't ready to let him go, and there was nothing in his training, nothing in any of his years out here, that told him what to do with that.
He stepped closer anyway. It hurt him to watch you standing there, frozen, unable to move toward the door. He kept his voice low, the only thing he knew to offer. "His family's waiting for him."
Your body flinched. "Right. Yes." You took a breath and finally stepped back. "I'm sorry."
Jack gave Clark a small nod. The signal that it was clear.
A few minutes later the transfer case was brought out into the heat, and the tent went completely silent around it. Six soldiers stepped forward to carry it. Jack was one of them. Clark too. He focused on his hands, on the weight, on keeping his steps even, because if he thought about anything else right now he wasn't going to make it across the compound.
Outside the sunlight was blinding after the dim canvas interior. The helicopter pad sat in the distance, the transport aircraft waiting beyond it. The camp had gathered along the path without anyone telling them to. Nobody spoke. Jack didn't expect them to.
When the case reached the vehicle, the soldiers stopped and stepped back into formation. Jack moved to one side. Clark stood beside him. Across from them you stood with your spine straight and your chin level, holding a stillness that Jack recognized immediately, because it was costing you everything you had left and he knew exactly what that looked like from the inside.
For a moment nobody moved.
Then Clark raised his hand in salute.
Jack's came up with it, automatic, trained, and it was returned down the line by every soldier present, the only sound the wind and somewhere distant the low building hum of the aircraft's engines. His throat tightened as he held the position. Across from him you were still standing at attention, perfect posture, perfect form, and he understood that you were holding it together through nothing but sheer will, because that was the only thing keeping you upright at all.
The vehicle began to move.
Only then did your hand lower. Only then did Gabriel actually start to leave, the case disappearing slowly up the ramp while the camp watched a piece of itself go with it.
That was when you broke.
Jack saw your shoulders drop first. Then your knees seemed to lose whatever certainty had been holding them, and the sound that came out of you was quiet and raw, the sound of someone who had held the wall up for exactly as long as duty required and not one second longer.
He was already moving before he'd decided to. He reached you in two steps and pulled you in, wrapping both arms around you, one hand coming up to rest against the back of your head without him thinking about it at all.
You didn't pull away. You pressed your face into his shoulder and let it come.
Jack didn't say anything. There was nothing true enough to say, and he'd learned a long time ago not to insult grief with empty words. He just held on, steady, while the engines spun up behind you both and somewhere over your shoulder Clark stood with his hand still raised, watching the two people he had left from that tent try to hold each other together in the middle of everything that had just been taken from them.
******
After Gabriel's transfer ceremony, the aircraft disappeared into the horizon. Yet somehow his presence stayed everywhere. In the empty chair near the mess tent. In the half-finished deck of cards still sitting on a crate. In the silence that followed every conversation now, the particular gap where his voice used to fill the space. In the jokes nobody told anymore.
War kept moving. It always did. Orders still came down, patrols still happened, the camp still woke up the next morning whether anyone was ready for it or not.
Jack hated that. Part of him wanted the world to stop, just for a day, just long enough for everyone to fully acknowledge that Gabriel was gone. Instead soldiers reported for duty, vehicles rolled out, radios crackled with the same routine traffic, and life continued like one man hadn't left a hole in the middle of all of them.
So Jack did what everyone else did. He kept moving. Checking equipment, checking ammunition, checking routes that didn't need checking. Volunteering for patrols, for sweeps, for anything that kept his hands and his attention occupied. Because the second he stopped moving, he started thinking, and every thought led back to Gabriel. Every single one.
Across camp you weren't much different. You worked every shift available, took every patient, stayed longer than necessary, found reasons to be useful long after the necessary work was done. The two of you were doing the exact same thing. Just in different uniforms.
A few days later Jack was checking his gear when your voice cut through the quiet.
"You volunteered."
Not a question.
Jack didn't look up. "Yeah."
"You don't have to go."
"I'm going."
"You just got back."
He kept adjusting a strap that didn't need adjusting, checking a weapon he had already checked twice.
"Jack."
Nothing.
"Look at me."
Slowly he lifted his head, and the second he did he knew you could see straight through him. You always could. Not physically exhausted, not really. Something colder than that. Like part of him had shut down after Gabriel died and simply never bothered switching back on.
"Don't go," you said.
His jaw tightened. "It's a sweep."
"You volunteered." You stepped closer. "And you haven't rested properly in days."
He almost laughed. The irony would have been funny if it weren't so depressing. "You too."
A tired breath escaped you. "True." You folded your arms. "But if I pass out, at least there's a hospital bed waiting for me."
A small smile pulled at the corner of his mouth, the first one in days. Then it disappeared, because the truth came out before he could stop it.
"To make sure nobody else ends up like Gabriel."
Silence settled between you. There it was. The thing he hadn't said out loud yet. The thing everybody already knew without needing it confirmed.
You stared at him. Then slowly closed the distance. "But what about soldiers like Jack Abbot?"
The question hit harder than he expected. For a second he couldn't answer, because the truth was ugly. The truth was that he hadn't thought about himself at all. Not since the explosion. Not since watching Gabriel die. Not since watching you cry.
A muscle jumped in his jaw. His eyes dropped away. "The day I signed up," he said, voice rough, "the day I got on that plane." A pause. "I stopped putting myself first."
You shook your head immediately. "No."
"Yeah."
"No." The anger in your voice surprised him. "You think Gabriel would've wanted this?"
Jack barked out a laugh with no humor in it at all. "Gabriel would've volunteered before me."
That hurt because it was true. Gabriel would have been first through the door, first on the helicopter, first running toward danger without a second thought. Which was exactly why he wasn't here anymore. The thought settled heavily between you.
"Jack."
He looked at you. Really looked. And suddenly you didn't seem angry anymore. Just tired. Heartbroken. Scared.
Your voice dropped, quiet and small and entirely honest. "I don't want you to go."
Something cracked inside his chest. The silence that followed felt endless.
Then you whispered, "Please stay."
Your eyes glistened. And for the first time since Gabriel died, Jack wanted to. God, he wanted to. If it had been anyone else asking he would have walked away without hesitation. But it wasn't anyone else. It was you.
For one terrible second he imagined dropping the bag. Telling command no. Staying. Choosing himself. Choosing you.
Instead he stepped forward, wrapped his arms around you, and pulled you close. The hug was brief and tight, the kind soldiers gave before deployment, the kind neither of you actually wanted but both needed anyway. His voice came low against your hair.
"I'll come back."
You closed your eyes. "This is weird."
He huffed softly. "What is?"
"The first time we haven't argued."
That finally earned a real chuckle, small and tired. "That means hell froze over."
You didn't laugh. Somehow that felt worse.
When you pulled back your eyes searched his face. "Promise me you'll come back in one piece."
Jack froze. Because he should have promised. He should have lied. He should have given you something, anything, to hold onto. Instead, "I won't promise that."
The hurt that flashed across your face followed him for weeks afterward.
He squeezed your shoulder once. Then picked up his gear and walked away. He didn't look back. Because he knew if he did, he wasn't leaving.
******
The location looked abandoned. A cluster of damaged buildings sat beneath the afternoon sun, broken walls, collapsed roofs, too quiet. Jack hated quiet. Quiet usually meant somebody was waiting.
The team moved carefully through the compound, weapons raised, eyes scanning every doorway, every window, every shadow. Jack's instincts were screaming. Something was wrong.
Then gunfire erupted. The first shots shattered the silence and soldiers dove for cover, more shots following in rapid succession until the entire compound dissolved into chaos.
"Contact left!"
"Move!"
Jack returned fire, called positions, directed movement as the team pushed forward. Then someone screamed.
He turned. One of the younger soldiers was down, hit, bleeding out fast. Without thinking he moved, exactly the way Gabriel would have, exactly the way Gabriel always had. He sprinted toward the soldier, dropped beside him, grabbed his vest, and started dragging him toward cover while bullets cracked overhead and concrete exploded somewhere close. Somebody was yelling. Jack barely heard them, because all he could think was not again, not another one, not today.
Then somebody shouted a warning.
Too late.
The world turned white.
The explosion hit with enough force to lift him off the ground entirely. Pain erupted everywhere at once. His ears rang, his vision blurred, the sky spun above him in a way that made no sense. For a second there was no sound at all. No gunfire, no shouting. Nothing. Just darkness.
And then a voice. Familiar. Terrified.
"Jack!"
The darkness shifted.
"Jack! Don't you dare leave me!"
Again. Closer. Louder.
"Jack!"
*********
PRESENT TIME
Jack woke up with a sharp inhale.
For a second he didn't know where he was. The darkness of his bedroom slowly replaced the battlefield, the walls and ceiling and silence settling into place where dust and gunfire had been a moment ago. Pittsburgh. His chest rose and fell heavily, sweat clinging to his skin, his heart hammering against his ribs while the phantom ringing from the explosion still echoed somewhere behind his ears.
He dragged a hand across his face. "Jesus Christ."
His head hurt. The familiar ache behind his eyes that only ever showed up after nightmares. Nightmares he hadn't had in years. He thought he'd buried that day, buried Gabriel, buried the explosion, buried your scream along with everything else.
Apparently not.
A sudden stab of pain shot through his prosthetic side and he tensed immediately. "Ugh." The ache spread upward, deep and persistent. His residual limb always acted up when the weather changed, or when stress got bad, or when old memories decided to crawl out of the grave uninvited. Today, apparently, checked every box at once.
"Fuck."
He sat on the edge of the bed for a minute, waiting it out. The pain didn't leave. He groaned and dropped backward onto the mattress, staring at the ceiling like it owed him an explanation.
He grabbed his phone from the nightstand.
Jack: Gonna take sick leave.
The reply came faster than expected.
Robby: You?
Jack snorted.
Jack: My leg hurts.
The three dots appeared immediately.
Robby: Say no more, brother.
Honestly, that was more than enough explanation. Jack tossed the phone onto his chest and closed his eyes again. Sleep wasn't happening. Neither was work.
At the Pitt, Robby took off his reading glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Abbot can't come in today."
Dana looked up from her chart. "That sudden?"
"His leg's acting up."
Her expression softened immediately. "Oh." A pause. "He should come here instead."
Robby raised an eyebrow.
Dana shrugged. "We literally have all the medicine."
Robby laughed. "I'll tell him."
"You should." She pointed toward the floor. "We're not letting him win Employee of the Month while sick at home."
"He has never once cared about Employee of the Month."
"Exactly my point."
Princess, who happened to be passing the desk at precisely the wrong moment, heard the entire exchange. Which was unfortunate for everyone involved. Her eyes widened and her phone appeared in her hand before either of them had finished the sentence.
Thirty seconds later, the Pitt group chat lit up.
Princess: 🚨 BREAKING NEWS 🚨
Princess: Dr. Abbot called in sick.
The three dots appeared instantly. Then another set. Then five more in quick succession.
Shen: impossible
Ellis: impossible
Javadi: impossible
Garcia: impossible
Princess: apparently his leg hurts
Shen: old man disease
Ellis: did he finally discover he's fifty
Garcia: he's not fifty
Shen: spiritually he is
Princess: should we send flowers
Ellis: send him a walker
Javadi: send him a retirement brochure
Across the hospital phones buzzed one after another in a chain reaction that spread faster than most actual trauma alerts. And just like that, the entire Pitt knew Jack Abbot had taken a sick day, which was somehow bigger news than anything that had happened in the trauma bay all week.
A few floors above the ER, you were in the middle of surgery.
The operating room was quiet except for the steady beep of monitors and the occasional request for instruments. Your focus was absolute. Scalpel. Suction. Clamp. Every movement precise, every decision deliberate.
Garcia stood across from you, assisting. For several minutes neither of you spoke. Then, casually, as if discussing the weather, "Abbot called in sick."
You didn't look up. Your eyes stayed on the surgical field. "Okay."
Garcia narrowed her eyes behind her mask. "He never calls in sick."
"Sounds like a personal achievement."
The scrub nurse bit back a smile. Garcia wasn't discouraged.
"His leg's acting up," she said.
Your hands kept moving, steady and controlled, exactly the same as before. Not a single hesitation. Nothing in your posture shifted at all.
Garcia glanced toward the anesthesiologist. The anesthesiologist looked at the circulating nurse. The circulating nurse shrugged. Nobody in that room could read you when you were operating, which was one of the many reasons you were good at this.
The surgery continued. Sutures, final checks, closure. A little while later you stepped away from the table.
"Good work, everyone."
The team began their post-op routine. You stripped off your gloves, then your gown. A few minutes later you stood at the scrub sink washing your hands. Garcia moved beside you and did the same. For a moment neither of you spoke. Water ran over your hands. You dried them carefully.
Then, finally, "I'll go out for a while."
Garcia didn't even try to hide her grin. "Yes, boss."
You shot her a look. It only made the grin wider.
She tilted her head. "You know his address?"
You looked at her slowly. A smirk pulled at the corner of your mouth. "I'm not that ignorant."
Garcia burst out laughing. "Oh my God."
You tossed the paper towel into the bin. "Don't start."
"Too late." She pointed at you. "You pretended not to care for an entire surgery."
"I didn't pretend anything."
"You absolutely did."
You started walking toward the door. Garcia called after you, "Tell him the Pitt survived without him."
Without turning around, you lifted a hand. "I'll let him know."
The second the door closed behind you, Garcia turned to the rest of the staff. "Told you."
The anesthesiologist sighed. "We all knew she was going."
The scrub nurse nodded. "Honestly, it would've been weirder if she didn't."
"By the way," the circulating nurse said, peeling off her own gloves, "did the Pitt make a bet on whether she'd go visit him?"
Garcia froze for a second. "Damn it. We're too late to join."
*******
Later, you showed up at his apartment.
Jack opened the door and went completely still. He hadn't been expecting anyone. Especially not you.
"You're supposed to be resting."
"I am."
"You look terrible."
"Thank you."
"You should moisturize."
"Get out."
He let you in anyway, and eventually he sat down on the couch with the particular care of someone managing pain he wasn't admitting to. You noticed him rubbing the stump absentmindedly, his thumb pressing into the same spot over and over.
"Still hurts?" you asked.
He shrugged. "Sometimes."
It was a lie. It hurt a lot, and you both knew it, but you didn't push. You sat down beside him without saying anything else and reached for his leg.
He let you.
You looked down at his leg. Hesitated. Then slowly reached for it.
Jack raised an eyebrow. "What are you doing?"
"Checking."
"Checking?"
"Do you want my help or not?"
That shut him up.
Carefully you rested your hands against his leg. You weren't entirely sure what you were doing, not because you didn't understand the injury, you knew exactly what you were looking for and where the tension would be sitting. It was harder because this was Jack, and somehow that made every step of it feel different than it should.
Your fingers pressed lightly against the tight muscle along the residual limb, working slow circles into the spots where the strain had built up.
"Still hurts?" you asked.
"Sometimes," he admitted. "If I have the nightmares."
You didn't answer immediately.
Your fingers kept moving, carefully working through the tension gathered in the muscles.
"I should've bought you that bike the day we met."
You rolled your eyes. "I would've said no."
"No, you wouldn't have."
"I absolutely would have."
"You accepted one now."
"Because you're annoying."
"And persistent."
"Mostly annoying."
"And handsome."
You shook your head and kept massaging his leg, your fingers steady and methodical. Then, quieter, "I'm sorry I couldn't save it."
Jack looked at you for a long moment. The thought sat in his chest before he said it out loud. "Hey. I never blamed you. It wasn't your fault."
"I know. Still." You didn't look up from his leg. "In my head, every time I see you, there's a million different ways I run it back. Trying to make it work out differently."
He reached down and covered your hand with his, stopping the motion gently. "Hey," he said again, softer this time. "Look at me."
You did.
"You did everything right," he said. "I'm still here. I'm still standing. That's because of you, not in spite of you."
You held his gaze for a moment, and something in your chest loosened slightly, the old guilt shifting just enough to breathe around.
"You're still annoying," you said finally.
"I know." The corner of his mouth curved upward. "Mostly annoying. Handsome, too."
You scoffed.
"Didn't deny it, huh?"
Jack looked entirely too pleased with himself.
Like he'd just won an argument nobody else knew was happening.
****
FLASHBACK
The medic tent was chaos. Blood, dust, shouting. Stretchers coming in one after another faster than anyone could process them.
Then they brought in Jack.
For a second your heart stopped. His uniform was soaked through, dark and wet in a way that told you everything before you'd even looked at the wound. His face had gone pale, that particular gray that meant his body was already starting to shut down peripheral systems to protect the core. The lower half of his leg was barely recognizable.
You moved before you'd finished registering what you were looking at. Airway. Pulse. Blood pressure. You ran the checks the way your hands had been trained to, on autopilot, because the part of your brain that wanted to stand still and stare was not allowed in the room right now.
"You can't panic." Clark's voice cut through the noise beside you. "We need to save him."
"Yes, sir." Your voice came out steadier than you felt.
The next few minutes blurred into a single continuous motion. Assessment, medication, blood transfusion, everything moving faster than you could fully track. You worked the line, you called for supplies, you watched the monitor with one part of your brain while the other part screamed at you to look at his face, to confirm he was still in there.
Then came the leg.
You stared at the wound and then at the imaging once it came back, and you felt something in your chest go very still. The damage to the blood supply. The crush injury extending higher than you'd hoped. Tissue that had already started dying from lack of perfusion, the kind that didn't come back no matter how skilled the hands trying to save it were.
"No," you said.
Clark looked at you. "The leg lost the golden hour."
"There has to be another way." You said it too fast, the words tumbling out ahead of the part of you that already knew the answer.
"There isn't."
"There is." You pointed at the scan, at the section of tissue that was still pink, still arguably viable if you moved fast enough, if you were good enough, if the universe gave you one single break today. "We can try."
Clark's expression didn't change. "Kid."
"We can try." Your voice cracked slightly on the second word and you hated that it did.
"We're out of time." His voice hardened, not unkind, just final. "You know what this looks like as well as I do."
You looked down at Jack. Unconscious, pale, alive, the rise and fall of his chest the only thing in the room that mattered right now. Then back at the scan. Then back at him again, and your chest tightened so hard it was difficult to draw a full breath.
"There has to be something," you said, quieter now, the fight starting to drain out of the sentence even as you said it.
Clark was silent for a moment. Then, "Amputate."
You shook your head immediately. "No."
"Amputate."
"No." You said it again like saying it louder would change the anatomy in front of you. Like refusing hard enough could rebuild a blood supply that no longer existed.
For the first time Clark's voice hardened completely. "With or without you, this surgery happens. The only question is whether you're the one doing it."
The words landed harder than anything else in the room. Because suddenly it wasn't your decision to make at all. It never had been, not really, not once the tissue had died the way it had died. You had been arguing with biology and biology did not negotiate.
You looked at Jack again. Unconscious. Bleeding. Alive. You hated this. You hated the choice in front of you, hated that there even was a choice, hated that every version of this ended with you taking something from him that he hadn't agreed to lose. You hated, more than anything, that saving him meant losing part of him, and that you were the one who was going to have to be the hands that did it.
You closed your eyes. Took a breath. Then another, slower this time, the kind you used to talk yourself back into the work when your body wanted to fall apart and didn't have the time for it.
When you opened your eyes again the surgeon had come back online behind them, pushing the rest of you down where it couldn't interfere.
"Get him to surgery ," you said. What mattered right now is to keep his heart beating through the next hour.
If Jack Abbot was going to survive, you were going to be the one standing there when he did. Even if it meant being the one who had to take the leg to do it.
******
PRESENT TIME
Jack leaned back against the couch and let out a slow breath.
"The next thing I remember." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I woke up in the States."
You nodded. "You needed further treatment. That's why Clark sent you back."
Jack snorted. "Could've at least warned me." His gaze drifted toward the window, somewhere past it. "I wake up, look around, and suddenly I'm surrounded by strangers." A pause. "Didn't even know where the hell I was."
Then his eyes came back to you. Softer this time.
"At least—" He stopped.
You already knew where the sentence was going. At least there had been you. At least one familiar face. At least someone.
Your expression shifted before he could finish it. The teasing dropped away.
"I didn't know you were transferred," you said.
Jack frowned. "What?"
You looked down at your hands. The memory still sat uncomfortably even after all these years, a part of the story you hadn't told him because it had never felt necessary until right now.
"I found out afterward."
"What do you mean afterward?" His voice had gone careful.
You hesitated, then sighed. "I fainted."
Jack blinked. "You what?"
*******
FLASHBACK
After Jack's surgery, something inside you broke.
You had saved his life. Everyone kept telling you that. But every time you looked at the empty space where his leg used to be, it didn't feel like a victory. It felt like a debt you'd paid with someone else's currency.
So you worked. One shift became two. Two became three. Patients came and went and you barely remembered their names, just the blood, the sutures, the next emergency, the next life. Because if you stopped moving, you'd think what you could’ve done to save Jack.
People started noticing. A medic quietly handed you water you forgot to drink. Someone told you to sit down and you didn't.
Then Clark found you.
You were halfway through another chart when his shadow fell over your shoulder.
"Get out."
You didn't look up. "I can still work."
"Get out."
"I'm fine."
"Get out before I ban you from this tent."
That made you look at him, because you knew he meant it. You stood, your body heavier than it should have been, and the moment you stepped outside the heat hit you like a wall. Two steps. Three. Then the world tilted sideways and the last thing you heard was someone shouting for a doctor.
When you woke up everything hurt. Your head, your neck, your pride. A canvas ceiling. An IV in your arm. The cot creaked when you shifted.
"Good. You're awake."
Clark sat nearby, arms crossed.
"How long was I out?"
"Two days."
"What?"
"Congratulations. You finally beat everyone else's record."
You stared at him. "Two days?"
"You collapsed. Your body decided to remind you that you're human, not a machine that runs on coffee and stubbornness."
You groaned, which made your headache worse. "How is he?"
Clark's expression shifted, just slightly. Enough that you sat up straighter.
"How is Jack?"
He rubbed his thumb against his palm, thinking before he answered. "You can't see him. I transferred him back to the States. He needs treatment we don't have here."
The words landed harder than you expected. "I didn't even get to say goodbye."
“It’s better this way.” Clark was quiet for a moment. Then, "Because I've seen soldiers like him before. He's drowning right now. No mission, no team, no leg. He doesn't know what his life looks like anymore."
"I could help him."
Clark studied you for a long moment, and something about it made you feel eighteen again, sitting in front of a commanding officer who saw straight through you.
"That," he said quietly, "is exactly what scares me."
"What does that mean?"
He leaned back. "Kid. You have a habit of trying to save everyone. You spend every day fighting death in that tent." His voice was gentle. "You don't need to turn a man into another project."
That hurt more than it should have. "I care about him."
"I know you do."
A beat passed. Then you muttered, "Did you separate us, because he's older than me?"
Clark sighed dramatically. "No." A pause. "Maybe a little."
You laughed despite yourself. "My parents have an age gap."
"Your parents met during peacetime." That shut you up, because he wasn't wrong. War changed people. Sometimes permanently. He looked out toward the camp. "And Abbot. War already took too much from him."
You thought about the nightmares, the exhaustion, the silence you'd already seen settle into him. "I could still help."
"And what happens if he leans too hard on you?" Clark asked. "What happens if you lose yourself trying to hold him together?"
You didn't have an answer.
Clark sighed, and for the first time he looked less like your commanding officer and more like family. "I already see you as my own kid," he said. "You're talented. Far too selfless for your own good. You fight the angel of death every day." A faint smile. "And somehow you keep making it wait."
"I don't know about that."
"I do. We all do." He leaned forward. "When this contract ends, what are you going to do?"
You shrugged. "Vacation. Therapy."
"Both good answers." He pointed at you. "I want you back in school. Another specialty."
"Me?"
"I'll write the kind of recommendation letter universities fight over."
"Why?"
He looked genuinely confused by the question. "Because someone with your talent shouldn't stop here. And because you saved my soldiers."
"It wasn't just me." You smiled faintly. "Abbot taught me a lot."
"He did." A grin. "He's the anchor of this unit. I'm still the leader though."
That earned a real laugh, the first one in days.
Months later, your contract ended. Your bags sat beside you on the tarmac, the transport plane waiting in the distance. The future felt wide open and uncertain in a way that made your chest tight.
Clark walked up beside you while you stared at the runway.
"Go out there," he said. "Travel. See the world." His eyes narrowed slightly. "Meet someone."
Your chest tightened immediately, because you already knew exactly who he meant.
He studied you for a moment. "If after all of that, you still think about him." A pause. "Then go see him."
The words hurt, but not because he was dismissing what you felt. The opposite. He was treating it like it mattered, like it might survive time, like it might survive everything you'd both been through.
Then he snapped his fingers. "Oh."
A soldier appeared behind him carrying a very familiar puppy. Your eyes went wide. "Riot?"
The puppy squirmed immediately, trying to reach you.
"Can I?"
Clark looked offended. "Of course."
The moment Riot landed in your arms he started licking your face, and you laughed for the first time in days. Clark watched with quiet satisfaction.
"Kid's already attached to you anyway," he said.
Riot barked happily, like he completely agreed.
***********
PRESENT TIME
Jack stared at you for a second. Then groaned. "I'm gonna kill Clark."
You laughed. "He'll beat you first."
He looked genuinely offended. "You underestimate me?"
"He's eighty."
"Exactly."
You raised an eyebrow. "That's not helping your argument."
"It helps mine."
"You realize he could still throw you across a room?"
Jack thought about it for a second. Then sighed. "Yeah. Probably."
That earned another laugh from you, and the sound settled something warm in his chest. For a moment neither of you spoke. Then he leaned back against the couch and the amusement faded from his face.
"I blame him sometimes," he said.
You glanced over. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "But he had more experience than both of us." A pause. "And he was right."
You stayed quiet, letting him take his time with it.
Jack stared at the ceiling. "I pushed people away." His voice was calm. Too calm, the kind that only came from years of sitting with the same thought until it stopped hurting and started just being true. "I couldn't accept it." His hand rested unconsciously on his thigh, or where his thigh used to end. "I couldn't accept that I lost part of myself."
Your chest tightened. You remembered. The angry version of him. The distant one. The one everyone warned you about later, the one who shut doors before anyone could walk through them, who refused help, who disappeared into rehabilitation and therapy and silence and didn't come back out for a long time.
Jack let out a quiet huff of a laugh. "I was an asshole."
You smiled slightly. "A little."
"A little?"
"A lot."
"That's fair." The corner of his mouth twitched. Then his gaze drifted toward the coffee table, toward a frame sitting beside it.
You followed his eyes and froze.
The photograph. Old, slightly faded, taken with your Polaroid camera years ago. Gabriel in the middle, grinning like he owned the frame. Clark pretending to look annoyed. Riot small enough to fit under one arm. Jack looking irritated because he'd complained about pictures five seconds before it was taken. And you, laughing behind the camera, caught mid-motion in the background reflection of the tent's metal trunk.
"You still have that?" you asked.
Jack glanced at it and nodded. "Of course." His voice softened. "It was sent to me during therapy."
That made you look at him directly. He was already watching you, carefully, too carefully.
"Was it you?" he asked.
"What?"
"The nurse." His gaze didn't move from yours. "The one who gave it to her."
Your stomach dropped. "Oh."
He tilted his head. "I noticed things changed after that."
You looked away, suddenly very interested in absolutely nothing on the wall.
He kept going anyway. "My pain medication changed." Silence. "The grape juice disappeared." More silence. "They started giving me apple juice."
You pressed your lips together.
Jack almost smiled. "I hate grape juice."
"I know." The words escaped before you could stop them.
The room went quiet. His smile widened immediately. "Exactly."
You closed your eyes. Damn it. He had you.
"There were only a few people who knew that," he said, his voice gentle now, not teasing, not pushing, just warm. "You were one of them."
You bit the inside of your cheek and twisted your fingers together in your lap, because the apartment suddenly felt smaller, quieter, more intimate than it had five minutes ago.
Jack kept looking at you, patient, like he already knew the answer and was simply waiting for you to be ready to give it to him. Which, honestly, he probably did.
You finally sighed. "I left instructions."
His expression softened immediately. "You did."
********
FLASHBACK
After you got back to the States, you secretly visited. Not once. Not twice. More times than you were willing to admit, even to yourself.
The rehabilitation center was almost an hour away from your apartment. You learned the route by memory. The receptionist eventually stopped asking questions. The nurses started recognizing you. But you never signed in as a visitor. Never walked into his room. Never knocked on the door.
You stayed where he couldn't see you. The hallway. The observation window. The corner near the physical therapy room. Close enough to know he was alive. Far enough to leave when it hurt too much.
And it always hurt.
The first time you saw him standing on the prosthetic, he fell. Hard. The therapist tried to help him up and Jack shoved the hand away immediately. You almost walked into the room. Almost. Instead you gripped the edge of the observation window until your knuckles went white.
The second time, he threw the prosthetic across the room. The metallic crash echoed down the hallway and several patients looked over. Jack didn't care. He sat there breathing hard, angry, humiliated, broken in a way you hadn't seen on him before. You left before he could see the tears in your eyes.
Another time you heard him yelling at a therapist through the door.
"Just leave me alone."
The therapist stayed calm. Jack got louder.
"I said leave me alone."
You froze outside the door, listening. Not because you wanted to. Because you couldn't make yourself walk away.
The therapist said something too quiet to hear. Jack laughed, a bitter, ugly sound that didn't sound like him at all.
"My friend's dead." Silence. "My leg's gone." Another silence. "So tell me exactly what I'm supposed to be positive about."
Your chest tightened, because suddenly it wasn't about the leg. Maybe it never had been. He wasn't fighting rehabilitation. He was fighting everything. Gabriel. The explosion. The future. The guilt.
The realization followed you home that night, and every night after.
One afternoon you were standing in your usual spot outside the therapy room when a familiar voice appeared beside you.
"How long have you been standing here?"
You didn't need to look. Clark. Of course. That man noticed everything.
You kept your eyes on the glass. Said nothing.
Clark followed your gaze. Inside, Jack was practicing walking again. One step. Another. Another. The therapist beside him, ready to catch him if he fell.
"You come every week."
Still no answer.
Clark sighed. Not annoyed. Just tired, the kind that came from watching too many people hurt for too long.
"You're waiting for him to become himself again," he said quietly.
Your throat tightened, because he was right. That was exactly what you were doing. Waiting for the old Jack. The one before the explosion, before the funeral, before the nightmares. The Jack who laughed easier. The Jack who believed he could save everyone. The Jack who had two legs.
Silence stretched between you.
Then Clark said the thing you would remember for years.
"He won't."
Your breath caught. You finally looked at him. His expression wasn't cruel or cold. It was sad, because he understood exactly what he was taking from you by saying it.
"The old Jack is gone." He let that sit for a second. Then looked back toward the therapy room. "So is the old you."
That hurt even more, because he wasn't wrong. War had taken pieces from all of you. Gabriel was gone. Jack came back different. And somewhere along the way, without quite noticing it happening, you had changed too.
Clark folded his arms. "Staying here won't save him. He has to want to get better."
Inside the room Jack took another step. Then another. His jaw was clenched, his face pale with the effort of it, still fighting, still refusing to quit even when every part of him wanted to.
Clark watched him for a moment. Then looked back at you.
"And right now," he said, his voice softening, "that's a fight he has to win himself."
For the first time since the war ended, you didn't argue. Because deep down you already knew. You just weren't ready to let go yet.
"Leave," Clark said finally. "While he's fixing himself and fighting his own demons, you go fix yourself. Improve your skills. Become better than the version of you that's standing in this hallway right now."
You looked at him. "And just leave him?"
"Not forever." He held your gaze steadily. "One day, perhaps, the two of you could work together again. But not like this. Not you hiding in hallways and him throwing prosthetics across rooms. That's not a reunion. That's two people drowning next to each other and calling it support."
Something in that landed. You felt it settle, slow and certain, the way truth did when it finally arrived after you'd spent weeks circling it.
"I will," you said.
You stood, and before you could think too hard about it you leaned over and pressed a quick kiss to Clark's cheek. "I'll see you again, sir."
He crossed his arms, but something in his expression had gone soft around the edges. "Make me proud, kid."
************
PRESENT TIME
"You were there," Jack said, staring at you. "You were there, and I pushed everyone away so hard I didn't even realize it."
You looked down. "There wasn't much to realize."
He laughed quietly. "I thought I was alone."
"You were never alone."
His eyes lifted to yours. "Then why didn't I see you?"
You swallowed. "Because I was dealing with my own grief too."
The answer seemed to hit him harder than he expected. "Huh." A small smile appeared. "You were close." His voice softened. "I didn't know."
Then he rested his head against your shoulder. For once neither of you joked. Neither of you moved away. The silence felt comfortable, the kind that didn't need filling.
"You know," Jack said quietly, "Clark was right."
You raised an eyebrow. "That's a dangerous sentence."
"He'd love hearing that."
"He absolutely would."
Jack chuckled. Then his gaze lifted toward you at the same moment you looked down, and the conversation stopped without either of you deciding it should. Your faces were closer than either of you had realized, close enough to notice the tiredness still sitting in his eyes, close enough to notice where his gaze kept drifting.
The moment settled between you. Neither of you looked away. Neither of you moved.
Just a little closer. Just enough.
Then your phone rang.
Both of you blinked. Reality crashed back in at full volume. You looked at the screen. Emergency.
Jack sighed dramatically and dropped his head backward against the couch. "I hate this hospital."
You laughed, already standing. "I need to go."
For one brief second he wanted to ask you not to. Just stay. Five more minutes. Ten. An hour. Anything. But he knew better, because this was you, and you would never ignore a patient for anything, least of all him.
So instead he nodded. "Go."
You stood and reached for your bag. Then Jack suddenly held out a key.
You frowned. "What's that?"
"My house key."
You stared at him. "Your house key?"
He shrugged, trying very hard to look casual about it. "My leg still hurts."
"Uh-huh."
"I need someone to check on me."
"Uh-huh."
"In case I fall asleep and can't open the door."
You narrowed your eyes. "That is the worst excuse I have ever heard."
"It got you to take the key."
You opened your mouth. Closed it. Then pointed at him. "You are impossible."
"And yet you're taking it."
With a sigh you slipped the key into your pocket. "I'll give it back."
"No rush." The corner of his mouth lifted.
Your pager buzzed again. You headed for the door.
"Try not to die," you said.
Jack scoffed. "Pretty sure that's your job."
You shook your head and left.
The apartment fell quiet. Jack stared at the closed door for a moment, then at the empty spot beside him on the couch where you'd been sitting a minute ago.
A slow smile appeared.
Because for the first time in a very long time, when you left, he knew you were coming back.
Thank you to everyone who has read this chapter. Leave a Comment and Reblog, please. I'd love to hear your thoughts. ❤️
FLASHBACK
It was hot. Not the kind of heat people complained about. The kind that simply existed, heavy and relentless, pressing down on him until breathing felt like its own small effort. The fans overhead rattled, pushing the same hot air back and forth without doing much of anything that he could feel.
No one spoke much. Not today.
Jack sat against the canvas wall, knees drawn up, his body aching with the kind of exhaustion that came from too many hours awake. His eyes burned. He hadn't slept. Every time he closed them he saw Gabriel laughing at something stupid, making fun of somebody across the mess tent, completely alive.
Then not.
Across the tent a soldier stepped out from behind the partition and wiped a hand across his face. Jack looked up.
"Is it done?"
The soldier glanced back the way he'd come. "She needs a minute."
Of course she did.
Jack already knew without being told that you'd been in there nearly an hour. Long after everything that needed doing had been done. Long after Gabriel had been cleaned and prepared, long after the paperwork, long after everyone else had said what they needed to say and stepped back out into the heat. He knew because he'd been watching the curtain the whole time, waiting for it to move, and it hadn't.
He stood and crossed the tent slowly. When he stepped through he found you beside the transfer case, gloves off, hands clean but trembling, your eyes red in a way that had nothing to do with dust. He'd seen you exhausted before. This was different. This was the kind sleep couldn't touch.
Clark stands quietly beside you. "Kid."
"His collar wasn't straight." Your voice cracked on the last word. "I fixed it."
Jack didn't say anything. He understood exactly what you meant and exactly what you didn't. The collar had never been the problem. You weren't ready to let him go, and there was nothing in his training, nothing in any of his years out here, that told him what to do with that.
He stepped closer anyway. It hurt him to watch you standing there, frozen, unable to move toward the door. He kept his voice low, the only thing he knew to offer. "His family's waiting for him."
Your body flinched. "Right. Yes." You took a breath and finally stepped back. "I'm sorry."
Jack gave Clark a small nod. The signal that it was clear.
A few minutes later the transfer case was brought out into the heat, and the tent went completely silent around it. Six soldiers stepped forward to carry it. Jack was one of them. Clark too. He focused on his hands, on the weight, on keeping his steps even, because if he thought about anything else right now he wasn't going to make it across the compound.
Outside the sunlight was blinding after the dim canvas interior. The helicopter pad sat in the distance, the transport aircraft waiting beyond it. The camp had gathered along the path without anyone telling them to. Nobody spoke. Jack didn't expect them to.
When the case reached the vehicle, the soldiers stopped and stepped back into formation. Jack moved to one side. Clark stood beside him. Across from them you stood with your spine straight and your chin level, holding a stillness that Jack recognized immediately, because it was costing you everything you had left and he knew exactly what that looked like from the inside.
For a moment nobody moved.
Then Clark raised his hand in salute.
Jack's came up with it, automatic, trained, and it was returned down the line by every soldier present, the only sound the wind and somewhere distant the low building hum of the aircraft's engines. His throat tightened as he held the position. Across from him you were still standing at attention, perfect posture, perfect form, and he understood that you were holding it together through nothing but sheer will, because that was the only thing keeping you upright at all.
The vehicle began to move.
Only then did your hand lower. Only then did Gabriel actually start to leave, the case disappearing slowly up the ramp while the camp watched a piece of itself go with it.
That was when you broke.
Jack saw your shoulders drop first. Then your knees seemed to lose whatever certainty had been holding them, and the sound that came out of you was quiet and raw, the sound of someone who had held the wall up for exactly as long as duty required and not one second longer.
He was already moving before he'd decided to. He reached you in two steps and pulled you in, wrapping both arms around you, one hand coming up to rest against the back of your head without him thinking about it at all.
You didn't pull away. You pressed your face into his shoulder and let it come.
Jack didn't say anything. There was nothing true enough to say, and he'd learned a long time ago not to insult grief with empty words. He just held on, steady, while the engines spun up behind you both and somewhere over your shoulder Clark stood with his hand still raised, watching the two people he had left from that tent try to hold each other together in the middle of everything that had just been taken from them.
******
After Gabriel's transfer ceremony, the aircraft disappeared into the horizon. Yet somehow his presence stayed everywhere. In the empty chair near the mess tent. In the half-finished deck of cards still sitting on a crate. In the silence that followed every conversation now, the particular gap where his voice used to fill the space. In the jokes nobody told anymore.
War kept moving. It always did. Orders still came down, patrols still happened, the camp still woke up the next morning whether anyone was ready for it or not.
Jack hated that. Part of him wanted the world to stop, just for a day, just long enough for everyone to fully acknowledge that Gabriel was gone. Instead soldiers reported for duty, vehicles rolled out, radios crackled with the same routine traffic, and life continued like one man hadn't left a hole in the middle of all of them.
So Jack did what everyone else did. He kept moving. Checking equipment, checking ammunition, checking routes that didn't need checking. Volunteering for patrols, for sweeps, for anything that kept his hands and his attention occupied. Because the second he stopped moving, he started thinking, and every thought led back to Gabriel. Every single one.
Across camp you weren't much different. You worked every shift available, took every patient, stayed longer than necessary, found reasons to be useful long after the necessary work was done. The two of you were doing the exact same thing. Just in different uniforms.
A few days later Jack was checking his gear when your voice cut through the quiet.
"You volunteered."
Not a question.
Jack didn't look up. "Yeah."
"You don't have to go."
"I'm going."
"You just got back."
He kept adjusting a strap that didn't need adjusting, checking a weapon he had already checked twice.
"Jack."
Nothing.
"Look at me."
Slowly he lifted his head, and the second he did he knew you could see straight through him. You always could. Not physically exhausted, not really. Something colder than that. Like part of him had shut down after Gabriel died and simply never bothered switching back on.
"Don't go," you said.
His jaw tightened. "It's a sweep."
"You volunteered." You stepped closer. "And you haven't rested properly in days."
He almost laughed. The irony would have been funny if it weren't so depressing. "You too."
A tired breath escaped you. "True." You folded your arms. "But if I pass out, at least there's a hospital bed waiting for me."
A small smile pulled at the corner of his mouth, the first one in days. Then it disappeared, because the truth came out before he could stop it.
"To make sure nobody else ends up like Gabriel."
Silence settled between you. There it was. The thing he hadn't said out loud yet. The thing everybody already knew without needing it confirmed.
You stared at him. Then slowly closed the distance. "But what about soldiers like Jack Abbot?"
The question hit harder than he expected. For a second he couldn't answer, because the truth was ugly. The truth was that he hadn't thought about himself at all. Not since the explosion. Not since watching Gabriel die. Not since watching you cry.
A muscle jumped in his jaw. His eyes dropped away. "The day I signed up," he said, voice rough, "the day I got on that plane." A pause. "I stopped putting myself first."
You shook your head immediately. "No."
"Yeah."
"No." The anger in your voice surprised him. "You think Gabriel would've wanted this?"
Jack barked out a laugh with no humor in it at all. "Gabriel would've volunteered before me."
That hurt because it was true. Gabriel would have been first through the door, first on the helicopter, first running toward danger without a second thought. Which was exactly why he wasn't here anymore. The thought settled heavily between you.
"Jack."
He looked at you. Really looked. And suddenly you didn't seem angry anymore. Just tired. Heartbroken. Scared.
Your voice dropped, quiet and small and entirely honest. "I don't want you to go."
Something cracked inside his chest. The silence that followed felt endless.
Then you whispered, "Please stay."
Your eyes glistened. And for the first time since Gabriel died, Jack wanted to. God, he wanted to. If it had been anyone else asking he would have walked away without hesitation. But it wasn't anyone else. It was you.
For one terrible second he imagined dropping the bag. Telling command no. Staying. Choosing himself. Choosing you.
Instead he stepped forward, wrapped his arms around you, and pulled you close. The hug was brief and tight, the kind soldiers gave before deployment, the kind neither of you actually wanted but both needed anyway. His voice came low against your hair.
"I'll come back."
You closed your eyes. "This is weird."
He huffed softly. "What is?"
"The first time we haven't argued."
That finally earned a real chuckle, small and tired. "That means hell froze over."
You didn't laugh. Somehow that felt worse.
When you pulled back your eyes searched his face. "Promise me you'll come back in one piece."
Jack froze. Because he should have promised. He should have lied. He should have given you something, anything, to hold onto. Instead, "I won't promise that."
The hurt that flashed across your face followed him for weeks afterward.
He squeezed your shoulder once. Then picked up his gear and walked away. He didn't look back. Because he knew if he did, he wasn't leaving.
******
The location looked abandoned. A cluster of damaged buildings sat beneath the afternoon sun, broken walls, collapsed roofs, too quiet. Jack hated quiet. Quiet usually meant somebody was waiting.
The team moved carefully through the compound, weapons raised, eyes scanning every doorway, every window, every shadow. Jack's instincts were screaming. Something was wrong.
Then gunfire erupted. The first shots shattered the silence and soldiers dove for cover, more shots following in rapid succession until the entire compound dissolved into chaos.
"Contact left!"
"Move!"
Jack returned fire, called positions, directed movement as the team pushed forward. Then someone screamed.
He turned. One of the younger soldiers was down, hit, bleeding out fast. Without thinking he moved, exactly the way Gabriel would have, exactly the way Gabriel always had. He sprinted toward the soldier, dropped beside him, grabbed his vest, and started dragging him toward cover while bullets cracked overhead and concrete exploded somewhere close. Somebody was yelling. Jack barely heard them, because all he could think was not again, not another one, not today.
Then somebody shouted a warning.
Too late.
The world turned white.
The explosion hit with enough force to lift him off the ground entirely. Pain erupted everywhere at once. His ears rang, his vision blurred, the sky spun above him in a way that made no sense. For a second there was no sound at all. No gunfire, no shouting. Nothing. Just darkness.
And then a voice. Familiar. Terrified.
"Jack!"
The darkness shifted.
"Jack! Don't you dare leave me!"
Again. Closer. Louder.
"Jack!"
*********
PRESENT TIME
Jack woke up with a sharp inhale.
For a second he didn't know where he was. The darkness of his bedroom slowly replaced the battlefield, the walls and ceiling and silence settling into place where dust and gunfire had been a moment ago. Pittsburgh. His chest rose and fell heavily, sweat clinging to his skin, his heart hammering against his ribs while the phantom ringing from the explosion still echoed somewhere behind his ears.
He dragged a hand across his face. "Jesus Christ."
His head hurt. The familiar ache behind his eyes that only ever showed up after nightmares. Nightmares he hadn't had in years. He thought he'd buried that day, buried Gabriel, buried the explosion, buried your scream along with everything else.
Apparently not.
A sudden stab of pain shot through his prosthetic side and he tensed immediately. "Ugh." The ache spread upward, deep and persistent. His residual limb always acted up when the weather changed, or when stress got bad, or when old memories decided to crawl out of the grave uninvited. Today, apparently, checked every box at once.
"Fuck."
He sat on the edge of the bed for a minute, waiting it out. The pain didn't leave. He groaned and dropped backward onto the mattress, staring at the ceiling like it owed him an explanation.
He grabbed his phone from the nightstand.
Jack: Gonna take sick leave.
The reply came faster than expected.
Robby: You?
Jack snorted.
Jack: My leg hurts.
The three dots appeared immediately.
Robby: Say no more, brother.
Honestly, that was more than enough explanation. Jack tossed the phone onto his chest and closed his eyes again. Sleep wasn't happening. Neither was work.
At the Pitt, Robby took off his reading glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Abbot can't come in today."
Dana looked up from her chart. "That sudden?"
"His leg's acting up."
Her expression softened immediately. "Oh." A pause. "He should come here instead."
Robby raised an eyebrow.
Dana shrugged. "We literally have all the medicine."
Robby laughed. "I'll tell him."
"You should." She pointed toward the floor. "We're not letting him win Employee of the Month while sick at home."
"He has never once cared about Employee of the Month."
"Exactly my point."
Princess, who happened to be passing the desk at precisely the wrong moment, heard the entire exchange. Which was unfortunate for everyone involved. Her eyes widened and her phone appeared in her hand before either of them had finished the sentence.
Thirty seconds later, the Pitt group chat lit up.
Princess: 🚨 BREAKING NEWS 🚨
Princess: Dr. Abbot called in sick.
The three dots appeared instantly. Then another set. Then five more in quick succession.
Shen: impossible
Ellis: impossible
Javadi: impossible
Garcia: impossible
Princess: apparently his leg hurts
Shen: old man disease
Ellis: did he finally discover he's fifty
Garcia: he's not fifty
Shen: spiritually he is
Princess: should we send flowers
Ellis: send him a walker
Javadi: send him a retirement brochure
Across the hospital phones buzzed one after another in a chain reaction that spread faster than most actual trauma alerts. And just like that, the entire Pitt knew Jack Abbot had taken a sick day, which was somehow bigger news than anything that had happened in the trauma bay all week.
A few floors above the ER, you were in the middle of surgery.
The operating room was quiet except for the steady beep of monitors and the occasional request for instruments. Your focus was absolute. Scalpel. Suction. Clamp. Every movement precise, every decision deliberate.
Garcia stood across from you, assisting. For several minutes neither of you spoke. Then, casually, as if discussing the weather, "Abbot called in sick."
You didn't look up. Your eyes stayed on the surgical field. "Okay."
Garcia narrowed her eyes behind her mask. "He never calls in sick."
"Sounds like a personal achievement."
The scrub nurse bit back a smile. Garcia wasn't discouraged.
"His leg's acting up," she said.
Your hands kept moving, steady and controlled, exactly the same as before. Not a single hesitation. Nothing in your posture shifted at all.
Garcia glanced toward the anesthesiologist. The anesthesiologist looked at the circulating nurse. The circulating nurse shrugged. Nobody in that room could read you when you were operating, which was one of the many reasons you were good at this.
The surgery continued. Sutures, final checks, closure. A little while later you stepped away from the table.
"Good work, everyone."
The team began their post-op routine. You stripped off your gloves, then your gown. A few minutes later you stood at the scrub sink washing your hands. Garcia moved beside you and did the same. For a moment neither of you spoke. Water ran over your hands. You dried them carefully.
Then, finally, "I'll go out for a while."
Garcia didn't even try to hide her grin. "Yes, boss."
You shot her a look. It only made the grin wider.
She tilted her head. "You know his address?"
You looked at her slowly. A smirk pulled at the corner of your mouth. "I'm not that ignorant."
Garcia burst out laughing. "Oh my God."
You tossed the paper towel into the bin. "Don't start."
"Too late." She pointed at you. "You pretended not to care for an entire surgery."
"I didn't pretend anything."
"You absolutely did."
You started walking toward the door. Garcia called after you, "Tell him the Pitt survived without him."
Without turning around, you lifted a hand. "I'll let him know."
The second the door closed behind you, Garcia turned to the rest of the staff. "Told you."
The anesthesiologist sighed. "We all knew she was going."
The scrub nurse nodded. "Honestly, it would've been weirder if she didn't."
"By the way," the circulating nurse said, peeling off her own gloves, "did the Pitt make a bet on whether she'd go visit him?"
Garcia froze for a second. "Damn it. We're too late to join."
*******
Later, you showed up at his apartment.
Jack opened the door and went completely still. He hadn't been expecting anyone. Especially not you.
"You're supposed to be resting."
"I am."
"You look terrible."
"Thank you."
"You should moisturize."
"Get out."
He let you in anyway, and eventually he sat down on the couch with the particular care of someone managing pain he wasn't admitting to. You noticed him rubbing the stump absentmindedly, his thumb pressing into the same spot over and over.
"Still hurts?" you asked.
He shrugged. "Sometimes."
It was a lie. It hurt a lot, and you both knew it, but you didn't push. You sat down beside him without saying anything else and reached for his leg.
He let you.
You looked down at his leg. Hesitated. Then slowly reached for it.
Jack raised an eyebrow. "What are you doing?"
"Checking."
"Checking?"
"Do you want my help or not?"
That shut him up.
Carefully you rested your hands against his leg. You weren't entirely sure what you were doing, not because you didn't understand the injury, you knew exactly what you were looking for and where the tension would be sitting. It was harder because this was Jack, and somehow that made every step of it feel different than it should.
Your fingers pressed lightly against the tight muscle along the residual limb, working slow circles into the spots where the strain had built up.
"Still hurts?" you asked.
"Sometimes," he admitted. "If I have the nightmares."
You didn't answer immediately.
Your fingers kept moving, carefully working through the tension gathered in the muscles.
"I should've bought you that bike the day we met."
You rolled your eyes. "I would've said no."
"No, you wouldn't have."
"I absolutely would have."
"You accepted one now."
"Because you're annoying."
"And persistent."
"Mostly annoying."
"And handsome."
You shook your head and kept massaging his leg, your fingers steady and methodical. Then, quieter, "I'm sorry I couldn't save it."
Jack looked at you for a long moment. The thought sat in his chest before he said it out loud. "Hey. I never blamed you. It wasn't your fault."
"I know. Still." You didn't look up from his leg. "In my head, every time I see you, there's a million different ways I run it back. Trying to make it work out differently."
He reached down and covered your hand with his, stopping the motion gently. "Hey," he said again, softer this time. "Look at me."
You did.
"You did everything right," he said. "I'm still here. I'm still standing. That's because of you, not in spite of you."
You held his gaze for a moment, and something in your chest loosened slightly, the old guilt shifting just enough to breathe around.
"You're still annoying," you said finally.
"I know." The corner of his mouth curved upward. "Mostly annoying. Handsome, too."
You scoffed.
"Didn't deny it, huh?"
Jack looked entirely too pleased with himself.
Like he'd just won an argument nobody else knew was happening.
****
FLASHBACK
The medic tent was chaos. Blood, dust, shouting. Stretchers coming in one after another faster than anyone could process them.
Then they brought in Jack.
For a second your heart stopped. His uniform was soaked through, dark and wet in a way that told you everything before you'd even looked at the wound. His face had gone pale, that particular gray that meant his body was already starting to shut down peripheral systems to protect the core. The lower half of his leg was barely recognizable.
You moved before you'd finished registering what you were looking at. Airway. Pulse. Blood pressure. You ran the checks the way your hands had been trained to, on autopilot, because the part of your brain that wanted to stand still and stare was not allowed in the room right now.
"You can't panic." Clark's voice cut through the noise beside you. "We need to save him."
"Yes, sir." Your voice came out steadier than you felt.
The next few minutes blurred into a single continuous motion. Assessment, medication, blood transfusion, everything moving faster than you could fully track. You worked the line, you called for supplies, you watched the monitor with one part of your brain while the other part screamed at you to look at his face, to confirm he was still in there.
Then came the leg.
You stared at the wound and then at the imaging once it came back, and you felt something in your chest go very still. The damage to the blood supply. The crush injury extending higher than you'd hoped. Tissue that had already started dying from lack of perfusion, the kind that didn't come back no matter how skilled the hands trying to save it were.
"No," you said.
Clark looked at you. "The leg lost the golden hour."
"There has to be another way." You said it too fast, the words tumbling out ahead of the part of you that already knew the answer.
"There isn't."
"There is." You pointed at the scan, at the section of tissue that was still pink, still arguably viable if you moved fast enough, if you were good enough, if the universe gave you one single break today. "We can try."
Clark's expression didn't change. "Kid."
"We can try." Your voice cracked slightly on the second word and you hated that it did.
"We're out of time." His voice hardened, not unkind, just final. "You know what this looks like as well as I do."
You looked down at Jack. Unconscious, pale, alive, the rise and fall of his chest the only thing in the room that mattered right now. Then back at the scan. Then back at him again, and your chest tightened so hard it was difficult to draw a full breath.
"There has to be something," you said, quieter now, the fight starting to drain out of the sentence even as you said it.
Clark was silent for a moment. Then, "Amputate."
You shook your head immediately. "No."
"Amputate."
"No." You said it again like saying it louder would change the anatomy in front of you. Like refusing hard enough could rebuild a blood supply that no longer existed.
For the first time Clark's voice hardened completely. "With or without you, this surgery happens. The only question is whether you're the one doing it."
The words landed harder than anything else in the room. Because suddenly it wasn't your decision to make at all. It never had been, not really, not once the tissue had died the way it had died. You had been arguing with biology and biology did not negotiate.
You looked at Jack again. Unconscious. Bleeding. Alive. You hated this. You hated the choice in front of you, hated that there even was a choice, hated that every version of this ended with you taking something from him that he hadn't agreed to lose. You hated, more than anything, that saving him meant losing part of him, and that you were the one who was going to have to be the hands that did it.
You closed your eyes. Took a breath. Then another, slower this time, the kind you used to talk yourself back into the work when your body wanted to fall apart and didn't have the time for it.
When you opened your eyes again the surgeon had come back online behind them, pushing the rest of you down where it couldn't interfere.
"Get him to surgery ," you said. What mattered right now is to keep his heart beating through the next hour.
If Jack Abbot was going to survive, you were going to be the one standing there when he did. Even if it meant being the one who had to take the leg to do it.
******
PRESENT TIME
Jack leaned back against the couch and let out a slow breath.
"The next thing I remember." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I woke up in the States."
You nodded. "You needed further treatment. That's why Clark sent you back."
Jack snorted. "Could've at least warned me." His gaze drifted toward the window, somewhere past it. "I wake up, look around, and suddenly I'm surrounded by strangers." A pause. "Didn't even know where the hell I was."
Then his eyes came back to you. Softer this time.
"At least—" He stopped.
You already knew where the sentence was going. At least there had been you. At least one familiar face. At least someone.
Your expression shifted before he could finish it. The teasing dropped away.
"I didn't know you were transferred," you said.
Jack frowned. "What?"
You looked down at your hands. The memory still sat uncomfortably even after all these years, a part of the story you hadn't told him because it had never felt necessary until right now.
"I found out afterward."
"What do you mean afterward?" His voice had gone careful.
You hesitated, then sighed. "I fainted."
Jack blinked. "You what?"
*******
FLASHBACK
After Jack's surgery, something inside you broke.
You had saved his life. Everyone kept telling you that. But every time you looked at the empty space where his leg used to be, it didn't feel like a victory. It felt like a debt you'd paid with someone else's currency.
So you worked. One shift became two. Two became three. Patients came and went and you barely remembered their names, just the blood, the sutures, the next emergency, the next life. Because if you stopped moving, you'd think what you could’ve done to save Jack.
People started noticing. A medic quietly handed you water you forgot to drink. Someone told you to sit down and you didn't.
Then Clark found you.
You were halfway through another chart when his shadow fell over your shoulder.
"Get out."
You didn't look up. "I can still work."
"Get out."
"I'm fine."
"Get out before I ban you from this tent."
That made you look at him, because you knew he meant it. You stood, your body heavier than it should have been, and the moment you stepped outside the heat hit you like a wall. Two steps. Three. Then the world tilted sideways and the last thing you heard was someone shouting for a doctor.
When you woke up everything hurt. Your head, your neck, your pride. A canvas ceiling. An IV in your arm. The cot creaked when you shifted.
"Good. You're awake."
Clark sat nearby, arms crossed.
"How long was I out?"
"Two days."
"What?"
"Congratulations. You finally beat everyone else's record."
You stared at him. "Two days?"
"You collapsed. Your body decided to remind you that you're human, not a machine that runs on coffee and stubbornness."
You groaned, which made your headache worse. "How is he?"
Clark's expression shifted, just slightly. Enough that you sat up straighter.
"How is Jack?"
He rubbed his thumb against his palm, thinking before he answered. "You can't see him. I transferred him back to the States. He needs treatment we don't have here."
The words landed harder than you expected. "I didn't even get to say goodbye."
“It’s better this way.” Clark was quiet for a moment. Then, "Because I've seen soldiers like him before. He's drowning right now. No mission, no team, no leg. He doesn't know what his life looks like anymore."
"I could help him."
Clark studied you for a long moment, and something about it made you feel eighteen again, sitting in front of a commanding officer who saw straight through you.
"That," he said quietly, "is exactly what scares me."
"What does that mean?"
He leaned back. "Kid. You have a habit of trying to save everyone. You spend every day fighting death in that tent." His voice was gentle. "You don't need to turn a man into another project."
That hurt more than it should have. "I care about him."
"I know you do."
A beat passed. Then you muttered, "Did you separate us, because he's older than me?"
Clark sighed dramatically. "No." A pause. "Maybe a little."
You laughed despite yourself. "My parents have an age gap."
"Your parents met during peacetime." That shut you up, because he wasn't wrong. War changed people. Sometimes permanently. He looked out toward the camp. "And Abbot. War already took too much from him."
You thought about the nightmares, the exhaustion, the silence you'd already seen settle into him. "I could still help."
"And what happens if he leans too hard on you?" Clark asked. "What happens if you lose yourself trying to hold him together?"
You didn't have an answer.
Clark sighed, and for the first time he looked less like your commanding officer and more like family. "I already see you as my own kid," he said. "You're talented. Far too selfless for your own good. You fight the angel of death every day." A faint smile. "And somehow you keep making it wait."
"I don't know about that."
"I do. We all do." He leaned forward. "When this contract ends, what are you going to do?"
You shrugged. "Vacation. Therapy."
"Both good answers." He pointed at you. "I want you back in school. Another specialty."
"Me?"
"I'll write the kind of recommendation letter universities fight over."
"Why?"
He looked genuinely confused by the question. "Because someone with your talent shouldn't stop here. And because you saved my soldiers."
"It wasn't just me." You smiled faintly. "Abbot taught me a lot."
"He did." A grin. "He's the anchor of this unit. I'm still the leader though."
That earned a real laugh, the first one in days.
Months later, your contract ended. Your bags sat beside you on the tarmac, the transport plane waiting in the distance. The future felt wide open and uncertain in a way that made your chest tight.
Clark walked up beside you while you stared at the runway.
"Go out there," he said. "Travel. See the world." His eyes narrowed slightly. "Meet someone."
Your chest tightened immediately, because you already knew exactly who he meant.
He studied you for a moment. "If after all of that, you still think about him." A pause. "Then go see him."
The words hurt, but not because he was dismissing what you felt. The opposite. He was treating it like it mattered, like it might survive time, like it might survive everything you'd both been through.
Then he snapped his fingers. "Oh."
A soldier appeared behind him carrying a very familiar puppy. Your eyes went wide. "Riot?"
The puppy squirmed immediately, trying to reach you.
"Can I?"
Clark looked offended. "Of course."
The moment Riot landed in your arms he started licking your face, and you laughed for the first time in days. Clark watched with quiet satisfaction.
"Kid's already attached to you anyway," he said.
Riot barked happily, like he completely agreed.
***********
PRESENT TIME
Jack stared at you for a second. Then groaned. "I'm gonna kill Clark."
You laughed. "He'll beat you first."
He looked genuinely offended. "You underestimate me?"
"He's eighty."
"Exactly."
You raised an eyebrow. "That's not helping your argument."
"It helps mine."
"You realize he could still throw you across a room?"
Jack thought about it for a second. Then sighed. "Yeah. Probably."
That earned another laugh from you, and the sound settled something warm in his chest. For a moment neither of you spoke. Then he leaned back against the couch and the amusement faded from his face.
"I blame him sometimes," he said.
You glanced over. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "But he had more experience than both of us." A pause. "And he was right."
You stayed quiet, letting him take his time with it.
Jack stared at the ceiling. "I pushed people away." His voice was calm. Too calm, the kind that only came from years of sitting with the same thought until it stopped hurting and started just being true. "I couldn't accept it." His hand rested unconsciously on his thigh, or where his thigh used to end. "I couldn't accept that I lost part of myself."
Your chest tightened. You remembered. The angry version of him. The distant one. The one everyone warned you about later, the one who shut doors before anyone could walk through them, who refused help, who disappeared into rehabilitation and therapy and silence and didn't come back out for a long time.
Jack let out a quiet huff of a laugh. "I was an asshole."
You smiled slightly. "A little."
"A little?"
"A lot."
"That's fair." The corner of his mouth twitched. Then his gaze drifted toward the coffee table, toward a frame sitting beside it.
You followed his eyes and froze.
The photograph. Old, slightly faded, taken with your Polaroid camera years ago. Gabriel in the middle, grinning like he owned the frame. Clark pretending to look annoyed. Riot small enough to fit under one arm. Jack looking irritated because he'd complained about pictures five seconds before it was taken. And you, laughing behind the camera, caught mid-motion in the background reflection of the tent's metal trunk.
"You still have that?" you asked.
Jack glanced at it and nodded. "Of course." His voice softened. "It was sent to me during therapy."
That made you look at him directly. He was already watching you, carefully, too carefully.
"Was it you?" he asked.
"What?"
"The nurse." His gaze didn't move from yours. "The one who gave it to her."
Your stomach dropped. "Oh."
He tilted his head. "I noticed things changed after that."
You looked away, suddenly very interested in absolutely nothing on the wall.
He kept going anyway. "My pain medication changed." Silence. "The grape juice disappeared." More silence. "They started giving me apple juice."
You pressed your lips together.
Jack almost smiled. "I hate grape juice."
"I know." The words escaped before you could stop them.
The room went quiet. His smile widened immediately. "Exactly."
You closed your eyes. Damn it. He had you.
"There were only a few people who knew that," he said, his voice gentle now, not teasing, not pushing, just warm. "You were one of them."
You bit the inside of your cheek and twisted your fingers together in your lap, because the apartment suddenly felt smaller, quieter, more intimate than it had five minutes ago.
Jack kept looking at you, patient, like he already knew the answer and was simply waiting for you to be ready to give it to him. Which, honestly, he probably did.
You finally sighed. "I left instructions."
His expression softened immediately. "You did."
********
FLASHBACK
After you got back to the States, you secretly visited. Not once. Not twice. More times than you were willing to admit, even to yourself.
The rehabilitation center was almost an hour away from your apartment. You learned the route by memory. The receptionist eventually stopped asking questions. The nurses started recognizing you. But you never signed in as a visitor. Never walked into his room. Never knocked on the door.
You stayed where he couldn't see you. The hallway. The observation window. The corner near the physical therapy room. Close enough to know he was alive. Far enough to leave when it hurt too much.
And it always hurt.
The first time you saw him standing on the prosthetic, he fell. Hard. The therapist tried to help him up and Jack shoved the hand away immediately. You almost walked into the room. Almost. Instead you gripped the edge of the observation window until your knuckles went white.
The second time, he threw the prosthetic across the room. The metallic crash echoed down the hallway and several patients looked over. Jack didn't care. He sat there breathing hard, angry, humiliated, broken in a way you hadn't seen on him before. You left before he could see the tears in your eyes.
Another time you heard him yelling at a therapist through the door.
"Just leave me alone."
The therapist stayed calm. Jack got louder.
"I said leave me alone."
You froze outside the door, listening. Not because you wanted to. Because you couldn't make yourself walk away.
The therapist said something too quiet to hear. Jack laughed, a bitter, ugly sound that didn't sound like him at all.
"My friend's dead." Silence. "My leg's gone." Another silence. "So tell me exactly what I'm supposed to be positive about."
Your chest tightened, because suddenly it wasn't about the leg. Maybe it never had been. He wasn't fighting rehabilitation. He was fighting everything. Gabriel. The explosion. The future. The guilt.
The realization followed you home that night, and every night after.
One afternoon you were standing in your usual spot outside the therapy room when a familiar voice appeared beside you.
"How long have you been standing here?"
You didn't need to look. Clark. Of course. That man noticed everything.
You kept your eyes on the glass. Said nothing.
Clark followed your gaze. Inside, Jack was practicing walking again. One step. Another. Another. The therapist beside him, ready to catch him if he fell.
"You come every week."
Still no answer.
Clark sighed. Not annoyed. Just tired, the kind that came from watching too many people hurt for too long.
"You're waiting for him to become himself again," he said quietly.
Your throat tightened, because he was right. That was exactly what you were doing. Waiting for the old Jack. The one before the explosion, before the funeral, before the nightmares. The Jack who laughed easier. The Jack who believed he could save everyone. The Jack who had two legs.
Silence stretched between you.
Then Clark said the thing you would remember for years.
"He won't."
Your breath caught. You finally looked at him. His expression wasn't cruel or cold. It was sad, because he understood exactly what he was taking from you by saying it.
"The old Jack is gone." He let that sit for a second. Then looked back toward the therapy room. "So is the old you."
That hurt even more, because he wasn't wrong. War had taken pieces from all of you. Gabriel was gone. Jack came back different. And somewhere along the way, without quite noticing it happening, you had changed too.
Clark folded his arms. "Staying here won't save him. He has to want to get better."
Inside the room Jack took another step. Then another. His jaw was clenched, his face pale with the effort of it, still fighting, still refusing to quit even when every part of him wanted to.
Clark watched him for a moment. Then looked back at you.
"And right now," he said, his voice softening, "that's a fight he has to win himself."
For the first time since the war ended, you didn't argue. Because deep down you already knew. You just weren't ready to let go yet.
"Leave," Clark said finally. "While he's fixing himself and fighting his own demons, you go fix yourself. Improve your skills. Become better than the version of you that's standing in this hallway right now."
You looked at him. "And just leave him?"
"Not forever." He held your gaze steadily. "One day, perhaps, the two of you could work together again. But not like this. Not you hiding in hallways and him throwing prosthetics across rooms. That's not a reunion. That's two people drowning next to each other and calling it support."
Something in that landed. You felt it settle, slow and certain, the way truth did when it finally arrived after you'd spent weeks circling it.
"I will," you said.
You stood, and before you could think too hard about it you leaned over and pressed a quick kiss to Clark's cheek. "I'll see you again, sir."
He crossed his arms, but something in his expression had gone soft around the edges. "Make me proud, kid."
************
PRESENT TIME
"You were there," Jack said, staring at you. "You were there, and I pushed everyone away so hard I didn't even realize it."
You looked down. "There wasn't much to realize."
He laughed quietly. "I thought I was alone."
"You were never alone."
His eyes lifted to yours. "Then why didn't I see you?"
You swallowed. "Because I was dealing with my own grief too."
The answer seemed to hit him harder than he expected. "Huh." A small smile appeared. "You were close." His voice softened. "I didn't know."
Then he rested his head against your shoulder. For once neither of you joked. Neither of you moved away. The silence felt comfortable, the kind that didn't need filling.
"You know," Jack said quietly, "Clark was right."
You raised an eyebrow. "That's a dangerous sentence."
"He'd love hearing that."
"He absolutely would."
Jack chuckled. Then his gaze lifted toward you at the same moment you looked down, and the conversation stopped without either of you deciding it should. Your faces were closer than either of you had realized, close enough to notice the tiredness still sitting in his eyes, close enough to notice where his gaze kept drifting.
The moment settled between you. Neither of you looked away. Neither of you moved.
Just a little closer. Just enough.
Then your phone rang.
Both of you blinked. Reality crashed back in at full volume. You looked at the screen. Emergency.
Jack sighed dramatically and dropped his head backward against the couch. "I hate this hospital."
You laughed, already standing. "I need to go."
For one brief second he wanted to ask you not to. Just stay. Five more minutes. Ten. An hour. Anything. But he knew better, because this was you, and you would never ignore a patient for anything, least of all him.
So instead he nodded. "Go."
You stood and reached for your bag. Then Jack suddenly held out a key.
You frowned. "What's that?"
"My house key."
You stared at him. "Your house key?"
He shrugged, trying very hard to look casual about it. "My leg still hurts."
"Uh-huh."
"I need someone to check on me."
"Uh-huh."
"In case I fall asleep and can't open the door."
You narrowed your eyes. "That is the worst excuse I have ever heard."
"It got you to take the key."
You opened your mouth. Closed it. Then pointed at him. "You are impossible."
"And yet you're taking it."
With a sigh you slipped the key into your pocket. "I'll give it back."
"No rush." The corner of his mouth lifted.
Your pager buzzed again. You headed for the door.
"Try not to die," you said.
Jack scoffed. "Pretty sure that's your job."
You shook your head and left.
The apartment fell quiet. Jack stared at the closed door for a moment, then at the empty spot beside him on the couch where you'd been sitting a minute ago.
A slow smile appeared.
Because for the first time in a very long time, when you left, he knew you were coming back.
°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･ what happens when a little bug bumps into you and asks for her ‘dada’
°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･ I hope you guys enjoy this one !! It’s been sitting in my notes for months I just could never finish it properly ˶ˊᜊˋ˶ single dad Andrew has been on my mind for a while now …
Minors, ageless, and blank blogs do not interact !!
You're at the grocery store stocking up on some items you'd run out of. Bread, eggs, butter, all that stuff, it was a busy Sunday morning. You hated grocery shopping, you usually just get it delivered to your house, but the weather was beautiful, and so you decided to head out and do it yourself. As you were checking your list you feel little arms wrap around your leg, looking down you see the cutest little girl ever, she had the chubbiest cheeks, and the cutest outfit ever. She looks up at you, making grabby hands with tears in her eyes. Bending down, you pick her up, and she rests her head on your shoulder, it melts your heart.
“Hey, lovebug, where are your parents?” You look around to see anyone who may be frantically looking for a missing child, but you spot none. “Dada?” She's looking up at you, okay so she's here with her dad. You need to find him.
“Okay, let's go look for him, bug."
And you search up and down the isles, trying to find anyone who may have lost their kid. It’s been a couple of minutes, and you decide to stay around the front of the store. That's when you hear a deep voice call out.
“Julie!!”
Turning around, you see a very, very handsome man run up to you and who you assume to be Julie. She lifts her head off your shoulders and lights up as she sees her father run up to her, she squirms out of your arms and runs to him. “Dada!!” He sweeps her up and gives her a kiss on the forehead, then glances over at you.
“Thank you so much for watching her, I was worried sick.” Julie was now resting her head on his shoulder and looked like she was going to fall asleep any minute now. "Hey, it’s really no problem she came running to me and was the sweetest angel ever.” He nods at you, grateful that it was you and not some weirdo.
“How can I repay you?”
“Repay me? For what?” You genuinely ask him, confused. It’s the right thing to do, to help. Before you can say anything else, he cuts you off. "Here, I’ll pay for your groceries, a thank you for looking out for Julie.”
“Oh no, sir, you don’t have to!! I was doing what was right."
“Please call me Andrew, and please do." Andrew tells you, and in a way he looks desperate, and so you decide to accept the offer. You two get in line, and you put your groceries on the belt, putting down the little divider so Andrew can load his. As you wait for him to finish, you make some silly faces at Julie that make her laugh, god she was adorable. It’s your turn, and the cashier rings your stuff up, and you start bagging your groceries. She tells you the total, and Andrew swipes his card, and then she rings up his stuff. You wait for Andrew outside, and you see him walk out with Julie. She spots you and rushes over to you.
“Uppies!” She’s making those grabby hands again, and you really can’t resist, so you pick her up, and she lets out a little giggle. You catch Andrew looking at you both. He puts your groceries in his cart so you can carry Julie with ease, and you follow him to his car. To any outsider you would’ve looked like a married couple with a child.
“Alright, lovebug, let’s get ya in your car seat.” As you lean down to put her in, she lets out a shriek, followed by a loud cry. Of course Andrew rushes over to check and sees that Julie is clinging onto you for dear life.
“I’m sorry about her, here let me take her.” As you try to hand her to her dad, she starts to cry louder, "Nuh uh!!” The little girl will not let go of your shirt as she cries. Andrew tries to take her, but she won’t let go.
“Julie, honey, you have to get into your car seat, okay, baby? Your daddy is waiting for you.” Her cries die down a bit, but she still lets out a couple of whimpers. This time when you put her down, she doesn’t fight it, but she clearly is upset. You turn to Andrew, who now looks a bit relieved.
“I’m sorry about her. She seems to really like you, which is so rare for her.” It was true, Julie didn’t have any women figure in her life. It was Andrew and her, Smurf had met her a couple of times, but Julie hated her. She had a hard time warming up to anyone, probably afraid they’d all leave her.
"Hey, don’t sweat it, Andrew. You’re doing a great job with her, she’s a sweetheart.”
After a couple more minutes of talking, you two part ways, but not before you get Andrew’s number.
summary: a night out with some coworkers after a medical conference leads to you accidentally texting your attending about how hot you think he is.
word count: 4.6k
contains: smut, oral (f receiving), unprotected sex, reader is a doctor, no use of y/n.
a/n: i know nothing about being a doctor or going to medical conferences but i tried my best here. If something is disgustingly inaccurate plz let me know :)
If you were being honest, you hated these things. Conferences, galas, all of it. You loved being a doctor, it was your life’s passion after all, but it was the incessant obligations outside of the hospital— the networking, the dressing up, the horrid small talk with other doctors— piled on top of your already packed schedule that had you dreading this particular medical conference more than usual.
There was one small silver lining, at least. This time, you had friends.
You’d only begun working at Pittsburg Trauma Medical Center a few months ago, looking for more of a challenge after spending the past few years of your career in dermatology. You didn’t hate it, per se, but you felt deep in your bones that you were meant for more high stakes work.
Not only did the job suit you better, but the people did too. Sure, you’d met some nice people in dermatology, even met your best friend there, but working in the ER surrounded you with people much like yourself. Adrenaline junkies.
Unfortunately, adrenaline junkies and medical conferences did not mix.
That’s how you found yourself at some dodgy dive bar down the street from your hotel the last night of your conference with two of your coworkers, Trinity and Victoria. The three of you had been bored out of your minds at the last lecture of the day, where some old pretentious man droned on and on and onnnnn about medical research that was about 25 years outdated. You really needed a drink.
“Okay, I know we agreed on vodka crans, but I got us green tea shots too. My treat, alright? I fucking need a shot after whatever that lecture was,” Trinity explains as she returns from the bar, setting three drinks and three shots down on the center of the table. You were able to snag some seats in the back corner of the bar, thankfully, because the last thing you want to deal with is any more people today.
“Oh god, it was horrible, wasn’t it? I was just about ready to rip my hair out. Didn’t think that guy would ever stop talking,” Victoria replies as she reaches for one of the shots.
The three of you clink glasses, tapping them down onto the wooden surface of the table before knocking them back.
“God, that’s fucking good,” you wince, the alcohol burning at the bottom of your throat.
The night continues in a cycle of work gossip and ordering vodka cranberries for the table. By the time you guys are leaving, you’re thoroughly buzzed.
You walk back to the hotel together, arm and arm, when you get back onto the topic of work. Feeling a little more truthful than usual due to the alcohol coursing through your system, you decide to tell your friends about an awkward moment you had during one of your shifts last week.
“Oh it was awful, you guys. I was assisting Dr. Abbot with a perforating GSW and he asked me to hand him hemostatic gauze, and I dropped the package all over the floor trying to open it. I’m talking gauze everywhere. I had to rush to get a new one, my hands were shaking like hell when I gave it to him,” you ramble. “And the worst part? He noticed. Pulled me into one of the on-call rooms afterward to ask what was up with me. I was horrified.”
Victoria furrows her brows, and Trinity slows her steps until the three of you are standing still in the middle of the dimly lit sidewalk.
“What’s wrong? Why are we stopping?” you ask, confused.
“Sorry, you were nervous?” Victoria questions.
“I didn’t even know that was possible for you,” Trinity admits, shock displayed on her face.
“I mean, yeah. If you guys had been there, you’d understand. The whole room was tense, you could hear a pin drop,” you explain.
“Don’t think that’s how I’d describe the Pitt, but okay,” Victoria concedes, falling back into step toward the hotel as you and Trinity trail close behind.
“Y’know, I don’t think it was the GSW that had you all worked up. I’ve seen you in action. You’re not one to falter, especially not like that. I think maybe a certain night shift attending has you all hot and bothered,” Trinity prods, landing a playful punch against your shoulder.
Victoria whips her head around at that. “Oh my god. That’s totally it!” she squeals. “Are you guys hooking up? I’ll be soooo jealous, he’s a total silver fox.”
Heat blooms in your chest and creeps up to your cheeks. You’re suddenly very, very hot.
“Jesus, no. I’m not hooking up with him. I’m not even into him, not like that. I can promise you he’s not what made me nervous,” you ramble. “We work a high stress job, it’s normal to make mistakes. And that’s all it was, a mistake,” you babble on, hoping your friends won’t pick up on the fact that you’re lying straight through your teeth.
While the part about not hooking up with him is true, you can’t deny the fact that you definitely have feelings for Doctor Jack Abbot.
It’s all his fault, really. From the start, he was charming. Good at conversation. Never made you feel less than, despite being the newbie of the department.
And it definitely didn’t help that he looked like that. Salt and pepper curls that framed his angular face which was dusted with freckles. Wrinkles around his eyes and mouth that made themselves known when he smiled. Biceps that bulged underneath his scrub top sleeve, which was far too tight considering the size of his muscles.
It got worse once you guys fell into a rhythm, able to work in tandem. Sometimes you didn’t even need words. It only took one look at each other for you to know exactly where he needed you, how to best assist him with a procedure.
If it wasn’t a look, it was a touch. A gloved hand overtop yours, guiding you on where to make an incision. A warm, large hand braced against your back as you intubate. A pat on the shoulder after you successfully stabilize a patient.
But undoubtedly, the worst part was the way he spoke to you. Whether it be a “Nice work, Kiddo,” after a particularly stressful chest tube placement, or a “What’s goin’ on up there?” with a featherlight touch to your temple when you were lost in thought. It was like he could sense what you were feeling before you’d even figured it out for yourself.
Clearly, whatever feelings you have for Dr. Abbot are written all over your face, because Trinity and Victoria seem wholly unconvinced.
“Okay, well if you’re not hooking up with him, then you should be. I’ve seen your dynamic, there’s some clear tension between you guys, babe,” Trinity argues as you finally approach the doors of your hotel.
“Yeah, that’s not happening. Even if I wanted it to, which I don’t, there’s no way he’d be into it,” you explain, the warmth in your cheeks only growing.
Victoria lets out a dramatic sigh as you make your way through the hotel lobby toward the elevators. “And I thought I was clueless.”
“Sorry?” you ask, pressing the button for the elevator. It dings and the doors open, the three of you piling in. You quickly push the button for floor three. You want to escape this situation as fast as possible, if you’re being honest. Your emotions are too heightened from the drinks to be having this conversation right now.
“If you can’t see it, there’s nothing we can do to help you,” Trinity replies. “Anyway, it might not be the brightest idea to sleep with a coworker. We all know how that went for me…”
“Oh Trin it wasn’t that bad. At least she doesn’t work in the same department,” Victoria remarks, then gestures vaguely at you. “Imagine if this hypothetical hookup with Abbot really did happen. She’d have to work with him all the time and he’s her attending. Now that’s bad.”
You groan. “Gee, thanks guys. I feel really supported right now.”
“So you do want to sleep with him then?” Victoria quips.
“No! My god, you guys. I’m done with the conversation,” you exclaim. The elevator finally reaches your floor and you waste no time stepping out into the warmly lit hallway.
“Well, I’ll see you both bright and early tomorrow. Still want to get coffee before the airport?” Trinity asks as she fumbles with her keycard outside of her room door.
Victoria, one door down from Trinity, follows suit in swiping her card. “Sure, how’s 7:00 sound?”
“Works for me, see you guys tomorrow!” you reply with a smile and a wave, making your way down to the end of the hallway to your room.
It hits you as you struggle to get your door unlocked that you’re a lot drunker than you thought. Not enough to warrant a hangover, but inebriated enough that you stumble toward your bed as you kick off your shoes.
After taking a much needed shower, washing away the grime of a long day, and putting on a pair of cotton shorts and a tank top, you cuddle up into bed and check your texts.
There’s multiple from your best friend, Jackie. The one you met when you worked in dermatology.
Jackie: girl i haven’t heard from you all day
Jackie: is the conference terrible
Jackie: so glad i don’t have to go to those lol
Jackie: is dr hottie there at least
You chuckle at her messages. Of course she’d bring him up. She’s the only person you’ve confided in about your attraction to Dr. Abbot, and she’s become obsessed with him ever since. Even gave him that ridiculous nickname.
You swipe back to check your other notifications, reading a text from your mom and watching a Tik Tok that Trinity sent you from her room before you finally go back to reply to Jackie.
Unfortunately, in your inebriated state, your finger slides on your screen and deletes your text chain with her.
“Shit!” you exclaim. At least you remember what she said. You quickly click the “New Message” button and start typing out her name.
j… a… c…
You click on her contact and begin typing.
You: sry i’ve been busy but yes the conference was shit
You: got drinks after im a ltitle drunk lol
You: and yes dr hottie is here thank god
You: i sat behind him during a talk this mornign and had to fight urges to run my hands through his sexy silver hair
You: i didnrt do it tho. i am brave
Sighing, you shuffle in bed so you’re no longer sitting up against the headboard but laying on your side. You reach toward the nightstand and flick the lamp off, filling the room with darkness.
Well, the room is dark until your phone buzzes on the mattress next to you and the screen lights up, emitting a soft glow.
Rather quickly, it buzzes again. You reach for it, expecting Jackie’s replies. While it’s not very late, she’s a night owl through and through, so of course she’d answer you immediately.
Instead, you see two notifications from… Jack Abbot? The only times you’ve ever texted him were about coming in early or that one time you’d forgotten your sweater in the break room and asked if he could hide it in one of the cabinets until your shift the next morning. Why would he be texting you at 11:00pm on a night you were both off?
You unlock your phone and click into your text thread with him.
Jack: I think you meant to send those to someone else.
Jack: I’ll try and sit farther away next time. Wouldn’t want my hair distracting you.
You shoot up in bed, breath catching in your throat. Immediately, your chest is on fire. There’s no fucking way you sent those messages to him.
You: oh my god
You: im so fuckign sorry
You: i was trying to text my friend
Jack: It’s OK.
You: its not
You: its extremely unprofessional
You: im so so sorry
Jack: Stop apologizing.
Your breathing still hasn’t calmed down. You’re mortified. How are you ever going to face him again?
For a minute, there’s no other reply. You debate texting him again, but what could you even say? “I’m sorry I think your hair is sexy”?
Instead, you try to focus on calming down. Everything will be fine. You can blame it on the drinks, even if you’re not really drunk. He won’t know that you’re lying.
Your eye catches on the three little dots at the corner of your text thread. He’s typing again. A lump forms in the base of your throat.
Jack: Where are you?
Confused, you type out a reply.
You: my room
You: why
Jack: How much did you drink?
You: not much
You: a few vodka crans with trinity and victoria
You: im mostly sober now
It wasn’t necessarily a lie. This interaction definitely sobered you up.
Jack: So you’re OK?
You: yep
You: safe and sound
Jack: Good.
Jack: Dr. Hottie, huh?
You: oh god pls dont remind me
You: im mortified
Jack: Don’t be.
Jack: Are you in bed?
Your eyebrows furrow at that last message. At first it seemed like he was just checking in on you, making sure you weren’t stranded and drunk at some shady bar. But what kind of question is that?
You: yes
Jack: Send me a picture.
Eyebrows knitting together in confusion, you open your camera and take a photo of the foot of your bed. You can make out the shape of the chair in the corner of the room and the TV mounted to the wall. You go back to your texts and send him the photo.
You: [1 attachment]
You: see
You: exactly where i said i am
Jack: No, a picture of you.
Oh.
With shaking hands, you swipe back to the camera app, this time flipping it so it’s front facing. You snap a photo of yourself, angling the phone so it captures your face and part of your torso.
You examine the photograph, taking in the pouty expression on your face and noting the way your tank top rides up at your stomach, exposing your midriff. Considering you didn’t put on a bra, you can see the faint outline of your nipples through the thin material.
Without overthinking it, you send him the picture.
You: [1 attachment]
Jack: Jesus.
Jack: You always sleep like that?
Feeling bold, the remnants of your night out still coursing through your veins, you type out a reply.
You: no
You: i usually sleep naked
You: but that feels a bit too exposing for a hotel
Jack: Fuck, sweetheart.
Jack: You have no idea what you’re doing to me.
You: send a pic
You: i wanna see
Heat pools between your legs. There’s no way this is happening. You’ll wake up tomorrow and realize you dreamt up this entire conversation.
An image from Dr. Abbot comes through.
Jack: [1 attachment]
He’s laying in his hotel bed in nothing but his underwear. You can’t see his face, but his chest is on full display. God, his muscles were something else.
But the real star of the show is his bulge, straining hard against the fabric of his boxers. One of his veiny hands rests atop it, and you can’t help but notice the wet spot pooling where his erection sits.
Fuck.
You hold your phone in one hand and slide the other one underneath your shorts and panties, rubbing slow, methodic circles against your core. Your phone pings with another message.
Jack: What’re you doing now?
You: touching myself
You: are u
Jack: Fuck, yes.
Growing warm, you kick the bedsheets aside. Your hand continues to circle, pressure building deep in your belly.
You: wish i could see u rn
Jack: [1 attachment - 0:21]
Oh, God.
Suddenly, everything starts feeling a little too real. You should not be doing this. He’s your attending. You’re sacrificing your career, everything you’ve worked so hard for, for what? One meaningless night?
But the way your hand is creating friction against your clit combined with Jack’s messages have you too horny to care, if you’re being honest.
Nervously, you click play on the video.
You almost regret doing it.
But you can’t look away from the sight of him pumping his cock up and down in the dim lighting of his hotel room.
It’s long, longer than you were expecting. And thick.
You watch as he drags his hand from the base up to the head, uses his thumb to circle the precum that's built up at the slit, and then works it up and down his length.
If the sight of that wasn’t enough, the sounds he’s making have you groaning into your pillow. He’s practically growling, the noises coming ragged from the depths of his throat.
You can’t even think straight, you’re so desperate for more. For anything. Without even thinking about it, you open your phone camera again and start recording.
It’s nothing special, considering how worked up you are. You really can’t even see much since your shorts and panties are still on.
You film as your hand moves underneath the fabric a few times, breathy moans escaping your lips. You pull it out slowly, showing off the sticky mess left on your fingers for the camera.
You: oh my god
You: thats so fucking hot
You: [1 attachment - 0:14]
You: this is how badly i want u
There’s no response for a minute, and you worry that you went too far. Maybe he realized how fucking crazy this whole situation is. Because that’s exactly what it is. Crazy.
Before you can begin to spiral too hard, your phone buzzes in your hand.
He’s fucking calling you.
You let it ring a few times, working up the courage to answer.
With a shaking hand, you click accept.
He doesn’t say anything at first, but you can hear his heavy breathing and the sound of something wet in the background.
“How are you doing it?” he mumbles into the phone, abruptly.
“What?”
“How are you touching yourself? Tell me.”
“Oh, I’m– I’m rubbing circles on my clit,” you can barely make out the words, feeling embarrassed.
“Oh fuck,” he groans. “Slip a finger in.”
“Jack, I–”
“Fuck, I need you to,” he begs. “Please do it for me, Kiddo.”
“O-Okay,” you stutter, lining up your middle finger with your entrance and sinking it in. You release a moan at the sensation, pumping your finger in and out a few times before adding another.
“God, that sound. You sound so pretty when you touch yourself. Can you hear me? Hear me pumping my cock? It wants you so bad, Sweetheart. You have no idea.”
His words make you shudder, more needy sounds escaping from your throat. The sound of his hand working against his length combined with his breathy moans have you bucking your hips into your hand.
“I want you too,” you whimper.
“What’s your room number?” Jack grunts.
“What?”
“I can’t do this. Knowing you’re right down the hall. What room are you in?”
You blink.
“302.”
The line clicks.
He hung up.
You stare at the dark phone screen in front of you, fingers coming to a stop under your panties.
What the actual fuck just happened.
Is he coming here? Like right now?
Suddenly, there’s three sharp knocks at the door. You readjust your panties and shorts and nervously make your way to the door, fumbling to open it because of how hard you’re shaking.
As you expected, Jack Abbot stands in front of you clad in a white t-shirt and a pair of sweats. He’s using his crutches, didn’t even waste time putting on his leg. His left foot dons one white sock. No shoe.
Just looking at his face makes the ache between your legs grow. His skin’s coated in a thin sheen of sweat, curls sticking to his forehead. His breathing is uneven, chest heaving against the tight fabric of his shirt.
Without a word, you open the door wide enough to let him through and he wastes no time heading directly for the center of the room, placing his crutches against the nightstand and sitting on the edge of the bed. You click the door shut and lock it.
“C’mere,” he whispers.
You take one step toward him. Measured, careful. Then another.
“Jack, I don’t know if we should…”
“Fuck, don’t say that. Would you just come here?” he growls.
You move closer until you’re standing in front of him. He reaches for you, placing his broad hands on your hips and tugging you closer to him, between his thighs. His thumbs move back and forth against your hip bone.
“Do you want this?” He asks, quiet.
“Yes.”
“Then let me make you feel good. Please,” he murmurs, pulling you even closer so he can press open mouthed kisses to the base of your throat and down your chest.
You moan into his touch, hands coming up to tug his hair.
“Is it as good as you imagined?” he teases.
“Sorry?”
“Running your hands through my ‘sexy silver hair’? Your words, not mine.”
A laugh escapes from his lips and you groan, dropping your head on top of his so he can’t see how horrified you are.
“Yeah, I’m going to regret that text for the rest of my life.”
Jack brings his hands up from your waist to the back of your head so he can pull you back to look at him.
“I’m not,” he says, maintaining such an intense eye contact that you begin to tremble underneath his gaze. “You have no idea how many times I’ve thought about it. Your hands in my hair. Your mouth on me. How you’d sound when I fuck you,” he whispers, leaning to continue sucking marks on your chest, just above the neckline of your tank top.
You moan at his words. If that’s the case, you should’ve been fucking him for months now.
Something snaps inside of you, and you give up on holding back. You want this. You can deal with the repercussions tomorrow.
You bring your hands down from his hair to his shoulders and push him back slightly on the bed so you have enough room to climb on top of him, straddling his thighs. He moves his hands back to your waist, keeping you stabilized against him.
“Hi,” you whisper.
“Hi,” he responds, breathless.
“Can I kiss you?”
“Fuck, please.”
You dip your head down and hover your lips over his, inches apart. You can feel his warm breath fan over your mouth as he exhales.
Fed up, Jack closes the distance, connecting his lips with yours.
And fuck, he tastes good.
You whimper into his mouth, quickening your pace, desperate for more.
The sound you make causes his grip to tighten around your waist, his kisses becoming sloppier. He darts his tongue out, seeking entry to your mouth.
You swirl your tongue against his and he releases a deep, guttural groan. Your bodies move together, hips grinding over the bulge in his sweatpants.
Between frantic kisses, he manages to lift your tank top over your head, pulling back only to admire your bare chest.
“Been dreaming about these,” he admits, taking his right hand off your hip to palm at one of your breasts. “They’re even better than I imagined.”
You throw your head back as he rolls your nipple between his knuckles. He dips his head and uses his mouth to suck on the other one, and the sensation has you rocking your hips even harder against him.
“So fucking sexy,” he breathes as he swirls his tongue around your nipple. You dig your nails into his shoulder, overwhelmed by his hands and mouth.
He kisses his way back up your chest and neck until his lips connect with yours again, hand still squeezing at your breast.
“Can I taste you?” he groans into your mouth.
You nod against him and he takes that as permission to lift you from his lap and toss you on the bed next to him, head hitting the pillow. You giggle at the sudden movement, Jack crawling above you to keep peppering your lips and jaw with kisses.
He pulls back so he’s sitting on his haunches and fiddles with the waistband of your shorts. Slowly, he peels the fabric down your legs and tosses them aside. He pushes your knees apart so you’re spread for him, ducking his head to kiss his way up your thighs.
“Jack, please,” you beg.
He places a few kisses over the lacy fabric of your panties before he pulls them to the side, face to face with your dripping center.
He licks one slow, agonizing stripe up your core, causing you to buck your hips up in the air.
“Fuck, you taste so good, Kiddo,” he mumbles into your cunt, lapping up the wetness that’s gathered there. He takes his time sucking and kissing at your clit, dipping his tongue into you, building you up to your first orgasm.
“Jack, I–I’m gonna come,” you whine, teetering over the edge.
“Let it happen, Sweetheart. Want you to come on my tongue.”
His words send you over the edge, riding out your orgasm against his mouth as he keeps swirling his tongue inside of you. He continues to leave soft kisses against your sensitive clit as you come down from your high.
Once you’ve settled, Jack kisses his way back up your stomach and chest until you’re face to face.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” you admit, still in shock.
“Me neither,” he whispers, brushing a stray hair from your face and tucking it behind your ear.
“I need you inside of me,” you breathe against him, desperate.
“Fuck, okay.”
Jack makes quick work of removing his shirt and sweatpants, then drags your panties down your legs, exposing you fully to the cool air of the room.
He strips himself of his boxers and pumps his length a few times with his hand, adjusting his position so he can line up with your entrance.
He pushes forward, seating himself inside you down to the hilt in one fell swoop. You moan loudly at the feeling of him, how he fills you entirely.
“Oh God, Jack,” you mumble.
“You okay?” he asks, hesitating to move.
“Yes, God, yes. Please move.”
With a grunt he begins working himself in and out of you, setting the pace. The head of his cock keeps hitting that spongy spot deep inside you so hard that it’s making you see stars.
“Fuck, Jack, just like that,” you babble, clawing at his back to stabilize yourself against his frantic thrusts.
“Jesus, Kid. You feel so good,” he mumbles into your neck. “I’m not going to last. Where do you want me?”
“Inside, do it inside,” you beg.
Those words alone are enough to make him falter, his pace becoming uneven and sloppy as he releases thick spurts of cum inside of you.
The warmth of his release combined with the feeling of his dick twitching inside of you has you hitting your peak, coming again with a garbled moan.
Exhausted, Jack collapses on top of you, head still nuzzled into your shoulder. The two of you are panting heavily, chests heaving against one another.
After catching his breath and leaving a trail of kisses beneath your ear, Jack lifts his head so he can look at you.
“Still embarrassed about those texts?”
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