mel realizes oh shit one day when they run out of size xl gloves and frank has to try to squeeze his huge hands into a size large. princess and perlah giggle about it and whisper something in Tagalog. santos rolls her eyes at them. "they're saying his dick's probably bigger," she explains like it's both totally obvious and really unfortunate. mel swallows and nods as it sinks in.
she locates a box of xl for frank and when she brings it over she can't help but hold her hand out and compare. he smirks and lets her. she can't help it. she wraps her whole fist around his ring finger. his wedding band digs under her skin. the very tip of his finger juts out from where she's gripped.
she's tempted to stick it in her mouth. but a code comes in and she drops his hand. but she's obsessed. she always wants to hold his hand now when no one's looking. lace her fingers in his. compare.
frank thinks it's funny. he lets her. it's harmless. he's got a wife and kids and he very firmly does not think about her small beautiful fingers wrapped around his cock. he does not stroke himself thinking of her pearly pink nail polish. when he does gets overwhelmed he goes to the bathroom and rubs one out. doesn't wash his hands. lets her cute little fingers wrap around his. one day he'll pull her there in with him. let her see what's really xl.
i'm thinking about the first time yoyo got to see santos's scars. i bet trinity played it flirty, made them get drunk first so garcia wouldn't zoom in on it or make a big deal. please let's go she probably thought because she didn't want something that happened when she was fifteen dictating her whole life. she didn't want to explain. she didn't want to tell her story. she wanted to be normal. sexy. desired. she didn't want it to change things. but it would. she knew that. it always did. so she got garcia a couple shots and insisted they touch in the dark of her apartment for the first time.
gotta say I'm a big fan of joy and ogilvie asking when lunch is, just like dennis did in season 1, and when dennis goes to throw a cereal bar? he only throws one to joy.
beautiful. joy is allowed to eat. ogilvie is permitted only to starve.
not sure how i feel about this whole farm wife thing with amy. like, guys, let whitaker run free with the cows and get some fresh air and a hot shower and this lady's hot crockpot meals. he can come home to robby whenever he gets his shit together.
let's go ahead and call it: abby's doomed. she's a goner, season 3 episode 1. then we get widower!langdon and supportive!mel and accidentally in love all through s3.
( gif from this beautiful set by the lovely @jackrrabbot ! )
☤ ─ SOLDIER BOY ! ; jack abbot
summ. It's the first time you see Jack in fatigues. It may or may not also be your last.
pairing. jack abbot / f!reader
w.count. 2k!
a/n. Watched 2x07 & had the itch to write Abbot doing what he does best (with a lil' PTSD, angst & religious imagery, kinda) because him in uniform is. WHEW!
YOU’RE ALRIGHT, SAYS the Saint donned in full-gear fatigues. He recites it akin to pious scripture. I got you. I got you.
You’ve been settled against the frosted cornerstone of a building. It’s rough, bites a chill against your back. Your vision is lulling, but you can feel fingers tuck your loose hair away to gently lean your head back upright.
“Abbot?” you realise, blinking hazily. “Huh. Hello there, soldier boy.”
You can’t hear what he says. A stream of static is erupting— it’s chatter, you piece, coming from the radio attached to his plate-carrier. Darling girl, you think you can make out, You’re gonna be okay.
“Darling girl?” you parrot, letting out a wet laugh. It’s difficult to speak— let alone breathe, or move. Something thick is collecting in your lungs, drowning you from the inside out. “What is this, the forties?”
He holsters his sidearm and musters an amused smile. It’s tense, you can recognise it in the dent of his cheek: the kind he flashes his patients with when they’re rolling into the ED, nervous out of their mind and asking if they’ll be okay.
“Well, you started it,” he says, deceptively calm as he thumbs at your carotid: it’s weak. Too weak. Abbot wills away the reflexive dread from taking over him. “Besides, I’m a classic kind of guy, y’know?”
“Take me home, then,” you murmur, delirious. The world flickers like a lightbulb on the fritz. “I’m… tired.”
“No, no, hey.” He breaks through your dizzy spell. “Not yet. We haven’t even gone out on a date yet, right?”
Groggily, you can see him sling his rifle aside and dig into his vest as he keeps an eye out. “You flirting with me, Jack Abbot?”
“Have been for the past year, sweetheart,” he hums, tearing a QuikClot packet with his teeth and ducking down towards you. “‘Bout time you caught on—”
You cry out.
A sudden bolt of lightning has rippled through you, and you catch yourself fisting at his sleeves out of blind instinct.
Easy, easy, I know, he apologises, still packing the gushing wound as tightly and quickly as he can.
The burst of white-hot pain has you jolting back into reality:
The street team. Routine outreach. You’d been right beside Whitaker when a thunderclap echoed through the winter air, sharp as the pop of a starting pistol. Then everybody had scattered in shrieks, and before you knew it you were looking skyward at the clouds, watching the snowflakes flutter down, down, down, to meet you.
“..itaker,” you choke, eyes bright with alarm, “Whitaker.”
“Safe,” he promises, ripping through a sterile dressing and pressing it over your bleeder. The dump of adrenaline won’t last you more than a few minutes at the rate you’re losing blood. “Hey, listen to me. Listen. EMS is coming, then we’ll get you to PTMC.”
You can hardly hear him through the battledrum in your ears and the firefight taking place only a street away from you. Gang-violence, you realise. That’s why Abbot is here with the SWAT team in full gear.
You’re gonna be fine, y’hear me?
“I’m bleeding out,” you slur, finally looking down at your torn scrubs, where Abbot’s gloved, red hands are coming away sticky; drenched up to the seams of his camo with cruor that’s too dark and too much and—
You remember now. You had taken a round straight through the gut.
What is it he told you, once?
Nipples to navel is no man’s land.
“Oh god,” you shiver, feeling your breath give way as the reality set in, “I’ve been bleeding out. That’s why you’ve— that’s why you’re being so sweet. I’m dy—”
“No one is dying,” Abbot cuts to the quick, chasing to meet your drowsy gaze. His voice is a low, fetching timbre. “Hey, hey. Look at me. That’s it. How does dinner sound?”
What? you say. Atleast you think you do.
He reaches up to touch your cheek, but hovers over the thin of it instead when he realises how bloody his palms are.
“Dinner. At a restaurant.” He spares a glance past the corner to where his unit has begun closing back in. “Somewhere classy, so we can dance, yeah?”
Gossamer. Periphery vignetting.
Okay, you agree. I’ll wear my finest.
The world tips like a cradle into a gaussian blur.
“…eetheart. Hey. Hey!”
You blink. Suck in a pained breath.
“Don’t close your eyes,” Abbot reminds, jostling you with a start. “You gotta stay awake, okay?”
Had you closed them? You didn’t notice. All you can tell are sirens blaring closer, and you imagine the ambulance, skidding in somewhere off in the distance.
“I can’t dance,” you admit, taking whatever precious time you have left to look at him; to carve into your memory the profile of his face, the colour of his eyes and the dimple whenever he speaks.
( Abbot looks different like this. Battle-worn and stalwart. But the light breaking through the snow behind him is casting a silver halo over his head, softening his rough edges. He looks like—
Like an avenging angel; armed to the teeth with nothing but gunpowder bullets and his healing hands. )
“Me neither,” Abbot soothes. “Just, just stay with me, can you do that?”
“Okay,” you say. “Okay. I will.”
Attagirl.
He doesn’t shake. He never allows himself to do so in times like these— it’s what had made him a good combat medic. Clarity in crises.
He doesn’t shake. Not when he’s forced to switch out between his medkit and his sidearm to return fire until Hiro had him covered; Not even when he’s forced to collar you a little further into safety, and it slashes a terrible, sickening dragpath of your blood across the glittering snow.
“You’ll be alright,” he’s saying. Ordering. It’s half for him and half for you. The firefight had long since passed and been handled, and he has you safe in his arms. The whole ordeal since he’d slid over to your side and carried you off had only been five minutes at best.
“I got you. I got you.”
When EMS hauls you both in and tears away, he doesn’t shake.
When they hook you up to drugs and bag you, he doesn’t shake then either.
Abbot might’ve even been mistaken for the calmest of the entire EMS crew as they wheeled you into the PTMC’s ambulance bay, where everyone’s already been prepped and waiting for your arrival.
Lateral transfer is smooth. They whisk you into Trauma-1.
Abbot gives a rundown of the situation; of mechanism of injury. He reports when and lists what’s been administered en-route to the trauma centre, and asserts that you “…won’t be stable for long, not unless we do something about her bloodloss and collapsed lu—”
Something blares from the monitors.
Jack’s heart seizes.
He reckons your vitals in a blink. O² is dropping, Jesse declares, and the bay runs more amok as other numbers begin to tank into catastrophe. You’re crashing. He has to move. He has to do something. He’s a doctor. He—
—grabs your limp hand; Feels your radial pulse deteriorating, thready with little life.
“You’re cold,” he announces, uselessly. It subsides into a whisper of “No,” and “Sweetheart,” and “Didn’t you say you’ll stay with me?”
Robby’s gaze snaps to Jack.
In a flash, someone is rushed in and is prying his fingers apart from you.
It takes Jack a moment of stubborn resistance to realise it’s Dana, tugging him aside.
“Listen to me. We gotta let ‘em work,” she avers. “Why don’t we patch you up too? Robby is on the case. He knows what he’s doin’, you know that.”
Robby. Right. Robby is a good doctor. An excellent doctor. He’s competent; not shaking— When did Jack start shaking? He never does.
…Not until now. Not until you.
( No amount of combat could’ve prepared him for this. No field manual ever said anything about witnessing your proverbial heart bleeding out in your arms, while you lie to their face that they would be fine. You just have to stay awake. Stay with— )
Like a good soldier, he has enough sense to let himself be led out and away from the fray despite his instincts clawing against it. But, “I’m not letting her out of my sight,” he says.
He’s shocked to find his voice fraught with desperation.
“Dana,” he startles. It’s his adrenaline, crashing. “Dana, I— I can’t— I can’t let her out of my sight—”
Something in her fractures along with the crack of his wavering voice.
“I know. I know, Jack. It’s alright,” she overrides in a hush, and like the clever woman she is, reasons with: “Look here. We can watch her from the Nurses station. How ‘bout we park you there, and you can keep an eye on her while we stitch your shoulder up. No rooms or beds, I promise. Sound like a plan?”
Yes. Good. Okay, he moves, since words are betraying him. There’s a ball in his throat he’s not sure how long he’s been swallowing down, and there’s a burn licking up the back of his eyes. He hadn’t even noticed he was clipped until it was mentioned.
Dana peels his gloves off. They’re slippery with your blood. She’s regarding him with that same, gentle look she spares for her most doleful patients. Then, once more like the clever woman she is, distracts his mind by turning its wheels as Perlah makes quick work of the wound on his shoulder:
She tells him that his SWAT team is safe and his unit is right behind him, ETA-5; that the rest of the hospital street team had made it out safely and were being treated too for minor injuries. That the men— gangsters— responsible for this whole shitshow in the first place are being apprehended as they speak.
Jack is grateful for her, in spite of however much of what she’s said almost certainly coming through one ear and out the other. It’s kept him, successfully, from spiralling into an anxiety attack.
He bristles, paces, hovers impatiently, until his adrenaline grinds to a stop. When they finally stabilise you and sweep you upstairs for emergency surgery, he tails you, helpless, where Walsh ends up having to step between him and the threshold of the doors leading towards the OR.
Abbot doesn’t argue.
Just stands outside at attention again until an hour— maybe several, he couldn’t tell anymore— had passed; and Dr. Shen must have come in already for the nightshift, because Robby is here now by his side to tell him the procedures he’d done on you in the trauma bay, and is pleading him to Stop doing guard duty, Jack. Stand down. It’s alright. The fight is over.
“Is it?” he cuts. You’re fighting for your life on a table right now, he can’t bring himself to say. And I never got to tell you that I—
“Robby,” he resigns, after a long while, “I won’t survive this.”
He had been picturing everyone he’s ever had taken from him since your gurney disappeared out of sight.
There’s Afghanistan— Curly and Vega and Yeti during Kandahar; Pope and Genie and Milo during Helmand— who he’s lost to the dogs of war. There’s his deceased MVC vet Raymond Orser who he coded for two hours straight to no avail, and there’s the ghastly weight of his wedding ring from when he lost his wife, and jesus fucking christ now he’s going to be losing you next, and—
Robby squeezes his good shoulder.
“I can’t. Not again,” Jack confesses. “I won’t survive it.”
It.
“She’ll pull through,” Robby insists, because there’s nothing more defiant than saying that at the face of Death; and lets his dearest friend cry at long last, lets him lean into him for a settling embrace.
The day’s events have caught up with them: they were anguished, and exhausted.
You wake up with the sun, an induced coma later.
Blearily, you make out what can reasonably be a rainbow of cards— is that a balloon?— and fresh flowers clogging your bedside, poking between the beeping medical paraphernalia that’s pumping drugs through countless lines. It feels like being a puppet with tangled strings.
You vaguely recall this isn’t the first time you may have been conscious as you recovered, but the first time fully awake and oriented.
There’s the ghostly warmth of a hand clasping yours you can still feel, after all, and the memory of muffled murmurs around you as you were sleeping.
Despite being sluggish, though, you manage the call button once you’ve gathered enough strength. A nurse materialises into your room, who briefly catches you up until your ICU doctor arrives with surgical consult: It’s Garcia, looking unimpressed with her pager pointed accusingly at you.
“You bitch,” she bites, without heat. “You scared the shit out of all of us the past week, y’know that?”
You make a face as you sip your cup of water. “Oof. Oh god. Don’t make me laugh.”
Then, not a split-second later:
“Oh, hello there,” you greet, to the Saint stunned at the door—
—And Abbot has to physically steady himself, out of the sheer overwhelming relief in his marrows.
“Soldier boy,” you finally call out. Your radiant smile, weak as it is, still washes over him like pure, incandescent sunlight.
“Darling girl.” His heart sighs at last. “I owe you a dance.”
It seems like many people missed that little exchange between Abbot and Al-Hashimi (don't blame you, they're both so hot I had to rewind several times).
Basically what Al-Hashimi says is that she worked in Kabul, Afghanistan and specifically in 2020 at the maternity wing of a hospital. In May of 2020 there was a massacre at the maternity wing which is located in Dasht-e-Barchi (that's what Abbot is referencing, that's why he follows up with "Tragedy.").
Given the scenes with the baby girl in the first episodes and now Al-Hashimi making a phone call to the Neuroscience Group to book an appointment with her doctor, she clearly has some sort of PTSD.
Can't wait to see where her storyline goes next. Sepideh does a phenomenal job with this role so far.
