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The Difference Between Us: Chapter 3

Pairing: Dr. Jack Abbot x Reader Reader: resident/combat medic!reader, amputee!reader, ex-military!reader, widow!reader

Summary: After being honourably discharged from the Army, you arrive in Pittsburgh with a half-finished residency, a body you are still learning how to live in, and a past you have no intention of unpacking. Dr. Jack Abbot is supposed to be a professional contact, nothing more. But he notices too much, understands things he should not understand, and carries himself with a familiarity you cannot quite place. What begins as professional tension slowly becomes something harder to ignore.

Word Count: 13.5K (ish)

Masterlist

Warnings: **This chapter specifically has references to child death**

age gap, mentor/mentee relationship, medical trauma, military trauma, PTSD symptoms, grief, spouse death, widowhood, amputation, prosthetic limb adjustment, survivor’s guilt, emotional repression, panic/nightmare episodes, captivity/torture references, violence, blood/injury, medical procedures, concussion, alcohol/smoking, age gap, complicated healing, eventual smut, swearing

Author’s Note: I want to say thank you all for the positive feedback AND for your patience :) This chapter kind of got away from me. I could have kept going but it was getting pretty long. I have added those who asked to the taglist, please just lmk if you want to join in the comments--reblogs, and thoughts are welcome.

Anyways! Enjoy! <3

Fifty dollars in Ubers to retrieve a car that had cost you nothing.

She was sitting in the bar parking lot exactly where you had left her the night before. Patient. Indifferent to all of it, occupying her space the way things that have outlasted everyone who loved them tend to occupy space. Without apology, without urgency, without any apparent awareness that time had passed at all.

You crossed the lot toward her.

A 1971 Pontiac LeMans Safari. The body was long and low-slung in the way that station wagons of that era carried themselves, a different grammar of car from what came after. Wide through the shoulders, with a hood that ran out in front like a declaration, the full length of her stretching back to a flat tailgate that sat close to the ground. The bones underneath were something. Anyone who knew what they were looking at would know that immediately. Anyone who did not would see only what the years had done to her.

The paint had once been Lime Gold, a particular saturated yellow-green that had probably turned heads off the lot in 1971 and now turned them for different reasons. Now chalky at the edges, paint lifting near the rear quarter panel in pale dry curls where the elements had found their way beneath it. Rust had set in along the wheel wells, patient and thorough. The chrome had gone dull, the brightwork reduced to a suggestion of itself. And the body carried dents the way a person carried old arguments, some of them yours, some of them Hunter's, some of them belonging to the decade the car had spent in storage where ordinary settling and neglect had done what neglect does.

You ran your thumb along the deepest dent as you reached her. It had been there since you were seventeen, and without meaning to, you were back in your grandparents house.

You were small. Small enough that the chair felt large, small enough that your feet did not quite reach the floor, small enough that you still thought of him as enormous even though in photographs from this time he is simply a regular-sized man with grey at his temples and a way of telling a story that made the room pay attention.

He was leaning back in his lounge chair, the one he always used, something in his expression had changed, from how it was when he talked about most things, to a more energetic version of himself reliving something from the past. Warmer. Like the story itself generated heat.

"I was twenty-two years old." He touched the centre of his glasses, pushing them up his face. "Your grandmother had just told me she was pregnant with your father and I had a car but it wasn't a family car. So I went to the lot, and as soon as I saw her," he pretended to wipe sweat from his forehead, one broad swipe of the back of his hand, "a 1971 Pontiac LeMans Safari in Lime Gold." He bellowed a laugh, loud enough that you heard it echo through the kitchen where you grandmother shift behind you. "She was mine."

You asked why he called the car she.

He looked at you over his glasses with the expression of a man who found the question both obvious and charming.

"Because you have to treat a car like a lady." He pointed at you with one finger, the way he did when he was making a point. "She'll take you anywhere you want to go. But you disrespect her, she'll leave you on the side of the road."

"Anyways," he restarted, after allowing himself a detour, "I drove straight from the dealership to pick up your grandmother." The smile that came was slower now, the specific one he reserved for stories about her. "She was standing on the front step when I pulled up."

He paused for effect.

"Arms crossed."

From the kitchen, your grandmother made a small sound, the kind that was not quite a laugh and did not pretend to be.

"We had a plan," he continued, with the tone of a man who had made peace with having abandoned the plan and never once regretted it. "Something sensible. Something practical. A family car, room in the back." He spread his hands. "And I came home with this. Lime Gold. Long as a boat."

He refused to repeat verbatim what she said about it. Every time anyone asked, he just laughed and waved it off, the gesture of a man who had won and could afford to be generous about the rest.

"What I will tell you," he said, "is that she came around."

Behind you, from the kitchen, your grandmother laughed, a real one, full, the sound of a woman laughing at a story she had heard so many times it had become less a story than a fact of life, something as familiar as the kitchen itself.

You stood in the bar parking lot with your thumb resting in the dent and let the memory go.

He died of a heart attack the year after your grandmother passed from a stroke.

Your father said he died of a broken heart, that he had missed her so completely, missed her in such a specific and structural way, that the body that had been operating next to her for more than fifty years simply decided it was finished.

You are a doctor now.

You know that's not how it works.

You still believe it is true.

You opened the driver's door. It groaned, the way it had always groaned, like the low complaint of a hinge that had been in use for fifty-three years and had opinions about it.

The interior smelled like stale leather and time, the particular combination of dust and warmth that very old cars accumulated and never fully lost. Underneath it, something else that had no clean name, the residue of a family that had sat in this car together, of laughter and bad singing and your father saying, “we’re gonna arrive in style,” with the certainty of a man who meant it every time.

You glanced up at the sun visor before you sat fully.

The polaroid was still there. Tucked into the felt, held in place by decades of pressure, slightly yellowed at the edges and still perfectly itself: your grandparents standing beside the car, young, her laughing at something mid-sentence, his arm around her with the ease of a man who had already decided how the rest of his life was going to go. Your father was in her arms. Weeks old. Eyes shut. Entirely indifferent to the car.

You looked at it for a moment.

Then you looked at the gear shift.

Manual. Five-speed. The clutch pedal on the left, which had been a problem when you first got the car back, and then a different kind of problem after Washington. Left foot below the knee was functional for many things and for this particular mechanical action required relearning from the beginning--not the motion, but the feel. Feeling the bite point through carbon fibre was not the same as feeling it through flesh, and the first weeks back behind the wheel had been a specific and humbling education.

You figured it out. You always figured it out.

You turned the key. The engine coughed, rattled, and caught with the low grumbling roar that had always been hers, rougher now, the sound of a machine that had been idle too long and was still clearing its throat.

I know. I gotta take you to a mechanic.

You let her warm up for a moment, then put her in gear and pulled out of the lot.

At the first red light you checked the rearview mirror.

The back seat was empty, but you wouldn’t have said the car felt empty. That was not the right word for it. It felt like a room does when the people who filled it are gone but the impression of them hasn't fully lifted yet. Not grief. Something more specific than grief. The particular sensation of being in a space where laughter used to live, where it had happened so many times the walls remembered it even if no one was there to hear it.

Your ninth birthday was the last time you’d all been together in the Pontiac.

You had not known that then. You were nine years old and it was your birthday and were pre-occupied with being newly nine.

Somewhere in the echo of this car, a smaller version of you was making the case of her life.

“Pllleeeeaaaasssee, Dad! Hunter got to steer on his birthday!”

You were on your knees, which was both theatrical and strategic. You had been planning this argument for months, since Hunter's fourteenth birthday, since you watched your father cave to the same request and unknowingly set the precedent. You had waited for your moment.

Your father was crouched down in front of you and tried to look firm. He had the face of a man attempting authority but not convincing either of them. He had already decided the moment you asked, thats the way it always happened. Whatever stern architecture he maintained with Hunter, with you and those eyes, he never stood a chance.

He opened the door and sat down.

“Sit on my lap. I do the gas and the brake.”

You had climbed in before he finished the sentence. The fairy wings from your costume, bent wire, thin nylon, three weeks past their prime, had gone directly into his face as you settled onto his lap and gripped the wheel with both hands. He did not say a word about the wings. You had the complete conviction of someone who has been waiting for exactly this moment and knows what to do with it.

“Put the pedal to the metal!”

He laughed. He was still laughing when he put the car in drive and helped guide you off the driveway and into the road, your hands on the wheel, his covering yours just enough without making it feel like you were in charge. He let you feel the weight of the wheel. The way the car moved.

And you drove.

The light changed.

You pulled forward.

The back seat remained empty in the rearview, and somewhere behind you, the shape of that birthday, the last one, sat in the car the way it always had. You had not known at nine--that last was about to gain new meaning. That the word would start to arrive differently in you, weighted and specific, collecting things it had no business holding.

You drove home.

The apartment building had a handicap space with your unit number painted in it. The space had come with the lease, arranged without your input, and you used it the way you did most things you had not chosen and could not practically argue with--without enthusiasm and with a resentment you acknowledged was not entirely rational and did not stop feeling.

You pulled in. Cut the engine.

Upstairs, the apartment was exactly as you had left it. The bathroom door was still closed. The hole in the lower cabinet was still there, the ghost of the burst face wash still faintly marking the wall above the tub. You stood in the doorway for one moment and looked at both of these things.

Then you turned away, changed into soft clothes, and brought your laptop to the couch.

863 unread emails. Jesus.

Eleven months... approximately. Eleven months of the world sending things into a void and not getting an answer back.

You scrolled.

The first hundred were exactly what you expected:

A clearance alert from the tactical gear brand you had ordered from twice before everything happened SALE ENDING TONIGHT!

Presumably the fourteenth time they had sent that particular subject line.

Three alerts from a scrubs retailer whose clearance section you had browsed one sleepless morning in the spring of 2024 and apparently never unsubscribed from.

A TRICARE service notification, No Action Required.

The AUSA Weekly Newsletter, subscribed in 2019, read perhaps twice.

Fifteen Army Times Digests.

None of them consecutive in the inbox because nothing in an inbox was consecutive, each one separated by something else.

A VA Claim Status Update you had filed six months ago and forgotten.

Next to a LinkedIn notification from someone whose name you recognised without a face attached.

A follow-up from the prosthetics clinic in Washington: Socket Fit Check-In – Please Respond. Sent six weeks after discharge.

You had not opened it then. You did not open it now.

Two emails from a Veterans' Peer Support Committee, subject lines about connection resources and benefits navigation.

Another scrubs sale.

You kept scrolling.

Then, deeper: names.

Amber. Three separate threads, three different dates. The first sent four days after your discharge from the Army. You did not open any of them.

Benson. Twice.

Gomez. Once, a month since you left. Subject: Checking in.

And then, a thread that made you stop. Lukas. The first message sent the week you arrived in Washington. The most recent from five days ago. Every week between, consistent as a clock. Subject: Still here.

Just that, every time. No pressure, no escalating urgency. Just, still here. 47 emails in 47 weeks, none of them requiring anything from you in return.

You were going to respond to them.

Just not today.

Near the top of the queue, one day ago, from an address ending in @ptmc.org:

CONDITIONAL OFFER — Observer Physician, Emergency Medicine, Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Centre.

You clicked it.

The language was clean and did not waste words:

Observer Physician, Provisional. Reporting structure: Dr. Jack Abbot, Senior Attending, Emergency Medicine. Minimum ninety-day observation period, subject to extension at departmental discretion.

Then the scope of practice during that period, laid out in plain terms.

Chart review and documentation: permitted, with required attending countersignature on every entry. Patient assessment: permitted under direct supervision. Procedural assistance: permitted with attending physically present. Independent clinical decisions: none. Independent ordering authority: none. Prescriptive authority: none.

Great. I'm a fucking intern again.

Two and a half years in the field. Clinical decisions made in under thirty seconds with whatever was at hand. Bilateral chest decompressions in the back of a moving vehicle, damage control surgeries in a tent, keeping people alive with whatever was in the gap between what you needed and what you had filled entirely by stubbornness and field improvisation. And now you required a countersignature on your documentation.

“You have to follow the rules of where you are.” UGH!

You had met him once, properly, for less than an hour, and he was already getting to you.

You read to the bottom.

In-person signature required. Contact Dr. Gloria Underwood, Director of Operations, at the number below. Both Director Underwood and Chief Attending Dr. Michael Robinavitch would be in attendance at the signing meeting. Please call at your earliest availability.

You set the laptop down.

Looked at the bookshelf.

Sawyer's letter was still there, still sealed, sitting where you had placed it the day the package arrived, the larger sealed envelope beside it. You had walked past both of them for too long.

You had not been able to open either one. Not because you were afraid, exactly. It was more specific than that, you had not been able to open them because doing so required something of you that you were not finished preparing for. The letter you wouldn't read until you'd gone through the photos first. All of them, the whole chronological box of them. You had only made it through perhaps a third of before you had to stop. You had not reached the end of it yet.

You looked at the envelopes a moment longer.

Then you picked up your phone, typed the number from the email, and pressed call.

It rang once.

Twice.

"Gloria Underwood." Clipped, efficient.

"Director Underwood." You kept your voice level. "This is Y/N Abbott."

A brief stillness on the line.

"Two T's," she said, and you could hear the smile in it.

"Two T's," you confirmed.

12 Days Later

The mirror in the front hallway was almost too large. It had come with the apartment and on most mornings you walked past it looking slightly to the left of your own reflection without deciding to. Tonight you were standing directly in front of it, which you were not finding pleasant.

Hospital-issue black scrubs. Off-white long-sleeve athletic shirt underneath, sleeves pushed to mid-forearm, which was where they were always going to end up anyway. The habit had calcified overseas. You spent years working in heat, in conditions that required rolling sleeves up dozens of times a shift until eventually you started every shift with them already rolled, a shirt that held the sleeve there without a second thought. You owned this shirt in six colours. The off-white was for tonight because it sat clean against the black.

Dark grey New Balances. Broken in. Quiet-soled.

Hair secured at the back of your head, relaxed but anchored, not a single strand given the opportunity to fall into your field of vision.

Eyebrows filled in at the ends. Mascara. The ring on its chain sat below your collarbone, just under the neckline.

You reached up and lifted it, dropping the chain beneath your shirt. Gone. Hidden for no one to ask about.

You bent over to adjusted the left pant leg, then turned your remaining limb through two rotations, checking the socket's tracking. Checking the drape of the fabric.

Nothing visible.

You straightened.

The apartment was quiet behind you. And then, without deciding to, you started to relive the meeting.

The conference room at PTMC had been ordinary in the specific way that institutional spaces were ordinary, a rectangular table, a ring of chairs, a pitcher of water no one had touched, fluorescent overhead light that did its job without enthusiasm. You had registered all of this and sat down.

Gloria Underwood had been exactly what you expected. Efficient. Warm in the specific way of someone who understood that warmth was professionally useful and deployed it with precision. She had looked at you when you walked in and said, with a smile that was controlled at the edges, she understood you had already made something of an impression on the emergency department.

You had not asked her to elaborate. She elaborated anyway.

“I hesitated, initially, when I received Sergeant Major Sawyer's request, because of the incident in the ambulance,” she said. “That cannot happen again. I want to be clear with you about that.” Then, in the same register, “But Sawyer explained the context. I understand what you came from. And I have a great deal of respect for both.”

Dr. Michael Robinavitch had been to her left.

He looked like a man at the far end of something long. Not burned out--that implied a flame that had extinguished, and this was not that. It was more that he had been running on will and commitment for so long that the two had become indistinguishable from each other, that the part of him that wanted to be there and the part of him that had no choice had merged into a single continuous motion he no longer examined. His eyes were attentive in the way of someone whose attention was not free, who had to choose where to spend it. He had looked at you when you sat down and not looked away.

"Call me Robby," he said, about three minutes in.

You nodded. You were not going to call him "Robby". He was your superior officer in every practical sense except the name, and you had been trained for the better part of a decade to address rank correctly, and a conference room in Pittsburgh was not going to override that.

He looked at you for a moment with an expression that was entirely unreadable and then let it go.

Gloria opened a folder.

She went through it the way she might go through a shipping manifest: name, discharge status, training history, deployment record, functional designation, each item in the same even register, without adjusting her voice to indicate that some items carried more weight than others.

Then the medals.

“Purple Heart. Prisoner of War Medal. Combat Medical Badge. Bronze Star with Valour Device.” She read the citation language, “For actions taken during captivity, demonstrating conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in the face of enemy action. 27 days of unlawful detention. Following escape, attempted treatment and extraction of two fellow service members under hostile fire. Sole survivor.”

The room was quiet.

You looked at the table and kept your face still.

Robinavitch had gone very still beside her, the attentive quality of his gaze shifting into something else entirely, something you could not name because it was aimed inward.

Gloria moved forward.

Dr. Osei's letter. Your PT's letter. Both landed on the same conclusion through different routes: "Re-entry, not immersion." "Structured, supervised, monitored." "She is not adjusting. She is functioning."

Then Gloria closed the folder, set it to one side, and looked at you directly.

"The details discussed today remain between the three of us," she said. "I also received correspondence from Dr. Abbot, who confirmed his connection to Sergeant Major Sawyer and has indicated he would serve as your direct supervising physician." She set her pen down. "I imagine having a supervisor who has navigated something similar will be a useful support. For the adjustment."

Silence arrived in the room.

Not a long silence. Just long enough.

You looked at Robinavitch. He looked at you. His jaw shifted, just slightly, in the way of someone who has specifically chosen not to respond. Neither of you said anything. Both of you moved on.

The second half of the meeting had been paperwork, HR protocols, a brief conversation with the accommodations coordinator about the locker situation and the parking marker. Robinavitch had been quieter through all of it, present but not leading, watching more than he participated. You had caught him doing it twice. That specific quality of attention, holding on you a beat longer than the content of the meeting required, as if he had arrived at something and was keeping the conclusion to himself.

When you stood to leave he stood too, looked at you one more time with those tired, careful eyes, and said goodbye.

Three knocks at the door.

You did not need to check the peephole.

You opened it and there was Kalista, oversized sweatshirt, hair loose, nose still bandaged, the bruising had gone yellow at the edges. She looked significantly more like herself. She also already had her arms open.

Oh no.

"I wanted to come and wish you luck," she said, and had her arms around you before you finished processing the sentence.

You stood there for a moment, arms at your sides, but then you raised them and held on. She was slowly and systematically making a “hug person” out of you, without announcing it and without asking permission, and you had apparently decided somewhere along the way to let her.

You pulled back first and pressed two careful fingers along either side of the bridge of her nose, checking the tissue.

Swelling resolving on schedule, alignment holding.

"It's healing well," you told her.

"I better be." She released you entirely and walked directly into your apartment, heading for the kitchen with the easy authority of someone who had stopped asking permission somewhere around the third visit. "I've always wanted a nose job. I just wish I'd had some notice."

You followed her. "Maybe I shouldn't have turned my head."

She opened the freezer, found the ice pack. "Then we'd be matching."

"Your face is proportioned correctly. You didn't need a nose job."

"Perfectly proportioned," she corrected, and pressed the pack lightly to the bridge with the resigned competence of someone who had done this enough times to have developed technique. "So." Her tone shifted to the mode that performed seriousness without committing to it. "Since my nose is broken, and it is at least partially your fault-"

"HA! You told him I could take him in a fight. Not me."

"He punched me because of you."

"He punched you because he was taking steroids. That anger was a character trait that was already present before you rage baited him."

She blinked at you. You looked at the bag of chips she had opened on the counter and took one.

"Duly noted," she said, already smiling. "Sooo. You are going to find me a hot doctor? That is literally the minimum you owe me."

"I am not Meredith Grey."

"You work in a hospital-"

"Yeah, a hospital is a place where sick people come to receive clinical care."

She raised one eyebrow. Just the one.

You looked at her. She held the eyebrow. You both said it at the same time, "So pick me! Choose me! Love me!"

Then you were both laughing, the kind that arrived before you could organise it and didn't stop cleanly. She slapped your arm. You let her. When it settled you were both slightly breathless and the tightness that had been sitting in your chest since you woke up had been pushed into a smaller space for the moment.

You had watched the show for the first time in her hospital room the afternoon she was allowed visitors, mid-season, no context, just sat in the bedside chair and started watching from wherever she was. You had spent the first few episodes pointing at the screen every time the medicine was wrong. When you got home you had started from the beginning.

Overseas, bandwidth on the base was allocated for operations and communications. Entertainment moved on hard drives, shared and copied, never guaranteed. You had mostly listened to music. You had never watched the show before and had not noticed the absence, not until you sat in a hospital room in Pittsburgh and discovered that it was the exact right kind of ridiculous for the moment you were in.

You were now 31 episodes in and had no intention of stopping.

"You're going to be great tonight," Kalista said.

The straightforwardness of it found a gap in your defences that you had not accounted for. You were still getting used to receiving things like that.

"I appreciate it," you said, and meant it more than it came out.

You returned to the front door and reached for your bag and ran through it: extra liner, backup shrinker, water bottle, the compact first-aid kit that had lived in every bag you owned since 2016 without requiring a conscious decision, granola bars, stethoscope. You found the ibuprofen. Shook a pre-emptive dose into your palm, a doctor's calculation, not a patient's. Getting ahead of the swelling before twelve hours on your feet made it a problem.

You had not been on your feet for twelve hours sin-

The smell arrived first.

Thick, humid, the stale damp air of an enclosed space not designed for people to stay in, that held the moisture on the floor and walls and never released it. You knew the smell before you realized you were remembering it.

Your arms were above you, tied tight. They had been above you long enough that the ache had become geography. Your tank top was soaked through. Your field shirt was gone. Your boots were gone.

You were standing on both feet. You could feel the grit of the cement and dirt against the soles of your feet.

A man in front of you was yelling at you in a language you could not understand. He said it again, the same flat cadence.

“Please,” your voice was unrecognizable, “I don't know anything, I don't know.”

His eyes moved downward.

The screw was large. Maybe six inches in length, an inch in diameter. The kind of hardware meant for structural things, for load-bearing things, for things that were not supposed to move.

You had felt every inch of it.

It went in slowly. One turn at a time, the way you turned something when you wanted to be certain it would hold. You could feel the pressure arriving before the pain did, the tissue giving way in a sequence your body reported to your brain in real time with a specificity that was almost clinical, almost, except that you were the patient and there was no anaesthesia. The sound that came out of you hit the cement walls and came back with nowhere to go. You heard yourself. You could not stop it.

"Pleeeeaaase! STOP! Pleaaaaaseeee!"

By the third turn it had gone through the arch. Rust against flesh, metal against bone. Both sounds at once, intimate and impossible.

By the fifth rotation, it hit the floor.

You were pinned.

You blinked.

Pittsburgh. Your kitchen. The ibuprofen in your palm.

You shook your arms out, hard.

Once.

Twice.

The ghost of sensation was moving through your leg, the echo of pain firing along pathways that led nowhere now. You breathed through it.

One. Your keys on the counter.

Two. The plants in the front hallway.

Three. The pairs of shoes by the door.

Four- four-

"Well, I know it's going to be a great night," Kalista said, from right behind you.

You turned.

She was watching you with the quality of attention that was not pity, not alarm, not the terrible careful gentleness of people who had decided to treat you like something that required handling. She had seen the arms shaken out. She did not say anything about it. Her eyes just said: I see you. We're still here.

Your pupils were still adjusting. You could feel it.

"Thank you," you said.

You took the ibuprofen. Dry swallow. Then shouldered your bag.

Kalista put her hand briefly on your shoulder as you passed. "Don't forget… hot doctors."

The laugh that came out was small and real. "Goodnight, Kalista."

"See you tomorrow!"

You turned toward the elevator and watched the numbers change.

You took the route that ran past the river.

It was wide and flat and silver at this hour, the sky behind it still holding the last of the evening light. A thin burnt pink sitting low at the horizon, the water catching the sun spreading it out in long flat reflections that moved slowly with the current. Something about a body of water that size did something to your nervous system that you had never examined directly, only relied on. In Salerno when the sun had set over the base perimeter and you had always loved it. But there was no water, just sand and distance and the way the sky shifted into a rich orange before the dark of night fell.

But this, this was different.

This was Pittsburgh.

You kept driving.

The staff parking at PTMC was a concrete structure, six levels, attached to the hospital. You turned in and came around toward the ground level.

The handicap spaces were there, well-lit, clearly marked, empty, close to the stairwell door. The placard was in your bag, you could grab it and put it in place before you finished parking.

Nope.

You drove past.

Took the ramp. Third floor. Fourth row back from the stairwell.

You cut the engine and sat with the ticking quiet for a moment. The Pontiac, your car looked like an old, beaten, lived-in station wagon that had been run into the ground. Faded and dented and not worth a second glance from anyone who did not know what they were looking at.

You got out of the car and made your way towards the entrance.

Locker 25. End of the row, bench angling away to the left before it reached you, sightlines of the room would not naturally fall to this corner.

Some small fortunes still remained in the world.

You had one earbud in. Can’t Get You Out Of My Head by Kylie Minogue came through low, the particular rhythm of it occupying the space where your thoughts would otherwise start running. Adam complained about this song every single time you played it. Too repetitive, he said. Always the same. You had played it specifically because of this opinion, which in retrospect was a slightly juvenile position. But now every song he had complained about was entirely yours, belonging to no conversation, answering to no one's preferences but your own.

The temporary code for your locker was 1-2-3-5-6-7.

Sawyer would have things to say about this.

You reset it: 0-8-1-2-9-6.

August 12, 1996. Adam's birthday. The same six digits you used for everything. Completely predictable to anyone who knew you. Sawyer would have had opinions about that too.

You loaded the locker. You keep the water bottle out, placed a granola bar into your left pocket and hooked your stethoscope around your neck. Then you checked your watch: 6:23 PM.

Nice. I got lots of time to look around.

You closed the locker and waited for the confirmation beep.

You made your way towards the door but it opened before you reached it, fast, full momentum, you had half a second before the impact. His chest met your face. Two hands caught the bend of your elbows, his grip certain and immediate, and you both stilled.

You looked up.

Tall. Fair skin, slightly flushed. Dark hair, almost black, and eyes that were a particular shade of blue that registered before anything else did, the kind that arrived in your visual field and simply sat there, certain of itself. He was looking down at you from a height that for a half-second, at this angle, in this light, was Adam's height.

Stop. Filed. Gone.

His breath was warm against your face. You could see a faint scar at the corner of his jaw, small, old, the kind that had been there long enough to be unremarkable to everyone but you in this particular second.

"Sorry," he said, on an exhale, and then he was past you. Three seconds to a locker across the room, something grabbed, three seconds back, clearing you without breaking pace, the door clicking shut behind him so fast you felt the shift in air pressure before the room settled.

You stood in the empty room.

Then you crossed to the full-length mirror. Just one final check, left pant leg, collar, ring tucked below the neckline.

You reached for the door handle.

It opened again.

Unhurried this time.

Dr. Abbot walked through with a small duffel slung over one shoulder, the strap held in his left hand, his arm carrying it with the particular ease of someone who carried things with intention. You registered the forearm, the clean definition of the muscle there, the line of a vein along the inside of it, the kind of detail that arrived without invitation, and redirected your gaze to his face in the same motion.

He met your eyes. The corner of his mouth moved.

"Abbott." He let the door fall behind him. "You're early."

"You told me to be on time."

That got a small, genuine smile from him, brief and contained. He punched his code into his locker, back to you, opened it, dropped the duffel in with the efficiency of a routine. Then he closed it, turned, and sat down on the bench facing you.

The expression that settled over his face was deliberate. He had something specific he wanted to say and had thought about when to say it.

"I want to tell you something now," he said, "so you're not carrying a question around all shift." He held your gaze steadily. "Sawyer told me about your leg. Left, below the knee."

Every muscle in your body now frozen in place.

He had said it the way doctors said things and the way soldiers said things, which were not always the same thing but in this case were, cleanly, directly, without softening it into something easier to hear than it was.

Your face did not move. Your mouth was closed. You were aware, distantly, that you did not have a response yet and were not sure what shape one would take.

"She told me because," He reached down. Rolled his right pant leg up in two efficient movements.

The prosthetic was functional and unornamented. A thing that had been integrated long enough to stop requiring adaptation, to simply be part of how he moved through the world. A mid-tibial right leg, the carbon-fibre pylon visible below where the suspension sleeve ended, the foot system built for long hours on hard floors. Not dressed up. Not apologised for.

In your apartment you had seen the hip compensation. The barely-there adjustment, the practised redistribution of weight when he turned in the kitchen, the quality of stillness that came from years of knowing exactly where his body was.

What. The. Fuck. Sawyer.

He let you look.

"Kosovo," he said.

One word. Carrying all of it.

He rolled the pant leg back down. Straightened. Ran one hand over his jaw, the faint rasp of several days' stubble, grown in rather than simply present, sitting well against the structure of his face in a way that was not your business to observe.

Not the time. Stop.

"So now you don't have to wonder how much I know," he said. "That's it. I don't know how. But I do know it was over there."

You nodded. Words still had not come.

He did not appear to need them. He tilted his head toward you, eyebrows lifting slightly.

"And because you're with me tonight, you're going to sit down when I tell you to sit down."

The eyebrows stayed up.

You nodded again.

"Good."

He stood up, looked at you a moment, then extended his arm--not a handshake, not the civilian version of it, but the other kind, forearm to forearm--a gesture that meant something specific between people who had learned it from the same source.

You took it. The grip, the brief hold, then release.

It was only afterward, when he had already let go, that you registered you had not hesitated to fill his grip with your own. You hadn't even thought about it. You simply took the grip the way you had taken it hundreds of times before, in places far removed from a locker room in Pittsburgh. You had not noticed the comfort of it until it was already over.

He tucked his chin, short, downward, precise. The greeting that was not a greeting, the acknowledgement that lived in a different register from anything civilian.

You returned it. And for just a moment you felt something click back into place, some recognition of yourself in a language you had not spoken in almost a year.

Then his eyes left yours and he moved to the door. You followed him into the corridor and under the sterile fluorescent light of a hospital.

He gave you the tour efficiently and without a single wasted motion.

The Pyxis unit, the automated medication dispensing system, “your ID badge accesses it, all pulls are logged, you are not independently ordering anything so anything your pulls needs my countersignature.” The crash cart locations, “north bay, south bay, trauma one, trauma two, know where they are before you need them.”

The supply rooms, the imaging order terminal, the on-call paging system for surgical and neuro and ortho consults. The board, which tracked every patient currently in the department and their status in real time.

You took all of it in the way you took in everything, quickly, without needing it repeated.

By the time you finished, the night team had gathered near the bay entrance.

Eight-ish people in the loose formation of a group that knew each other well enough not to need to perform it. They cohered when Dr. Abbot arrived without being asked to, the way groups shift around certain people naturally, not from authority alone but from something more specific to the person.

Dr. Ellis was there. You recognised her from South 7, the particular quality of her stillness that communicated more than movement usually did. She looked at you when you came in and the expression on her face became fractionally more specific, not quite a smile, not quite relief, something between them.

Beside her was a young man with shoulder-length curly hair who looked at your name badge, looked at Ellis, and then looked back at you with the undisguised expression of a man who had been waiting for this moment and found it did not disappoint.

Great. Everyone in this room already knows my fuckin’ name.

Dr. Abbot stood front and centre of the loose cluster. Weight distributed evenly, arms loose, the same quality of stillness you had seen in the trauma bay and in the locker room and in your hallway at six in the morning--the kind that meant he was entirely present and the room knew it.

He looked around the group and let a beat of quiet settle before he started.

"Alright, I see the eyes." He looked around with the dry acknowledgement of a man who found his team predictable and did not mind it. "I know what you're all wondering. So let's deal with it." He gestured toward you with a slight tilt of his head. "To my left is Dr. Abbott. Yes. Dr. Abbott. Two T's. I know. We will get to the implications of that in a moment." A brief pause. "She comes to us from overseas. Specifically a forward surgical environment, which for those of you who have spent your entire careers at institutions where the supply room has what's in the supply room, I want you to understand that she has been practicing medicine in conditions that would make most of your worst nights look like elective procedures." He let that land. "She is functionally an R3 and she is joining us tonight in an observational capacity. What that means is she is with me, she assists when I say she assists, and all documentation from her requires my co-sign. Shen, if I'm not available, she can go through you." He nodded to a man on the far side of the cluster, lean, attentive, holding a cold drink. "Clear on all of that?"

General nods.

"Good." His tone shifted, fractionally lighter. "Now. For the record. And I say this because I know one of you," he looked at the curly-haired man with something adjacent to patience "have already been thinking about this. If your documentation involves both of us, which tonight it will, you need to differentiate. The paperwork needs to be distinct. If I find a chart that has combined us because someone forgot a second T, I will be very disappointed and slightly impressed, but mostly disappointed."

A ripple went through the group. Ellis was pressing her lips together.

"So," the curly-haired young man said. "What do we call you?"

What followed was several seconds of people thinking out loud simultaneously, with the particular collaborative chaos of a night shift team that was comfortable with each other.

“Senior Abbot and junior Abbott?”

“Boy Abbot and girl Abbott?”

“Attending Abbot and resident Abbott?”

“Old Abbot and young Abbott?”

That one earned a brief silence and a side eye which everyone pretended not to notice.

Then the curly-haired one.

Mateo.

You read his badge, who had clearly been waiting for his moment "Generic Abbot and Brand Name Abbott. Jack is generic, same active ingredient, one T, no frills. She's brand name," he gestured toward you "full formula, two T's, premium."

Dr. Abbot looked at him with the long-suffering expression of a man who had made the mistake of encouraging this.

"Or," someone said, "Abbott 2.0."

That one settled differently. Landed cleanly. A few people nodded.

Ellis said it again under her breath, “Abbott 2.0,” as if trying the fit of it.

Dr. Abbot looked at you.

You looked at him.

You had given a quick "hello" to the group when he introduced you in the beginning, accompanied by a small wave that you were already regretting. You said nothing now but gave a small smile and the faintest nod.

Abbott 2.0 isn’t the worst.

"2.0," he said. "I like it. That works. Anyone who puts it in official documentation goes home."

"Noted," said Mateo, who clearly had no intention of following this.

Dr. Abbot looked around the group one more time, and something changed in his face. The lightness clearing, the thing underneath it becoming visible, the specific quality of a person who cared genuinely about the people in front of him and expressed it in almost no words at all.

"We are the nightcrawlers," he leaned in as he spoke, "we deal with the weirdest and the wildest. Because-!"

They came back at him together, without hesitation, "We are the weirdest and the wildest of them all!"

"That's right!" He clapped your shoulder once, firm, his other hand gripping the stethoscope around his neck. "And tonight they are reaaaaally going to be crawling. So." He looked at the group. "Go get some."

The room shifted. Something warm and specific moved through it.

Again, in unison, "HOOAH!"

You caught it just above a whisper, "hooah," the cadence already there in your chest from years of something similar, from circles like this one in places far from a hospital corridor in Pennsylvania. It came out quieter than everyone else's, a quart-second behind, but it came out.

He heard it. His eyes found yours for just a second.

The team dispersed with the efficiency of people who knew exactly where they were going.

Ellis passed close enough to nod at you with the expression of someone who had questions and was choosing the right moment for them.

Mateo fell into step beside her and you caught, just, the tail end of what he said to her, "so we are absolutely calling them Abbott squared, right," and Ellis laughing as they moved away.

Jack stayed where he was. You stayed beside him.

"Stay close tonight," he said, looking toward the board. "Don't go looking for something to prove."

"I'm not trying to."

He looked at you sideways.

Partially true.

"Mm," he said. And walked toward the board.

You followed, one step behind, his left foot leading, your right. Into the shift.

The first case he brought you to was a 30 year-old male, abdominal pain, presenting from triage.

"Good place to start," he said, outside the bay. "I can asses. See where you're at." He tilted his head slightly.

You understood “where you're at” actually meant he wanted to asses where you were beyond your clinical ability.

The patient was sitting up in the bed, arms wrapped around his midsection, the posture of someone who had been hurting for long enough that bracing had become automatic. He looked up when you came in.

"Hello, Mr. Ramirez." Dr. Abbot kept his voice easy. "My name is Dr. Jack Abbot. This is Dr. Y/N-" brief, unavoidable pause "-Abbott."

Mr. Ramirez narrowed his eyes.

"Unrelated," he clarified. "This is a teaching hospital, are you comfortable with Dr. Abbott assisting today?"

He looked between you both. "...Sure?"

You moved to his bedside. Started at the beginning, the way it always started: history first, presentation, onset, quality, radiation, associated symptoms. He had woken with the pain, four on a ten-point scale, which had climbed steadily. Nausea since this morning. Low-grade fever he had assumed was nothing.

You palpated his abdomen, beginning at the left upper quadrant and working methodically clockwise. When you reached the lower right quadrant--McBurney's point, two-thirds of the way between the navel and the right anterior superior iliac spine--he flinched hard.

You pressed the left side. He gasped from the right.

Positive Rovsing's sign. "What is... appendicitis."

"We're going to get an ultrasound to confirm what I think is going on," you told him. "In the meantime, we can get you something for the pain." You glanced at Dr. Abbot, who gave the small nod of someone countersigning a decision he had already made himself. "Do you have any allergies?"

He did not. You ordered four of morphine with Dr. Abbots co-singing your credentials. He watched you administer the drug and the tightness across Mr. Ramirez's face gradually release as the medication reached him.

"Thank you," he said, on an exhale, and you could hear in those two words how long he had been carrying the pain before coming in.

You closed the bay door behind you.

"How'd I do," you said, without inflection.

He looked at you with the expression of someone who was choosing what to say from a longer list.

"You were good," he said.

He said it plainly, without elaboration, the way he said most things. But you had spent years alongside Sawyer, reading the space between what she said and what she was holding and you could feel the same shape in him. He was satisfied. He was also watching something more specific than your technique.

You filed it and moved on.

Jack's POV

The board was quieter than most days by midnight, which meant Shen, Ellis and Mateo had a few minutes to be themselves rather than purely functional. This meant they were standing near the north nursing station making the kind of conversation that only night shift people made.

I was across the bay with a chart I was not fully reading.

I was distracted watching her.

She was in trauma two with the latest arrival. I checked on her twice and she did not need me yet, her hands steady, her head down, doing the work with the quiet competence of someone who had done harder work in worse places. The version of her that existed in this room was already different from the version that had stood in my locker room two hours ago. Not more open, exactly, but more present. Like she had found a register she recognized.

She was working the patient with the kind of focus that didn't perform itself. No sideways checks to see if anyone was watching. No adjustment for the audience. Just her hands, and the work, and the thing underneath the work that she was holding back with everything she had.

That was the part that caught me. Not the competence--I expected the competence. It was the effort running parallel to it, invisible if you weren't looking for it, the quality of someone keeping two things completely separate from each other--what her hands were doing, and everything her mind was carrying while they did it.

I knew that effort. I had logged the same hours.

I had looked away twice. I was aware of having looked away twice, which meant I was aware of looking back, which was its own kind of information I was not particularly interested in examining right now.

There was something specific about watching her that I could not organize into a clinical observation and leave there. Something that went past what I was looking for, past the question of whether she was going to be alright in this room, whether the field training would hold or fracture under the particular pressures of a real facility.

Past all of that.

Something that was just her, the way she moved through a space, the quality of attention she brought to a thing once she committed to it. Its made something in my chest shift.

That's… new.

I was still looking at her when Shen said something across the bay. Ellis laughed. Mateo pointed at trauma two, then turned and pointed at me with the expression of a man who had caught something and was not going to pretend otherwise.

I looked back at my chart.

I had felt this before. I recognised what happened in a room when someone arrived and the room recalibrated itself around them.

I looked back at the chart.

Then, despite myself, despite the other eyes, back her.

Sawyer. What have you gotten me into?

Your POV

An MVC brought in three critical patients within four minutes of each other.

The third one was yours. 22 year-old male, ejected from the vehicle, chest trauma, compromised airway. You moved through the initial assessment fast: airway, breathing, circulation, in that order, A-B-C. Dr. Abbot was to your right, working the second patient with Shen, available without crowding you.

Henderson called out, “Abbot, I need you over here.”

Both your heads turned.

Henderson looked between you, recalibrated. "Uh- sorry. Dr. Abbot. Jack. The actual--” He pointed. "Him."

You turned back to your patient. Dr. Abbot gave your arm a brief touch before he moved. "You good?"

"Yes."

"You sure?"

"Yes."

True.

Your hands were in this man's chest and somewhere beneath all of the training and the months away, you felt more like yourself than you had in a long time. Practising medicine with your hands, a patient in front of you, a problem to solve. The rest of the world had gone quiet in exactly the way it needed to.

He moved to Henderson.

You kept going.

The bleed revealed itself under careful retraction, arterial, requiring immediate control. Your left hand found the angle and your right went automatically to the backpack, the Kelly clamps that lived in the left exterior pocket, the ones that had been there for two and a half years--

Wait.

You did not have a backpack. You did not have a kit. You were in a trauma bay in a hospital where things lived in specific places that were not on your body.

Your eyes went left. Right.

You needed a clamp.

The sweat was immediate and started at your hairline.

You needed a clamp.

You looked at the instrument tray, at the walls, at the absolutely extraordinary abundance of organised and catalogued supplies in this room that you did not yet know how to find.

You needed a--

"Hey." His voice came from directly over your right shoulder, low and certain, cutting through the sound of your own heartbeat. "We're gonna follow the rules of where we are."

You met Dr. Abbots eyes.

His hand came alongside yours, the other one extended. "Kelly clamp," he said, and the nurse from earlier, Mateo, expression entirely matter-of-fact, had it in his palm. Clean, uncapped, ready.

He placed it in your hand. His voice, still low: "Now ask for a--”

"Sponge," you said, the word arriving on its own.

A hand clad in the blue latex-free glove, appeared at the edge of your field of vision. The sponge was already there.

"Good. Now--”

"Bovie," you said, to no one in particular, or to the room in general, and the room answered.

It kept being true. Every time you called out a tool to be used the room would give it to you in a gloved hand, waiting, exact, as if the space itself had anticipated you.

Dr. Shen appeared at your elbow somewhere past two in the morning with a plastic cup, Dunkin' Donuts, orange and pink lettering across the side, with the easy manner of someone performing a welcoming gesture without making it feel like one.

"You drink coffee?"

"Yes," you said, and then registered what he was holding. The cup was sweating. There was ice in it.

He set it on the counter beside you. "Wasn't sure what you liked. It's got two pumps of vanilla, no cream."

You looked at it. "It's cold."

"It's iced coffee."

"Coffee is hot."

"Not always." He looked at you with the mild curiosity of someone who had not expected this to become a conversation.

"In Salerno there wasn't ice to put in water," you said. "The idea of putting it in coffee," you picked the cup up and looked at it, "why would someone do that?"

His eyes went slightly wider than the topic warranted. "You've never had iced coffee?"

"I've never had iced coffee."

"Try it."

You tried it. The cold arrived first, sharp and immediate, then the sweetness threaded through it, and then underneath both of those things the actual coffee, present and correct despite everything that had been done to it.

You held the cup for a moment.

Hm.

Shen was watching you with the satisfied expression of a man who already knew how this was going to go.

"Oh my god," you said.

"Yeah," he said.

The night moved in the particular rhythm of an ED shift: compressed and then dilated, moments of full-speed action followed by the strange suspended quality of waiting. In the intervals you started to know the room a little.

Cruz Henderson found you during a brief quiet stretch, leaning against the wall in your vicinity with the ease of someone comfortable in most spaces.

"Hey, 2.0." He was now committed to the nickname. "What do you do for fun?"

The question arrived and sat there.

Fun had a shape you recognised from before, from a version of your life that had existed prior to the last few years, but the specific contents of it had reorganised themselves in ways you had not yet fully mapped. You opened your mouth.

Before you could say anything, an ambulance pulled into the bay with a new case.

"To be continued," Henderson said, and was already moving.

Ellis found you near the end of an hour you would not have been able to number. She came to stand beside you with the deliberate intention of someone who had been waiting for the right moment.

"I didn't actually expect to see you here again," she said. Not unkind. The opposite actually, said with the warmth of someone who meant it as a compliment.

"You said you needed a change in conversation," you reminded her.

"When Abbot told me I went home and thought there's no way she's actually starting here,” She shook her head, smiling. "I have about 50 follow-up questions from that night."

"I'll answer some of them."

"Some."

"Probably not the ones about privileges."

She laughed. Behind her, Mateo arrived into the conversation with the timing of someone who had been waiting nearby.

"Abbott squared," he said. "That's what I keep calling you in my head. Or like… Abbot to the power of 2T." He looked at Ellis. "Is there a medical joke there? Like two T cells?”

"Please don't," you laughed.

"She said don't," Ellis smiled with you.

Mateo looked delighted by this.

At some point past the halfway mark of the shift, one of the radiology techs asked--not to you directly, but in your general vicinity, the way people asked things they wanted answered--"so both Abbots were military, right?”

The question landed in a brief quiet and Ellis picked it up. “Both Army,” she clairified.

Then someone else within ear shout but out of eyesight, “But… Jack was honourably discharged. Right?”

Dr. Abbot, a few feet away near the board, nodded once. Did not look up. Did not elaborate.

You noted the particular quality of the chosen silence.

Later, much later, in the quiet of a night that had opened into something more manageable, you turned to Dr. Abbot and just above a whisper you said, “you know what I can't get over?” you looked up into his eyes, “you say the word and it just appears," you flutter your fingers to make the word dazzle.

He looked at you with the expression of someone revisiting a specific memory.

“I know exactly what you mean,” his eyes glued to yours with a sparkle of recognition, “I remember the first time I asked for something and it just showed up. I thought someone was pranking me.”

“How long until it felt normal?”

He took a moment to think. “Six months? The asking. The trusting that it would come,” then, “but the medicine was the same. The medicine is always the same.”

You nod. You knew what he meant by that.

"You know what I didn't expect?" you said.

He looked at you.

"Iced coffee." You nodded toward Dr. Shen's half-empty plastic cup sitting on the counter. "Coffee is supposed to be hot. It has always been hot. That is the entire point of coffee."

The laugh that came out of him was real and loud enough that it turned two heads at the nursing station, the kind that seemed to surprise even him slightly.

"I’m still not used to that one," he said, when it settled.

The lull came around 4:40 brief and real.

You were on your feet, moving through it, when Dr. Abbot came to stand in your path with the deliberate positioning of someone who had thought about this.

"Sit down," he said.

"I'm fine."

"I didn't ask."

You were amped, not manic, just fully alive in the way that twelve hours of useful work made you feel, like a circuit that had been open for months had finally been connected. You had not felt this in close to a year.

"Why don't you sit?" you challenged.

He looked at you.

You looked at him.

He sat down.

Hmm.

You sat across from him, because what else were you going to do, he'd let you win.

He extended his right “foot” and tapped it lightly against your left "foot" the prosthetic toe against yours, a small deliberate contact, not quite a knock, not quite a nudge.

You rolled your eyes a smirk tugging at the corner of your mouth.

He said nothing. Just looked at you with the expression of a man who had won without speaking.

Across the bay, you did not see Ellis nudge Shen. You did not hear what Mateo said quietly that made Shen give a tight lipped smile and stifle a laugh.

At 5:57 in the morning, you were standing in the ambulance bay with Dr. Abbot, debriefing a case that had closed well. The air was cool. The sky outside the bay doors was still dark but differently dark, the particular darkness that preceded the first pale edge of morning.

Something moved in your chest that you caught and examined before it could grow into anything larger.

Nope.

But it was there. The first fragile thread of something that might, given time and enough of nights like this one, grow into something you could trust.

Then headlights swung into the bay. Not an ambulance. A regular car, moving too fast, horn going.

You both ran.

The mother was in the back seat holding her son in her arms the way mothers hold things they are terrified will disappear if they let go for even a second. She was screaming before the car had fully stopped.

"Please! Please help him! He was fine, he was sleeping, he was fine!"

The boy, maybe eight or nine years old was grey, lips already bluish at the edges.

Secondary drowning, the diagnosis came fast, the way they did when the picture was complete before you had consciously assembled it. The child had been in water earlier and had come home, seemed fine because children after submersion often did. Then he had gone to bed. The water in his lungs had been working against him while everyone thought the danger had passed.

"When was he in the water?" you asked the mother.

"This afternoon-- the pool at the Y-- he coughed a little after but he was fine, he was laughing, I put him to bed and he was--” Her voice broke. "He was sleeping and I went to check on him and he wasn't--" Then she was wailing, like she had made a conclusion she wasn’t ready to cope with.

Now inside, youd started compressions by the time the gurney reached the room.

1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14-15-16-17-18-19-20-21-22-23-24-25-26-27-28-29-30. Stop. Two breaths from the ambu bag. Again.

You were sweating through the back of your scrubs. Your arms burned. But you did not stop.

The team moved around you.

Another 30 compressions.

A rhythm built and then changed.

Another 30 compressions, this time you felt his ribs break.

And as it did when the picture was becoming clear, you could feel it in the room, the quality of attention shifting, the quiet that came before the harder quiet.

Another 30 compressions.

"Another amp of epi!" you called.

No one moved.

You kept the compressions going and looked up.

"What are you doing? Another amp of--"

"We've given three," Dr. Abbot said calm and flat. Quietly, from behind you.

You did not stop.

"We've gotta call it," he said.

"No. He's coming back." Your arms did not stop.

"Come on." His hands were at your shoulders, not pulling you, offering a way out. "We gotta call time of death."

You felt his hands and you pushed them away then one hard shove centre-chest that rocked him back a step. You reached past him for the epi.

His hand closed around your wrist.

You stopped.

You looked at him.

He looked at you. And in the way that two people can have an entire conversation in three seconds when they have been paying attention to each other. You had him, you did not want to stop. Abbot was telling you that stopping was the only thing left. You didn’t want it to be. He knew that, and it made no difference to what was true, and he was sorry for that and you could see it.

Your hand loosened on the epi.

You stepped back.

He looked at you warily. Waiting.

You squared your shoulders. Breathed out once. Grabbed everything that had come up in the last few minutes and pressed it down into the place you kept things you could not afford right now, pushed it deep and locked it there.

Your face was still.

"Time of death." You checked your watch. "6:07 AM."

You left the room.

The family was in the corridor.

You walked toward them because someone had to, and the person who had been there at the end was usually the one who delivered the news.

The mother looked at you and knew before you said a word. The way mothers just... knew.

You told her. You said the words clearly and without softening them into something less true. Her husband caught her when her legs stopped working. She made a sound that was not language, that was below language, that belonged to a frequency of grief that no vocabulary had ever needed to describe because there was nothing to do with it but let it exist.

You stood with them. You stayed. For several minutes, you stayed, because leaving would have been the wrong thing and you had been trained long enough in the wrong things to know one when you saw it.

Then you excused yourself.

The women's bathroom near trauma one.

You stood at the sink and looked at yourself in the mirror.

There was a version of you that should have been here. That you looked for and could not quite locate. She felt very far away right now.

You could feel the tears starting. Not a wave, just the first pressure of them at the edge, the signal before the signal. You inhaled sharply through your nose, once, utilizing technique that had served you in many rooms with people watching--the sniff pulled the sensation back, reset the baseline, bought you ten seconds that became thirty that became however long you needed.

You closed your eyes.

The sun over the Salerno roofline. The specific quality of the morning light over the base perimeter, the way it turned the dust gold before the heat came, the few minutes of each day when even that place had been clean and quiet and purely itself.

You let yourself be in it for three seconds.

Then you let it go.

You opened your eyes.

You straightened your scrubs, pressed the back of your hand briefly to your face, and walked out.

Dr. Abbot was in the hallway.

He straightened when you came out.

"Hey." His voice was careful. Not careful in the way of someone managing you--careful in the way of someone paying attention. "You okay? I didn't mean to push you back in there."

The box inside you, filled with every emotion, held. Not a crack in it.

You rolled your shoulders back, "never better," you said. It came out with more edge than you meant.

"Hey," he stepped into your path lightly, not blocking, just present. His hand landed briefly on your shoulder. "You gotta be honest with me. That's the deal."

You looked at him for a moment.

Then you breathed out. "I guess... I haven't lost someone in a while. With the recovery, the time off. And it hits different when it's a kid."

It was true, and it was not the whole of it, and you both knew. He did not push further.

"Come on," he said. "Let me show you how we hand off."

The day shift charge nurse was at nursing station when you and Dr. Abbot walked up, already mid-handoff with the outgoing night charge Lena. Reading glasses on with the easy authority of a woman who had run this floor for long enough that the floor ran itself around her.

She looked up when you and Dr. Abbot were close.

"Dana, this is Dr. Abbott… 2.0." He said it with the particular dry affection of someone who had not chosen the name but had decided to keep it.

She looked at you over her glasses for a long moment.

"I finally get to put a face to the name," she said. "Been hearing about you since Tuesday, kid."

"Good things, I hope."

"Mostly." Her eyes were kind, "Dana Evans," her hand was stretched to yours, you shook it, "first shift?"

"(Y/n) Abbot, nice to meet you. And, yes, first shift," you confirmed.

"Likewise. How was it?"

You thought about it honestly. All of it. The locker room. The handshake. The clamp appearing out of nowhere. The iced coffee. The name debate. The child.

"It was good," you said. "It feels good to get back into the medicine."

That was true.

As true as anything you had said all night.

Dana looked at you for just a moment longer than the sentence required. Then she looked at Dr. Abbot, once, with the quick and knowing look of a woman who had noticed things.

She did not say whatever she was thinking.

She looked back at her paperwork.

Dr. Abbot glanced at the time. "7:13. Handoff's done. You’re good to get your stuff from the locker room." He stepped back. "I need to find Robby before I leave.”

You nodded.

You peeled away from the nursing station, already mentally in the stairwell, already halfway to the parking structure and the long drive home, when something stopped you.

Not a sound. A quality in the air had shifted in the light near the entrance, the particular stillness that preceded something that was not ordinary.

You turned.

Two soldiers were coming through the waiting room doors.

Army Service Uniforms--the dress blues, dark and precise, hats on, gait squared. Between them, held in both hands with the careful flat-palmed carry of something that was not to be dropped, was a folded triangle of fabric. Red and white stripes at the edges. The blue field of the canton visible at the apex, tight and even, the way they folded it when it came off his casket.

Every cell in your body came to a violent halt.

In the back of your mind you knew they were coming for you. Not today, not this specific morning, but in the general sense of eventual--you had known, and had been avoiding it the way you avoided things that required you to accept a finality you were not ready to accept. You had refused all visitors and had been difficult to contact and had let the distance between you and everything and everyone from before grow.

The soldiers were still twenty feet away.

And then you looked again and they were not strangers.

Amber, on the left. Taller than the image your memory had preserved, her hair shorter, a corporal's chevron on her sleeve. She walked with the particular straightness of someone who had been in dress uniform enough times to have forgotten they were wearing it. Her eyes found you immediately, the way eyes found people they had been looking for.

On the right, Lukas. His jaw was set the way it got set when he was working to keep something in. He had emailed you every week for almost a year. Every week, without asking for anything back. Subject: Still here. Every time.

The space had gone quiet in the way that rooms went quiet when something was happening that people recognised even without a program. You were aware of eyes at the nursing station. Ellis and Mateo, somewhere to your left. Dana. The incoming day shift who did not know you at all and were watching anyway.

The two soldiers came to a stop three feet in front of you.

Amber spoke, her voice was level and formal, "Captain Y/N Abbott." She held her gaze steady. "On behalf of the United States Army, and in recognition of the service and sacrifice of Sergeant Adam Handscombe," she glanced at Lukas, who transferred the flag to her hands with the careful coordination of something rehearsed, "it is our honour to present to you this flag, which flew over the base at FOB Salerno in his name."

She held it out.

At first you couldn't move.

The emergency department, this enormous loud functional space, suddenly contracted around you until it was just this. Two soldiers, a folded flag, and every eye in the room landing on you at the same moment. The walls came in. The sounds of the floor dulled. Your pulse, which had been steady, kicked, hard, like a door being tried from the other side.

Not here. Not now. Absolutely not here.

You could feel your hands wanting to do something with the type of alertness you couldn't put down, the kind that arrived before the spiral did. You breathed in through your nose, held it, then let it go.

Your face did not move. You had built that particular architecture over a very long time and it held.

Then you bent your elbows, lifted your hands, and took it.

The weight of it was almost nothing. A few yards of folded fabric, precise and tight. And it was the heaviest thing you had held in a long time.

You were aware of every eye in the room. You were aware that something had just been said out loud and answered questions everyone had been too polite or too busy or too uncertain to ask. You were aware of all of it and none of it mattered for the next several seconds while you stood holding a triangle of flag in a hospital corridor at 7:15 in the morning. You looked at your two closest friends from another life.

Amber raised her right hand.

The salute was formal and precise and absolutely personal at the same time.

Lukas, beside her, did the same.

You had not been in uniform for almost a year. You were in scrubs, with yesterday's mascara probably doing its own thing, holding a folded flag in a hospital waiting room. None of that mattered.

You raised your right hand.

The three of you held it for a full three count.

Then you lowered yours and Amber's face changed.

She stepped forward.

You were already reaching for her.

She put both arms around you, hard, the full grip of someone who had been waiting to do this for a long time, and Lukas stepped in from the other side, and the three of you stood in the middle of a room full of people who had stopped pretending not to watch, you pressed your face against Amber's shoulder and let yourself feel the specific relief of being found by people who had known you before you had to learn yourself again.

It was not a clean feeling. Nothing about it was clean. Happy and devastated and relieved and terrified all in the same moment, layered over each other, the sorrow running through all of it like thread.

But it was real. You were standing. All three of you were standing.

After a while the three of you pulled back enough to put your foreheads together, close, the way you had done a hundred times in a hundred different circumstances in a place very far from Pittsburgh. Lukas's hand at the back of your neck. Amber's at your shoulder.

"We're still standing," Amber said.

"Still standing," Lukas confirmed.

You breathed in and said it with them, "Still standing."

Jack's POV

I was standing at the edge of the corridor when it happened. About to turn toward the elevator when something told me to stop and look back.

I watched them come in. I watched her recognise them.

I had seen this before, a long time ago. Not this exact thing. The moment when the war finally finds the door you have been living behind and knocks on it in a way you cannot pretend you didn't hear.

I watched her take the flag.

But, the half second before she took it--the stillness, the quality of it, the particular controlled nothing of her face, that, I recognised as the opposite of nothing. I had worn that expression myself in rooms I could not afford to come apart in.

She thought she had hidden it.

She had hidden most of it, her face gave almost nothing. But I could see behind her eyes she was trying to contain something bigger.

Then the other two stepped forward.

The woman was a corporal, the chevron on her sleeve catching the light as she squared up. Her voice carried across the floor--clear and formal, “On behalf of the United States Army, and in recognition of the service and sacrifice of Sergeant Adam Handscombe.”

The name landed in the room like a stone dropped in still water.

I went stiff.

“It is our honour to present to you this flag.”

A husband? She had a husband.

Past tense, present weight, the specific gravity of a loss that did not get smaller with time, only more precisely shaped.

Sawyer.

I watched her face stay still in a way I now understood, watching it from the outside for the first time, was not stillness at all.

Then the corporal stepped forward and her arms went around you and the face that had been still stopped being still, and something in me flinched away from watching it-not from discomfort, from recognition.

She had a husband.

She had lost a husband. She had come to Pittsburgh with all of that packed down somewhere below the surface and had spent a full shift beside me moving through this floor like someone who had decided, somewhere along the way, that if she just kept moving nothing could catch her.

I knew that exact calculation. I had made it myself. I had made it for years.

My thoughts, now aimed squarely at Sawyer.

Of course you didn't tell me. Because if you had, I would have handled her differently. And you knew that handling her differently was exactly the wrong thing to do.

I stood there another moment.

The three of them had their heads together now, something passed between them too quiet to reach me. Something old and specific to those three people and no one else.

I thought of Robby. The particular tired quality of his face lately, the way he had been carrying the weight of the ED on will alone for longer than anyone had asked him to. I had been meaning to find him.

I turned toward the elevator.

The doors opened as I reached it. Robby was inside, coming down, coat on, the end of something written across his face.

We looked at each other.

He read whatever was on mine.

He stepped back. Stayed where he was as the doors began to close.

I stepped in.

Neither of us said anything.

The doors shut.

Your POV

You walked toward the stairwell unsure of the exact time, the flag tucked under your arm.

The stairwell door swung shut behind you.

You stood on the landing between floors for just a moment, alone, in the concrete quiet.

You looked down at the flag.

You had been carrying the absence of this for almost a year. The shape of what you had not allowed yourself to receive, what you had walled off and worked around and refused to acknowledge in the specific way you refused to acknowledge things that had the power to completely undo you.

It was in your hands now.

You pressed it once, briefly, against your chest.

Then you went down the stairs, through the parking structure, and into the early morning.

The Pontiac was where you had left her. You got in, put her in gear, and drove home into a sky that was beginning, very slowly, to go light.

AN: Thank you guys again for being so interested and so kind. I really really appreciate it! I've made a taglist for those who asked! If you'd like to be added just let me know and I'll do my best. Comments, reblogs, and thoughts are always welcome <3

Taglist: @seulbeomie @generation-zero @peariesque @amerryraven @tinka490 @hazydespair @itwasneverdvt @trustmeima-doctor-blog @defronix @mrskreizler-zemo @graciiiaciii @dedicateeverythingtomilkshake @kneelforloki @stardustworlds @imaginecrushes @wiltedpetalzz @sydney-m @oddin4ry @fightmeyoushits2

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