kingdon week 2026 @kingdonweek - Tumblr Blog

about the bugs and alphabet - ch 6

@kingdonweek day 6: numbers (work with me here) G - 7.5k (30k total so far) - childhood friends au - ch 6/7 - (new chap each day this week)

Even though Frank’s favorite subject was a tie between science and history, he usually liked his math classes, too. Something about it just made sense to him, which seemed somewhat at odds with his otherwise chaotic approach to many things.

In ninth grade Geometry, Frank found that he loved proofs. He loved knowing a starting point and an ending point and using logic to connect the two. He liked the challenge of explaining his thinking, which was something almost every one of his previous teachers had complained about. Show your work was scattered across his work throughout the years in different handwriting.

At the time, he thought it was kind of like how he tried to figure out what Mel was thinking. Like what they did together on the rock beach from the very first week he met her, sorting through the rocks and determining which ones were suited for tumbling and which ones weren’t—which was different from which were cool rocks and which weren’t. He sometimes watched her working out of the corner of his eye and studied which one she picked, trying to work backwards to create the mental rubric she was using.

There was something soothing about math, though, at least until it started being more about letters and Greek than numbers.

(continued below or on ao3)

His high school cross country coach noticed his knack for it immediately, which meant that Frank spent four years helping with timers and calculating splits and annotating their rosters with PRs. It was comically easy compared to the trig and precalc and calc and stats he did in school, of course, but he appreciated having a job, a way to help, a lens through which to view the world.

There was very little he could actually control, in the grand scheme of things, but he could check his watch and count in his head and set a concrete goal for his next mile. During practice, his inner monologue was sometimes like that of a kid who just learned how to convert measurements or wanted to figure out fractions: Four laps is a mile. I’ve run twelve laps, which is three miles. I have sixteen laps left, which is four miles. By the end of this, I will have run seven miles. I am twelve twenty-eighths of the way done, which can be reduced to six fourteenths, which can be reduced to three sevenths.

His teammates—first in high school and later in college—looked at him weird when he mentioned it, assuming that everyone did the same thing. They counted their laps, of course, but nobody else seemed to do weird zen math exercises in their heads. There was something soothing about focusing on the numbers, though, that let him drown out everything else: the burning in his lungs, the sun on the back of his neck, the ache in his heart.

That habit or reliance on counting and converting in his head is the kind of thing that helps him move quickly through the ER, barking out dosages and keeping track of multiple patients at once and moving confidently through multi-step procedures without hesitation.

It’s also the kind of thing that makes him really good at diverting controlled substances.

-

“What exactly would a trial separation prove, Abby?” Frank asks, arms crossed as he leans against the wall of the bathroom off their—her—bedroom and watches her brushing out her long, beautiful hair. “That we should get divorced? Because I’ve been saying that since before Penny.”

“Jesus Christ, Frank, now is not the time to play I told you so,” she throws back at him, spinning to pin him down with one of her narrow-eyed looks. “Yes, you told me what I was signing up for when we decided to keep Tanner. Yes, we both decided to get married anyway. Yes, you saw that I was unhappy after less than a year and told me I deserved better. Yes, we probably should have been more careful about all the weepy sex back then. Yes, our kids are the best kids ever. Don’t you think we should still try to see what we can save?”

“What exactly is there to save, Abby?” Frank sighs, tipping his head back against the wall. “We were fuckbuddies who accidentally made a perfect baby. Twice. Who are we to each other besides co-parents who fuck?”

And we don’t even do that anymore, he doesn’t add.

“Isn’t that what marriage is? Co-parenting and fucking?”

Frank’s first thought in response to that is something Mel told him when they were twelve.

It was the day after she’d come up for the summer—the morning after she’d come straight to say hi to him after a drive from hell, just to pick the only song on his stupid playlist about friendship—and they were discussing how insane it was to listen to that much High School Musical.

“How did your parents survive it?” Frank asked.

He knew his dad would’ve shut that down right away and put own bad music on, no discussion.

“They’re always in their own little world,” Mel shrugged, smiling one of the private smiles he only saw when she talked about her family. “They were holding hands, like, the whole drive.”

At the time, Frank hadn’t held hands with anyone, but he thought it sounded awfully sweaty to hold hands for twelve hours.

“Plus, they were talking to each other over the music. Sometimes it’s like they have their own language.”

“That’s cool,” Frank said, wondering if it would be weird to corner Mr. or Mrs. King so he could ask them how to make a relationship last. Depending how cool they were, maybe he could even subtly suss out if they agreed with his plan to wait until they were fourteen, or if they thought that thirteen might be old enough. “My parents barely seem to like each other sometimes.”

Mel looked shocked.

“I can’t even imagine that,” she whispered, like Frank had divulged a horrible secret. “I think my parents are probably soulmates. It seems like they just...fit together. Two halves of one whole. I mean, I haven’t decided if I believe in soulmates or not, but if I do, it’ll probably be because of them. And the Ancient Greek story.”

He liked that idea, especially as a twelve year old who had an eight-year plan that ended in marriage and a happily ever after.

It’s a wildly disorienting thing to remember eighteen years later, staring into the unamused and exhausted eyes of a wife he’s been trying to get to give up on him for years.

“I don’t think so, Abby,” Frank says, tired. “I think, despite the examples we had in our own families, there are some couples who actually make each other happy and fit together, not just because of the kids.”

Abby considers this, setting her brush down and switching to patting moisturizer on her face. He’s sure she’s thinking of her own parents, who are more focused on appearances than almost anything else. She might be thinking of Frank’s parents, who do best when they’re at least one state apart.

He never even spent time with the Kings together, not really, so he doesn’t have a mental image of what that kind of partnership could look like. Mr. King was always a little weird, like his brain was solving five different problems at once and they were all too complicated for Frank to understand, but he was nice and clearly loved his daughters. Mrs. King was more outgoing, the kind of person to remember his sister and cousins’ names to ask after them when she saw him. He could maybe see how those differences could complement each other instead of clash, the way the jagged edges between him and Abby always seem to.

It’s weird to think of Mr. and Mrs. King now, knowing that they’re both dead, knowing that he outlived both of them and their relationship.

He wonders if Mel’s figured out whether she believes in soulmates yet.

(Frank doesn’t. If there’s one thing he learned from the death of Richard King, it’s that the universe is either entirely random or so cruel that the logical thing to do is give up completely. He tries to believe in the former.)

Frank and Abby go to bed—her in the room that used to be theirs, him in the guest room that has become his—without solving anything.

The next morning is pretty typical for them.

“God dammit Frank, I told you we needed more milk,” Abby hisses across the kitchen counter.

Frank winces. He knew there was something he was supposed to do after work yesterday. Besides, y’know, taking a couple of Ativan.

“I’m sorry,” he says, meaning it but knowing it’s not enough. “I can pick some up today?”

Their conversation is interrupted by Penny’s loud wail. Frank watches in detached horror as she smears a hand covered in yogurt through her hair.

“Don’t bother,” Abby says, snagging Penny’s hand and wiping her hair with a towel produced from who knows where. “I’ll get some when I’m out today.”

Frank nods, wishing he felt worse about it but mostly feeling kind of apathetic. It’s hard to care about things at the house sometimes, especially when Abby makes the most minor of inconveniences seem like a catastrophe, which stands in stark juxtaposition against the real catastrophes Frank wades through in the Pitt.

But he tries not to be a complete asshole, even in his own head. He knows that they’re measuring on different scales, and he understands why the stakes seem so much higher for her, a stay-at-home mom in a city she still doesn’t like that much with a distant husband who won’t go to couples’ counseling or do a trial separation.

He wonders where his benzo thing will register on her scale. Hopefully, she’ll never have to know.

-

One of the things that people probably don’t realize about successfully diverting controlled substances from an ED is just how much math is involved. Not just math, but subterfuge and precision. Knowing exactly how much a patient needs versus what he can prescribe without raising any eyebrows. Tracking how much he has in his locker (just during shifts, he doesn’t leave anything there, Jesus) and how much he has in the glovebox and how much he has in the childproofed medicine cabinet of the basement bathroom. Remembering when he last took something and how much he took and how much he should take next time to keep weaning himself off of it, without writing anything down or leaving any records.

Honestly, the ease with which he’s pulling it all off is its own kind of thrill.

That’s not why he’s doing it, of course. He’s doing it because the only thing he’s good at is being an ER doctor and the only way he can be that is if his fucking back isn’t screaming at him every second of the goddamn day.

It’s temporary. He’s got it all under control.

-

“If you’re going to get divorced, just get fucking divorced,” Yo tells him, leaning against the locker next to his. “Jesus Christ. You guys argue all the time, you don’t share any interests, and she’s grossed out by medical stuff. You make no sense together, which I’ve been saying since you first wanted your dick in her.” She pushes herself off the locker, shaking her head at him as she trails behind him into the Pitt. “Straight people are exhausting.”

“Thanks so much for your advice,” Frank sighs. “I’m sure that recounting this to Abby is what’ll get her to agree to it.”

Yo hits him on the shoulder, too hard to be entirely friendly.

“You don’t need to just wait for her to agree, dumbass. Start doing shit yourself. Find an apartment. Get a lawyer. Show that you’re serious.”

Frank scrubs a hand down his face.

“I don’t want to just fucking leave my wife and kids. I don’t want to be that kind of asshole.”

“No, you just want to be the kind of asshole who languishes in a loveless marriage and models that shit for his kids, huh?”

“Jesus Christ, Yo, tell me how you really feel.”

Yo shoots him an unimpressed look.

“I’ve been telling you how I really feel since we were 19. That’s why I’m so exhausted by your bullshit.”

“I remember thinking that ranking residencies together would be nice because we’d be able to support each other through it. Really feeling that now.”

Yo’s phone goes off. She backs away from him.

“I am supporting you. Get divorced.”

She spins on her heel and does her stupid I’m-a-busy-surgical-resident-so-I-walk-fast-while-looking-at-my-phone routine towards the elevator. Frank takes a deep breath, pushes all thoughts of his doomed marriage aside, takes a swig from his Red Bull, and prepares to be a great fucking doctor.

He banters with Heather and gets his hand-offs from Ellis—making sure to grab Louie’s case ‘cause that’s low-hanging benzos—and grabs McKay’s attention mostly on autopilot, the frustration and guilt that had been plaguing him outside the hospital gradually disappearing entirely from his mind.

He’s here. He’s present. He’s feeling fucking great. He’s—

What the fuck?

He stops short of the computer he was going to, because—

“Mel?”

His mouth is faster than his brain, as usual. It’s absurd to think that Melissa King could be in his ER, waiting beside the Hub for everyone to assemble for rounds, even if this woman does have a honey-blonde braid (only the one, though, not pigtails) resting against her back and slender shoulders that are hiked ever so slightly up and hands twisting nervously in front of her.

There are plenty of anxious blonde women in the world. There’s no way.

Fuck, did he mess up a dose? Is this the beginning of a psychotic episode?

“Frank?”

He moves without thinking, arms automatically reaching out for a hug that might confirm that she’s real and not a figment of his imagination. He stops himself just in time, jumping back when he realizes the absurdity of his actions.

“Fuck, sorry, you probably still don’t like people touching you, huh?”

He can’t stop staring at her. It’s surreal to see all of the features he memorized—the mark beneath her eye, the swirls in her iris, the slant of her nose—on the face of an adult, a mix of familiar and new. There are little lines by her eyes when she smiles. He’s, like, six inches taller than her.

His study is interrupted by her flinging her arms around him, her cheek squishing into his chest, and he can’t help but press his forehead against her hair, inhaling the sweet vanilla of her shampoo and cataloguing the feeling of her back under his hands.

“You’re not people,” she says, muffled by his scrub top, and he registers how low her voice is. Was it always like that?

“Ooookay,” Robby says, clearing his throat, and Mel jumps back as though she was burned, her cheeks filling with color. Frank can’t look away. “As, uh, touching as that was, we are in an emergency room—”

“Oh, grow a heart, Robinavich,” Dana interrupts with a smirk. Her eyes dart between Frank and Mel, hip cocked and arms crossed.

“Sorry!” Mel apologizes, wringing her hands in front of her stomach. “I didn’t mean to interrupt anything.”

“How do you know each other?” Heather asks. Robby tosses her an incredulous look and she holds up her hands defensively. “Don’t say you’re not curious. Langdon’s smiling outside of a trauma.”

Frank rolls his eyes.

“Way to make me sound like a psychopath.”

Heather shoots him a look like you said it not me. Mel glances between them, a little crease between her eyebrows, and he tries to smile reassuringly at her. Is it possible to communicate I promise I’m not a psychopath, but the only time I really feel alive is when I’m saving someone’s life with just your eyes? Probably not.

“We grew up together,” Mel says to Heather, which makes something in Frank warm. What a generous way to summarize four summers shared between them. “But I haven’t seen him since before, you know—”

She waves a hand, seeming to run out of words.

“—high school,” Frank finishes.

“—my family died,” Mel says at the same time.

Her eyes fly open and she clamps her mouth shut like she can’t believe she said that, and a glance around the loose circle of residents and students shows a mix of shock, discomfort, and judgment.

Frank can’t help it: he starts laughing. Dana swats at him, but he shakes his head and slings an arm around Mel’s shoulder.

“God, I missed you,” he tells her, which melts the distress off her face. She smiles up at him. The sight fills him with an impossible amount of joy. He clears his throat and nods at Robby. “Intros, Dr. Robinavich? Rounds? This is an emergency room, y’know.”

He smirks at Robby’s annoyed look and releases Mel’s shoulder with a squeeze. He skirts around her to the computer so he can double check the details on his GSW patient. He listens absently as the group introduces themselves—interesting that Mel is only an R2, she must have taken one more gap year before med school than he did—and tries to round on autopilot. It works for the most part, though he finds himself going out of his way to squeeze past Mel, to stand near Mel, to watch Mel’s reactions.

It’s all going more or less fine until he’s putting in the orders for Louie’s Lorazepam and Librium. He’d usually siphon off some of the Lorazepam, add some saline back in, and make sure he tracked that vial so it didn’t affect the next patient. For most outpatient Librium scrips, he’d up the number a little and just grab the extra, but he knows Louie’s not going to even open this prescription, let alone take it, so he can easily prescribe the standard amount and swipe half of it. He’s about to submit the order when he sees Mel’s braid across the room.

Can he really do that when Mel is here?

His attention darts between the computer and the back of her head as she follows Robby towards an incoming trauma. He asks Donnie to wrap up Louie’s meds and discharge, a sinking feeling in his stomach that he tries to ignore by jumping on the next trauma.

Fuck. This might make things more complicated than he thought.

-

To say that he’s surprised to see Melissa King in the middle of PTMC on a Friday in September is an understatement.

It’s been seventeen years since he saw her; almost eleven since he successfully found any trace of her, which, tragically, was just a mention of her in the obituary for her mom that he suspected she wrote. In that time, he sometimes felt a little bit like he made Mel up.

He only has pitifully limited tangible proof of their time together: a crumpled yellow flyer for the Royal Dog Walkers; two polished rocks; one unpolished Petoskey stone; the copy of Artemis Fowl and the Eternity Code that he borrowed from her, which she had borrowed from Carly. He also had a drawing of the sunset over Lake Michigan from Becca, which he half-counted.

He spent the first few years of high school beating himself up for not figuring out a way to contact her. He should have insisted that he give her his number instead of relying on Carly as the middleman. He should have told her to make a Facebook account, since he made one for the start of high school. He should have given her his address or asked for hers so they could be pen pals or swapped email addresses or something. Why did he trust that he would just see her next summer? He’d been so naive.

Instead, he’d been left with the Shady Bluffs directory, which had endless contact information for her Aunt Susie, all of which was outdated by the time he actually realized what was going on.

News of their car accident filtered to Frank’s family a couple of months late, since his mom didn’t really talk with Shady Bluffs folks outside of summer. There was a paragraph about the tragedy in the quarterly Shady Bluffs newsletter. His mom read the news to him, a hand cradling the back of his head, and hugged him close when he started crying.

Frank hadn’t been very good with death, back then. He hadn’t had a ton of exposure, just Nana Beth and their neighbor down the street and Phil’s cousin, but his mom said he’d always been a sensitive kid, so the way his eyes would well up with tears and his throat would close and his chest would clench didn’t surprise her. Once he’d calmed down, he was usually embarrassed about it all, but not that time.

The loss of three people he knew, three people who were so important and loved by someone he cared about so much, was almost beyond his comprehension. He couldn’t stop thinking about all the times he talked to Carly—asking her about Mel, discussing Percy Jackson, complaining about camp—just that past summer alone. She was going into tenth grade, one year older than him and Mel.

How could it be possible that she was just...gone?

He messaged Phil on AIM and told him he wouldn’t be able to come over to watch movies that night, after all. His mom called Carrie and made him talk to her, which did help a little. She was still ok, away in her dorm room with her weird roommate. Not everything was over.

It felt self-important for Frank to think he was really grieving because he was so aware of how little he actually knew them, but their deaths and the absences they left behind echoed in his head for months, usually just little realizations or wonderings. Like: what was going to happen to the cottage now? Where was James living? Did Carly give his number to Mel before she died? How was Mrs. King doing, abruptly torn from the husband Mel called her “soulmate”?

With each new question, he felt like a worse and worse person. Sometimes it was because he thought those questions should have come sooner—why didn’t he think of Mrs. King right away?—and sometimes it was because the questions felt so superficial, so unimportant next to the tragedy.

By the end of the next summer—a summer he spent biking circles around Shady Bluffs most afternoons, eyes peeled for a Mazda 5 with Virginia plates and an Obama bumper sticker while pretending that wasn’t what he was doing—Frank tore out the page of his notebook where he’d written the plan two years earlier. Clearly he wouldn’t have a chance to ask Mel to be his girlfriend; clearly it was futile to try to plan ahead, when nothing was promised.

Even so, he got an account on every social media site that became popular, Twitter then Instagram then Snapchat. He always used his full name for his username to make himself as findable as possible, but he never could find her. He couldn’t tell if she was going by a different name—he always tried Mel and Melissa, but there had to be other nicknames from Melissa, right? Lissa? Lisa?—or if she was just chronically offline.

He thought that any news would be a relief to him, that any sign of the girl who remained the most interesting person he’d ever known, even years and years later, would make him feel better, right up until he found her mom’s obituary. Then he just felt like an asshole again. He needs to practice coming up with more depressing worst case scenarios or something.

The only things that stopped him from becoming overwhelmingly depressed were running and school. Running helped because it truly did feel like something he could rely on: the counting of laps, the thud of his shoes, the wind on his face. He could run no matter where he was, and it turned out he was pretty good at it, too. He started getting recruited to D1 schools when he was just a sophomore, and that gave him a clear thing to focus on. If it also served as an excuse to spend less time in Shady Bluffs over the summer, since he had training to do and competitions to attend, that was just a bonus.

High school clicked for him in a way that school never had before. He liked having so many different classes, the chance to switch between things just when he was reaching his limit. He liked what he was learning, especially since some of it was challenging him after years of breezing by with minimal effort. Most of all, he liked his Biology class. He’d always enjoyed science, but something about Bio in particular lit his brain up, like he was finally seeing the outlines of the pieces in a finished puzzle that had been confusing him. His Bio teacher was enthusiastic and loved answering his questions, especially once he started bringing them to her during lunch instead of derailing class.

He followed those threads as far as he could, only stalling out when he herniated a fucking disc during his junior season of college, which meant retirement and a surgery at the beginning of his senior year. It wasn’t like he planned to pursue track beyond college, but it was an overwhelming amount of change in a short time span.

Frank decided to take it as the opportunity he’d never had, between random piss tests and brutally early practices, to enjoy college, Animal House-style. He blacked out for the first time. He smoked enough weed that his friend referred him directly to his dealer so he’d stop bumming it off of him. He lost his virginity during a house party with a girl whose name he couldn’t remember the next day.

He probably would’ve crashed all the way out if Yoyo hadn’t sat him down for a mini-intervention and reminded him that she wouldn’t be going to med school alone, thank you very much.

It was surprisingly easy to go straight edge again, untagging himself from the embarrassing pictures on Facebook and deleting his dealer’s number and spending time at Yo’s apartment instead of a bar, but it wasn’t as though Frank really enjoyed that frat shit in the first place. It was something to do, particularly since he wasn’t allowed to even jog for eight weeks after the surgery.

(See? He’s cut out substances before. He’s got this benzo thing under control.)

He felt weirdly guilty about losing his virginity to some rando when he’d been so intentional about waiting to have his first kiss with Mel. Other guys on the team gave him shit about how little game he had, how he didn’t hook up with anyone, but he shrugged it off with ease. Yeah, he saw hot girls all the time, and yeah, he made out with some at parties, but he hadn’t met anyone who he actually wanted to date or get to know. He knew what it was like to be crazy about someone, and nobody else had made him feel that way.

Yo said he’d make a good lesbian.

-

Two discharges, one nerve block, one technically-illegal resuscitation attempt, and zero stolen pills later, Frank finds himself trying and failing to chart at Central. Robby leans against the counter in front of him and checks in about the ongoing language mystery.

“Still unsolved. So I bet you’re wondering what the history is between me and Mel,” Frank says, leaning conspiratorially towards Robby.

“Not really,” the attending replies, pushing off of the counter. He settles at the computer beside Frank’s and pulls out his glasses. “Seems more like a personal thing than a work thing.”

“But we talk about personal things.”

Robby shoots him a look over his stupid glasses.

“You talk about personal things, sure,” Robby agrees.

“We’re friends,” Frank says, deeply unmoored.

“Not if this conversation goes on much longer.”

Frank opens and closes his mouth, stung. What the fuck?

“I have a lethargic four-year-old,” Mel says, suddenly appearing over the counter, and Frank’s attention is immediately diverted from there.

It’s actually insane how easy it feels to work beside Mel, trading off questioning the parents. He’s uncomfortably aware of her presence beside him, like he has some Mel-radar that was just waiting to be activated.

They exit the room together and Frank feels like he’s forgotten how to speak. He has so many things he wants to know, wants to ask, wants to say—and she’s gone before he figures anything out, off to order those labs, because they’re at fucking work, duh.

He checks in on a couple of other patients before she pops back up beside him with a cheerful smile and lab results. He can’t help his double take—how is she being so normal? Is he crazy for being so distracted by this?

When she comes up to him again, no work in her hands and a bright smile on her face, he can’t help it.

“How’s Becca doing?”

He thought it would be a good place to start, since Mel always loved talking about Becca and it doesn’t seem like it’s a fast track to accidentally making her think about her dead parents out of the blue.

“She’s doing great, thank you for asking!” Mel enthuses, bouncing in place a little. “That’s actually what brought us to Pittsburgh. She’s just gotten into a great facility where she’d been waitlisted forever.” She pauses. It seems like she’s trying to leave off there, but can’t help but add, “Not actually forever, of course. Just a few years.”

God, it’s the Mel he knew on steroids: her literal and precise way of talking, her constant fidgeting, the gleam in her eye. He can’t look away.

But also: How is it possible that she’s gotten even more cheerful since he last saw her? How has the last decade and a half hollowed out any optimism or romanticism or hope from him to replace it with cynicism, while she’s brighter than ever?

“Congratulations, by the way,” Mel says, since he’s just staring gormlessly and contributing nothing to the conversation. He’s confused for a moment before she nods down to the gold band loose on his hand. “How long have you been married? Where’d you meet?”

“Met on an app, married four and a half years.” He knows his tone is all wrong, but he can’t help it. It feels ludicrous to talk about his failed marriage with Mel. “Hoping not to make it to five years, though.”

What the fuck is wrong with him? He watches Mel’s face cycle through shock, concern, confusion, concern again—

“Can I present my case to you?” one of the other newbies asks, a little rudely, and Frank jumps on the interruption.

-

He always knew that Mel would be an awesome doctor. Her bedside manner at age thirteen was better than most adult doctors he knows. Hell, it’s probably better than his bedside manner.

It’s one thing to know something intellectually, though, and another to see the evidence of it in front of you.

He’s bubbling with a weird sense of misplaced pride after watching her perform a perfect cric when he clocks that she’s upset.

“Sorry,” she apologizes, out of nowhere and for seemingly no reason.

“You’re doing great. Take your time.” He watches her tie off the suture and accepts the instruments from her, trying to parse what her expression means. “You ok?”

“Yeah,” she says. Her eyes dart up to his and he can see her decide not to bullshit him. “You might remember that I get frustrated when I can’t do things. Or at least it looks like it.”

Frank tries to remember anything Mel couldn’t do. She didn’t like making lanyards, for some reason, and tended not to draw, but otherwise...

“I’ve never thought you couldn’t do something,” he says. Then he remembers that they’re medical professionals in an extremely challenging specialty and there are definitely things that both of them can learn and practice and improve. “But yeah, I know what you mean. Me neither.”

“Thanks.”

She smiles, but it’s dimmer. She takes a breath and he can tell she’s about to ramble. He tries not to smile at the fact that he can still read her, lest she think he’s not taking her concerns seriously.

“My frustration manifests itself emotionally, and then, uh, I get upset, and then it looks like I can't handle things, and, you know, then I can't cry in front of the patient because no one wants to see their doctor cry. That's just a big red flag.”

He’s frowning by the end of it.

“Whoever told you that’s a red flag is an asshole,” he says before he can overthink it. She blinks at him in surprise. “We have to cry. I’m sure you know as well as I do the physiological benefits of crying. But more than that, we’re people. We need to care about our patients or we’ll be terrible doctors, and people who care about others cry sometimes.”

Mel nods seriously while he talks, maybe looking a little comforted by the end. He wants to do whatever he can to help her see how great she really is.

“Mel,” he says, and she looks up at him, a little startled, perhaps by his sudden intensity. “You just did a perfect cric. You're doing great.”

He watches a real smile blossom on her face, eyes crinkling at the corners, and wonders the last time he cried was. Definitely before the benzos, huh?

Shit.

-

He’s often thought that emergency medicine might be the only thing he’s good at, which is part of why the back thing fucked him up so much. If he can’t work, who is he?

As he spins through the ER, delighting in Mel’s smile as she trails behind him, he realizes he’s having honest-to-goodness fun. He kind of forgot that he could have fun doing anything other than spending time with his kids, that adrenaline rushes could be accompanied by joy, not just focus or satisfaction or channeling that rush into the next challenge.

Mel holds her hand up once the elevator doors close and he high fives her with a smile, stopping himself from locking fingers or holding on from sheer force of will. He’s lost a lot of details over the years, but he remembers the thrill he felt when she grabbed his hand on the breakwall, that he was worried about being sweaty and gross. He’s less worried about that now—whose hands aren’t a little sweaty after peeling gloves off?—and more focused on how soft her skin is, how small her hand is against his.

He walks away with Heather as Mel heads off with the intern he’s keeping an eye on. Santos, right?

“So what’s the story with you and Mel?” Heather asks once they’re out of ear range. Frank glances over his shoulder. Nobody’s paying them any attention.

“Our families, uh, go up to the same spot in Michigan in the summer. My family has a cottage up there,” Frank says, already knowing the kind of shit he’s going to get for that. “We hung out a lot in, like, middle school, I guess? Then her family stopped coming after some, uh, losses.”

Heather watches him shrewdly. He sighs and leans a little closer.

“I was basically in love with her,” he says in a lower volume. “As much as a thirteen-year-old boy can be in love, I guess.”

Heather nods like this matches with what she’s observed.

“The fact that your family owns a vacation home in Michigan explains so much about you,” Heather comments, looking up at the board. “That’s some real white behavior.”

Frank resists the urge to explain that their cottage was built by his great-great-grandfather and has barely been updated in the past century. He knows that barely makes it better. Actually, it probably makes it worse.

“In Mel’s defense, her family didn’t have their own cottage,” he says, not wanting Heather to walk away with the wrong idea about Mel. “They stayed with her aunt’s family and only for, like, two weeks a summer.”

“Interesting that you feel the need to defend Mel but not yourself,” Heather says, eyebrow raised. “Also, please tell me there are pictures of you on a sailboat.”

Frank clears his throat and looks up at the board.

“Wow, Dr. Collins, look how many patients are waiting to be seen!”

Frank walks away from Heather’s interrogation, ignoring her knowing look. It’s fine. None of those pictures are anywhere she can find them.

-

“Mel!” Frank calls, bouncing lightly on his feet. He can’t believe what he saw coming in from triage.

“Yes, Dr. Langdon?” Mel asks, pushing away from the computer to follow him to the supply cart. A weird shiver runs down his back at the sound of his name coming from her.

“You’ll never guess what we’ve got coming in,” he says, grabbing the numbing agent and saline he’ll need.

“You’re right,” Mel nods. “I have such a low chance of guessing what it could be that it would be foolish to try.”

Frank’s cheeks are starting to hurt from all this smiling. Jesus, that’s bleak.

“Arthropod in the EAC,” he tells her.

Mel seems torn between excitement and revulsion.

“That sounds uncomfortable,” she says diplomatically.

“I can only imagine,” Frank agrees.

Mel winces.

“Wanna bet what kind of bug it is?”

She considers this.

“I bet one candy of your choice that it’s a cockroach.”

“High stakes, Dr. King. I bet you one candy of your choice that it’s a spider.”

Mel sticks out her hand. Frank flashes back to watching her shake his counselors’ hands the first time he met her, how adult that seemed. He hopes his handshake measures up.

-

He loses Mel for a while, vaguely aware that she seems stressed about some patient’s family situation, and has just sidled up to her charting at the Hub to ask what candy he should be buying her when Dana calls for him.

“Langdon, I think you’d be good for Central 9,” she says, which is less a suggestion than an assignment.

“Whatcha got for me?” he asks, using the counter to stretch out his back a little. Jesus.

“On the spectrum” is all Dana says before her attention is needed elsewhere.

Mel perks up a little.

“Oh, do you have specific expertise about neurodivergent patients?” Mel asks.

Frank shrugs, a little embarrassed. This is probably telling of just how much Frank’s been thinking about the Kings over the years.

“I mean, I wouldn’t say I have expertise, per se. I haven’t done any formal training or anything. But I, uh, went out of my way to learn about best practices for treating patients on the spectrum. I think they just throw those cases to me because of bullshit about the patient satisfaction surveys, though.”

He straightens up and notices that Mel’s eyes jump from his arms to his face.

“Can I come along?” she asks.

When has Frank Langdon ever turned down additional time with Mel King?

-

Frank’s exiting the bathroom when somebody hooks a finger in the back of his scrubs and drags him to the break room. He deduces it to be Yo from the speed with which they walk and the complete lack of reaction from anyone else. Princess pauses to let them pass without comment.

The door closes before Yo releases her hold and spins him to face her, which he allows because he knows there’s no use fighting it.

“Why didn’t you tell me that Blondie is THE Mel?” she demands, arms crossed.

Frank tries to convey the depth of his incredulity with eyebrows alone. She continues staring him down.

“At what point during our very busy shift should I have done that, exactly?”

“There’s this crazy thing called texting, Langdon. It takes 10 seconds.”

Frank rolls his eyes and grabs his phone out of his pocket. He starts a text to Yo but only gets as far as opening the thread before she snatches it from his hands. When he looks back up, he’s surprised to find she looks genuinely pissed at him.

“Why are you so mad? I would’ve told you when we got off.”

“Because it’s like the universe dropped a fucking neon sign in your lap about how you need to get divorced, which you were literally complaining about this fucking morning—”

The door to the break room swings open, revealing none other than Mel herself. Frank straightens up involuntarily, and he can feel Yo’s judgment burning into his face.

“Oh! I didn’t mean to interrupt your, um—” Mel glances quickly between the two of them, her expression landing somewhere near confusion. “—fight?”

“I told you. Langdon’s too soft to fight.”

Frank shoots her an annoyed look.

“Don’t worry about it, Mel,” he says, aiming for calm. “Yo and I go way back. We actually went to college together.”

Mel brightens.

“Oh! Did you also run track?”

Yo glances at Frank. He’s not sure what she’s looking for or what she finds, because his brain is going haywire.

How does Mel know that? Maybe it’s a lucky guess. He had already been running for a couple of years the last time they saw each other.

Watching her cheeks start to flush, though, he thinks it might be more than a guess.

“Yes, but keep that to yourself, ok? I don’t need people knowing my business. I like to keep an air of mystery around these parts.”

Mel mimes zipping her mouth shut and throwing away the key. Frank laughs, weirdly charmed, and ignores whatever Yo is sending his way.

“Terrance’s scans should be back by now. C’mon, Mel.”

He turns around to back out of the room. Yo’s watching, nonplussed.

“We can resume this discussion later, Yo.”

Later is so delightfully vague, Frank thinks, falling into step with Mel and checking the results on the tablet she grabs. Maybe he’ll be able to avoid Yo the rest of the day.

-

Standing in the ambulance bay with Mel, Frank has the bizarre urge to tell her about his benzo thing. There’s just something about the openness on her face as she looks up at him, the eagerness with which she shows him recent pictures of her with Becca, that brings back the feeling he used to have, like he could tell her anything.

What would he even say?

Hey Mel, I know it’s your first day here, but I’ve actually been doing something lowkey illegal. Don’t worry about it, though. I have a plan of how to stop. It involves more illegal shit, but it’s really just taking care of my health, because I’m a doctor. Yes, I know that doctors aren’t allowed to treat themselves. Do I want your help? Nah, I’ve got it under control. I just wanted to burden you with this knowledge for no particular reason. It’s definitely not a cry for help.

Fuck. He might have a problem.

-

His hands are shaking. It’s only 4pm, but he can feel the little tremors starting that mean nothing good. He must’ve fucked something up, because he never has to re-up during a shift. Or, fuck, maybe he miscalculated something on the taper?

Or, the voice he normally blocks out chimes in, it’s a terrible idea to be trying to administer your own taper off benzos, let alone working in an ER while you do that.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

-

He tries to start pacing the shift like he would a run. There are two and a half hours left. He has worked nine and a half hours. Those don’t go into a nice fraction. He’s worked nineteen twenty-fourths of his shift. He has five twenty-fourths left.

Fuck.

-

“Robby? I need to talk to you about something, uh. Personal. But it also affects work. And I think I need...I need some help.”

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