☆ ꨄ︎ Summertime Sadness: Summary: "Growing up being Jack's best friend meant having to hide your feelings for his hot older brother. When you let a joke slip about asking a friends brother for a condom, Luke is the only one who puts it together. Can you keep it a secret from Jack? Or will things with Quinn spiral out of control?"
☆ ꨄ︎ ⚡︎ Part Two: Summary: "You did the one thing you both promise not to repeat. If it was so wrong, why did it feel so good? Only when Quinn gets in his head, you realize how attached he really was."
☆ Alone Time: Request: "Can you please write a smut story of Quinn on top of Y/N dry humping because they are out of condoms but then end up having sex without a condom because they are both desperate for each other."
☆ Ice and Dice: Request: "Please write a story about Quinn Hughes and y/n having car sex right before dice and ice!! ❤️❤️❤️🙏 (1st round: y/n on top of Quinn in the drivers seat then 2nd round: Quinn on top of her) but Quinn trying to be careful not to cum onto y/n’s dress by holding it against her stomach."
ꨄ︎ Marriage Proposal: Request: "Can you write a story about Quinn buying and engagement ring and proposing to y/n? Also including how nervous he is. 🙏😍❤️ thank you!!"
ꨄ︎ ⚡︎ Dinner Dashing: Summary: When Jack invites you to dinner. You were already stressing about the prices. When Quinn insults you, you sneak out only to make up a few weeks later.
☆ Midnights: Request: "Can you please write a story about Quinn and y/n sleeping but then Quinn wakes up with a hard on. (Quinn laying on top of y/n) He doesn’t want to wake up y/n so he dry humps her leg but wakes her up in the process because his thighs are rubbing against her clit. Thank you!! Please also do dominate Quinn."
ꨄ︎ Forbidden From The Beginning: Summary: "When Luke has you come up to visit him after your ex, Derek broke your heart. You are overwhelmed with Quinn's presences".
☆ ꨄ︎ Forbidden From The Beginning PT2: Summary: "After Trevor spilt the beans on Quinn's feelings, your left with aftermath of a broody boyfriend".
☆ ꨄ︎ Forbidden From The Beginning PT3: Summary: "Every time you and Quinn tried to get intimate, something always interrupted. Or someone. Having being fed up, Quinn tries to make it up to you. Only to get cock blocked when your ex keeps frantically texting you".
☆ ꨄ︎ Forbidden From The Beginnings PT4: Summary: "Things finally stabilize, and after a gentle, steamy morning. New insecurities rise when Quinn's ex-fling shows up to family dinner".
⚡︎ꨄ︎Christmas Chaos: Summary: "After months of not talking and seeing other people, Luke and Jack drag you to Vancouver for the holidays. After your ex storms out, Quinn slowly creeps back into your life".
ꨄ︎ ⚡︎ QH43- Build me up: Summary: "After a summer fling of getting over your ex, one disastrous media leak brings you both together".
Blurb: Here.
--
Luke Hughes-
ꨄ︎ Curb Side Confessions: "Summary: When Luke invited you to his lake house. He didn't think it would end in him fighting for your affection from his friends. What happens when he suddenly explodes outside of the bar?"
ꨄ︎ ⚡︎ Lakehouse fights, or flights?: Summary: "Summary: After years of butting heads in college. You become best friends with Luke's older brother. His feelings only changed when he saw you with your boyfriend (ex now)."
ꨄ︎ Bar Breakups: Summary: "After years of Luke and you fighting, one fight ends up with more than bruised egos. It leads Jack too pushing a make up."
ꨄ︎ Poolside Lovers: Summary: "When Jack takes you to the lake house after a messy break up. You don't expect to get on with his younger brother so well."
ꨄ︎ LH43- Skates and Secrets: Summary: "When Luke finds out your a virgin, years later he plans to help you through it. But what happens when your pulled between him and Nico".
ꨄ︎ LH43-Bar Breakdowns: Summary: "the building tension causes you and Luke to have some weird moments. The most notable when he punched a guy at the bar for you".
ꨄ︎ LH43- Lakeside Lovers: Summary: "Julia invited you to the lake house that her new fling invited you too. Only to get there and realize you weren't invited, she just brought you. Luke started to befriend you in an attempt to be the man his mom raised him to be".
ꨄ︎ LH43- Dock's and Diving: Summary: "When Jack forgets his to-go bag one night, you bring it to the game. Only for his younger brother to rush out and collect it. To apologize Jack invited you to the lake-house this summer. Totally not because his brother has the worst crush on you".
--
Clark Kent-
ꨄ︎ Alleyways: Summary: Summary: "A late night robbery leaves you with the courage to ask Clark out."
--
Chishiya Shuntaro-
ꨄ︎ Convenient Stores: Summary: "When you get separated from Arisu and Usagi, Chishiya had taken it upon himself to take care of you. Especially when the game of hearts started to get tense".
ꨄ︎ Convenience Store Floors: Summary: "After crashing at a hotel, you and Chishiya wander the city in hopes of finding your friends. While slowly building and crumbling tension".
ꨄ︎CH- Twists and Turns: Summary: "After you take a bolt to the arm for Chishiya, he spends the night taking care of you. The tension building as you start to believe he actually wants to be around you".
ꨄ︎CH- Twists and Turns PT2: Summary: "Summary: Stuck in a game of truth or dare, you both learn more about each other than you wanted too".
--
Dean Winchester-
ꨄ︎ Old Friends, New Lovers: Summary: "After your uncle Sonny's handyman Jack died under weird circumstances, he called up and old friend of his. And an old lover of yours".
Summary: Sat in a cell, your only comfort is the Mandalorian imprisoned next door.
Warnings: 18+only. Smut ahoy including masturbation and penetration 🍆
A/N: Little extra Friday treat for you! I’ve been working on this one since I started binging the series in anticipation of the movie. I know NOTHING about Star Wars, I’m a complete fairweather fan on the basis of Pedro. So anything that doesn’t make sense in the universe is on me 🥰
Let me know if you think I should write more…
WC: 8k
Din Masterlist
➰➰➰➰➰➰➰➰🚀➰➰➰➰➰➰➰➰
The cell smells like rust and recycled air, and the lights went down hours ago – not off, never off, just dimmed to that bruised red that means the facility's day cycle is over and its prisoners are supposed to sleep. You haven’t slept. You’re not sure you remember how to anymore.
Three days. That’s how long you've been in here, counting by the rhythm of the ration slot and the heavy clank of boots that come once per shift change. Three days since the bounty hunter who calls himself Vane dragged you off your transport with a vibroblade at your throat, smiling like he'd won a sabacc pot. He hasn't told you what he wants yet, clearly being the kind of man that likes to make a woman stew.
You shift on the metal bench that passes for a bunk, drawing your knees up to your chest. The durasteel wall behind you is cold even through your shirt, but you press your shoulder blades into it anyway, because the cold is a real thing, and real things are rare in here.
That’s when you hear him move.
The cell next to yours was empty when they put you in. You'd stared at the dividing wall for the better part of a day, watching the seams, listening for breathing, and there had been nothing. But somewhere in the long stretch between the last meal and the dimming of the lights, they must have brought someone in, because now you can hear the unmistakable scrape of something heavy against metal, the dull clink of what can only be armour settling.
You hold your breath and hear a long exhale on the other side – mechanical, filtered. Like it’s passed through a vocoder before it reaches air. You know that sound. Every spacer this side of the Rim knows that sound.
A Mandalorian.
You don't know what possesses you to speak. Loneliness, maybe, stupidity, definitely and you turn your face to the wall.
"Hey."
There’s nothing for a long moment, just that mechanical breathing, even and slow, like a man who’s been in worse places than this and is conserving himself for whatever comes next.
"You're awake."
His voice lands in your chest like a stone dropped down a well. Low, rough at the edges, made stranger by the helmet's modulator, carrying that slight metallic burr that turns every consonant into something with teeth. It should have been off-putting, but it isn’t. It’s the first voice you've heard in three days that isn’t Vane's oily purr, and your whole body leans toward it before you've even decided to.
"Can't sleep," you reply. "How long have you been in there?"
"Couple hours."
"I didn't hear them bring you in."
"They didn't want you to."
You press your palm flat against the wall, as if you can feel him through it. You can’t, of course, the durasteel thick enough to stop a blaster bolt. But you imagine him on the other side, sitting the way you’re sitting, his helmet tilted toward the sound of your voice.
"Are you hurt?" you ask.
He pauses. "Nothing that matters."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the one you're getting."
You smile, in spite of everything. "Fine. Don't tell me your name either, then."
"I wasn't going to."
"Of course not." You let your head tip back against the wall. "So, what do I call you for the purposes of this limited conversation?"
"Mando works."
"Very original."
"It’s functional and descriptive."
You laugh, a tiny breath of one, surprised out of you because it’s been a long time since anything has made you laugh. You hear him shift on the other side of the wall, a slow grinding of beskar against metal that you feel more than hear, the vibration humming through your spine.
"What did you do to end up in here?” he asks.
"Wrong cargo on the wrong ship. You?"
"Wrong face on the wrong wanted poster."
"Yours or his?"
"Mine, apparently."
"Hm." You trace a finger along a seam in the wall, following its line down to where it meets the bench. "Are you going to kill him when you get out?"
"Yes."
He says it the way another person might say I'm going to get water. No inflection, no heat, just the flat statement of a future fact. You should be frightened of him, but you’re not. There’s something steadying about that voice, that certainty. As if the universe is a problem he’s already solved, and you’ve only stumbled into the middle of his working.
"Take me with you," you say, before you can think better of it.
"You don't know me," he replies, with the shape of a laugh through the modulator.
"I know you're not him."
"That’s a pretty low bar."
"It's the one I've got."
He goes quiet for a while after that. Not an uncomfortable quiet, rather the kind that feels like company. You listen to him breathe, slow and even, and try to match your own to it, and find after a few minutes that you have. You inhale when he inhales and exhale when he exhales, as if you’re sharing a single set of lungs through the wall.
"What's your name?" he asks.
You tell him without thinking, the syllables just leaving you, soft, into the dim red dark.
"That's a good name.”
"It's just a name."
"There’s no such thing as just a name."
You turn your face to the wall and press your cheek to it. The metal’s less cold now, or you’re warmer – one of the two.
"Say it again," you whisper.
There’s a pause long enough to make you think he might refuse. Then his voice comes, lower, slower, and he says your name the way you've never heard it said before, like it has weight, like it’s a thing he’s setting down carefully on a table between you, where you can both look at it.
Something flutters low in your belly, and you tell yourself it’s hunger. Three days of nutrient paste can do things to a person.
You know it isn’t the hunger.
"Tell me something," you say, mostly to fill the silence. "Anything, I don't care."
"Like what?"
"Like…what's the last good meal you had and on what planet. I don’t know, anything."
You can hear him thinking about an answer before he speaks. "Tiingilar. On Nevarro. But there was too much spice, and it burned my tongue for an hour."
"You eat through that helmet?"
"Not in front of you, I wouldn't."
The phrasing is so specific, so oddly intimate, that it makes your face hot. In front of you. As if he's thought about it. As if you’re a person whose presence would change what he does with his mouth.
"Why not?" you ask, voice careful and quiet.
"It's the Way. No one sees my face."
"No one?"
"No one living."
You let that sit and take in the whole shape of it — the loneliness baked into it, the discipline, the strange tender violence of a vow that old. You think about a man who hasn't shown his face to anyone in years, who eats alone, who sleeps alone and who would die before he breaks that code.
You think about what it would mean if he ever did break it for someone.
"What about touch?" you ask, and you can hear your own pulse in your ears now. "Does the Way say anything about that?"
He pauses for a single beat. "No."
"No, it doesn't say anything? Or no, you don't…?"
"It doesn't forbid it."
"Oh."
The silence after that has a different quality, the silence of two people who’ve both noticed the same thing at the same time and are waiting to see who’s going to acknowledge it first. You feel your fingers curl against the wall and the wall against the line of your thigh through your trousers, the cold of it sinking through and meeting the heat of you.
"Mando," you say finally.
"Yeah."
"When's the last time someone touched you?"
The modulator catches his exhale and turns it into something like static. He doesn’t answer right away and so you wait. You can be patient when you need to be, and right now, with your cheek to the wall and your blood loud in your throat, you need to be.
"It’s been a long time," he admits finally.
"How long?"
"Longer than I'm going to tell a stranger."
"I'm not a stranger, you know my name."
"That doesn't make you not a stranger."
"Doesn't it?"
You imagine him in the cell next to yours, that helmeted head bowed, his gloved hands resting on his thighs. You imagine his shoulders pressed back against the same wall you’re pressed against, the only thing between his skin and yours a few centimetres of durasteel and a lifetime of bad decisions.
"What about you?" he says.
"What about me?"
"When's the last time anyone touched you?"
The directness of his question startles you. You've been the one playing this game and somehow, he’s taken the cards out of your hand without you noticing.
"A while," you admit.
"How long is a while?"
"Long enough that I think about it when I shouldn't."
"When shouldn't you?"
"Now," you say, "for instance."
You hear the soft sound through the modulator that you decide, immediately and with some certainty, is a laugh, or the closest thing he allows himself to one. It’s a warm sound and it goes straight down your spine and pools at the base of it.
"You're thinking about it now?" he asks.
"You asked."
"I did."
"Are you going to ask what I'm thinking about?"
"I think I'd rather you tell me."
Your face is suddenly on fire and you’re grateful for the wall, grateful for the dark, grateful for every centimetre of durasteel that keeps him from seeing the colour you must be. You press your forehead against the metal, close your eyes and feel the steady, mechanical sound of his breathing on the other side.
Fuck it, you think. You’re never going to see him and he’s never going to see you. If you both die in this place tomorrow, the only thing left of this night will be the air it’s moved through.
"I'm thinking about your voice," you say.
"My voice?"
"That's where I'd start."
"Where would you start with it?"
You wet your lips. "I'd want you to keep talking. I'd want you closer to the wall. I'd want…I'd want to put my ear right up against it, and I'd want you to put your mouth right up against it on your side, and just…talk. About anything. I just want it in my head."
You hear him move, hear the scrape of beskar against the wall, and you know, even though you can’t see him, that he’s shifted closer, that the helmet is nearer to you now than it had been a minute ago. That if there were no wall, he would be a hand's breadth away.
"Like this," he says, and his voice is lower than it had been, the vocoder rasp gone soft, almost a whisper, and impossibly intimate for that. "This close enough for you?"
"Yeah," you breathe. "Yeah, that's…that's good."
"Tell me what else."
"I'd…" You swallow. "I'd want you to tell me what you'd do."
"What I'd do?"
"If there wasn't a wall."
He takes his time with the answer. You can hear him thinking, hear him deciding, hear the moment he gives himself permission to say what he wants to say. It comes through the helmet as a small exhale, almost a sigh.
"I'd put my hand on your throat," he says.
Your breath catches.
"Not to hurt you," he adds. "Just to feel it, your pulse. You've got it going pretty fast right now, I bet."
"How can you tell? It's…it's not the only thing it's doing."
"No?"
"No."
"Tell me."
You press your thighs together, the friction of the rough fabric almost too much. You haven’t realised how wound you've been, how three days of fear and adrenaline has sat in you with nowhere to go, and now his voice is a key turning in a lock you haven't known was there.
"I'm wet," you say, quiet, into the wall. "I've been wet since you said my name."
The sound he makes then isn’t modulated. It is – for just a fraction of a second – something raw that slips through underneath the vocoder, a breath that turns into something else, and you want to live in that sound, want to wear it.
"Show me," he says. "Tell me. Whatever you're doing…tell me."
"You first."
"I'm hard."
The directness of it punches the air out of you. He says it the way he said yes, I'm going to kill him, flat and true, a simple fact of the universe.
"Are you touching yourself?" you whisper.
"I want to wait."
"For what?"
"For you."
Oh. Oh. You bite down on the inside of your cheek to keep from making a noise that will carry. Some part of you is still aware that there are guards somewhere in this facility, that Vane is somewhere in this facility, and that anything either of you does or says too loudly could be heard. But the bigger part of you, the part that’s been starving for three days and probably longer than that, is already past caring.
"Together, then," you say.
"Together."
You work your hand under the waistband of your trousers. The fabric’s stiff and unfriendly, but underneath it, you’re soft and slick and so ready that the first brush of your own fingertips makes you gasp into the metal.
"Talk to me," you say. "Mando…keep talking."
"I'm undoing the belt," he says. "Just the cod, the rest stays on. You can't be careless in a place like this."
"Yeah."
"I’ve got my hand on it."
"Tell me…tell me what it looks like."
"It's hard. It's been hard since you asked me about touch. And it’s leaking a little at the tip. I'm wiping it with my thumb."
"Are you…are your hands gloved?"
"I took the right one off – for you.”
You whimper softly, and don’t even try to hide it. You have two fingers circling your clit now, slow, the way he’s talking – slow and deliberate, with that mechanical control that you suspect is the only thing keeping him from coming apart already.
"What about you?" he says. "Tell me what you're doing."
"I've got my hand down my pants. My fingers…” you exhale. “I'm so wet, Mando, I can't…I'm circling, just circling, slow."
"Slow's good."
"I want it to be your hand."
"What would my hand do?"
"It would be slower than mine and heavier. You'd make me wait. You'd make me…you'd make me ask."
"Would you ask?"
"Yes."
"Ask now."
You can’t think because you can barely breathe. The wall against your forehead is wet from your breath, the metal smelling faintly of iron. “Please."
"Please what?"
"Please touch me. Please…please don't stop talking, please put your fingers in me, please…"
"How many?"
"Two, start with two."
"Tell me when."
"Now. Mando, now…"
You push two fingers into yourself and the sound you makes is hot and high and you press your other hand over your own mouth to muffle it. On the other side of the wall you hear a sound through the modulator that’s almost a groan, but not quite. He’s holding it back, but you hear the shape of it, hear the way it cracks the calm in his voice.
"That's it," he says. "Tell me how it feels."
"Tight. Hot. I…Mando, I haven't…I haven't done this in so long, I…"
"I've got you."
"What are you doing?"
"Stroking, slow. Long strokes. My grip's tight, I…fuck…"
That word through the modulator, low and almost involuntary, is the most vulgar thing you’ve ever heard. It makes you clench around your own fingers, and whine into your hand.
"Say it again," you beg.
"Fuck."
"Again."
"You feel that good?"
"Yes."
"What if it was me? What if it was my hand inside you?"
"It is. Right now, it is. Tell me you're thinking about it."
"I am. I'm thinking about…about pushing you up against this wall where you can't move. Where I can hold you there with one hand and use the other…"
"How many?"
"Three. You'd take three."
"I would."
"You would. You'd take everything I gave you, wouldn't you?"
"Yes."
"Say it."
"I'd take everything you gave me."
You add the third finger. It’s a stretch, just on the edge of too much, and that edge is exactly where you want to be. Your thumb works your clit in tight circles and you pant against the wall, against your own palm, and on the other side of the durasteel a Mandalorian is stroking his cock to the sound of your voice and you’ve never, in your entire life, been so undone by a man you’ve not seen.
"Mando."
"I'm here."
"I'm close."
"How close?"
"Close. Close, I…keep talking to me, please, please, just…"
"Listen to me," he says, and his voice has dropped to something so quiet it’s almost a breath, almost prayer. "Listen. You feel like silk. You feel like the best thing I've put my hand in in years. If I were there, I'd have my mouth on your throat right now. I'd have my teeth on the place where your pulse is. I wouldn't bite hard, just enough that you'd feel it for days. I'd have my fingers in you all the way to the knuckle, and I'd be working you open, slow, until you were begging me, until you were saying my name…"
"I don't know your name."
There’s a pause. A long one, during which you almost stop breathing.
"Din," he says. "It's Din."
Something cracks open in your chest. He’s given you something he’s not supposed to give, given you something that, by his own laws, no one should have. And he’s given it to you with his hand on his cock and your name in his throat and a wall between you. And you understood, in that moment, that you will never, not as long as you live, hear that name said in that voice again without falling apart.
"Din," you say.
"Yeah."
"Din…Din…"
"Say it again."
"Din, I'm…"
"Come."
You come around your own fingers with his name in your mouth and the metal of the wall against your forehead, and you bite down hard on the heel of your hand to keep from screaming. On the other side of the wall, you hear the shape of his climax through the modulator, the cracked-open sound of a man who hasn’t let anyone hear him in a very long time. It goes on, and on, and on, and when you finally collapse back against the bench, you’re trembling all over, slick with sweat, your fingers still inside yourself, your breath coming in pieces.
For a long time, neither of you speak, but you can hear him breathing. You lie back on the bench with your trousers half-undone and your hand against your chest and your heart hammering up into your palm and listen to him do the same on the other side of the wall.
The dimmed red lights buzz faintly overhead and somewhere far down the corridor, a door cycles. The world is still in here, the way it always was – but underneath the stillness, something new is sitting between you that hadn’t been there an hour ago. You can feel the weight of it and suspect he can too.
"Din," you say, just to see if you’re allowed to say it again.
"Yeah." His voice is rougher than it has been, the modulator doing its best to flatten it out and failing. "I'm here."
"Are you alright?"
"That's my question."
"I asked first."
"I'm alright."
You smile at the ceiling. There’s something so absurdly him about it – a man who has just come apart with a stranger's name in his throat and is now answering you in two-syllable monosyllables, the way he probably answers everyone about everything.
Your fingers are still tacky, your face still hot and you feel, somehow, like you’ve just survived something rather than enjoyed it.
"I'm alright too," you say, in case he’s waiting for it.
"Good."
"Din?"
"Yeah."
"You shouldn't have given me that, should you?"
He’s quiet for a long time and you let him have the quiet. You've learned, over the course of the night, that his silences are a kind of speech, that he’s a man who turns things over thoroughly before he sets them down.
"No," he says finally. "I shouldn't have."
"Are you sorry?"
"No."
"Good."
You roll onto your side, facing the wall, draw your knees up and tuck your hand under your cheek. The metal is warm now where you’ve been pressed against it, warm with the warmth of you, and you imagine that on the other side of it some matching patch of beskar is warm too, warmed by a helmet that’s been resting against the same plane of durasteel for the better part of an hour.
"Are you really going to kill him?" you ask.
"Yes."
"Tomorrow?"
"As soon as I get the chance."
"Will I get to see it?"
"You'll be out of the cell before it happens, I'll see to that."
You close your eyes. The certainty in his voice is a strange thing to lean against, but you lean anyway. It’s the most solid thing you've had to lean against in three days, maybe longer.
"Din?"
"Yeah."
"Tell me something else. Anything, just…keep talking, until I fall asleep."
"What do you want to hear about?"
"Anything that isn't this place."
You hear him shift, heard the soft sigh of the helmet against the metal as he thinks about it and settles him in.
"There's a marsh moon," he says, "out past Trask. There’s nothing on it, no settlements, just water and reeds as far as you can see. The water glows at night. Some kind of bioluminescent thing in it. You walk through it and your boots light up the whole pool, blue, like you're walking on stars."
"Have you been there?"
"Once."
"What did you do there?"
"I refuelled, sat on the ramp of my ship for a while and watched the water."
"Alone?"
"Yeah."
"I'd like to see that."
"I'll show you."
Your chest does a thing it has no business doing, given the circumstances. You press your cheek harder into the wall, not rusting yourself to answer, because if you answer, your voice is going to do something embarrassing.
"Keep going," you say when you can. "Tell me more."
So, he does.
He tells you about a desert at dawn on a planet whose name you don’t catch, where the sand turns the colour of beaten copper in the first light. He tells you about a forest where the trees grow so close together that you have to turn sideways to walk between them, and about a kind of bread they baked on Sorgan that you eat with your hands.
You don't know when you fall asleep. You only know that somewhere in the middle of a sentence about a city built into a cliff face, your eyelids give up, and the last thing you remember is the steady metal-edged sound of his voice telling you about the way the wind moves through the canyon at night and, for the first time in three days, you’re not afraid.
****
You wake to white.
Not red, not the bruised dim red of the night cycle, but the cold flat white of the day lights, full and unflattering and merciless on your gummed-shut eyes. You squint and sit up, your body protesting in a hundred small ways and you put your hand to the wall before you've even fully remembered why.
"Din?"
Nothing.
You frown, sleep still thick in your throat.
"Din,” you cough. “Are you awake?"
Nothing.
The breathing’s gone, that’s the first thing you notice, the absence of the slow, even, modulated breath that has become, over the course of the night, as familiar to you as your own pulse. The cell on the other side of the wall is quiet. Not the quiet of a man sleeping, but the quiet of a room with nothing in it.
Your stomach drops.
You scramble off the bench and go to the front of the cell, pressing your face to the narrow slit in the door, trying to angle your eye to see down the corridor. You can’t see much, but you notice the edge of the next cell's door…
…which is open.
Not forced or blown, rather open the way a door’s open when someone’s unlocked it and walked out. The interior, what little of it you could see, is empty. No figure on the bench, no silhouette by the wall, no beskar.
"Din?"
Your voice comes out smaller than you mean it to.
You stand there for a long time with your forehead against the cool metal of your own door, and you try to talk yourself into the reasonable explanations. He’s escaped and he’s going to kill the man who put him here, and a man who says a thing like that the way he said it isn’t a man who stays in a cell longer than he has to.
He said he would see to it that you got out before it happened.
He said I'll show you.
You believe him. You had believed him at the time, and you believed him now, in the cold white morning, with your hair stuck to your face and your hands trembling slightly from cold or hunger or the aftershock of a night you’re still half-convinced you dreamed.
You go back to the bench and sit down. You put your hand against the wall, except it isn’t warm anymore. It’s cold all the way through. He’s been gone for hours, probably, since not long after you fell asleep, because that’s the kind of man he is – the kind who waits until you’re safe in sleep before he does what he has to do, so that you won’t have to lie awake listening to him do it.
You wonder if he said goodbye. If somewhere in the dark, between one of his sentences about canyons and the next, he said something soft to the wall, and you hadn't heard it because you were already gone. You hope so. You hoped he'd put his gloved hand against the metal one last time and said your name the way he'd said it the night before.
You draw your knees up and wrap your arms around them. Then you press your forehead to them and you breathe, slow, in and out, the way you’d breathed with him in the dark, except now you’re doing it alone, and the rhythm doesn’t match anything but the memory of him.
It’s then that you notice it.
A small thing, set on the floor at the base of the dividing wall, on your side, where it must have been pushed under through the narrow gap between the wall and the floor – a gap you haven’t noticed before, a gap barely wide enough for a finger but wide enough, evidently, for this.
You pick it up.
It’s a sliver of beskar, no bigger than your thumb, cut clean, the edges smoothed. A scrap, probably, from some repair he's done to his own armour a long time ago and kept in a pouch for reasons that are his and not yours. The metal’s warm in your hand, even though it shouldn't have been.
Wrapped around it, twice, is a thin strip of leather. And on the leather, scratched in with the point of something sharp, in letters small and precise and careful, he’s written you a message.
Wait for me.
That’s all. No name, no instructions. no promise more elaborate than those three words, in a hand that has pressed hard enough into the leather to scar it.
You close your fingers around the beskar and shut your eyes. You press your closed fist to your mouth and sit there in the cold white morning of the cell that has held you for three days, and you don’t cry, because you’ve not cried in years and you’re not going to start now. But something in your chest does a thing that’s very close to it – a hot, full, aching thing that wants out and can’t get out and so just sits there, glowing, like the water on his marsh moon.
Down the corridor, very faint, you hear footsteps, heavy ones, coming closer.
You open your hand and look at the sliver of beskar once more, and then you close your fist around it again and tuck it into the inner pocket of your shirt, against your skin, where no search would find it without finding you first. You straighten your spine, wipe your face with the heel of your hand and set your jaw.
You wait.
Because he's asked you to. Because he’s coming back. Because a man like that, a man who said yes the way he said it and I'll show you the way he said it and Din – Din, it's Din – into the dark, to a stranger, through a wall, breaking a vow he has kept his whole life – that man doesn’t say wait for me unless he means it.
The footsteps get closer then stop outside your door.
You hear the soft electronic chirp of a lockpad being overridden – not the heavy clang of guards cycling a door open in the normal way, but the cleaner, quieter click of someone who knows exactly which wires to cross and which ones to leave alone.
The door slides back and there he is. Beskar from helm to boot, the morning light off the corridor lamps making a hard silver line down the curve of his pauldron. Blaster holstered at his thigh, vibroblade still wet at the tip. He fills the doorway like he’s been built to fill it, and the visor turns toward you. You stood up so fast you nearly crack your head on the underside of the bunk.
"Took your time," you say.
The modulator catches the tired amusement before he's even spoken. "There were six of them."
"And Vane?"
"Five."
You snort because you can’t help it. He steps into the cell, glances at you, glances at the wall, glances – pointedly – at the floor where the sliver of beskar had been. He doesn’t say anything about it because he doesn’t have to. The angle of his helmet says, good, you found it, and the small tilt that follows says come on, and you’re moving before he's finished the gesture, ducking under his arm into the corridor.
"This way," he says.
"I know which way."
"Then go."
You know the layout of this facility because you’ve spent three days memorising the sliver of it you could see through the door slit, and because, it turns out, you also saw the schematics two weeks ago in a briefing on the Crest – a briefing you had pretended to listen to while throwing ration wrappers at the back of his helmet.
You take the left at the junction and he covers your back. Then you take the service stairs down two levels, through the maintenance hatch and out into the cold dawn air of a landing platform where a familiar gunship sits waiting with its ramp already down, because he landed it himself before he came for you and he isn’t the kind of man who leaves a door closed when he might need to run through it.
The ramp clangs shut behind you, the engines spool and you brace yourself against the bulkhead as he takes the pilot's seat and throws the Crest up off the platform with the kind of brutal efficiency he uses for everything. The planet falls away under you, the stars come up, and you’re free.
You stand in the cockpit doorway, breathing.
"Don't say it," he says, without turning around.
"Don't say what?"
"Whatever you're about to say."
"I wasn't going to…"
"You were going to."
"I was going to say thanks."
"No, you weren't."
You laugh, finally. It comes out shaky, the adrenaline leaving you in a slow drain. You let yourself slide down the bulkhead until you’re sitting on the deck with your back against the metal, and you put your hands over your face and laugh until your ribs hurt.
He punches the coordinates in, sets the autopilot, then stands up, slowly, the way he stands up when his back hurts and he doesn’t want you to know. But you know, because you've been flying with him for nine months and you know every small tell his body makes through the armour.
He crouches in front of you and puts his gloved hand on your knee.
"You alright?"
"Yeah."
"Look at me."
You take your hands off your face and look up at the visor. The T-shape of it is the same as it’s always been. The same as it’s been across a hundred campfires and a thousand cantina tables and the dozen times he’s sat across from you in this same hold and cleaned his weapons while you cleaned yours.
The same, and not the same.
"We really need to stop doing this," you say finally.
"Doing what?"
"The wall thing. The talking through the wall every time a job goes sideways, and they put us in adjoining cells thing. This is…Din, this is the third time."
"Fourth."
"What?"
"Fourth. You're forgetting Ord Mantell."
"Ord Mantell was a closet, not a cell."
"Still a wall."
"Still a wall," you allow.
He huffs, his hand still on your knee. The leather of the glove is warm from the inside of his fist, and you can feel each individual finger, and that he’s not lifting it away.
"It's because we don't talk like this anywhere else," you say. "You know that, right?"
"I know."
"You only get like that when there's a wall."
"I know."
"It's ridiculous."
"I know."
"Din..." you hesitate. "That's the first time you've told me your real name."
"Yeah."
You lick your lips. "Fuck me."
The hand on your knee tightens, just a fraction, just enough that you know he heard you.
"Don't," he says
"Fuck me. Let’s get it out of our systems. Once, properly, with nothing between us and…and I swear to you, I swear, the next time some Hutt-licking bounty hunter shoves us into a holding block, neither of us is going to need to do the wall thing ever again, because we'll have done it, and the tension will be gone, and we can go back to being…"
"Being what?"
"Whatever we are."
"You think that's how it works?"
"I think it's worth finding out."
You watch the visor, watch the way his shoulders move when he breathes, watch the long, calibrated stillness of a man who’s already decided what he’s going to do and is making himself take an extra second to be sure of it.
"You don't know what you're asking for," he says.
"I do."
"You don't."
"Din, I had three fingers in myself last night while you talked to me through a wall. I think I have some idea."
The sound that comes out of him isn’t a laugh, it’s something rougher, something he doesn’t quite catch in time, and his hand leaves your knee and goes to your jaw, gloved thumb against the corner of your mouth.
You stop breathing.
"Stand up," he says.
You stand he stands with you, and you have to tip your head to keep looking at the visor. He looks down at you for a long moment, and then his other hand comes up and he hooks one gloved finger under the collar of your shirt and tugs, gently, until you take a step toward him, and another, and then his back is against the bulkhead and yours is against him and his arm is around your waist.
"Once," he says.
"Once."
"And it doesn't fix anything."
"Probably not."
"And you're going to have to be quiet, because the autopilot doesn't know what to do if you scream and trip the proximity alarms."
"Din, I am going to scream."
"Then I'll cover your mouth."
You go hot all the way through and feel your own pulse in places that have no business having a pulse. You press your forehead against the cold beskar of his chest plate breathe in the smell of him – leather and weapon oil and metal warmed by the body underneath.
"Bed. Bunk. Somewhere. Now."
He picks you up, one arm under your thighs and the other across your back, like you weigh nothing, like he's been waiting a long time for the excuse to find out exactly how much you weigh. He carries you down the short ladder into the hold and through to the narrow alcove where his bunk is set into the wall and sets you down on the edge of it. Then he stands between your knees and starts, with great deliberation, to undress.
The pauldrons came off first, heavy clunks against the deck. Then the vambraces, the chest plate, the cuirass, the thigh plates. He sets them all aside in the order he always sets them, the order you’ve watched him set them in a hundred times, and the familiarity of the ritual mixes with the unfamiliarity of what’s happening making your head spin a little.
The flight suit comes off next. Black, snug, all the seams you’ve stared at across many a hold while pretending to read. He peels it down to his waist and you see the long lean torso of him, scarred in a dozen places, a constellation of old hurt, a body that has been keeping itself alive for a long time and has the receipts.
There’s scant hair across his chest, dark and soft-looking, narrowing down toward his waistband and a long pale scar that wraps around his ribs like a vine. There’s a tattoo, small, on the inside of his left bicep – a mythosaur skull, no bigger than your thumb – that you have absolutely never known exists.
He keeps going. Flight suit all the way off, boots, trousers and the under-layer beneath. Everything. Every stitch.
Except the helmet.
He stands there in the low light of the bunk alcove, completely naked from the neck down, hard already, his cock heavy against his thigh, and the beskar catches in the dim light off the bulkhead in a way that makes the helmet seem almost a separate creature from the body that’s offering itself to you.
"Din...”
"No."
"I didn't…"
"You were going to."
"I wasn't…"
"You were."
"...I was."
"No."
"Just the eyes. Just…just let me see your eyes."
"No."
"Please."
"No."
He says it gently with no heat in it, as a feature of the universe, not a refusal of you. And then he steps closer and takes the hem of your shirt in both bare hands and pulls it off you, slow, then drops it on the floor on top of his own.
"You have me," he says. "All of me. Just not that."
"Din…"
"All of me," he says again, and he puts his bare hand flat over your sternum, between your breasts, hot palm and rough fingertips against your skin, and you forget what you had been going to say. "Everything else. You can have everything else. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Say it."
"I understand."
"Then take it."
He kisses you.
Or…the helmet does. He presses the cool flat front of the beskar to your forehead first, the way he had once or twice before in moments you’ve not allowed yourself to think too hard about. Then he tilts his head and brings it lower, pressing the brow of the helm to your mouth, just for a moment, just enough that you feel the cold kiss of the metal on your lips, and then his hand is sliding up to cradle the back of your neck and he tips you back onto the bunk.
He kisses everything else with his hands.
The pads of his fingers move down the line of your throat. His thumb skates across your collarbone. His palm cups the underside of your breast and his mouth – the front of the helmet, the smooth lower edge – drags slow against your nipple, cool and unyielding, and you arch up off the bunk with a noise that you try, and fail, to keep quiet.
"Shh," he says.
"I can't…"
"You can."
"I can't…"
His hand comes up and his fingers slip into your mouth. Two of them, the same two, and you bite down and moan around them and he makes a low sound through the modulator.
"Good. Like that. Quiet."
He keeps going down, the helmet tracking down the line of your sternum, the soft place under your ribs and the flat of your stomach. His other hand works your trousers open and shoves them down. You kick them off, and your underthings with them, and then you’re naked under him, and the cold metal of the helmet presses against the hot skin of your inner thigh and the contrast makes you whimper around his fingers.
"Din…"
He doesn’t answer with words. He answers by taking his fingers out of your mouth and replacing them, slowly, between your legs. Two fingers, the way you’d asked for last night. He finds you slick and ready and he hisses, audibly, through the modulator.
"All night," he says. "Like this?"
"Most of it."
"Greedy."
"For you, just for you."
The fingers push in slowly, deeper than yours had gone, longer, more deliberate, and you make a sound that starts high and would go higher but for him pressing the front of the helmet to your sternum.
“Quiet, I told you."
"I'm trying."
"Try harder."
He fucks you on his fingers for what feels like a small eternity. Long, slow, brutal strokes, his thumb finding your clit with the precision of a man who knows where every nerve in a body lives and where to put pressure on each of them. You’re drenched, shaking, biting the back of your own wrist to stay quiet and he’s watching you do it, the visor angled down at your face the whole time, and you know – you know – that behind that visor his eyes are on your mouth.
"Din…Din, please, I want…"
"Tell me."
"You inside me, properly. Now."
He takes his hand away and shifts upwards, bracing one hand on the bunk beside your head and the other on his cock. You feel the blunt heat of him drag through your slickness and your hips buck up of their own accord and he makes a low strangled sound.
"Wait. Wait, look at me."
You look at the visor.
"Are you sure?" he asks.
"Din."
"Say it."
"I'm sure. Fuck me, please."
He pushes in slow, so slow you think you’re going to die of it. He pushes in to the hilt and then holds there, his forehead – the brow of the helmet – against yours, his bare chest against your bare chest, his hand on your jaw and the metallic rasp of his breathing the loudest thing in the world. You can feel him trembling, just slightly, with the effort of not moving.
"Alright?" he asks.
"Move."
"Alright?"
"Move, Din…"
He moves the way he does everything – efficiently, without waste, with the calibrated intensity of a man who’s decided what he’s going to do and is now doing exactly that, and nothing else, and nothing less. He sets a rhythm that’s deep and steady and merciless, and you wrap your legs around his hips and your arms around his shoulders and press your face to the side of the helmet, to the place where his ear would be, and you say his name into the beskar over and over again because you can’t say it into his mouth.
"Din…"
"I'm here."
"Din, harder…"
"You'll bruise."
"I want to bruise. Please, Din, please…"
He fucks you harder. He braces both hands on the bunk now, one on either side of your head, and drives into you with the long, full strokes of a man who’s been holding himself in check for nine months and has finally been given permission to stop. The headboard of the bunk knocks, softly, against the bulkhead in time with each thrust, and your hands roam his back as you map him by feel.
The helmet stays on.
You beg, somewhere in the middle of it. When the pleasure has stripped your inhibitions down to nothing, you put your hands on the sides of the helmet and say, "Please, Din, please, just…just let me see…" and he catches your wrists in one hand and pins them above your head.
"No. Not that. Anything else. Anything else but that."
"Anything?"
"Anything."
So, you take the anything. You take his hand off your wrists and put it around your throat, light, the way he said he would in the dark. You feel his fingers settle there, careful, finding the pulse, and he makes a sound that’s almost a groan, almost the sound you heard through the wall last night, and his thrusts falters for one stroke and then comes back harder.
"Like that?" he asks.
"Like that. Like that. Din…"
"You're close."
"Yes."
"Stay quiet."
"I can't…"
"You can."
He puts his other hand over your mouth. Bare, hot, dry and rough and you moan into it. He fucks you through it, hips snapping against yours in a rhythm that’s losing its precision, finally, after how long you can’t say, and you feel him start to come undone above you – felt the small involuntary movements he’s no longer controlling, feel the way his head bows and the helmet presses to your temple, feel the choked sound through the modulator that you’ve now heard five times in your life and will, you suspect, hear a great many more times before you’re done with each other.
"Come for me," he says, against your ear, against the metal between your ear and his mouth. "Now. Now, sweetheart, now…"
You come around him with his hand over your mouth, his other hand at your throat, his cock buried to the hilt and his forehead against yours, and you scream into his palm. He feels you go – feels every pulse of you around him – and he makes a sound you’ve never heard him make before, a real one, a whole one, unmodulated and choked and human, as he comes inside you, hard, in long pulses that you feel all the way up into your stomach.
Then he collapses – not all the way, catching himself on one elbow carefully – but his full weight comes down on you in a way it hasn’t, and the beskar of the helmet rests cool against the side of your face. You wrap your arms around his shoulders and hold him, his bare back slick under your palms, his breathing wreckage.
"Din," you say when you can.
"Yeah."
"You called me sweetheart."
He freezes fractionally. "I did."
"And...I lied."
"About what?"
"The tension. It's not gone."
His forehead – the brow of the helmet – presses harder against yours.
"No," he agrees. "It's not."
"What are we going to do about that?"
"Try again."
"Now?"
"Give me five minutes."
You laugh into the side of his helmet and feel his shoulders shake, just a little. You run your hand up the back of his neck to the very edge of the helmet – the place where the beskar meets the skin – and let your fingertips rest there.
He doesn’t stop you or pull away. He lets your fingers stay at the line where his hidden self begins, and he lets you keep them there, and that, you understand, is a different kind of yes.
You take it, close your eyes and keep your hand where it is.
Five minutes, he said.
You can wait five minutes.
You have, you reflect, gotten very good at waiting for him.
word count: 4k ish
pairing: din djarin x reader
a/n: [old timey radio voice] interrupting your regular schedule of bat boy to bring you [does jazz hands] yet another man that could kill u! i will apologise for not updating wtssf and instead giving this but i do not control the brain worms <3 hopefully this is still tasty for sum of y'all ! title from NFWMB by hozier
synopsis: Din gives you an unexpected gift. A dagger crafted with beskar, a fine weapon, a courting gift. You misunderstand. It doesn't take long for you to catch back on. inspired by a convo with my beloved @djarinova
By now, the constant hum and rattle of the Razor Crest around you was nearly unnoticeable.
You travel enough light-years with one stubborn screw in your cot, almost always returning to the spacecraft with one injury or another, and eventually the low lull becomes something more familiar.
Almost, if you'd let yourself admit it, a comfort.
Sleep is funny on the Crest. You'd been a light sleeper for most your life and it had saved your skin more time than you cared to count. Yet, it was the simple knowledge that a Mandalorian roamed in the cockpit above that allowed sleep to drag you deeper than usual.
It had taken months to let your guard down, to realise there wasn't going to be blade buried in your gut as you slumbered defencelessly. In the safety of his company, for the first time in decades, you dream when you sleep.
He hates having to wake you, only doing so if it's absolutely necessary. It's always with the lightest of touches, the leather of his gloves pressing softly against your shoulder, your name murmured and diluted through the modulator of his helmet.
Despite his gentleness, it never stops you from jarring awake.
You shudder awake with a violent twitch, pressing up on your elbow in a split second, prepared to move. You're stopped from moving further by Din's hand on your shoulder. He's knelt beside your cot, visor fixed on you.
You're on a new planet. The foreign atmosphere gives that away in an instant, the chalky taste in your mouth and the swarming heat on your skin. Your jack-rabbiting heart calms a bit.
"Din?"
You know he's only waking you because he must. The momentary calm banishes again as you push yourself up again. Din lets you this time, his gloved hand retreating to his side.
"It's not an emergency." He says, knowing your train of thought already. He tilts his head slightly, gesturing towards the ramp door. "I need to leave the ship. I didn't want you to wake and..."
Your trailing gaze darts back to his visor quickly, swallowing as you fill in the end of his sentence. Din doesn't finish it, but his shoulders readjust in a minuscule motion.
"I'm getting supplies. Watch the kid. Please."
You're nodding before he's finished his sentence. The sleep in your system is already dissipated and you push up, shifting onto your feet and trapping your pained hiss behind gritted teeth as Din rises to his full height.
There's a beep from his valance as he punches a button then a soft hiss as the pressure changes, the ramp door beginning to lower.
It's habit to watch the sliver of the outside grow, the new terrain stretching out before you as the mouth of the ship opens. As expected, a seemingly endless spread of sand greets you. You wrinkle your nose.
Din hadn't indulged the reason or destination of this particular trip. You hadn't asked. A deep slice in your thigh courtesy of a vibroblade and a mouthy Twi'lek had kept you off your feet and eager to rest.
The slice had been by pure luck—or so you thought.
But Din's silence following the patch up in the ship, his quietness suddenly uncanny, left you beginning to wonder if he was questioning your ability to fight. Weighing up your ability to defend.
And if those things were up for debate, certainly so was your position on his ship.
It had just been passed 3 years, almost six cycles if you counted how time passed on your home planet, since you had joined his crusade. Your job had one very simple, very crucial objective.
An objective that was now babbling at your feet, tiny claws reaching out for you.
"Hey, you," You say, reaching down to scoop Grogu up into your arms. He reaches his arms up as he does, making a happy gurgle as you tuck him against your hip.
His round, dark eyes peer up at you, his big ears twitching mischievously and you couldn't help but smile. You turn so he could see the stretch of desert and are surprised to find Din still in the mouth of the ship. He's turned back, his dark visor giving away nothing of his expression.
It's then you get the feeling once more; you're being evaluated. Your usefulness being weighed up. You shift beneath the weight of his gaze, unmoving but still not speaking.
"Did you forget something?" You ask, just to break the silence.
Din finally shifts, his helmet giving a small shake in answer. He doesn't speak, just stares another moment, before he's turning, his cape catching the wind as he strolls down the ramp.
You watch him go, heart in your throat, pondering with an ache of melancholy if your time on the Crest was coming to a close.
Another burbling noise from the little green monster in your arm tugs your attention away. You look down, smile already pulling at your mouth at his clawed hand reaching for you.
"At least I know you still like me," You murmur, letting his cling to one of your fingers. "You wouldn't fire me, would you?"
Grogu makes a noise of agreement, gripping your finger tight. Then he opens his little mouth and tries to direct your finger into it, the clearest declaration of his hunger he can give.
You huff a quiet laugh, turning back to the ship, mentally tallying up your list of things to do.
—
By the time of Din's return, the sun has dipped low in the sky and the dunes glow a scorching orange in its rays.
You see him coming in the horizon, the only figure out on the desolate landscape. You wonder, for not the first time, if he's burning up beneath all his armour. He never seems to use the fresher to cool off like you do.
It's as he reaches the ship, his footsteps heavier than usual and betraying his tiredness, do you realise he's returned with a bag. Your eyes glue to in instinctively but you bite your tongue and swallow the burning question of what the contents of the bag is.
"Get what you need?" You ask instead, hands laying flat on your knees, avoiding the bandage on your thigh.
You're knelt besides the ship wall, sitting on your feet, one of the panels hanging haphazardly by a single screw and a box of tools beside you.
There's a function for cooler air on the Crest but it's been busted since a gnarly shoot up leaving the atmosphere of Coruscant months ago. You've been trying to fix it for weeks, each time with no avail.
Today is no different.
“You haven’t fixed it.” Din says candidly, instead of answering your question.
That suddenly familiar worry of your usefulness shirks up within you.
“Yet.” you counter, aiming for optimistic. It’s impossible to tell what the immovable expression of Din’s helmet means. “It’s not the same problem as I started with, at least.”
After a moment, he gives a short nod as if he understands — which is mean because there isn’t a single thing you can think of that Din Djarin is bad at. Besides talking to Jawas, of course.
He passes you and you force yourself to keep facing forward, even as you long to trail his broad figure. You squint at the tangle of wires within the panel and sigh. It’s feeling pretty fruitless. You were hardly a mechanic to begin with and—
A loud clatter beside you makes you startle, something heavy dropping into your toolbox.
You jump back and after a quick second, realise that it’s Din who had dropped something purposefully. Trying to calm your racing pulse, you lean forward and peer in.
“This might help.” He says.
You blink down at the new tool he’s given you. It’s the one spanner size that’s missing from your toolbox.
The last one had been lost when you lobbed it at an intruder’s head in a blind panic. Not your proudest moment— even if it did distract the guy enough for Din to put him down.
You swallow your heart in your throat. “Thank you.”
You don’t hear him retreat but the part of you that fizzles like a freshly born star when he’s near dims, a giveaway to his movements. You curl your fingers the new tool and try to tell if this a good sign or not.
Behind you, Din clears his throat.
You peer over your shoulder, your brows knitting together — it’s not often he calls your attention so forwardly, much preferring to stand and wait, staring long enough til you notice and flush.
He’s still standing in the hull, one hand curled around and holding the bag he returned with. You twist fully, letting him know he’s got your attention.
For a long moment, he doesn’t move. You stare, waiting patiently and try not to let your eyes roam—especially after the last comment he made when he absolutely caught you staring at the broadness of his shoulders, eyes drinking in the cut of his figure.
You’d be a terrible criminal, cyra’rika.
What’s that supposed to mean? You had retorted, flustering just a bit.
He had turned and fixed you with a tilt of his helmet that meant he was likely smirking underneath it.
You have shifty eyes.
Your face had glowed fiercely at the reminder that just because you couldn’t see his eyes, that didn’t mean he couldn’t see yours.
Across from you in the Crest now, Din coughs awkwardly.
“I,” He starts. One of his hands clenches, the leather crinkling as he does. “I have something. For you.”
Surprise piques up inside you, fiery and delighted. It warms your stomach and there’s no fighting the smile that pulls at your mouth even if you wanted to.
Gifts from a bounty hunter are few and far between and he’d already replaced the spanner. Your bounty hunter in particular doesn't like to spend his credits unwisely.
Even less commonly does he acknowledge that something is a gift—but you've learned to love the quiet hum he gives you when you thank him for something.
"Oh?"
He shifts his weight ever so slightly, the most obvious indication that he's nervous.
You sit up a little straighter. The anxiety from earlier pools in quickly.
He gives a tiny, almost inaudible huff and then, instead of reaching into the bag, he pushes back his cape and reaches back. His skilled hand unclips something sheathed at his waist. He drops the bag and steps forward, his hand outstretched.
You hold your breath without realising.
It's... a dagger, you realise.
A very beautiful blade by all standards. As you press up to your knees, rising to get a closer look, the details of its intricacy begin to call out to you.
The hilt is twined in a delicate, leathery fabric, not yet moulded to any hand. The pommel holds a promise of a shimmer as though it's embedded with a mineral. And the blade itself... A darker metal curls through the lighter one that encases it, like smoke on a sunlit sky.
It's expert craftsmanship, with a precise balance of two metals — and if you stare a moment too long, you swear the darker one matches the hue of Din's armour. His beskar armour.
"Will you accept it?"
It's with the gravel of Din's voice do you realise you haven't moved. You haven't reached out for it, haven't even blinked since he offered it out to you. You exhale, suddenly feeling a little lightheaded.
It's elegant beyond words. It's too much.
Too much for you, too much as a... a... What was it?
A gift? A reminder of your sole duty on the Crest? Of what you nearly failed at during your last mission together? The wound on your thigh seems to throb painfully as if in response.
He's never got you a gift that's anything less than helpful.
"I," You breath, finally tearing your eyes off the dagger and looking up at the visor fixed on you. "Din, I—"
Your gaze drops back to the blade in his hands. This time, you're certain it's beskar twined within the steel.
"It's very beautiful but..." I'm not worthy of beskar. "I couldn't, it's— it's too much. I can't accept it, Din."
The words come out clumsily and you wonder if in your attempt at being polite, you've gone too far in the other direction and offended him. You wring your hand against your thigh, pressing your knuckles into your wound. The pain dances along your nerves, a welcome distraction as you force yourself to meet his gaze.
The hum of the ship fills the space between you and like almost always, you have no idea how to read his silence.
"I understand."
And then he's stepping back, resheathing the blade into its holster in one fluid motion. He does it so quickly you don't see the tremble in his wrist, his hand just a touch unsteady. Above you both, there's a beep in the cockpit.
This time, you do manage to clock his body language, well aware of the way his guard has suddenly been wrenched up and the anxiety in your veins quickens with a sinister twist. Oh stars. You've definitely made it worse. You should've just accepted the dagger.
He turns and wordlessly heads towards the ladder to the cockpit and you watch him desperately, a dozen words caught in your mouth and none of them the right ones to say aloud.
"I—"
Din pauses, one gloved hand on the rung of the ladder, facing forward. He gives you a moment to speak. Your mouth dries.
When it's clear you aren't going to, you catch the slight sigh he gives, his shoulders dropping an inch.
"Grogu will miss you."
What?
You don't even get a moment to consider what he’s said or to digest the implications before he’s climbing the ladder, deft and quick. By the time you’re on your feet, the swish of his cape is disappearing into the hatch on the ceiling.
You stare at it a moment, all your unsaid words suddenly transforming into confusion. Your mouth opens then closes, your hands held out in front of you in evident bewilderment.
“What—” You begin as you take the rungs twice as fast, following Din’s path up to the cockpit. “—is that supposed to mean?”
You’re halfway up when The Crest suddenly lurches to the side with a rumble, the powering of engines thrumming beneath your feet and you stumble to catch your balance. Below you, you hear the familiar hiss of the ramp closing.
Stars, what is he doing? He hasn’t been this eager to leave a planet since a bounty back on Hoth.
“Where are we going?” You ask, forgoing your unanswered question. You shift forward as the Crest continues to rise with a powerful whirling sound.
Casting an eye at the passenger seat, you’re relieved to find it already occupied by your favourite green friend. Grogu coos in your direction at the sight of you and despite the situation, you can’t help but smile.
“I can take you wherever you wish to go.” Din’s flat response has your smile fading, your head whipping around to face him.
But he doesn’t take his focus off the control in front of him for a moment, stoic and silent as he continues to initiate takeoff. The Crest rises higher, the sandy ground of the planet out the window growing smaller and smaller.
Wherever you wish to go?
Does he— does he think you want to leave?
Your head spins in a tizzy as you try to clue together how the hell he had come to that conclusion. The Crest rocks as it breaks through the atmosphere and you stumble again, struggling to keep your balance.
For whatever reason he’s thinking it, he’s wrong.
Action finally possesses you. You surge forward and slam your hand onto the console, killing the power to the thrusters.
The ship stalls with a loud droning noise, coming to a shuddering stop before it begins to float in the darkness of space. The only light is the glowing orange of the planet and stars beyond the glass.
“Why do you think I want to leave all of a sudden?” You demand hotly.
For a moment, you think Din will continue the silent treatment that he’s all but mastered. His helmet, visor gazing out through the windshield, doesn’t move — until he tilts his head toward you slightly. He sighs quietly.
“I don’t imagine after…” He waves a hand idly and you scan his figure intensely, searching for what he could possibly be referring to.
After…?
It suddenly seems quite obvious.
Even if you had no idea what it had meant to Din, clearly this has to do to you turning down his gift.
“Din,” you say very quietly.
His helmet turns another inch, his chin tilted up to show he’s listening.
You swallow and it feels like your heart in is your throat, burning and bursting all at once. But you have to ask.
“What did the dagger mean?”
Now he averts his gaze, his helmet dipping as he mumbles something, nothing, his voice almost too low for his modulator pick up, a gift, but in the gravel of his murmuring, you hear one unmissable word: courting.
Oh.
Oh.
It was a… courting gift.
A dagger blended with beskar, given as a courting gift from a Mandalorian. It meant you- and him — the hope you had been harvesting, the hope of something more blooming between you two, it had not been unrequited.
Your mind casts back to the exact phrasing as you turned what you believed to simply be a gift too prized for you— it’s too much, I can’t accept.
Maker. No wonder he thought you wanted to leave.
Whatever is crossing your face must be the opposite of subtle because as you grapple to find a response to that, Din’s head tilts back up.
“You didn’t know.”
There's a tiny wobble of relief in his voice.
“No,” You breathe. Blinking hard, suddenly you feel a bit wild because Din all but proposes to you but doesn’t even think to check if you knew the depth of what he was offering? Of the real question behind his gift?
You shake your head. “No, I didn’t know, Din.”
Silence lulls between you, charged and heavy. Even without seeing his face, you know Din must be squirming beneath his helmet — his intentions, his feelings, out in the open and you still staring at him speechless.
You manage to find your voice.
“May I see it once more?”
The request comes out softer than you intend, your courage suddenly quivering in your chest. You will it to rise, to embolden you. Din had been brave — now it's your turn.
Without a word, he shifts and reaches back to release it from its sheathe on his waist. For a split second you see it, the hesitation in his hand.
Then he's holding it out, balancing in his open and trusting palm, held out for you. The thickness in your throat grows.
You swallow tightly and grip your courage, searching within you for that warm, safe feeling that beats like a drum, Din, Din, Din. You seize it tightly.
Eyes fixed on the blade, you ask quietly, "Would you... offer it to me again?"
It's impossible to draw your eyes up, too nervous to see yourself reflected in the darkness of his visor.
"Yes."
Your heart becomes a supernova.
"Will you?" You whisper, finally daring to look up at him.
Your protector, your partner, the man who showed you the softness of his heart and asked for nothing in return. "Will you offer it to me again?"
The subtle motions of Din are something you've come to learn with the years you've spent at his side. Now, staring up at you, the inclination of his armour gives away his surprise.
Then he's rising to his feet only to step before you and sink down, brought to his knees before you. His hand remains steady, the offering held out, and this time the meaning of it cannot be misconstrued in any way.
"Cyare," He murmurs — and it's beloved, it's please, it's don't part from my side for as long as you'll have me.
Something within you trembles and your bottom lip quivers in emotion and then you're moving without thinking, sagging until you're on your knees too.
Equal heights, each of you in a position of devotion, facing toward each other.
Hand reaching out, you clasp your fingers around the hilt of the dagger and say thickly, "I accept."
There's a ragged exhale through the modulator of Din's helmet. He shifts, moving to strip the gloves from his hands and the sight of so much skin from him is enough to make you falter. But there's barely time to recover your stolen breath before his bare hand curls around yours, far larger, the dagger gripped in both of your hands.
His skin pressed against yours burns like starlight. You stutter out a breath, your smile coming so easily at the sight of your joined hands.
Din's other hand raises up and pauses momentarily, halting as if he's unsure if he's allowed before it settles gently on your cheek. You lean into the warmth of his skin and hear another sharp inhale through the modulator.
"I—" He begins, quickly cutting himself off. His thumb on your cheeks begins to wander, soothing over your skin lightly. He urges you forward and you bow your head, forehead pressing to the cool beskar of his armour.
"Thank you."
"You're thanking me?" You chuckle wetly, emotion clinging to your words. His thumb on your face traces another soft circle and you shudder beneath the loving touch, eyes fluttering closed.
“You could have been clearer." You chastise lightly, though your evident joy means your words don't have any real bite.
“I offered you beskar, cyra’ika,” He murmurs, voice warm and full of love. His thumbs draws another delicate circle. “How much clearer could I be?”
His point makes you laugh, eyes opening and seeing your own reflection in his visor. "I don't know," You say, averting your eyes down to your still intertwined hands. You squeeze your hand and feel him echo the motion. Your heart sings.
"Use your words?" You suggest with a cheeky smile, well aware that words were not a strong suit of your Mandalorian.
Din sighs, a faux long suffering one, and the mere familiarity of it makes your heart ache in the best way.
The worries of earlier bubble up within you, the reminder of why you had been so sure the dagger had some other meaning.
“I,” You begin, pulling back lightly and casting your gaze towards Grogu, who had been suspiciously silent as if knowing the significance of the moment before him. “I wasn’t thinking about the beskar, I was being stupid.”
With your free hand, you cover Din’s hand with yours, hiding your face away, which suddenly feels a little warmer. The nudge of your hand against his does nothing to alleviate the glow.
“I thought it was, like,” You mutter quietly, embarrassed. “You were saying I wasn’t doing my job well enough or— or something and I started worrying you were gonna…”
You can’t even finish the sentence with how foolish you feel.
“You thought I wanted you to leave?” Din asks, his voice dubious and warm. Like the mere thought of that is so far from believable that it’s amusing to him.
“Shut up,” you groan, eyes closing as if it can save your from your further flustering.
“Didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t need to.” You murmur.
His hand in yours tightens, the other on your face coaxing you out of hiding with the gentlest of nudges.
"Never. As long as you want it, I want you with me." He says and in his voice you hear nothing but utter devotion. "Close your eyes."
You follow his command without hesitation, darkness cloaking your vision and you feel his hands retract from yours. The dagger remains in your palm, still cradled in your fingers. Then, there's the tell-tale hiss of his helmet and you inhale sharply.
"Cyare," He says and this time, it's with all the richness and roughness of his natural voice.
The timbre of his voice is like gunpowder sprinkled across your soul and when his hand finds the curve of your cheek once more, it's set alight.
"May I?" He asks. You can feel the soft heat of his breath fan across your lips and feel your heart quiver in response, bursting forward, as if trying to reach him. His thumb soothes across your cheek, full of wanting.
Your nod would be imperceptible if it was anyone other than Din — if his gaze wasn't trained on your face, drinking the details like a starved man, finally with uncloaked eyes.
He moves forward, presses his mouth against yours, and finds home.
Headcanon that the centaurs do see Shane first and foremost as Ilya’s husband because, duh, they knew Ilya first and that’s his husband — husband!!
And at first, Shane is like fuck yeah I get to be a husband, and then halfway through the season he’s like guys… I feel the need to remind you that I’m actually Shane fucking Hollander
The centaurs then begin treating Ilya as Shane Hollander’s husband. Ilya does not mind.
in love with ilya's facial expression when he's disagreeing with the timeline because he's looking at YUNA when he starts talking like
"no, no, he is wrong. one second. let me get him together. i can't believe he is embarassing me like this in front of my future mother-in-law. please hold."
Summary: When Frank shows up at your apartment bloody and in need of patching up, you help him out. But it's a little more than that...and maybe it always was. Requested; see request here! word count: 4.4k
Warnings; mentions of blood, sexual tension and scenes but no full on smut.
You've just had the longest shift of your life, a shift so long that despite the fact you hate your rundown hells kitchen apartment you're grateful to be home. You fumble with your keys, turning them the wrong way in the lock out of pure exhaustion, and then the right way when your brain kicks back to life. The door creaks with protest that you ignore. You've been told to oil the hinges to stop the squeaking, but you like the sound being there. You live in Hell's Kitchen after all, and if anyone were to break in, you would like to hear them coming.
You close the door behind you and it cries out again as you push it shut and turn the lock. But the hairs on your neck rise before you can turn back to the foyer, and you know out of pure instinct that someone's in here with you. I guess the creaking door does nothing to warn you if you're not home when someone comes knocking.
You reach into your purse for the gun you keep there, just as a voice, gruff and quiet, calls out from behind you.
"just me, sweetheart."
Frank. You would recognize that voice anywhere, and you slide your hand out of your purse and turn around. Sure enough, his figure is there, obscured by the dark apartment. You reach over to the wall and flick the lamp on, only to come face to face with the reason Frank is in your home.
"Jesus,"
"No, just me." he mutters absolutely deadpan, as he leans against the wall. He's got blood all over him, and a hand pressed to his right side. There's red seeping out from between his fingers, and when he pushes away from the wall, you can see blood he's left behind on the wallpaper.
You take a step toward him, dropping your purse to the floor as you close the distance. "How much of this blood is yours?" you say, lifting a hand to his face. You grab his chin and tilt his face from side to side, assessing the damage.
"You don't wanna know." despite the fact he's torn to shreds in front of you, he reaches out and runs a finger over the collar of your uniform. "How was work?"
The roll of your eyes tells him everything he needs to know.
"That bad, huh?"
You nod, and move past him, despite the way his affection makes you shiver. "Don't get me started."
"Okay then," he follows you through the apartment, a strong limp in his step that he doesn't try to hide. He doesn't bother hiding those things from you anymore. You see right through him. Plus, it hurts like a bitch too much to care.
"Stop following me and sit down." you snap, without looking back at him. He halts his pursuit of you, and moves back toward the living room.
"yes ma'am." he listens to you, he can't help himself. A pretty lady tells him to do something and he obeys like a dog.
When you return to the living room after five minutes, you're in new clothes, an old grey t-shirt, already stained from the previous times you've had to do this, and light blue pajama shorts. The last thing you need is to get blood on your work uniform, so whenever you're tasked to clean him up you have to change.
"I like the shorts." Frank says as you make your way over to him, pulling a stool close to his chair so you can begin. You've got your first aid kit in one hand, and a bottle of scotch in the other.
"You say that every time, Frank." you unzip the first aid kit, which is a lot more serious than the regular household one. It's got a lot more in it than one would expect, considering you're packing wounds and stitching up holes in the man before you more often than you would like.
"Because I really like 'em." You try to avoid his gaze as he speaks, pretending to be interested in the contents of the kit you so don't have to look up and feel the burn of his eyes on you. The situationship you have with Frank is a complicated one. You know he likes you, and you would dig your teeth into him if given the time, but nothing ever seems to come of it.
"What happened this time?" You pass him the bottle of scotch and he pops it open, taking a swig as you reach toward his shirt, pulling it up to observe the injury on his ribs. It's a large gash, probably from a knife, and it's bleeding like crazy.
"Just a little conversation that went south." He grunts as you press some gauze to the wound and hold it there.
"Seems like more than a conversation." you press harder onto the wound just to scold him, and then grab his hand and place it over the gauze. "Hold it there, keep the pressure." He knows the drill, but you tell him anyway just for the sake of it.
"Okay, your turn. What happened today?" Frank's brows are furrowed, and it's clear he can tell your frustration isn't just at having to patch him up again. You stand, and take the few steps to move between his legs, now examining the wound on his shoulder.
"Nathan," you say the name of your coworker with distain, "took credit for my work again." Your hands move over Frank's skin, gentle and caring as you wipe away blood from his other wounds. This one isn't as serious as the one on his abdomen, but you still want to treat it anyway.
"Did you tell him to stick it where the sun don't shine?" Franks asks, his free hand coming up to your hip, holding you gently in place as you work on him. He likes you this close, you can tell by the way his breaths deepen. In and out, intentionally slowed, as if he has to keep himself cool.
"Tried to, didn't do much." you begin disinfecting the wound on his shoulder, and Frank lets out a sharp breath that brushes against your torso. He shifts his grip from your hip, to the back of your thigh and you try not to startle at the gentle squeeze he places there.
"If you want, I can go ask him to apologize."
You know what he means by that statement, and while it's tempting you're not sure you want your coworker to come back to the office black and blue.
"You'll have a conversation with him, I bet. A conversation like you had tonight?"
Frank shrugs, looking up at you with those deep brown eyes, so dark they're almost black.
"No thank you, I can handle Nathan myself." You tape some more gauze to the wound on his shoulder, and let your eyes fall to his, taking in the expression he holds. It's full of affection, and you watch a small smile slide itself onto his lips, gentle and not often seen.
"I know you can, but if you ever need me I'll be there."
Your stomach does a little flip at the words, and you know he means it more than anything else he's said tonight. You don't want to give into him so easily, but you know if he asked you, you would do anything.
"Thank you," you manage to murmur, and his thumb runs up and down the back of your thigh, a soothing gesture. He still hasn't taken his eyes away from your face, as if there's nothing else in the world he would rather lay his eyes on.
You pick up the bottle of scotch he placed down a while back and shove it at his chest. "Drink this." he has to take his hand away from your thigh to grab the bottle. "You're going to need it."
He chuckles, but does as he's told, bringing the bottle to his spilt lip. You'll sort that lip out later, but right now you've got to sort out the wound he's been putting pressure on for the last few minutes.
You sit back down on your stool, and place your hand over his on the wound, giving him permission to let go. He lets you take the lead, like a good little solider, and removes his hand so you can get to work. He keeps on drinking as you disinfect, and stitch him up, only wincing or hissing occasionally at the pain. You're not sure if it's because he's used to it or if the scotch really is helping.
"Thank you." Frank says, voice rough and tired once you're done with his abdomen. You stop rummaging through the first aid kit for a second to analyze him, his face, littered with cuts and bruises.
"Don't get ahead of yourself, we're not done yet."
He chuckles, low and quiet as you stand again and take the steps between his legs once more. You lift his chin with a finger, though it's not nessacary really, since he's already looking right at you. His eye contact is strong, and it makes your knees weak as you examine the cuts on his face.
"I've never seen someone get this many hits on you." you note, counting each cut and bruise. "Did you give them a head start?"
"You know me," he gently knocks your hand away as you touch a bruise on his eyebrow "gotta make it a fair fight."
He watches you closely as you reach into the first aid bag for more supplies, but stops you before you can pull anything out. "Hey, just wait a sec." he reaches out and grabs your free hand, tugging you closer between his legs. "Just be here with me a minute."
His hand is calloused and rough around your own as you take a moment to stand and look at him, really look at him, without just seeing the blood and bruises. He looks content, and more relaxed than you've ever seen him.
"Did you want some clean clothes?" your voice comes out as barely a whisper, Frank's hands coming up to hold your hips. His hands hold warmth that you can feel through the fabric of your clothes, his touch heating every inch of skin as his fingers flex.
"I really like these shorts." he mumbles again, ignoring your question completely.
"well these shorts won't fit you," you run a hand through his hair, watching as his eyes close when you do so. "Do you want clean clothes or not, Frankie?"
He practically purrs at the nickname, and at the fact you run your fingers through his hair again. As soon as you touch him he becomes shamelessly pliable, his head going wherever you push it.
"Yeah, I'll take clothes if you got 'em." the words come out as an afterthought, Frank's mind preoccupied. He's respectful, has always tried to be, but he can't deny that he's getting attached to you.
"If you want the clothes you're going to have to let me go get them." you mumble after a minute, and Frank opens his eyes to find you looking down at him. He feels the weight of your hands on his shoulders, and his own hands pressed to your hips. He feels the fabric, wishes he could touch just a sliver of what was underneath. He rubs his thumb up and down over your hip to get just that, pushing up the hem of your shirt just enough for him to feel the smallest piece of skin. Then, as quick as he had done it, he lets go, and watches as you walk off to the other end of the apartment to find him a change of clothes.
His hands clasp themselves together as he waits, nothing for them to hold while he sits here alone. When you return you have one of his shirts from the previous time he visited all bloodied and bruised, except it's been washed, dried and folded. Blood no longer curses the fabric, and you hold it out to him with a smile, unknowing just how much this makes his stomach twist. The subtle act of care for him, has his mind reeling.
He takes the shirt from your hands, his eyes flicking between it and you with a frown.
"If you don't want that one, I think I have another somewhere that you left a few weeks ago. I couldn't get all the blood out of it though, so it's still a little stained."
Frank shakes his head, "No, this one is fine. Thank you." he puts the shirt on the arm of the chair and attempts to pull his torn up shirt over his head.
"Fuck, you're gonna pull your stitches out Frank." you scold, halting his movements. "Let me help, Jesus." Frank wants to protest, but he can't find the words to do so when he feels your hands on him. Again, you make him shamelessly pliable.
You take the hem of his shirt in your hands and usher him to lift his arms, slowly as to not put all the work you'd done bandaging him up at risk. "Good," you say, as you lift the shirt over his head, freeing him of the fabric. Frank almost caves completely at the loosely given praise but holds himself together as you look him over.
"hold on, let me get a cloth." you vanish toward the bathroom before Frank can respond, leaving him shirtless in your living room and obeying like a dog once more. When you return with a damp cloth in your hand you mumble under your breath, "remind me to clean you up in the bathroom next time, that's much more efficient." Your words go in one ear and out the other for Frank, his eyes on the cloth in your hand.
"What're you doing with that?"
You look at the damp fabric between your fingers and back at him. "have you looked down at yourself? You're filthy, but you're not going in the shower and dampening your bandages after I've spent all this time putting them on."
"You're not giving me a sponge bath like I'm some old man." Frank snaps, making to stand, but you push him back down into his seat without hesitation.
"Calm down, I'm just wiping some of the blood off of you, you look like a stuck pig."
Frank shuffles in his seat, "I can do that later." his words don't carry any weight though, because you settle yourself between his legs again and he's lost looking up at you like a lovestruck teenager.
You run the damp cloth over his shoulder, the white fabric coming away red as you clean his skin of all the darkness. His hands find the back of your thighs like earlier, and he holds you there, warm fingers burning against your skin. You wipe away at his chest, and his neck, but as you move to clean his face, Frank halts you.
"Why is it you're so gentle with me, huh?" his hands begin to move, absentmindedly up and down the backs of your legs as he speaks, but never higher than is polite.
You frown, and bring the corner of the cloth underneath his eye, wiping away at the red splattered there. "Because who else is gonna be?"
The words hang between you for a moment, and Frank tilts his head to the side, looking at you a little differently now.
"C'mere," He takes his time moving you forward, and you take the two steps he ushers you to, before climbing into his lap. By the time you're still, you've got a leg on either side of his hips, straddling him in your living room chair.
As if nothing happened, you bring the cloth back up to other side of his face, and continue your work from before. You wipe over his cheek, and under his jaw before Frank grabs your wrist in a large hand. "Can you stop that for a second?" he releases your wrist, and moves a hand to your face, cupping your cheek in his large palm. "please?" He adds as an afterthought.
Frank damn near melts as you press your cheek further into his palm, taking the cloth from you and throwing it onto the table beside the chair without so much as looking. You're trying hard not to lean on him or his wounds too much, even breathing softer as to not cause him pain, but of course, Frank notices that too.
"I'm not made of glass, honey. A beautiful lady in my lap won't break me."
He watches as you duck your head, shy for a moment in the quiet apartment. Frank has been here more times than he can count over the past few months, and almost every night he spends here ends up like this. Him holding you close in some capacity, but never straying further than that. He's enjoyed it for the most part, keeping you close, feeling something other than anger and resentment. But now, Frank feels something different stirring within him, in his chest, his stomach.
When you look back up at him, so close now, the world stops moving. The clock on the wall doesn't seem to tick, and the little light on the fire alarm above him doesn't seem to blink.
"Can you please let me finish cleaning you up?" you ask, and despite the fact he could sit here with you doing nothing forever, how can he ever say no to you?
He nods, "Yeah, do what you gotta do." you lean toward the table to fetch the cloth, Frank's hand on your back steadying you so you don't fall away from him. He lets you wipe the rest of the blood away, gentle, caring and cautious, watching every movement with a marine's eye. And when your hands start to slow, the job coming to a close, Frank turns his head to the side, kissing your wrist as your hand comes up to wipe his brow. When you don't pull away he places another kiss on the heel of your hand. The affection is a 'thank you' an 'I'm sorry' and something else he's not ready to think about just yet.
"Was that an apology for smearing blood on my walls?" you joke, though it's barely a whisper. You're deadly still, waiting for his next move.
"I'll clean that up." Frank says, leaning forward to brush his nose against the side of your neck. He's crossing a line he drew for himself long ago, but maybe it's time he lets go of some rules.
"Does that mean you're staying the night?"
Your invitation brings him pause, and it sprawls itself over the both of you like a blanket. You're on the same page it seems, but you're walking on broken glass just the same. If you go through with this, things won't ever be the same. Frank runs the risk of making you a target for his enemies with every touch and embrace. But maybe he's long past that point already.
He lifts his head, his face now so close to yours that your noses touch with each exhale. "If you'll have me."
You do nothing but nod, and Frank somehow manages to pull you closer, arms wrapping around you like barriers, protecting you from the outside elements. He closes the distance in a few slow breaths, and for the first time, his lips meet yours.
The kiss is tentative, and he takes his time getting to know this new piece of you. The part of you he hasn't got to meet yet.
"You doing okay?" his lips brush yours as he speaks, pulling back from the kiss just enough to say the words. To check on you.
You nod, eyes closed but Frank grumbles in disapproval, squeezing you gently in his arms. "I need to hear you say it."
He breathes in the touch of your hands as they move across his shoulders, your eyes opening at last to look at him. "I'm okay."
Your fingers slide up the nape of his neck, and that feeling that tugs at his chest starts again. He knows what it is, but he hasn't felt that way for someone in so long that can't bring himself to acknowledge it just yet. This time, you lean in for the next kiss, and your initiation of it drives him wild. His hands find your hips, grinding you down onto his lap just as a shrill sound fills the apartment. Your nose bumps with his awkwardly as you startle to attention, looking toward the source of the sound. It's the doorbell, though you have no idea who would be ringing it at this hour. Frank groans as you shift on top of him and you can't help but notice that he's very solid beneath you.
"Should we go see who that is?" you say as he turns your head back to face him with an eager hand. His fingers trace down your jaw, marking out a path for his lips later on.
"Probably just some kids." Frank mutters, pressing his lips to the corner of your mouth. He's tense in the shoulders now though, and you can tell he wants to know who has interrupted your night just as much as you do. He's weighing up whether or not to let it go, running his warm hands up your legs, teasing the fabric of your shorts with his fingers, when the doorbell rings again.
"Maybe if we ignore them, they'll go away?" you offer, kissing Frank's shoulder. He bucks his hips up slightly, an almost involuntary movement to relieve some tension, and you chuckle against his skin. He could get used to this if given the chance.
The doorbell rings a third time, and it's becoming apparent that whoever it is, is not going away. "Fuck's sake." Frank throws his head back in frustration, both sexual and otherwise, grabbing the fresh shirt you got him off the arm of the chair. He pulls it over his head with a little help from you just as a voice calls out from behind your front door.
"I know you're in there, Frank."
The voice is one you don't recognize but clearly Frank does, because he mutters under his breath, "Fucking Lieberman," before lifting you effortlessly off his lap. Your feet touch the carpet as Frank stands and heads toward your door. It's strange to see him like this, moving to answer your door in an almost domestic manner, even though you know it's anything but. You can almost imagine being with him in a home you share, though you don't have time to dwell on it before Frank pulls open the door and you rush to make yourself semi presentable to whoever it is. You run a hand through you hair, and pull your shorts a little lower, straightening them out from where Frank's hands have roamed.
You move toward the door but keep a fair distance back, waiting for Frank's assessment of the man he knows.
"What'd you want?" Frank's rough voice sends a shiver down your spine, the outside air cold and fresh coming in through the open door.
"Why weren't you answering your phone?" the so called Lieberman asks, avoiding Frank's question as if he's used to it by now.
"I'm busy,"
Frank's response gets Lieberman looking past him and into the apartment. His gaze finds you as the words come together in his mind. He takes in the sight of you, and then looks back at Frank, and down a little to the tent in Frank's black cargo pants—a reminder of the sort of busy Frank was.
"Oh shit, I uh—" Lieberman fumbles over his words, taking a breath to compose himself. "we've got a situation, and I hate to interrupt but this is a little more important."
Frank is struggling to think of something more important than what's in the room behind him right now, but he nods. "Can you give me a minute?"
Lieberman doesn't object, and Frank closes the door in his face after a few seconds of silence. When he turns back to face you, he heaves a sigh that makes you laugh.
"Raincheck?" you say, even though that's the last thing you want to do. He makes his way toward you, reaching out those hot hands to hold you again.
"I'm sorry," he presses a kiss to your forehead, and it's extremely clear that your relationship with him has changed in to something far more serious than before.
"S'okay, just make sure you come back and finish what you started another time." You can feel him smile into your hair, and he pulls you into him one last time before he leaves for the night. He's all patched up and clean, thanks to you, but he wishes he had the time to repay you for it.
"I'll be back before you know I'm gone." his voice is a deep rumble that you can feel in your chest and you pull back to look at him. He's still got the split lip you forgot to attend to in favor of kissing it, and a cut on his brow left untreated as well. But he's more than capable to doing that himself.
You push yourself up onto your tiptoes and kiss him, and his hands tighten their grip on you momentarily in order to savor it. He tastes like blood and spearmint, something you note as he pulls away and the taste of his lips lingers. You push him toward the door, gently so as not to bruise him more than he already is, and though it's not common, he smiles. He really smiles, before opening the door to the apartment and putting back on his facade. He slips outside without anymore words, but you know everything that went without saying.
I'll be back soon. Wait for me.
I love you.
-
reblog and comment to support your writers! (also don't feed my work into ai databases please)
GENERAL TAGLIST: @heliads @candywh0r3 @caplanreadss @hiya-itsamber @s00buwu
Summary: It’s the Pitt’s worst kept secret that you’re Dr. Abbot’s favorite nurse. When a close call with a patient leaves you hurt and vulnerable, he steps in to make sure you’re all right.
Word Count: 2.3k
Content: fluff, protective Jack, aggressive patient, depictions of violence and assault of medical staff, Jack being a professional yearner
A/N: Struggling with motivation to write, so thought I would try a new character and fandom focus just to flex my muscles. Anyways I’m in Pitt hell at the moment, so here ya go.
It was a shift from hell.
A young man who’d gotten in a terrible motorcycle accident, a teacher with. pulmonary embolus who’d stroked right in front of you, and a pediatric case that the team coded off and on for hours until he couldn’t be brought back from the brink. Those cases tended to hit the team the hardest, doctors and nurses alike. Suffice to say, morale was low already across the board. Weariness and suppressed emotions seeped down to your bones.
And then Brian rolled in.
Brian was a frequent flyer substance abuse case, one who’d refused help time and again from the night shift social worker. He was stubborn and bitter (and probably a closet misogynist, based on how he spoke to the female staff), but usually harmless. Usually.
Still, it seemed the universe had it out for you that night.
You took his vitals and deflected the usual inappropriate comments and lecherous looks as you always did. He didn’t seem to like that you weren’t your normal, smiling self. He grew more and more agitated, but you didn’t call ‘hula hoop'. You thought you could handle him. That once he got his treatment, he’d calm down some, like all the other visits before.
He tried to get out of bed, and you began to gently redirect him to sit down again. Hands seized your shoulders in an iron grip, and that’s when you realized this wasn’t like the other visits.
Your back hit the wall hard, knocking the wind out of you. The back of your head collided with the drywall, accompanied by a sharp pain and stars behind your eyes. You could barely breathe, let alone shout, but luckily Brian was shouting, and that would catch someone’s attention. Spittle flew from his lips as he screamed incoherently in your face, as you tried with all your might to wrench yourself from his grip, as you gasped like a fish out of water.
At last, your lungs filled with a little bit of air, and you weakly called out, “Hula—“
Brian was ripped away from you by several pairs of hands before you even finished the phrase, and you collapsed to the floor.
He'd been talking to Lena at the front desk, debriefing on the trauma that had just been moved up to ICU, when he heard the noise. Jack's head whipped in the direction of the shouting. Through the glass, he could see a hostile patient, standing up and raving nonsense.
Then just past the patient’s shoulder, he saw you, pinned to the wall with wide, frightened eyes and a gasping mouth. You, the sweetest nurse in the building, who had a smile for everyone and wouldn’t hurt a fly.
Jack began moving before he fully absorbed what he was seeing, before he recognized Brian. All he knew was that you were in harm’s way, which was unacceptable. So he skidded around the edge of the desk, grabbing Diaz by the back of his scrubs and hauling him towards North 6.
He flew through the doorway and roughly yanked the man away from you, arguably much harder than necessary. The man snarled and shouted profanity as Jack and Diaz wrestled him back to the bed.
“—stupid fucking whore—“
The patient tried to sit up, and Jack, seeing red, slammed him back down by the shoulder. The patient yelped and writhed beneath his grip. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he registered that someone was trying to to shoulder past him, but Jack stood firm, his jaw clenched as he held the man down.
“Abbot.”
Jack almost didn’t hear the warning past his own pulse roaring in his ears. He turned to see Shen, moving in to take Jack’s place, a stern but understanding look on his face.
Over his shoulder, Jack saw your crumpled form on the floor, pale and trembling. A few shards of broken plastic surrounded you on the tile, and only when he saw your hair falling wild around your face did he realize what they were — the remains of the clip that you wore your hair in every day, shattered to bits when your head hit the drywall.
You stared in shock at the scene before you, your eyes still wide like a spooked animal’s.
Jack's eyes snapped back to Shen, and he allowed him to replace him in restraining the patient. “You got him?”
Shen nodded, then jerked his head in your direction. “Get her out of here, and tell security. to get off their asses.”
Jack was at your side in an instant, one hand at your back, the other hand wrapped around yours as he quickly pulled you to your feet and steered you out of the room. “All right. I gotcha,” he murmured. “I gotcha.”
“Lena, tell security to wake up and help out in North 6.” He tried not to shout, but the words still came out rougher than he intended. He felt you flinch slightly beside him and kicked himself internally. “What’s open?”
“South 18. You alright, hon?” Lena had already moved out from behind the desk when the chaos started a few seconds ago, and she laid a gentle hand on your shoulder. You nodded weakly but said nothing.
Lena began to walk with you and Jack towards South 18, but Jack insisted, “I got her. Can you keep this place from falling apart for five minutes for me?”
She nodded, squeezed your shoulder, and pivoted back towards the hub.
Jack ushered you into the room, closed the door behind him, and eased you onto the edge of the bed.
“I’m okay,” you blurted, before he got the chance to say anything. The tremor in your voice and the tension in your shoulders told a different story.
“I know you are,” he replied gently. “I'm just gonna take a look at you. Hospital policy.”
He reached his hand into his pocket for his penlight. “Eyes open for me.” You squinted as he checked your pupillary response, rolled your eyes when he asked, “What's today’s date?”
“Dr. Abbot—"
“Humor me,” he softly urged you, pocketing his penlight again.
You sighed and surrendered. “Thursday, the fifteenth.”
He offered you a smile. “Wasn't so hard, was it?”
As gently as he could, Jack examined the back of your head where it had made contact with the wall, his fingers probing your scalp. You hissed quietly when he pressed near the tender spot.
“Tender here, but no broken skin. You'll probably just have a bump for a few days.” he said thoughtfully, pulling back to look at you. “I wanna get you into CT, just to be sure.”
You started to protest. “I’m fine, I promise—“
“Please,” Jack interrupted you, not allowing you to talk him out of his concern. “For my own peace of mind, if nothing else.”
After a moment’s hesitation, you nodded. “Okay.”
You peered up at him with those still-frightened doe eyes and took a stuttering breath, your lower lip wobbling ever-so-slightly. Jack's heart nearly cracked at the sight of it.
“Hey, hey,” he muttered sympathetically, and before he thought better of it, he pulled you into a tight embrace. “C’mere, sweet girl.”
He was sure to regret that particular turn of phrase later. It was too affectionate, a little too revealing. But you were so small and fragile in his arms, and he couldn’t fight his instincts to hold you close, to murmur reassurance into your hair.
“He’s not comin’ near you again,” he vowed, a surge of protectiveness underneath the words. “I promise.”
Your fingers tightened in the fabric of his scrubs, your breath hitching with held-back sobs. Jack kept his breathing slow and steady, and soon enough your breathing matched his, evening out to a calmer rhythm. He gave you one last squeeze, breathing in the sweet scent of your shampoo at the crown of your head, and then released you.
Just then, Lena cracked open the door, holding up your water bottle, the one you covered with stickers. Your cheeks flared with embarrassment at having been caught in such an emotional state, and you quickly wiped away the tell-tale tear tracks streaking them. Jack quietly thanked Lena and grabbed the water bottle, passing it to you when you were ready and politely dismissing her.
“Here, drink.”
You sat down on the edge of the bed once again, taking a few sips obediently. Jack suspected you could use a quiet moment to yourself, so he straightened his spine and prepared himself to return to the circus that likely awaited just beyond the door.
“Sit tight for me, and we’ll get you down to radiology. Can I get you a snack or somethin’?” he offered, his hands slipping into his pockets so they wouldn’t do something foolish like reach for you again.
You shook your head. “I’m not hungry, but… thank you.”
“Of course. Can't lose my best nurse. You're my backup.”
You didn’t smile. You weren’t quite there yet. But your expression softened a little, the corner of your mouth twitching upward. You’d be all right, he was sure. You were tough underneath all that sweetness, and you wouldn’t let this get you down for long.
Jack gave you the kindest smile he could manage and slipped back out into the hall.
You hated being treated with kid gloves, and there was a lot of that for the next few shifts. Your head CT had come back normal, and without evidence of a concussion, Dr. Abbot let you finish the last few hours of your shift under strict advisement to ‘take it easy’ (which was easier said than done in the Pitt).
But the damage had been done. People had seen you weak, seen you cry. For a week after the incident, every interaction with Pitt staff was marked with well-meaning check-ins and encouragement bordering on the patronizing. You just wanted to forget the whole thing had ever happened, but that was impossible with all the hovering.
The only attention you received that didn’t exhaust or annoy you was Dr. Abbot’s. He'd smile at you from across the bay, but it was friendly, not an expression of pity. He’d ask you how you were doing like he genuinely wanted to hear about your day, not because he was worried you were about to have another breakdown. He cracked jokes and threw winks at you as he worked over patients and instructed residents.
It wasn’t all that different from his usual attention, just more…dialed-in. It had the same effect on you that it always did — an inexplicable warmth in your chest, a flush to your cheeks, and a slight flutter in your stomach. It was a welcome distraction from the bruises and soreness that were still fading from the altercation.
Three shifts after the incident, you arrived at the Pitt, tossing your bag in a locker and shuffling over to the hub desk. Waiting by the spot where you usually left your water bottle was an unexpected sight — a gift bag, small and in an unassuming color, bearing a tag with your name on it.
On the opposite side, in messy but familiar handwritten script, the tag read:
In case you need a backup.
-J
Flushing slightly, you glanced around you to make sure you didn’t have anyone’s attention before opening the bag. Inside were two small items. The first was a hair clip — not just any hair clip, but the exact one that had lain shattered on the Pitt’s floor almost a week ago, the one you had worn religiously since you started working there. It was just a generic hair clip you had found at the drugstore — not fancy, sturdy enough to keep your hair out of your face and last a couple years. But the fact that he’d gone out of his way to find that exact one made your heart do funny things in your chest.
The second item was a scrunchie, the color matching the fleece you wore most days to stave off the chill of the air con. You couldn’t help but smile to yourself as you slipped the scrunchie around your wrist and began to wind your hair up into a twist, securing it with the clip.
Somehow materializing out of thin air right in front of you on the opposite side of the desk, Bridget gave you a playful side eye as she typed into her tablet. “I know that look. That's an HR issue waiting to happen.”
You feigned nonchalance. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Discreetly as possible, you slipped the tag off the bag and tried to pocket it. But Diaz, who also apparently obtained teleportation powers, snagged your wrist and managed to pry the tag from your fingers.
“‘’J? Who could that possibly be?” He smirked as you snatched it back, your cheeks on fire.
“Only one person in this building makes her smile like that,” Bridget replied with knowing amusement.
“You know you’re totally his favorite, right?” Diaz whispered conspiratorially. “None of us ever get presents.”
You elbowed him in the ribs. “Shut up.”
He snickered as you rounded the desk to glance up at the board, getting the lay of the land as you started your shift. Across the bay, Abbot was doing the same, hands in his pockets, until his eyes drifted to you.
Something twinkled in his eyes when they fell on the scrunchie at your wrist, and a proud smile spread across his face. You smiled back, a little shy but fond all the same, before moving in the direction of your first patient.
(didn't do my permanent taglist on this one because it's not Bucky and idk if yall go in for that sort of thing, but if yall are interested in the future lmk<3)
♡ pairing: jack abbot x fem!reader x michael rabinovitch (kinda)
♡ synopsis: after a patient attacks & strangles you, you're put on a short leave of absence so you can recover in peace. when you return to ptmc, you stay practically glued to robby's side. jealous, abbot tries keeping his distance—granting you time & space, so as to allow you to come to him when you're ready to discuss the events of that day...which he emerged from with bloody knuckles on your behalf.
♡ content: angst, hurt/comfort, strangulation, assault, robby being soft w/ you, jack being jelly b/c robby has so much of your attention, jack comforting you while you have an emotional meltdown
♡ a/n: requested by @styx03, ty! | i intended for this to be a lil prequel to tell me what you feel, but it ended up being its own thing since robby's actions in this one-shot vs what i put in the aforementioned fic about him wouldn't align.
"I want out of this Goddamn bed," Mr. Haberly spits from behind you.
You nod while continuing on with furiously typing away the results from his EKG. "I understand. The doctor will be in to see you really soon. But until then—"
"What? So he can tell me that I have fuckin' Covid or somethin'?" He scoffs. "Bunch of quacks. Whole thing is a hoax. Well, you listen me to me, you little—"
You spin around on your heel, desiring to cut his tirade of expletives off at the head. "It isn't Covid in your case. Nor is it a heart attack like I know you were concerned about. We're going to run a few more tests, then—"
He shoots upright. "And max my out of pocket?" He hollers. "No," he continues with a swipe of his hand through the air. "I'm done. No fuckin' jabs, or tests, or—"
You step toward him and place a gentle hand against his shoulder. "I understand your concern with medical bills, believe me. But you really need to—"
Swatting your hand away, he rips his leads off and stands.
Panicking, you take a small step back. "Sir, p-please get back into bed. If you go home AMA, you...you may not make it back if things get worse, or—"
The world sways. One moment, you're facing your patient. The next, the back of your head has slammed off the tile floor, leaving you staring up at the ceiling. You blink dumbly, and then a searing pain begins to build at the back of your skull until it develops into a blazing inferno.
Oh God. Are... Are you paralyzed?
You curl your fingers inward, taking stock of what still functions. Just when you go to wiggle your toes, he climbs atop you and straddles your waist. "Please," you rasp as tears gather in your eyes, causing them to sting. "Pl—"
He wraps his hands tightly around your throat which you begin to claw uselessly at as your eyes bulge from your head. He presses his thumbs into your larynx next in an attempt to crush it.
His face will be the last thing you see—this red, ugly, pockmarked thing, and breath that reeks of alcohol and peppermint chewing gum which fans across your face.
You're going to die here.
If you're fortunate, his heart will give out before the job is through.
You kick your legs and flail your arms, completely helpless to stop what's happening to you.
"You stupid fuckin' cunt! I told you I wasn't gonna let you do it! Shoulda fuckin' listened!"
Your vision grows blurry, and then dim—the harsh lighting overhead bleeding, instead, into inky darkness.
"Hula hoop! We've got a code hula hoop!" Someone shouts from far away.
You'd had one of those as a child. Aggravating things. Never could get it to stay circling your waist for very long. You suppose that's of little concern to you now, however.
"It's Y/N!" They screech panickedly.
Just as your eyes have begun to flutter closed, a fast-moving, towering form rushes into the room, knocking the monster from atop you, sending him skidding across the floor.
Your body, acting on reflex, doubles over while your hand comes to circle your throat, desperate for air to fill it. You cough hoarsely—a good sign—then draw in a harsh sounding, ragged breath.
People circle you from all angles, fussing over you and speaking all at once. So quickly that you can hardly discern a single question or comment. Too much. It's all too much!
And then the screaming starts again. "Abbot's gonna kill 'em!" Yowls a feminine voice.
Your head rolls to the side, and like a horrific car crash, you find yourself unable to look away as a fist is drawn back before making impact with an impossibly swollen face, sending blood splattering against a stark white wall.
You shudder at the sight, but remain impossibly still, praying you won't be next.
Until a strong pair of arms slide beneath you and hoist you up, holding you against a sturdy chest. "I've got you, sweetheart. Stay with me."
You watch as the floor falls away from beneath you, creating a sense of vertigo. It makes your head swim.
A head full of silver curls turns back to you, and when your eyes lock, his fist stops in its downward descent toward what looks to now be a dead man.
He huffs, then shoves the man aside, leaving him slumped over against the wall and quickly forgotten as he rises.
Bending your head back, you gaze up at a familiar face. One you've admired so many times before from afar. And now you're in his arms. Oh, how lovely it is to be held by him.
"Robby," calls a thickly accented voice at your side. "Put her in here. I've got the room all cleared out."
Dana. Yes, it's Dana directing him as to what to do with your injured form. You like her very much.
With impossible gentility from a man of his stature, he settles you on a gurney and cups the top of your head in his palm before turning toward the doorway from which you just entered. "Whitaker, get me a portable ultrasound machine. Now."
You hear the sputtering of a young man grasping at metaphorical straws, and then Robby sneers. "I said now!" He barks, causing you to flinch in fear.
The sound of sneakers squeaking against polished floors fades away.
Robby turns back to you, and his fingertips gently massage your scalp. "You're gonna be alright, sweetheart. I promise."
He glances to the side. "Security needs to get down here—"
"Already here," Dana says, following his train-of-thought. "Fuck 'im. I hope he codes before they get 'im off the floor."
Leaning down, Robby presses a tender kiss to your forehead, and despite the circumstances, a hot rush of blood rises to your cheeks. "I'm so sorry, Y/N. I should've had a better eye on things. Nobody is ever going to hurt you again in my ER. Never."
You open your mouth to attempt a reply, until he shakes his head and shooshes you.
"Don't talk. You've got a lot of swelling," he states while tenderly probing at your throat with his fingertips. An action that causes hot tears to prick your eyes.
"Don't you worry, doll," Dana croons.
You turn to look at her, wanting to brush away the blonde strand that's fallen before her twinkling eyes.
"Dr. Robby's on the job, and he's got ya real well looked after."
You're put on leave for the next couple of weeks as you heal. Being unable to speak—not to mention the apparent bruising around your throat—would only serve to make your occupation that much more difficult.
And when patients would inevitably get to asking questions you in no way felt comfortable answering... It's safe to say you enjoy the short vacation you've been alloted as best you can.
Your return to the Pitt is just as hectic as always. A feeling quickly instilled itself within you like you'd never left as residents rushed a patient past who was coughing up mouthfuls of blood into a small plastic tub, an elderly woman hollered from her bed about wanting vodka, and an ambulance screeched outside, signaling another was incoming.
So much for trying to take things easy your first day back.
You do spend your day taking easier cases in the end, though—as easy as they can get in the ED, anyway—per Robby. He assigns you a child having an allergic reaction to a peanut butter cookie, a young woman who'd just returned from a cruise in the tropical islands and came back with the souvenir of an odd fungal infection as a reminder of her time away, and a middle-aged man with a dog bite on his rear.
The rest of the time you spend before a computer at the nurse's station, charting.
You're grateful to those who treat you the same as before the attack. Their looks don't linger, their touches aren't ginger, like you might shatter if your shoulder is squeezed too hard in a simple gesture of reassurance—no matter that you wouldn't entirely mind a hug—and their words are straight to the point of how they require your aid.
Abbot is a different story.
The first thing you'd made note of was the splint around the middle finger of his dominant hand, as well as faded yellow bruises and scabs along his knuckles. You had wanted to thank him, but when you opened your mouth to do so, the words got stuck in your throat. It's a bizarre thing to be appreciative that he assaulted a patient on your behalf, is it not?
When he looked at you with utter alertness, however—ready to hear whatever it was you had to say—you froze up, then scurried away in search of Robby.
He's been a sort of security blanket for you ever since you came walking back through the ED's sliding glass doors. The comforting feeling of being in his arms while he whispered sweet nothings to you made a lasting impression, like an imprint in wet concrete before it dried—forever memorializing the mark left upon its surface.
You've done your utmost to remain out of his way, so as not to hinder his ability to properly do his job, but when either of you have a spare moment, you seem to just appear randomly at his side. Apparently your feet have a mind of their own now, always in search of him they are.
When you're not, though, is when Abbot comes into play.
He'd started out by putting a gentle hand against the small of your back—desiring a talk with you the first morning you returned—but when you squeaked in fear from the unexpected contact, he promptly dropped it. Then watched as you wandered away in search of his fellow attending.
Now, he loves Robby like a brother. He's one of his closest friends. His closest one at PTMC, to be certain. But watching you at his side—gazing up at him with doe eyes, all soft and adoring like—has left a feeling of heated jealousy burning deep within his chest.
Not because he feels like he's owed something for having defended you—he would've done it for anybody here (perhaps he wouldn't have gone quite so far in another's case as he did for yours)—but rather because he wants to gain whatever it is that Robby seems to have; whatever spell he's cast over you.
He doesn't know why it means so damn much to him: ensuring that you understand he's just as much of a safe place for you as Robinavitch—but it does. So, he goes about it by a different approach. Such as buying you lunch.
Until you take the pricey sandwich from him with a quiet 'thank you' before wandering off to eat it in solitude one afternoon.
It makes him feel just the least bit pathetic, practically courting you like a damn school boy with a juvenile crush, but he simply wishes for you to talk to him. Have one decent conversation so he can get...whatever this is out of his system and he can get his head screwed on right once more.
Because if your reason for avoidance is fear? He can't let that go. You should never have a reason to fear a fellow coworker here, particularly an attending. It'll only serve to make the possibility of dire mistakes all the more likely on the job if you hesitate to ask for his expertise when it's required.
So he gives you space; deigns that you'll come to him when you're ready.
He hopes so, anyway.
"I care about her, too, y'know?"
Glancing from the iPad he holds, to Jack over his glasses, Robby raises a brow in confusion. "What?"
Jack folds his arms, then rolls his head to the side from atop his shoulder. He should've kept his damn mouth shut.
"You know who."
Robby merely stares at him for a moment before he snorts quietly with mirth—an action that sends his shoulders slightly shaking from a sense of amusement. "Y/N?" He asks.
That damn obvious, then, Jack muses. "Mhm."
"Alright."
Jack rolls his eyes toward the ceiling. This is the stupidest fucking conversation he's ever had in his life, hand to God. "She just won't..." He sighs from frustration. "She won't fucking talk to me," he hisses while turning toward him. "Every time I try, she runs in the other direction. To you."
Unexpectedly, Robby barks a laugh, then waves his hand before him. "I'm sorry," he begins before crossing one arm over the other, leaving the tablet to hang loosely at his side. "Are you actually saying that you're jealous? About what, Jack?"
Jack silently steams. If this were the damn cartoon with the coyote, there'd be smoke coming out of his ears. "Forget it," he clips before stomping off.
"Oh, come on!" Robby hollers from behind him. "Come back so that we can talk about—"
A raised middle finger cuts him short.
You can't stop shaking. Violently. You're all alone, trapped in that room again, with a hefty man atop you, trying to choke the life from your throat.
You hadn't even done anything wrong—all you wanted was to help him; make him better. Send him home to his family.
Your fault, your fault, your fault. Last you heard, he was in jail. Now what will happen to him? And there've been whispers. That Jack's professionalism has been called into question—if not his medical license as well. How many lives have you ruined all because you were too weak to act? To take care of the problem you caused?
You want to tell someone. Want the truth of everything you've been bottling up and pushing down to come spilling out like an endless river until its bed has gone dry and nothing is left but sand.
But you can't burden anyone else. Can't put them on the line as well for the sake of your own sanity.
Cradling your head in your heads, you rock back and forth while sobbing, doing your utmost to self-soothe and come back to yourself before your break is over.
It's been like this every day since you got back: scheduled meltdowns. You worry you're conditioning yourself for them, because once the clock hits a particular time, here comes a downpour.
"You're fine, you're fine, you're fine," you repeat over and over again.
Problem is, they feel like empty words at this point because you've said them so many times.
A metal door swings open, and you huddle further into the corner you occupy beneath the stairwell, quietly sniffling, hoping they'll soon be on their way.
Even footfalls descend the stairs, your eyes drifting to each one as an unknown foot makes contact with the other side of the stairs that loom above you.
Then they stop at the bottom, round a corner, and—
Oh no.
"You've got people looking for you," Abbot states with his hands on his hips.
Your chin wobbles, then you break into a fit of sobs again.
Taken aback, he stalls for a moment before morphing into a soldier ready to jump into action. His black tennis shoes scuff against the floor as he walks over to you. Pressing his back against the wall, he slides downward, finishing with a quiet 'oomph' when his butt hits the floor.
"Alright," he begins, dragging himself closer until he's pressed against your side. "This about what happened, or somethin' new?"
"H-happened," you choke out inbetween sobs.
For once, Robinavitch fails to be the hero coming to your rescue this time, Abbot muses, despite knowing that he's too damn old to be thinking so immaturely.
And yet.
Outstretching his arm, he makes to wrap it around your shoulder, until you go spastic, nearly pushing him over onto his side. "No! No, I can do it! I have to! I can do it this time! No one has—has to—"
Resituating, his brows furrow. "Sweetheart, what the hell are you talking about?"
Burying your racing head in your hands, you claw at your scalp. "It's all my fault," you mutter between ragged breaths. "That man. He's in jail. And—And you. Your job and—and license. Oh, God, what've I done?"
His mouth falls slightly open as he attempts to formulate a reply. You blame yourself? Just how long have you spent beating the shit out of yourself for things you had no control over, exactly?
Grabbing your face between his hands—refusing to let you slip from his grasp this time—Abbot levels you with a steely look. "I gave that piece of shit what he deserved. Had we been outside the hospital, I can promise you that I would've done a lot worse. I only stopped because you were watching. As for my license, yes, there was an inquiry, but the case is now closed. I'm fine. HR deemed in the end that ultimately I did what I had to to protect my staff."
Sliding his hands beneath your legs, he drapes them over his lap before enveloping the rest of you in his arms.
Almost immediately does the tension within you loosen from the unexpected embrace.
He cups your cheek and brushes a tear from your cheek with the pad of his thumb. "Everything is fine. That...patient," he spits. "Is fine. Recovering. In jail. Where he fucking belongs. Whatever happens to him next is strictly due to his own actions. Understand?"
Slowly, you nod. "I'm sorry. That I've been avoiding you."
He shakes his head. "I understand why now: you felt guilty when you had no reason to. I thought..." He trails off. "Doesn't matter now. Everything is alright. That's what matters."
"W-what? You thought—"
He sighs, and runs a tired hand down his face before leaning his head back against the wall behind him. "I lost myself in the moment." He wiggles his splinted finger. "When I saw him on top of you, something just...snapped. Everything went red. I was out for blood; felt like I was back overseas again. The shouting turned into gunfire, and all I saw was a faceless man trying to hurt someone that I—"
No. He can't go that far. Not when you're in such a delicate state of mind.
"That you...what?" You question innocently.
"Care about." Deeply, he supplies, but leaves unspoken.
Jack knows it's more than that.
Your sobs having turned instead to the occasional quiet sniffle, you let your eyes flutter closed. Now having exhausted yourself from a nervous breakdown, you'd really like to take a nap.
But there's still four hours left of your shift.
Jack's lips tug into a soft smile at the sight of you so peaceful. And in his arms, at that. "You okay now?"
You nod, then yawn. "Sleepy, but yes."
Granting a kiss to the crown of your head, he breathes deeply. "I knew you were going through it. It's why I hovered," he murmurs against your forehead. "Then I gave you space since suffocating you wasn't getting me anywhere. Maybe I should've done things differently—"
You shake your head, then settle it atop his shoulder. "It wasn't you. It was just...me."
He chews his lip for a moment. Fuck it. "You went to Robby."
Your brows furrow. "Yes...?"
Jack rolls his eyes, then squeezes them shut. He is truly too old for this schoolyard crush bullshit. Damn his heart. "Maybe I got a little jealous."
Your head shoots up—nearly clipping his chin in the process. "Wha—" Your mouth quirks to the side, so as to prevent yourself from smirking. There's just something so deeply hilarious about that statement to you. Coming from someone such as himself, especially. He served overseas—bearing witness to God knows what, then came home only to continue watching people die in the ED, and you giving Robby attention is what does him in?
At a loss for words, you merely look at him with wide eyes.
Shaking his head with a smirk now plastered on his face, he half turns his head toward you. "You don't have to say anything. Please don't, actually. I've already given him shit about it and don't need to feel like any more of an ass than I already do."
You lean forward, and he slides a palm up your thigh. Pressing a kiss to his cheek, you nuzzle against his neck. "I'm just glad to hear that everything is okay with you."
Resting his cheek against the top of your head, Jack nods. "Same here."
getting dressed at work is a bad idea. getting caught half-naked by dr. langdon is worse.
bet u wanna meet the reader! ── .✦ °❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･
pairing: frank langdon x er!barbie!reader
warnings: fem!reader, barbie!reader, admin assistant reader, sunshine!reader, girly!girl!reader, workplace inappropriate behavior, hr hates to see them coming, suggestive dialogue, mutual pining!!, reader has zero spatial awareness, accidental nudity, extreme sexual tension, clothes b4 bros, fluff, flirty bickering as a love language, medical setting but no medicine
wc: 1.7k
You’re halfway into your date outfit. Well, if halfway means standing in your office in nothing but a satin bra and a swishy skirt that keeps catching on the corner of your desk, surrounded by six potential tops draped across your chair like they’re contestants waiting to be handed a rose.
You’ve spent fifteen full minutes analyzing the difference between cute but not desperate and hot but not like trying-too-hard hot, which feels like the emotional equivalent of performing surgery with a spoon.
It shouldn’t be this hard.
Your date itself is… fine. Whatever. A blurry, man-shaped opportunity for human conversation without talking about charting software and insurance codes.
And, of course, free food. You tend to be extremely motivated by the prospect of free food.
You hold the pink top up to your chest, smoothing it flat with your palm. Too romantic. Too soft. Too I bake on weekends.
You swap it for the lace once. Too intense. Too funeral.
Are you dating a man or being reborn into a new faith?
You exhale, dramatic and long-suffering, and let both tops slide from your hands to the floor, where they land in a sad little pile of unmet expectations.
The door swings open without warning, hinges squeaking like they’re tattling, and in walks Dr. Langdon, voice already doing that brisk, efficient thing that usually means paperwork is about to become your problem.
“Charting from Bay 3 is missing again. I need you to follow up with Supplies and flag the intake forms from the double-code Tuesday.”
He doesn’t even glance up from the clipboard. Just keeps talking like you’re not — well. Like you’re not.
He tends to do this. To talk at you, rather to you. Like you’re just a vessel for admin efficiency. Which, you are, technically.
You’d rather be a vessel for something else when it comes to him but that’s besides the point.
“Got it,” you chirp, turning to reach for a little ceramic holder on the windowsill. Where are your gold hoops? Did you leave them at home? You flick open the container. Empty. You frown as you turn back to Langdon and add, “I’ll track it down and resend anything they lost.”
He shuts the door behind him, nose buried so deep in his notes you’d swear the hospital would implode if he looks up for even half a second.
“And check whether radiology sent over their addendum,” he tacks on, then stops short, square in your path, transforming himself into a broad-shouldered obstacle.
You repress the urge to scold him and rather sidestep his body. It’s a clean maneuver honed by years of dodging gurneys, supply carts, IV poles, and men who somehow manage to occupy doorways like it’s a competitive sport.
You catch a clean hit of coffee and linen starch clinging to his scrubs. It’s nice.
And — oh. There. On the hook behind him. Your hoops.
They had been a gift from your sister.
Langdon isn’t a fan, once muttering about how they’re a liability, how patients could yank them out of your ears, and how studs would be safer.
As if you’d ever surrender an accessory with emotional significant and outfit impact for something as trivial as self-preservation.
One woman’s liability is another woman’s signature look. Or something like that.
You clasp them on mid-step, moving around him again so you’re in front of him.
“Just so you know,” you add lightly, “a please would really elevate this whole interaction.”
Langdon huffs. “I’ll add it to my list of aspirational behaviors —”
He finally looks up and his words falter instantly, vanish, get replaced by a strange, suspended stillness.
His gaze catches somewhere around your collarbone and stalls.
You watch his expression blur, then go blank entirely, a neutral mask where something else had started to bloom. You can’t put your finger on what.
“Well while you’re workshopping personal growth,” you say, distracted as you adjust your earring, “you could work on being nicer to me specifically. Baby steps.”
You step forward, hand reaching for his clipboard to confirm whether the double-code patient had ever gotten their updated consent form.
You don’t bother to look as you move because spatial awareness has never really been your strong suit and you have a tendency to trust that your proximity sensors kick in.
They don’t.
You misjudge the distance, your chest brushing against his bicep. It’s not a grand amount of contact by any means, but it’s enough to turn his whole body to stone.
Shoulders tense, arm rigid beneath you, as if his body has decided on its own that movement is a no good, very bad idea.
There’s that linen smell again.
You find yourself wondering what detergent he uses. Something boring, you suppose. Probably unscented, because he strikes you as a man who resents fragrance as a concept.
You bet he irons. You know he irons.
You peek back up at him again.
He’s usually brimming with eloquent disdain by now, some perfectly honed remark about professionalism or personal space or this is why HR has ulcers.
But this time, he says nothing. Just stands there, staring somewhere past your shoulder like he’s trying very hard not to look at you.
He clears his throat, finally, and it’s the most awkward sound you’ve ever heard him make.
Strange.
“Baby steps,” he repeats, flat, like he’s rolling the phrase around his mouth to see if it bites back. Then, after a beat, “I’ll try to remember that the next time I’m compensating for half the department dropping the ball.”
“Okay, well, I’m not the department. You can’t passive-aggressively scold me for other people’s incompetence. That’s emotional mismanagement.”
And frankly, beneath you.
“I don’t scold you,” he says, not even blinking. “I delegate.”
“Passive-aggressively.”
“Efficiently.”
You shove the clipboard against his chest with more force than strictly necessary. “Well, your little delegation kink can wait until tomorrow. I have plans. And they do not involve getting micromanaged into celibacy.”
It’s a good line. Strong delivery. Very feminine rage of you.
But the second it leaves your mouth, you feel it. Like biting into a strawberry that looked better than it tasted. A lie. Tart and bright and 100% cosmetic.
You are not sleeping with your date tonight. You’re not even planning to. You’re planning to swirl the ice in your drink, feign interest in a marketing executive’s gym schedule, and go home to exfoliate in silence.
Not that you’re opposed to first date sex, you’re not a nun, but the logistics get tricky when you know, with absolute certainty, that the entire time you’d be picturing someone else.
Someone taller. Grumpier. Addicted to energy drinks and benzos.
He visibly recoils at your words. Nose wrinkles, lip curls.
“I don’t want to know anything about that,” he mutters, which is rich coming from a man who’s seen arterial spray and more than likely has performed a disimpaction or two in his med student days.
“That’s a shame,” you say, casually, bending at the waist to dig through your purse, the black hole where lip gloss goes to die. “Because I was just about to overshare. With emphasis. And hand gestures.”
“Jesus Christ, just — don’t,” he mutters, scrubbing a hand down his face. “My blood pressure cannot handle whatever comes after that sentence.”
His tone’s flat, but the tips of his ears are going a little pink. Peony-pink, to be specific. Very cute.
You straighten, uncapping your lip gloss. “Sounds like a you problem, Doctor.”
Langdon exhales sharply through his nose and tilts his gaze toward the ceiling like he’s appealing to a higher power for backup. (Joke’s on him. Heaven likes you better.)
“So is this why you’re half-naked in here?”
Your brows furrow at that, lips pursed as you try to reconcile his words with reality.
You glance down. Shit. Bra. No shirt.
Your brain bluescreens so violently you half-expect your vision to pixelate. No thoughts, no language, just a single screaming dial-up tone echoing through your skull and the creeping realization that you are the world’s biggest idiot.
A workplace violation so severe you can already see the email subject line: Regarding Your Conduct.
You shriek and lunge for the nearest top, which, unluckily, has three buttons and zero stretch.
“Oh my god,” you yelp, halfway tangled in a sleeve. “What is wrong with you? Say something next time, you freak!”
“I did say something.”
You growl, still wrestling the top like it personally wronged you.
The sleeve is inside out, the collar’s twisted around your ear, and your hair is now somehow… inside the shirt?
“Hold still,” he sighs, then careful fingers hook into the fabric, tugging it until it slides into place.
You clamp down at the urge to shiver against the feeling of calloused, cold hands against you.
“Thanks,” you grumble, cheeks radiating enough heat to power a small clinic. You pat your now-mostly-covered chest like it might apologize on your behalf. “And you should’ve said something sooner. Can’t I be, like… charged for that? Public indecency or something?”
“I’m pretty sure intent matters.”
“Oh, I see — so because I didn’t intend to traumatize you with my boobs, it’s fine?”
Langdon raises an eyebrow. “If that’s what you consider traumatizing, you have a dangerously low opinion of yourself.”
You gasp and smack his chest with your palm.
“Dr. Langdon!”
He holds up his hands in surrender, lips twitching. “Apologies.”
The bastard doesn’t sound sorry at all. Doesn’t look it, either.
“You’re enjoying this.”
“I’m not.” His hands are still raised like you’re a flight risk. His eyes, however, are on anything but you. Or more accurately — anything below your shoulders. “I swear.”
“You should’ve knocked anyway. There are rules. Laws. Social contracts. Just because you’ve got a badge and a God complex doesn’t mean you’re exempt from the sacred Knock First Doctrine.”
He presses his lips together, failing miserably at pretending he’s not amused. “I know. You’re right.”
And it’s that damn half-smile that seems to completely dismantles your argument. You were doing so well, too. At hiding the embarassment you feel so clearly.
You had momentum and moral-high ground, and now you’re losing it because he looks stupidly handsome when he’s trying not to laugh, the dimple on his chin flexing then smoothing.
“What if I’d been fully naked?”
He pauses at that, a flicker of something dark shining through the irises of his eyes. Really pretty eyes, you might add. Blue and striking. Like frozen lakes you’re warned not to step on.
Whatever crosses his mind, he doesn’t flinch from it.
“I think,” he starts, “you’d have to take responsibility for what that would do to me.”
You can feel every ounce of blood rush to your head.
Sorry? What kind of responsibility are we talking here? The fun kind? The moral kind? The “oh no I slipped and fell into my boss’s lap and now we have to move to the Alps” kind?
You’re not quite sure if you could recall your name if someone asked you right now.
And he knows. You can see that he knows what he just did to you.
You try to muster up some whitty deflection but come up empty, mouth opening and closing like a useless doll.
“Well,” he adds, saving you from yourself, hand on the door, “I won’t keep you.”
You blink. “Keep me from what?”
He glances at you with a smirk. You want to kiss it off his face.
“Your plans.”
“Oh,” you say dumbly. “Right. My… plans.”
You had plans? Interesting, you don’t recall.
“I’m sure he’ll love it,” Langdon says, nodding toward your now strewn together outfit. Not the final look. “Or at least try not to crash his car when you open the door.”
And then he’s out the door, leaving you in a helpless puddle of… something. Best not to be named.
You should text your date and cancel. Or reschedule. Or fake your death and change your name.
Because if you go on this date now, you are bringing Langdon’s voice with you
a flirty white lie to escape a creep gets out of control when you grab the nearest man... unfortunately, that man is dr. frank langdon. now you're stuck pretending to date the hospital's scariest ER doctor, who plays along a little too well.
bet u wanna meet the reader! ── .✦ °❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･
pairing: frank langdon x er!barbie!reader
warnings: fem!reader, barbie!reader, admin assistant reader, workplace harassment, unwanted attention, fake dating (impulsive af), protective langdon, kinda enemies to lovers, however they don't quite reach the lovers part, implied past addiction (langdon), sexual innuendos, langdon making a comment about ur ass, one-sided pining (or so she thinks), workplace romance, literally just one big HR violation <3
wc: 2.3k
You have a deep love for your office. It’s not far from the pit itself, just a left turn down the hallway, and it’s not necessarily impressive, a shoebox filled with paperwork, cute pens, and arranged trinkets.
However, it might as well be Nirvana in the way it shelters you from the fluorescent lighting that makes your temples throb. From the metal-on-metal shriek of trauma carts. From the constant, looming threat of someone bleeding out within splatter range of your vintage suede ballet flats.
And you really hate blood. It hates you back, with passion.
An unfortunate dynamic for someone working as an administrative assistant in one of the busiest emergency departments on the eastern seaboard. But fate has always struck you as the kind of entity that laughs after delivering the punchline.
Today, the pit is practically foaming at the mouth. Before noon, someone’s child launched a juice box at you, the phone has been ringing off the hook with people demanding to speak to someone with actual authority (rude), and the discharge paperwork that you printed, you stapled (with a bow sticker, for morale), and you left in the outbox is apparently missing.
Which is how you find yourself back in the belly of the beast, bracing yourself as the noise and motion crash over you all at once.
You spot Dana’s blonde ponytail across the sea of moving heads. Your girl. Your one-woman who once stitched up a guy with a fork sticking out of his thigh while telling you your blouse looked cute and asking if you brought cupcakes again.
If anyone will know where your papers went, it’s her.
You take two steps toward salvation.
You do not make it to her.
“Hey there. You just gonna walk past without saying hi?”
You turn around with your usual default smile (the one you save for lost visitors and mildly terrifying surgeons), expecting someone familiar, or semi-familiar, or at least someone you’ve exchanged passive aggressive breakroom eye contact with once or twice.
But the man’s face that greets you doesn’t ring a bell. He’s got that aggressively forgettable look, like if you asked someone to draw a generic white guy from memory using only vague guesses and sad lighting. Pale. Tired-looking. Baseball cap pulled low over dull eyes. He could be someone’s uncle. He could be someone’s tax accountant. He could be a ghost.
You blink at him, brows drawing together.
“Sorry — do I… know you?” you ask, like maybe you forgot a name or an appointment or an entire conversation, which, in your defense, does happen.
“Nah,” he says. “But I swear, I’ve seen you in my dreams.” His smile widens, showing slightly uneven teeth. “I didn’t think angels worked the day shift.”
You laugh, because honestly, what else are you supposed to do? It’s not the worst pickup line you’ve heard. Not even top ten.
This place is practically a petri dish for bad flirting and worst timing, a simmering stew of hormones, narcotics, and people who’ve been sitting in plastic chairs for six hours with nothing to do but stare and develop confidence they did not arrive with.
You’re pretty sure there was a study about it. Or maybe that was a tweet. Either way, it feels peer-reviewed by lived experience.
“That’s sweet,” you say, defaulting to sugar-coating like your life depends on it, even though it’s not sweet. Not at all. It’s weird. It’s deeply un-sweet. And you would very much like to disintegrate into a puff of strawberry-scented vapor and waft gently toward Dana’s desk. “But I’m pretty sure dream-me doesn’t work doubles. She’s probably napping. Or retired. Or, I don’t know, on a yacht somewhere with a pina colada.”
“Doubles, huh? I can tell,” he says, eyes dipping, just briefly, but long enough to make your skin prickle. “You’ve got that worn-in look. Real cute on you.”
Is that supposed to be a compliment?
Because worn-in sounds suspiciously close to run into the ground, and you’re not entirely convinced real cute is strong enough to save it. It’s like being called brave in a dress you didn’t realize was see-through.
You force a light laugh.
“Well, you know what they say,” you chirp, breezy, harmless. “No rest for the wicked.”
“Maybe what you need is a little after-hours entertainment.” Then, casually, “What time you get off tonight?”
Your lip curls before you can stop it, and you have to mentally smooth it back into submission. Gross. The hospital air isn’t even sterile enough to filter out the way it sours between you, something rancid creeping in where banter (if you can even call it that) used to be.
You don’t want to imagine what after-hours entertainment means to him, don’t want the visuals nor the explanation.
But you do imagine what happens if you tell him to back off. Best case, you’re a bitch. Worst case, he follows you into the staff lot.
So you give him an out. Wrapped in politeness, sealed with a smile. Just enough plausible deniability to keep things from tipping. You tilt your head, shrug like it’s nothing.
“Tempting,” you say. “But my boyfriend’s already booked me for after-hours entertainment.”
You do not say that your boyfriend lives in your imagination. That he’s cobbled together from soap opera plotlines, your worst instincts, and a half-formed mental sketch labeled man who could end someone.
“Yeah? Where’s he at then?”
You should have expected that response. Men like this only register rejection if it arrives somene else’s fists.
So you switch tactics. Fast. Panic jumps a little in your chest, but you press it down. Flatten it. Replace it with a square of your shoulders.
“He — he’s around,” you say, lifting your chin. “He works here. In the hospital. You know. With the… medicine.”
Smooth. So smooth.
And of all the people in this very large, very populated hospital, your brain reaches into its little Rolodex and picks Dr. Frank Langdon.
Mr. Monosyllabic Trauma Bay. ER Ken with rage issues and cheekbones that could slice steel. Professional proof that repression is alive and well in the greater Pittsburgh area.
Probably the single worst option for a fake boyfriend. He’s the guy who barely looks at you unless you’re blocking his path, and even then it’s just to sigh like you’ve personally ruined his afternoon. He’s moody. Dry. Practically allergic to small talk.
And yet somehow your brain plasters his face across your internal romance billboard like he’s the star instead of a guy who once told you to “get off the gurney, it’s not a toy.”
You tell yourself it’s because he’s convenient. Because no one would question a man like that defending you. He looks intimidating enough to scare off someone with a single glance.
But that’s not the truth. The truth is you’ve always had a thing for fixer-uppers, for a challenge.
And Langdon is the epitome of a challenge: rehab, recent divorce, a kid he only sees on alternating weekends because addiction rearranged his life into neat, painful compartments.
He’s locked behind walls you’d very much like to scale, if only to prove you could.
And despite your charm, your wit, your general tendency to leave people a little bit in love with you after three sentences, he remains immune.
Still. Imagining him as your fake boyfriend has a certain appeal.
The man’s gaze sharpens. “Must not be very good at his job if he lets guys talk to you like this.”
You open your mouth to respond, something feminist and devastating in a fuck-you sort of way — something about how your boyfriend respects your boundaries and believes in your agency and doesn’t need to play caveman to prove his love — but then the universe does what it rarely, rarely does for you: it delivers.
A miracle in navy scrubs appears to your right. Langdon.
You seize him. There’s no other word for it, treating his bicep as your personal stress ball. You worry you might be a second away from popping a blood vessel.
“He’s excellent at his job,” you blurt.
You are so going to hell for this. Straight to HR medical prison. Is that a thing? Doesn’t matter. You are definitely not passing Go, not collecting Frank’s approval.
He looks down at you, startled. “What —”
“Aren’t you, honey?” you chirp, turning to him with the most desperate approximation of casual affection, your eyes doing all the heavy lifting as you beg him, silently and with every fiber of your being, please don’t ruin this, I’m in too deep, I’ll knit you another scarf, I’ll stop calling you Doctor Daddy in public (for a week), just go with it.
Langdon looks at you, then over at the guy, then back at you.
“I mean,” he finally says, in that same begrudgingly-human tone he uses when you ask him to open your pickle jars, “I’d like to think so.”
He’s still frowning. You’re not sure he understands what’s going on.
“Well, aren’t you a lucky bastard,” The man says, loud enough for the entire nurse’s station to hear. His voice is thick with something slimy, all false cheer and veiled challenge. “Good for you, man. You’re really punching up. Hope you’ve got a good grip on her.”
Langdon blinks once. Then again, slower. You can almost hear the internal gears clicking together, the pause where he reads between the lines and then draws a big red circle around the situation.
His head tilts, just barely, but enough that it radiates condescension, surgical grade.
“Yeah,” he says, voice dry as bone. “I’m still adjusting to the burden of being this blessed.”
“See? This is why I keep him around. The self-awareness. The humility.” You turn to the guy. “And the sarcasm? Complimentary. Limited time offer.”
Langdon doesn’t say anything at first. Just shifts his weight a little closer, the edge of his arm brushing yours, hand drifting to the small of your back like a warning, you’ve made your point, Barbie, let’s not give this creep another reason to open his mouth.
“Alright,” he says, “Let’s head back before I start living up to the reputation.”
You nod like you’ve been programmed to obey, limbs still buzzing with aftershock as he guides you down the corridor.
Your heart’s doing that fluttery, hummingbird thing it does when you almost trip in front of someone hot, or when Langdon says your name with too much gravel in his voice. You’re riding the adrenaline high and trying to walk in a straight line, which is difficult because your knees? Fully made of Jell-O.
Then, from behind, sleazy and absolutely not whispered enough —
“She’s even prettier from the back.”
Before your brain can register rage or disgust or a comeback involving a clipboard to the jaw, Langdon’s arm wraps around your waist.
He pulls you directly in front of him, his own body suddenly a full barrier between you and the hallway. Between you and that guy.
“Boyfriend privileges,” he says without looking back, “That’s a restricted angle.”
Interesting. Because that sounds a lot like proprietary language for someone who doesn’t notice you and definitely isn’t interested.
You try not to smile. You’re a mix of emotions right now, a contradiction in every right of the word. Angry with the stranger, a little hot for Langdon.
Once you’re finally out of sight, and earshot, you let go of the breath you’ve been holding. It escapes out of your lungs all at once, dramatic and overcompensating, and you immediately try to reel yourself back in.
You slow your steps, glance at Langdon, and smirk. It’s shaky at first, but you smother it with sheer willpower.
“Punching up,” you repeat, “Wow. I mean, congrats. That must be exhausting for you. Dating someone this far out of your league. I’m sure you’re doing your best.”
He side-eyes you, brow ticking up like he’s debating whether you’re worth engaging or just tolerating.
You can see the exact moment he gives in.
“You’re right,” he says flatly. “I should’ve gone for someone more attainable. A woman like you is not worth the stress.”
“That sounds like an admission that I’d ruin you.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“So you think you could handle me?”
“I could handle you without breaking a sweat,” he says, too sharp, too fast.
“Prove it.”
Langdon goes still. The only part of him that betrays any reaction is his throat, tightening around a swallow so slow, you swear you can hear it. Like he’s physically pushing the words down. Forcing them back.
And for one single, stupid second, your heart dares to hope. You swear he just might do it. You imagine him stepping in, crowding your space, that unreadable look in his eyes sharpening into something hungry. You imagine his hand braced your head and his voice wrecked when he says, “Fine.” You imagine a lot of things. Because you are you, and your brain is an unmedicated place set to a Lana Del Rey soundtrack.
But none of that happens.
Instead he swallows again. Clears his throat. Refuses to meet your gaze. “That… was hypothetical.”
You don’t let him off so easy.
“That’s crazy, because it didn’t sound hypothetical.” You lean in. “But if you want to pretend you’re not tempted, that’s between you and your therapist. Assuming you have one. Which… mm. Might explain a lot.”
His jaw flexes. “If I needed a therapist, it’d be because of you.”
You beam at him. “Aw. That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“That’s not a compliment.”
“Didn’t say it was. You can insult me as long as you’re thinking about me afterward.”
He mutters something under his breath.
“I’m not participating in this conversation any longer.” He turns like that’s the end of it, then pauses. “And if that idiot tries something, come get me. You’ve got the situational awareness of a soap bubble.”
Another insult. You can recognize that. You can also recognize that your whole body is doing that glittery, fizzy thing it does anytime he’s around.
Because he just exists like that. Hot, mysterious, fundamentally allergic to saying what he means.
Anyway. Lost discharge papers. Terrible lighting. Emotional whiplash. Show must go on.
Summary: The PITT didn’t expect to ever meet the girl that had changed Abbot’s mood for the better, much less under the conditions you arrived in. After a quick thinking move saves a patient's life, Abbot can’t withhold the pride he has for you and your work.
Tags: EMT reader, established relationship, canon type violence, horrible use of medical terms, probably just a lot of medical inaccuracies, cannon blood, mentions of injury/blood, hurt/comfort, angst-ish, fluff, hurt/comfort, happy ending, jack being a simp hehe, idk if they use pagers but I choose to believe they do, making out and nothing more, reader is a woman
WC: 2.8k
a/n: I don’t know much about medical content, so I am really sorry if there are bad inaccuracies lol, anyways, I’m having fun writing these one-shots, enjoy!
! not proofread !
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You had just returned home from your 24 hour shift. Your body ached as you dragged your feet out of your car. Despite it being a slow shift, highlights including a sprained ankle and two elderly transports, your body was beat. You didn’t mind the slow shifts, what you did mind was that you hadn’t seen your boyfriend in over 48 hours. Your schedules happened to overlap in just a way where your 24 hour shift happened to come right after his double, and just when you got off your shift, he was arriving back at his.
You were used to not seeing him for a while, but when your body is as sleep deprived as it currently is and Jack was at the hospital most likely feeling the same way, all you want is to curl up in bed with him. Before you had left for your shift you made sure to meal prep for the both of you and smiled when you had gotten a text from him thanking you. It had only been a few months since the two of you started dating, but it felt like it had been years with how easily you both fell into a routine.
Everyone at the PITT knew Abbot had started seeing someone. Over the past few months he has begun to check his phone, he arrives at work with lunch and little notes. little notes. The most notable change was how now he would go to the roof to answer the phone, coming back to the pitt much lighter than before. He let the staff tease him to an extent, simply brushing off any questions or comments towards his sudden shift in mood. He liked what the two of you had, it felt like a much needed separation from the PITT, something all to himself.
So to say he couldn’t believe his ears when he heard your voice cut through the emergency room, it would be an understatement. His heart sank to the floor, momentarily frozen. He couldn’t tell if it was you shouting in pain or someone else but he knew it was your voice and you were in the pitt.
Around the corner you were shouting for a gurney and help. Jack's feet were moving before he had time to react, eyes scanning over your body. You were still in uniform despite texting him thirty minutes ago that you had made it home safely. You showed no signs of injuries, he allowed himself to exhale for just a second before you started explaining what happened while two nurses wheeled a gurney to your car.
“They were just shouting for a doctor, and I thought I could help but it was risky and stupid,” Jack stands in front of you watching as you bring your blood stained hands to your face, holding your wrists to your forehead trying to calm down. You’re not sure if it’s the lack of sleep or the stress of the situation but the look on Abbot's face has you just about sobbing.
“Slow down honey, what happened?” Is all he asks before three nurses roll in a middle aged woman with a tube in her neck. You watch in horror as he grabs your wrists pulling them away from your face. He holds his eyes firm on you searching for anything that can help them decide what to do next. He can already tell what had happened simply by the tube, but he wanted to make sure you were calmed down. He places his hands on your shoulders steadying your shaking body, grounding you to the cement and himself.
“I tried the heimlich and it wasn’t working and she wasn’t taking in any oxygen or responding, so I performed an emergency cricothyrotomy with the supplies you stashed in my car,” He gives you a nod, squeezing your shoulders, before running behind the patient into Trauma room 1. You take a few breaths trying to steady yourself.
When you finally notice your surroundings, you see the girl who had driven you to the hospital, tears falling down her face. You may be freaking out, but you know her friend must be more scared than you are.
“She’ll be okay, common,” You nod at the girl as you begin to walk away from the trauma bay, leading her to the patient rooms.
It happened too fast you're already forgetting details of the incident. You were hoping out of your car when a woman across the street from you started screaming for help. You ran up seeing her friend choking. You immediately performed the heimlich but after several tries whatever was lodged in her throat wasn’t coming up. Her body went limp in your arms, her body slowly draining color from a lack of oxygen. You laid her down on the floor using your hands to open her mouth and try to find whatever it was that was stopping her breathing. Her friend continued to scream as you looked over at her. You knew what you needed to do, wishing a silent prayer that this wasn’t happening.
“What happened?” You pull out your phone using it as a flashlight to search further down her throat.
“We were laughing and she has a nasty habit of biting on water bottle caps and it must've been loose because it just flew into her mouth” Her friend crouches down to hold the girl's hand, her tears dripping onto the concrete.
“I need you to drive as fast as you can to The Pittsburg Trauma Center, can you do that for me?” You hand her your keys as you begin to carry her friend. You mentally run through the materials Abbot had left in your car knowing there was at least a kit for anything and everything.
“Keep your eyes on the road, wherever you do, do not look back at us, alright?” She helps you open the backseat doors, laying the girl on the seats while her friend runs to the front, starting the car. You rummage under the backseats until you find exactly what you're looking for.
You weren’t thinking about how stupid you were being. Performing a cricothyrotomy in the backseat of a moving vehicle with no restraints holding the girl steady was one of the dumbest ideas you’ve had in a while. Yet that didn’t stop you from performing the surgery. Blood was seeping into the floor of your Subaru, your hands steady despite the bumps on the road. You could hear her friend asking if she was okay but you ignored her, focusing on cutting a straight line into her throat.
You kept replaying it in your head. What if you had inserted it wrong, but she was breathing so that couldn't be possible? But what if you hadn’t needed to perform it, yet that also couldn’t have been true because she wasn’t breathing at all. You sat her friend down into a chair as you looked for a bathroom to wipe the blood from your hands.
You’re not sure how much time had passed when you left the bathroom with steady hands and dried tears.
“You were the one that performed the cricothyrotomy?” A woman points you out as soon as you step into the pitt. Her brown hair is tied back, scrub cap still on. You nod your head unsure if your voice is strong enough to speak.
“Nice save, Abbot said you’re an EMT?” She nods at your uniform you had forgotten you were still wearing.
“Is she going to be okay?” You wipe your hands on your pants nervously. You’ve never been one to question your own work, typically taking pride in your skills and how far you’ve come. For some reason, this one is sticking with you and you can’t shake the feeling that you’ve messed up.
“She’s going to be fine, just had a bottle cap lodged in her throat, we’ll see if there's any mental deterioration when she wakes up,” You sign in relief at her words. Just a bottle cap. She’ll be okay. She gives you a quick smile before adding on “Honestly what I really should be thanking you for is making Abbot laugh again, I can tell you're important to him,” She walks off, leaving your whirlwind of emotions confined to yourself.
You look around the emergency room. Patients continue complaining, doctors keep on moving. Not one face seemed to notice that for a second it felt like your world was crumbling in and the next like you were on top of it.
“Roof.” You hear him before you see him. His hand makes brief contact against yours as he walks past you, eyes holding on your for as long as they can. You follow him up the stairs. You watch him as he leads the way up, his left leg taking more of his weight than his right. You take a mental note of this to ask if he needs any help massaging his leg when he gets off work.
He holds the door open for you, nodding for you to go first. You didn’t even get a chance to take in the PIttsburg sky line because as soon as the door shuts, his hands are on your shoulders, spinning you around. He wraps one hand on the back of your head while the other pulls your waist flesh to his. Your arms immediately reach up to his neck, holding him strong as you both breath for what feels like the first time since you arrived at the hospital.
“You scared the shit out of me,” You feel his words vibrate through his chest into yours. “For a second I thought it was you on a gurney,” his voice is quiet, almost whispering into your ears. You feel him sigh into you, pulling back slightly to rest his forehead on yours. You look up at him, your heart breaking at the sight.
You know what he’s been through, how much loss he carries deep within him. At times he’s made comments about you choosing a safer profession, maybe only transporting people from elderly homes. You know even though he is joking, there is truth to it. He is scared to lose you like he’s lost so many people before.
“I’m right here,” You mutter, pulling him back into your arms. There's a breeze grazing your skin as you stand outside but his body keeps you warm. Absent-mindedly he begins rubbing his hands up and down your back.
“I thought you were off work?” He pulls back, looking at you. He takes your image in again. Your tired yet shining eyes. The slight tear in your lip, no doubt from biting it hard in the ER. It’s a nasty habit he tries to break, always offering you a chapstick when he can feel you anxiously bounce beside him.
“Yeah me too,” You begin to smile, in return lighting up his face. You're laughing, which means you're comfortable and safe, he reminds himself. A small smile creeps to his lips as he brings them to your forehead giving you a soft kiss. You close your eyes at the contact, letting every burden and fatigue wash away at his touch.You could stay like this forever you think, on the roof in the arms of the only man who sees you for you.
“That was a good save, I’m really proud of you,” He pats your head as you roll your eyes. Taking compliments was hard, but you would be lying if you said your heart didn’t swell at his praise.
“I really thought I fucked up,” Your smile drops a bit, the reality of what had just happened settling in. How if this had gone badly you could've lost your job. There was also a part of you that was scared of letting Abbot down. You knew he was a good doctor, teaching you new techniques and practices constantly but you never had to perform them in front of him.
“I mean, the cut definitely could've been more precise, if I were to grade it I'd give it a B+” He teases you, a smile blooming across his face. Anything to try to get you to laugh again. You move your hand from the back of his neck to playfully slap him on the chest. He simply grabs your wrist, holding it in place, eyes not moving off yours.
“Wow, just a B+, you know I made that cut without any fancy tools in a vehicle not made for operating,” You joke back looking up at him through your lashes. Any worry or doubt about how you performed today simply faded away at his words.
“I’ve missed you,” He blurts out as if he wasn’t expecting it. His past shift had felt like a countdown to seeing you again. He was checking his phone for updates, staring at the clock, shifting through patients hoping the next one would distract him enough to not think about you for more than a minute.
“I missed you too Jack,” You smile back. His hands move back to your neck pulling you in for a soft kiss. You sigh into it, letting your head fall into his hands as he wraps it around your cheek. You pull back despite wanting nothing more than to keep him as close as possible to you.
“Shouldn’t you be saving lives?” You tease, only half serious.
“There are other doctors down there,” He smiles back leaning in once more. This kiss is much more urgent, his lips moving from yours to the side of your face, then once more to your neck. Goosebumps erupt on your skin as his stubble drags across your neck. He brings his mouth back up to your lips as you press into him. His hands travel to your ass, squeezing tightly. You let out a little laugh as he moves them back to your neck.
“I love seeing you in uniform,” You laugh as his breath brushes against your skin only making you lean into him more.
“You have no idea how worked up you got me, everyone was shocked at how well that cricothyrotomy was due to the circumstances and it took everything in me to not shout that my girl had done that,” He moves his hands to the first button of your top, opening it to reveal more skin he can touch. Blood rushes to your cheeks at his praise. You feel on top of the world right now as he continues to nip and suck on your skin.
Just as he brings his lips back up to yours his pager goes off interrupting the two of you. You both groan as he pulls away to check what could possibly have stopped him from worshiping his girl.
“Shall we?” He kisses you once more, a quick peck before turning around. You follow him, keeping your hands in his. He leads you downstairs, stopping at the door to the emergency room.
“Get some rest okay,” He kisses the top of your head again. You smile once more at him as you both walk into the ER. Several eyes at the nurses station divert away, the clearly snooping doctors trying to busy themselves as if they weren’t trying to read your lips. This makes Jack send you a wink before guiding you through the patients and to your car sitting in the ambulance bay.
Just as you step out of the doors, he grabs your waist pulling you close to him.
“I love you, I’ll see you at home in a few hours” He practically shouts the first part into your ear, loud enough for the people spying to hear.
“I love you too Jack,” You stand on your tippytoes to give a small kiss to his cheek, letting your hands linger on his face for a beat before turning away.
“See you in two hours,”
You choose to ignore the smell of blood as you drive yourself home. This will be a pain in the ass to clean but that's a thought for another day. What you decide to think of is how when you wake up from your sleep, Abbot will be home and with you once again.
Back at the PITT Jack begins charting. Shen and Ellis slide up behind him, both with shit-eating grins. They had placed bets a while ago on who the mystery woman was and when they would eventually meet her.
“So, about that girl you were talking to earlier…” Shen leans in waiting for Abbot to respond.
“Don’t you two have patients to see?” They both slump their shoulders knowing he won’t break. As they hop away he smiles to himself knowing he won’t have to keep you a secret from the PITT anymore.
summary: “I will pay for your coffee,” you add quickly, stepping forward and leaning into his space. He keeps shaking his head, so, in a moment of pure madness, and lacking better ideas, you just say: “I’ll go down on you.”
word count: 4k (smut and fluff mainly)
a/n: i know i'm supposed to work on the part two of my andrew story, but...yeah, episode 7 was really something for my brain
❤︎ Thank you so much for reading!
One of the few undeniable advantages of the apartment is its location.
A single block separates your front door from the ER, which means: no subway delays, no buses filled with people’s germs and no waisted minutes that could be spent studying.
The apartment itself, however, is less impressive. It’s small, a fifth-floor walk-up with a radiator that only works every other day in winter, but it saves you from many issues, especially after a twelve-hour shift. Like most attendings say: efficiency is survival in third year. And this place is efficient.
The other perk is Jack Abbot, who objectively is a good roommate.
He pays rent two days early, every month, without fail. He wipes down the counter after he cooks, because apparently, in Jack’s mind, you could be an M3 and have the time to cook (Oh, fuck off, is your main and consistent thought every time he sets a plate of actual food in front of you at breakfast and dinner). He rewinds the VHS before returning it, and he even agrees to 4am study sessions when you are doubting yourself with the tracheobronchial tree structure.
The only problem with Jack Abbot is…he does not bend. For anyone.
It’s a mistake people make about him at the hospital. They assume that because he listens more than he talks and doesn’t talk the loudest in the room, he must be easygoing. They’re all wrong because in ‘easygoing’, there’s the word easy. And Jack is many things – observant, funny, annoyingly competent - but easy is not one of them. Right now, for instance, he’s being impossible.
Sprawled at the dining table, legs stretched out, hair still damp from the shower and curling at the nape of his neck and a gray shirt clinging enough to make you look away, Jack is in the middle of Sabiston Textbook of Surgery, annotating it.
You pause in the doorway for a second, watching him read before clearing your throat.
“Jack.”
He doesn’t even look up. “No.”
“I haven’t said anything yet!”
“Don’t need to,” he replies, flipping a page. “If it’s prefaced with my name in that tone, the answer is no.”
You step closer and place your hand flat over the open page of Sabiston, earning a mildly annoyed look from him.
“I just need a small, tiny favor.”
“No.”
“Please at least listen to me!” you implore.
One corner of his mouth lifts, and there it is, that smirk that you want to either punch or kiss “You want to switch our trauma shifts tomorrow.”
You hesitate just long enough for him to catch him, his eyebrow lifting slowly. “Why do you need it?”
“I…” you exhale, a little embarrassed. “I haven’t completed my procedure log. I’m missing one intubation and I really need it to pass the rotation.”
“One intubation,” he repeats, a little judgy, closing the book with his pen marking the page. “Haven’t you been on three different procedures already?”
“I know,” you snap, heat creeping up your neck. “I know. But Meyers took the first one because he is an asshole who can’t stop himself from playing mister Know-it-all, the second one went to Patel because he hadn’t logged one either, and the third…”
“You froze.”
I hate you for remembering this, I hate that you noticed, I hate how right you are, you thought.
“It was just…one second.”
“In trauma,” he replies, leaning back in the chair and hands folding behind his head, “one second is the difference between life and death.”
You glare at him. “Jack…I am missing one intubation. Just one. If I don’t log it, Reyes will tank my evaluation, and I’m not repeating this rotation, I physically cannot handle doing another six weeks of this while pretending I don’t care when he calls me ‘sweetheart’ in front of the interns like I’m a pretty accessory instead of a med student. So yes. I want your trauma shift cause I need it. You can’t even fathom the depth of my despair right now.”
“Oh, I think I have a pretty vivid imagination,” he replies.
“I’ll do the dishes for a month.”
He snorts.
“I’m serious!”
“You can’t be trusted with my plates.”
“I will pay for your coffee for a month,” you add quickly, stepping forward and leaning into his space.
He keeps shaking his head, so, in a moment of pure madness, and lacking better ideas, you just say: “I’ll go down on you.”
That gets his attention. “You…You’re not going to go down on me.”
“I’m sorry, which part of ‘despair’ don’t you understand with your so-called vivid imagination?”
He frowns, with that tiny crease between his brows that you want to kiss as much as his smirk, his throat moving as he swallows. “You’d actually…do that?” he asks carefully.
You hadn’t expected that answer and for a moment, the weight of what you just offered settles in. The apartment suddenly feels too quiet, and you become acutely aware of the fact that you are standing very close to Jack, that his hair is still damp and you want to run your hands through those curls, and the way the lamplight catches in his hazel eyes and turns them warmer, almost golden.
The fact is…you like Jack. You’ve liked him for the past few months, and quite frankly, being his roommate has not helped with your massive crush problem.
You shrug, forcing your voice into something light and easy. “Yeah. I’m okay with it. If you are, I mean.”
His fingers flex against the edge of Sabiston, not looking away from you and saying quietly. “So, um…we do this and you get my shift?”
“A privilege for another,” you clarify, voice steady even if your pulse is sabotaging you. “You help me log the intubation and I… return the generosity.”
He nods once, and to your quiet, personal satisfaction, a faint blush creeps across his freckled cheeks, like a tell he can’t suppress. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay,” he says again, quieter.
You reach for the back of his chair, gently turning him toward you, your faces now inches to each other. “How about now Jack? Or are you too busy studying…let me guess: the saphenous vein?” you murmur, with a teasing smile.
“It was the VSD actually,” he breathes, his gaze dropping briefly to your mouth before snapping back up. “But…yeah. Now is fine.”
You drop to your knees, his knees parting quickly, confirming your personal theory: it has been a long time for him. Probably as long as it’s been for you. Third year is not exactly fertile ground to start having relationships: no time, no personal life, no sleep and not to mention that you have never seen him bring anyone back here. Not once. He’s never acted on any nurses’ or classmates’ flirtations. The apartment has always been just the two of you.
You hook your fingers into the waistband of his sweatpants, pulling it down as he lifts his hips. “I’m not entirely sure that I haven’t passed out on the table and this is all just a hallucination,” he continues, a groan escaping his mouth when you let your palm graze over his half hard cock, eyelids shutting completely the moment you wrap your hand properly around him.
“I don’t know…” you joke as you start moving, enjoying the view of Mr. Perfect Grades keeping his hands diligently on his legs and pressing his teeth on his lips. “You look very awake to me.”
You wet your lips lightly, running your tongue over them as his gaze finds yours. You’ve always loved that part: the control, deciding when and how it happens, to go slower or faster, feeling someone react under your hands and mouth, but still…you’re a little nervous. It’s been a while and you hope you haven’t lost it in…oh my god a year ago now? Yeah, it was definitely a year.
Either way, you don’t give yourself more time to think about it before dipping your head to take him in.
Multiple things come up to your mind: first, he’s not the kind of guy to put his hands on your hair to get you to move faster or deeper – which you appreciate - second, he’s vocal, muttering your name and profanities each time you manage to fit him entirely in your mouth - you still don’t know how you do that, the guy is huge - and third, you are officially on your knees, blowing your roommate, crush and student rival.
Once he’s done, you stand back up, knees numb and wiping the back of your hand over your lips, both struggling to catch your breaths.
“6am. For tomorrow. But get there at 5.30,” Jack says, closing his eyes briefly before putting his pants back on. “And you better do this intubation.”
──────────
Two weeks later, he’s the one standing in the living room.
“Hey.”
You don’t look up from your notes. “No.”
He exhales sharply through his nose, dropping onto the couch beside you. “Please.”
“No,” you repeat, turning a page calmly even though the corner of your mouth is threatening to betray you. There’s something so satisfying about denying Jack Abbot anything.
He drags a hand through his hair, mussed from the shift at the hospital, and puts his hand on yours (don’t freeze over that, it’s stupid anyway). “It’s just one procedure.”
You raise an eyebrow, finally looking at him. “Doctor Abbot missing something on his log?”
“No,” he starts before hesitating, his pride wrestling with the request, “it’s about the thoracostomy. Reyes is letting one M3 take lead tomorrow and I need someone to cover triage so I can stay in trauma long enough to be picked.”
You let your gaze drag slowly over him, pretending to think. “No.”
“You’re enjoying this,” he sighed, his hand still clasps around yours.
“Oh, immensely.”
“Please. I’ll make it up to you.”
You snort softly and close your notebook, setting it aside before turning fully toward him, your knees brushing his. “How, doc?”
“I’ll go down on you.”
“What?” you ask slowly.
He shrugs, trying for casual, one hand still loosely wrapped around yours, his thumb brushing absently over your knuckles. “One privilege for another. That’s…that’s our thing, right?”
“Um…yeah. You really want to do this thoracostomy?”
His lips pull into that maddening kissable half-smile that you love more than anything, the one he gets in the ER whenever he answers correctly to one of the residents’ questions. “I really want to do it and erase Meyers’ smile once and for all. So, what do you say?”
“Okay,” you reply, parting your legs (oh yes, Jack, you’re gonna have to kneel for this one, no way I’m passing on an occasion to let you do everything) “but be quick, I still have to read the biological markers of…”
The words don’t get out of your mouth when he kneels in front of you, pulling off your pajama short and underwear, the leather of the couch making you feel hotter than you were already.
“I’ll be very quick and thorough, I promise,” he replies, amused – probably because you were now completely silent – before working his tongue on you.
And wow, you have received plenty of good cunnilinguses in your life, even if it’s been some time, but this one…is miles from the rest. You can recognize it happily… Jack has some wicked knowledge of the human anatomy and how to get you there in a few minutes.
“You better be fucking great for this thoracostomy, Doctor Abbot,” you say as you’re try to catch your breath, Jack picking up your notes, ready for a new study session (you don’t comment over the fact that he doesn’t go rinse his mouth or put distance between you and just…drags his thumb across his lower lip and then licks it clean).
“You know me,” he replies with a smug smile that makes you roll your eyes.
And yes, you know. The next day proves it. You’re buried in triage when you hear from your resident, the Doctor Robinavitch – a young, tall man, barely a few years older than you who keeps trying his best to be half your friend, half your boss – that Jack had been an example of calm and solid, earning a fist bump from both Reyes and Robinavitch.
You nod slowly, pretending you don’t feel the faint flare of something warm under your ribs, travelling down your body. Pride. You are so proud of him, and you want to reply to the resident, of course he was solid, of course he didn’t choke, this man is great and kind and…actually is also a great giver, but you don’t need to know that.
You catch sight of him later in the hallway, walking toward you with a protein bar in hand, a little smile on his face. And that smile, Jesus, all warm and bright and unguarded…it’s definitely a second privilege he doesn’t need to know about.
──────────
Four days after, you get behind on your charting.
Because you’d rather slit your wrist than stay late in the ER with Reyes breathing into the back of your skull, you make another deal with Jack.
“If you stay up with me until it’s done,” you murmur to Jack in the CT-Scan room, “I’ll give you a very nice orgasm.”
He checks to his left and right. “Define ‘very nice’”.
“You’re insufferable.”
“Hey, I’m the guy who’s gonna stay to help you, so be a little more grateful.”
You salute him with your pen. “Aye aye doc.”
Late that night, steam fogs the bathroom mirror, the water running hot. He’s already under the spray when you step into the doorway, taking off your clothes (after all there’s almost nothing he hasn’t seen already). You step closer before putting your hand on him, his palms ending up on the tiled wall behind you and muttering a “Jesus fucking Christ.” at the combined feeling of the water cascading on his body and your movements who only grows faster, making him come in a few minutes, your name on his lips.
“You know…it’s stupid to waste the water,” he murmurs after a while.
“Oh, really.”
“I mean, we’re two broke med students, it’s cost-effective. And we’re already in here anyway.”
Surely you can’t disagree with this idea.
Efficiency, after all, is very important in medicine.
──────────
“Hey kid.”
You look up, the Doctor Robinavitch standing there with that expression – the one who wants to gossip but tries to refrain himself from it.
“Um,” you say cautiously, pen lingering over the chart. “What?”
He glances down the hall then back at you. You follow his gaze automatically.
Jack is at the nurses’ board, talking to one of them, arms crossed and sleeves rolled up. He laughs at something, shaking his head. You look away, glancing back at the resident, who’s already staring at you, leaning over the table just enough to meet your eye level.
“…What?” you repeat, sharper now.
“How long?”
You blink. “How long what?”
“Whatever that is,” he replies, gesturing vaguely between you and the air.
You scoff lightly, going back to writing your charting. “There is no ‘that’, Doctor Robinavitch.”
He sighs deeply, rubbing a hand down his face. “Listen kid, you realize the entire staff has a betting pool, right?”
Your pen freezes mid-word. “On what?”
He just stares at you until you break (my god how you hate when he does that, condolences to all the future doctors who’ll get him as an attending).
“We’re not together. It’s…it’s not like that,” you try to explain weakly instead of saying we’re just roommates who are the type to perform oral sex to get what we want, no big deal there. oh, and now we take showers together every night to save the planet, not to…give the other a freebie.
His smile widens. “Oh, so there is a ‘that’.”
You look back at the nurses’ station. Jack is still there, but now he’s looking directly at you, an eyebrow raised with a small, knowing smile – like he can feel that your mind is turned to this morning and the two orgasms he gave you before going to work.
You can’t help but smile back at him.
Robinavitch follows the silent exchange, then looks back at you with open disbelief. “That,” he says slowly, “right there, is definitely a thing.”
Before you can gather your words to get a more convincing denial, a monitor alarms from down the hall.
“Go, kid. And try not to share lovey-dovey looks over the patient.”
You shove his shoulder as you pass him, heat rising in your cheeks.
“I hate you, Robinavitch.”
“I know that’s not true!” he calls after you.
Annoyingly…he’s right. You don’t hate him.
And there is a thing.
──────────
It happens after the code blue.
You and Jack are walking home in silence, refusing to mention how, when you had stepped into the patient’s room, he had handed you the laryngoscope without hesitation – you, not himself – like there has been no other option in his mind.
Your hands brush every few steps, neither of you pulling away.
By the time you reach the apartment, your body feels heavy, exhausted, dumping your bag on the hallway floor and ripping of your jacket as you go straight to the bathroom.
The light is too bright. It exposes everything: the smudged mascara under your eyes, the dark circles who can’t be hidden well by the foundation, the way your eyes are reddened by your need to cry.
You grip the edge of the sink and stare at yourself, murmuring “You did well, don’t worry. The woman is alive. The baby is alive. You did well.”
The door opens quietly behind you.
“If you’re about to tell me I did great, don’t.” you mutter, voice flat, refusing to meet his eyes in the mirror. If you look at him, you might crack.
He doesn’t answer. Instead, you feel him step into your space, listening to him opening the cabinet and the rustle of cotton pads. He reaches around you, close enough that his arm brushes you before gently turning you by the shoulder so you’re facing him instead of your – miserable, pathetic – reflection.
“Hold still,” he murmurs.
His face is close to yours – barely four inches away. Close enough that you can see the freckles across his nose. Enough that you could close that distance with the smallest tilt forward and drown your thoughts in something easier than this ache sitting in your chest.
The cotton pad is cool against your skin. He wipes slowly beneath your eye, careful, his thumb steadying your jaw. “Can you do me a favor?” he asks quietly.
“I’m not in the mood tonight,” you reply automatically.
He rolls his eyes, but there’s no heat in it. “No, not like that. Not…” he exhales, dragging the pad gently across your cheek, “not everything is about having sex.”
“I wouldn’t call exactly what we’re doing ‘having sex’,” you say, sharper than you intend.
He stills and for a fraction of a second, something flickers across his face in between surprise and hurt. “Oh. Um…Okay.”
His throat bobs as he switches to a clean pad, focusing on your eyes.
Eyes closed, you try to explain yourself better, words coming out before you can filter them. “That’s not what I meant,” you murmur. “I just…I don’t want this tonight and I don’t want this to be another thing that happens because we almost lost someone. We…we can’t keep doing this.”
Fuck, you don’t even know what this is anymore.
You feel him getting even closer – so close that his breath brushes your lips when he exhales. He finishes wiping up your face. “Can you…” he starts, voice lower now, uncertain like you’ve never heard from him, “can you let me just be here? With you?”
You open your eyes slowly, now seeing everything: the faint traces of tears at the corner of his eyes, the way his curls have fallen messily over his forehead from running his hand through them too much. He looks younger like this.
“I’m sorry Jack. I didn’t mean to make it sound like…like what we do doesn’t matter. I just…” your voice breaks, “I don’t want it to be the only reason we touch.”
He doesn’t hesitate. “It’s not.”
You study him, skeptical.
“Fine,” he admits quietly. “It started that way because we’re two massive idiots who don’t know how to say what we want without turning it into…a mess. But it’s not why I continued doing that.”
He sets the cotton pad down in the sink and brings both hands to your face now, his palms feeling warm against your cheeks.
“I don’t want this to be about that. I…I want to be the person you come home with after something like tonight. Not just the guy you’re giving blowjobs to who turns out to be your roommate.”
“Great blowjobs, you mean. Wonderful. Fantastic,” you reply, trying to smile a little.
“Yes, sure. All of the above and more,” he nods, matching your grin with that crooked, infuriatingly gorgeous one before leaning in slowly, giving you time to pull away if you want to. He waits until you give the smallest eager nod before his mouth brushes yours.
Oh. Oh. Okay. You should have started here weeks ago.
The kiss is nothing like the moments you’ve shared before. It’s unhurried and soft, his lips moving against yours like he’s learning a part of you he doesn’t know.
And God, he’s a good kisser too – good doctor, good giver, does this man know how to be bad at something?
He tilts his head slightly, deepening it and learning to read every small reaction: when you sigh softly against his mouth, he runs his tongue against yours, when your fingers curl into the fabric of his shirt, he pulls you closer.
Out of breath, he rests his forehead against yours, noses brushing.
“I like you, okay? I like you when you study until four in the morning. I like you when you are right about a diagnosis and high five me. I like you when you’re scared. And stubborn. And exhausted,” he whispers against your mouth. “You’re my person. In the ER, here, everywhere.”
You swallow. “My god, how didn’t you get with, like…all the girls of the hospital?”
“Well, you see, I was a bit busy trying to get the attention of a certain woman,” he replies, chuckling.
“Oh, do I know her?”
“Hm. I’m not sure,” he murmurs, lips still close enough that your breath mingles. “She’s obstinate. Overworks herself and pretends she doesn’t need anyone. Terrible at dishes.”
You pinch his side. “Rude.”
“Oh, and she rolls her eyes when I’m right,” he continues. “Which is very often.”
“Unbelievable.”
“And,” he adds, softer, “she has this look she gives me every time there’s an alarm. Like she’s checking if I’m okay.”
You swallow. “Oh. Her.”
“Yeah.” His mouth curves, his nose brushing yours deliberately. “Her.”
You shake your head, smiling despite yourself. “You’re ridiculous.”
“And you love that.”
You hesitate before nodding. “Yeah,” you admit. “I do love that.” I love you, I love you, I love you.
“Yeah?” he asks, a smile spreading across his face as his hand slides to the small of your back. “Good.”
You don’t give him time to get smug about it before kissing him again, your fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt and pulling him closer until there’s no space left between you. His breath catches against your mouth, a surprised sound that makes you press him against the bathroom’s door.
Against his lips, still holding onto his shirt, you murmur, “Shower?”
“Shower.”
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I'm having a lot of fun imagining Shane and Ilya dealing with these dumbass hockey players like the rookies are acting weird for weeks and then finally one of them breaks and asks, "So uhhhh not to be fucking stupid man but when you say you waited to come out 'because Russia' what does that like, mean," and Ilya blue-screens and Shane has to give a presentation about the history of anti-gay legislation in Russia
Some reporter asks "What's it like having a gay couple in the locker room" and a rookie gets all teary eyed and sputtering and goes "it's FUCKED UP man. FUCKED UP." And bursts into tears
And the media room goes crazy and finally Coach Wiebe has to step in and be like, "OK it's not what you think. Last week they all watched Moonlight together"
