are there still beautiful things?

26! call me k :). free palestine

[sweetttsummer]

kay’s navigation!

masterlist | fic recs

requests are open!

characters i write for:

bucky barnes, robert chase, tasm!peter parker, spencer reid, matt murdock, jason todd, steve harrington, sam winchester, clark kent

this list is ever growing, please feel free to come by and ask if i'll write for a character (if i know them, i'll likely say yes!)

[sweetttsummer]

reachin' up for sunlight (just to be ripped out by the stem)

dr. robert chase x fem!reader

summary: Robert Chase and you fell somewhere, somehow, somewhat in love each other at what was the worst time of your lives. Now, a decade later, you've showed up at the one place he didn't think he'd see you, Princeton-Plainsboro, as a patient.

wc: 17k

tw: typical house medical stuff, Chase's family history (yes thats a tw) and some allusion to not a great family life for reader also!

author's note: this is a week late, but in my defense..its 17k words long. also, i'm not a medical doctor or even close to one so if you wanted accurate medical shit, wrong place! wrong person! this has not been beta read so apologizes!

have a request? ask away!

Dr. Chase took a moment to glance as he stepped out of the elevator door, and the next moment to breath in happy to be out of his own place. The long weekend off had done nothing for him, he felt exhausted. His weekend off had finally taken all the excuses he had left and he had pulled out the last box of things that his father had left him. 

It had been months (half a year? when did that happen?) at this point since he had learnt of his father’s death. When it first happened, it was like nothing had changed, he got the phone call, he remembers thanking the person for the information and then continuing on with his day. (Given the lawsuit that had found itself into his life, obviously it had bothered him more than he first thought.)

But then the box showed up. It had taken a week, and Chase had already learnt that his father left him no money (although it wasn’t shocking) so when the box showed up, he had been confused. Inside the packing bag, was a fairly decent sized briefcase. For the first week, the briefcase stayed on the dining room table. It’s not like he ate dinner in his apartment anyways. It haunted him often, and it took three days of it sitting there for him to realize it was the same briefcase he remembers his dad coming home from work with before he had left. That clarity was enough for him to take the briefcase and shove it against a nook, out of eye sight. And then came the long weekend half a year later, and what else was he suppose to do? Suddenly he was faced with the fact that five months later, the briefcase was still here and his father wasn’t. So he had picked it up back and opened it. 

There wasn’t a lot, the deed to a house his father had owned passed to Chase, some heirlooms he doesn’t recognize that he’s sure his father would be ashamed at the blank memory. The folder in which the deed rested in had been filled with other papers, some obviously were older than most. The already mentioned deed (and the pile of paperwork that comes with that), a pile of photos from before his father left, some mail that he’s sure his father’s lawyers had forwarded, and a bundle of letters, the top one doesn’t have a return address instead just “Robert” written in his fathers illegible writing. Papers that he couldn’t get himself to sort through so instead, he threw them on the table and moved along. The briefcase had ended up making its home at the front of his door, he had stared it down this morning before leaving thinking about easy it would be to slip his own things into it and use it. 

The beep of the elevator shakes him from the small turmoil he was suddenly throwing himself into. He forced his feet to start moving himself. 

The wooden bench was not meant to be sat on for hours: she had come to that conclusion about 20 minutes into camping in the hallway. That had been about an hour and a half ago according to her watch. Still, the lengthy medical file with her name poking out of the top was enough for her to deal with the numbness of her legs. The idea of wasting time did linger in the back of her head, she let out a small sigh and leaned her head up against the wall behind her, keeping her unfocused gaze on the ceiling. 

(Y/N) had found herself thinking about quitting her paralegal job at the law firm she had finally made a home at. Everything was going so well she had finally found herself a position that used her degree, and was in a town that she found the perfect balance of small but still full of things happening. Whatever bad luck she had when she was a teenager had finally been flushed out, or so she thought. 

About a week ago, she had fallen sick, quite literally. She had blacked out at her desk and came to by a small tap on her cheek, one of her bosses was crouched down near her obvious concern across her face. (Y/N) had felt embarrassed immediately and tried to sit up at her desk, but couldn’t seem to find her own strength and felt her face shake a little at the energy that was being used. Her struggle must have been obvious, as her boss had sent her home with a referral to a doctor she recommends. She was sent home by the first doctor with a simple answer of “stressed, dehydrated”, “You legal type work too hard, just give yourself the weekend” 

So she did. A whole weekend off, not answering her pager, her cellphone or home phone. It was a hard weekend, a reminder of the emptiness she had found herself in for adulthood. She had her job, her own pride, her health (for now), she tried not to think of the loneliness that lingered in the crawl spaces of her life. It would just lead to her dwelling on her teen years spent miles away, across oceans and railroads, with the one person who took in every piece of her and had shed light on the loneliness. No enough. 

She finally focused her gaze again and went back to staring at the tiles on the ceiling. She couldn’t think of him, she avoided it all these years and there’s no reason to think of it, of them, now. The ceiling is four by six tiles. She thinks to herself and it immediately brings her back to the ache of her butt against the wooden bench. A ding of the elevator torn her eyes from the ceiling and she went back to staring down the empty office’s glass door. 

Dr. Chase felt a few people slip out of the elevator behind him and he finally kicked himself into gear, moving towards the conference room. He was sure no one would be in yet, but he couldn’t stand sitting around anymore, better to hang out in the conference room where Foreman and Cameron might be able to pull him out of his own existential dread. Even if it’ll be through pissing him off, it would be better than this. 

Across the conference room, Chase noticed a small figure slightly slumped on the wooden bench. The color of her hair made his gut tighten just for a moment. The way it laid, the exact color, it all felt too close to someone he knew so long ago, someone he never thinks about anymore. It wasn’t on purpose, the way he immediately moved his feet towards the person on the bench. 

(Y/N) had heard the footsteps coming closer to her and ended up sitting up a little in her spot and looked up at the doctor who had stopped a little further than she thought he would. Whatever thoughts she was trying to avoid a few minutes ago, suddenly swarmed across her mind.  Dr. Chase didn’t even make it all the way over the person before his feet stopped him, it couldn’t be. 

There was a moment where they seemed to both size each other up, to debate if they had lost their minds. Chase couldn’t help the way his feet moved, they were use to walking towards her, not running away from her. 

“(Y/N)” Chase barely recognized his own voice. (Y/N) on the other hand had that voice burned into her brain. The lilt in the accent, the slight breathlessness laced in her name. It had been at least a decade since she heard him say her name. Still she could pick him out by voice alone. 

(Y/N) straightened her back against the wall in her sitting position and opened her mouth to reply. Nothing came out. Instead, the unanswered letters she had sent 10 years ago flash across her mind. She finally closed her mouth and kept her gaze up. He looked mostly the same, older of course, a decade apart will do that to a person. He had let his hair grow out, and despite the shocked look on his face, he still had the same rosy undertone in his cheeks. 

Chase took her silence to really look at her. He thinks of lingering teen hands, of giggling in the dark, of the only soft thing he had when everything was falling apart around him. There had been plenty of parties in his teenage years, so many girls, so many things he hid away but (Y/N). (Y/N) had been the one person he never spoke about, he had done his best to ignore the betrayal he felt when she left and she never reached out to him. He had packed it away. His father’s briefcase all packed with his things flashes in his mind. 

“What are you doing here?” Chase finally speaks up again, he rolled his shoulders a little and tried to put on a front, tried to pretend he wasn’t aching at the sight of her now. She still mostly looked the same, a little thinner than he thinks is natural for her, slightly hollow in her face in places that shouldn’t look like that. He tore his eyes away and glanced over to the empty conference room, House’s empty office. He ignored the voice telling him something was wrong. He had looked away and she could find her voice again. 

“Robert” (Y/N) finally spoke said the only thing that came to mind.  She didn’t know how to answer his questions, she wasn’t here to even ask his professional opinion, she had no idea he was even here. She had last seen him so far from here she never imagined he would have came all the way to New Jersey. 

Thankfully, the moment died quite quickly. Sadly, it was broken by the voice by House. 

“Chase, tell Wilson here..” House didn’t finish his sentence when he noticed Wilson had taken his chance to slip away, not wanting to hear whatever shitty thing House was going to yell across the hall to Chase. 

Chase clenched his jaw and kept his eyes trained on House as he limped over to where Chase stood. 

“Not now House,” Chase mumbled. 

“Dr. House?” (Y/N) tried to confirm if this was the man she was told could help her. House acted like he didn’t hear her and went to say something else to Chase before (Y/N) stood up quickly and held her medical file out towards House. 

“My name is (Y/N) (Y/L/N) and I was referred to you. I work under Stacy Warner and-“ (Y/N) was cut off by a small wave of fatigue. She felt her legs shake a little at the act of standing up so quickly. Chase didn’t think twice  when he moved a little closer, let his hand linger around (Y/N)’s  arms. He stopped himself before he could actually put his hand on her, there was something scary about the idea of touching her again after all this time. It felt like another lifetime when he had the chance to be able to touch her freely, and her disappearance from his life felt like enough for a sign that she didn’t want him to touch her anymore. 

His voice soften when he spoke, “Hey, you should sit back down,” he kept his hands lingering near his elbow as he came closer to her, a little nudge to get her back onto the bench. (Y/N) listens without thinking and falls back onto the wooden bench. Her medical file is still in her hand and slightly held up towards Dr. House. “If you could at least look at it, tell me anything please,” (Y/N) tried to get Dr. House’s attention. 

House didn’t seem to be looking at her, or the medical file. Instead he had his gaze trailed on Chase, on the hand that he pulled away and shoved into his coat pocket when he noticed the lack of response from (Y/N). House finally caught Chase’s eye for only a moment before Chase immediately looked away. It was the only response House really needed. It had been a while since something had Chase on edge. House had been wondering if after the lawsuit Chase had caught if he decided to simply shut down, but his actions now seemed to say otherwise. 

House barely glanced at (Y/N) before snatching the medical file from her hand. (Y/N) let out a small sigh and leaned her head against the wall again, her eyes closed for a moment in relief. Dr. House grabbed my file, he’s opening it, Stacy had told her this would be the hardest part and she did it. (She can’t help but internally laugh at the fact that the hardest part is Robert Chase standing. right. there. But Stacy couldn’t have known.) 

Dr. House barely glanced at the file before swing it towards Chase for him to take it. Chase clenched his jaw but took the file and held it closed. 

“You ever spend time in Australia?” Dr. House leans against his cane as he finally stares down (Y/N). 

(Y/N) couldn’t help but glance over to Chase who was staring down House. She thought of her time in Australia. She had met Robert by accident, when she was working some fancy event that he was attending as a teenager. He was so obviously a bad idea, but he made her laugh and she could see the insecurity behind whatever fake gusto he was displaying. She remembers how he had almost blown her off when he realized that he wasn’t going to be able to fuck her tonight. She tries not to dwell on the years they spent attached at the hip. She tries not to think of all his secrets she had been holding close to her heart. Sometimes, when she focuses enough, she can remember the first time he had confessed that he thinks(knows) that no one else will ever understand him the way (Y/N) did. 

“I lived in Australia for 5 years when I was 16. My mother wanted me away from my father, and apparently across the country wasn’t enough, so she took me to the further place she could think of. It’s been so long I doubt it’s connected, I just barely started getting sick.” (Y/N) answered keeping her gaze away from Chase. 

House let out a little “huh” before he opened his mouth to say something else. Chase immediately spoke up to stop him from asking what he knows House will ask, “No.”  House glanced over Chase’s shoulder and noticed Cameron and Foreman making their way over to the both of them. 

House snatched the medical file, that Chase still hadn’t open, and met Cameron and Foreman half way and pressed the file into Foreman’s hands. Chase took a moment to glance at (Y/N). He thought of how much it hurt when she left, he thinks of her promises that she would write, that being physically separated didn’t mean anything with them. She felt his eyes on her and pulled her eyes from the ceiling, Chase still seemed to have her memorized because he could tell she was going to say something about the situation and he wasn’t sure he could handle it. He immediately turned away and went over to where Cameron was speaking. 

“It says here she had a cold about a month ago….”

“She also lived in Australia when she was 15 and now she seems to be 30. Weird right?” House said in an obnoxious tone that had Chase glaring at him already. 

Cameron’s attention is pulled from the file as she looks at Chase slightly confused. “You know her?” She asked ignoring the glare Chase is wearing. 

“Doesn’t matter,” Foreman said as he quickly walked over to (Y/N). She seemed to be slightly falling asleep against the wall, her head falling a little before she realized and slightly stood up. Foreman grabbed her shoulder a little and shook her awake a little. House watched as Foreman made sure she was aware of where she was, he noticed the way Chase’s jaw clenched at Foreman’s attention and grabbed the file out of Cameron’s hand. 

“Get her a room, and come back to me with information.” House made his way back to his office. Cameron glances at Chase for only a second before she made her way over to (Y/N) and helped Foreman out. Chase didn’t move, keeping his eyes on House his jaw clenched, “Well. Go!” House motioned with his cane. 

Chase had waited for House to make himself comfortable in his office before he took off. He didn’t even mention to Cameron and Foreman that he wouldn’t be around. He just needs a few moments to himself, the irony of how much he didn’t want to be alone an hour ago wasn’t lost on him. Chase was staring at the inside of his locker, he had walked into the doctor locker room without thinking and opened his locker like he was going to go home. The locker was full of his own items and he tried to take inventory. Instead he lost himself in the memory last time he had spoken to (Y/N) face to face.

They were both 21, he never had a secret with (Y/N) since he first opened up. Often, he remembers feeling like she had came into his life and without any medical school, knew how to perform open heart surgery, knew his insides without any problems. This was the first time he had held a secret from her. He had confirmed his medical school entry date and had been scared to mention it to her. ow, he couldn’t avoid it anymore, he was leaving tomorrow and the guilt at not telling her soon ate him alive. For the last few years it was just them, together, Chase knows he has his sister, and really his mother is still alive, but neither of them seem to see Chase. They see his hands cleaning up their mess, his voice lecturing them about something new. Then there was (Y/N). Every time he imagines not having (Y/N) it feels like those first ten minutes he was locked in his father’s office for the first time. He feels the ache in his hands from pounding on the wooden door, the panic in his chest. 

“Bobby,” (Y/N)’s singsongy voice came from behind him. 

He had picked her favorite little coffee shop he had shown her. She always claimed she liked all his spots equally, but something about the beach side patio this one had always made her brighten up a little. He likes to think it has to do with the fact that they can easily walk to the little beach cave they use to spend time in. He hoped it was enough to make her not hate him. 

He knew he wasn’t just dependent on her, it was mutual. She rarely spoke of her family, of the father and brothers she was pulled away from in the States. When she did speak of her mother it was in the same tone Chase spoke of his own. Distain, slightly laced with the longing want for someone, anyone to care. They both chalked it up to teenage angst as they grew together, not wanting the other to think them broken. It was a precarious situation. Both afraid the other would leave if they were broken, both holding each other together. 

(Y/N) was, as always in Chase’s eyes, beautiful. She was a little frazzled, caught being late as she was between class and work.She went to lean down next to his seat and without thinking he pulled himself up a little more, knowing what was coming. 

“Thought I told you not to call me that,” Chase mumbled a little as she pressed her lips against his cheek in a swift kiss. When she straighten up again and started towards the seat across from him, Chase stopped her and reached out to grab her hand. She stopped her movement without question and he pressed a small kiss onto the top of her hand before dropping it and letting her settle into her seat. 

She hummed a little at his comment, “Would you believe me if I said I forgot?”

Chase laughed a little under his breath and rolled his eyes slightly playful. 

(Y/N) took a moment to glance around the coffee shop. When they first really became friends, Chase would insist on meeting up somewhere, not wanting to expose (Y/N) to his mother, and (Y/N) hadn’t questioned it not wanting to answer questions about her own mother. This coffee shop had been in the middle of all the trips and for a while it didn’t mean anything to her. Most of them didn’t matter to her, what mattered was the company with her. What mattered what light blonde hair and rosy cheeks and blue eyes set in that slightly mischievous glare. What mattered when it came to their breakfast dates was how Chase would slip his feet towards her under the table, press his leg against hers just to feel her. What mattered was how easily it was kiss for kiss with them. 

Chase pulls out the folder he had put together, he was prepared, had his whole schedule, what halls he’s being put into. He had taught himself to have it all ready. 

“I was going to tell you sooner, but..” Chase trails off and keeps his eyes locked on the top of her head as she skimmed throughout all the papers he had pushed across the table. (Y/N) didn’t say anything for a few minutes, as she looked through the papers. Chase kept trying to find an excuse as to why he waited last minute to tell her he was leaving for medical school. It was never a secret this is what he wanted, had never let himself dream about it out loud unless (Y/N) was the one listening. Now, he was felt the guilt of abandoning her for this dream looming in his throat. (Y/N) took a sip of her now cooled down beverage and pushed the papers back into the middle of the table. 

“Can I keep this paper? Or should I just write the address down? Can you even get mail in a college hall? ” She said keeping her eyes on the paper. She ignores the abandonment that’s growing in her own gut, tries to figure out what can work with them. She knew this was coming and she wished he had told her sooner, but at least he told her. 

“What?” 

“You need an address to be able to get mail, as far as I understand the postal service at least.” (Y/N) took a sip from her drink once more and kept her hands on the cup and squeezed it just a little. 

Chase couldn’t help but laugh a little at her. He glanced down to the way she was squeezing her take out cup, reading it for the anxious movement it was he put his hand onto the table, his palm facing up. The dread he felt a few minutes away seemed to simply melt away. Of course it was going to be easy, it always is with (Y/N). She would write, he would reply, and they would survive. It would be even easier than it was now, besides the fact that they’d never actually see each other. Okay so maybe not easier, but worth it anyways. 

(Y/N) looked at the palm open hand Chase had stretched towards her and immediately dropped her hand into his.  He tightened his grip on her hand for just a few seconds before relaxing his grip and keeping his gaze on their clasps hands. 

“Just write to my current address, I’ll be back every other weekend to see my sister. It’ll make it easier to come knowing your letters, hand delivered,  are waiting” Chase said trailing off a little at his final statement. (Y/N) hummed in reply. They both see it for what it is, an invitation to wait for him every weekend, to just hold on during those weekdays. 

Chase squeezed his eyes closed at the memory. It continued without his permission. He remembers the first weekend he came back to visit his sister. It was a weekend his father decided to play his part, he was there, asking questions after question about medical school. More importantly,  (Y/N) had written a letter explaining that she had to leave (the details were blurry but Chase knew how much she didn’t like talking about her family) but she would keep writing, and he should write back, she misses his words, really his voice but his words will do for now.  Chase had spent that whole weekend rereading the letter, had recited the letter in his mind when his father was ranting about the medical school Chase had picked. Even now, all these years later, he can see her handwriting, her words at the end, in his head. Sorry I’m not actually there, but let’s pretend I am, we’d be sitting in that little grove you’ve hidden away from your sister, with shitty coffee made by whatever maid your father hired this week. Go do that. I’ll find some shitty coffee on Saturday, maybe if we’re lucky we’ll be doing it at the same time. (Hope to ) See you soon. 

Sick of the flashbacks, Chase presses his locker door closed and looks around at the empty locker room.  

_______

Chase slipped into the chair next to Cameron in the conference office. He put down the tray of coffee and takes his own out from the slot before Cameron and Foreman grabbed theirs. 

“Thought I hired you as a doctor, not an intern?” House spoke as he wrote on the white board. 

Chase glared at his back for just a moment before using a second to try and stable his voice, “Good thing I didn’t get you a coffee then”

Foreman slid a copy of the medical file he had made towards Chase. Chase’s eyes went to the file, he stared down the name sticking out from the top. (Y/N) (Y/L/N). He grabbed the file and held it closed but moved his gaze to House who had finished his nonsense on the whiteboard. Now that he wasn’t blocking it, Chase could see it was a rough timeline. His grip on the file tightened and he heard Cameron let out a sad sigh. 

“At 16, (Y/N) moves to Australia and she leaves when she’s 21,” House took another marker and circles the area between those years, “ Which makes these the Robert years,” House moves around on his cane for a moment mimicking a pace.

“She got sick a week ago, how is this relevant?” Foreman knew it was useless to ask the questions but he couldn’t help it. 

“Why would it not be relevant?”House leaned against his cane, “Parasite,  STD, spider bite, botched abortion who knows what happened in Australia?” 

Chase took his eyes off the whiteboard at House’s words the glare in his eyes back. After a second he finally found the courage and opened up the medical file to pretend he could handle this. His eyes immediately focused on the photo copy of her drivers license photo. 

“Can’t you torture Chase on your own time?” Cameron mumbles a little as she opens her own file and seems to focus on something inside of it. “Botulism fits most the symptoms?” 

“Botched abortion could have left the little Chase attached to her uterus, growing this whole time.” House ignored Cameron and kept his eyes on Chase. Chase looked up and gave House the most bored look he could muster. He couldn’t get himself to tell House anything. 

“It’s been too long for Botulism, but heavy metal poisoning could mimic it depending on the metal?” Foreman stated although he knows only Cameron seems to be paying attention.  

“She’s a paralegal who lives in a fairly decent area, where would she be exposed to that much of any heavy metal?” Cameron shut the file and finally looked at House who was staring down Chase still. At this point House typically picks a side and decided something. House gives Cameron a look of confusion, “Sorry” He hisses a little sarcastically “haven’t heard from my whole team, can’t decide just yet.” 

Chase didn’t think as he ran his thumb over the little black and white photo. He was listening just barely and realized both the options would give House an excuse to go diving into (Y/N)’s current life. He couldn’t seem to focus on the actual symptoms but when House hissed he looked up and noticed all three pairs of eyes on him. 

Cameron’s pity was written across her face and Chase clenched his jaw at how bad it made him feel. Foreman looked away immediately and focused on House instead. “Both can be found with blood testing,” House finally gave up and leaned back in his chair, cane sitting between his legs. 

All three doctors took the dismissal for what it was and stood up. House cleared his throat and stared at Chase a little dumbfounded, “Not done with you.” House waved away Cameron and Foreman. Cameron patted Chase’s arm as she passed him and exited, Foreman right behind her. House made his way into his office, Chase behind him. 

_____ 

In the hospital room, (Y/N) sat up in the bed a little at the sight of Dr. Cameron and Dr. Foreman. The last few hours had been hard for her, sitting in the dull hospital bed reliving those few moments with Chase over and over. She had gone from shocked to angry to sad to shocked multiple times and now she’s landed on simply dazed. She saved her lamenting of those years for dark nights in her empty apartment, for dreams that she pretended weren’t memories and now she couldn’t do that. The second she saw him, she had remembered the weeks she’d spent waiting for a reply, she remembers writing letter after letter, and never getting once back. There was a year of her life that she swore she spent more time at her local post office and PO box than her own little shitty apartment. It had taken a little over a year before she wrote her final letter to Chase. She wasn’t sure why he never replied, wasn’t sure what happened, but whatever it was, she wanted the best for him. She had ended this letter different than most, no references for a future, instead a simple goodbye. 

“We’re going to need a few samples, blood, urine, the simple stuff” Dr. Cameron smiled at her. 

(Y/N) liked Dr. Cameron so far. She had been polite, and managed to make some small talk when she and Dr. Foreman had helped get her settle into the hospital. She spoke kindly to the nurses and despite the awkwardness that came from the fact that everyone seemed to know Chase, Cameron treated (Y/N) as well as she can imagine a doctor could. 

“If this is for drugs, I’ve already admitted to smoking weed in the past but its been years, and my file is completely up to date and correct about any medication I have taken,” (Y/N)   said as Foreman grabbed some tools close by and motioned for her arm. (Y/N) let him take it and looked away as he took some blood. 

Cameron noticed the way (Y/N) seemed a little squeamish at the needle and moved to look at her. “We’re going to look for any sort of toxicity within your blood. You might have been exposed to something that’s causing your condition.” 

(Y/N) had a confused look on her face for a moment she went to open her mouth to speak back, try and understand what she possibly been exposed to. Cameron watched as (Y/N) seemed to lose her train of thought and in seconds, (Y/N) started to seize. 

_____ 

“I don’t want to talk about her,” Chase started once House had settled himself into his chair. 

“Really? Couldn’t tell,” House moved a little in his chair, “Problem is, you need to do your job, which involves, speaking.” House emphasized at the end of his sentence. 

“Just let me run the blood tests, or any of the lab work, I’m sure Cameron would like a break from the lab.” 

House took a moment to rest his feet up on his desk and stared Chase down for a moment. 

“I didn’t do anything to her, I haven’t seen her in years. She’s sick and I have nothing to do with it.” Chase said. He’s been repeating the same phrase in his head since he first heard Cameron and Foreman debating the diagnosis. She’s sick. She’s sick. She’s sick. 

“What are her symptoms?” House asks. 

Chase rolled his eyes, knowing full well that House had already memorized the file. When he got no answer, House stood back up and walked towards Chase and snatched the medical file Chase had been gripping this whole time. “Go away, you’re no fun to me.” 

House went to his office door and held it open, waiting for Chase to leave. Instead, Cameron filled the doorway, “She seized.” Cameron was obviously out of breath, “She’s been given lorazepam and-“ 

Chase took the medical file back from House before interrupting Cameron speaking, “Brain stem seizure could be a possibility” he mumbled a little under his breath as he opened the file and ran his thumb across the photo again and glanced at the medical tests already performed by previous doctors. “She’s always had high blood pressure,” Chase kept the file open but looked up to meet House’s gaze. House took a moment and focused his gaze on Chase before turning to Cameron

“Put her on Reteplase,” House started to walk away. 

“We should do an MRI first, it might not be a brain stem seizure, Reteplase can-” Chase was cut off before he could finish. 

“You know where the patient is, you know where the MRI machine is. Do it yourself.” House looked at Cameron “Give her Reteplase and monitor her”

_____ 

Chase didn’t pray that often anymore, but he almost went to the hospital chapel when Cameron said he would help him get the MRI before she gave her Reteplase. He tried to ignore the obvious pity Cameron had when she said she’d help him. He’s sure he looked like a kicked puppy when he realized House was going to force him to see (Y/N) no matter what, at least it’s working to his advantage. 

Cameron slipped (Y/N) into the MRI room and Chase felt himself sit up straighter in the computer chair as he watched them chit chat with each other. He didn’t think about his actions as he pressed the speaker button to be able to hear them. 

“Montgomery’s library is a little bigger than the this towns, but I think the university library tends to be the best for content,” (Y/N) had been speaking in a slightly out of breath tone. Chase wondered about her oxygen stats and leans forward on his seat to really look at her. Cameron’s voice was in the background as she replied to (Y/N)’s comment but Chase wasn’t pay enough attention to make out the words. Still, Chase felt a burst of joy at how easy Cameron connected with patients. 

Instead, he noticed the way (Y/N)’s hand shook gently, a slight tremor, another symptom he knew. He noticed the dark red nail color she had on, slightly chipped and obviously done by her own hand since her non dominant hand seemed a little messier than the other. The fact that she had already pulled Cameron into a full conversation effortlessly was also familiar. He remembered how easy it was to just listen to her. When they were young he remembers telling her he hated the silence, he had so much of it. She had always feared over talking, taking too much of the space. He smiled a little at how much stayed the same when he noticed the sheepish look on (Y/N)’s face at the fact Cameron had to stop their conversation to work. Cameron had slipped back into the computer room once she had gotten (Y/N) settled. 

There was a moment of silence as Cameron checked the systems. “She’s nice,” Cameron finally broke the silence. 

“Didn’t like her because she was nice,” Chase couldn’t help the way his defense seemed to come up. He still felt like he was in the room with House. If he looked over he’s sure he would catch Cameron rolling her eyes. Chase opened his mouth to apologize, maybe even to thank Cameron for her help, but was interrupted by a voice through the speaker. 

“Dr. Cameron, I should have probably mentioned that enclosed spaces aren’t exactly my favorite” (Y/N)’s voice held a slightly nervous shake. 

Chase clenched his jaw and looked at the machine throughout the window, he felt Cameron’s eyes on the side of his head and he reached his hand out to the speaker button and thought about what to say. His hand fell short once he found his own thoughts and he looked over at Cameron, “Ask her to tell you about the worst movie she’s watched recently,” He said in a slightly whisper, as if (Y/N) could hear through the glass and the machine. 

Cameron turned to glare at Chase but the look fell from her face after a moment, he had turn his gaze back to (Y/N) in the machine. His hand was resting near the speaker button, she could tell he wanted to do something, felt the small bouts of desperation that slightly radiated off him. Without thinking, she reached past his hand and pressed the speaker button. 

“No worries (Y/N), close your eyes and stay still it’ll go by really quickly” Cameron took her finger off the button. 

Cameron watched on the screen as (Y/N) settled and closed her eyes. The tension of the enclosed spaced was written across her face and when she glanced out the window and saw (Y/N)’s hand in a tight fist. Chase’s hand balling itself into a fist stole Cameron’s attention for just a second. 

Cameron let herself start looking at the scan and for a few seconds she had focused in enough to forget the situation around her, until she went to point something out to Chase and he seemed to still be staring through the glass focused at the way (Y/N) was relaxing her fist just to clench it again. Cameron had felt like she had learnt everything there was to know about Chase in the years working with him. Even sleeping with him hadn’t really taught her anything about him. She had used that experience as an excuse to write him off completely, an arrogant pretty boy doctor with daddy issues, they were everywhere in this field. Now she was faced with a quick reevaluation of him, had to put him into this new light. His other hand rested against his mouth in that same stubborn way he rested when he was resisting the urge to speak up. She had blown off the obvious connection with Chase and (Y/N) as a teenage year mistake that Chase was too proud to face, but that didn’t explain why he seemed to care that she was uncomfortable in the machine, explain the motion Cameron had caught of his thumb tracing (Y/N)’s picture. In just a few seconds Cameron made her decision and reached out to press the speaker button. 

“Hey (Y/N), do you like movies?” Cameron said in a soft voice and watched through the window as (Y/N)’s fist unclenched a little, Chase pulled his hand away from where it rested near the speaker button. 

(Y/N) hummed in response obviously doing her best to take the distraction given to her. 

“I saw this terrible movie in theaters last week.” Cameron continued trying to search for the last movie trailer she had seen on television to sustain her lie “Worst thing ever, something about calls? Ever heard of it?” She leaned back in her chair once she heard (Y/N)’s voice in a steady stream start to talk about what movie she thinks Cameron was referring to.  

She let go of the button and glanced over to Chase. (Y/N)’s voice was gentle in the room and Cameron noticed the way Chase settled back into his seat, and finally started to look at the work on his screen trying to catch anything in the scan. For a few minutes it went on like this, Cameron and Chase exchanging mumbles of “nothing here” at each scan loading, (Y/N)’s voice through the speaking filing the emptiness. There was a moment of lull in which (Y/N) had tampered off, slightly embarrassed at how quickly she had let herself start to ramble. 

Without taking a chance to look away from the scans, Chase reached his hand out, pressed the speaker button and, out of an old habit, something that was buried inside him from years ago, spoke out “Where’s the unmute button?” 

In the MRI machine (Y/N) felt herself lose her breath at the words. The phrase always lingered in her mind when she needed the boost of confidence even all these years later. She wishes she could remember when the joke had started, the first time Chase had joked about how she stops herself without any warning, how jarring it felt like someone had pressed the mute button on their conversation.The insecurity in her own voice had slowly started to disappear when she realized that Chase really did like hearing her ramble, it took him out of his own mind. He had started asking for the unmute button as a joke whenever he felt the heavy air of silence and eventually it just became a phrase she took as a sign that she was being listened to, that she, herself, was being listened to. 

She didn’t know what was happening outside the machine so she assumed that the tension she felt came from hearing the phrase. She let out a small breath and closed her eyes once more before she started speaking again. This was something she could do, she understood her role when she heard “unmute button” even after all this time. 

Cameron heard (Y/N)’s breath hitch for just a second before she continued on her rambling. Almost in tune with her, Chase froze until she started rambling again. 

Cameron opened her mouth and started to say something, “Chase..” She tried to find the right words. 

“It’s been ten years, it really doesn’t matter.” Chase didn’t let her continue. He leaned back into the office chair and let out a small sigh  “The brain stem looks completely clean, not a single sign of seizure” He sounded obviously defeated. 

Cameron didn’t say anything but instead stared at the scans. She tried to find an obvious sign of anything wrong in the scans they already had. Before she got the chance to speak Chase stood up and rushed out of the computer room. 

Cameron pressed the speaker button “Okay (Y/N), we’re all set, I’m going to come help you out.” 

—— 

 Chase knew that Cameron could handle (Y/N) and while the idea of them alone made him a little nervous, the idea of having to face (Y/N) was more nerve wracking. Instead, Chase had stopped by and visited Foreman in the lab to check on the samples. Foreman glanced up thinking it was something important. When he noticed it was just Chase he went back to reading the sample slide. Chase took a stool out from under the counter and sat next to Foreman, but kept himself facing the counter. He didn’t know exactly what he was here for, Foreman seemed to have it almost finished and they had rarely hung out and chit chatted for fun. 

“Brain stem is clean.” Chase finally spoke, best to land on the one thing they do have in common: the patient. Chase ignored the way his gut tightened at the idea of (Y/N) as a patient. She’s sick. She’s sick. She’s sick.  

“The toxicity report came back clean also,” Foreman let out a small sigh as he leaned back and crossed his arms, “Her liver functions seem fine, her blood seems a little high in white blood cells but she just got over a cold a few weeks ago.” 

Chase had his hand in his coat pocket, squeezing his fist for a moment as he tried to understand what was happening. 

“You’re stupid for letting House get to you this much,” Foreman mumbled a little as he started cleaning up the blood samples he had. 

“Like he’s never gotten to you?” Chase felt himself slip back into the amour he had built himself so long ago. Right, this is why he sought out Foreman. He exists as a reminder of the person he had crafted himself into here.  

“I hide it better than you,” Foreman mumbled a little before stopping his clean up, “Go home, or go see the girl, but stop mopping around, it’s embarrassing” Foreman shrugged a little as if it would make the statement softer. 

“Not that easy,” Chase mumbled as he glanced at the tests that Foreman had ran. 

There was a soft click before another voice took over the room,  “Actually, it is.” House spoke, “Cameron says she’s stable,” House glanced at the results to the tests that sat on the counter and turned to leave the room. “Keep your pagers on” House yelled from the hallway. It was the closest to a dismissal they have ever gotten from him. 

_____

Chase had tried to go home. He sat in the locker room with Cameron and Foreman and they all grabbed their stuff. He mimicked the motions, took off his doctors coat, grabbed his items ,Cameron even offered him a ride home, but he couldn’t do it. Foreman cupped his shoulder for a second before he left and Cameron just mumbled a little, “Get some sleep” when they both finally left. The silence of the locker room was enough to push Chase out the door, but not enough to stop his feet from heading to the third floor where (Y/N)’s room was. 

Once he got to the room he realized he didn’t know his plan. It had been so long since he didn’t feel prepared, since he felt ungrounded. His tether had been cut loose for a short time when his father died, but he quickly recovered, shoved the thoughts away and weighted himself down enough that he didn’t think anything would shake him again. He recalled the way (Y/N) had been sitting on that stupid wooden bench this morning, how silly all that tethering had been. How easily he felt himself fall back into her gravity and they haven’t even spoken more than two words to each other. Chase moved away from the closed door and debated his next steps. He didn’t know if she was awake, if she would even want to see him. He glanced around the hallway and after a moment pulled out his wallet from his pocket. He let it fall open and shoved his fingers into one of the extra slots. The wallet was slipped back into his pocket and he slowly folded the worn piece of paper. The creased were slightly discolored from the constant pressure in his wallet but it still read the same words. He didn’t completely unfold the letter, instead just flopped the first crease up, exposing the signature on the letter. Always yours, (Y/N). Chase ran his finger across the name, it was the only thing he let himself keep from the whole situation. He had taken his position at the hospital and made the decision to get rid of all his reminders of (Y/N), it was better, safer. Yet, the letter never left his wallet, he had pulled it out so many times and thought about tossing it, but this was the last thing he had of her. The only thing left that  confirmed he didn’t make her up so he kept it. He started to pull the whole letter open when a nurse slipped out of the room. 

“Oh, Dr. Chase sorry do you need Ms. (Y/L/N)? She just fell asleep for the night, I thought all the tests were done and she was little shaken up so I gave her something to help her sleep.” The nurse grimaced a little, House’s team wasn’t known for kindness. 

“No, it’s fine. Tests are done for tonight,” Dr. Chase folded the letter as he spoke and slipped it into his pocket before nodding a little at the nurse and trying to act like he wasn’t scared as he started towards the door, “Just checking in” He didn’t let the nurse say anything else as he finally stepped into (Y/N)’s room. 

The room was the same as every hospital room around it, not exactly dark, but no longer well lit, soft beeps breaking whatever silence there was. Still, Chase tried to look around the room instead of at the girl laying fast asleep in the bed. Chase clenched his jaw when he heard the smallest shuffle from the bed. He finally let his eyes linger on (Y/N). She was fast asleep, fist in a slight curling position near her face. Without thinking Chase let out a small breath of air and felt himself move over to the side of the bed. Chase raises his hand to uncurl (Y/N)’s fist a little but stops short. Throughout the day he had stopped himself the few times he was close to touching her, he thinks of the warmth that barely came off of her when he first saw her stumble a little. Thinks of Cameron’s easy hands helping (Y/N) settle into the MRI machine. (Y/N) shuffles a little more in her sleep and it finally breaks something in Chase, she had always been restless in her sleep. He lets his hand reach past her fist and instead lets his fingers move a few strands that rested on her forehead. The warmth of her skin tingles a little against his fingertips.

“Hi darling,” Chase whispers a little when his hand trails down her hair a little, letting it drop onto the bed when he gets to the end of the strand.  He felt a small shake in his knees and pulled his hand away, letting himself plop into the plastic chair that was in every room. He squeezed his hand into a fist and felt a few tears start to appear in his waterline. He leaned his head back a little to stop the tears from completely dropping before finally letting himself completely look her over. Despite the obvious signs of something unhealthy lingering in her features, she mostly looks the same, a little older, but still the face he knew all those years ago. Chase didn’t think as he pulled himself and the chair to be closer to the bed. He leaned forward in the seat and let his hand settle near the end of her hair. He lets the lack of movement from her push him to reach his fingers out and slightly twist the end of her hair. It’s not the touch he wanted, but it was something. He let himself twirl the strands a little before letting his eyes completely rest on her face. Finally, he broke the sound of the machines around him. 

“House is a dick, but he’s good. The whole team is really, don’t tell Foreman I said that,” Chase let out a small huff of a laugh before he drops the strand of hair he was toying with. He let his hand rest on her bed, not touching her, but only a small motion would bring his finger against her arm. 

“Seems like you like Cameron, she’s good with people, although the movie trick was mine, I’m sure you remember it. I think you’ve talked me through more movies than I’ve actually watched.” Chase’s voice stayed low as he spoke. 

It seemed a little ridiculous if he thought of it too hard, talking to someone who wasn’t listening, but still it was (Y/N), he had never learned how not to talk to her. He spent what felt like a few minutes explaining how he ended up on House’s team. It was a superficial telling, wanting to avoid the pieces that still felt tender, his sister, his parents. It didn’t take long for Chase to feel himself fall into the familiar place that was (Y/N)’s side, even if she asleep. 

Chase forgets how quickly time passes in a hospital when you aren’t working. How the windows barely give away time and people are always moving so it’s hard to notice when hours past. The only thing that indicated the passing of time was the nurses who slipped into the room every once in a while, in the same rotation they’ve been doing their whole careers.Every nurse took a moment to eye Dr. Chase, trying to understand why he was here, and then proceeded to explain what they were doing like he was just another family member. It wasn’t until a nurse showed up with an extra blanket and tossed it at the end of the bed that Chase accepted his fate. He didn’t give the nurse any indication of a thanks but grabbed the blanket as she was walking out. He closed his eyes and in the dark, he felt the nerve to reach out and rest his hand in her empty one. 

_____

Dr. Chase sat slumped in the chair and Cameron tried to bite her tongue at how he tried to switch his clothing to make it look like he’d gone home, but she knew that shirt had been a spare he left in his locker. The spare blanket he had tucked under the chair wasn’t obvious to anyone that hadn’t been in and out of the room, but still couldn’t fool Cameron. His eyes were droopy, but any attention he had left in his half asleep state was completely on (Y/N)’s hand interlaced with his. Cameron stood for a second and debated coming in and bothering him, she had assumed that (Y/N) was awake when she first passed by the door, hearing Chase low whisper and she felt a strange pride in her chest that Chase had finally gotten the nerve to speak to her. The pride was undeserved, apparently as (Y/N) was dead asleep and seemed to have been like that for a while now. When she realized Chase had leaned a little closer to the bed and was bringing (Y/N)’s hand up in his own she quietly tapped on the door to make her presence known. She mentally kicked herself when she realize how quickly Chase had slipped his hand out of (Y/N)’s. 

“Hey, just swinging by to check on her, thought she was awake,” Cameron’s pity seeped into her voice no matter how much she tried to fight it. Most the time, the family’s found some sort of comfort in it, the care that this stranger of a doctor had. Chase, was not most people. 

“She’s been asleep for a few hours now, a nurse just came in twenty minutes ago and did the bare minimum,” Chase mumbled as he leaned back into his hospital chair. If it had been any other person within the hospital he probably wouldn’t have spoken, but Cameron had helped him with the MRI, risked a verbal berating from House for him, and never once brought up how he had embarrassed himself after a one night stand with her. Cameron put her hands into her doctor pockets and stayed near the doorway. 

“Well, you know how House gets about the nurses,” Cameron rolled her eyes a little at how often Dr. House had groaned about the fact that nurses mess up, and how own team’s mistakes are his but he hated having to account for random nurse’s mistakes. 

Cameron moved into the room a little more, reaching for the clipboard at the end of (Y/N)’s bed. She took a second to pretend to read the information on the clipboard as if it gave anything new to the case. She glanced back up at Chase when she realized he had the same look she had seen a million times before, the same look she saw once in her own face, when she lost her husband. It felt wrong to see it across Chase’s face, to know this doctor who she found fairly intelligent (at least when he wanted to be), and charming (again, when he wanted to be), was falling into a pit of despair over a women none of his coworkers even knew about, a women who he claims he hasn’t seen in ten years. 

“She’s not bad enough for that look yet. We’re going to figure it out.” Cameron tried to make a joke but instead was met with Chase’s subtle glare. She let the joke sit in the air and decided there was nothing else she could do and started towards the door. She had barely reached the handle when she finally heard him speak. 

“I think I’ve made it fairly clear it wasn’t great after my dad left ” Chase spoke through gritted teeth. Cameron let her hand linger on the door handle, but she stayed frozen. “She was the only thing I had left to hold onto when I was a teenager” 

Cameron turned a little so she could face him but didn’t come closer. It felt a little silly, like trying to approach a lion during a safari trip, or a bunny in the backyard she didn’t want to scare him out of finally saying something. She noticed Chase had leaned his head back against the wall and had his own hands wringing within each other, resting every few moments in a sort of prayer position. She was sure if she looked closer she’d notice his eyes closed. 

Cameron realized it was her turn to speak, confirm she wanted to hear this. “She’s not Australian?” Cameron pointed out the only thing that felt safe. It had made no sense they knew each other all that time ago and when she looked at the file there was no relevant information as to why (Y/N) was in Australia, no past doctor seemed to find it important enough to ask and House knew better than to actually think her few years in Australian were important to the case. Chase shook his head against the wall. 

“She was in Australia because her family, I can’t….” He kept shaking his head and Cameron understood. That isn’t mine to tell, it’s hers, he was saying. 

“She was working at this shitty dinner that was down the block from my neighborhood. I’d always meet my friends there, to avoid them running into my mother. One day she was just there like she had always been around, too young to be working there but she knew someone needed to bring money in, she had problems I hadn’t even thought of but that didn’t matter, doesn’t matter even now. She just….” Chase finally pulled his head forward and kept his gaze on (Y/N)’s sleeping face. 

“She made sense, maybe not right away. But I kept showing up and she kept telling me she wasn’t going to sleep with me,” He laughed a little and Cameron realized he wasn’t actually telling her the story, he was just thinking out loud “I kept lying, saying that it didn’t matter to me,” His hand reached out a little as he tucked his fingers under (Y/N)’s resting hand on the bed, “And then one day, it wasn’t a lie. It didn’t matter to me, she just wormed her way into it all. She was the one thing I had that wasn’t ruined by anything, she saw me and nothing else around me.” 

“You cared about her,” Cameron whispered a little, trying to remind Chase he had an audience. 

“Yeah, something like that.” Chase finally caught Cameron’s gaze and flinched a little at the amount of pity that was seeping out her. “Not that it really mattered. We were kids and I had to go to medical school, just had to leave…” Chase stops and Cameron knows the implication, he needed to leave his parents house. “I told her and she took it well, thought it would be harder. She told me we’d be fine, she’d write and I’d come visit every weekend and we’d survive and once we were both away from our parents, on our own completely, we’d finally figure out whatever it was between us.” 

Cameron tilted her head a little trying to make sense of what Chase meant. 

“You weren’t together?” She finally just asked. 

“I had a reputation, she’s never been native” Chase shrugged a little knowing it was well earned, “And I think she knew we both needed each other more than we needed to be together,” The vulnerability was threatening to rip his chest out, but he couldn’t handle keeping it inside anymore. Cameron wasn’t, would never be, (Y/N) but she was still kind, still understood that Chase wasn’t always a dick. Cameron stayed quiet, waiting for Chase to keep going, he hadn’t gotten to the end, the piece that really mattered to her. After enough silence Cameron finally decided she needed to say something to push Chase into finally explaining why they had gone ten years without speaking. 

“I’m sure she’ll forgive you for not coming back,” Cameron whispered in her softest tone. 

Chase clenched his jaw and looked away from the gaze he had on Cameron. Shame was a feeling Chase had quickly learnt to hide away. He leant quickly that pity doesn’t get you much and that shame would never do anything useful for him. Now, the insecurity of being left by the one person he cared about was seeping into his gut. 

“I came back.” Chase said through gritted teeth, “I went home every weekend for my first year in medical school. She said she would write and the first weekend I went there was a letter  so I came back and waited for another letter for a whole year. Whenever there wasn’t one, I would reread the first letter.” Chase shook his head a little before stealing his hand back from under (Y/N)’s hand. He stood up and clear his throat, “It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s been years.” Chase cleared his throat and fidgeted with his tie before he started towards the door. 

Cameron felt herself stunned at the sudden shift in tone. She didn’t expect it to be Chase who was left high and dry. For a second it all seems to add up in her head, of course Chase was the one who held on longer, was it not just a few months ago that he was trying to make something out of the one night stand they had? She forgot how soft Chase could be when he wanted to be, forget that underneath the pretty boy doctor facade, he was someone who raised his sister and his mother, someone who spent his childhood praying for something better, for help. Cameron glanced at the girl who laid in the hospital bed and felt a twinge of anger that this girl had hurt Chase. 

___

(Y/N)  winced a little at the pressure of the needle against her skin as Dr. Foreman mumbled an apologize.  She wasn’t exactly sure what happened overnight but the tension in the room had somehow ballooned into something more and even in her state, she felt it. She had learnt at a young age to be able to detect when something was unsaid, that something wasn’t right. After Dr. Foreman pulled the needle and she felt the pressure release from her back, she turned herself over a little to look at Dr. Cameron and Dr. Foreman. She tried to silence the whisper in her head that there was typically one more doctor on the team, tried to ignore the way he seemed to exist on the edges of her whole visit. The visitors chair had been pulled away from the wall when she woke up and she had stared at it for a few minutes, trying to create an apparition of the person she hoped had filled the chair while she was asleep. She noticed the extra blanket across her feet, the one part she always struggles to keep warm. Dr. Foreman had been exactly what she had expected from a doctor, what she has been dealing with for weeks, she had come to rely on him for the real medicine of it all, once she realized Dr. House didn’t seem to interact with patients. Dr. Cameron on the other hand, knew something and cared, (Y/N) wasn’t sure when it happened, but she felt the tension from her the whole day so hard. Foreman and Cameron were speaking to each other and when they started walking away (Y/N) finally spoke up. 

“Dr. Cameron?” (Y/N) cringed a little at how dry her voice sounded. Dr Foreman seemed to look at Dr. Cameron for just a moment before he walked away, obviously trying to get some sort of work done. (Y/N) kicked herself a little at the fact that she didn’t plan out what to say. She took a moment to sit up as much as possible in the hospital bed and felt herself shake a little at the energy it took. She noticed the way Dr. Cameron seemed to take in every shake and movement, ever vigilant in the face of her job. 

There was silence for a moment before (Y/N) cleared her throat a little and squeezed her eyes shut. For the last two days every test had brought her closer to the idea that this was it, that she had tried every option, that the world had give her this last chance to be able to tie up any loose ends in her life. Robert being at this hospital was a sign enough for her, she had nothing left but to figure this out so when she died she at last had the answers. She had been debating how to do it, focused on every outcome instead of the needles and the blood and the shitty hospital food. She hoped over and over every hour since she last heard his voice during that MRI that she’d get the chance to ask him directly. She even dreamt of him, the first time in years, of his voice, of him, close by. 

“(Y/N)?” Dr. Cameron said her name but her eyes were glancing at the machines to try and figure out if something was wrong. (Y/N) shook her head lightly at the questions interlaced in Dr. Cameron’s voice. 

“Everything is the same,” (Y/N) swallowed a little and braced herself, “I know I don’t have the right to ask you, but Robert, uh-“ (Y/N) ignored the pressure in her chest at the vulnerability she was going to force out of her. She noticed how quickly Cameron seemed to straighten up at the name. 

“(Y/N),” Cameron shook her head a little. 

“He has every right to not want to see me,” (Y/N) always knew her relationship with Chase was a stroke of luck anyways, “He knew me for only a few years so long ago, I’m sure it meant nothing but,” (Y/N) stopped herself against and tried not to cringe. 

At this Cameron furrowed her brows a little, it didn’t make sense to her. Meant nothing? Cameron thought of the way Chase held onto (Y/N)’s hand when she slipped in, thinks of the way he couldn’t work knowing she was uncomfortable in the MRI machine. Something wasn’t adding up, and Cameron was trying to put it together when (Y/N) kept speaking. Cameron seemed to have forgotten how quickly (Y/N) can tumble into rambling. 

“I’ll die, it’s fine,” She paused, “Well not fine of course, but I think it’s time I accept it. And all I want is to understand what happened. I know I don’t deserve it, if he wanted to give me an explanation he would have answered one of my letters but I’m dying now, so maybe…” (Y/N) trailed off when she noticed Cameron’s furrow eyebrows. 

“Sorry I thought you guys are friends, or that maybe he mentioned something, which is stupid now that I’m thinking about it,” (Y/N) felt herself slide a little more into the bed to try and escape the situation. 

Dr. Cameron shook her head softly and whatever anger she had felt when Chase told the story seemed to leak out of her, “Hey, I get it.” Cameron whispered a little, “I’ll talk to him, but…” She trailed off to figure out the right thing to say. Finally she just let out a huff, “One letter isn’t a good enough excuse to leave someone hanging,” She spoke in her softest voice. 

“One letter?” (Y/N) swallowed and pressed her fingers against her eyes to try and subdue the headache. “I wrote over and over and over.” 

Cameron glanced at the door and decided she needed to figure this out.

___ 

“You had no right and you know it,” Dr. Chase was snipping at Cameron. 

“She thinks she’s going to die, and she thinks you’ve abandoned her!” Cameron huffed a little. 

She wasn’t sure why she always put herself into things that were none of her business, but Chase is her friend, at least she thinks he is. She’s never been good at denying someone’s dying wish, although she’s sure that not many people deal with dying wishes this often. She had sat with (Y/N) for about an hour, learnt about what it meant to be pulled from the people who loved you at such a young age, what it meant to have a parent that saw you as nothing more than a weapon against others. Cameron kept a score each time she heard (Y/N) mention writing another unanswered letter. She had heard the way (Y/N)’s voice seemed to soften a little around Chase’s name.

“She’s not going to die.” Chase clenched his jaw.

“She said she wrote, she mentioned it over and over. Maybe the post office couldn’t deliver? It was the 90s and who knows how Australian post offices even work! You need to talk to her, really, you’re both just missing each other.” Cameron felt herself sparked within the story she had heard from (Y/N). “She’s so afraid, and her mother just” 

Cameron was immediately cut off by Chase’s cold voice. 

“Don’t try and make me understand her. I know about her mother, I know her, better than I have ever known anyone. You treat her as a patient for a few days and suddenly you think you get it?” Chase felt the anger of the situation he had been pushing away bubble in his chest. “She’s been the voice in my head my whole life, I didn’t exist before she said my name. I’ve seen her everywhere all these years. I thought I had finally lost my mind when she sitting on that bench, and instead it’s something so much worse. Don’t get involved Alison. Don’t speak on things that are bigger than you’ll ever understand.” 

Cameron opened her mouth to fight back when Foreman opened the conference room and stuck his head in. “She’s having trouble swallowing, the tremors are getting worse.” He ignored the obvious tension in the room between Chase and Cameron. 

“If you really know her, you know she wouldn’t have left the way you think she did. ” Cameron whispered before heading towards the door with Foreman. Chase ignored the comment and instead stared at the door where they were both leaving. Cameron was right, he knew her, knew she wouldn’t have abandoned him with a single letter filled of promises. He knows her. 

“Is she having trouble speaking?” Chase grabbed her file off the table and without thinking, pressed his thumb against her photo like before as he read the file, trying to make it fit with what is turning in his mind. Whatever Foreman responded was ignored as Chase pushed his way throughout the conference room and headed to where he assumed House was. He wasn’t sure if Foreman and Cameron were following, but it didn’t matter at this point. 

In the clinic Chase pushed into the room the nurse pointed that House was in. He had assumed the clinic patient House was taking care of was fake once he read “Eric Shawn” on the chart. 

“It’s her immune system. The tremors, the fatigue, it had to be autoimmune. She had a cold a while ago, but (Y/N)’s always been bad at gauging how much pain she’s feeling. It was most likely a Campylobacter jejuni infection and it started to attack her immune system. She downplays the cold, doesn’t notice the tingling in her limbs and dismisses any of the pain she was feeling, keeps going until it turned into what it is now. Guillain-Barre.” Chase closed the file he had brought within and looked up at House half asleep on the patient’s table. 

House glanced behind him to see Cameron and Foreman standing there. He didn’t get up just holding his head up, “Any objections?” 

Chase looks at them both, “It’s Guillain-Barre syndrome. A few weeks with immunotherapy, some plasma exchanges and she’ll be well enough to figure out how to survive with an autoimmune disorder.” 

“She’ll be in and out of the hospital all the time.” Cameron frowned a little. 

House pressed his cane against the floor and stood up from his laying position, “Oh wise one, should we test? Go run another useless test? Or can we treat?” House glared at Chase, letting him know that he didn’t appreciate the MRI test behind his back. Chase stood his ground, didn’t flinch at the glare, she didn’t have a brainstem Reteplase would have caused damage, he regrets nothing. He’s sure Cameron looks guilty enough for the both of them.  

“Figure out if you’re doing plasma exchanges or intravenous immunoglobulin, then do it” House pushed Foreman and Cameron out the door and shut it. 

“You should have figured that out when she was still sitting on bench.” House mumbled a little once they were alone. 

“At least I figured it out,” Chase mumbled a little. 

House didn’t say anything as he stared Chase down a little. After a few minutes, he finally shook his head before opening the door again and motioning Chase out ready to go back to his nap. 

___ 

Chase debated his next step. He thought figuring out what was wrong with (Y/N) would have been enough to clear his mind. In some sense it was clearer, more space had been freed up to think about what Cameron had said.  The few hours of sleep he had accidentally caught on her hospital bed didn’t seem enough to keep him standing much longer, so once Foreman sent an update about her condition and that were going to start some treatment despite not testing for Guillain-Barre, he took it as a sign to get some sleep. He thought of going through the motions of undressing in the locker room, getting his stuff and really leaving, maybe even swinging by to take create for his diagnosis like they always did, but found the whole ordeal exhausting. Instead, he pulled his coat out of the conference room and headed to his apartment with Cameron’s words repeating in his head. 

If you really know her, you know she wouldn’t have left the way you think she did.

If you really know her, you know she wouldn’t have left the way you think she did.

If you really know her, you know she wouldn’t have left the way you think she did.

He spent an hour in his own bed, twenty minutes on his couch and even tried to lay on the floor to try and calm himself down enough to sleep when he finally got to his apartment. If you really know her, you know she wouldn’t have left the way you think she did. He finally stood up completely and scrubbed his face a little at the irritation. His eyes landed on his father’s papers that he had tossed a few days ago, onto the dining table nobody used. He sat himself at the dining table for what felt like the first time since he bought it. If you really know her, you know she wouldn’t have left the way you think she did. If his brain wanted to keep tormenting him, he could do it right back he quickly decided. He grabbed onto the deed of the house and made a mental note to call the lawyer who’s card was paperclipped to it and started to sort through the papers. Anything with sentimental value was tossed away from him, something to handle later. His mind had somewhat silenced, completely focused on what papers would have to go straight to his sister and which he would have to handle himself. 

It didn’t take long and Chase let himself puff out his chest a little in relief. The final thing he had in front of him was a stack of letters, on top sat an addressless one, ‘Robert’ in his father’s terrible handwriting. He ran his finger across the name, bumping into the rubber band that held the stack of letters together. He pulled the top one out and went to open the letter when he noticed the next one in the bundle. 

The address read his father’s home back with his name, nothing straight. But the top corner, the send address held the name he had been avoiding. Immediately  he dropped the letter he was holding and pulled the rubber band off the small bundle of letters. He shuffled them as he looked at each sent address, Auckland. Tokyo. California. Colorado. Iowa. New York. Each addressed to him, at his father’s house. Each from the same person. (Y/N) (Y/L/N). She said she wrote, she mentioned it over and over. 

Chase dropped the letters onto the table again and spent what felt like hours, but most likely was only a minute, staring them down. They all had the same worn look, like someone had dropped them into a desk drawer and didn’t pull them out for years. They weren’t dated, he didn’t know if he should open them, (they were his mail he could right?) She said she wrote, she mentioned it over and over. 

Chase finally grabbed the one letter he knew he could handle reading; his fathers. 

Robert, 

There is no way I can make you understand why I kept these from you. You wouldn’t want to hear my answer if I tried. The first month she kept sending them and you kept showing up at the house, slyly checking the mail, looking at your textbooks but never really pulling anything out. I was grateful you had a reason to even come to the house, yet I needed you to understand the importance of your studies. Then the more time that passed, the more you seemed to forget, the easier it was to just ask the maids to tuck the mail away,  you seemed to focus on medical school. That’s all I wanted. You had a duty to your studies, to the Chase name, it seems you understand that now and your mother tried to take that from me long ago, I wasn’t going to let the same happen to you. Look at you now, it did you wonders. 

Chase turned the piece of paper around, as if he was going to find anything else. As if his father would have put another note on the back a quick “Just kidding!” Or a P.S of any sorts. Chase felt his eyes warm as the tears seemed to build and he dropped the letter back onto the table and pressed his palms together in a prayer motion without thinking as he felt a few tears slip out. It wore him out enough that he found himself falling asleep on the couch, ignoring the dread of letters he knew he had to open. 

____

(Y/N) perked up in her chair when Dr. Cameron slipped into her room. The treatment had been working for the last few hours now. It had taken some time to find the right plasma type and get it all set up, but (Y/N) already felt her shakes subside just enough. Dr. Cameron pressed the door shut behind her and dropped a cup of pudding onto (Y/N)’s lap, “Don’t tell the nurses, I had to steal it from someone’s cart,” She smiled a little as (Y/N) nodded. 

As she dug into the pudding Dr. Cameron started speaking, “Guillian-Barre syndrome is an autoimmune disorder. We believe it got triggered during your last cold. Dr. Chase,” Dr. Cameron paused just a moment to look at the way (Y/N) tried to not stiff, “mentioned that you’d probably downplayed the cold and any tingling that occurred before the fatigue. It’s easy to miss the signs at first when you’re trying to tough it out. The plasma exchange you’re getting is only to be able to stabilize the immune system again, you’ll have to get checked at least yearly from now on, it can reemerge, but you’ll be able to live your life mostly normal again.” 

“So Robert figured it out?” (Y/N) spoke with the spoon in her mouth, at Dr. Cameron’s nod of confirmation (Y/N) pushed the pudding to the side table and nodded back. “And he’s not gonna…” (Y/N) squeezed her eyes shut fighting back the tears at the lack of his presence and opened them again “Thank you. Please make sure the rest of the team gets told I owe them everything. Thank you guys.” 

Dr. Cameron reached her hand out and squeezed (Y/N)’s fingers just a little “Give him a little more time,” She whispered before leaving the room. 

____ 

When Chase finally woke up he felt the warm sting of crying to himself last night and groaned a little. He pulled himself off the couch, glanced at the clock that read 4:32am and grimaced a little at the 12 hour nap he had fallen into. He lagged for about an hour, trying avoid the obvious task sitting on his dining table. Finally, he had no choice and had scooped them all up and sat on his couch. 

He stared at his old address, written in handwriting he knew once long ago, and finally he gently, as if not to disturb anything, pulled the envelope open. Inside sat a postcard, scribbles across the back. 

 Hi Robert, 

It’s been nearly three weeks since I last saw you. (or heard from you. Write back if you’re not too busy. Please?) I barely explained in my last letter, I’m sorry. Things got worse with my mom. And you were gone, and we both decided that distance doesn’t matter so I hope you aren’t too angry with me. (If you are, that’s fine, just write and tell me you’re angry.) I’m going to stay at this address for about three months, so it should work if you are writing and the stupid post office is losing them. 

Anyways, enough of that.  I know you noticed the New Zealand postage. New Zealand is amazing Robert, you were so right I do love it. It’s green and warm and wet and everything a Tolkien girl could dream of.  I’ve taken to eating like the hobbits, snacks and snack and snacks, since you aren’t around to remind me about real meal times. I’ve met some cool people, no one is you, they’re being nice to me and showing me around. I’m sure you have a lot of homework, lots of studying, so here’s just a list of things I need to tell you about next time we’re face to face. The rowboat, two rainbows!! Aroha and her family, the terrible movie that was on cable the first night I got here, the book I read on the train to go swimming at some random swimming hole. 

I wish we could put cameras into our eyes, let you see everything I’m seeing, and force you to stare into a mirror so I could see you, even just for a little. I miss you and no amount of New Zealand can make me forget. 

Always yours, 

(Y/N). 

P.S I know you’re judging me for putting a postcard in an envelope, but I wanted to make sure it got to you in perfect condition, the photo in the front is the town I’m staying, so now you know where to picture me. 

Chase felt his heart ache at how easily he could hear her voice in her writing. He let out a small broken laugh when he flipped the postcard and started at the photo. She had drawn an arrow to some random spot in the photo and scribbled two little hearts, in the smallest writing yet she wrote “you’re right here with me!” 

He felt more tears come out of his eyes and he quickly wiped it away to avoid them dropping onto the postcard as he run his thumb over the two hearts, feeling the indentation of the pen. Flipping it again, he reread the letter, once, twice, and then a third time, trying to contain the bubble of emotion that sat in his chest. He grabbed the next letter in the pile and noticed she was still in New Zealand when she sent this one. When he noticed it was a full letter, not just a simple postcard, he wiped his tears as clean as he could and started reading the letter. She had decided and wrote upfront to ignore the silence on his end for this letter, instead writing details about her housemates, the swimming she had been doing, the coworker she was sick of waiting tables with, Chase flipped the page and read the other two in a matter of minutes.

The third New Zealand letter explained that she had felt like she overstated her welcome, and maybe it had something to do with the letter she had gotten from her mother, she had a saved enough to go somewhere, and when she looked at plane tickets, it seemed Tokyo was that somewhere. She promised that if he felt like writing her, she would get the letter if he sent it to her New Zealand address as the family she stayed with was happy to forward mail. 

The first Tokyo letter was almost the same as the first New Zealand postcard, but Chase could feel the dying hope of hearing back from him. No sly remarks about him writing to this address, nothing about seeing each other soon, but still at the bottom of the letter he read; “Always yours, (Y/N)”. One more Tokyo letter, and it read like an itinerary, “flying back to the states. landing in california, going to find my brother and dad.” an address to where he could write scribbled in a different color, as if she almost didn’t put it. And again, “Always yours, (Y/N)” 

It was the first Colorado letter that had Chase contemplating praying for his dad to come back to life just so Chase could kill him. The sloppy letter and smudges were enough to tell that (Y/N) had been emotional when writing. Chase didn’t register any of words instead paying attention to the smudged “R” where a tear had fallen. 

Robert. 

They were suppose to be here. My dad always loved Colorado and I thought maybe he would have been here. But he’s not, not in the phonebook, not in any directory. I don’t know what to do anymore. I’ve lost it all. Anything. Everything. 

The scribbling she had done barely covered the words, but still she started the letter over again. 

We were suppose to be fine. You promise you’d write and I know I promised I’d be there so maybe I deserve this. But I miss you and I miss our coffee shops and I miss the green grove at your parents and I miss shitty Australian tea. You swore everything would be fine. If I knew this was going to happen I would have stayed in that fucking house with the monster who thinks she’s my mother. I should have stayed, at least until the weekend, so I could have explained it to you face to face, but I couldn’t she had 

More scribbles in the line, these dark and hiding whatever secret her mother had done, whatever the final straw was. 

The worst part is, I can’t get myself to stop sending these. I keep convincing myself that you’re just not getting them. If that’s not the case, just write me telling me to fuck off, I can take it. 

I miss you so much. Sometimes when I’m in the dark room of my motel, I’ll close my eyes and I’ll find on a movie I’ve seen a million times and I’ll try to imagine you’re laying with me, asking the dumbest questions about the stupid movie just to hear my voice. More and more I’m convincing myself you were never real, something I made up in a time of despair. Other times, I know I could never have dreamed you up. Do you remember when you tried to teach me to surf? If I had tried enough I know I would have been able to get it, but you had your hands wrapped around my ankles as I tried to stable myself on the board and it’s all I could focus on. I had been so nervous and you started rubbing circles against my ankle bone and I lost any chance of learning how to surf. The other day I was in a crowded bar and some dude put his arm around my shoulder and suddenly I wanted to crawl out of my skin. Still, I slept with him, and thought of you the whole time. It’s probably better I never slept with you, I knew from the start you would have me wrapped up, completely incased in you. Imagine if we had actually slept together? I don’t know how much longer I can pretend your letters aren’t getting to me. I don’t know if I can keep holding onto something that’s slipping out of my fingertips. 

Next time, I’ll stay. I’ll endure what I have to, as long as it means you. 

Always yours, 

(Y/N). 

Chase didn’t bother opening the last two letters. He had enough. He stood up from the table and scrabbled to grab all the letters. His father’s letter was shoved to the bottom of his coat pocket as he rushed out the door. 

____ 

(Y/N) had slept well that night, finally actually getting the treatment she had been waiting for. She focused on that the whole time she was falling asleep, ignoring the pity she got from Dr. Cameron when she came to check in. Dr. Foreman had made it clear that (Y/N) would be in the hospital for a while as she got better, they wanted to keep an eye on her, make sure everything was going back to normal. So she slept, waking up for breakfast at 8am and eating as much of it as she could stomach. She flipped through another magazine some nurse had slipped her. It was all easy, until she flipped to the travel agency ad and they were boosting about low Australian flights. She tossed the magazine away and let herself slip back into an uneasy sleep. 

She was awoken by a small tickle against her scalp. She didn’t open her eyes but crinkled her nose a little at the sensation. Dr. Chase had entered the hospital and didn’t even bother going to find any of his colleagues or boss. Heading straight to the girl he wanted to see. He had stood in the doorway for a little trying to catch his breath, trying not to fall into an endless pit of guilt at his abandonment, he knows she won’t hold it against him. He was a victim as much as she was in this situation. Still he steeled himself to be sent away before he slipped in and let himself fully touch her, his fingers lightly scratching her scalp. 

“(Y/N)” The accented voice left a warm feeling all the way to her toes. 

“‘M sleeping Robert,” She mumbled a little, still mostly out of it all but pressing into his touch anyways. 

“The doctor who solved your case can’t get a minute of your time?” Chase tried to joke but felt the watery tone in his own voice. 

At the small crack in his voice, (Y/N) pried her eyes open, he dropped his touch. She didn’t say anything as she looked at Chase, instead just savoring looking at him. He had obvious tears in his eye line. The smallest quiver of his face made her sit up, “Oh you’re here,” She whispered a little and she tried to tame her hair a little and rub the sleep out of her eyes. 

“I didn’t think you’d come, I didn’t expect you to come, you’ve done enough. Thank you,” She shoved her hands into the blanket to avoid reaching out, “For saving my life,” She clarified. Chase hummed a little and sniffled to try and hold back a tear. (Y/N) furrowed her brow a little and glanced to see the door to her room was shut before she pulled her hand out from under the blanket and reached out to grab his. She stopped herself before she could grab it and looked up at him. He didn’t bother making eye contact with her, his eyes trained completely on her hand before reaching out and meeting her halfway. 

“I didn’t know, I didn’t get them. My father he- He’s dead and still mucking up my life,” Chase breathed out. He dropped her hand for just a minute so he could go around the bed, put himself back into the visitors chair that sat exactly where he had left it. Once he was sat, he reached out again without thought and wrapped up both her hands in his. “I was never angry at you for leaving, never for that.” He held their hands close to his chest as he spoke. 

(Y/N) let him speak as she tried to put together exactly what he meant. The sleep was still clouding her brain just a slightest, but having Robert here in front of her, touching her short wired her brain just the slightest. “Honey, I just woke up, you gotta clue me in a little,” She cooed and squeezed his hand a little when he squeezed at her voice. 

Chase pulled one of his hands away from holding hers and grabbed the letter his father left for him from his pocket. He pasted it to her and she grabbed it with her empty hand. As she started to read he started to speak, “I’m going to write you back, for each one. I’m going to send you four letters for every one you tried to send me. I had been writing them in my head for years, you’re always the person I’m talking to. Darling, I’m sorry,” He confessed. 

(Y/N) slipped her hand out of his completely and sat up as she read and reread the letter that Chase had given her. For a few minutes it was silent as she accepted the fact that it wasn’t Chase that didn’t reply. It wasn’t his fault he never saw her words, she mentally thanks whatever God that Chase never had to read her drunk crying letter from Colorado but feels a little dip of despair at all the postcards he missed out. 

“I know it’s not a good enough excuse, I should have looked for you, I knew you’d never break your promise and I just let myself believe you didn’t write.” Chase whispered after the silence went on for too long. 

(Y/N)’s eyes widen, “Wait what? Robert?!” She slightly scoffed. Chase cringed a little and (Y/N) knew what to do in this situation. This was something she was still an expert in. Soothing Robert Chase when he tries to shoulder blame that isn’t his was a textbook problem for her. 

“Your father kept all the letters from you until he died? And you think that’s not a good enough excuse?” (Y/N) dropped the letter and let it join the useless magazine from this morning. 

“Nothing to forgive.” She whispered and let herself be brave by reaching her hand out and wiping the tear that Chase had let out. “Plus you saved my life, kind of have to forgive anything” She joked a little but felt her own tears start to build. 

When Chase felt her hand against his cheek he let himself sink into it a little, his cheek resting against her palm for just a few seconds before he grabbed her hand in his again and intertwined your fingers together. “It’s my job, I should have been quicker, but you’ll be fine.” He brings their hands up to his lips and pressed the lightest kiss against her knuckle. 

“Has Cameron explained everything to you?” Chase leaned forward in the chair to be close to (Y/N). 

“Most of it, but I’d rather hear it from you,” (Y/N) contently sighed at the way Chase kept trying to get closer. 

____

Dr. Foreman had been about to slip into (Y/N)’s room when he heard Chase’s laughter leak out from it. He knocked instead of just going in and took a quick moment to observe the way Chase had found himself sitting at the end of the bed, (Y/N) sitting up and obviously in the middle of a story. Chase didn’t move an inch, didn’t even acknowledge Foreman, his eyes trained completely on (Y/N). 

“Hi Dr. Foreman! Time for more meds already?” She smiled. Foreman knew that she looked better because she was in fact, getting better, but he’s sure Dr. Cameron would claim it had something to do with the two making up. Dr. Foreman nodded and started to get the machines ready to give (Y/N) more plasma. He had zoned himself into the process so much, he didn’t notice the small whisper of Chase’s voice. When he looked up, he noticed Chase had moved, now resting back on the chair as he whispered to (Y/N). Foreman paid enough attention to hear him explaining what exactly each thing was to (Y/N) but stopped listening once he heard, “It shouldn’t hurt at all, sweetheart.” followed by (Y/N)’s soft confirmation. 

Foreman managed to get it all set up and never once did Chase seem to actually pay any attention to him. It wasn’t until (Y/N) had. slipped into a nap because of the meds that Chase finally looked at Foreman.

 “She’s doing a lot better. I’ve been waiting her vitals since I’ve been in here,” 

“Your diagnosis” Dr. Foreman said, letting Chase know there was no thank you needed. 

____ 

(Y/N) groaned a little at the stretch she had taken. The hospital bed wasn’t the worst to start but by week three she had found herself counting down the time to leave the hospital. She ignored the lingering doubt that she’d lose Robert again and let herself instead enjoy every second she had gotten over the last three weeks. He had started coming in to eat every meal with her. He was there when she went to bed, and unless a case had come up, he had been there when she woke up. It felt easy, it was always suppose to be easy between them, it was others that had complicated things. They had fallen back into the rhyme they once had, only it felt as if something had clicked. (Y/N) didn’t ask about his parents, although eventually he did drop some hints to what was happening. Robert had asked about her father, and brother and was met with an excited (Y/N) pulling out photos from when she finally found them again. It was this moment that made Robert pull out his own wallet keepsake. (Y/N)’s eyes had watered at the letter he had been carrying around for so long and pressed a soft kiss against his cheek when he said “I still owe you letters, I haven’t forgotten”. 

Now, she stared at the terrible hospital bed and found herself going to miss it, even just because it gave the perfect excuse for Robert to be closer. 

“Ready sweetheart?” Chase spoke from the doorway, “Convinced House I had to see you off,” He hummed a little and grabbed her bags without thinking. (Y/N) looped her arm around Chase’s open one and they set off outside the hospital. 

“Did you really think sleeping with me would make it worse?” Chase said as they stood int he elevator. 

(Y/N) groaned at his questions. He had been doing this all month, asking questions that had to do with her letters. He never told her if he finished reading them, but one night he had come in, teary eyed and pressed a kiss against her forehead mumbling apologizes that were unnecessary. She had assumed he read that final letter, the one she had poured everything she had felt into before she locked it up. 

“Sleeping with you would have probably ended with me trying to swim back to America from Tokyo,” (Y/N) pressed the floor button and rolled her eyes, “So yeah, it would have made it worse,” 

“Well, you’re already here so no harm in trying it now right?” Chase smirked a little and braced himself for (Y/N) gentle wack. 

“At least take me to dinner first Bobby,” (Y/N) gasped with no malice. 

“No,” Chase glared with no real threat at the nickname, “No one here knows me by that, lets not start, brat” He made sure all her bags were in one hand and used his other to pull her in his arm around her shoulder. “I’ll take you to dinner, maybe even a movie if you promise to talk my ear off the whole time,” He mumbled against her hair as they walked out of the hospital. (Y/N) hummed a small confirmation and pressed herself deeper into his arms.

extra authors note: thanks for making it this far! please come let me know if you hate it, love it or even if you want more! i have so many silly little thoughts about these two together <3 come chitchat!

[ellie-1-8]

OMG LOVE LOVE LOVEEEEE THIS FIC!!!!

[sweetttsummer]

thank you thank you thank you!!!!! <33333

[hoss-bonaventure]

when the father/son coded duo lowkey just gotta kiss

[sweetttsummer]

heeeey finnick lovers! im working on a fem!reader piece for finnick. she's basically going to take annie's spot in the games, but with the character im writing she can either go into the 75th hunger games with finnick or not! which would yall prefer?

finnick x fem!reader story

reader in the 75th arena

mags go in just like the regular canon!

Voting ended onMay 9

[sweetttsummer]

hi k :) hope youre well! i cant remember if i ever sent you an ask (despite desperately meaning to) (im in the bad habit of hoard all my thoughts together) but i have so so much love in my heart for reachin' up for the sunlight <3 its genuinely my favourite chase fic and i just love how you characterised him, managing to fit his complex story into your own. its so shining and wonderful in my mind, and i often find myself reaching to reread it over and over again - i think i could do so a million times over and never get bored. the line "she's been the voice in my head my whole life, i didn't exist before she said my name" feels like gold strung together and i always always slip out a few tears reading through the letters. thank you for writing and sharing it with us <33

i have been staring at this message literally every hour since i saw it and just kicking my feet in joy. thank you so much it's unbelievably kind for to say any of this <3333 reaching up for sunlight means so much to me, and its truly the first fic i have ever written, i made this blog JUST to be able to share that fic bahaha. i hope to write more chase fics soon <3

you're a darling. i loooove you!!!

[nctinmotion]

Source: This

[brindlefern-deactivated20210619]

[xcziel]

[cellophanes-princess]

I really needed the last one

[sweetttsummer]

hi :) i just wanted to say that i read your “exposure therapy” fic pretty often because it’s comforting, so well-written and has this comforting, genuine characterisation and feel to it that’s just so wonderful honestly 🌟🥰

thank sm nonnie <333. literally felt possessed when i wrote it lol. the idea that anyone is reading my work at all makes me giddy, so you coming back and rereading it,,, i will literally devote my life to you

[inenaby]

old trend but here you go anyways

[mademoiseli]

The notes are broken. This is what tumblr is all about apparently.

[atonau]

THE NOTES ARE BROKEN!  This has been reblogged so many times, Tumblr just shrugged and said “infinity”

[slow--spark]

just give dana some time to distract security

[sweetttsummer]

Hii! I just read your touch starved reader x clark. The way you write is so cuddly and warm, like a blanket, it's really good :)

I saw you have your asks open and I was wondering if you could write about Supes with someone who is a painter or artist of any sorts. Just someone that is so lost in their own little world that it baffles him, as he is used to the urban rush. Maybe they are an urban landscape artist painting Superman saving the day and he kinda just hovers around them like. 'Oh, that's me :O'

Have a good day/evening! :)

hiiii hunny!! thank you sm, thats the vibe i wanted!!1 <3333, im sooo cold and prickly irl so i was scared lol. kidding (kind of) either way!! this request has def gotten out of hand, hope you enjoy it :3

clark kent x reader

tw: none? i think? idk if something needs to be tagged pls let me know!

wc: 2.3k

Clark watches as your foot catches on the sidewalk. The small lip higher than the one flat of concrete. The beat up toes of your sneakers suddenly make sense. You trip a little, but catch yourself, still talking as if nothing happened. His hands twitch just the slightest. 

"The owner basically gave me free rein! Can you believe that?!" You glance at him as you keep walking. Clark notices a man rushing towards you both on the sidewalk, he takes a moment to shuffle a little behind you, giving the man a path to keep walking. 

"Well maybe free rein isn't the right way to describe it," You hum a little and when you notice he's behind you, you turn a little wanting to speak to him directly. He's too focused on your bright eyes to notice another person rushing on the sidewalk. Your shoulder gets shoved a little and it makes Clark want to speak up but you don't even flinch. 

"She told me that she wanted something that'll represent Metropolis, but not like the upper echelon of Metropolis. Which, I don't think she really needed to say, given the borough she's in." You stop suddenly and Clark has to move faster than a human would to not run into your back. 

"This way," You say after a moment and take off down an alley. Clark is moving quickly behind you, resisting the urge to ask if you really need to run down an alleyway. It's the middle of the day anyways, nothing is going to happen, Clark tells himself. Also, you're Superman Clark, you can handle anything an alleyway will throw at them. Clark's mind supplies for him. Before he can get caught up in the weird amount of confidence he feels at his internal voice, you stop and quickly turn throwing your hands up. 

"Ta! Da!" You drag out the word a little. It takes effort for Clark to stop looking at you and instead start looking at the piece you had been working on for the last two weeks. 

Clark thinks his heart stop. His breathing hitches for sure, but he's not sure if the small beat where he doesn't hear his own heart actually counts as his heart stopping. The mural is still fresh, clean in a way that he's sure the grimy alley will solve quickly. But it's bright and blue and red and it's him. 

Okay maybe not him him, not Clark Kent, but he's trying to come to terms that maybe he can be Clark Kent andSuperman for a few people. And now he's staring at a beautiful bright freshly painted mural of Superman. It's not overall dramatic, at least not compared to the others he spots, the sky is his favorite shade of blue, and the cape seems to take up most the mural, but he's there, glasses missing and slight serious look on his face. He's positioned in a way that if it came to life, he'd be flying out of the wall. It embarrasses him just the slightest, like when Ma asked him if he got the pack of underwear she sent while she was on speaker phone. Embarrassed at the love, even if he doesn't mean to be. 

"It wasn't what I was going to do originally," You start to speak when Clark doesn't say anything. For a moment, Clark thinks you figured it out. He's careful, extra around you, but he can't seem to understand how your mind words most the time. 

"It's my first commission that reached out to me, so I thought I'd stick to my regular kids playing on the street, or street vendor landscape, I love doing those," You smile a little to yourself as you recall the past works you had done. 

"But then last month..." You trail off and Clark's eyes are immediately pulled from the painting. His gaze is taking you in. Shoulders rounded in a way he's not use to, your hands wringing in each other. 

"I get why you write about him so much," You say in a voice that leaves Clark unsteady, "He's..." You pause and Clark knows he's lost you in your own mind searching for a word. 

He's taken back to last month as his eyes land on the bright red you had used to paint the cape.

*** 

Clark hears heart beats the way he thinks of most humans hear voices, individual and unique to each person. He can recognize quite a few heartbeats, his Ma and Pa were the first, some high school friends he had forgotten at this point, coworkers he's around all the time, but he's coming to realize, yours might be his favorite. He thinks you might be his favorite everything, but it's too soon to be telling you that. 

So when he's helping a slightly grumpy (and honestly a little ungrateful) business man from some rumble and his ears tune into your heart, he doesn't think much of it. It's become a subconscious habit, when your heart beat is around his ears simply seem to tune into you. But it's closer than it should be, faster than he's comfortable with. The business man is grumbling as he starts to take off, as if he just noticed the chaos around them. 

Clark squares his shoulders and glances over to where the strange creature is stomping down on parked cars. His eyes narrow onto you, pulling yourself out of one of the parked cars. He moves without thinking, stopping for just a nano second when he hears shaky breaths from a magazine vendor hiding in his stall. Clark sends him off safe, and is rushing to pull you out of the car. You're saying something, but all he can focus on is holding your arms tight enough to pull you out of harm, but not too tight to cause any harm himself. Once Clark has you in his arms, and away from the car that is currently being crushed by the creature, he's flying without thinking about it, just wanting you away from the mess. Your hands tighten on him when you realize you're in the air. He can't help but smile at how shocked you seem. 

"Are you okay? Does anything hurt?" Clark's voice is still strong, sure in its questioning. It makes you let out a small laugh, the adrenaline still coursing through you. When your feet touch the ground, it makes your knees weak a little, and Clark is holding out his hand to stop you from falling. He can still hear the smashing of the tantrum the creature is having, but a voice comes in, Guy. It's enough to absolve him of any guilt that he's not out there helping others. He lets himself focus back on you. Your heart is still racing, but Clark can hear it starting to settle, your breath is a little raggedy, but you sound mostly normal. You didn't answer his question though and for a moment he debates taking you to a hospital. Would you listen to him, as Superman, if he tried to get you checked out? Maybe he can ask you as Clark, later, he'd have to hope you'd tell him about the whole incident. Is it worth telling you his secret? Before he can answer the question you're speaking. 

"Thank you," You say breathless, slightly shaken as the rush of fear leaves you cold, "I'm okay. Carless, but that's what full coverage is for right?" You try to joke, your voice airy in a way that makes Clark want to frown. 

"Thank you, really." Clark hadn't heard this tone before, it makes him want to pull you closer, try and sooth the obvious panic that's seeping out of you. 

Clark puts his hands behind his back, fighting the urge to warm you when you shiver. You don't know him like this, it would be wrong. It's the hardest thing he's done since he moved to Metropolis. 

"No thanks needed ma'am, just.." Superman trails offs and it feels strange on a man who's so large, "Please, stay safe?" 

You nod at his request, eagerly and happy to give the man who saved you anything. You glance around, at the empty little dumpster corner Superman seemed to have dropped you at. You're not even sure why he did it, you knew he helped people, have heard the stories both first hand and through other sources. But most the stories speak of Superman in flashes, flying in the air, hands pulling someone safe, a sure grin when they do get him to slow down and thank him. Nothing this long, nothing this personal. You shake your head, it's not personal. He just saved you from a strange and annoying death, it's natural for you to want to latch onto him. So you focus back on your day's mission, the landscape piece you were finishing on the Concord art corner. 

"Uh," You pause and try to figure out how to tell him you have no idea where you are. Clark can tell you're lost, a common occurrence in the messy streets of Metropolis. He's come to recognize the look, you might love the city, but you can't seem to understand the random so called grid that they call the streets. 

"We're off Ostrander Road. Do you need me to take you home?" Clark says without thinking. It's probably a strange offer from Superman, but he can worry about that later. He takes a moment and notices your eyes darting back to where you both came from. Of course, you're worried about the dangerous situation he had just pulled you from. He takes a moment to listen to the loud thud and a cheer and some sirens. 

"There's other people taking care of the creature, sounds like they have it under control." Clark answered the question he could read on your face. 

You debate asking if the mind reading is an alien thing. As far as you're aware, Superman had never claimed to be able to read human minds, (but if you were an alien one of a kind, would you disclose that?) 

You shake your head, "No I'm okay, I'm off to Concord and Kelly. I can find my way there." You smile at him and Clark has to squeeze his hands behind his back tighter, resisting the urge to hold your face in his hands. He debates what to do next, he doubts you'll be in any danger, its the middle of the day and Concord and Kelly isn't far from here. It's a good part of town, always busy, a small walkable mall. Still, Clark finds himself not wanting to let you leave his sight. Maybe he could text you as Clark, ask if you'd like to hang out. But that would still include leaving you now. He finally lands on being honest. Or as honest as he could be. 

"Do you mind if I make sure you get there safely?" His gaze watches as your head tilts a little, trying to figure out his motive. He doesn't squirm under your gaze, instead just grins a little harder at you. He's sure he'll hear about it as Clark, and eventually he'll have to apologize when he explains himself. But for now, he'll take this moment. 

"I'm sure my boyfriend wouldn't mind," You turn and start to walk towards the busy street. Clark follows behind you, his hands still wringing behind his hand, under the cape. 

***

"I think the kids will like it more when they realize if they stand here," You shift a little and Clark looks down to notice your feet lining up with a small box you had painted down, "They're Superman" You smile and Clark looks back up and notices the way you seem to be lined up against the mural so he own figure is hidden, instead the cap looks like its coming off of you. His throat starts to close up, it's so nice. You're showing him and you don't even know it's him you painted. 

"It looks beautiful," He says and his voice sounds heavy to his own voice, "People will love it," He clear his throat and steps a little closer to you, his hands coming up to move some hair from your face. "I love it, if that means anything," He bends down just the slightest and you meet him halfway, pressing a quick easy kiss against his lips. 

"Well if you love it, I did my job" You grin at him and again, for a moment Clark is worried you know his secret. It's tampered down when you kiss him again the small 'muah' exaggerated as you pull away from him. 

"Do you think maybe next time you see him you could thank him for me?" You hum a little as you kick a rock down the alleyway. 

"There's no thanks needed, (Y/N), he's happy to help" Clark bites back his actual answer, that there's no thanks needed because he's pretty sure he'd do anything to make your day easy, keeping you alive and happy isn't a something he needs to be thanked for doing, ever. 

"D'ya mind thanking him anyway?" You hum and push yourself up on your toes to press a kiss against his cheek. Clark feels the blush in his cheek. He glances back as you both start towards the street, to talk to the owner of the building about the finished work. His face stares back at him, the small imperfection in the wall makes it look a little strange from the angle, but it's him and you painted him. It was your decision, your choice, and you picked him, even if you didn't know it was him. 

Clark thinks it might be time to tell you. 

[mottesk]

SANE Dana my beloved

bsky

[sweetttsummer]

everyone freaking out over the samira exit..yall she just requested a day off

[pencil-n-pen]

—you’ve ruined my life

──────────────────────

jack abbot x overachiever! intern! reader

summary: good things happen to those who are found crying in the supply closet by their hot, older, maybe flirty boss-slash-mentor.

wc: 14.5k (i have no idea how that happened)

tags/tropes: age gap (duh), slow burn with an insane amount of tension, lowkey very emotionally rife, hurt/comfort, not-so-unrealistic amounts of crying, langdonmel in the background if you squint (you don’t have to squint very hard i love them so much guys im sorry) vaguely referenced but not subtlety implied bad childhood, gratuitous and frankly ridiculous medical inaccuracies because i took a lot of creative liberty, reader is an ode to Matilda by Harry Styles and You’re Gonna Go Far by Noah Kahan, Pitt Crew becomes reader’s family :)

a/n: this was supposed to be a sort-of drabble for @leeknowpegger. idk what happened. pegger i’m sorry i’ve been so dead recently (always) will you take this as an apology. If you’d like more cohesive tags, more context, extra details, and more in depth warnings, this fic has been cross-posted on ao3, and will be linked below :]

NOT-SO-FRIENDLY-PSA: Any comments asking me to write more, post another chapter, or anything of the sort will be deleted. Please do not send an ask into my inbox either. Screaming in my inbox (not about wanting more, general screaming) is totally fine though!

ao3

──────────────────────

۫ ꣑ৎ

You have been the perfect day shift intern for five months. Five freaking months of listening to mostly constructive criticism, five months of adapting and learning on the go with not a single complaint voiced, five months of diligent note-taking, studying, and practice. Five months of weaseling your way into the list of interns-slash-young-doctors that your residents actually respect. Five months of grueling shifts, hard losses, and never saying no when someone needs you to do something.

Five months of being the untouchable, “perfect” intern. Robby’s newest addition to his growing list of “work-wards.”

Five months of unflinching effort and dedication and it took four hours of your third night-shift to reduce you to a miserable, snotty mess on the supply closet floor. Tucked into the space between the two shelves, just the toes of your blood and snot and god knows what else covered shoes peeking out, the rest of you obscured.

Five months, four hours, and back to back fuck-ups that escalated into Dr. Jack Abbot, the man you may or may not have had the hugest crush on since beginning your intern year, removing you from a case. Five months, four hours, and two parents screaming at Dr. Abbot, telling him that you’re not fit to be a doctor.

Tonight isn’t the first night a patient has yelled at you. Tonight isn’t even the first time you’ve been removed from a case. It’s not the first time Dr. Abbot has had to correct you, and it’s certainly not the first time you’ve made a mistake.

You’re an intern. It’s your job to fuck up, learn from it, and keep going. That’s what Dr. Mohan said to one of the other interns awhile back. They’d ended up flunking out, but oh well. It was good advice. It wasn’t meant for you, but hell if you don’t say it to yourself every night like a prayer.

But right now, the usual calming mantra is doing absolutely nothing. You’re stifling ugly sobs into the tops of your knees, arms wrapped around and squeezing as tight as you can, your chest shaking and shuddering with the force of your complete and total freak-out.

The patient isn’t dead. Despite your mistakes, they didn’t die. There’s really nothing to cry about. Nothing to hide in the supply closet for.

And yet, here you are.

Your first mistake wasn’t terrible, but it was ridiculously stupid and incredibly embarrassing. Triage room, emergency measures being taken. And you, tired and off kilter from being so used to the day-shift, broke the sterile field. Like some dumb medical student, not a fairly seasoned intern who’s drilled sterile protocol into her head until it’s muscle memory.

For a scalpel. You dropped a scalpel. Arguably the worst thing to drop. And then, like an idiot, you picked it back up.

And, well. There’s no time to re-scrub, so there wasn’t a need for you in the triage room anymore.

Your second mistake was equally stupid and avoidable, if you’d focused more. Dr. Garcia was kind enough to let you scrub in on an emergency appendectomy.

It was a test. Not your first.

And you ripped the fucking purse strings.

Once again, you were unceremoniously booted from the room (being kicked out of an OR feels a hell of a lot worse than being kicked out of a triage room) and sent back to the pit. Dr. Abbot immediately caught wind of it and demoted you to scut work until “you get your head back in the game.”

And, well. You tried really hard to devote yourself to your new task, but you had to keep blinking tears out of your eyes every five seconds and you absolutely refuse to cry in front of literally any of your coworkers, lest they think you some weak-willed weak-stomached intern who can’t handle some criticism and correction. You’re a hard worker. You’re good at this. You have to be.

So yeah. Crying in the supply closet.

You’ve always been a frustrated cryer, which is annoying on a good day and downright awful on a bad one (case in point.)

You’re just so upset with yourself. You’re better than this. You know you are. You’ve proven that you are. You don’t drop scalpels. You don’t break the sterile field. You don’t rip purse strings.

But you did tonight. And maybe one day you’ll laugh, but today is not that day.

You just don’t get it. Day shift? Incredible. Manageable. You’re on top of things, put together, and worthy of Dr. Robby’s respect.

But tonight? Quite literally the exact opposite.

You can’t be burning out, right? That’s not how burn out works. There’s like, signs, and you start to feel terrible and awful and exhausted and sure you definitely feel all of those things, but that’s because you work in medicine. And you’re an intern. You’re supposed to feel terrible and awful and exhausted. But maybe you’re not? You do enjoy your work, and it’s exhilarating, especially when you try something for the first time and execute it well, because you always do, you always get things right on the first try, obviously, so that means that this can’t be burn out. You don’t burn out. That’s not you. Right? No. Of course not.

You gasp a particularly rough sob into your knees, air feeling like knives as you inhale, making you cough horrendously. You must be quite a sight.

Unfortunately, due to your alternating hacking coughs and dramatic crying, you don’t quite hear the door open.

You do, however, hear the quiet “Oh.” that’s mumbled a few moments later.

Of-fucking-course.

You scramble upright, aggressively wiping at your face and attempting to make it look like you weren’t just crying on the ground.

“Dr. Abbot! I’m so sorry, this is very unprofessional and I know you have me on scut work but I promise I’m still working on it—“

He holds up a hand, and you slam your jaw shut with an audible click.

“Just needed some four by fours, kid.”

Always one to be helpful (especially to the guy you have a crush on who also happens to be your boss, aka the same person who professionally told you to get your shit together about forty minutes ago) you reach beside yourself and hand him the package of gauze, an awkward smile fixed on your face.

“…Those are three by threes.”

Bitch. Motherfucker. Fuck your life.

“Right,” You mumble, dragging your hand down your face. “I’ll just get out of your way. Sorry.”

You turn to walk past him, attempting to go quick enough that he might not notice the new tears shining in your eyes before a hand lands on your shoulder.

“Look,” Dr. Abbot starts. “You’re one of Robby’s adopted interns, right? Robby-Junior?”

“That is one of the rumors Santos has been spreading, yes.”

His hand is on your shoulder. His hand is on your shoulder. (!!!)

You don’t know what to do. He’s looking at you. Your boss doesn’t fluster you. You’re chill. You’re normal. You’re cool as a cucumber, yep yep yep.

“Robby doesn’t adopt interns lightly. Don’t let one bad shift mess you up. It happens to everyone.”

You purse your lips. You should let it go. Take his advice. Thank him.

The all-consuming-guilt and ever-present-need to prove yourself itches too painfully to ignore.

Dr. Abbot seems to notice, and he catches your gaze again.

“What, it doesn’t happen to you?”

A jolt of panic stabs your chest. “No! Of course it happens to me, I didn’t mean to imply that I’m like, above making mistakes or having bad shifts at all—“

Genuinely what is wrong with you. Why the fuck does he do this you. You’re a smart, confident woman who apparently chucks her brain into the garbage bin whenever her boss is around.

Dr. Abbot, probably picking up on a pattern of behavior by now, levels you with another look that shuts you up fairly quickly. He’s got a sort of impish grin on his face, and it shouldn’t be hot, but he’s got his hand on your shoulder and you’re having a ridiculously shitty night. Does anything matter anymore?

“Usually, we try to mix up interns schedules so you don’t get into a rhythm on one specific shift so that when you inevitably switch, the change doesn’t mess up your flow. But I'm sure your knack for keeping your head down and doing good work let you fall through the cracks.”

He takes his hand off your shoulder and shoves it into his pocket, but you almost don’t notice because he said you do good work.

Abbot gives you another grin. “And I didn’t stick you on scut as a punishment. Mindless work tends to be calming, which in turn helps focus your mind.”

“But I ripped the purse strings,” You blurt like a Catholic school girl in a particularly rife confessional, “Like an idiot.”

“You ripped them like an intern doing something for the first time.”

“I practiced hundreds of times to make sure it didn’t happen!”

He tilts his head, almost cat-like. “Did you also practice on a live person in a higher stakes situation while your body is messed up from a sudden and huge sleep schedule change?”

“…No?”

He snorts. “Exactly. Dr. Garcia probably won’t hold it against you. She’ll give you shit for it, but it’s not like she’s never going to give you another chance.”

You wipe the last bit of wetness of your cheeks with the back of your hand, embarrassment heating your face. Despite the awfulness of being caught crying in the supply closet, the beginnings of pleasant warmth is spreading through your chest, Dr. Abbot’s reassurances echoing in your head.

“Thank you, Dr. Abbot. Um. Sorry about the crying. I promise I don’t usually do that.”

Dr. Abbot snorts as he saunters towards the door. “Wouldn’t judge you if you did, kid.”

—

Dr. Jack Abbot is bored.

He has his work, which is great. He became a doctor after being discharged because he’s always been the kind of man that needs something to do. Something to mind, something to watch, something to fix. Robby and him and much the same in this way.

Working at the ED was enough for a while. There was a certain challenge to it, an unpredictability that itch sated, kept him sane. And, well. Now he’s an attending. Night shift lead.

He started to get restless again.

He thought a pet might work. He was going to get a dog, but it didn’t sit right with him to get an animal built for companionship and then leave it at home for over twelve hours a day. Then he thought a cat might do the trick. He looked online first, saw beautiful, well bred felines that could probably compete and win for best in show for whatever the cat equivalent is for the Westminster Dog Show.

And then he made the mistake of going to the shelter and seeing an old, one eared tuxedo cat that stared at him with something in between fear and spite and its eyes. And well. The shelter attendants assured him that the cat in question prefers being left alone and having its own space, but might warm up eventually, and he brought him home that day.

And then it was just Jack, occasionally Robby, and now his asshole cat who might not love him back.

That also worked for a while. Having Charlie was fun. It was nice having another living creature in his house that wasn’t him. Even if he did have a habit of chewing on power cords when left unattended and eventually progressed into attempting to destroy Jack’s stethoscope if he left it anywhere he could find.

Minding the cat gave him something to do that wasn’t tedious, and it was a special sort of bonus to wake up every now and then and see the cat sprawled at the foot of the bed, snoring away. He didn’t actually know cats could snore like that.

Around the time that the itch came back and Jack was considering adopting a second cat from the shelter (well on his path to becoming a crazy cat lady, as Robby said in the park over beers) he met you for the first time.

Sometimes Jack slips quietly into the ED and watches the chaos of day shift’s conclusions. He’s picked up a very special language of gauging what he’s getting into based on the body language and behavior of the rest of the hospital staff. Robby had told him about the latest intern— a motivated, stubborn sort of girl that frequently went toe-to-toe with Santos but without any of the pushback when receiving correction or criticism. He’d heard that you were smart, capable, and well on your way of becoming a great doctor.

Robby failed to mention that you were pretty.

He’d watch you, comparing notes with Mohan with a certain intense focus on your face, worrying your lip between your teeth and repeatedly tucking a piece of hair behind your ear because it’d fallen out of your disheveled pony tail he thinks ‘Oh.’

And then, a few months later, he finds you crying in a closet, subtly confessing fears of failure and falling short of expectations, and then he thinks ‘Well, there’s something to do.’

Jack tries not to think about you, at first. You, looking up at him with red-rimmed eyes, bottom lip jutted out just a bit, hugging your knees. He tries not to think about how you’d looked at him when he’d assured you that you did good work, the awkward thank you, and the way that for the rest of the shift, all the annoying menial tasks that get forgotten in the chaos were all mysteriously taken care of.

He tells himself that he’s just going to keep an eye on you. For Robby’s sake. He’d do the same for Whitaker.

The next time you have a night shift, you’re clearly more prepared for the exhaustion, and when he finally sees you in true, proper action, he understands immediately why Robby likes you and Mohan frequently attaches you to her cases. Skill, patience, and focus.

When he watches you trach a patient with a certain ease that only comes from practicing hundreds of times, Ellis shoots him a knowing look. Raised eyebrows and smirk. When she passes him in the hall a few hours later, she jabs her thumb behind her shoulder at where you’re diligently filling out a chart.

“That one yours, then?”

Jack shakes his head. “It’s not like that. You make me sound like a creep.”

Another raised eyebrow. “Sure it isn’t.”

“She’s Robby’s intern.”

“Mhm.”

“She’s way too young.”

Parker shrugs. “She’s good.”

“She is.”

The senior resident cuts a glance back to you. “Think she’ll burn out?”

“Maybe.”

Parker crosses his arms. “Are you gonna let it happen?”

“She’s not my intern.”

Up to three Parker Ellis looks and counting.

“It’s an HR nightmare.”

Parker shrugs. “You just said she’s not your intern.”

He narrows his eyes. “You know what I meant.”

“Do I? It’s been awhile, Jack. No one would really judge you for having some fun.”

“Parker.”

“Jack.”

He shakes his head, walks towards the boards. “You’re the worst.”

Parker just laughs. “Sure I am.”

To your credit, he doesn’t find you crying in a supply closet again to see evidence of you doing so for a solid few weeks. But, like most things in the ED, the peace doesn’t last.

You came into work soaking wet, which is odd, considering the fact that he knows you drive, and the walk to the parking lot isn’t far enough to account how you’re shivering in your freshly changed scrubs. He brushes it off, chalks it up to freakish Pittsburg weather.

Some night shifts are relatively slow and mild. Tonight is not one of those shifts. Patients are extra irritable at late hours, which is to be expected, but what he’s not expecting is to walk by South 15 and see a 50-something year old man slap you.

Jack blinks, and in the next second he’s in the room, standing in between you and the patient.

“Excuse me, what the fuck is going on here?”

Gloria will probably give him shit for his language later, but right now all he can think about is the startled look on your face and the echo that the contact made.

“I said I want a real doctor, not this fucking—“

“Get the fuck out of my hospital.”

Shen peaks his head in. “Security’s on their way.”

Jack reaches behind him to where you’re still standing, your hand covering your cheek, and gently pushes you towards Shen, towards the door. You stumble over your feet a bit, but truly, Jack’s never been more thankful for his residents because then Parker is right there, ushering you out the door with a hand on your shoulder. Jack resolutely ignores your mumbled “I’m fine, really, he just surprised me.”

Thankfully, security doesn’t take that long to get to the room, and the second Jack is finished explaining, he’s out the door and scanning the ED for your face. Nurse Young jerks her head towards the break room, and he thinks he manages to give her what he hopes is a thankful smile before he’s beelining for it.

When he opens the door, you’re sitting on the floor again, holding an ice pack to your cheek with one hand and dabbing at your lip with a paper towel. Like you’ve never heard of medical protocol in your entire life.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

You jerk your head up, a kid caught with its hand in the cookie jar.

“Dr. Abbot!”

Lowering himself to the ground is awkward, physically. Prosthetics don’t lend to much mobility and he’s too old to be doing this, but he just. There are little beads of blood collecting and then sliding down your chin, dripping onto the leg of your scrubs. At the same angle of the split in your lip, there’s a little cut he can see peaking out from under the ice pack.

He reaches forward, fingers itching towards the deep scarlet dripping steadily. He pauses, remembering things like words and questions and sees the wild look in your eyes.

“Can I…?” Jack’s voice trails off, the words clunky and useless in this bubble that’s seemed to form around the two of you, on the probably disgusting floor of the ED break room.

You slowly drop the napkin, let the ice pack lower to your lap and nod.

“He had a ring on. I guess it caught me. I didn’t really notice until I got here.”

“Parker and Shen didn’t notice?”

You look at your lap. “I told them I was fine… And covered it with my hand. There are other patients. It’s just a little cut.”

Jack’s fingers finally reach your face, and he almost takes them back when you flinch on the initial contact, shaking ever so slightly.

But then, with noticeable effort, you relax into his palm, his fingers curling around the side of your jaw. He should grab gloves. He should get up, take his hand off your face.

Anyone could walk in right now and call Gloria on his ass.

His thumb sweeps across your cheekbone, just below the cut, which does have some faint bruising around it. And truthfully, the split in your lip doesn’t look that bad either.

But there’s still little dots and trails of scarlet and he doesn’t think he’s going to be able to calm down until he fixes it. He needs to fix something.

“If I leave you here so I can get supplies,” He starts, voice a little rough, “Can I trust that you’ll stay here and not do anything stupid?”

“Uh, yes? Should I move to a real chair though?”

Jack huffs as he hauls himself to his feet. “That’d be preferable.”

Later, when he’s at home in his bed, he’ll assure himself that the night shift wasn’t truly that busy and he trusts his residents to handle things while he’s busy.

No one stops him on his way to the medical supply closet (the irony of the location is not lost on him) and he makes it back without interruption. Upon opening the door, you have in fact moved to a chair, and it seems the bleeding slowed in his absence.

What he should do is sit down in the chair opposite of you and handle this situation like a professional, like the Dr. Abbot, night shift attending, not Jack who’s got a thing for fixing.

He does try to remove his emotions and feelings from the situation, he really does. It’s something he’s generally very good at —which is where he and Robby differ; Robby would prefer to feel too much and Jack would prefer to feel nothing at all— but you’re looking up at him and there’s something really dangerous in the air and it must’ve gotten into your blood stream or something cause it’s swimming in your eyes and he realizes that removing his feelings is not going to be possible.

He decides he could at least tone it down. You’re an intern. Robby’s intern. So what if you’re bleeding all over the break room? Jack’s just doing his job as the attending to look after the doctors and nurses under his jurisdiction or whatever. That’s all.

“Tilt your head up.”

He sets to work cleaning up the cut and split as detached and clinically as possible, even puts on gloves so there’s no skin to skin contact, just protocol, but he can feel the warmth of your skin through the latex and you keep sucking in these tiny little breathes when something stings and he can’t get the sound of the slap out of his head and it’s all just kind of a lot.

He readjusts his hand on the side of your face, sort of holding your forehead now to have better access and control over the cut on your cheek and wow. Your skin is really warm. It kind of feels like you’re burning up.

Jack tosses the piece of gauze he was using and rests the back of his hand against your forehead. Shit, you are burning up.

He thinks back to you, walking in today, soaked to the bone.

“Did you walk to work today?”

You wince. “My car kind of died? On the way here? I was only a mile away. But I called a towing company, so I didn’t just leave my car in the middle of the road.”

He blinks.

“Your car died, so you had it towed and walked a mile to work, in the rain, late at night, and didn’t tell anybody?”

You just keep staring at him, brows furrowed.

“Yeah? I carry a knife and I’ve taken self defense classes, and my car was just towed back to my place, so. I had a shift to work.”

There’s… a lot to unpack in your answer.

“Kid,” He starts, wondering why Robby never thought to give him a heads up before you started working more night shifts, “What was your plan to get home?”

“Walk, probably. I was thinking about taking the bus. Dr. King knows the bus schedule, so I’m probably going to text her.”

Jack decides to just finish cleaning you up, before he does something stupid like shake you by your shoulders and ask why you didn’t think to let your boss know that your car broke down and you’d be walking home in the rain. Or that when a patient slapped you in the face, his ring cut your face and lip open.

God.

“It’s really fine though,” You say, gesticulating animatedly with your hands. “My place isn’t that far, and it’s not the first time my car’s died. The battery’s kind of shot, but I guess my car has a weird battery, and it’s like, crazy expensive to get a new one, so. Besides, I like walking. I’ve been meaning to catch up on my audiobooks.”

He wishes you’d stop talking so he’d stop hearing things that make him want to do things he can’t and shouldn’t do. Like find out what car you drive so he can buy you a new battery. Or buy you a new car all together.

Christ, you have him wrapped around your fucking finger.

“I’ll drive you home. If you’re fine with that.”

Jack has to fight a grin at how comically wide your eyes grow at his suggestion.

“Oh no, you really don’t have to. I promise I’m—“

“Please stop saying you're fine,” He begs, “You don’t have a working car, a patient slapped you in the face, and I think you’re coming down with something.”

The smile that’s seemed permanently fixed on your face since he came into the break room falters, for a bit.

“Well,” You grimace, hands fisting the hem of your scrub top, “Things certainly aren’t… great, but I’ll survive. I’m not like, incapable, or anything.”

Jacks quiet for a bit, not just mulling over your words but the way you said them; the cadence and tone.

He hums. “Is that what you think? That I or someone else here will think you’re not competent or that you’re weak if you take a break or ask for help?”

Your face falters again. “No, no, of course not I just… I don’t know. I’m an intern. It’s my job, supposedly, to mess up and have to be looked after in case I accidentally kill someone and stuff like that. I just don’t want to be someone that people think they have to worry about. I need— internships are competitive. They’re competitions, really. And I want to win.”

Jack Abbot knows what it’s like to want to win. That need to prove yourself, prove that you’re capable and strong and unfailing.

So Jack also knows how quickly that can all go south.

“You’re a smart kid,” He says, voice ever so slightly soft in the quiet tension of the break room, empty except for the two of you, “And you’re going to make a great resident, and one day, a damn good attending. But none of that means shit if you burn out or get run yourself into the ground before you get there.”

He avoids eye-contact while he carefully applies the bandage to your cheek. “This industry will chew you up and spit you back out if you don’t take care of yourself. I get it. We’re doctors. We make the worst patients. But you got slapped in the face during a shitty day. It’s okay to… not be okay for a minute.”

You huff a watery laugh. “Isn’t that what energy drinks are for?”

He shakes his head. “What, trying to die faster?”

“Anything to shake those student loans. Can’t be in debt if you’re dead.”

“Don’t they just pass it to your family? Next of kin or whatever?”

“I don’t think they can give student loans to a cactus. I mean, I consider her my daughter, but I hardly think it’ll hold up in court.”

Jack mentally files that information away for later. What later is, he isn’t sure.

He stands, pulls off his gloves and tosses all the used gauze and shit in the trash can.

“I gotta get back out there,” He jams his thumb towards the door, “But feel free to take five. No one’s judging you. Matter of fact, as your boss, I’m telling you to take a break.”

You roll your eyes. “Whatever you say, Dr. Abbot. But thank you. For the…”

You gesture to your bandaged cheek and lip. “…And for the advice.”

He shrugs, like taking care of you hasn’t become a persona fantasy he may or may not fall asleep imagining most nights. Like it doesn’t matter, like he’s just doing his job.

“Offer for the ride’s still open. Just let me know by the end of shift.”

And with that, he’s out the door.

It’s the end of shift, and you’re staring at the double doors that lead to the outside world, and beyond that, absolutely fucking miserable weather for walking, a dead car, and cold as shit apartment.

You’re not exactly rushing out the door.

You’re clutching at the strap of your bag, regular clothes on, still damp despite the fact that it’s been over thirteen hours since you originally took them off, begging the universe to strike you down where you stand. Spontaneous lightning bolts happen indoors too, right?

The doors just stare back at you, unchanging in their miserable-ness, and after a solid ten minutes of staring, you feel rather than see Jack sidle up next to you.

“Still raining out there?”

“Yep. Looks worse now.”

“Not great weather to walk in. Especially considering the low-grade fever.”

“Mhm.”

“Did you text Dr. King for the bus schedule?”

“No. I didn’t want to wake her up.”

Jack huffs a breath, then jerks his head towards the doors that lead to the employee parking lot.

“Come on, kid.”

The ride is quiet and awkward. Well. Dr. Abbot probably doesn’t think it’s awkward, because he seems like the kind of man not to be bothered by long stretches of silence. Or silence at all.

He’d been kind enough to turn the heat on full blast (you started shivering the moment you stepped outside) and the radio is softly playing, and it’s only thanks to Sabrina Carpenter’s voice that you don’t feel like completely freaking out.

You mouth along to the lyrics, quietly humming the chorus under your breath.

“—I get wet at the thought of you being a responsible guy—“

“—Treating me like you’re supposed to do, tears run down my thighs—“

By the time you’ve realized that perhaps this isn’t the best song choice to sing along to, considering the situation and who’s car you’re currently riding in, the words “I get wet” have already left your mouth so there’s no real point in stopping.

On a completely unrelated note, Dr. Abbot starts smiling a little bit when you hum.

Pittsburgh traffic is terrible, so the drive kind of drags on. The radio is playing Chappell Roan now. Casual specifically. You’re considering changing the radio station because god.

“So,” You start, just to say anything that drowns out “knee-deep in the passenger seat and you’re eating me out, is it casual now?”, “Did you… have a good shift?”

That was a terrible question. Jesus. What the hell is wrong with you? How did you get through medical school?

Dr. Abbot snorts. “Shouldn’t I be asking you that question?”

Ah. Right. The Incident.

“I told you I’m—“

“Didn’t I tell you to stop saying that?”

Your lap has never looked more interesting. Wow, is that a loose thread on your sweats?

He continues. “Fine or not, a patient assaulted you. Even if he didn’t leave a mark, that’s still shitty.”

“Have you been hit by a patient before?”

He huffs. “Hell yeah. It happens to everyone eventually. It’ll happen again. You get better at keeping your cool.”

“Sorry you had to step in. I’ve been hit by a patient before and I was fine.”

“Oh yeah?”

You nod. “It was during my Pedes rotation, actually. I’ve always known working with kids probably wasn’t going to be for me, but, well. Kid came in for intussusception, and she was screaming and writhing in pain, and I failed to restrain her properly.”

“What, did she slap you too?”

“Nope. Kicked me in the chin. Ended up biting almost clean through my tongue.”

“Fucking hell, kid. What’d you do?”

You shrug. “Kept my blood in my mouth until we finished sedating the patient. Ended up with three stitches.”

Dr. Abbot lets out a low whistle. “Always the patients you least expect.”

“The importance of proper patient restraint was thoroughly impressed upon me, I assure you.”

The silence after your short conversation is slightly more comfortable, and thankfully the radio station has decided to play less pointed music.

Between the warmth of the car, the smell permeating the seats that smells distinctly like Dr. Abbot, and the drumming of rain outside, it doesn’t take long for drowsiness to begin to overtake you.

Your last thought before falling asleep is that you don’t remember if you gave Dr. Abbot your address or not.

Someone is gently shaking your shoulder, and you feel like shit.

“What?” You attempt to say, but the side of your mouth is pressed against the seatbelt and your shoulder so it comes out sounding like: “Whamfgh?”

Opening your eyes is a herculean task, like someone sewed miniature weights to your eyelids while you were asleep. You’re absolutely freezing, despite the steady hum of the car's heat, still on high, and you vaguely recognize the street the car is currently parked on.

Oh right, your apartment.

“Oh,” You yawn, hauling yourself semi-upright, aiming for woman who has it together, and less disheveled swooning woman in a Baroque painting.

Dr. Abbot is staring at you with equal parts humor and concern.

You rub at your eyes. “How long have I been asleep?”

“Little over forty minutes. You looked like you needed it.”

“It doesn’t take that long to drive to my place, even with traffic.”

Your brain is moving like molasses, so it takes you a second to catch up with the implication of his statement.

“Did you just… park in front of my house? So I could keep sleeping?”

He just shrugs. “Like I said. You looked like you needed it.”

Embarrassment and a touch of something else floods through your body, hot and cold at the same time.

“Sorry. You didn’t have to wait.”

“If I didn’t want to, I wouldn’t have.”

Still moving slowly, you gather up your bag from where it partially spilled on the floor all over your feet, shoving old receipts and pads and chapstick back in with the reckless abandon of a person who isn’t nearly aware enough of social cues to be in a car alone with their hot boss.

Whilst you're grabbing and shoving, Dr. Abbot reaches into his back seat, rifles around for a bit, and then drops something rather unceremoniously over your head and shoulders. After a quiet “hey” you pull it into your lap, and then that hot feeling is back in full force.

It’s a rain jacket. Clearly Dr. Abbot’s. You can see his name written on the inside pocket. It’s nice too. Definitely not the kind of rain jacket you could afford on an intern’s budget.

“For the next time your car dies,” He clarifies, as if the jacket’s purpose is the thing that’s stupefied you, not the fact that he’s the one giving it to you, “In case of rain.”

“You really don’t have to,” your words are rushed and clunky in your mouth, tumbling over each other in your haste to say something, anything, “I mean, I can just buy my own—“

“First of all,” He cuts you off, voice smooth and rough at the same time, “Do I seem to be the kind of guy in the habit of doing things I don’t want to? And second of all…”

He tilts his head, gaze sharp. “Are you really going to buy one for yourself?”

Your mouth goes dry.

“I was planning on looking online—“

Dr. Abbot interrupts you. “Now you don’t have to.”

Like it’s that easy. Does he want it to be?

“Dr. Abbot, I—“

“Jack.”

His grin goes from mild to shit-eating as you stare at him, obviously radiating confusion.

“Jack,” you start, testing out the name in your mouth, hearing how it sounds in the air. “I can take care of myself. You don’t need to give me your jacket. I’ve been doing just fine on my own.”

“Kid—“

The prickling of perceived weakness makes anger spark in your chest.

“Don’t call me kid like I’m stupid.”

Dr. Abb— Jack seems simultaneously impressed that you interrupted him for a change and vaguely put out.

He holds up a finger, effectively silencing anything else you were thinking of saying.

“I don’t call you kid because I think you’re stupid. I don’t think you’re stupid. You’d know if I thought you were stupid, because I would tell you. ‘Kid’ is a…” He trails off, free hand tapping thoughtful rhythms on the steering wheel, “…Nickname. Term of endearment. Whatever you want to call it, but it’s not derogatory.”

Jack holds up a second finger.

“You have not been taking care of yourself. If you were, you wouldn’t have a low grade fever, and you would’ve called me as your boss or one of your friends to drive you instead of walking after your car died. You’ve been surviving. There’s a difference.”

Shame burns white hot through you— all your recent failings laid out by the person you want least to notice them. Clearly, he has.

Possibly out of pity in response to your no doubt miserable expression, Jack continues.

“Don’t beat yourself up about it. It’d be an honest-to-god miracle if any intern managed to properly take care of themself. Hell, residents don’t do it either, and neither do attendings. Does Robby strike you as the kind of man who takes perfect care of himself?”

“That depends. Is my answer going to make it back to him?”

Jack huffs a quiet laugh. “Exactly. Doctors make the worst patients, in and out of a hospital setting. Knowing better doesn’t actually make us all that inclined to do better. Terrible misconception.”

He nudges the jacket on your lap. “So just take the jacket. One less thing to worry about.”

Emboldened by his recent streak of kindness towards you and the flush of fever running through your veins, you look over to him.

“You worry about me?”

Something dances in his eyes for a split second, gone before you can blink.

“I worry about all the interns and residents on my service, but especially the ones my best friend has taken a liking to.”

Right. Of course. He only cares because of Robby. And Robby only cares so he can add another doctor to the already short-staffed PTMC. It’s not like Jack actually likes you or anything.

You clutch the jacket to your stomach, finally finding the energy to get out of the car. Jack’s car.

“Well. Thanks for the ride, Dr. Abbot. And the jacket.”

“No problem, kid.”

And if later on that evening, in the safety of your tiny apartment, you take in the deep, fresh, almost spicy smell that makes up Jack, lingering on the jacket, that’s no one’s business but yours.

—

From that night on, it feels like Jack Abbot is everywhere.

Whether it’s something he’s doing on purpose or you’ve just developed a heightened sense to his whereabouts— it doesn’t matter. Sometimes it’s a whiff of his cologne (eerily similar to Dior Sauvage, which makes you shudder. Certainly he didn’t choose a cologne similar to the number one male manipulator scent on purpose?) or seeing his handwriting on a whiteboard or his notes in a chart, he’s there.

You’re being scheduled for night shifts fairly regularly now, in addition to the 24-hour shifts you have the pleasure of being put on as an intern.

Working a double isn’t horrific, really. Exhausting, sure, but Robby and Jack’s solid presence makes the shifts more bearable. Plus, you’re quickly becoming friends with the fresher residents, Whitaker and Santos, plus some of the older residents like Mohan and King. Even Dr. Langdon gives pretty solid advice and mentorship, despite the tension in the air whenever he happens to be working with or near Robby.

Normally, 24 hour shifts are grueling, but not impossible. Somewhere around the 15 or 16 hour mark, the sleep deprivation hits, and you can just coast on stress-induced inertia and a healthy does of energy drinks and mania.

Today, though, has been particularly fucking awful. Maybe it’s the fact that the fever never really went away, or the fact that you started your period the day before (being sick on your period should be illegal.) It’s probably both of those things.

But there isn’t really anything to do but grin and bear it. The day will pass, and you have the next two days off anyways. Just survive the next however-many hours of the shift and then you can go home, dress in exclusively fluffy clothes, and binge watch tv whilst eating heart-stopping junk food.

You’re distracted from your charting, propped up on the counter at the nurses station by a light tap on your shoulder and someone saying your name.

Dr. Langdon has sidled up next you, voice hushed.

“Hey, uh. I just wanted to let you know that you seem to have… bled through.”

If a spontaneous earthquake could open a chasm beneath your feet and swallow you whole, now would be the time.

“Fuck fuck-ity fuck fuck,” You mumble, wiping your hands down your face. “Right. Yeah. Of course. Thank you for letting me know.”

In a moment that is as mortifying as it is kind of sweet, Langdon passes you a hoodie that is clearly his.

“To tie around your waist,” He clarifies, holding the object out across the meager space between the two of you, voice a bit awkward and stilted, like you might decide to spit in his face or something.

You don’t actually know what it is that Dr. Langdon did before your arrival that makes the break room go quiet when he walks in (unless Dr. King is there) but you don’t particularly care. If it was truly something horrific that you should be worried about, he wouldn’t be working here. Robby wouldn’t let that kind of thing slide.

So you take the offered hoodie with a strained smile (can this shift just be over) and speed-walk to the break room, praying no one decides to snag you on the way there.

What you should do is go to your locker where your stash of pads, tampons, spare underwear, and extra scrubs are, and then probably the bathroom to get changed, so you can keep on going but you also just saw Dr. King go into the break room and you just really need a hit of her specific brand of optimism.

The woman in question perks up when she notices your arrival, hastily eating the same snack she always eats around this time— a tiny bag of pretzels.

She watches as you collapse into the chair across from her, letting your head thunk onto the table.

“Bad shift?”

“Bad life,” You grumble. “Dr. Langdon had to give me his hoodie to tie around my waist because I bled through onto my scrubs. Like a middle schooler who doesn’t know what pad sizes are for.”

Dr. King nods thoughtfully. “He asked me if it would be weird of him to let you know and offer his hoodie. To which I replied that periods are a normal bodily function and he’s a doctor.”

“Here here,” You half-heartedly cheer, any actual cheer or enthusiasm severely lacking in your voice. “How did you survive your intern year, Dr. King?”

“We’ve been working together for awhile, you can call me Mel,”

She pops another pretzel in her mouth before answering. “But to answer your question, I mostly just kept telling myself that failing wasn’t an option. Which. Probably isn’t helpful, or good advice, but it worked for me. Something that’s nice is if you have a fellow intern or doctor that you enjoy working with. I know the other two interns who matched into the PTMC dropped out of the course, so it’s just you, but you have Dr. Robby, right?”

You nod, picking absently at a spot on the table and ignoring the way that it wasn’t Robby who popped into your head, but Jack.

Your teeny, ignorable crush on him has become a full-blown thing, with semi-weekly dreams about him in various… situations, and casual daydreams at all hours of the day of what it would be like to just be with him, or hear him, in any capacity that couldn’t be qualified as work or a boss checking on his employee. Intern. Whatever.

Hormonal and fever-ish, you suddenly feel like you’re going to explode and die if you don’t have someone to confide in right this very second. You haven’t heard Mel really talk about anyone you work with outside of professional doctor-to-doctor conversation, not even about Dr. Langdon, who she seems almost suspiciously close with.

“Mel,” You start, voice a little too thick and watery to just be talking about your stupid, annoying, one-sided workplace crush, “Can I tell you a secret?”

She seems to consider the pros and cons first, and looks fairly caught off guard, but she answers. “Um. Sure?”

“Have you ever had a crush on a coworker before? Or like, a boss or mentor?”

Mel sets down her bag of pretzels. “Is this about Dr.—“

“I have the biggest crush on Dr. Abbot and I think it’s ruining my life.”

The words burst out of you all at once, and Mel’s expression goes from shocked, to confused, before finally settling in abject amusement.

“Ah,” She says, sliding the pretzels across to you. “Um. Well I personally don’t have a crush on Dr. Abbot, but I think I understand the sentiment.”

You bury your face into your hands and groan. “It’s awful. It’s so cliche. It’s so fucking Grey’s Anatomy.”

“I’ve never actually seen that show. Becca likes it though.”

Mel allows you a few moments of wallowing and pretzel eating before she speaks again.

“Have you… acted on it?”

“No!” You snap your head up. “I mean. No, I haven’t. I’m not naive enough to think that he would reciprocate. He’s an attending and I’m an intern.”

She leans in. “But…?”

“But sometimes… I wonder? I don’t know. I’m probably crazy. He drove me home the other day, cause my car died, and it was raining, and I got slapped by a patient, and that was when I first came down with this stupid fever, and like, that’s normal, right?”

Mel nods. “Fr— Langdon drives me to work when we share shifts, and sometimes when we don’t. I think Dr. Santos and Dr. Whitaker carpool too. So maybe?”

“Right. Yeah.”

She takes the pretzel bag back. “Is there more evidence that makes you feel crazy?”

Your skin flushes hot at the memory alone.

“He gave me his rain jacket. To keep.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

Mel once again takes a few minutes, and the rest of her pretzels before responding.

“I’m honestly not the best person to ask for advice about this. I’ve been told I can be… dense when it comes to romantic endeavors.”

You shrug. “You’re a great listener, and you haven’t steered me wrong in the past.”

She brightens. “That’s good! I think my advice would be to talk to Dr. Mohan. She has experience with your… particular situation.”

Mel tosses the empty pretzel bag and heads toward the door. “I’ll let Robby know you’re taking ten, so don’t worry about someone looking for you while you’re changing.”

“You’re the best. I love you.”

The resident flushes at your gratitude, and then ducks out the door, leaving you alone to stew on her advice.

—

Talking to Dr. Mohan proves difficult, at first. How exactly do you start that conversation? “Hey, I heard you had advice on having a world-ending crush on your boss, got any tips?”

Additionally, she’s kind of hard to track down. You greatly respect Dr. Mohan’s work ethic and truly aspire to her unflinching devotion to patient care at the PTMC.

After a few days (which turns into a few weeks, because you are an emotional coward) of trying (and failing) to find a moment to talk, Dr. Mohan actually ends up finding you.

“Hey!” She jogs up to you as you’re walking to your car, a too-bright smile on her face for the fact that you both just got off a fourteen hour shift.

“Sorry to be that annoying coworker who talks to you in the parking lot, but I wanted to catch you before you left. Mel said you wanted to talk to me?”

“Right!” You stammer, slightly mortified. You admire Dr. Mohan so much and really want her to think you’re capable but you really need some advice on Jack Abbot as a whole, and it sounds like she’s the only expert around. “Yes. That. It’s a really normal question, you know.”

Dr. Mohan just nods, a smile still fixed on her face, like this is a totally normal conversation. “Uh, sure?”

There’s a beat of silence where you both stare at each other, and then she gasps.

“This is about Abbot, isn’t it?”

You groan, throwing your head back in defeat. “Am I that obvious?”

She laughs goodnaturedly. “No. Probably not. You’re just the only intern in the ED right now so I try to make it a habit to keep an eye on you. Plus, Mel is literally the only person in the world who knows about my now-dead crush on him, so. I just connected the dots.”

“He’s so hot, Dr. Mohan. I feel like I’m dying.”

She makes a noise of sympathy. “He is. It’s fucking annoying, at a certain point.”

“Thank you!” You shout, “Like it’s just so there. It should be illegal to just walk around and look like that. I should be focusing on like, studying and learning, but instead I’m just harboring this stupid crush on an attending.”

“Have you ever seen Grey’s—“

“Yes. I know. I can’t be Meredith. Meredith was like, always a mess. Am I a mess?”

Mohan purses her lips. “Well. You did just say you felt like you were dying.”

“I know,” You sigh. “It makes me feel… shallow. I like being a doctor. I was so excited to get matched into the PTMC, and this stupid crush is throwing me off my game.”

“It can’t be that bad.”

“On my first night shift rotation I dropped a scalpel, picked it back up, and then ripped the purse strings on my first appendectomy.”

She winces. “Oh. That’s not… great.”

Your hand finds its way to your comfort necklace. “He found me crying in the supply closet like some medical student, and then he comforted me. It was terrible.”

Mohan starts ambling towards the direction you assume her car is in. “Well, if it’s any consolation, I’ve been caught crying in the supply closet several times. I think it’s a right of passage. And as for that second part…”

She shrugs. “Abbot gives credit where credit is due, but he won’t coddle you. If he actually offered real comfort or advice or whatever, then he meant it.”

“That’s what he said. It just didn’t really help the whole crush-on-him part. And then there was the slapping incident, and he drove me home, and now I have his rain jacket in my backseat in case my car dies again.”

Mohan actually looks taken back.

“Okay. It sounds to me like this is a situation that is in serious need of wine. Do you drink?”

“Whenever I have a spare twenty dollars.”

She grins. “I happen to have a couple bottles at home that might do the trick. Follow me back to my place?”

“Yes please.”

Wine and, eventually, takeout at Samira’s is much more enjoyable than you expected— considering the fact that you’re an intern and she’s a resident. She confides that she doesn’t have very many friends outside of the ED and was excited at the opportunity to have “real girl-time”.

She shares how she weathered her own seemingly life-ending crush on Jack, gasps and screams at the appropriate times when you tell her about the slapping, the events that occurred in the break room afterwards, the drive home, and the jacket.

You leave her apartment feeling lighter than ever. Like life might be worth living. Like you could survive your intern year.

Maybe everything will be okay.

—

Everything is not okay.

You’re now two full weeks into a never-ending fever, you keep getting stuck with shitty shifts (how many times a month can one person possibly be scheduled to work a double?) and top it all off, you’ve been pissed on not once, but twice in the same fucking shift.

Santos snorts when she sees you go by in your third set of scrubs for the day.

“Careful. You’re gonna replace Huckleberry pretty soon.”

You shoot her a look. “Supportive as ever, Dr. Santos.”

“I try.”

You sink into the chair next to hers, taking a moment to press the heels of your hands into your eyes and maybe, like, take a thirty second nap.

It doesn’t help much.

There’s a particular misery in watching the day-shift rotation handoff with the night shift and not being able to join in the process. Because you’re still there. And will be, until you see them again for your handoff, in twelve fucking hours.

Patients tend to get bitchier the later it gets, and it’s one of those nights where every patient bleeds into the next in a never-ending sea of complaints, pain, and fixing.

The fixing is fine. You like the fixing.

You’re just… having a hard time keeping up with everything while the fever perpetually runs you down. It’s the kind of thing where no amount of sleep can help you. Unless it was for 48 hours straight and then you got another 48 hours off after that to relax while you’re awake, and then another 48 hours to be productive.

A vacation. A week off. You’re describing taking a week off work. It’s comical, actually. Imagine requesting a week off from work. Gloria or whoever it is would never grant that. Not as an intern.

You notice Jack lingering around your general vicinity, which is fairly normal on a night like tonight. Technically, as the only intern on shift, you’re the only liability he has to really worry about.

Somewhere around the eighteen hour mark, he slides into the chair next to you while you’re charting.

“You’re flagging.”

Your eyes burn as you tap information into the tablet, then check on the computer in front of you. “I’m fine. I just need a Redbull or something.”

He slides the tablet out of your hands. “Part of being a good doctor is knowing when to take a break. Can’t be a good doctor if you’re falling asleep during the exam, right?”

“I would never fall asleep during an exam.”

He shrugs. “I’ve seen it happen.”

Jack jerks his head towards the break room. “Take five. Get an energy drink or whatever. Then I want you on chairs for at least an hour.”

“Yes sir.”

He rolls his eyes. “Get going.”

Chairs don't prove to be as uneventful as you (and probably Jack) hoped it would be. You get vomited on by a teenage girl, who apologizes profusely when she finally manages to stop throwing up, narrowly avoid a swing from a patient that quickly becomes a behavioral case, and become an unwilling participant in another patient’s doctor fantasy.

Security had to get involved with that last one. It was. Something.

Your shift ends with little fanfare. It’s honestly a miracle you survived. You’re exhausted, achey, and still feverish. The only thing you can think about is crawling into your bed, indulging in a rare expense of turning your heat up, and sleeping until your next shift.

Walking into your apartment ends up being a slap in the face. First of all, it’s fucking freezing. As if you left every single window open while you were gone. Secondly, it’s dark. Like, not even the clock on the microwave is on.

“Fuck,” you mumble under your breath, tears beginning to burn with unshed tears digging through your bag and fumbling with your phone, about to text your landlord when you see that he’s already texted.

Eric (Landlord): Power and AC is down. Might take some time to fix. Power should be back on by tonight.

And that’s just the last straw, really.

You slam the door behind you, not even bothering to go inside your apartment at all, chest tight and face hot, you race down the stairs, trying to find Samira’s contact through blurry eyes. When you think you’ve found it you click call, collapsing on the curb with your body doubled over, crying like a crazy person into your knees, at something like nine in the morning.

The phone rings for a bit, and you’re about to give up when the line finally stops and somebody picks up.

“Hello?”

It’s not Samira who answers. It’s Jack.

You sniffle. “Why are you answering Samira’s phone?”

“I didn’t. I answered my phone. Because you called me. Are you okay?”

“Oh,” You decide to ignore his question, “I meant to call Samira. Sorry.”

“Wait,” Jack’s voice comes out all rough and tinny through the speaker, but even distorted through a phone, you could listen to it for hours, “Answer the question. Are you okay?”

Your bottom lip wobbles dangerously.

“The power’s out in my building. And the heating went out too. My landlord said the power won’t be on until tonight, and I just wanted to go to sleep, but it’s cold and I'm tired and this stupid fever won’t go away.”

“Do you have a place to stay?”

Always a man of action, Jack is.

You shrug, then make a non-committal noise when you remember he can’t see it. “I was supposed to call Samira and see if she’d let me sleep on her couch.”

“I have a guest bedroom.”

The statement hangs in the crisp morning air. You think of Jack’s encouraging advice, Jack’s steady presence, Jack’s warm car and his nice smelling rain- jacket. Jack, Jack, Jack.

“Jack?”

“Yes?”

“What’s your address?”

The drive over involves bawling your eyes out to Vienna by Billy Joel. It’s just that kind of day.

You have no problems finding parking (miraculously) and no one stops you as you head up to Jack’s apartment as directed.

It’s… fancy. Like, polished floor lobby, lounge area adjacent to the front desk fancy.

The actual building itself isn’t very tall, nothing like a skyscraper, so it’s not exactly surprising that Jack’s apartment is the penthouse. It’s just suddenly very awkward standing in front of the door, in the same sweatshirt you’ve had since high school, sweats that have seen better years, looking exactly like the kind of girl who sobbed on the ride over to Billy Joel.

Jack opens the door almost immediately after you knock, and.

If seeing him in scrubs was bad, it doesn’t hold a fucking candle to him in a tight, army green shirt and grey sweatpants. Grey sweatpants. That couldn’t have been intentional, right? Is he online enough to know these things? God.

His features soften when he takes in your tear-streaked face and disheveled appearance.

He makes a low noise in his throat.

“Oh, you poor thing. Come here,”

Jack had actually been gesturing to the apartment, saying ‘come inside’ but the dam breaks the moment he says “poor thing” and you don’t have the wherewithal to think anything more complex than “Jack=Comfort and Safety".

Your bag drops with a dull thud onto the ground and then you’re crashing into him, face pressed into his chest and arms wrapped around his middle. You can barely find it within yourself to be embarrassed.

Jack doesn’t react at first, going completely stiff in your hold, and you think maybe you’ve gone and fucked this up too, like everything good in your life, but right when you move to pull away a hand finds its way to the back of your head, and another rubs circles on your back.

“Poor girl,” he murmurs, voice a soothing rumble with your ear close to his chest, “They been running you ragged?”

You nod uselessly, feeling raw and cut open— like you’ve been smashed against a rock and everything you keep tucked inside is spilling out and you can’t stop it.

“I’m so tired.” You half-mumble-half-sob into him, a sentiment that feels too light to convey everything that’s happened since you became an intern at the PTMC, and everything else you don’t talk about that happened before.

“I know sweetheart, I know,” Jack is solid beneath your cheek and arms, a lifeboat in a storm. “How about we get you inside and get you warm, huh? That sound nice?”

At the promise of warmth you finally detach from him, shame burning through you when you eye the wet spot on his shirt.

“Sorry,” You say, voice barely above a whisper. “I think I got snot on your shirt.”

“Trust me kid, it’s seen worse.”

He grabs your bag before you can even make a move for it, and you trail behind him into his apartment, attempting to ground yourself by looking around his apartment.

It’s nice. Lived in, not sterile. It doesn’t, actually, look the inside of a dentist’s office, like you were half expecting. Most new apartments have that doctor’s office lobby feel. Not exactly comfortable when you’re a doctor and the goal of home is to not remind you of your job.

Jack hangs your bag on a hook by the door, right next to his own. Something twinges in your chest at the sight.

There’s a feeling under your skin you can’t place as you shuffle into his apartment, something warm and skittish that aches for this to not be a one time thing, to be able to compare the pale morning light you’re watching now to late afternoon sun. To know where he keeps his mugs, what drawer the silverware is in, if he’s got a junk drawer with random shit in it, and what the random shit is. What it feels like to be in his kitchen, shoulders brushing.

But that’s a lot of complicated things to name or voice just past the threshold of the foyer, so you wrap your arms around yourself and toe your shoes off, then pad quietly after him.

Jack is— inviting, or maybe enticing; all those words that beckon the skittish thing closer and it feels just on the tip of danger to obediently sit on the couch he ushers you to.

“By the way,” Jack says somewhere behind you, maybe in the kitchen? “I have a cat. His name is Charlie. He probably won’t come near you, but be warned, he’s an asshole when he wants to be.”

“Oh, that’s fine. I like cats. Especially the asshole ones.”

“That explains a lot of things.”

His statement is kind of loaded, chock full of subtext you don’t care to parse through at the moment.

“Um,” You start, feeling a bit unsteady, “Is— Do you mind if I shower? I kind of smell gross probably, and I feel… grimy. Your apartment seems clean and I’d hate to get my hospital grime on anything.”

Jack just chuckles. “One, I wouldn’t care if you got ‘hospital grime’ on anything because that would be a very hypocritical thing to care about, and two, of course you can shower. Do you have spare clothes?”

“I might’ve forgotten to grab those.”

Another huffy laugh. “That’s fine. You can borrow some of mine. I’ll leave them on the bed.”

That’s like. Wow. Yeah. You’re just gonna borrow some clothes from him. From Jack. You’re going to shower in Jack’s shower and use whatever bodywash he has (hopefully not 5-in-one) and then put on his clothes and you are totally capable of being Completely Normal about these things.

“I already started on dinner when you said you were coming over. Should be done by the time you get out of the shower. Chicken noodle okay?”

Damn Jack Abbot and damn your shitty emotional regulation and damn your life for putting you in these situations.

“Yeah,” You croak, thinking about things like soup and family and being cold and strong and alone, “Yeah that’s fine. Thank you.”

Jack politely does not comment on the fact that soup is reducing you to a tangled heap of emotions and tears, and instead directs you to where his shower is and says to use whatever you want and take however long you want. He says want, not need. You’re not sure if there’s an intention behind the word choice.

Once in the shower, you allow yourself time to cry, to feel awful and self-pitying and all those things that are terrible to go through in front of another person. His shower is expensive and the water is warm and he does not have 5-in-one. There’s a litter box nestled next to the toilet, and it’s not funny, but it kind of is, because Jack would be the kind of guy to look at a litter box and put it right next to the toilet. Everything in its place.

Maybe that’s your problem. You haven’t felt like anything is in the right place in years.

You want to stay in the shower, in the bubble of protection it provides, but the idea of running up Jack’s water bill is enough to guilt you into getting out. You shiver, dry, aggressively attempt to make yourself look less like a wreck at the sink, and then tip-toe into the attached bedroom and carefully pull on the clothes Jack left for you on the bed; a faded, oversized college shirt, and a comfy pair of sweatpants.

They smell like him. You smell like him, like his body wash. The house smells like him. Everything you take in is a pleasant assault of Jack, Jack, Jack.

Enough guilt to fuel an entire room of ex-Catholic’s is the only thing keeping you from snooping around his room. The idea of stumbling upon something private or hidden away makes you feel slimy and gross, so you exit the bedroom and pretend like you don’t feel like a foster dog on its first night home from the shelter.

(Do shelter dogs miss the shelter? Do they miss its familiarity? Do dogs miss anything at all?)

The apartment smells of more spices and good smelling food than you privately thought Jack capable of. You’d read him as the kind of guy to subsist on takeout and maybe like, protein bars. But he’s dutifully stirring a metal pot with all the diligence of the military man that he once was.

Quietly, as if he might throw the wooden spoon he’s stirring with if you make too much noise or take up too much space, you carefully pull out a barstool in front of his kitchen island, the one closest to the door, and haul yourself onto it.

He gives you an examining glance over his shoulder, turns a knob on the stove, then rests his forearms on the island counter across from you. His rather delicious looking forearms, you might add.

“Feeling better after your shower?”

You hum an affirmation, folding your arms and resting your chin on them.

“Isn’t it kind of weird to make soup for breakfast?”

He shrugs. “It’s dinner for us. Or, well, me. I’m not sure your body knows what meal it is.”

He taps a pointer finger rhythmically on the counter. “Any word from your landlord?”

“No. Sorry for… all of this. I know you’re tired.”

“I wish you’d stop apologizing for things I don’t mind doing for you.”

You don’t really know how to respond to that, or what to do with how it makes you feel, so you elect to save it for later. Good at compartmentalizing, ED doctors are.

You clear your throat. “I can call Samira whenever. She’d probably be excited to have girl time. So you know. Don’t feel like— I have other options. If or when you want me to leave.”

“Do you want to leave?”

You wish he’d stop asking questions you don’t want to answer.

You try to play it off, smother your fear and exhaustion with humor. Robby’s kid, through and through.

“Well, I can’t have you getting sick of me. You’re the only person I know who has a very rob-able house if this whole internship doesn’t pan out.”

Jack straightens, shoulders pulling and flexing. “Who said I’d get sick of you? Maybe I like the idea of you in my house.”

“Do you?”

You ask the question before you’re aware of how terrified you are of the answer. But you’ve already said it, and it feels nice to be the one asking the hard question instead.

Jack, likely experienced in this sort of thing, doesn’t look outwardly bothered by it, but he gets a sort-of-sad look on his face, almost like he’s disappointed that you had to ask.

“Have I given you any reason to think otherwise?”

“I don’t know,” You look down, picking at a hangnail to avoid his expression and his eyes and his everything, “I don’t want to assume anything.”

“You’ve already assumed quite a bit.”

You scrunch your face. “That’s different. Those are safe assumptions.”

“Are they?”

“Obviously, it’s safer to assume that you don’t want me to stay here, or at least not for very long, because if I assume that I do I’ll bother you and I want you to—“

You cut yourself off, jaw shutting with a firm click, but the end of the sentence hangs in the air unspoken anyways. It’s not hard to figure out what you were going to say.

I want you to like me.

Jack sighs, and alarm blares are going off in your head and your chest starts to feel tight and cold despite the warmth of his apartment, and then he’s rounding the island and you turn your body to follow him —never turn you back, never let your guard down— and then he’s standing in front of you, over you, and you’re not sure if you want to run or metaphorically curl up at his feet, tail tucked.

It’s pathetic. It’s embarrassing. It’s impossible to ignore.

(What does a shelter dog think, on that first night? Do they hope? Do dogs hope?)

He raises a hand, slowly, giving you a chance to lean away, and when you don’t, it comes to rest on the side of your face, his thumb swiping at the barely-there wetness from earlier tears.

It’s cleaning the cut from the slap, it’s a kindness you can curl into, and it might be a threat. Might be bad, might turn harsh and painful, might leave without a word.

Unlike that day in the break room, there’s no fluorescent lights to suck any heat out of the room and no gloves as a barrier; as a reminder of who he is, of what you are, of how things work.

It’s just you and Jack, in Jack’s apartment, wearing Jack’s clothes, and pretty soon you’re going to eat food that Jack made. Just for you.

And you think maybe, possibly, if he stops here you could kind of hold onto this moment for the rest of your life and it would get you through being alive and strong and alone, and you’d make it through this, whatever this is, if he stops here.

He doesn’t. He starts talking.

“I like knowing that you’re safe. That you’re taken care of. I like knowing with certainty that these things are true because I’m the one making sure of it.”

Your breath hitches in your chest.

“That’s kind of a lot of work, though.”

He hums. “It is. Luckily, I just so happen to be a pretty hard worker.”

Everything about the current situation is a lot and your nerves are over-taxed and dialed up to hundred, so it’s not surprising that you start crying again.

Jack brings up a second hand to the other side of your face and gently wipes away the tears as they come. It feels sort of like the physical version of everything he’s been doing for you since that day in the supply closet.

“You don’t have to do anything, or say anything, or make any kind of decision right now, okay? We can do whatever you want. I’ll do whatever you want.”

There’s the word choice again; want, not need. Is there a difference? What does the difference mean to him? What does he mean? Why is he doing any of this?

Jack's phone goes off in his pocket, and he steps back, drops his hands, and goes back to the stove.

Jack said you don’t have to make a decision right now, but you kind of feel like if you don’t do something you’re going to be sick with everything that’s swirling and clawing inside you, threatening to burst. Like the very essence of you is going to explode, and your soul will be painted on Jack’s perfectly decorated walls.

That would be something, wouldn’t it.

You stay seated at the island, turning to stare at Jack’s back while he adds the final touches to the soup. He doesn’t talk anymore, but he keeps looking back every few minutes, like he’s making sure you’re still there.

Eventually Jack turns the stove off, dishes up a bowl of soup for you, and sets it gently in front of you. He uses his pinky to cushion the placing of the bowl, so there’s no loud clinking noise when he sets the bowl down.

There’s a tiny sprig of parsley on top of the soup, right in the center. Like a Panera ad for soup in September.

You start crying again, in earnest.

“I’m sorry,” You gasp, pressing the heels of your hands into your eyes. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m— I don’t know. I don’t know.”

You’re hoping the last sentence encompasses an entire lifetime of events, accidents, mistakes, and memories that have never been able to find a place in your head except dead center, at the forefront of your mind at all times, stamped on your forehead for anyone with eyes to see.

Your life hasn’t been wants or choices for a very long time. And here Jack is, giving you an array of both, and saying things like he wants you to want.

“I’ll do whatever you want.”

“Hey, hey hey hey, shhh,” Strong arms wrap around you, tucking your head into a warm chest, effectively shutting off all sensory input that isn’t Jack. “You’re okay, you’re safe, you’re okay, I got you.”

He rubs circles into your back, then switches to tracing shapes, and he lets you cry into him again and he doesn’t tell you to stop, or to calm down, or you’re being too much too fast.

“You’re okay, you’re gonna be okay sweetheart. Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

—

You, embarrassingly, fall asleep right there, sitting at the kitchen island over a bowl of soup and twenty-something years of holding up your life with hands that never quite seemed big enough to do it.

You wake up in Jack’s bed, his comforter pulled up to your chin and the clock at the bedside table reading 8:17 p.m. There’s the muffled sound of several voices coming from beyond the door.

Holy shit. What the fuck.

Deciding to ignore the implication that Jack carried you to bed, you mentally take stock of what’s around you.

In front of the clock is your phone (plugged in to charge), a glass of water, and a note with Jack’s handwriting on it.

Kid-

I’ll probably be in the ED for the night shift by the time you wake up. I called Mohan (who called Mel, who was with Langdon, for reasons unknown) to go to your place and grab you some things. There may be people in the apartment when you wake up. You are in no way obligated to interact with them. They have to leave eventually.

Charlie is in the room with you because he hates strangers, but he probably won’t leave the bathroom. Probably. Drink water and eat something, if you can. Text me if you need anything.

The voices beyond the door are, more than likely, the aforementioned individuals who have now seen the glorified closet you call home. It’s not ideal, but you’re wrung out and don’t have the energy to really care. Besides, Samira and Mel are too nice to judge you that hard (you hope) and from what you’ve heard, Langdon isn’t really in a place to say anything.

On one hand, going out there requires socializing. Which, ew. On the other hand, Samira and Mel are the best. Langdon is maybe okay.

Before you can talk yourself out of it, you shuffle out of bed and then continue shuffling to the door, hoping that whatever you look like isn’t too terribly awful.

Samira, Mel, and Langdon are standing around the kitchen island, various takeout containers and bottles of alcohol littering the space. For some reason, Trinity, Dennis, and Robby are also present.

Samira and Langdon are engaged in what looks to be a rather animated discussion-slash-argument, and Mel is standing just a little closer to Langdon than what could be considered normal for friends. Trinity is very obviously ignoring Langdon’s general existence, bickering with Dennis on the couch, and Robby is seated in the armchair by the window, nursing a beer and watching both conversations unfold.

You sniff aggressively, and all heads snap to you.

“There are more of you here then there’s supposed to be,” You grumble, scrubbing at your face. “Why are you all here?”

Mel is the first to speak.

“It was Frank actually!” Trinity rolls her eyes, and part of you wants to share the sentiment, “He figured Trinity would be upset that something happened to you and he knew and didn’t tell her, so Trinity decided that me and Samira would get your stuff while everyone else stayed here in case you woke up before we came back!”

Wow, okay, that’s. A Lot.

You squint. “That doesn’t explain why you’re all here. I mean it does, but only like, why you’re here physically.”

Robby frowns. “We heard that you were going through a rough time and you had to stay with Jack, so we came.”

Trinity snorts on the couch and Dennis, next to her, looks like he’s about to have an aneurysm.

Robby shoots her a look, but continues. “We care about you. We— I don’t want you to feel like you have to do everything on your own. In or out of the ED.”

Trinity blows out a loud sigh and low whistle. “Jee-zus Robby, give the woman some time to wake up before trying to induce tears again.”

Robby does look a little apologetic, maybe a teensy bit chastised (and annoyed that Trinity was the one doing the chastising) and turns his deep brown eyes back to you.

"Sorry. Can't help these Dad tendencies, you know."

Your face gets hot, maybe a tiny, wet prickle behind your eyes forms while Robby smiles, and the tension leaves the room all in one go, and you start to think that maybe things are in the right place.

–

At the ED, Jack Abbot, who's been checking his phone whenever he gets a free moment like a highschooler with a crush, opens the first text that pops up on his screen after hours of waiting.

It's a picture from Robby. You, with your head thrown back in a cackle of a laugh, not a single bit of stress evident in any of the lines of your body. There's one text accompanying the picture:

Please don't make me give you a shovel talk. I think you already know what's at stake here.

Jack snorts and pockets his phone, because yeah, he does.

–

When Jack finally gets back to his apartment, he's half-expecting to see the kind of mess that a large grouping of obnoxious people leave behind. Trash, maybe a few red solo cups, empty takeout containers, someone asleep on his couch, someone passed out on the floor.

He's not expecting to see a clean space. The only evidence that people were there at all is some rearranged pillows, a half-empty bottle of wine on the counter, and some new takeout menus on his fridge.

And then there's you. You're lying on the couch, eyes glued to the TV, watching a show he doesn't really recognize. There's a well-loved backpack on the floor, just under the coffee table. The shocking bit is Charlie, his resident asshole, is 'loafing' right on your chest, purring away.

You lift your head when you hear the jingle of his keys, a smile immediately brightening your face. He mentally takes a picture, right there, so he can remember this exact moment forever.

"What'd you bribe him with?" Jack says instead of something much more neurotic, like 'You don't have to go back to your place when the power comes back on.'

You shrug, unaware of his emotional and romantic pain. "You were right. He came out from under the bed after everybody left. He kind of growled at me for a little bit, but once I settled down here he just kind of... came right up."

You plant a little kiss to the top of his head, right in between furry ears. Great, now Jack's jealous of a senior cat with one ear who licks his own butt. "How could I resist this face? I see why you brought him home."

Jack rounds the end of the couch, shuffling by, and Charlie opens his eyes just enough to shoot him a look that Jack takes to mean: If you make her get up and move me, I will kill you in your sleep.

Jack does not disturb his cat as he sits down on the couch. There's a moment when things almost get hairy- you pull your legs back when he goes to sit, slightly jostling The Asshole, who pins his only ear back in annoyance.

Jack solves this problem by taking your legs, clad in some soft flannel pajama pants and pink fuzzy socks, and lays them across his lap. There. Problem solved.

The warmth of your legs on his lap and the look on your face is reward enough for him. He can't think of a way he'd rather spend his time.

Jack, in a rare show of mercy, does not tease you, and decides that you've probably had enough excitement for one day.

"So," He says instead, looking up at the TV and grimacing at the mutilated corpse on the screen, "What are we watching?"

He watches you shrink into yourself. He hates it when you do that. He hates that you feel like you have to.

"Uh, Bones. I can turn it off, though. I'm sure you don't want to watch this."

He doesn't answer the question you've not-subtly voiced, instead choosing to redirect the conversation.

"Why did you put it on?"

You start chewing on your lower lip. Your signature 'I don't want to answer this question so I'm going to think really hard about it' move.

"It's kind of my comfort show? I don't know. I watched it a lot growing up. We didn't have cable, but the hotels I stayed at sometimes did. I'd wait until my dad fell asleep and then I'd turn on the TV and watch from the sci-fi or drama channels. Watched a lot of Bones. Supernatural too, and sometimes Doctor Who, if it was on. But Bones was my favorite."

The characters on the screen are involved in some sort of car chase now, police siren flashing on a black SUV. Jack isn't paying attention to that at all, because this is the first time since the day you walked into the PTMC and introduced yourself that he's ever heard you talk about your childhood.

"How come?"

"I don't know. I've always liked procedural shows. Had a huge House MD phase. Death and bones and corpses and stuff has never really grossed me out, which is part of the reason I became a doctor. But also..."

You point to the male character. "You see him? That's Booth. Seeley Booth. They all have kind of crazy names. He's an FBI agent, and his partner is that woman there. Temperance Brennan. Booth calls her Bones."

"She doesn't look like an FBI agent."

You smile. "She's not. She's a forensic anthropologist, but she consults on murder cases and stuff like that because she's kind of a genius. She's smart, strong, and capable. She and Booth don't always get along, because they both can be headstrong and stubborn. But he respects and trusts her, implicitly. No matter what. They love each other."

Your throat bobs, but your voice is steady when you speak.

"And when Brennan needs him, if she's in trouble or she needs him by her side, even if she doesn't know she does, he's always there. He always saves her."

Jack can picture it, in his mind. You, small and alone, watching these characters on some shitty hotel TV and getting it into your head that this kind of thing only exists in TV shows. He pictures you dreaming of having a Booth, of having someone to be there for you, to pick you up when you fall. He thinks of you crying in the supply closet and how quietly you'd done it. Almost silent.

He thinks of what happens to a person to make them learn how to cry without making a sound.

He rests a hand on your ankle, fingers instinctively drifting towards the pulse point there- posterior tibial. He keeps two fingers on it, even though he can't feel it through your fuzzy socks. With his thumb he makes circles, because he's seen how you lean into Robby's shoulder grabs, how you preen at physical and verbal praise, how you'd slumped like a marionette with its strings cut into his arms just yesterday.

"Jack?" Your voice is tentative, unsure.

"Hmm?"

"Am I..." You start chewing your lip again, "Are you— I don't to assume anything. So if I fuck this up and make you uncomfortable—"

"I want to kiss you."

Jack has learned how to speak fluent you. He knows how to stop an incoming spiral, how to soothe old wounds rearing their heads.

He continues when you don't speak.

"I want you to wear my clothes. I want to take care of you. I want you, in whatever way you'll let me."

"Oh."

"I was laying it on pretty thick, kid."

You look away from him, and this is another moment he'd like to keep forever.

"I thought I was just reading into things!"

"Do you think I call every intern sweetheart?"

Jack is positive Charlie's presence on your stomach is the only thing keeping you from actively squirming in place.

"I thought maybe you were just one of those guys. Samira said it was possible!"

He rolls his eyes. "You can't ask Mohan for romantic advice. She's you in a different font."

"I'm going to take that as a compliment."

You turn back to your show, losing yourself in the plot for a while. When the murderer has been caught and the credits are playing, you look at him again.

"We don't. Um. Can we just keep doing this? For now?"

For the first time since meeting you, Jack gets to say exactly what he's thinking.

"We can do this forever. We can do whatever you want."

۫ ꣑ৎ

[hollis-art]

he's on his way to go make wilson's day significantly worse <3

[sweetttsummer]

exposure therapy

clark kent x gn!reader

(i think this might be gender neutral reader, but i could be wrong. pls correct me if i am)

summary: touch is something you're not use to, clark takes it personally. but he's a problem solver at his core. aka, you're slightly touch starved and clark is worried that he's being overbearing. (he's not)

wc: 2.1k

tw: nah. this is low-key fluff. but no beta reader so maybe typos!

author's note: uhhhh, i'm not touch starved. the idea of a clark kent putting his hands on me just makes me wanna run to the hills in case i want it even more.

have a request? ask away!

"Why do you do that?" Clark finally huffs childishly. The sound causes you to look up and furrow your eyebrows a little. 

"Do what?" You hum a little. Clark's hand comes up your arm and stops against your cheek. It makes you clench your jaw just a little. 

Clark is pretty sure you like him. You had said yes to a date. You had kept saying yes. And maybe he cheated a little when he started to doubt it. Your heartbeat was racing sure, but that didn't mean you were lying. Still, every time he touches you, you tense, even flinched a few times. He thought maybe he was doing that so called eerie thing where he moves without making a sound, but even when you saw him coming, you tensed. 

He watches as your jaw clenches, his thumb lightly swiping against your cheek. He can't help but hear your heart beat a little harder, like you're nervous, like you don't want him to touch you. But you don't pull away, don't ask him to not touch you. Just tense, almost freeze. 

"That!" Clark whines a little and pulls his hand away, "You just," Clark rubs his hand over his face. 

You let out a small startled laugh. Obviously Clark has lost his mind. You pat his forearm and pull away, making your way towards the dining table where Clark had dropped the takeout he picked up. 

Clark watches from his spot as you pull out the boxes of food, stopping when you notice one is your favorite from the restaurant. You pop the top open and take a moment to nod to yourself when you notice the lack of bell peppers. Clark lets himself think over the situation. Maybe you just don't like being touched, it makes him want to crawl into a hole and die at the idea of not being able to touch you. But if you don't like it, he'll learn. He'll figure out how to show you he cares in a different way. You're worth that. And anyways, that's what the start of relationships are for, learning each other. Your voice pulls him out of his own problem solving. 

"Thank you for picking up dinner, I know I said I'd cook but work was.."You turn a little as Clark approaches you. 

"Busy, yeah, not a problem." He finishes your sentence a little quickly. The boxes of food are half way out of the bag, but you're focused on the way he seems to be boxing you in at the table. 

You feel your palms start to sweat just a bit and you clench your fingers into the palm of your hand, focus on not reaching out to Clark. Clark catches the smallest hitch of your breath when he rests his hands on each side of you, against the table. It goes against his own nature to not grab you by the waist and pull you closer, but maybe it'll eventually go away. 

"Can I kiss you, honey?" He asks softly. You nod before he can even finish the question. It's the only permission he needs to lean forward and press his lips against yours. His hands stay on the table, despite the burn in his chest. You hum a little against his lips and Clark realizes you don't seem to mind this. He can live with just being able to kiss you. At least that's what he tells himself, as he runs his tongue against the bottom of your lip. 

You move when you realize he's still boxing you in, he feels so close, but you don't actually feel him anywhere else besides against your lips. It's strange, you had learnt fairly quickly that Clark kisses with his whole body, like it's not enough to have your lips on his. You press a small final kiss against his lips before taking back your lips. 

"Leaving room for Jesus?" You joke a little and glance at the space between you both, his hands against the table. When you look back up, you're met with Clark's blue eyes trying to catch your gaze. His mouth forms a pout that has you furrowing your brows. Your eyes lock onto his gaze and wait to see who'll break first. 

"You tense when I touch you," Clark finally sighs out. It makes your heart drop, you didn't think he noticed, or at least didn't think he cared about it enough to let himself worry over it. 

It's second nature to cringe into yourself, pull your hands into each other and tear your gaze away from his. Clark takes it as rejection and slowly pulls his hands away from the table, giving you a way out of the box he had crafted around you. Your hand shoots out without thinking, reaching out to pull him back in. Before you can touch him, you find yourself and drop your hand. Still, the motion is enough to have Clark pausing, hands half way to his side frozen. 

"If you're uncomfortable, just tell me, I can handle it" Clark says a little sheepishly. 

You're shaking your head as he speaks, once the pieces all start to fall into place. The careful way he's been reaching out to you lately, how he had been asking before kissing you, god last week he had asked if it was okay if he held your hand. It makes you close your eyes a little and lean your head back thinking about how silly you feel. Clark takes the chance to let his eyes trail down your exposed neck. He wants to lean in a little, wants to press his nose against the soft warm skin below your jawline, but instead he just comes back to boxing you in at the table. He might be able to hold back actually touching you, but being this close is starting to feel like oxygen to him. 

You pull your head back and notice the way his eyes are trailing down your neck, eyeing your sternum. His gaze makes a warmth spread through your belly, nerves twisting in your chest. It's overwhelming and he's not even touching you. 

"'m not uncomfortable when you touch me," You're not sure why you're whispering, "I like when you touch me," Clark's eyes meet yours and you see the smirk he's holding back, "Any way you touch me," You crinkle your nose as little at the heat you feel in your cheeks. 

"I like doing it," Clark responses, matching your soft tone. His words make you laugh without meaning to and he drops his head a little at how it sounded, "I like touching you," He grimaces a little when he realizes that doesn't sound any better. Before he can keep going you stop, stepping the slightly bit forward and putting your hands on his shoulders. It's a little awkward with how tall he is, but it makes him move immediately, putting his hands on your waist. Your breath hitches without you meaning to, and you feel yourself tense a little. 

"Don't like that," Clark sighs, letting you know he had noticed the slightest movement. You take the nervous feeling and do your best to shove it away. Your hand comes up from his shoulder, tracking its way up his neck and you hold his cheek for a moment. Try to ignore the way Clark presses his cheek against your palm. Clark's thumb moves across your waist, a light back and forth over your shirt. 

"I'm just not use to it," You whisper again and let your thumb start to follow the same pattern against his cheek. Clark's gaze keeps locked on yours, waits for you to keep forming your thought. 

"You've met my friends, they aren't," You pause and reach your other hand down to grab Clark's off your waist, "They aren't touchy. My family wasn't huggers growing up. I've just never been someone who people touch, but I like it. And you're just so," You pause. 

You let your fingers intertwine with his, feel the nerves in your finger fire up at the warmth of his palm. He presses a little closer, the hand against your waist squeezes a little, as if to warn you he was getting closer. 

"Handsome?" Clark jokes a little, an obvious out to any serious conversation if you'd like. His eyes glimmer a little and he moves just enough to press a kiss against the palm of your hand. You can't help but scoff a little, you pull your fingers apart from his and pat his chest a little. 

"Overwhelming" You tease, it makes him stiffen just the tiniest bit. "Good overwhelming Clark," You clarify when you realize how he could take the comment. Clark's shuffles just enough for you to catch the questions he has written across his face.

"I still feel you even when you aren't touching me. It makes my heart race and I get," You groan a little at how vulnerable your words feel, "I like it too much, it's never enough and somehow it's too much. I just get overwhelmed with how nice it is, and you do it so freely." 

Clark doesn't say anything, instead reaches up and grabs your hand off his cheek. He takes his hand off your waist and has both his hands engulfing your one. He's pulled back enough that you can let out a small breath of both relief and disappoint. 

"Just have to get use to it, huh?" Clark mumbles a little. You nod. For a moment, you're worried you had ruined it. That maybe Clark realized you weren't worth this effort. Maybe you should have pulled him closer to enjoy the feeling once more. 

"Exposure therapy probably would be the best course of action," You joke a little, an attempt to reach out without being too obvious. Clark picks up the thread immediately and before you can apologize, or beg for him to not let this ruin anything, he's pulling you into his chest by the hand he's still holding. 

"Probably best the exposure therapy is done by the same person, consistency is important," Clark hums a little and moves slower than you're use to when he starts to pull you into a full hug. You hum in response and ignore the way your heart picks up again, a light shiver threatens your spine. You find yourself wrapping your arms back around his upper body. 

Clark debates his next step for just a moment, and lands on believing you. You said you liked it, so much so it's overwhelming. That has to be good, even if overwhelming feels like a bad word. He tries not to doubt himself too much when he lets his hand pull your shirt up enough to slip his hand under it and he's pressing his large palm against your lower back. 

His hand is warm against you, the skin to skin enough to make you tense just the slightest. Clark moves a little, panic lurks in your stomach and you tighten your own grip, afraid he misunderstood what you've been saying. Clark hums a little at your grip continues his movement, it leaves him practically draped over you. He's warm and when you feel him get closer you let your breathing shutter a little. 

It's easier to read the enjoyment in your movement now that Clark can look for it. The way you seem to be pulling him closer even slightly, the goosebump he feels when he pulls his hand up and down your back. 

"Thought maybe you weren't sure how to tell me to stop," Clark says softly. 

When you go to respond you feel him nose at the side of your face and you move without any real thought, tilting your head just enough to have him tucking his face into the crook of your neck. His breath is hot and it makes you shiver when you feel his nose nudge against your jaw. You tighten your grip around him and if you had to guess, Clark is smiling against your skin. It grows wider when he realizes your heart is racing, and he doesn't have to worry about it being a bad sign. 

"Your heart is racing" Clark's words are felt against your neck and you feel the goosebumps raise across your skin. It's not a question, but maybe he can feel your pulse, still you confirm. 

"Yeah, little overwhelmed," You say a little breathless. A giggle slips out when you feel his lips ghost a kiss over your skin. 

"We'll work on it," Clark hums a little. He presses a solid kiss against the juncture of your shoulder and neck and pulls himself slowly off yourself. His hand still resting on the small of your back. You heart beats inside your own ears. Clark smiles a little wider at you.

[irondive]

this keto shit easy