Summary: A code black leaves you trapped inside the Pitt with an unstable explosive and Jack helplessly watching from the other side of the glass. With neither of you knowing how the night will end, the feelings you have both been avoiding become impossible to ignore.
Pairing: Dr Jack Abbott x F!Reader
Warnings: Bomb and explosive threat, blast injuries, blood and medical gore, serious injuries, emergency medical procedures, hospital evacuation, near-death situations, panic and anxiety, emotional distress, trauma and its aftermath, protective Jack, angst and hurt/comfort.
Warnings vary between parts. Please read the individual warnings included at the beginning of each chapter.
you're proactively planning your fertility like a responsible med student. dr. abbot, however, would greatly prefer you planned literally anything else.
pairing: jack abbot x angel reader
warnings: just a short lil drabble, fluff, anxiety and overthinking, age gap mentioned, reader is twenty something, reader is a med student, mentions of fertility, flirting in the workplace, implied sexual content, questionable reproductive proposals, basically just angel reader asking abbot to be her baby daddy
wc: 0.5k
“— and it’s not even like she means to do it, you know? Like she calls and it starts normal, totally normal, we’re talking about groceries or whatever, and then BAM, like clockwork, it’s ‘so how are your evaluations going’ and ‘have you thought about residency yet’ and I’m just sitting there like… yeah, mom, funny you mention it, I think about it all the time, constantly, obsessively, in a way that is probably not healthy for my long-term psychological stability.”
You cast a sidelong glance at Dr. Abbot, brows arched expectantly, silently imploring him to jump in and extinguish the slow, smoldering anxiety that has spontaneously combusted in your mind and body and soul.
He doesn’t bite.
Instead, he offers you his trademark stoic gaze, effectively deflating your balloon of expectation on impact.
“Your evaluations will be fine,” he says shortly. “You’ll match. Now type, please.”
“Sorry, charting, right. Doing that now,” you mumble, snapping dutifully back to the glowing screen like a golden retriever who briefly forgot what sit meant.
Your fingers move with genuine, industrious purpose for approximately three whole seconds before inevitably, you’re speaking again.
“But, then she mentions marriage and having children, multiple children, as if one isn’t intimidating enough, because why wouldn’t she? Perfect natural segue. And now all I can think about is this random fertility rabbit hole I fell into afterward. Which, by the way, was a lot. That was a lot of information. Like I’m literally sitting here as we speak, losing eggs by the second, practically fossilizing before your very eyes.”
You hear him release a short huff of air. Can picture him pressing his forefinger into the space between his browsz
“Kid, you’re — what, all of twenty-something?”
You wave a dismissive hand, not looking up. “Twenty-something with eggs dropping like New Year’s confetti at midnight. Tick tock.”
“You’re not even close to egg depletion,” he says dryly, nudging your chair slightly with his foot. “Trust your attending on this.”
You roll your eyes, immensely grateful he can’t see your face.
“Easy for you to say. Your biology lets you remain fertile until, like, the heat death of the universe.”
“Wasn’t aware you’d taken such a keen interest in my reproductive potential.”
You swivel around in your chair without warning, knees knocking lightly into the desk as you tip your chin up at him.
“Well, listen, I was actually thinking that if I hit a certain age and still have no romantic prospects, we could make a pact,” you muse. “You generously contribute your objectively excellent genetic blueprint, I carry the resulting small human. Voila, instant legacy preserved. It's a win-win.”
The words have barely left your lips when Abbot nearly sputters coffee all over his pressed white coat. His hand shoots up swiftly, coughing discreetly as his gaze flicks sharply, incredulously, up at you.
“Jesus — at least give me a heads-up before you proposition me for genetic samples,” he mutters under his breath, eyeing you cautiously now, like you’re a lab specimen who’s suddenly started speaking fluent Latin.
You gasp, pulling a hand to your chest. “Dr. Abbot, please — I was referring exclusively to a very professional sperm donation arrangement. Entirely above board, paperwork involved, sterile conditions, the whole thing.”
“Of course,” he drawls, skepticism coloring his voice. “Nothing questionable about that.”
“It’s all part of my incredibly thorough contingency plan. That I created last night,” you assure him, nodding fervently. “Proactive and forward-thinking, exactly the qualities you’re always nagging me to develop. See? I listen.”
“That’s not what I meant,” he says, fixing you with a stern, pensive look. “Face the screen.”
You obediently face the screen, fingers tapping out a half-hearted sentence once again, before your curiosity inevitably gets the best of you again, eyes flicking over your should to peer at him through lowered lashes.
“Not hearing a hard no,” you hum.
“It is a hard no,” he starts, leaning in to talk against your ear, “because If I decide to help you out with that particular problem, it’s going to be the old-fashioned way.”
He straightens smoothly, unbothered as he walks away, leaving your heart stumbling over itself in dizzy little circles.
Synopsis: A new night nurse starts in the pitt and Jack takes an instant interest in her, not in a good way.
Warnings: mean jack, age gap, reader is mid to late 20s, sunshine reader, shy reader, anxious reader, eventual smut, smut, 18+, MDNI, angst, fighting, slow burn, co-workers to enemies, enemies to lovers, blood, gore, medical inaccuracies, pittfest, panic attacks, mentions of suicide, PTSD, grief, widower jack, mentions of past military trauma, violence against medical staff, reader is described to be shorter than Jack, reader has hair past shoulders.
🦋 - fluff
🌧️ - angst
🔥 - smut
Can be read as individual, standalone blurbs, but will be written with a timeline in mind.
Find My Pitt Masterlist here
Jack could be relentless when it came to stirring up trouble.
Especially when it came to poking a little fun at PTMC's Shark.
What no one could quite understand was why? Or how Jack managed to get away with it.
Not until you, Jack's fearless firefighter of a wife, comes rushing into the ER.
Turns out your presence worries more than just Jack.
Notes: strong language. established relationship. medical inaccuracies. injuries. Jack being relentless when it comes to teasing his brother-in-law. overprotective Shark.
Word Count: ~4.5k
Jack was known to poke a little fun here and there.
Known to keep a steady head, a calm resolve.
Keeping things light hearted despite the weight of the work. Whatever troubles he had he buried them deep inside, something very few people knew..
It was a trait most carried whilst working the night shift.
An air of indifference, so polarising from the dayshift’s tightly wound energy, it could give someone whiplash.
But one thing remained the same between the day and night shift.
Was its need to feed on gossip.
Gossip was what made the ER spur on. Or at least, simply helped maintain a little sanity for those who worked there.
He loved stirring up a little humour.
His therapist had told him more than once that it was a coping mechanism – but he countered that comment by asking what harm could a little laugh here and there really do?
Whenever someone new came aboard.
One of the inevitable questions that came to their mind was – How did you lose your leg?
Now it wasn’t like everyone outright asked him, most skirting around the topic, too afraid to ask, too timid to broach such a personal topic.
But there were times where some intern or student let their curiosity get the better of them.
Had let the question pass by their filter.
And that such time was now.
As Ogilvie raised a brow, pointed at Jack’s leg and straight up asked, “How’d you lose it?”
A hush falling over those nearby, a huff of annoyance at his blunt question. The insensitivity of it all.
But in Jack’s eyes, the timing couldn’t have been more perfect.
As Jack catches sight of PTMC’s Shark. The chilling orthopedic surgeon that made everyone’s blood freeze at the sight of him.
That made people part and duck their heads, averting their gaze.
Only a select few found the ability to stand toe-to-toe with him. To not waver in his presence.
And one of those few, was Jack Abbot.
A grin slipping onto Jack’s face as he answers dryly in response to Ogilvie's question, “Bitten off by a shark"
Jutting a finger over towards Park, "That one, that one took my leg,” the words were so blatant, and dry.
An expression of complete seriousness taking over Jack’s features as he spoke.
One that Ogilvie honestly couldn’t decipher from being real or false. His mind knew it was a joke, and yet Jack’s delivery couldn’t have sounded more honest.
Catching word of the joke, Park merely scoffed with the slightest shake of his head, concealing the faintest chuckle beneath his breath.
It wasn’t the first time Jack had made that joke.
And both knew it certainly wouldn’t be the last. The joke never once got old, for either of them.
Jack often brushed off questions about his leg with a simple, before you ask…it was a shark. It was one of Jack’s favourite jokes when avoiding the topic.
Jack shot a look back at Ogilvie, “Now shouldn’t you be helping with hand-offs?”
“Uh–yeah, course,” His eyes widened, stammering slightly with a nod of his head, ducking away.
Jack clicks his tongue, turning to face Park, “I swear that kid is going to make a fight break out in here if he doesn’t learn to bite his tongue”
An air of mutual respect hangs between them. A silent understanding between the two.
“And this is why I chose to go into surgery and not emergency med”
“Hm, and why’s that?”
“The patients tend to be less chatty,” Brendon’s eyes glance up at the clock, eyes furrowing as he simply nods towards Jack. “Makes it easier to talk shit”
Jack merely chuckles from his response, patting his back before Park disappears back upstairs.
It was rare.
But not an uncommon sight to see Jack and Brendon get along.
Whenever they passed each other, every one could tell that there was a friendliness between their interactions.
No one could quite pinpoint why.
Or how.
But it was clear that Brendon tolerated Jack.
But this mutual respect didn’t mean Jack didn’t divulge himself in a little gossip here and then about the Shark.
Whether he’d be passing by as his colleagues spoke, catching wind that the topic was about Park.
He’d add certain little things, “I heard he only ever listens to the soundtrack of Jaws whilst he operates” True or not, he liked to poke fun at the man.
“And how do you know that?” Santos would raise a brow in question.
Jack would simply shrug, “Heard it from someone I know”
It’d be simple things, small things that amused Jack.
Slipping in little truths here and there.
The information always chalked up to having heard it from someone he knew.
Now this someone as far as anyone knew could’ve been anyone, from admin, to a scrub nurse to a fellow doctor in the hospital that Jack was friends with.
No one any wiser to the fact that he was, in fact, referring to his wife.
Brendon Park’s sister.
You.
It was no secret to the staff of PTMC’s emergency department that Jack was happily married.
He proudly wore his wedding ring for all to see.
Speaking highly of you, a clear pride and deep devotion in his tone as he spoke of you.
He kept a photo of you in his wallet, and his camera roll was filled with photos of you and him, simply happy. Just waiting to be pulled out and scrolled through.
The sight of you never failed to bring a smile to Jack’s face.
Slipping you into the conversation with ease. Without even realising it, he could easily spend minutes talking about you to anyone that would listen.
On occasion even doting about you to his patients whilst he worked.
Going on and on about how strong and courageous you were. Fearless. Compassionate.
…
From the moment Jack had laid eyes on you.
His first thought was that you were smoking hot.
Literally smoking as you brushed away at the ashes from your suit, smoke curling from behind you.
Whilst you walked out of the building you and your team had just wrangled with, containing the burning embers until they were out.
He was on the scene assisting the SWAT team as a medic.
And he simply couldn’t take his eyes off of you as you carried yourself with confidence. Words firm as you made the next orders for your team. You were captivating. As you took control of the chaos around you.
How you had taken the time to crouch down and console one of a young boy who had gotten caught up in this mess.
It was that little boy that had brought you over to him.
Having tugged off your glove, your hand was wrapped with his, as you stopped before Jack. The slight dusting of embers on your cheek.
“Do you mind checking up on him? Just want to make sure he didn’t inhale too much of the smoke,” you had asked. “I’d go to the EMTs, but they’re all a bit preoccupied at the moment”
Jack nodded, “Of course,” his eyes moving down to the boy, whilst he crouched before him, to appear a little more friendly.
“What’s your name, kid?”
“George”
“Well George, I’m Dr Abbot, but you can call me Jack. Do you mind if I take a look at you, make sure everything’s ok?”
George nods, “Ok,” his hand never lets go of yours. Clutching it tightly.
“You were pretty brave in there,” Jack said whilst glancing up at you.
You shrugged slightly, “All part of the job, isn’t it?”
Eyes drifting down to the little boy by your side, “Though I think you were braver than me George, maybe you’ll be a firefighter one day huh?”
“Or you could be a doctor?” Jack added.
While George’s nose scrunched up laughing at the two of you. His mind drifted away from the stressful events, as he focused on you both.
“Saving lives, and helping people,” Jack continues to say.
While you twist your mouth, debating his words, “Firefighters do all that too, and we get to ride in a pretty cool truck, what do you say George?”
Whilst George tilts his head in thought.
Jack chuckles, feigning defeat, “When you say it like that, being a firefighter does sound pretty cool”
“Then I’ll count on seeing you at the sign ups,” you remark jokingly.
Jack’s hands moved swiftly, announcing anytime he did something, and what he was checking for. From checking his pupils, to listening to his heartbeat, Jack was thorough.
“Can you take a deep breath in for me George?” Jack asks, while George agrees, “One, two, three, and out, that’s it.”
Your eyes watch as Jack continues to be gentle, humorous as he makes the young boy laugh.
There was something soothing about Jack.
Something that made the adrenaline coursing through you begin to rest and settle. Heart steadying.
“Seems like everything is in order, George, I’d offer you a lollipop but it seems like one of the only things I don’t have in my pockets,” Jack jokes.
“Hey Park! We’ve located the kid’s mom,” one of your colleagues called over. Whilst you nodded in acknowledgement, before looking back at Jack.
“Thanks again for the help, doc”
“That’s what I’m here for,” Jack nodded.
You both hesitate for a moment, not yet wanting to part. “I don’t know what it is about you Abbot, but something tells me you’re trouble”
“Hopefully the good kind,” he replies, with a small quirk of his lip.
“–Park, c’mon!” you’re urged once more.
“I’m coming,” You hum, with a small nod of your head as you wave at Jack. “I’ll see you around”
“See ya”
One of his colleagues comes up to his side, as Jack’s eyes follow you. “Who was that?”
“I don’t know, but I’d like to,” he replied.
Clapping his shoulder, Jack’s attention snapped to the side, “Maybe next time Romeo,” and with that Jack is pulled away to attend to another injury.
From that moment on.
It felt like each time Jack saw a fire truck or a cluster of firefighters, he always, without meaning to, searched for your face in the crowd. Had kept an eye out just to see you once more.
Until eventually it had faded.
His hope had begun to dissipate. Pittsburgh was a big city afterall. The chance of seeing you again was slim to none.
Days turned into weeks, which had turned into months.
Until you had become a distant memory, simply a nice idea.
Well.
That was until you had tapped on his shoulder. Whilst standing in line at a coffee shop one late afternoon, smiling as he met your eye.
You would be lying to say your mind didn’t drift to the memory of the medic you had met all those months ago.
The image of him flitting into the forefront of your mind. How his eyes held a depth to them, unwavering, calculating. The way he held eye contact with you. Softening ever so slightly.
There was a story behind those hazel eyes.
A story you wanted to know.
Eyes tracing his features, as you took in his appearance. No longer wearing the camo tactile suit of a SWAT medic, instead simply in a black t-shirt and cargo pants.
Upon meeting your eyes, they blinked in surprise, before a smile graced his features.
“Well if it isn’t Pittsburgh’s finest firefighter,” he tilts his head, “It’s good seeing you again”
“I see I made quite an impression,” you grinned. With this look in your eye that had him enthralled.
“As if I could forget, Park wasn’t it?” he said.
With a smile you nodded in confirmation, “But you can call me Y/N”
“Well if you’re not busy, how about you join me for some coffee?”
You pause for a moment, letting the offer stand in the air. Before you eventually nod, “I’d love to”
“Great,” a twinkle sparked in his eyes.
Intrigue developing.
Laughter and smiles shared over coffee. Swapping stories from your own funny moments as a firefighter to Jack’s own mishaps in the ER.
A friendship gained, with the feeling that something more could develop.
When schedules aligned. You’d share a coffee or tea, or whatever you felt like, maybe even breakfast before your shift started and after his shift ended.
You had grown closer until soon, the line between friendship and something more had become blurred.
As Jack leaned in, hand caressing your cheek gently. Waiting, tentative, longing to cross that line. Until you tugged him down, crashing your lips against his, melting into his embrace with a sigh.
It was messy at first, clumsy and new.
Trying to find your rhythm together. But once you did. It was absolute bliss. A peace harbouring between you both.
Understanding one another, even in the silences when words felt too difficult to say.
That wasn’t to say it was all perfect.
That there weren’t times you wanted to pull your hair out in frustration as he’d shut you out. Or times where you would be reckless coming home worn out from a shift as Jack would incessantly worry over you.
But you both pulled through.
You learned to grow, to be better. For yourselves. And for each other.
Jack should’ve known that a life with you would always be full of surprises.
Especially when you insisted he meet your brother.
The brother you had mentioned a handful of times, how he was scary but a real softy once you got to know him.
Imagine Jack’s surprise when he opened the door to your home, only to be confronted by the sight of Brendon Park.
The orthopedic surgeon known as the Shark of the very hospital that Jack worked at.
It definitely started out as a tense meeting.
Whilst you tried your best to melt the tension. It didn’t go past you to see how Brendon’s jaw clenched, eyes narrowing at Jack. How Jack held his gaze. Cool. Unflinching.
Both simply, polite. But nothing more.
A stale mate.
Only once you slapped him in the arm did his cold facade begin to fracture. “Cool it,” you muttered to Brendon with a pointed look.
Jack watched as Brendon relaxed, how it was clear he cared for you. The way you both interacted with ease. A clear bond.
A side to Brendon he never thought he would get to see.
Jack followed your lead as you teased Brendon, whilst Jack would add his own quips, growing bolder with each passing meeting.
And though Brendon was never one to reveal the cards closest to his chest.
He was glad to see you so happy with Jack.
And even happier when he watched as you and Jack had exchanged your, I Dos, words of cherished promises and love. Brendon couldn’t believe it, the little girl he once grew up with was now grown and married.
Hell, Brendon still couldn’t believe the risks you put yourself through day in and day out as a firefighter.
Even if at times all Brendon wanted to do was wrap you up in bubble wrap and ensure you were ok. He knew that wasn’t a solution.
But no matter what, no matter how much time would pass he would always worry over you. It was part of his job as your brother.
Even if you were confident and able.
Fearless. Bold.
When you walked into a room it was as though you would gain control of it. Eyes would look to you. Your shoulders pushed back, a keen look in your eye.
You and Jack made quite the pair.
That was the you that those in the ER had grown to know. In the fleeting moments when you’d drop by, You’d always take a moment to say hello to everyone whenever time allowed.
Even sometimes bringing in a little something for everyone to eat – knowing all too well the negative impact an empty stomach can have on morale.
You were always a welcomed sight.
Unfortunately.
Tonight was one of those nights they wished they didn’t see you. On the cusp of changeover, just as the night shifters had begun to filter in as those from the day began to file out.
A trauma had been called through.
Another trauma.
Nothing out of the ordinary, especially for those in the Pitt. Barely batted an eye at the information, simply going through the motions as they prepared for it.
Female, a firefighter that had simply got caught in a bad accident.
What no one had expected however.
Was you.
The moment the gurney rolled through the doors it felt like everyone had their breaths caught in their throat.
Snapping back into motion as they hear your muffled groans.
Jack felt like he couldn’t move.
It felt like his heart had stopped.
You were lying there.
Covered in soot. Your gear, partially cut away. A cervical collar wrapped around your neck. One of your legs securely stabalised in an inflated splint.
Bruises already blooming across your jaw.
Yet somehow.
Somehow.
You still managed a grin, running high on adrenaline or on the medications, that was something you couldn’t decipher.
“Hey–” you managed to choke out, voice strained.
“Jesus Christ," Jack had muttered, feet moving fast as he moved beside you. Eyes flickering to everything and everyone as they work around you.
You pull his attention back to you, as you grasp his hand. “Look at me,” you said firmly.
His brows knitted. Worry plastered all over his face.
“Don’t do that”
“Do what?”
“That face, that terrified look doesn’t suit you,” you mumble out, breathing short between your words. “Especially on your handsome face”
A few of the others in the room stifle a laugh.
Jack bites his lip, before sucking in a harsh breath, “I’m sorry love,” his hand clasps yours tighter. Unable to shake the worry from his features.
“I’m going to be fine”
No matter how many times you might say that to him. Jack’s shoulders remained tense. On edge. His attention flickers between you and your vitals. Doing his best to keep you alert.
To keep you talking.
To keep you breathing.
To keep you smiling.
Because smiling meant that you were okay. At least, okay by your standards.
Robby moved fluidly, quick and efficient, doing his very best to ensure you were going to make it through this. He was not going to be the reason Jack lost another wife…
“Page ortho,” he had directed, eyes assessing your leg. No signs of broken skin tissue, which was good, less risk of infection. But there was clearly something wrong with your leg.
Ordering scans as they assess the damage.
Shit.
That was the thought that had crossed Jack’s mind once the word ortho filled the air. Eyes glancing down to his watch.
There was no way Park would still be here.
No way that he would be the surgeon called down.
A wave of relief had washed over him as the orthopede that had appeared, was instead one of the residents.
Watching intently as they worked upon you, feeling the weight of Jack’s eyes.
It seems.
That Jack’s slight relief was short lived.
“What’s the verdict?” Park’s deep voice echoed in the room.
The universe has a strange sense of humour.
The room stilled.
As Brendon appeared at the door. Eyes stern, cold, calculating as he glances at those around the room.
But once his eyes land on you.
He freezes.
Eyes widening, a lump forming in his throat. Dana might have called him down here.
But this was not what he had expected to see.
Not who he had expected to see.
When she had said the words urgently. He imagined a lot of different scenarios. But he never once expected to see you here.
“It appears to be a fractured tibia,” the resident reported.
You snorted, “Think it’d be okay if I borrow your crutches?” you teased Jack.
“Do you really think this is the time to be joking?”
“You could teach me how to use ‘em,” you continued.
Those around you laugh lightly from your jokes.
All except for Brendon and Jack.
“What happened?” Brendon’s face hardened.
Just as the resident was about to speak up, about to explain the details of your fractured tibia. They stopped short, noticing that his attention was directed at you.
“I’m fine,” you replied.
Brendon shook his head, moving to assess the imaging himself, “Fine people don’t get wheeled into the ER”
“Everyone has a bad day,” you shrug, wincing slightly from the movement. Jack’s hand grips yours tighter.
“And what did your bad day include?” he asks, words clipped.
“Building collapsed, that’s all,” you murmured. Your other hand waved lazily, trying to decrease the situation.
“Y/N?” he asked once more.
You simply complained, “Oh my god, you’re hovering”
His brows knit at your words, “I’m not hovering, just worried. Right Jack?”
“Right,” Jack nodded.
Brendon crosses his arms over his chest, lips pulled taut.
"I am making sure you're okay."
But there was this glint in your eye, one that Jack had seen far too many times to count. One he had recognised immediately.
Oh no.
Robby arching a brow at the sight.
Whilst the others watch in confusion, completely left in the dark as to what was happening. Never had Park shown such interest in a patient.
Before Jack could stop you, your arm had reached up.
Your finger pressing against Brendon’s nose.
As you booped him.
You had fucking booped Shark’s nose.
Everyone held their breaths, waiting for his reaction, waiting to see what would happen.
The look on Brendon’s face was one of blinking shock.
Whilst you bore a delighted grin.
“What the fu–” he had grumbled out.
Until you had booped his nose again, his hand catching your wrist. Firm but not harshly.
“What are you doing?” he raises a brow as he looks to you, eyes narrowed.
Whilst Jack pinched the bridge of his nose.
“I read somewhere that sharks back down if you bump them on the nose,” you had explained, a small laugh escaping you before forming into a harsh cough.
Instead of a growling rage. Instead of a harsh retort.
The whole room watched as Shark, PTMC’s fiercest orthopedic surgeon. The very man that could make medical students and interns cry with a simple click of his tongue.
Any harshness had been bitten back, as he instead crouched by your side, grasping your free hand.
Here he was.
Softening.
“Are you ok?” he asks you, softly.
“I will be if you let anyone here do their job,” you squeeze both of their hands, eyes moving to glance between them both.
“It’s not my first broken leg, and you know it,” you looked at Brendon.
He remarks, “Don’t blame me for worrying over you”
Your hand slipped from his, as you pinched his cheek, “I know you’re just being a good brother”
Brother.
The word travelled through to the ears of those nearby. Eyes widening in shock. As if today couldn’t have brought any more surprises.
“As the break is clean and transverse, surgery isn't necessary,” someone had announced. “It’ll likely be a cast for several months to allow it to heal”
You sigh.
Whilst you had been putting on a brave face you had a genuine feeling of relief rush through you. No surgery was a good sign.
Even if you were feeling good now. Anything could happen.
“I love you both, a lot–” you had begun to say.
Jack clenched his jaw, shaking his head, “Don’t speak like that”
You send him a look, “I’m just saying I love you”
“That tone says something else,” his words hang between you.
“I love you too,” he leans down to press a kiss to the side of your head.
Robby lets out a chuckle as he catches a glimpse of outside the trauma room. Knowing that this incident had added fuel to the flames, gossip spread like wildfire.
Just outside of the trauma room, where you laid, Brendon on one side, as Jack stood on the opposite.
The second it became clear that you weren’t dying.
That you were in the clear.
The second everyone realized your injuries amounted to a cast, a handful of bruises, and a mandatory period of sitting still that would undoubtedly drive you insane—
The gossip began.
Dana bit back a grin as she overheard the murmurs that passed through. This was something that was definitely going to stick around.
“Well this explains it.” Santos said arms folded over her chest.
Whitaker raised a brow, “Explains what?”
She elbows him as though it were obvious, “Explains why Abbot and Shark get along”
“They’re obviously playing civil for her sake,” Princess comments, nodding in agreement. “Seems like Mrs Abbot was once Miss Park”
“They’re always acting like this” Ellis stated as she came up to check up on charts.
“Did you know?”
Ellis stared at them confused. “You didn’t?” her eyes scanning those before her. The dayshifters who had gotten caught up once more with overtime.
And those who simply didn’t want to leave until they knew you were ok.
“No,” Santos exclaimed.
Javadi shook her head, “Had no idea”
“Why would we know that?”
Their shock had only worsened once Mel joined the conversation. “What’s everyone talking about?”
“Y/N, Abbot’s wife, the firefighter” Mohan began to explain.
“Yeah?”
“She’s Park’s sister”
“Oh,” Mel said.
“Oh?” Santos raised her brow.
She tilted her head, brows furrowing, “I thought everyone knew that?” her eyes glanced around at those standing there. Meeting Ellis’ eye who nods, believing the same thing.
“How did you know this?”
“Dr Abbot mentioned it,” Mel explained. It was in passing and so small, to the point that Mel didn’t think anything more of it.
“Of course he did,” Javadi sighed.
Questions brewing in their mind. Their thoughts run wild.
Questions about what it was like having Park as a brother?
What was it like having Park as a brother in law?
How did Abbot not cower when he realised?
Did Park give an overprotective brother talk?
Everything and anything that came to mind.
They would simply have to wait for their questions to be answered just until you were feeling better.
Your hand not once leaving Jack’s as he stood by your side. Soothing you and consoling you.
The worry that had pent up within him now finally was able to settle.
You were safe.
That was all that mattered to him, and to Brendon.
At least now everyone could say that one thing was for sure.
While a shark might not have taken Jack’s leg.
It was true.
That a shark’s sister had taken his heart.
Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed. I just loved the idea of Jack using the excuse of a shark biting his leg off, only to tease his brother in law Brendon. Both finding a middle ground when it came to joking about the other. and I totally picture most of the night are already in the know about your relation to Shark as well as Mel!! catching everyone else off guard about it. Just know that no one can look at Abbot or Park the same after this interaction haha
Let me know what you thought ✨
There will be more to come for the Shiver Collection!! Let me know if you’d like to be added to the taglist ♥️
Next up will feature Mateo Diaz x Reader: Tricky Fish
Read Part 2: Surviving The Shark
Comments, Reblogs and Likes are welcomed and appreciated 💕
For more Jack Abbot Works check out my series below!
Such as my Dr Jack Abbot x Reader Who Would've Thought series here💖
Or my fic Based on Waitress the Musical, Dr Jack Abbot x Waitress!Reader Sugar, Butter, Flour series 🥧
Or for a lil bit of hurt with eventual comfort check out Jack and the reader create a bond through being widowers, I Know You're Hurting series
Or check out my overall Masterlist here
You ask Jack for a picture--a selfie to be precise--and who is he to say 'no' to you?
My penance for not posting anything for The Pitt in what feels like a century. Sorry if it's bad, I just needed something to get me back into it :) cheers
Jack likes it when you send him pictures during the day. It’s one of the many “rules” he has for keeping you at home, on his payroll, so to speak. He likes seeing the evidence of his hard work splayed across the screen in the form of snapshots of your daily activities.
Working out, wearing the skin-tight spandex outfits he buys for you. Picking up an overpriced coffee from whatever cute coffee shop you stumble upon during your morning strolls. Trying on dresses for occasions that have yet to appear on your calendar, snapping photos in the dressing room mirror.
And your face. It’s those damn selfies he loves so much. Seeing your smile appear on his phone during the far-and-few breaks he gets during his back-breaking shifts on the E.D. floor.
He’s perfectly content responding with a heart emoticon or a quippy phrase, nothing more. And you don’t ask for anything more, for which he is mighty grateful.
Until today.
Beneath a photo of your bright face, grinning wide beneath the buttery afternoon sun, is a request. It’s not for a new pair of shoes, or a set of lingerie he can later remove with his teeth. It’s not for another trinket to add to your collection–those little naked babes that stare at him from the windowsill whenever he sneaks into the bedroom, home from a shift. No, it’s not for a toy or an expensive piece of sparkle you can wear on your neck.
It’s for a photo.
Of him.
Now! Pretty please!
When there’s a lull, he takes advantage of the break in the chaos to slink out to an empty on-call room. He angles his phone just right, and thinks way too much about what to do with his lips, his eyes, his teeth. He presses the button, capturing his face in the frame. Before giving the photo a second thought, he sends it, and treks back to the floor.
Sitting at lunch, you practically launch like a rocket off your chair when the notification pops up on your lockscreen. It has you giggling like a schoolgirl.
Attachment: 1 Image
You waste no time navigating to your messages with Jack, laying eyes on a selfie taken from an angle you wouldn’t necessarily have chosen–but what does that matter–and practically salivating at the sight of him. Black scrubs, unidentified stains on his neck, and those delicious salt-and-pepper curls you just love to weave your fingers through.
Flipping the phone over to a table full of your closest friends, you await their oos and ahhs.
18.6k || All my content is 18+ MDNI || CW: mentions of blood, mentions of bones breaking, mentions of guns/shootings/gunshot wounds, mentions and discussions of suicide/suicidal ideation, CPR, mentions/discussions of jack's injury and losing his foot, anxiety about partner's safety, angst, Jack's traumatized, everyone's traumatized honestly, probably incorrect description of medical events, potentially incorrect medical descriptions/knowledge, PIV sex, mentions of morphine and alcohol, age gap referenced in passing once kind of, reader loves Paris and the Louvre, reader's favorite flowers are daffodils, I had this idea and started drafting before we knew Jack was a widow so in this world he has never been married, no use of y/n or related.
Summary: The aftermath of you being shot and collapsing in the trauma room and a new reality.
AN: I'm a certified yapper like our man, so I apologize for how long this is.
You drop at just the right point in your swaying that you fall backwards, head first. You hit the floor back of your skull first with a sickening crack.
Everyone in the room knows what that was the sound of - your skull cracking.
“Fuck me!” “Fucking shit!” “Holy fuck!” “Oh god!” “Was that her fucking skull?” Verbalized reactions fill the air from Robby, Dana, Heather, Mel and Santos, respectively. Jack is silent. He’s not even sure he’s breathing. He’s frozen as he looks at you, both struggling to process what has happened and already understanding what has happened at once, hearing dulled as he focuses on you.
Things have now gone from really fucking bad to somehow a lot fucking worse in a matter of seconds.
A head injury was the last thing you needed. And it was preventable. He should have prevented it. He should have stayed with you, told Robby to handle the code on his own, kept holding you, actually looked you over before letting you go but he didn’t.
“Somebody get a fucking gurney in here!” Dana yells out the door.
“Collins, you handle this. Mohan, you’re with me!” Robby orders. Once your neck is secured in a c-collar and you’re on a gurney you’re rushed into trauma two, the team swarming you just like they do any other unfortunate soul who ends up here.
Jack suddenly finds himself again, hearing no longer dampened and follows your gurney into trauma two. “Mannitol-”
“Get out Jack!” Robby shouts at him amid the chaos of getting you hooked up to monitors and IVs going. “You can’t be in here!”
“And yet here I fucking am.” Jack almost snarls back at him as he takes a place on the other side of you.
“Dana.” Robby shoots her a look and she steps back and away from you, peeling her gloves off and tossing them to the floor.
“Jack,” she says softly to him, rests a hand on his bicep and squeezes gently. “Let’s step out.”
He shrugs her hand off. “No. No fucking way. Somebody…” He trails off as he looks down at you, freezing again. More blood pours from your mouth, and now your nose. He looks down and sure enough, it’s dripping out of your ear too, not unsurprising given the head trauma, but still. The image is seared in his brain.
“Fuck!” Robby yells. “She’s in DIC.” He takes a look at your vitals. To say they’re abysmal would be a gross understatement. “Okay, massive transfusion protocol now, people! I wanna do two to one to one with how much blood she’s lost. Set up for a central line.”
“Push etomidate and roc!” Mohan yells into the chaos. “7.0 ET please.”
“Jack, you have to move, okay? They need access to her.” Dana grabs Jack’s arm again and is able to pull him to the side. “Once she’s intubated you can sit by her, okay?”
He gives a single nod in response, sits automatically when Dana pushes the stool into the back of his knees. It doesn’t take the team long to get you intubated and Dana helps him move so that he sits at the top of your head.
Everything and everyone else fades away as he looks down at your face, your beautiful blood smeared face. He leans in towards you a little. He has so much he wants to say and yet he can’t get a word out.
“We’re taking her up to surgery, Jack.” Robby is suddenly leaning down next to him. “We have to stop the internal bleeding before we can image her head.”
“She’s in DIC. She has a subdural from the fall, I’m sure. Fractured skull. We have to address it.” Jack almost mumbles it as he watches them put the bed rails up and start to move you.
“I know,” Robby tells him gently, “but if the major source of bleeding isn’t stopped, you and I both know that the skull fracture and subdural aren’t going to matter.”
Jack just nods and stands, follows your gurney in silence up to the OR floor. He hates it but he has to take one last look at you before turning to go into a locker room to grab a fresh pair of scrubs. He changes fast, finds Garcia and Shamsi in the scrub room.
“What are you doing Jack?” Garcia asks him, sharing a look with Shamsi. “You’re not coming in the OR.”
“Yes I am.” He ignores her, grabs a pack and starts to scrub. The door opens again and Jack doesn’t need to turn to know it’s Robby.
“You guys go.” Robby nods at Garcia and Shamsi. “Jack, come on. Let’s go to the gallery or waiting room.”
“Fuck that!” Jack yells as they walk in. He’s still scrubbing furiously. “I’m not going to watch them hack her-”
“You and I both know they’re not going to ‘hack her’ and that there’s nobody else you’d rather have operating on her. You need to let them do their work.” Robby stops next to the sink Jack is scrubbing at. “That is the best thing you can do for her right now. Let them work.”
Jack keeps scrubbing for a minute, jaw clenched tight. But then he stops. He knows Robby is right. Knows that scrubbing in and being in the OR isn’t going to fix you. It isn’t going to let him make up for not noticing you were shot earlier, before you were already half dead on the floor with a broken fucking skull he could have prevented.
The combination of emotions is crushing. He throws the soap at one of the doors in the scrub room and yells a “fuck!” There’s a moment of silence and then a whispered “fuck,” that his voice crack on half way through.
“Come on.” Robby picks up the soap and throws it away, throws a towel at Jack for his hands. “Let’s get some air.”
“I’m going to obs.” Jack tells him. Robby tries to speak. “No. If I don’t get to be in the OR with her I at least get to fucking watch over her from obs.”
“No, Jack! I’m not letting you fucking torture yourself by watching this. She wouldn’t want that. She wouldn’t want you seeing her like this-”
“You don’t fucking know her!” Jack seethes, getting up in Robby’s face, chests touching. “So stop fucking acting like you do.”
A tense silence passes, a staring match before Robby holds his hands up in defeat and looks away. “Alright. I’m sorry.”
“I have to watch her die, Robby. I have to have been there for her. Been there with her. I am not letting her go alone.” Jack shakes his head, eyes red rimmed and glassy but more serious than Robby has ever seen him before.
“I know.” Robby opens the door of the observation suite for him. “If something happens and they get close to calling it you can go be with your girl, okay?”
“No.” Jack huffs, treading water more and more to try and stay above the flood of emotions. “No it’s not fucking okay! None of this is fucking okay! She’s not okay! I’m not okay!” Jack takes in a shuddery breath and turns his back on Robby. “None of this is okay,” he whispers, voice thick with emotion and tears that can no longer be held back.
Robby lets Jack have a minute to try and pull himself together. He knows that right now is not the time to have some sort of heart to heart with Jack. Instead he puts the intercom on so that they can hear what’s happening in the OR but the OR can’t hear them.
It’s not good but it’s not bad, you’re not dead. There’s no conversation between the two men, just Jack up almost pressed into the glass to watch while Robby observes him more than the surgery.
“So,” Robby says casually after a couple of minutes. “Peter?”
Jack huffs, shaking his head and coming to sit next to Robby. “Don’t ask.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“I really like this little routine, you know?” You smile at Jack as he peruses the shelves, coffee in one hand and your hand in the other. You’re back at the bookstore where you met, off in the back shelves where it’s quieter, fewer people. You’re alone in the aisle.
“Coming here?”
“Mhmm.” You nod at him. “It was a really good idea.”
Somewhere between dates number three and four Jack had suggested you guys go back to the bookstore once a week. Make it a thing. Get coffee, pick out books together. Just walk around. How could you ever say no?
“I have one every now and then.” He smiles at you.
You point to a book, say the title. “That looks interesting.”
Jack looks at the book. It’s on the bottom shelf. You didn’t ask for him to bend down and get it for you but he will anyway. And you knew when you said it that he would. He’s just a gentleman like that. And so he does. Sets his coffee on the shelf and bends down to get it for you.
“Why is it that every book you want is always on the bottom shelf?” He feigns a huff.
“Because I like making you bend down so that I can check out your ass.”
He freezes for a second. It was so not the answer he was expecting. He’s not sure he was expecting an answer. But then you come out with that. Always keeping him on his toes.
He grabs the book and stands back up, smirking as he hands it to you. His fingers find the belt loops of your jeans and pull you close to him, lips brushing against yours. “You like my ass?”
You giggle against his lips and kiss him. “I do.”
“You’re terrible, woman.” He gives you another kiss.
“More like your terrible woman.” You can feel his jaw clench at that and he holds you a little tighter. Oh he liked that. A lot. It makes you smirk.
“Damn right you are.” One last kiss and then you break apart.
“I think I’m falling in love with you, Peter.”
He cocks his head at the name. “Peter? Should I be concerned you can’t keep your men straight?” He doesn’t mean it, nor does any anxiety roll through him. He knows you, knows it was deliberate, and knows you’re about to give him some ridiculous explanation.
“Rabbit,” you grin. “Peter Rabbit. Abbot. Jack Abbot always makes me want to call you Jack rabbit. Ergo, Peter.” You run the back of your second knuckle on your index finger over his shirt. “Inspired by the book.” You nod and look to the side. He follows your eyes to the display you look over at where, sure enough, a copy of Peter Rabbit sits.
He groans and makes a face. “Really?” He grimaces. But you both know it’s fake. His eyes are too sparkly and the ghost of a smile is too present on his face. It’s so ridiculous. If anyone else dared to call him that he would hate it and they would know it.
“Really, Peter. Better get used to it.” You wink and start walking down another aisle.
“I think I’ve already fallen in love with you, Doll.” Jack whispers to himself. “You’re not allowed to go anywhere on me.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You wake with a start, your body jerking for a second before pain rips through your stomach and head. It’s bright. So so bright. Your eyes instinctively close and you pull your head back, trying to get away from the tube that feels like it’s down your throat but it follows. You start panicking.
It filters back in. What happened. Passing out in the trauma room. Jack’s face. The pain. The bullet hole you’d felt on your skin.
“Honey?” A voice you can’t place calls out your name. A woman’s voice. “It’s okay.” You know she’s trying to be reassuring but at the moment it’s not. There’s only one voice you want to hear and it’s not hers and you panic more when you don’t hear his because where is he? Did something happen to him? Maybe he’s here and you just can’t hear him. One way to find out.
Your eyes blink back open to an unfamiliar face above you. After you adjust to the light you quickly look around as much as you can without moving too much.
Jack isn’t here.
The woman above you smiles down at you. “I’m Dana. Jack just stepped out to shower and I said I’d stay with you. He’s going to kill me for convincing him to go and you waking up while he wasn’t here. It was his nightmare. He’s on his way. Knowing him he’s liable to just have a towel wrapped around him and soap in his hair because god knows if he wasn’t finished showering he wasn’t going to finish when he heard you’re awake.”
You blink a few times, start to calm. Dana. She has a calming presence. Jack told you about her. You trust her. “Good, that’s good. He’s going to be here any second. And I’m going to get your doctor and see what we can do about getting this tube out of your throat, yeah?”
You can hear Jack before you see him. Hear him running down the hall towards you. He’s panting when he runs into your room, looks at you, your vitals, Dana and then back to you. “You’re awake.”
All you can really do is look at him with wide eyes. He’s over by you in a second, taking Dana’s place as she goes to find your doctor. One of his hands finds yours, squeezes reassuringly. “I’m here. God I’m so sorry I wasn’t when you woke up, I didn’t want to go but they convinced me and-”
You squeeze his hand and then let go, make a motion like writing. “You want to write? Hopefully you can be extubated soon, you might be breathing over the vent already, I can look.”
You squeeze his hand again and it focuses him back on you. “Shit. Yes, um…” He feels all the pockets on his scrub pants until he finds the little notebook and pen. He gives you the pen and holds the book for you.
Scared.
A piece of his heart shatters when he reads the word.
“I know Doll, I know. It’s okay.” He strokes your hair gently. “I’m right here, okay? I’m not going anywhere. I love you.” Jack’s eyes bore into yours and in the moment you’re so grateful for his need for direct eye contact. It’s reassuring in a way you can’t describe. Even if he hadn’t said anything. If he had just looked at you like he is now it would have been enough to calm your fears. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you, okay?”
“I heard she’s awake?” Your eyes leave Jack’s and look over at the man who entered, but Jack’s eyes never leave you.
“Yeah, she is. This is Robby, sweetheart.” You blink slowly.
It’s a lot. Everything is a lot and there’s a tube in your throat and more people walk in, Dana again and your doctor, a nurse. You’re overwhelmed. You just want it to be you and Jack and you want to be at home cuddled in bed together, both of you perfectly fine. You don’t want this. It makes you kind of dizzy. And your inability to express yourself makes it all that much more difficult.
You focus on Jack’s eyes, try to block everything else out. Focus on his touch. His hand holding yours, the other stroking your hair. There’s a faint buzz of the others talking together and you know it’s about you but you remain centered on Jack. “That’s right, Doll,” he murmurs, voice low, just between the two of you. “Just focus on me. I’m right here. You’re okay. We’re okay.”
“She’s breathing over.” Robby says quietly. “We can pull it.”
Jack raises his eyebrows at you and nods his head a little. “That’s good. We’re going to get the tube out, okay? Then you’ll be able to talk.”
Your eyes widen a bit and you move your hand towards the notebook again, point at the word.
Scared.
“I know. I know it’s all scary, and I know thinking about having the tube out is scary. But you’re safe, okay? If you need it back in then we will put it back in okay?” He squeezes your hand. You give the smallest nod.
Jack explains what will happen to you and then they do it. It hurts and is uncomfortable and you panic for a minute after it’s out because you’re coughing and it feels like you can’t breathe. Jack puts an oxygen mask to your face. “Breathe, baby. Just breathe. You’re just coughing, it’s okay. It’ll be better in a minute. I promise.”
And just like he promises it does get better. “How about we switch this,” he takes the oxygen mask from your face and hands it to Dana while taking the nasal cannula from her, “with this.” He gets the cannula adjusted under your nose and over your ears and then smiles at you.
You still haven’t spoken. You can’t find words. You don’t know what to say.
Robby hands Jack a cup of water with a straw silently before he, Dana, your doctor and the other nurse slip out.
“Here, I’m sure your throat is dry.” Jack holds the straw for you. “Small sips.”
You take a few before pulling back a little. “Thank you.” You’re quite hoarse and make a face at the sound of your voice but Jack. Jack beams. It makes you smile, makes everything start to melt away. You’re here and awake and Jack is here and everything is okay. “I love you too.”
You press your lips out a little and it hits him. He can kiss you now and he does, soft but lingering. He never wants to pull away.
“How long was I out?’’
“Since surgery?” Jack glances down at his watch. “Sixteen hours and thirty seven minutes. Give or take ten seconds.”
You smile. It’s a little weak which shoots a bit of a pang through him, but it’s okay because you’re smiling at him. “Not that you were counting.”
He laughs and rolls his eyes at you, eyes watery. “I’m really fucking glad you’re okay.”
You get a little teary. “I’m really glad you’re here. I was really fucking scared Jack.” You let out a breath and a few tears.
“There is nowhere else I’d rather be than by your side.” He leans back in, kisses you again, kisses all the tears away. “There is nowhere else I will be, okay?”
You nod a little. You want to ask him what happened, what your injuries are but you can’t bring yourself to. You don’t want to know. Not now.
Jack doesn’t volunteer anything. He figures that you’ll ask when you’re ready. He knows what it’s like to have it shoved in your face when you’re scared and drugged out on morphine and other medications and overwhelmed and not in a mental place to process it.
You can’t have been awake for more than thirty or forty minutes but you’re already so tired again. Jack can tell.
“Sleepy?”
“A little.” You pause. Then, a whispered admission. “Kind of scared to go back to sleep.”
Jack’s heart squeezes. “That’s understandable,” he nods. He knows the answer is no but he asks anyway. “Can I do anything?”
“Hold me.” Your words are out before he finishes his questions. His eyebrows raise. He wasn’t expecting that.
You can see him thinking. Thinking about how to say no. His face is pained and he tilts it. You know he’s afraid to hurt you. “Please.” He bites his bottom lip. “I need this Jack,” you whisper. “You need this.”
“If I hurt you at all you have to tell me, okay? If anything feels like it’s tearing or pulling or ripping, you have to tell me immediately.” He gives you a serious look, fear blazing in his eyes.
“I promise.”
He nods. “Okay.” It takes a while for him to help shift you over a bit and move all the wires and lines but eventually he’s in bed with you, holding you.
“Thanks Peter.” It’s completely sleep garbled but so precious and he has to laugh because even with all that’s happened you’re still calling him that name.
“You’re welcome, Doll.”
Once he’s sure you’re asleep Jack sobs as quietly as he can as he holds you. Lets himself process the emotions that he has tried to keep himself walled off from since you went down in the trauma room. He doesn’t want you to see, doesn’t want you to have to deal with him right now when you need to focus on yourself and recovering. He doesn’t want you to feel guilty, because he knows you and he knows you already feel bad about all of this. Like it’s your fault.
Jack doesn’t know it but you wake when you feel him start to tremble. You hear and feel every sob. A little piece of you dies inside.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jack leans against one of the windows in his apartment, stares out into the dark city and alternates watching the rain fall under the light of the street lamps and tracking drops that slide down the window. The bedroom is dark, only illuminated by the light of the city that pours in. He’s half dressed, shirtless, a pair of flannel pajama pants. The window is cold against his arm but he likes it. It reminds him in the moment that he can still feel.
You watch him from the bathroom doorway. You’ve been together seven and a bit months now.
You’re struck by how beautiful he looks in the backlighting. Struck by how sad and conflicted he looks.
You walk over to him quietly, but making your footsteps just heavy enough so that you don’t startle him when you wrap your arms around him from behind, rest the side of your head on the smooth skin of his back. Always so warm, your Jack, even now in the chill of the rainy night.
He leans back into you for just a second, just long enough to acknowledge that he knows you’re there, appreciates it.
Neither of you say anything for a few minutes before his voice interrupts the patter of the raindrops hitting the window.
“I’m sorry.”
Your brows furrow. “For what?”
“Being like this,” he shrugs. “It’s been so long. It shouldn’t still affect me like this.”
“Well first, should is a stupid word. Nothing should or shouldn’t be. Things just are. And it’s okay for them to be as they are. It’s okay for this to be as it is.” You lift your head from his back and gently pull at his torso a bit to get him to turn and look at you. He tries to avoid that eye contact he normally needs but you don’t let him. “Second, you have nothing to apologize for. And third, I don’t know Jack, I’d almost be more concerned if the anniversary of the day you lost a piece of yourself, literally, and woke up alone and terrified in a hospital bed ever stopped affecting you.”
As difficult as it is to hear, he likes that you just say it, say what happened. You don’t shy away from it, don’t avoid talking about it or speak about it without actually saying it. You never have. You’ve always just accepted it as part of him. He takes in a deep breath and then grabs your hand, leads you over to bed with him and waits for you to get in.
But you give him a look, a slight raise of your eyebrows and nod. He sits on the edge like you wordlessly asked. You kneel before him and it makes his heart pound, blood rush towards his groin even though he knows this isn’t going there. It’s just instinctual.
Jack watches you with glassy eyes as you push his pant leg up and remove his prosthetic for him, set it aside. You don’t have to ask if it’s hurting, of course it is. It’s the anniversary of losing his foot. Even when there’s no real reason for it to be causing him pain it is anyway. You know it. He knows you know it.
You open the drawer of his nightstand and pull out the balm he has, get a little bit and warm it between your hands before placing them there. You glance up at him. You always do. Always make sure it’s okay. You know how hard it can be for him to have you touching there sometimes if he’s too in his head. He just barely narrows his eyes before letting them go back to being wide and round as he watches. An unspoken please.
You start massaging gently and he takes another big breath in and holds it for a moment before letting it out and leaning into your hands slightly. “Mirror?”
He knows you’re asking if the pain is bad enough for him to want to do mirror therapy. He shakes his head. “No. It’s not that bad.” He gives you a small smile, cups your face with a hand. “Especially not now. You make it better. You always make it better, make everything better.”
A slow smile spreads over your face. You work on him a little more before his hands are on yours and pulling you towards him a little. He slides into bed and you follow.
You lay on your sides looking at each other. “You wanna talk about it?”
“Not right now, no.” He swallows hard, looks like he’s waiting for you to be upset. “Is that okay?”
“Course it is. I’m never going to force you to talk about it with me.” You already have talked about it. You know everything, every detail he can remember and was told about what happened. About his hospital stay at Landstuhl, transfer to Walter-Reed. How depressed he got, the survivor’s guilt, the wishing he had just died instead.
But he knows what you mean. You don’t have to talk about it now, about his feelings, what he’s carrying in his chest and mind at the moment. You lean in and kiss him. “We can whenever. If and when you’re ready. Or you can talk to your therapist. It doesn’t have to be me.”
The way he looks at you makes your stomach flip. Like you’re the most important thing in his world, like you hung the moon and stars for him, like he’s amazed by you. Like you’re helping to heal him.
He reaches out to cup your face again, runs a thumb over your cheek. “I want you.”
You smile at him, soft and small, befitting of the moment. “You have me. You’ll always have me. No matter what.”
He gives you a look that acknowledges your words. “You know what I mean.” His hand starts to wander down to the hem of his shirt you wear. “I need to turn that part of my brain off. Get lost in you.”
“God, what a tough ask,” you click your tongue, voice teasing and full of feigned exasperation. “Such a real hardship for me.”
He laughs a little. “I’ll make it up to you.”
“Oh no Dr. Abbot,” you move closer to him and push at his chest so he rolls on his back, straddle his hips and bring your chest to his, lean in to kiss him but stop short, just let your lips move against his, “this is all about you.”
Jack groans from somewhere deep in his chest. “You know what doctor does to me,” he murmurs before he kisses you hard, possessively, holding the back of your head with one hand so you can’t move away, not that you’d ever want to.
“Indeed I do, sir.” Another groan from him and a smirk from you as you sit up and push the covers back, pull his pajama pants and boxer briefs down all at once.
Jack swears you spend hours lavishing him in attention, kissing every inch of him, every scar. Even that one.
By the time you guide him inside of you you’re the only thing on his mind. You ride him slow, just fast enough to not be teasing, at the rhythm and pace you’ve learned he loves, let him watch as he slides in and out of you because you know how much he loves it.
You lean back at one point, rest your hands on both his thighs and something about the move and the way you’re not afraid to get close to the missing part of him heals him and makes him lose it.
After, you lay on his chest, absentmindedly draw random shapes on his skin while he runs a hand up and down your back. “This part always feels just as good but in a different way,” you murmur.
“Cuddling releases oxytocin. Oxytocin makes you feel happy, helps you heal, reduces stress, bonds you to the one you’re snuggling with. It’s called the love hormone.” Jack always makes you laugh when he does that, explains something medically, biologically. You like him sharing his knowledge, little pieces of his job with you, and you like that he’s not condescending about it, just tells you it like you’re a student.
You laugh a little. “That tracks then.”
You sit in a comfortable silence for a bit. Jack thinks about everything you’ve done for him tonight, over the past seven months, how you feel laying here on his chest. A surge of oxytocin hits him and he’s overwhelmed by it, how much he loves you, how much you do for him, care for him.
“I don’t deserve you.” He says it quietly, almost like he doesn’t mean to speak the thought out loud.
You stop tracing shapes, furrow your brows and lift yourself up to look down at him sternly, eyes burning with love. “I’m not even gracing that absolute bullshit with a reply tonight Peter.” You kiss him.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Four days pass. Things are simultaneously getting better and increasingly harder.
You meet everyone, the entire ED, you swear, everyone Jack has ever talked about. They’re all lovely and genuine. You hit it off with them all despite the circumstances. Part of you worries though, that they only like you because they pity you and because you’re in the hospital and what else can they do. Jack reassures you that you’re one of them now, you’re Pitt family, that even when they didn’t know you or about you and had never met you, you already were.
Jack helps you shower. Really Jack showers you. Does it all for you. It’s one of those most intimate things you’ve experienced with him. Him taking care of you like this, when you can’t take care of yourself. He takes his time washing your hair and body gently, like you’ll break if he touches you just a little too hard. He makes sure your stitches and central line stay dry. Makes sure you don’t lean your head back too far and aggravate your skull fracture.
Physically you’re doing okay. Improving. Maybe not as fast as everyone, Jack especially, would like. But you’re not getting worse.
Mentally, however, things are devolving. Rapidly.
Once the initial shock and happiness at being alive wore off you’re left with reality.
A nurse from the floor comes in to take vitals like they do a couple of times a day. Jack steps out to go grab a drink from the vending machine while you and the nurse chat a little. You ask her if you can move into the chair, go sit by the window. She says of course, unhooks you from some monitors and helps you move over. She takes your dinner and sets it on the table in front of you. You thank her and wait for Jack to come back.
Dusk is falling over the city. It’s easier to sit and look outside when it’s not so bright. You keep the lighting in your room low to help with the headaches you’re still fighting. You suppose a broken skull will do that to you.
You haven’t felt well all day, have slept more than usual. You’re sure it’s just depression from being here and all the changes and mostly, probably, seeing what all of this already has done and continues to do to Jack, physically and mentally. Your stomach turns at the thought and you shiver despite your cheeks burning. You’re so uncomfortable and there’s no end in sight and you don’t want to keep doing this to Jack, keep asking him to be here and sleep here. The logical and rational part of your brain knows that you’re not asking him to do anything. He’s doing it because he wants to, because he loves you.
“You need to eat,” Jack reminds you as he walks back in the room.
“I’m not hungry,” you murmur, continue to look out the window.
“I know, Doll, but you’ve gotta eat to keep your strength up.” Jack says softly as he pulls up a chair to sit across from you. You nod a little at him but don’t move to start eating. “What’s wrong?” he finally whispers.
It takes a moment but eventually you shrug. You don’t want to burden him with it.
“Talk to me. Please. Even if just a little.”
“I don’t know… I’m just tired, I think.”
He tilts his head at you, eyes appraising and clinically evaluating you. Something is off, something has been off, he’s just struggling to figure out what.
“Don’t look at me like that, please,” you whisper.
He furrows his brows. “Like what?”
“Like I’m a patient who needs to be evaluated.”
“I can’t help it. It helps reassure me that you’re okay.” He lets out a bit of a breath. “I’m worried about you right now. Is everything okay? Do you feel okay?”
You take in a big breath of air and fight back the wince before letting it out. “I’m just… I don’t know Jack. I’m sad. I’m fucking sad. All the time.”
Ah. Depression.
He knows it intimately and chastises himself mentally a bit for not realizing it sooner, not recognizing it. Not anticipating it from minute one. He gives you a moment to see if you want to say more.
“I… I feel sorry for myself, yes, but it’s more than that. I see what it’s doing to you, the pain it’s causing, I’m causing you. Physically, having to sleep here. I can practically see your back and hip hurting, Jack. I can see the overcompensation when you walk. I know you cried. I was awake. And I didn’t want to make it a thing and pressure you into talking to me. But I see how scared and on edge you are, all the time. Because of me-”
“No.” He doesn’t mean to interrupt but he has to right there. “Not because of you. This is not your fault. None of this is. This isn’t because of you, it’s because of what happened to you.”
You shake your head. “No, Jack, it’s me. It is me. I feel like I’m sucking the fucking life out of you. Dealing with me is exhausting. I can’t keep asking you to do this, be here and take care of me. It’s not fair.” You sniffle and wipe some tears you didn’t know fell with the back of your hand. “I mean, Jesus, Jack, I’m exhausted and all I have to do is sit in bed all day. I hate it.” The tears fall a little faster and he gives you space to let it all out. Your emotional brain takes his silence as some sort of tacit and silent agreement. That you are hurting him, that it is exhausting him, that you are sucking the life out of him.
The rational part of your brain is right there but you’re too exhausted to listen to it, to fight your emotional brain on it. So it all consumes you.
“I sit here and sometimes I just wish it would stop, wish it would be over, for both of us. Wish I had never even made it out of the OR, fuck out of the courthouse. You could be properly grieving already and working towards mo-”
“What the fuck?” It falls out of his mouth before he can even stop it. “Are you for fucking real?” He knows this reaction is wrong, that he should be validating your feelings. He knows far too well what it’s like to be depressed in a hospital bed wishing that you had died instead. But it’s too much for him because he already lived so intimately with the possibility of that reality. Of you dying. And so to have it brought up and brought up by you. All rational thought and ability to control himself disappears. “Properly grieving? You think I’d be properly grieving? Jesus fucking Christ, Robby would have had to beat me to the fucking roof or they’d be burying us together!”
You shake your head, tears falling harder. “I don’t want that, I would never want you to do that. I’d want you to take care of yourself! I’d want you to live for me. For us. Find-”
“No.” He shakes his head, runs both of his hands over his face, heel of his palms pressing into his eyes for a moment. “No. I can’t fucking-” He has to swallow hard through the intense nausea that threatens to make him dry heave. Just thinking about this, let alone living it. He knows this is not his finest moment, not a good reaction, that it’s a really really fucking bad one, but he can’t think about it right now, about an alternate reality where you died, where he was anywhere other than right next to your side in this moment. It’s too much. And so he reverts back a bit, starts to completely emotionally shut down. You’ve never seen him like this before. “I can’t fucking talk about this right now.”
A knock on the door interrupts you and you both look up and over at a smiling Robby. “Hey! Look who’s awake! How are you feeling sleepy? You’ve been asleep every time I’ve come to visit today.” He starts making his way closer.
“We can talk about this more later,” Jack mutters at you under his breath. His tone is a little sharper and more brusque than he means or even realizes.
But with your emotions where they are already it feels a little like he’s pulled a piece of your heart away. You wonder if this is it. If he’s finally had enough of all of this. Of you.
He didn’t sign up for this. There haven’t been any vows of sickness and health.
The adrenaline runs icy through your fingers and toes and sits like a rock in the back of your throat, hugging tightly around your stomach so much that your incision burns and itches. It gets hard to breathe. It’s panic, you tell yourself. You nod silently, fidget with your fingers and whisper the smallest “okay.”
You’re thankful for the low lighting and the cover it gives you and your tears. “Sorry about that,” you force a small laugh at Robby. “Just one of those days I guess.” You force a yawn this time. “Honestly I’m actually a little sleepy again,” you admit sheepishly. “I think I might get back in bed.”
There’s a pause as Robby waits for Jack to react. But Jack says nothing, and the look on his face tells Robby he’s a million miles away. You getting up is what brings Jack back to himself somewhat and he’s up and hovering behind you to make sure you don’t fall in an instant.
“Um, well.” Robby runs a hand through his hair and over his beard. “Jack, if you wanted we’re pretty backlogged down there, we could use someone for even just a few hours to help out. I just wanted to offer. We’ll be fine if you don’t.” Robby’s eyes flick between the two of you. “Thought it might be a good way to help transition back to full shifts eventually.” He coughs awkwardly.
Jack looks at you with his eyebrows slightly raised, like he’ll do whatever you say as opposed to what he actually wants. Despite looking at you it’s like he doesn’t consciously take in your face at the moment, how hurt you look, how small, the tears lining your eyes, how scared you look, how anxious, how questioning.
“Up to you.” You give him a strained smile. “I’m just going to sleep, so it’s not like you’re going to miss much here. Robby is right, might be a good way to help transition.”
Jack nods. “Okay. Okay, yeah.”
“Fuck, thank you so much,” Robby sighs in relief. “It’s pretty bad honestly.” He looks at you with a soft smile. “Sleep well and I’ll keep an eye on him for you.”
You give him a forced smile back and nod, waiting for Jack to come say goodbye before following Robby out the door. But Jack is so shut down and on autopilot he doesn’t even give you a kiss or say anything other than an absent, “sleep well,” before he follows Robby out of the room. The sound of the door closing behind him may as well be the sound of your heart shattering.
Hours pass.
Hours you do not in fact spend sleeping but instead wide awake feeling like you’ve got the flu. Everything hurts, you shake, you’re sweaty because you’re so hot but you feel so cold. You just feel so weak. You’re so miserable you’re not even aware of the way breathing takes more effort and seems less effective, how much it hurts. Hours enough for you to miss Jack and wish he was here and want to call down and beg him to please come back up. But not quite enough hours for the next vitals check.
The hours are quick for Jack. Work helps him. It keeps his mind busy. The more and more he comes back to himself fully and opens back up with clear eyes the more desperate he is to get up to you and apologize. He feels awful about actually deciding to come down here. How could he leave you? He knows he didn’t react well. It just caught him so off guard and he reverted back to a previous version of himself. All he can do is hope you’ll forgive him, but he knows you well enough to know that you’ll understand and be able to put yourself in his shoes and forgive him and you guys can talk.
He volunteers to take one last ambulance coming in. He goes outside to wait for it, to get some fresh air. To be out of the hospital if only for a moment.
Mel runs through the automatic door, head on a swivel to find him. She starts running to him when she sees him. “Dr. Abbot!”
Jack turns his head, thinks Mel’s voice is off, but he guesses it’s been a bit since he’s heard it down here. But when he sees her face, the way she’s running towards him, his heart speeds up and he shakes his head a little as she approaches him. Mel’s eyes are wide, just the slightest bit wet.
“Dr. Abbot,” Mel breathes. “She’s crashing. Robby went up to see her and she crashed.”
“What?” It’s whispered. Jack’s whole world stops again. He doesn’t even wait for an answer, is sprinting inside and screaming to hold the elevator because he knows it’ll be faster than he can take all the flights up to your room. He tries to hold onto hope. Mel had said crashing not coding.
This would fucking happen. This would fucking happen. He leaves you and then you crash. The realizations hit him when he gets in the elevator and presses the door closed button over and over. That the last thing you said to him was that small, barely audible “okay.” That your last interaction was an almost fight in a way, was him upset when you were telling him what was on your mind when that’s what he has been begging you to do. That he walked out of your room without saying goodbye, without giving you a kiss, without telling you he loved you.
Sleep well.
That could be the last fucking thing he ever said to you. Sleep well. He pictures your face when he looked at you that last time, near tears, scared, small, anxious, questioning. Probably questioning whether he was going to come back or whether he loved you or whether he still wanted to be with you after so clearly hitting a nerve with him. Especially on top of all the guilt you were already feeling before that conversation. The guilt you were telling him about when he shut down.
The world already gave him a second chance with you and he fucked it all up in a minute. Somewhere deep in his bones he knows “sleep well” will be the last thing he ever said to you, that your last interaction together will be a quasi-argument. Because if you’re crashing at this point, this far out from surgery, something bad is happening. Differential diagnoses flip through his mind. Pulmonary embolism, having somehow reopened one of your internal wounds and bleeding out, sepsis, delayed collapsed lung, drug reaction, the list goes on and on. None of them are good. All of them would require you to fight hard to pull through.
And with fucking “sleep well” as the last thing he said to you after he practically jumped in your shit you probably think you have nothing left to fight for.
You’re vaguely aware of Robby coming into your room and talking to you even though you can’t make out any words at first. But then you become acutely aware of him screaming about you crashing and somebody call Jack.
Jack.
Robby says something about intubation but you get a hand up, cling to the fabric on the arm of that blue sweatshirt he always wears. “Wait,” you choke out, wondering when it got so hard to breathe and how you’re just noticing. “Jack,” you force out in a wheeze, “want to talk,” you look up at Robby with terrified eyes he’s seen hundreds of times in patients who think they’re about to die, only yours have a slight look of determination. “Please.”
He hesitates for just a second. “Okay,” he nods, looking down at you. “Okay. But only if he’s here within the next two minutes. I’m counting.” He grabs an oxygen mask and holds it over your mouth and nose. Your eyes say ‘thank you’ in the most heartbreaking of ways. You both know he’ll be there with one minute and fifty six or seven seconds to spare.
The elevator door opens on your floor and Jack’s sprinting out of it to your room, praying that maybe you’ll still be alive when he gets there. He could talk to you, tell you he’s sorry and he loves you and please fight. He’s panting when he runs into your room, looks at you, your vitals, and then Robby. “Why the fuck isn’t she intubated yet?!”
“She wanted to be able to say something to you,” Robby tells him as he pushes drugs, barks out orders and gets ready to intubate you. “She’s totally fucking septic Jack, out of fucking nowhere,” he calls back over his shoulder. “She must have thrown a septic PE.” Robby pulls the oxygen mask away from your face.
Jack looks back at you as he moves closer. You lick your lips and rub them together a little, trying to get them wet and unstuck from each other. You look terrified but try to offer him a brave smile anyway. “I love you,” you manage to mouth before everything is consumed by black and quiet.
Where everything goes black and quiet for you, Jack’s senses are overwhelmed by the look on your face, the way your eyes shut, the way Robby’s hands so gently turn your head back so he can intubate you and seconds later by the high pitched whine coming from your patient monitor announcing you’ve flatlined and Robby yelling for someone to start compressions.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
He’s not exactly looking for it when he spots it as he walks down a street to pick up the take out you ordered on his way home. But it’s there and it makes him think of you. It’s almost perfect. Almost.
He slips inside, gets in a conversation with the store owner. They can customize it for him. He thinks you’ll love that, the idea that nobody has the same engagement ring as you. The owner says he’ll get him some sketches. Jack puts down a deposit. You text asking if he’s okay.
He says a quick goodbye to the owner and that he’ll be back and runs to get the food and back to you. He’s known for a while now that he wants to ask, wants to marry you. You just get him in a way he can’t describe and knows he’ll never find again.
That night in bed he lays awake spooning you and thinking about how to propose. You wouldn’t want something too big and flashy. But he doesn’t think you’d hate it being in public necessarily. God, what if you say no? What if you’re not ready or it’s too fast or he’s too old, too broken?
No. He knows you don’t think he’s too old or broken at all. He knows you’ll say yes, knows you’ll cry. But how to do it. Where to do it.
The bookstore with the ring in the book feels like too much, a little too on the nose. You wouldn’t hate it by any means but it doesn’t feel right.
He thinks about a conversation you had in the travel section at the bookstore.
“I love travelling.” You say it as you look over the shelves. “Especially internationally.”
“Yeah?”
“Mhmmm,” you hum. “We should go somewhere.” You hand him a book on Paris. “I love Paris. Have you been?”
Jack shakes his head, starts thumbing through the book. “Can’t say that I have.”
“I would love to show you around. It’s just so pretty. The Eiffel Tower sparkles and they light up all the buildings at night and I swear almost every building looks so beautifully historic. And the Louvre. I love the Louvre. I don’t even really know why, I just do. I like the inverted pyramids by the entrance and I like how you just get lost in there.” You’re flipping through your own book, this one about France in general. “We could do a France tour. Start in Nice or somewhere and work our way up.” You look up at him, and when he looks up from his book at you he’s surprised to see nerves. “If you would want to, of course. Obviously. There’s no pressure. I know you’d have to take time off from work and you love work and it would waste a lot of time off, probably depending on how long we went for. If we did. So it’s okay. I could go by myself or with a friend if I got desperate enough.” You give a breathy, anxious laugh and fiddle with the book.
Jack gives you a little smile and puts the book back where it belongs. “It might shock you to hear this but I have maxed out the amount of annual leave time off I can accrue. I donate everything I have leftover at the end of the year. I’ve donated all of it for a couple of years now because I can’t accrue it anymore.”
“Oh, well,” you clear your throat and it would almost be funny and adorable if he didn’t hate seeing you in distress. “That’s very nice of you. You’re a very good man Peter.”
“I want to go with you.” Your lips twitch up and eyebrows raise. “I want us to do that.”
“Yeah?” You beam at him and it’s straight sunshine. You’re too good for him, he swears.
“Yeah,” he nods, returns your smile, kisses you quickly. “Robby might try to kiss you like that for getting me to go. He’s always on me about taking a vacation.”
Yes. In Paris. That would be perfect. You haven’t started planning the trip because life has gotten busy for both of you, but he mentions it enough to make sure you know he hasn’t forgotten, you talk about when you’ll start planning it some nights but often fall asleep mid conversation, exhausted from your day.
In front of the inverted pyramids at the Louvre. He can hire a photographer and they won’t even look suspicious. Just like someone taking photos of the Louvre.
He starts planning it, the France trip. Doesn’t tell you. Reaches out to your boss who he has met to make sure you can get the time off. He’ll surprise you with it soon, he tells himself. He’ll tell you soon now that he has the ring hidden away in a box in a closet that you can’t reach easily.
Soon. He knows he can’t keep putting it off, can just hear Dana and Robby in his ear if they knew, telling him to grow a pair and do it, that tomorrow isn’t promised, that he should do it here at the hospital so they can finally fucking meet you. That, while they don’t know you, Dana would give him a sharp look then, they know you’ll love it.
You’ll be at the courthouse tomorrow. It’s not too far from his place. He could surprise you and pick you up, take you out somewhere nice. He has the day off too so he could go get the book you handed him, put the tickets and copy of the itinerary he’s planned so far in it.
He smiles to himself as he imagines the shock on your face, the way you’ll struggle for words and repeat a bunch of one syllable ones for thirty seconds before the ability to form real sentences comes back to you. Yeah, that’ll work.
Tomorrow.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It’s a perfect day. Not too hot and not too cold. Like that Miss Congeniality bullshit that you made him watch and he secretly and surprisingly enjoyed.
It’s your perfect day.
Jack thinks that’s real fucking ironic.
Sleep well.
Jack was right.
Those were in fact the last words he ever spoke to you.
While you were conscious anyway. It’s all he can think about as he sits here in his dress blues at your fucking funeral. He couldn’t bring himself to buy a plain navy suit for the occasion.
No, that day he had said a lot more words to your unconscious self up by your head as Robby and the team tried and succeeded at stabilizing you enough to get you to the OR. And he had said a lot more words when they let him in the OR so that he could hold your hand and talk to you for just a bit longer before they called it. Somehow in the moment he had managed to block out Garcia standing on the other side across from him with her hand in your chest, manually beating your heart to give him more time with you.
And then he had said a lot more words to your dead body.
He must have sat in that stupid operating room with you for hours just holding you once they had closed your chest and sat the OR bed up a bit for him. He thinks he must have cycled through every stage of grief with you in his arms.
Denial. All he could do for a while was mumble to himself that this couldn’t be happening. This couldn’t be real. You weren’t really dead. This is some twisted fucking joke you’re trying to play. To see if you could get him to cry. You can stop playing now, Doll, you got me to cry. Okay so not an elaborate joke. Well, you’d wake up in his arms any second now, shock everyone, the whole medical community with your recovery. Because this simply could not be fucking happening.
Anger. He yelled at you to wake up and not do this to him, to think about how unfair and selfish you were being, how fucking dare you. How dare you leave him here alone. How dare you for talking about him properly grieving. Does it look like he’s properly fucking grieving to you? And he knew, he fucking knew you were about to say moving on, that he could be working towards moving on as if he’s ever going to fucking move on, fuck you for that. He was supposed to propose and you ruined it. You left him How. Fucking. Dare. You.
Bargaining. He negotiated with himself. He should have looked you over before stepping away from you, should have taken you right into an exam room and checked every inch of you for injury before leaving you. If he could go back he would. He would do it all differently. He wouldn’t let you out of the house, would have insisted you skip work that day. He’s not a particularly religious man but he’s praying, bargaining with a God he’s not sure he believes in to bring you back to him. Take his other foot, take his hands, take his ability to be a doctor, take anything and everything that’s enough to bring you back.
Depression. Crushing and all consuming. The reality that this was happening. A sadness so deep in his soul and causing so much physical pain in his heart that for one glimmer of a second he thought maybe he was suffering from broken heart syndrome, that maybe if he could keep himself worked up and sobbing it would kill him. A sadness so consuming he’d never pull himself out of it. There would never be enough tears shed or enough therapy or enough anything to make any of it better.
Acceptance. Eventually it washed over him. You were dead in his arms. He was holding your lifeless body. This was his new reality. One without you in it.
But mostly he just sat there and cried over you. Cried for you. Buried his face in your neck at times to muffle the screaming sobs that made him shake. Rocked you and held the side of your face against his when his sobs became so deep they were soundless.
For a while he thought Robby and Dana were going to have to drag him out of there, drag you out of his arms. But at some point he just broke in a different way. Became some sort of numb. Resigned. So he forced himself to leave.
The only thing he could think to do at the end as he laid you back down was to try and make them better. Those two words.
Brushing some hair back from your face and running his thumb over your jaw he had told you that he loves you and that he always will. He whispered for you to rest now, gave you one last unreciprocated kiss, and then murmured “sleep well.”
He had to damn near drag himself out of the OR after that. Robby knew it. Dana knew it. They were both right there waiting for him. He had needed to get the fuck out of the hospital and to somewhere he could just send himself into oblivion because he had no fucking idea how to deal with the pain, with the loss of you.
Dana’s hand on his arm grounded him a little. Enough that he heard Robby say quietly, “let’s get you home.”
Home.
Jack had realized in that moment that he didn’t have a home. You were his home. Your heartbeat. The one that was now gone. That simply no longer existed. That had been thrown away by the universe like it meant nothing when it meant everything to him.
Yes, he realized he had an apartment, he had somewhere to go. But that was the apartment that he was supposed to have shared with you. The apartment with all of his things, all of your things, still in boxes. You had been planning on spending the weekend unpacking and painting and getting furniture where you wanted it. You had been planning on making it your home. Together. And then you got shot.
And now, Jack had realized, there was no more together. There was simply an apartment full of boxes of shit and furniture haphazardly placed just to get it in.
He had had to laugh about it, it was so fucked up. He had barely even realized that he, Dana, and Robby had made it outside somehow, through a side door so that he didn’t have to walk through the entire Pitt. And so out there on the sidewalk in the sun - because of course it couldn’t have been night, he couldn’t have had one thing to give him comfort - he’d broken down in a fit of laughter for a moment that quickly devolved into sobs.
Big wracking ones that required Robby to hold him up until he had let Jack slide down the side wall onto the ground where the sobs came so hard they were silent. It hadn’t been just you he was weeping for at that point. It had been for you and for himself and for the future you should have had together. For the apartment whose lease would be broken and the trip to Paris he had planned to surprise you with that would never be gone on. For the engagement ring that would never grace your finger. For everything that could have been. For everything that already was.
He’d stopped crying at some point. Dana had gotten her car and driven him and Robby to Robby’s place. Everything since then had more or less blurred together.
Schedules had been changed so that Dana and Robby worked opposite shifts so that one of them could always be with him. Always watching him. Acutely aware what was likely to happen if they didn’t.
You had no family so everything had been left to Jack, which meant it really had been left to Dana because Jack was barely functioning. Funeral planning. Burial or cremation. Dealing with all of your things.
Unsure of your preferences Dana had picked burial, found a cemetery, bought a plot, gotten it all arranged. Unbeknownst to Dana the one thing Jack had managed to do during all of this was purchase the burial plot next to yours. Only time would tell how long that space next to you would remain empty. Not long if Jack had it his way.
And so here they all were. At the cemetery. On your perfect day.
The funeral was to be held graveside and then back to somewhere for the celebration of life, Dana told him where at one point but he doesn’t remember. Somewhere in his mind he notes that it feels like the entire damn department is here and he can’t help but wonder who the fuck is staffing it right now. As if it matters. As if he’ll ever bring himself back to that hospital.
Jack’s completely zoned out, unaware of what’s being said, if anything is being said. Your casket is right there. With you in it. He wants to climb inside with you and let them bury you both with him alive. He wants to let your grave smother him to death. He realizes it already is in its own way. So then he might as well be with you, right? No. You’d specifically told him you wouldn’t want that. You said you’d want him to take care of himself and live for you, for the two of you. But he doesn’t fucking want to. He just wants to be with you.
He tracks your casket as it lowers six feet down. He wants to dive in after you. After a moment Dana nudges him. Right. It’s time. Time for him to throw a flower and some dirt on the top of your grave.
He forces himself to stand, takes the two daffodils from Dana and approaches your grave. One for him and one for you. They’re your favorite. He stops for a second and just stares down at the wooden box that houses you. Some sort of broken and raw moan slips out before he can stop it, a whimper just a second long, just enough to prove to himself that he’s alive and you’re not standing next to him and there to comfort him and make it all better. He can’t cry. Not here. Not now. Not in front of all of these people.
He brings a shaky hand up and reaches under his overly pressed shirt until he finds the chain, pulls his dog tags up and over his head, wraps them around the stems of the two daffodils. His chin trembles as he tosses them on top of your casket before following with a little dirt. He thought about tossing the ring he bought you in too, but instead he wears it on a different chain around his neck for now.
The symbolic burial of himself with you through his dog tags doesn’t escape anyone’s notice and if anyone present wasn’t crying already they were now. Robby and Dana share a heavy tear blurred look with each other. He still can’t be alone.
Jack just stares down. Can’t bring himself to move. To go sit back down. So the funeral ends with him standing there, looking down at you.
Robby and Dana give him a few minutes. As he senses people leave he lets the tears slide down his face silently but copiously. His shirt is darkened by his tears quickly. Eventually Robby clears his throat and steps up behind him.
“Jack?” Robby says his name softly at first. Jack doesn’t respond. “Jack, come on.” It’s a bit louder this time, but still nothing. Robby grabs his shoulder and gives it a little squeeze, is much louder now. “Jack!”
“What? What happened?” Jack’s head snaps up, the rest of his body following and pushing him out of the chair in seconds. His neck twinges from the awkward angle as his two fingers curl over your wrist automatically, finding your pulse as his vision clears and the patient monitor showing your vitals becomes readable.
All your vitals are normal. Stable.
Your eyes remain closed. Comatose.
“Nothing,” Robby says quietly, squeezing his shoulder again. “You fell asleep. It didn’t look comfortable. You’re going to fuck your neck if you’re not careful.”
“Jesus fucking christ,” Jack pants, the sheer amount of adrenaline spreading through his system so fast making him shake. He closes his eyes as he tries to bring his heart rate and breathing back to normal. He takes a second to focus and it’s there, under his two fingers thumping along in time with the reading on the patient monitor. Your heartbeat.
“Fuck.” Jack brings his free hand up and uses it to wipe away the tears itching his face. His chest is wet, shirt undoubtedly darkened by his tears.
“Another one?” Robby gives him a knowing look. “Funeral again?”
Jack just nods. It’s not the first nightmare Robby has woken him from in the last three days. It’s not the first time Robby has woken him up from that nightmare.
“You talked to your therapist recently?” Robby asks as he sits in the other chair near your bed.
“I don’t have fucking time for the psych-bullshit right now, Robby.” Jack huffs as he sits back in his chair, stretching out his neck. “And I don’t need therapy. I need her to wake the fuck up and come back to me.” He leans forward to kiss your hand, gives it a squeeze and holds his breath that you’ll squeeze back. You don’t. “It’s been five days Robby. Five fucking days.”
Robby nods slowly. “I know. Her body has been through a lot. Sepsis on top of a gunshot and skull fracture is a lot and brain bleed is a lot. And she had a PE, and they had to crack her chest, Jack.” You got lucky and didn’t need surgery to fix the brain bleed. And nobody had wanted to do a thoracotomy on you, not while you were septic, but with your other injuries they had to be careful with blood thinners and the thoracotomy quickly became the only real option. The last ditch option. “All of that is a lot. She needs time. And it’s not bad news. She’s been extubated. That’s a big thing, you know that.”
“I know,” Jack sighs. It’s small and as exhausted as he sounds and makes him deflate into the chair. “I just… can’t Robby. I can’t keep having that nightmare. I need to hear her voice. I need to know she heard something from me other than fucking ‘sleep well.’ I need this to have never fucking happened!”
Robby doesn’t reply immediately, gives Jack a few minutes to come back down. “She knows you love her, Jack. She knows that you guys would have worked through whatever it was. Deep down she knows that, even if in the moment she was having anxiety.”
“You don’t even fucking know her. You can’t say that.” Jack shakes his head at Robby “You have no fucking idea.”
Robby just raises his eyebrows and gives him a resigned look, lets the silence take back over.
“I need to get back down there, but Dana is going to come up in a bit,” Robby tells him as he stands up.
“I don’t need babysat.” Jack huffs.
Robby walks by and squeezes Jack’s shoulder again. “There’s a difference between being babysat and your friends wanting to sit with you to be with you through a difficult time, Jack. We just want to help and right now all we can really do is be here. It’s not babysitting. It’s being a friend. It’s loving a friend. Let us do it, okay?” He doesn’t wait for an answer before walking out.
And so here you are again. Just the two of you. Only one of you conscious. Jack runs a hand through his hair, moves his chair back closer to your bed and holds your hand. He’s exhausted but terrified to sleep. It always ends the same.
He’s hardly aware of time passing but knows it must because Dana walks in, hands him a cup of tea. “How’re you?” Jack shrugs. Dana lets him. “Drink the tea.”
He takes a sip, if for nothing more than to get her off his back about it. They sit mostly in silence. Sometimes Dana volunteers a funny story or tells him about some ridiculous patient they had, keeps him up to date on the Pitt gossip.
“You should shower,” she suggests to him. She’d gone over to your guy’s place at some point and brought in toiletries, fresh clothes for you both. “I’ll sit with her.”
“I’m fine. It’s not like I do anything other than sit here.”
“Still, it’s a good place to take a minute to yourself. Clear your head.” Dana tilts her head at him. “Look at me.”
After a second he does, tears his eyes from you to look at her. “She’d want you to take care of yourself.”
Her words are a little too close to what you had said to him and he bristles, looks back at you. “Nerve there,” Dana observes, always perceptive. “I know I’m right. I know she must have told you that at some point or it wouldn’t have pulled whatever that reaction was.”
“I’m not leaving her. I don’t care if I can use the shower in her room.” All he can think about is showering you there, watching the pink water go down the drain as he got all of the blood out of your hair and off the rest of your body, the way you melted into his touch and thanked him. How intimate it was. Potentially one of your last moments of intimacy.
“And the last time I gave into you and showered she fucking woke up without me.” The words hit him and he looks at Dana. “The last time I showered she woke up,” he whispers. He’s not really one to normally believe in such a thing but right now he’s clinging to anything. “I should shower.”
Dana gives him a long nod with a small smile. “Yeah.”
So he does. Tries to split the difference between quickly so that he doesn’t have to spend too much time alone thinking but slow enough to give you time to wake up. But when he turns the water off and doesn’t hear Dana talking he already knows.
You haven’t woken up.
“I’m sorry, hon. I was hoping it would work.” Dana looks at him apologetically.
He shakes his head. “It’s fine.”
Dana nods a bit and walks out.
Jack finds it hard to talk to you like this. He doesn’t really know why. Maybe it’s just too hard for him to stand the silence he gets in return.
Sometimes he’ll read to you. That feels nice. You go on and on sometimes about how much you love his voice. You guys met at a bookstore, both love reading. So it just feels right. And he doesn’t have to stop talking and forget and be waiting for a reply that you won’t give him. He can just read.
He picks up whatever he had been reading to you and starts back up. He doesn’t make it through much though because he just can’t. The sun is setting outside again, another whole day of you in a coma almost finished and he can’t stand it.
It burns him from the inside, makes him feel like he needs to crawl out of his skin. He needs you to wake up. He needs to fix you. He’s a doctor. Fixing is what he does. He’s fixed countless people.
But he simply cannot fix you. The only one that matters.
“You know,” he starts, leans back in his chair and looks at you. He scoffs. “God I don’t even know. I don’t know how to do this. What to say to you.” He shakes his head. “And I hate that,” he whispers.
He sets the book down and the author’s name catches his eye. He moves in closer to you, gets up and sits on the edge of your bed, leans his head in a bit towards you as he holds one of your hands. He needs you to hear this. “I’ve decided that if you don’t wake the fuck up soon I’m going to have no choice but to have someone bring me that book and start reading it to you.” He squeezes your hand and shrugs. “So there. That’s my motivating wake up talk.” Tears hit his eyes and his lips wobble a little. “Wake the fuck up or I’m reading you the god damn book.”
Jack watches you for a moment and sighs. He leans in and gives your cheek the lightest kiss. He can’t bring himself to kiss your lips again and not feel yours move back against his. He settles back in his chair and picks up the book he was reading. Instead of opening though he just vaguely hits himself straight in the face with it a few times. He doesn’t even know why. He just has the impulse. It’s not hard, it doesn’t do anything. It’s just tapping, just something to ground him maybe. He rests it on his face, closes his eyes and leans his forehead into the cover just to feel the resistance when he pushes the back against him a bit. Maybe he tries to pretend it’s your forehead and the way you lean into each other with your foreheads together sometimes.
“Should I be jealous of the book Peter?” Your voice is barely audible with how cracked and dry your throat is.
It takes a second for the book to drop out of Jack’s hands and hit the floor. “Holy fucking shit,” he breathes. “You’re awake.”
He’s frozen for a minute, shaking hard as adrenaline pours into his system and he feels every emotion he can think of at once.
“Fuck me,” he huffs. “Really? All I had to do was threaten to read that stupid book to get you to wake up?”
You give him a pained smile and small laugh. It sends him into action.
“What can I say? I really hate that book. Couldn’t have you torture both of us. I think I’m doing that enough to the both of us right now.” You lick your lips and try to swallow. “Water?” You whisper at him.
He brings you a cup quickly, holds the straw for you. “Sips,” he says softly. “Little sips right now, okay?” You do as he says, eventually nodding for him to take it away. “Pain? Are you in pain?” He looks on your bed and finds the remote. “Here.” He puts it in your hand, your thumb on top of the red button. “If you need a booster of morphine press the button.”
You’re immediately pressing it over and over. “What happened?” You groan slightly. “My chest, Jack. It’s so bad. It hurts to breathe, like a weight’s on it.” Your words are a little slurred as the boost of morphine hits. It takes him back to the way you slurred in the trauma room and he has to fight not to go right back there in his mind. You need him.
“I know.” He strokes your hair. “I know, I’m so sorry.” He looks over at one of your IV pumps. “I can ask them about upping your dose now that you’re awake, okay?”
You nod, blink at him. Your hand drops the button and finds one of his and gives it a little squeeze. “What happened?”
He searches your eyes with his, lets them flit about your face. His lip trembles. It breaks your heart. Whatever it was destroyed him.
He sits back in his chair, moves it as close to you as he can get it. You reach up to cup his face with your hand and he leans into it immediately, puts both of his hands over yours. “You went septic. Threw a clot. It was bad. It was really bad. You coded. They had to crack your chest to get you back. So that’s why your chest hurts so bad. You’ve been in a coma for five days. I’m so sorry,” he whispers, “I’m so sorry I didn’t-”
“Hey, hey,” you whisper back to him. “Don’t do that. Don’t apologize. None of this is your fault. You didn’t do anything, didn’t cause this.”
“No,” he sniffles, “I know, but I just… I…” Tears start to stream down his face as he looks at you helplessly and shrugs. “I couldn’t…”
“Jack.” The way you say his name shatters him and he folds, buries his head in your lap, wary of hurting you, and sobs as he keeps squeezing your hand. “It’s okay,” you whisper, run your free hand through his hair. You both know its a lie. Nothing is okay right now.
But you’re awake.
He doesn’t cry for long, too conscious of how exhausted you must be, how he doesn’t want this to be how he spends the time he just got back with you. Not right now anyway. There will be time for tears and emotions and processing later.
He rubs his face in your lap a bit to wipe his eyes and then lifts his head before resting it on its side against your legs. “I’m just so happy you’re awake.”
“Me too.” You give him a sleepy smile. “Was always going to wake up, couldn’t leave you here alone could I?”
He gives a little half laugh, half sob. “Good. Because I don’t know what I’d do without you.” You want to tell him he’d figure it out but you don’t.
“You gonna give me a kiss now Jack Abbot? I know I haven’t brushed-”
He’s moving the second you say kiss. He feels bad it didn’t occur to him immediately but he was just so overwhelmed with you being awake. His lips against yours cut you off. It’s not just one kiss, it’s two and three and you lose count.
Soft ones, small, just long enough. They say more than he could figure out how to say with his words right now. Each one is perfect in its simplicity.
“You should rest,” he murmurs against your lips. You hum at him in response, eyes already fluttering closed. “You know I love you right? More than anything. More than I deserve.”
You open your eyes back up and look at him. “Course I know that,” you murmur. “You know I love you right?”
He smiles at you. It’s a little watery, a little trembly. “Course I know that.”
You swallow hard, just from all the meds and fighting the exhaustion. “Get in bed.” Your tone doesn’t leave much room to argue but he does anyway.
“No. It’s not safe. I could hurt you. You need to heal a bit more.” He squeezes your hand. “But believe me, I want to, more than anything.”
“You won’t hurt me. Didn’t last time.” You look at him with big sleepy eyes that kill him. “Heal better with you in bed with me.” He bites his lip, torn, so scared of causing you any pain and so desperate to give you what you want. To give himself what he wants. “You’re the one that said oxytocin helps healing…” Your eyes flutter closed again.
He has to laugh through some tears. “God, you really do listen and learn don’t you?”
You hum at him. “Someone has to be your best student. And it better always be me Dr. Abbot.”
He laughs at that. It’s so you, such a you thing to say. For the first time in days he really laughs even with as short as it is. For the first time in days he feels hope. Hope that everything is going to be okay and you’re going to go home together and unpack and set up your place and paint and just be together.
“You’re my best everything,” he murmurs as he gently shifts you and all your wires and climbs carefully into bed next to you. He needs it. And you need it. And so he lets you both have it. He lets himself hold you as best he can while keeping you in a neutral position that won’t hurt you. Your head falls to rest on his shoulder and you sigh softly as you fall asleep. Jack kisses the top of your head, lets his lips linger.
“Sleep well.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Doll, I am not a dancer. I promise you. Nobody wants to see it.”
“I don’t believe you,” you pout at him. “And I’ve seen those hips in action Peter. I know how much control you have over them. How you can isolate all the little muscles in them.”
“None of the muscles in your hips are particularly little-”
“You’re not changing the subject,” you cut him off. “It’s a wedding. We’re going to have to dance. At least to the slow songs.”
“Are you sure you really want to take me?” He doesn’t even really mean to ask it, it just comes out.
You look up at him and pause, drop his comforter that you were pulling back to get into his bed. “I… Is it too soon? Too serious too soon? I guess going to a wedding together is kind of…” you trail off looking for the word. “I don’t know a thing.”
“No!” He’s quick to reassure you. He leans up and pulls the comforter back for you. “Get in bed.”
You do as he says. “It’s not too soon, and I want to go with you, trust me. Even under threat of dancing. I just wanted to make sure you don’t feel like you have to take me. I know a lot of your friends will be there and if you’re not ready to make those introductions, that’s okay,” he explains as he pulls you to him, arms wrapping around you but loose enough so that you can see each other.
“I don’t feel like I have to take you. I want to. I want people to meet you. I want to show you off.” One of your hands slips into the back of his hair and plays with it, ruffles the curls and scratches at his scalp on and off as you look at each other.
“Show me off?” He smirks at you. “You wanna show me off?”
“My intelligent, thoughtful, hot as all fuck doctor of a boyfriend? Yeah. I wanna show you off.” You grab at the old shirt he’s wearing to sleep in and give it and him a look of mock offense at it being on but pull him to you by it anyway. “Wanna see you in a partial suit. Nice slim fit pants, collared shirt, a tie, one or two buttons open at the reception and the tie shoved in your pocket to use on me later.”
Jack sucks in a sharp breath of air and you just give him a little raise of your eyebrow, start to roll onto your back. He’s on top of you and kissing you and has his hands roaming all over you the second your head hits the pillow.
He always pauses for a moment and makes eye contact with you before letting himself collapse on top of you after he’s done fucking you like this. The intimacy of that quick moment always makes your heart metaphorically skip a beat. This time is no exception.
Jack snuggles into your chest, kissing at the top of your breasts as he does before he settles. You run your hands through his hair, are always running them through his hair or up and down his back or both. He loves it.
“Hey Jack?” He’ll never get used to hearing his name come off your tongue.
He makes a little hum of acknowledgment, still blissed out and coming down.
“We’re dancing at the wedding.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Days blur together.
Your Pitt family rallies around both of you.
You start seeing a therapist and it helps, you improve some, mentally. Jack finally makes an appointment with his therapist and it helps him.
Everyone helps distract you, but it’s not just sitting in your room with you. One night Samira, Javadi, McKay, Mel and Heather show up in your room with painting supplies, easels, foldable stools, and a woman you’ve never met before.
Paint and sip, they explain. You’re doing a paint and sip right here in your room, minus the sipping, unfortunately, because of your meds. It’s so sweet and thoughtful it makes you teary. Jack will never admit it but it may or may not have made him a little teary as he gave you a kiss and walked out to be with Robby for a bit as you guys did your painting.
There are more things. There are a lot more things that they all do for you, and for Jack. Robby forces Jack to leave the hospital, just to go home, get more things for you, pick up food you like, small things. The first time is rough for both of you. But it gets better.
Of course, the most special though, the one that helps your mental health the most, is what Jack does for you.
One night a good two and a half weeks into your hospital stay, Jack goes out to pick up dinner and Dana, Samira and Heather show up in your room again, but this time they have clothes for you. Nice clothes. A nice dress, the one you were going to wear to the wedding. Nice shoes. Make-up. Perfume.
The Pitt is having a little get together on the roof and you should come, they explain. You worry that Jack is not going to be happy with you out of your room and on the roof, that it’ll scare him and you don’t want to scare him any more than you already have. They convince you that it’s okay, that Robby called Jack already and told him and so he knows to meet you up there. You’re confused by it all but don’t feel you’re in a position to really question anything and also very excited about the prospect of getting to be out on the roof in fresh air and city noise.
The girls help you get dressed and your makeup and hair done nicely. Dana sprays some perfume on you. It makes you smile.
“What?” She asks, but it’s a little too knowing.
“I wore this perfume on Jack and I’s first date.”
She hums. “Well isn’t that special? You’ll have to see if he remembers.”
Heather and Samira disappear, say they’ll meet you up there, they’re going to go change. Dana brings you up, opens the roof door and tells you to go, she’s gotta go change. You look at her confused and shaking your head and now you know something is up. But she’s off before you can question her.
You turn around and walk out onto the roof a little, around a little corner and there’s Jack.
There’s Jack standing next to a dinner table with a white linen tablecloth with candles on it, fairy lights strung up on the guard rail. There’s Jack holding a bouquet of daffodils for you and looking at you like you’re a vision. There’s Jack standing in front of you in nice slim fit pants, a collared shirt with two buttons undone.
You look shocked because you are so far fucking beyond shocked you didn’t even know it was possible. He did this for you.
“We didn’t get to go to the wedding,” he calls to you as he walks over while you walk to him. “You look gorgeous.”
You’re speechless. Beyond. You’re thoughtless, struggling to process this, all this work that he did for you.
“I promise to give you a raincheck on the tie,” he smirks as he reaches you, leans in and kisses you. He pulls back, brows furrowed like he’s confused and it makes you laugh a little because how the hell is he the confused one now. “You smell like our first date.”
“I…Jack, this is… Yeah, it’s the same perfume. Dana brought it.” You pause, think back on your conversations with Dana. She dragged it out of you so casually one day you thought nothing of it. You shake your head and laugh a little. “She asked me about it one day and I didn’t even think about it.
“She’s pretty good, isn’t she?” Jack laughs. You nod.
“Jack, I’m,” you look around, hold onto his forearms to ground you. You’re teary. Of course. “You did all this? For me?”
“Well I certainly had many co-conspirators who helped me get it all set up, but yeah. It was my idea. You needed it. I needed it. We needed it. A date night. And this was the only place we could get in.” He hands you the daffodils, grabs your hand and leads you over to the table where you stop.
“I…” You look around again. “It’s safe? For me?” You look back at him and he knows from the look in your eye that you’re not asking because you’re worried about yourself. You’re asking because you’re worried about him, worried about putting him through more trauma and more pain if something were to happen to you up here.
“Yes.” He helps you into the chair. “You’re probably the safest diner in all of Pittsburgh tonight. You’ve got a physician’s supervision.” He smirks at you. His eyes flick to the ground on the side. His go-bag. He’s prepared, just in case. That brings you back to reality, brings you back to yourself, makes you smile and give a soft laugh.
He sits down opposite you, starts to take a drink of water. “Have I ever told you how hot I find it that you’re a doctor?”
Jack chokes, starts coughing and it makes you giggle.
“What?” You draw the word out with a bit of that shit-eating grin he loves. “What did you expect me to say?”
“I don’t fucking know but not that! You were so speechless a minute ago!” He’s laughing a bit now, looking at you like you’re one of the seven wonders of the world.
“It’s just the truth!” you say through a laugh. He reveals dinner to you. Your favorite dish from your favorite place. You thank him for this, all of it, you keep saying it because you’re so blown away.
You eat dinner. You eat all of yours for the first time in two weeks and it makes Jack so incredibly happy and relieved. After you’re done with dinner you sit for a bit, chat a little before Jack stands up and holds out his hand to you. You raise an eyebrow at him.
He takes his phone out and thirty seconds later your guy's song, soft and slow, starts playing from a speaker he had hidden under the table. He offers you his hand again.
“Oh Jack.” You pull the words out a little bit as you start to cry.
Through tears you take it and let him pull you close into a dancing hold. “I hope they’re good tears,” Jack murmurs as he holds you close.
“They’re the best,” you sniffle. “I love you so much.”
Jack kisses your temple at the side of your eyebrow. “I love you more.”
The song plays on a loop. Jack dances with you until you admit you’re tired and need to rest. It’s not even really dancing more than just swaying together, him holding you close, murmured conversation. But it’s everything. He’s everything.
You’re there for weeks. Weeks that are beautifully uneventful, the only exception being when you hit some milestones in your recovery.
And then one day is eventful again because a word starts being used. The word you’ve both been desperate to hear.
Home.
You’re desperate to get out of the hospital and home. Jack is just as desperate to get you there. He never wants to let you out of it again, but that’s a conversation for a later day. He’s dreading when you have to go back to work, back to that courthouse. Rationally he knows with the increased security since the shooting it’s probably one of the safest places for you to be but his emotional brain doesn’t give a single fuck about that.
You laugh about it with Jack one day, how you’re going to go home to your apartment that’s still in boxes with furniture pushed to the center of rooms so you could paint. “It’s okay, we can wait to paint or I can make Robby help. And then you can just boss me around and tell me where to put things as I unpack while you rest on the couch.”
He gives you a very pointed look.
“I think I’ll be okay to help you unpack. At least some things and at least for a while. If I get tired I’ll rest and I won’t go lifting a box of books, okay?” You give him a reassuring smile.
“No.”
You let out a deep sigh. “Jack, we’ve talked about this. You can’t treat me like I’m glass forever. Especially once we’re home.”
“Why not? And it’s not even treating you like glass, it’s making sure you take it easy and recover.” His face is set, but not quite as hard as it has been when you’ve had this conversation in the past.
“I will take it easy. And I will recover. And you will be there to make sure I do both of those things. But being active, to an extent, I know, is important. Robby has said it. Dana. Heather, Mel, Santos, Shen, Parker, Perlah, Princess, Shamsi, Whitaker, Garcia, Javadi, Mohan, Mateo, everyone who has ever stepped in this room. Even you told me that, back when I didn’t want to get out of bed.” You run your hands over his chest, try to be soothing. You don’t want to upset him. “I know you have been through a lot with this. I know I have been. I know we have a lot to process and work through together and individually. I don’t want to argue. And I know that if our positions were reversed I would be the exact same way towards you, and that if anything you have it worse because you’re a doctor and so you know way too much about the things that could go wrong. But I’m okay. I will be okay. You tell me everyday how I’m getting stronger.”
Jack settles his hands on your hips, rests his forehead against yours. “I know. I just… struggle. Because you were better and then you weren’t. And I am terrified that’s going to happen again even though I know the chances at this point are so low.” His hands squeeze your hips. “I think maybe seeing you out of here will help. Seeing you at home. It’ll make it more real. That you’re really okay.” He pulls his head from yours. “I’m sorry.”
“Hey,” you cup his face with both of your hands. “I don’t want you to be sorry, Jack. Not for caring so much, for loving so much. Because that’s what this is and I know it. It’s not micromanaging or not trusting me or wanting to control me. I know that. I promise. I know this is motivated by fear and by love. We’re going to get through this together, okay?”
He nods because he knows it’s true.
And then there’s another eventful day, with a phrase you’ve both been itching to hear.
Discharge instructions.
They let Robby give you them even though he’s not technically your doctor. He gives them to you even though he doesn’t need to because you have Jack who’s going to be all over you and enforce stricter ones. But you still appreciate hearing them so that you have some idea of what’s okay and what isn’t and what appointments you have scheduled for follow ups and the meds they’re sending you home with.
You ask about sex.
Jack almost drops the bottle he’s packing away for you. “Why, please tell me why on earth,” he draws the word out, “you’re thinking about sex? And not recovering.”
You look at him, hold a finger up and then riffle through the bag next to you on the bed. You take out the small stand mirror Dana had brought you so that you could do your makeup that one night. You open it and hand it to Jack. “Take a look in the mirror Dr. Abbot.”
You’re so nonchalant with how you say it, like it’s obvious and just a fact and nothing you should really have to be explaining.
“Oh my god,” he mutters.
Robby ends up totally snorting his laugh because he tried to stifle it for Jack for a minute but it’s too good, it’s too funny. Robby smiles at you as he pulls it together, thinks how good you are for Jack. How you’re what he needed.
“You could have just asked me, you know! I’m a doctor! I know you know that, you tell me how hot it is all the time! We didn’t have to fucking drag Michael into this,” he huffs. But all of you know it’s not serious. He’s not really mad. He’s just worried and scared and wants to protect you and doesn’t want anything to happen to you and more than anything he doesn’t want to hurt you. But there’s the subtlest tinge to his voice that reflects his lust, his want, his desire to have you like that again.
“Yes, but I don’t trust you to give me a straight answer right now,” he goes to interrupt you but you shake your head and continue, speaking over him, and Jack pouts. Truly pouts. “And you know that’s valid and you would have given me the most conservative answer possible. And it’s Robby,” you shrug, “he’s a doctor and your best friend and obviously knows we’re having sex, or were before all of this. Plus he saw my tits when he coded me, I think we lost some boundaries when that happened.”
“They’re very nice b-”
Jack shoots him a glare, one that would have Robby dead on the floor if looks could kill.
Robby stops talking and clears his throat. “Right, well, uh,” Robby hugs his tablet to him and rocks back and forth a bit. “I mean as soon as you’re ready and feel up to it.” You look over at Jack and flash a pleased smile, raise your eyebrows. “But nothing too rough or overly strenuous. Keep it soft, slow. You know real love-making-”
“I’m going to fucking quit if you keep talking.” Jack interrupts Robby who wears the biggest self-satisfied shit eating grin.
You snort a laugh because the whole situation is so fucking absurd. “Thank you, Robby.”
“Of course.” He opens his arms and you hug. “Don’t take this the wrong way but I am really fucking glad I won’t see either of you tomorrow.”
The three of you share a laugh. “Ready?” Jack asks you. It’s funny how in the moment you’ve been dying for you’re suddenly terrified and unsure. The hospital is safe. There are doctors and medications.
You remind yourself that there’s a doctor and medications at home too and the thought lets you smile at Jack and nod.
He flicks his chin to the wheelchair. “Oh you cannot be serious. That is so unnecessary.”
“Hospital policy.” Jack shrugs.
“Hospital policy or Jack policy?”
“That one actually is hospital policy.” Robby confirms.
Jack gives you a triumphant smirk and you roll your eyes and stick your tongue out at him. He does it back.
And then he wheels you out.
Being home is strange. It’s a whole new normal to get used to again. There are lots of emotions. You’re all over the place, somehow more emotional labile the first two days at home than you ever were in the hospital.
Despite his own emotions Jack is your rock through it and things start to get better. He paints with Robby’s help. You talk him into letting you paint. You direct Jack and Robby on where furniture should go, with Jack’s input of course. You and Jack unpack boxes together.
Six or seven days after you came home you’re down to just two boxes left. All books. You and Jack are unpacking them together, him bending to get them out of the box and you alphabetizing as you put them on the shelves.
Jack picks up a book. The book. The one that started it all. The one ‘Move in with me?’ is written in. He stares down at it.
Earlier today he’d unpacked the box where he’d hidden the ring. The ring box is in his pocket, pants loose enough to hide it.
“Peter?” You hold a hand out behind you to get the next book from him but Jack doesn’t put one in your hand or say anything. “Jack?” you repeat as you turn around to him staring at the book. He has a weird look that you can’t really place. Your brows furrow in concern. “Are you okay?”
He sets the book back in the box and looks up at you for a second. And then he’s sliding down to one knee and your eyes widen. “Jack,” you whisper, already teary.
“We’re going on the France trip,” he starts. “It’s all planned. You should be well enough to travel by then and we can adjust to take it easier if we need.” Your mouth drops open a little. “I had this all planned too. Proposing. I was going to take you to the Louvre, propose in front of the inverted pyramids, have a photographer. I had planned to tell you about the trip the night of the day you got shot. And then the entire time you were in the hospital I wanted to ask but I didn’t want it to feel like I was asking because you were in the hospital and things were scary.”
You bring a trembling hand to your mouth. “But I can’t wait anymore. I can’t wait for Paris. You know this has nothing to do with what happened. I had planned this before what happened. I knew I wanted to marry you within a month. That time you met me outside of the hospital after I coded that vet at the very end of my shift. We had spoken on the phone for less than a minute, I didn’t tell you about it or say anything was wrong and yet you just showed up. In your work clothes. When I asked why you were there you said you could hear it in my voice, that I needed someone, needed to not be alone and so you took the day off, and it’s funny because up until you said it I had been telling myself that I needed to be alone. But you were right. When I started to argue you just put a hand to my chest and kissed me, told me that it was already done, you’d already let your boss know, grabbed my hand and started walking to my place. And that’s when I realized you knew me better than I knew myself and that you weren’t afraid to just do things for me, that you weren’t going to make me ask, ever, for anything, when you knew I wouldn’t be able to. You weren’t going to make me struggle, force me to either open up or not get what I need from you. That’s when I knew I wanted to marry you.” He pauses and swallows, trying to clear the tears that line his eyes from his voice. “There’s so much I wanted to say in this moment, so much you deserve to hear” he laughs a little, the sound wet with tears, “but everything has fallen out of my mind. I promise though that, if you’ll let me, I’ll spend the rest of our lives making sure you hear them and know how important and necessary you are to me, how much I love you.”
Tears stream down your face. They have been for a while now. Your mouth and chin tremble under your hand.
Jack gets the box from his pocket and opens it.
The way Jack says your name is etched into your memory. Then. “Will you marry me?”
You move your hand from your mouth, give him a look and move your shoulders in a way that says he didn’t even have to ask.
“Yes.”
It’s not exactly whispered, your voice is just so choked with tears it makes it sound like it. Jack’s face breaks out into the biggest teary smile and yours matches. Shaking hands get the ring on your finger and then Jack is standing up, arms going straight to hold your face and he kisses you like he never has before. It’s indescribable. It’s perfect.
You hug him tightly for a minute before you both pull away. “Is it okay? The ring?”
“Oh,” you sniffle, try and wipe at your eyes with your hands. “You’re going to laugh,” your voice gets a little more high pitched as another wave of emotion hits you. “The tears, there’s too many, I haven’t been able to see it.” You cover your mouth with your hand.
And Jack, Jack starts laughing. Because it’s so you, from being too teary to see it to the way you got even more emotional when you told him. You laugh-cry with him.
The entirety of the proposal is perfect.
As is what follows once you’ve seen the ring, almost screamed about it and how perfect it is, and gushed about it for several minutes to him.
Jack takes your hand and leads you to your bedroom. Your shared bedroom. He lays you down on soft sheets. It’s your first time after what happened.
He takes his time with you. Kisses every inch of you, every scar, new and old, lingers on the new ones. He worships you. Takes you apart and puts you back together again. Lets you do the same to him.
The groan of relief that comes from his chest when he finally pushes inside of you is unholy. He holds you tight to him. He adjusts so that he’s on top of you, arms under your shoulders with his elbows supporting him, holding your face in his hands. It’s all panting and breathy and sloppy kisses and uncontrollable groans and moans and warm sweaty skin and eye contact and Jack slowly losing it and groaning nonstop as he fucks you and chases your hips harder and harder, moving you both up the bed a bit as he tries to get deeper and closer to you.
You take a bath after to clean the sweat off of you both and just to feel each other. He pours in so much epsom salts to help you heal that you tease him you’re going to float in the water. It’s so warm and his touch is so relaxing that you actually fall asleep leaning back against him for a few minutes. He lets you sleep. Tries to commit the moment to memory.
You decide to have a housewarming party. You invite everyone from the Pitt, time it so that the night shifters can drop by for a little bit before their shift starts if they want. You invite some of your friends too.
You use it to announce your engagement. Every time someone knocks you and Jack go get them and you hold your left hand up. Everyone is happy for you. Some cry which makes you get teary. Jack hears you discussing the ring with Dana, Samira, McKay, and Javadi, you holding your hand out and all of them looking closely at it. He can’t hear the conversation but he catches, “he custom designed it,” and “it’s so perfect, just like him.”
He stands alone for a minute watching you and the party. He smiles as you walk up to him, arms automatically opening for you to step into. “And how is my beautiful fiancée doing?” You giggle at the word. Fianceé. It makes it so real. “Tired?” He’s checking in on you and you know he’d have all of these people out in a literal minute if you said you were tired and needed to rest.
“No, I’m okay, I promise.” You lean up and give him a kiss. “How’s my handsome fiancé?”
“I’m pretty perfect, Doll.” He gives your hip a squeeze. “Thank you.”
“For what?” You cock your head at him a little and he melts even more for you somehow.
“For everything.” Jack kisses you. “For saying yes.” Another kiss. “For waking up.” Another kiss. “And for telling me that book wasn’t worth it.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I wanted both without having to destroy Jack because he deserves everything so here we are. I hope it was okay! Please let me know your thoughts and comments!! Liking, replies and reblogging are so so appreciated! My inbox and requests are open (see masterlist for more)! Thank you for reading all of this, I know it was long!
Part 3 is up!
And let me know if you'd like to see more of these two! Wedding, more before reader is shot, just little domestic moments between the two? I'm hoping to do a follow up to Perfumer and maybe a few more shorter things, maybe some Robby? Who knows, certainly not I.
jack abbot can't stop the way his brows are furrowing. he doesn't have a wife, but he does have someone he hopes to someday make his wife.
you. the realisation dawns on him like that.
its probably something simple. you miss him or something. he's rarely on the day shift and he knows how much it disrupts your routine when he's not there.
you need to speak to your daddy, thats it.
"thanks, princess, ill go call her."
he disappears to the ambulance bay in an odd moment of serenity in the ED. his wife. thats what you've said on the phone. a secret wish that belonged to the ring stuffed in his underwear drawer that you've just exposed to the world.
jack stands out in the ambulance bay, staring at robby's stupid motorbike. he pulled his phone from his pocket and clicks on your contact.
you pick up immediately. "jack!" you shriek and he's immediately worried.
"what is it, sweetheart?"
"I can't get out of the-" you scream again. "there's a spider!"
and jack pauses. he doesn't want to laugh, but its so hard to keep a straight face. he clears his throat, as if that'll help him compose himself. "where's the spider, sweetheart?"
"it's in the doorway!" you scream again. "daddy im scared."
and he can hear the genuine fear in your voice. this isn't silly to you. its a small spider, and you're terrified.
"okay baby, listen to me," he says and sits on the wall, bracing his hand on his knee. "you know the cup our toothbrushes are in?" he asks. there's silence and jack can only assume you've nodded. "dump our toothbrushes put and put the cup over the spider."
there's a little bit of commotion, your toothbrushes hitting the counter. but then, jack hears nothing. "i can't, daddy," you say and jack thinks you’re gonna start crying again.
"you can baby. just put it down carefully and it'll keep the spider contained until I get home."
"can you come home now?"
your voice breaks and jack feels his heart breaking with it. his sweet girl, you should never feel this scared.
"soon, baby," he answers as Dana joins him, cigarette in hand. she side eyes him, but jack keeps going. "put the cup on, step over it and go hide in the bedroom."
you sniffle. "can you stay on the line while I do it?"
"of course, baby," he says and hears you exhale. "just gotta be quick, okay?"
you give a quiet okay. Jack stays on the line with you while you put the glass over the spider. he tells you he's proud of you when you cheer and step over it.
"I gotta get back to work, baby," he says. "ill be home soon. love you."
"love you," you say back and end the call.
Dana looks at him, eyebrows raised. her way of asking what that was all about.
"my wife is scared of spiders," jack says and heads back inside.
summary: almost caught having a steamy makeout session with your older not-so-boyfriend boyfriend in the middle of the emergency department by a certain pretty D.Mohan, getting ushered out of the room to deal with a violent patient. Jack thinks he’s doing what’s best for you. (2.4K) (PART 1) part 2
Characters: Jack Abbot x fem reader , x platonic! dennis Whittaker, x samira mohan ( love her, mother)
Content: 18+, established relationship, jealousy, angst, no comfort yet! this is part 1, no spoilers for s2!, mentions of wounds and medical treatment, allusions to smut! MDNI
“ L/N, I've got the patients' charts right here—" Harmless eyebag Dennis calls, one of his hands holding the large ER tablet and his other hand gripping the room's curtain tightly. His tousled, dirty brown curls kiss his eyebrows, his now raised eyebrows. “Oh! Should I come back later? -” He immediately turns around, dropping the tablet onto the floor. “ Crap! Crap! Im so sorry!” Bending his knees with his head turned down, Denniss slender hands shakily grip the edge of the black cover tablet.
Your hand twitches, holding the needle holder in one hand and tweezers in the other. “Dennis-” You hiss through gritted teeth, tightening your grip on the utensils. “ How many times have I told you not to barge in when I'm doing sutures?”
The frustration begins to vibrate through your body, feeling it in your throat and head. Not literally. Just theoretically, with the way your throat is ready to produce the vowels for the meanest words within the English language and your head's evil, evil thoughts about the poor little Nebraskan farm boy. Who is now looking at you like a deer caught in headlights.
You part your lips, ready to bark at Whittaker, when you feel a rugged, calloused hand rubbing the side of your outer thigh. From the side, completely unknown to Dennis or anyone walking by, the fully pulled curtain to one of the ER beds.
The warmth from his fingertips seeps through your black scrubs, feeling it against your skin like hundreds and hundreds of tiny needles poking at you, so tenderly and so softly. It grounds you from the outburst you were about to spew at Dennis.
He clears his throat, trying to straighten his back. Failing miserably, the open wound on his back makes him furrow his pretty eyebrows. The sound that fell from his mouth was even prettier if that was possible. A deep, guttural groan makes your eyes widen, and your legs quite the opposite.
“ Ja-” Clearing your throat, tilting your head to the side hurriedly. Ponytail swooshing in the air, brushing against his chiseled face. A breathy laugh escapes his chapped lips, a deep breathy chuckle that's sending butterflies swarming through the pit of your stomach and warmth to your face and hands.
“ Dr. Abbot, did I accidentally nudge you?” You murmur. Warm and gentle, almost melodic in a way. The kind of softness reserved for someone cherished and clement. Not for a deeply emotionally scarred man, built from restraint and trauma. Your attending. Much, much older attending.
“Don't worry about it, Dr.L/N, just keep..” He takes a deep breath in.
You watch closely, the way he draws in a deep breath, like a depraved woman. The slow drag of it. How his chest rises, pecs visible through his black scrubs. The way his tongue sweeps over his bottom lip. The same bottom lip you tug and pull with your teeth during late nights in the hospital bathroom. But never at home. Home is tightly restricted to shirtless him draped over your bed like a human heated blanket, with his biceps resting underneath your head. His salt and pepper hair toussled against your pillow. Your pillow, well, it has become his. Perfectly mended to his face, the same face you spend hours and hours staring at when you shouldn't be. Like now.
“ Just keep going.” He says, with a tight-lipped smile etched into his tired face.
You mimic his behaviour, also taking a deep breath in. Annoyance fills you as you look back at Dennis. But the annoyance quickly fades away when you look at his big blue eyes; he looks like a kicked puppy. Oh god you can't be mad at him. Poor little Hucklerry.
“ Just leave them there,” You point your elbow towards the workstation that's scattered with colorful pens and a notepad.
“ Right..right..right! I-ill just leave them right-right here!” Dennis plants the tablet onto the workstation, on top of your pens. This sends the pens flying off the table, scattering to the floor.
“ Just go, Nebraska!” You say, tightening your grip on the needle holder, as you tie another knot with the surgical thread.
That earns another unfortunate, fortunate for you, groan from the grouchy older man sitting on the hospital bed with his full-back muscles presented to you like a bucket of gold coins.
Dennis does a full 180 spin, stuffing his sweaty hands into the pocket of his black scrub pants. Your eyes immediately drop down to his ankles, his bare ankles. The hem of his pants hug the top of his ankles tightly, too tightly. Like he's scrunched them up to get ahead of a flood. Stupid idiot picked up scrubs 2 times smaller than his size. That earns a warm smile from you, losing the tenseness in your shoulders and back. Now, finally relaxing.
“ You gonna finish suturing this old man or are you going to keep me waiting?” Jack murmurs, his voice soft yet roughened on the edges. Like a shot of vodka sliding down you didn't know you needed on a Friday night.
“ Drop the attitude, and I might kiss it better.” You whisper softly, your forearm resting against his buff shoulder. You can feel him flex the muscle beneath you, cushioning the hands he loves so much.
He curls the corner of his mouth, letting out a quiet, tame chuckle. “You're gonna kiss me anyway, arentcha sweetheart?” Voice husky and breathy, each word sliding across you like heat. Tilting his head to the side, against your forearm.
You purposefully yank the thread into another knot, furrowing your eyebrows with your tongue sticking out the side of your lip. Peeking through the obvious grin on your lips.
He lets out a loud yelp, nuzzling his head against your forearm like a child. That earns a loud laugh from you, and you softly nudge your elbow against his head. “ Sit up straight! Or do you want your sutures to come out wonky? You're worse than a child, Dr Abbot.”
He traces your waist with his warm hands, sending shivers down your spine. Unconsciously arching your back a bit, leaning towards his touch without even realising.
“ Come onnnnn…” he drags the word out, breath thick with cigarette smoke and a sharp tang of nicotine gum. It makes you scrunch your nose and your eyes watery. Drawing your eyebrows together while pressing your lips into a tight line.
His midnight blue eyes, as if someone had bottled the ocean's deepest trench inside them, observe your face. He studies the way you just drew your eyebrows together, and how the little wrinkles appeared on your forehead. You were upset, and it was clear it was because of him.
“ No, no, no, come on, pretty girl..” He whispers under his breath. Wrapping his hands around your waist and pulling you in, against his face. He rests his face against your stomach, pressing his lips right above your bellybutton and peppering you with little wet kisses. So tender and so delicate, you could fall and swoon at his knees.
After every little kiss he leaves on you, he blows a bit of cold air. The burning tingling feeling from the nicotine mint gum he was chewing prior makes you jump. Heart racing and vision blurring with lust. You can feel the upset exterior you temporarily built, because let's be honest, it was never gonna stand with the way his hands just feel so right on your skin.
“ You told me you would quit Jack.” You mumble as you put the suturing kit down, finally finishing a task that should have taken you five minutes if it weren't for Huckleberry barging in like a toddler telling his mom he puked.
“ I know I know.. I'm so bad..I don't deserve to be kissed…I don't deserve you.” He whispers against your stomach, shaking his head as if he were the disappointed one. As if he wasnt the one who broke a promise, a sworn pinkie promise made in an alleyway of a bar right in front of the ER. A promise made almost a year ago.
Placing your gloved hands on his shoulders, you attempt to push him off, but fail miserably as you feel his strong arms engulf your sides. Eyes widening and head shooting towards the closed curtain of the hospital room, so afraid that anybody could just yank them back and catch the sight of a resident and an attending getting cozy. During their shifts.
He takes your jawline in his calloused palms. The contrast of his rough skin against the softness and delicacy of your skin sends shivers down both of your spines. Unconsciously leaning your face deeper into his palm as your eyes lovingly bore into his. It's so unbelievably intimate that you both draw in deep breaths and close your eyes.
Both of your lips meet halfway, hands coming up to thread through his dark hair flecked with grey, soft yet telling of the years he's experienced before you. His hands find their way to grip the skin on your waist tightly, as if you could slip away at any time. And you could. It's happened before, steamy makeouts in the hospital staff lounge or bathroom being forcibly interrupted by loud pagers blaring through the hot wet kisses or Robby's voice vibrating through the Pitts ' walls calling for rounds or discussions. He is trying to get as much as you as he possibly can before his fantasies are ripped away from his fingertips, not that this wasnt already a fantasy…
And, then just like clockwork, the curtain gets pulled open.
But not before Jack's military-trained eyes spot the pair of black surgical clogs against the floor, peaking beneath the orange curtain. His once soothing, sensual grip is now distant and echoing through your body like a distant call. The force with which he had pushed you off sent you stumbling back, almost slipping on the scattered pens. Courtesy of Mr Whittaker's foolishness and idiocy.
Tan's hands wrap around your waist to stabilise you. It doesn't feel the same as the hands that were gripping onto you a mere three seconds ago. Not like Jacks hands, hands that have memorised every curve, and inch of you. Their hands feel foreign and distant, like a key fitting into the wrong lock.
“You okay there Dr. L/N?” An airy, silky voice cuts through the sweaty tension in the room. You part your lips in shock and embarrassment, immediately stepping to the side and turning your head towards Dr Mohan.
Her eyebrow raised with a lopsided smile framing her soft face, shes waiting for you to respond.
“ Yeah! Yeah, sorry, I was just picking up my scattered pens.” You say, clearing your throat as you crouch down quickly and let your hands pick up the pens that have canvased the ER floor.
You were about to open your mouth to start spewing excuses for your ill ability to see patients waiting in the waiting room when you were quickly forced to shut your mouth.
“ You okay there, Dr Abbot?” Dr Mohan asks, tilting her head to the side, her beautiful dark eyes gazing at his figure. Her eyes so deep you could not tell when the pupil ended, the kind of darkness that holds warmth and a magnetic pull of something you just cannot name.
He nods his head, his hands itching to start gathering the pens with you. His fingers flex against his palm, as if it's physically hurting him to not be able to help you or hold you. His dark blue eyes gaze into hers. And just like that, you feel as though you have disappeared. In his eyes.
“ Dr L/N was just patching me up. Got hurt in combat-” She cuts him off.
“ Oh no lets take a look.” Her long, slender fingers grab the blue elastic gloves and yanks them out of the box. Her hands almost melodically slip the gloves on, like a symphony shes performed hundreds of times. And she has, but each time it just seems to mesmorise you more and more. Apparently not just you.
“ Oh, I have already looked over and suttured him, Dr Mohan-” Standing up with fifteen pens gripped tightly in your fist, with a few slipping to the floor from how quickly you were to react to her words in haste.
“Didn't Dr Whittaker need you, Dr L/N? There is no need to worry, Dr Mohan here is said to have the stealthiest hands for sutures.” Jack says, his lips pressed into a tight-lipped smile. Lips that were just connected to yours a mere five minutes ago, unforgiving and ravenous against yours. Now smiling at someone else.
Was it just you who still felt the ghost of his lips trailing along your body and lips? Or did he feel it too? Does he feel you as deeply as you feel him? What are you saying? Are you overthinking? Of course he does. Right..? No yea right.
So why is he so entranced with her? While you're stuck on the floor picking up scattered pens like a child.
You watch him lift his shirt, revealing another wound. A wound which he didn't tell you about or show you when you immediately dragged him into this room after seeing his beaten figure walk into the ER. Eyes widening and lips parting in surprise and hurt. Did he not trust you to suture well enough? Is he questioning your ability to suture as a resident?
His eyes immediately find yours after Dr Mohan's short, quiet gasp; he can see the hurt that's momentarily washed over your eyes. But he doesn't say anything, too afraid to get caught or be seen by Dr Mohan. So he just chooses to ignore you. Great choice. Not like you were flying in over your head, a million insecurities rushing through your mind. She's older, far more experienced, not only in the medical field but also socially, romantically, shes just so much cooler and funnier. And god her hair-
“ Dr L/N, are the pens covered in butter?” Dr Mohan attempts to lift the tension in the room by cracking a little joke, earning an awkward chuckle from Jack.
You lick your lips in embarrassment as you squint your eyes shut, clammy, sweaty hands grabbing the remaining pens that keep escaping your wet grip.
“ The Kraken needs a change. Would you mind, Dr L/N?” She asks as her fingers graze Jack's abdomen, where his wound lies.
“ No no no. Not at all!” You respond as you turn around and yank the curtain open, but not before looking into Jack's eyes. Eyes that are now looking at her.
