#minific

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@kingdonmicrofic july 18, alternative prompt: bang (wc: 306/347) cw: mature, infidelity

They did this thing, sometimes. It was weird and shameful and like nothing Mel had ever heard of before, and they didn’t do it a lot, but it went like this: first, they’d share a look. This part always just kind of happened - it’s not like they ever planned it. Frank’s face would go all intense and serious, and he’d look down at her lips, and that’s how she would know.  

They would slip away then, if they could, into a closet or an empty room on a different floor. He would pull her close, an arm around her stomach, and ease his weight against her back. Then he’d rock his hips into hers like they were having sex. She’d press back and try not to make any noise, even though she was pretty sure he liked it when she did. 

They never took their clothes off or anything. They never even kissed, but she still felt guilty about the way he’d groan and his hips would stutter and he’d drop his forehead to her shoulder and just breathe there for a while after. Not guilty enough to not let him do it, though. 

It always felt good. One time he had lifted her up and pressed her against the door so that the handle pushed against her just right, and she’d come hard even though she was terrified the entire time that the door was going to swing open and they’d drop to the floor with a bang. 

It was risky and she didn’t know what made it worth it for him because they never talked about it. There was only one time, when she was fixing her braid, that he said anything at all. This is going to be different, someday, I promise. She was still waiting to find out what that meant.

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@kingdonmicrofic july 17, crowd (wc: 429/317)

There's a little crowd huddled around the nurses' station and Frank has a bad feeling about it. Javadi’s in the middle with her phone out, Princess and Joy leaning in, Santos with a hand over her mouth. A few of them are laughing.

"What's up?" He shoulders his way in. 

Javadi hesitates - that’s a bad sign. Then she tilts her phone so he can see the screen.

He recognizes the woman they're watching immediately: it’s Becca King. They’re watching what looks like a TikTok with Becca King front and center, and she’s doing some sort of choreography with her arms and lip syncing to the music. But behind her, only mostly in frame and also doing the dance, is Mel.

"There's like five of these," Princess says. "Mel does the-"

"Cool,” he cuts her off, annoyed. "So we're laughing at the King sisters, then."

"Not like that," Santos starts, rolling her eyes. “And not Becca, anyway.” 

Javadi, to her credit, slips her phone in her back pocket, appearing appropriately chastened. 

"She's not even here today,” he snaps, because that was where his bad mood began, when he rolled in at six-thirty and remembered Mel wasn’t scheduled this weekend. "She's off, and you're all wasting time laughing at her." None of them are looking him in the eyes. He gives up. "Whatever. Santos, your guy in North 3 started throwing up again."

He’s been practicing distancing himself from unnecessary stressors, so. He walks. 

Frank lives alone now, and there isn’t all that much to do, which is why he downloads TikTok as soon as he gets home. She’s easy to find - the app has somehow gone into his contacts and pulled the profiles of what seems like everyone he’s ever met. 

Becca has 76 followers and forty-two videos. In most of them, she’s either alone or with a man Frank assumes is Adam. Only a handful feature Mel, and he finds those quickly. He watches the one from earlier, just to see it better, just so that maybe he’ll understand what was so fucking funny. Then he watches the next one. It’s the same sort of thing, Becca dancing in front, Mel behind. They both know all the words, and they both look like they’re having fun.

There are two more like that, but then there's one where the sisters accidentally bump into each other and Mel laughs with her head all the way back. Her shoulders shake. He can’t see her face but he knows how it’s lit up. He can’t hear her laugh, but he knows what it sounds like. 

Frank doesn't get what the big deal is. They're cute.

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@kingdonmicrofic july 16, glitter (wc: 358/227) abby pov cw: infidelity

Abby was reasonable. She noticed the effort her husband was making to fix things, and she was a good enough wife to be grateful for it. He was sober and he was present and when it was her birthday he’d sat the kids down at the kitchen table with glue and popsicle sticks and they’d all worked together to make her a picture frame. They’d used green glitter to decorate, and it had gotten everywhere, into Frank’s scalp, his collar, in the gap between his ring and his finger. A week later it was still around. He'd pick it out from under his fingernails or shake it out of his hair like a dog and say, I’m pretty sure this is a biohazard, and she'd laugh, and it felt good, like before. 

Sure, Frank didn’t quite look at her the way he used to, but that would probably come back with time. He was coming back to himself more and more every day. 

So she decided to drop by the hospital on a Tuesday. She had forty minutes before daycare pickup and a meatball sub she knew he would appreciate, and she was thinking about the old days, when she used to show up with a homemade meal and he'd laugh and kiss her in front of everyone.

But this time, when he saw her, it was like his face went dark. He glanced over his shoulder, looking paranoid, as though he didn’t want anyone to see her there.

He came over. He asked if the kids were okay, and his demeanor didn’t get any less intense when she reassured him that they were.

A woman approached, another doctor with a blonde braid pulled over one shoulder, and he turned his body fully away from Abby to give her his full attention. She asked him something about moving a patient to a bed upstairs, told him she’d defer to his expertise, and she did not look at Abby at all. Frank answered her. He did not say, this is my wife. He didn’t look at Abby either.

The woman, smiling and obviously charmed, thanked him and turned to go.

Abby saw it there, on the back of the woman's neck, just above the collar of her scrubs: a fleck of green glitter.

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@kingdonmicrofic july 14, cake (wc: 180/113)

Frank was never much of a baker. But Mel’s birthday was Tuesday and he didn’t know if anyone else would do it for her. So he spent Monday afternoon baking a vanilla cake with some cupcakes on the side for Tanner and Penny, and didn’t mention it at all when Abby got home from work.

It wasn’t great. The cake came out pretty flat and by Tuesday the frosting was stale. Mel loved it anyway, bouncing on her toes and then hugging him so tightly he almost pressed a kiss to her head, just instinctively. 

He told her to take the rest home. Bring the dish back whenever. No rush.

Abby didn’t notice the missing dish until Friday, staring at the spot in the cabinet where it normally sat. Frank explained. She kept staring, with a frown that he knew meant they’d be fighting about this after the kid’s bedtime. 

Stupid. He couldn't believe that, along with everything else, she was so concerned about a dessert dish.

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@kingdonmicrofic july 13, smoke (452/295)

Mel didn't bother arguing with Becca. It had been an excruciating thirty minutes of Becca complaining about being the only one of them with a boyfriend, so by the time she informed Mel that they were going to cast a love spell on Frank Langdon, she just shrugged her shoulders. Whatever.

She did, casually, ask why Frank. Because Becca knew Frank, and he was nice enough. 

Sure. It didn’t actually matter. None of it was real, anyway - a “love spell” on Frank would affect exactly nothing, and Becca would be satisfied, and Mel could go to bed. Sure, fine, let's cast a spell.

There wasn’t much to it - Mel suspected that Becca was making it up as she went. A circle of lit candles (mostly the cheap Yankee Candle knock-offs from the drugstore) and a strip of paper with Frank's name in Mel's handwriting, because it had to be hers, Becca said. Mel sat in the circle and held the paper to one of the flames. It caught fast, curling in on itself, and the smoke came off it gray and acrid-smelling. She jumped up to drop the burning paper into the sink, and opened the window. 

"So what's supposed to happen now," Mel asked. 

Becca pulled the window shut. "Now he's in love with you." She grinned wide, explaining, matter-of-fact: “It’ll be like me and Adam. He'll want to know how your day is going - all the time, every day. He'll remember things you said weeks ago. He'll show up when you need him. He’ll text you all the time, and he’ll send good morning and good night texts, too.”

Mel rolled her eyes. Ridiculous. 

Frank already did text her all the time. He asked about her day and then asked follow-up questions. And some of those things - well, he’d been doing them since the start. He’d been there for her since her first day at PTMC, he’d remembered their inside jokes after months away. That didn’t mean he was in love with her. He didn’t even know her back then.

He was just a good guy. When she left her taxes almost too late, he’d turned up at her house and filed them for her. He got dressed up to go to the ren faire with her because he wanted her to have fun and he knew she wouldn’t do it alone - it was nice of him, but it didn’t mean anything. That’s what friends do.

“Trust me, Mel. He’s going to start doing those things and then you can ask him to be your boyfriend! He’ll definitely say yes.”

She blew out the candles one by one. Becca didn’t get it. 

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@kingdonmicrofic july 12, gold (418/340) future fic cw: emotional infidelity

Penny was an official, honest-to-god Girl Scout, with the sash and the cookies and everything. There was a song she learned that she sang for a week straight, and one afternoon she made Frank sing it with her in a round: Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver and the other gold. 

Frank found himself idly considering the message, and sorting the people in his life into the song's two columns - he couldn’t make them all fit in just right.

He suspected Mel, shiny and gold, had her own columns. He wondered where he fit. 

Mel's new boyfriend was short. His name was Will and he worked with computers. Played D&D with his buddies on Sundays. He was a nice guy who laughed at everyone’s jokes, including his own. Thin hair, weak handshake, and within four months he somehow had landed a drawer at Mel's place. 

Frank had met Will for the first time when he suddenly appeared at central next to Dana, carrying a boxed salad and a passionfruit iced tea. Surprise! Mel had been flustered. She dropped her tablet and went red in the ears. It pissed Frank off, watching her scramble. None of them had time for this, not in the middle of a shift. Even Dana was rolling her eyes. But Mel wanted it to go well. He could feel without even making eye contact how much she wanted it to go well. So he shook Will's pathetic little hand and found somewhere else to be for the next five minutes.

Listen, he had Abby, sure. She didn’t leave him when she had every right to, and he wasn’t planning on leaving her, even though the relationship had long since gone a little cold and metallic-feeling. So it’s not like this new guy was actually keeping him from anything. But he often caught himself, in his own head, in a different life: a bedroom with both his and Mel’s things in it. The way they’d work out the custody schedule with Abby, the days that he and Mel would pick Tanner and Penny up from school. And kids of their own, too, that were anxious but brave like her, and smart but short-sighted like him. In his head, there was a glow to all of it, a perpetual golden hour, which he knew wasn’t realistic. Still, he lived in that world a lot. 

He and Penny started the song over from the top, chasing each other’s voices around the round.

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@kingdonmicrofic july 11, surprise (wc: 186/186)

It’s a slow day, so she thinks he'll duck out at seven sharp, home to the wife and the two little kids she’s heard about and never seen. But he stays three hours past sign-out with the overdose teen whose parents never showed, speaking in a low voice with the lights out until the boy sleeps.

She tries not to stand too close to him because she knows everyone thinks she has a crush. But some asshole in triage lunges for her and Frank steps right in the middle, takes a fist to the jaw, and apologizes to her after for the way he had knocked into her shoulder.

She won't ask about his marriage because it's none of her business and she doesn’t think she wants to know the truth anyway. But some days he wears the ring and some days he doesn’t.

She’ll never get to kiss him. She's pretty sure of that. But she notices when he first sees the plastic mistletoe Princess hung in the breakroom and instinctively turns his head to look at her, absentmindedly running a hand through his hair. 

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@kingdonmicrofic july 10, feast (wc: 470/301) (dedicated to noah wyle)

Privately, Robby likes to keep a pretty close score. It’s for the best. If his sabbatical taught him anything, it’s that he can’t handle the loneliness and the disappointment anymore, so he has to do this, for his own sake, he has to keep count, a mental tally on who he can trust and who he can’t. 

Frank Langdon, he’s learned, he can’t trust. Not by quite a large margin. 

Which is maybe why he gets so annoyed when Langdon turns up at the Friendsgiving thing. He wasn’t even in the groupchat, the one Shen had started and called feastie boys🍗- it was just supposed to be the fuck-ups with nowhere better to be. Robby certainly qualifies, single and childless. But Langdon has a wife. Two kids, a dog, medical debt, a long recovery road ahead of him. It’s the holiday weekend and Langdon is supposed to be at home. He shouldn’t be here, and he really shouldn’t be all pressed up against Dr. King as if there’s not plenty of room around the table at this shitty all-you-can-eat homestyle buffet place. 

He can’t stand it: Langdon keeps leaning in and King just smiles at him, probably doesn’t even realize he’s flirting. It’s egregious. 

He should pull Langdon aside. Be careful, he should say, You've got enough on your plate. Don't blow everything up over a woman who sees you as a brother at best. But then Langdon would snap at him, make some snarky comment about his extended sabbatical. Because, as much as he wishes otherwise, people don't really change. Not at their core, even when they try. 

By the time they all go around and say what they’re thankful for, Robby has to take a second to swallow down all the bitterness before he can say he’s grateful to be sleeping in his own bed again without sounding like a psycho.

Langdon says he's grateful for his support system. He says he’s lucky to have his friendships. He's looking at King when he says his life has been “greatly, greatly enriched” these past few months. That he's learning to be a better father. A better man.

No better husband. Robby notices, adds it to the tally. 

It’s ridiculous, and no one else seems bothered, which makes him wonder if this is just the new normal since he’s been gone. This is why he shouldn’t have left, he should have been here to make sure Langdon was staying the course. 

The fucker is just so - relaxed. It’s like he doesn’t care, or like he’s not struggling, which is absurd. When he smiles his face looks completely different, like he’s a whole new person.

Robby keeps his mouth shut and eats his food. He doesn't know what to make of any of it.