Not sure you're still interested in hurt Frank ideas. If you are, Robby or Jack hearing Frank in distress on the phone and being too far away to help.
I am always interested in ways to hurt Langdon.
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It was a nice night out. Crisp air, not too cold, a slight breeze. The connection to his earbuds was good, nothing skipping, no weird pausing. He just had to get a new ones, too, the sound having slowly dimmed to nothing on his old pair.
Their shift had been, overall, rather uneventful. Nothing outside of a normal round. There was an oddly high number of dislocations, though. All unrelated to each other.
Robby looked both ways before jaywalking, almost to his house by this point.
Walking was, and has been for a while, his preferred method of getting anywhere. He did have a car, of course, but he lived close enough to the hospital that it wasn't a big deal. Not that he was lacking in time spent on his feet, but it gave him space to decompress.
All of that to say, he was very surprised when his music suddenly was interrupted by his ringtone, especially when the contact displayed was Frank Langdon.
It only took a moment for him to pick up.
"Hello?"
"Hey, look, can you just stay on the phone with me for five minutes until I get home? There's this car I've seen circle the block three times, it's creeping me out."
Fuck.
Robby nodded, doubling down his efforts to get home. "Yeah, of course. Can you tell me anything about the car?"
"Black, some kind of SUV. Maybe Honda." There was a moment of rustling, then a hissed out breath. "Shit."
Panic, red and hot, ran through him at that. "Frank? What the fuck does that mean? You can't jus-"
"I'll call you back." There was more rustling, and presumably he had been shoved in a pocket by the way everything became muffled. It was only Frank's voice he could hear clearly.
Some kind of exchange was going on. Some kind of talk. Robby needed to get to his car, he knew the route Frank took home from work. He could find him.
"I don't carry a lot of cash on me, but yeah. Just give me a moment."
More movement, each brush of clothing sent Robby's heart farther and farther up his throat. Frank was getting robbed. Fucking robbed, presumably at some kind of weapon point, and Robby was bearing witness.
He couldn't even talk, say something reassuring, try to help Frank keep calm. He just had to breathe into the speaker, listen, and pray this was all going to be just a bad experience in his rearview.
"Doctors really don't make as much as you think, and kids are expensive, man." A small pause. Good idea, mentioning them, but it just reminded Robby of how quickly this could end. How poorly this could go. "Yeah. Two."
Tanner and Maddie would be getting ready for bed right now. They needed to stay late on shift, help clean up for a car crash, and it got them both out nearly an hour past by the time handoff was done.
Frank had been sad about the fact that he might miss them tonight, with the added time of walking home. He usually drove, but car troubles were a bitch, and Abby needed transportation for them.
God, this sucked.
"I'm serious, I don't have anything else. No watch, no more cash, nothing valuable."
Except for the phone, this horrible thing he was using to listen in on the way Frank's voice was just barely wavering. It hit him like a brick.
It took a lot of pressure, for anyone in the ED to start breaking. They were trained out of it and into de-escalation, ways to get out of situations.
Something had to be applying that force.
"You've got a gun pointed at me, you think I'd be lying?"
The world's worst bullseye. Robby felt it like a arrow to his lungs.
So close. He was so close to home. Just another minute. One more minute.
Sudden clamor picked up on the other side, some kind of shouting starting. He could barely hear it, could barely make out whatever the attackers were saying, but he could still hear Frank.
"I don't think that's neccesary-"
He was on his block.
"I didn't see anything, I swear-"
He'd have to go inside for just a second and grab his keys.
"C'mon, fuc-"
Robby almost froze, hearing two incredibly distinct sounds crack through the speaker, overriding anything else in his head.
Gunshots.
A squeal of tires.
Nothing.
He'd so rarely felt so afraid.
"Frank? Frank??"
