( credits to the lovely @abbotstudy for this fantastic gifset ! )
☤ ─ 1/? | IN LIEU OF FLOWERS ; jack abbot
summ. Fate, it seems, has a new plan for Jack Abbot. or: Two warforged souls fall in love. w.count. 6k, baby! tags. Set pre-S2 (PittFest) , no y/n , descriptions of panic/anxiety attacks , combat & PTSD mentions , probable medical inaccuracies , slow-burn? , reluctant friends-to-lovers , tags tbd fic tag: #ILF; a/n. A potential series! Here’s to hoping I have the inspiration to keep it. Tell me what you think!
IT'S MUCH, MUCH later that Jack Abbot realises something:
It was neither the eulogies, the last salutes of fellow servicemen, nor the echoing pop of the Honor Guard’s rifle volleys that had sent him over the edge. No; it was the flowers— white lilies, with something blue— surrounding them when he bore witness to the all-too-familiar sight of an American Flag being folded and handed delicately over to yet another grieving wife.
Mrs. Foster is a strong woman because she has to be a strong mother.
She’s not strong today.
Abbot figures he can try, at the very least, to be that for her. There’s very little he can do about grief and even less he can do about death, so he lets her embrace him after the procession for however long she needs it, then goes through the motions of offering his condolences; of saying what needs to be said despite how useless it feels to say them.
“He was a good man,” is what he concludes with. And she smiles that performative smile, the weary kind that never reaches the eyes, shows the weight in her marrows. He sees a reflection of himself in her like clear water.
Then they’re all off. It’s the peak of July; it wouldn’t do to endure the summer humidity. By and by, friends and family and comrades slowly scatter to return home; silence takes up the vast space of Allegheny Cemetery and the dusty corners of his soul. Silence, and standing arrangements of flowers.
White lilies, with something blue.
Clustered. Soft. He doesn’t know their names. He knows it’s definitely not the same kind he bought, the day h—
“Better the shakes come after than during,” comes a voice.
He blinks. Looks over his shoulder from where he’s parked himself onto a lone bench to try and will himself from giving into this sudden tide of anxiety.
It’s you.
From the funeral. He can’t recall your name, but you’d served alongside Lt. Foster’s unit in Afghanistan, from what he gathered from your eulogy— but he almost certainly remembers you from the VA. Two tours, you’d shared, on one of Abbot’s earliest memories of that therapy programme. On the shittier days, I sometimes still mistake shadows cast by ceiling fans for helo rotors.
You’d been a fellow combat medic just like him. Abbot had watched you, poised in the way all jaded soldiers carry themselves after surviving the dogs of war, pounding what must’ve been either your CMB or Unit pin into the Lieutenant’s casket as tribute. He’d figured you would have already left the funeral with the others.
“Better no shakes at all,” he answers, curt to the point of being rude. It’s unfair of him to do so, but he isn’t in the mood, at this very moment, for niceties.
But he can feel you watching him even after he turns away. Examining. Assessing. It makes him feel like an exposed nerve. Makes him clench his fists tighter to stop the jitter. He wants to crawl out his skin. He wants to disappear into himself and not be perceived.
“Were you close?” you ask. Your voice is frustratingly gentle, the type of demonstrable cadence bordering on either compassion or pity. He can’t tell if he hates it. Hell, he can’t get his thoughts straightened out at all. Everything in him is unraveling.
White lilies, with something blue.
“Close enough,” he answers.
“How d—”
“I’d rather be alone,” Abbot overrides, sharp. And he knows he is being an asshole this time, he figures, because he finds himself uselessly adding, “Please,” out of guilt at his own discourtesy.
If you’d been offended, though, it doesn’t show.
He’s not quite sure what you think at all— and frankly doesn’t care— really, because eventually your nebulous presence departed his side, and he finally felt free to cave in on himself; to grieve all that he’d done and failed to do in this wretched life.
He wrings his hands and squeezes his wedding ring— his proverbial heart— until that rotten, seizing dread between his ribcage gradually unfolds itself; until the tunnel-vision recedes along with the rush of blood in his head; until the deafening tinnitus ebbs away into nothingness.
It’s only when the phantom ache in his amputated leg comes that he remembers the dreary forecast for that afternoon. The pain always appears like a tocsin for dismal weather.
“Shit,” he says to no one in particular, looking skyward. The clouds drifting over earlier have finally swallowed the sun and brought along with it a silvery shower, already inching its way down the cemetery lot. Abbot hadn’t had the presence of mind to bring along—
An umbrella.
Black and nondescript. It’s set beside him on the bench like a portable, metaphorical olive branch.
That was the beginning.
The Universe, he notices, slowly begins paving inroads between his life and yours.
Abbot is a pragmatist, not one to believe in angel numbers or the world shifting itself around him (though he does glare at Dr. Shen in regards to the forbidden Q-word, and can probably be convinced of the ER Full-Moon phenomena if you really try hard enough), so he knows exactly why he keeps getting reminders of you everywhere he looks—
Frequency illusion; the Baader-Meinhof Effect: The more you think about something, the more they start to stand out and appear around you. Cognitive bias, if you will.
The umbrella you’d lent him was still yet to be returned, after all, and because of it, you’ve been dog-eared like a wrinkled page into his brain.
That, and the fact that August has been wrack with uncharacteristically rainy weather. He’s found himself using your umbrella more than once, has kept it in his locker for when cloudbursts decide to ruin his commutes.
“And last but not least, drumroll please: another hydroplaning accident,” Robby says, finishing his handover with a decisive click of his tablet back into its charging dock at the Nurses station.
“Guy’s lucky. Bruised sternum and a rib contusion from his seatbelt. Minor pneumothorax, but nothing that can’t be resolved spontaneously. We’re eyeballing him at South-16 for now before a bed opens upstairs.”
“‘Course we are,” Abbot sighs. “That’s, what, the fifth weather-related MVC we’ve got this week?”
He doesn’t get an answer. Dana, looking sympathetic as she muffles the landline handset on her shoulder, had leaned over the counter to interrupt them with news. “Robby, ETA 5 on the transport team for our donor.”
It’s for their firefighter. Nina Wyndham, 26-year-old female, Robby had briefed him, got caught in an apartment fire earlier this afternoon trying to save a kid, wheeled in unresponsive. We did what we could. CT came back with diffuse anoxic brain injury.
Abbot can picture the dark grey scan in his mind’s eye; complete deprivation of oxygen. She’d met the criteria for brain-death, her family gracious enough to permit organ donation.
“We’re doing the honor walk in here,” Abbot says, less of a question than it is a statement.
“ICU’s still backed up from the pile-up two days ago, remember?” Dana laments, walking with Robby as they all found their place alongside the other staff lining up. That had been another nasty case of aquaplaning which sent seven MVC trauma victims in a row to the ED. “We had no choice but to keep her down here, instead.”
From the hub, it's clear to see Nina Wyndham is well-loved. Her family and fellow colleagues are filed in numbers along the walls of the Pitt now, looking grave, most with faces red and wet with tears. It takes Abbot a while to notice—
You’re here, too.
He catches your downcast gaze, keeps you in his periphery as the honor walk took place, up until the hall had loosened and Wyndham’s family was eventually shepherded along with her transport from the ambulance bay. You’d stood close to the doors, watching the convoy turn out the hospital grounds, gloomy clouds already dimming the sky overhead.
Abbot couldn’t find the right words to say, for some reason— he was battling with an intense sensation of déjà-vu.
Frequency illusion; Baader-Meinhof.
The Universe must have a dark sense of humor to put Abbot in a situation as ironic as this. Had he not been on the receiving end, and bitten the hand that fed— or, to be more precise, extended an olive branch to— him, just a month ago?
He entertains the idea of bringing it up. Of asking you to wait while he fetches it from his locker. Abbot would have to steel himself for the caustic remark, the anger that comes with grief, the tongue-lashing.
I owe you your umbrella, he finally moves to say into the silence, but the words are snatched away from him. Lena is paging him: A patient had coded, demanding his immediate attention.
It’s the last he’d seen of you until much later.
Nina Wyndham’s name is a hot topic by the end of August. A week following her death, a candlelight vigil had been set to take place at the VA to celebrate and honor the firefighter who gave the better half of her life in service to the city. It turns out the Wyndham’s are volunteers within the hospital, active with their therapy programme: The men in their family served; a family trade.
Abbot couldn’t attend.
Instead he’d stood and watched it being streamed out the TV of the PTMC’s waiting room instead, rapt, listening to the stories shared and outpour of gratitude from the community. Then your face appeared, glimpsed alongside Nina Wyndham’s father and other veterans, standing like a beacon at the forefront of shuttering cameras as the man tearfully addressed the public, voice echoing down flagstones.
He turned away when the camera cut and zoomed in onto a display of flowers.
White lilies, with something blue.
It’d made his hair stand on end— And suddenly there was that crawl under his skin again.
Abbot ought to bring it up to his therapist.
For now, he buries himself into his work, and tries to ignore every angel number and shift of weather and reference to you from whatever divine providence is apparently trying to bring to his attention. He does so, unfailingly, until the Universe had thrown at him another veteran— Raymond Orser— and let him run a code for two hours straight to no avail.
Had a guy come in. Hit by a drunk driver in a crosswalk. 39-year old vet. Survived three tours without a scratch.
Then he needles at Mel King, irrational and disproportionate of a reaction as it is, simply because she was excited; for being from the VA, for unintentionally reminding him of you and that umbrella and that damn way he shook like a leaf over a bunch of flowers.
Frequency illusion; Baader-Meinhof.
White lilies wi—
His temper hasn’t been far from the surface these days. Only Dana and Lena have been able to withstand his cold demeanour.
At half-past nine in the morning, his phone buzzes on his living room coffee table. It’s Robby. Raymond Orser’s sister dropped by, the notification reads. She said to tell you she’s grateful for your letter.
Abbot doesn’t bother replying. Instead he just buoys himself with take-out he’d bought on the way back home after a blistering shower, lets the television drone on to fill in the silence of his house as he catches up on his cleaning and tidying.
Most of all he just thinks of Foster, of Wyndham, of you and the VA— of the two long, hopeless hours he'd spent coding a decorated veteran. The Universe has recently felt unbearably small. Had you known him, perhaps? Would you attend yet another funeral of a friend?
Maybe he should bring you up to his therapist too.
Abbot draws the curtains shut to keep the sunlight out, props his prosthetic by the foot of his bed, then tosses and turns enough to force himself to switch on the police scanner as a way to drown out the din in his head.
It stays on and on; long enough for the static to fade away into white-noise, until his alertness subsides and he drifts between consciousness, margining the thin line of both waking and dreaming, lulled by inane radio chatter and transmissions from dispatch over low-level crimes.
…And then Jack’s freezing his nose off in his fatigues, hoping he doesn’t get an earful from Sgt. Graves for swiping his crappy zippo lighter from right under his nose just so he could bum a cigarette from Keller and smoke in peace by the parked humvees during night patrol.
It takes a dozen tries before the flintwheel sparks. By then, somebody leans against the humvee beside him and crosses their wrists at rest on the butt of their rifle, moonlit face somehow veiled by the muslin-thin wisps of smoke Jack is exhaling. The stranger politely declines a puff.
Those things kill, Doc, says the soldier.
I gotta stay warm somehow, Jack humors. Besides, I’ll take my chances. Pretty sure a bullet will take me out before I collect enough cancer in my lungs.
Y’oughta go, continues the soldier. His face is still shadowed. Whad’ya mean ‘why?’ You’ve got places to be, Doc.
Where? he asks, perplexed. We’re still on night patro—
The radio on Jack’s plate carrier crackles to life.
He loses his cigarette from the sheer force of him jumping out his skin. It’s strings of patterned numbers and communicative jargon. A series of brevity codes, he realises. The officer’s voice is curdled thick with panic as they detail the situation live to a dispatch operator:
Send all units… been a mass sh… I repeat! Th…s an active shooter at Pitt…
Below him, his boots come off disgustingly sticky from a growing puddle where his cigarette has landed and flickered out. It’s blood red. It’s coming from another new soldier, limp on the dusty floor. It’s—
You.
The smoke clears from the nightsky, and Jack freezes at the face of the stranger looming beside him.
Dr. Abbot, drawls Lt. Raymond Orser. It’s time to wake up.
He doesn’t. Not fully, that is. The nightmare had sown a discordance in his soul, however levelheaded he believes he is for having jolted awake and gathered himself quick enough to walk out the front door.
Abbot shoots a text he doubts will be read, puts his bad leg through the wringer by making the trip to PTMC in half the time it usually takes, returns the grateful embrace of Robby with his camo-bag hanging off one shoulder. And it’s not until then— instructing their motley crew of medical staff on triage colours; how to play God by picking and choosing who could and couldn’t be saved— that the clarity of purpose had sobered him up, had awakened him.
The PA overhead booms. Trauma bays are gutted free of unnecessary equipment and loaded disaster bins thunder down the hallways. Gurneys are queued up neatly by the ambulance bay like a harrowing omen; Doctors and nurses and techs of every department soar past each other looking like guardian angels in their paper-white gowns and PPE, armed to the teeth against the divine call of Death.
In a blink they’re descending into madness: triaging a carload of patients, and then the next crisis, and then the next. Everyone drowns out the riot of blaring sirens echoing from the outside; ignores the howling, screaming, crying.
Dr. Jack Abbot is calm. Here is a combat medic home at last; in his terrifying element: Blood and death and chaos.
But ofcourse, comes a trick of fate.
He’s snapping on his tenth set of nitrile gloves when his ears perk up at someone’s voice— and his heart seizes.
Abbot nearly gets whiplash.
“Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” he says, before he can stop himself.
You cock your head. “Not my name.”
Then: “Not my blood, either,” you add, exasperated.
Straddling an obvious Red tag patient— unconscious male, young, early-teens— You’re half-dressed and elbows up in smatters of blood and cruor, denim shorts streaked a grisly red all the way down to your shoes. You had forgone your top in favor of turning it into a makeshift pressure dressing, packed tightly over a gory pelvis wound you’ve managed to dedicate your entire bodyweight onto for the past six minutes.
Robby and Abbot are already wheeling you both into Trauma-2 as you rattle off vitals in rapid-fire succession.
Ruptured femoral. Bullet went through and through. Couldn’t get a junction tourniquet. Lost his pulse en route but came back with CPR and an epi. Thready radial. Unresponsive since.
“Prep for REBOA,” you exact. “Somebody drill in an IO. Hang up a unit of whatever blood we’ve got for however many we can spare.”
“What she said,” Robby assents, into the split-second hesitation from the nurses. “2 unit’s O-Neg, Jesse. Let’s move, Dr. Mohan!”
The room leaps into action. Someone takes over pressure for you. The swap off is as smooth as it can get. Robby barely manages to look up from the fray to tell Abbot he’ll handle the trauma and to Go check on her, and eventually you find yourself being tailed out the bay, bristling in search of the closest restroom in sight as Abbot calls out your name.
“I need you to point me to where I can change out of this disaster of an outfit before we—”
“Woah-ho-ho, stand down, soldier,” Abbot orders, looping a hand at your upper arm to pivot you swiftly back to his side. He minds not to jostle you, gives you a critical once-over. “There is no we. You are a patient.”
You stare at him with as much affront one can muster after barking out medical orders half-naked in a bra and blood-stained shorts.
Abbot meets your stare just as evenly.
“EMS cleared me at the scene,” you recount, as measured as you can. “I’m an EM Attending from the VA, and I’ve got hospital privileges to practice medicine here at PTMC.”
(Something in his head clicks in place. He vaguely remembers you in the therapy programme mentioning that after having been discharged from the military you’d pursued a career in civilian medicine.)
“You can still easily be revoked treating patients while walking around like—” he waves a vague hand and wears an even vaguer, awkward expression, “—roadkill.”
“What a charmer,” you mutter, trying not to squirm under his scrutinising gaze. He’s tugged you into a corner away from the thoroughfare and begun poking and examining you. It’s clinical: assessing all your exposed extremities from head to toe, narrowing his eyes at what appear to be scrapes or blooming bruises. None of the glaring blood is yours, but it’s impossible to tell at first glance.
“I’m surprised you even remembered my name,” you ask.
He clicks his pen-light, tracks your pupillary reactions; instructs you to follow his finger. “Dr. Mohan,” he explains.
Samira had lit up at the sight of you whisked into the bay, practically cheering your name out faster than she can realise that this was probably the worst state to see a beloved ex-colleague of hers in.
“Right,” you snort. “So, tell me, are you always this rude to people trying to help you out, Dr. Abbot?”
It’s a loaded question. Abbot privately flinches.
“Believe it or not, this is actually me being nice,” he says wryly, reflexively defensive. “Y’know what day it is?”
“Oh, come on—”
“Humor me,” he says, in a tone that implies he isn’t being humorous at all, before his pen-light clicks shut. He drops his hand and catches your wrist just as you move again. Fingers settle over your radial pulse. It’s strong and steady.
“September 5th; Friday. You’re being a pain in my ass,” you relent. “The blood isn’t mine. Hell, I barely stepped foot into PittFest before the shooting started. I got bumped against some barriers—” his eyes flick at your ribs upon hearing that, not quite convinced, “—but that’s all there is. I’ve been declared A-and-O. I’m operational.”
He stops you short again when you attempt to sidestep him towards an isolation cart.
“You’re upright. That’s not the same thing. You can still compensate right up until you don’t,” he says incredulously. “Internal hemorrhaging, delayed pneumothorax— pick your fancy. Either way, none of your symptoms might present until your adrenaline crashes. I’m not taking that chance on you this time.”
You can hardly wrap your head around that last sentence before he turns away.
“Head to Family Medicine with the Green tags,” he goes on, ignoring your protests, “we don’t have time to argue about this.”
“Exactly!” you hiss. It seems to have startled him into actually listening to you now. “Look around you. You’re going to need all the help you can get and I am not compromised.”
“For now. But who knows if—?”
“We both know ‘for now’ is all these people have left,” you insist. It’s the harshest tone you’ve taken with him yet.
As if on cue, someone frantically calls out for help with an airway.
( Something in him twitches out of instinct. Go help them. It’s Dr. McKay and her Pink MCI-12— male, twenties, unstable chest wound— probably circling the drain and destabilising to Red, by now. )
The world unnarrows itself from you, and the clamour of the Pitt makes itself known to him again.
Abbot grits his teeth. Tamps down that instinctive flare of frustration he gets whenever a situation gets away from him. He thinks of Foster, of Wyndham. He thinks of Orser; Imagines you— another combat veteran coding under his watch, just like that omen of a nightmare.
“You’re killing me here,” he says, with a sudden candor. You have been for quite awhile now.
But he lets out an exasperated sound, instead, something akin to a sigh and a growl.
“Goddamnit. Alright, somebody get our hero a scrub top!” he orders, already making his way down towards Central-6 with a final, pointed look at you. “Hey, stay within my sightline, you copy? I will not hesitate to bench you if I see you so much as wobble on your feet.”
A nurse— Perlah, you later learn— badges the dispenser and tosses you a spare top as she speeds by.
“Copy. But not if you catch me first.” You flash a disaffectionate smile at Abbot. “Before I hit the ground, that is,” you joke.
I’m being serious! you hear him yell, but his threat is lost between the tumult by then, and you’re far too busy outfitting into scrubs and gear to bite back.
THE REST OF the hours comes in a frenzied blur. Familiar, though, in the way all old haunts return to you like muscle memory; how your feet might carry you down a route back to a childhood home, or how your lips recite lyrics of a forgotten song before the brain catches up.
Chaos of this MCI isn’t as different as it would be back in your military days darting around Front Aid stations with frantic litter teams. Its modus operandi is still identical: treating a myriad of GSW’s, lac’s of exposed tissue and penetrating wounds, all while coupled with dwindling resources and nothing but an 11-blade and a prayer keeping everybody sewn together long enough for a proper Medevac to a field hospital.
The only thing missing is shitty lighting and the stench of gunpowder from live rounds firing distantly overhead as you weave through each patient like water, triaging and treating methodically from tag to tag.
Sorry, who lost a pulse? We can’t, Black tag now— Any more dislocations on your kid? Alright, head to Green, then— Hey, I’ll reduce the compound fracture then you can assess those boot prints for blunt trauma at Yellow— No, no, Red here has got skull fracture indicators, we’re not risking any nasal airway on him; If we can’t get it orally we’ll cric him, go get Neurocrit on the case ASAP.
In the beginning 30 minutes you’d checked more than a dozen radial, femoral, and carotid pulses; helped with multiple fussy airways; shot quick orders to nurses and staff. But now as another hour passes, chest tubes turn to ET tubes turn to NG tubes turn to—
Damn cowboy medicine, you hear someone from Surgical complain.
Gurneys keep rattling in; calls of vitals overlap. HIPAA is thrown into the wind. Someone’s demanding for more hemostatic gauze, someone else shouting for another set of hands. The piercing smell of antiseptic no longer keeps up with the metal tang in the air from all the bloody streaks of footprints tracked across the hospital floor.
Exhaustion makes itself known, slowly but surely. Gloving up between each trauma becomes your only brief respite, a moment to catch your breath before—
Someone yanks you aside as a gurney barrels past, nearly clipping your hip.
“Watch your six,” Abbot says, unimpressed. He’s in the middle of switching out into a fresh set of PPE’s. Your eyes flicker to his arm, braced solid, before he releases you. “Been awhile. Ribs okay? How’re you feeling?”
“Better than most of the people in here,” you reply, choosing to ignore the burn of his clinical gaze again as you move from Behavioral Health towards the latest grimacing patient.
He’s been checking in on you. You’re acutely aware of the occasional glance from him as you worked together, and more often than not you feel your skin prickling instinctively whenever he’s afar, sparing a second to lift his head over the rows of traumas just to see if you’re still stable on your feet.
It doesn’t take long before Abbot reunites with you again.
He can’t seem to stop planting himself into your orbit. ( Or perhaps it’s the Universe, again, doing it for him. )
“Arterial?” he asks, stepping in.
You’re zeroed in on cric-ing MCI-88; Intra-abdominal GSW from an alleged ricochet. Nipples to navel is no man’s land. “Yep.” You yank the bougie and make way for the nurse. “Occluded with a 30cc foley catheter, stable for ICU. End-tidal?”
“Yellow,” Princess declares.
You spare yourself a long, slow sigh. The weight of the day, it seems, has finally settled and taken root in you. Abbot’s about to comment on it but gets cut to the quick.
“Hey, uh.” Princess’ eyes flicker inquisitively between the two of you. “Did you two serve together?”
( She’d meant to ask an hour earlier after watching you and Abbot practically flitting through the trauma bays like a two-man field unit in a hot zone, speaking in rapid medical and military shorthand while in perfect sync.
Anyone who’d been wheeled into your guys’ path has so far come out the other side with a fighting chance, no matter how ugly.
Princess— unsure if she’d just witnessed you two perform the most efficient emergency temporary vascular-shunt known to mankind on an artery using nothing but whatever improvised material was available within reach— had turned to Robby instead to ask, stunned:
“…How long have they known each other, exactly?”
“Uhhh…” He followed her gaze, cocked his head. “When did the first few MCI patients start rolling in?”
“Twenty minutes ago,” she said, and he’d laughed, just as impressed.
“Then about twenty minutes ago.” )
You shake your head as you snap your gloves off.
“Oh, no, I was too busy being shot out of a helicopter all the way in Afghanistan.”
Princess looks aghast. She turns to Abbot out of morbid curiosity anyway. “Oh,” he deadpans, then parrots: “Yeah, no, I was too busy getting my foot blown off by an IED in—”
“Alright, Mav and Goose, quit dick-measuring,” Walsh interrupts as she drifts by, walkie chattering between department primaries. “Got three OR’s turning over. Room for one Red. Perlah, send this one up to cardiothoracic ICU. Hey, Antonio, 1500 CC’s out buys yours a golden ticket upstairs unle…”
Robby hollers in alarm for help with a patient.
MCI-72, trample victim. Was yellow for rib fracture, started seizing his way into Red. 4mg of Lorazepam and an EFast courtesy of Whitaker for bilateral hemopneumo and cardiac tamponade.
“Dibs on the heart,” you humor, already making do with a central line kit. Prepping a pericardiocentesis tray would’ve risked precious time it’d take in search for it, assuming the kits haven’t already been stripped clean for other jury-rigged procedures by now. “Surprised he’s still kicking at all.”
You bump wordlessly past Abbot. Robby doesn’t bother arguing against it. Together the pair of you have been moving like a well-oiled machine despite the occasional smart-mouth remarks at each other that he earwigs— but Abbot trusts you, at least professionally, as far as Robby can tell, which means he can do the same.
“Going in blind?” Abbot says, more a gesture at banter than an actual retort. He had seen you palpating landmarks, too preoccupied with picturing a mental anatomical map to answer him; 5th intercostal space, subxiphoid approach, unless you can grab me a bedside ultrasound in the span of two seconds for guidance.
Robby and Abbot are quick to decompress the chest traumas after they both assume a side. It appears to be more air than it is blood that's causing the collapse, which is— for what it’s worth amid an MCI where all hell has broken loose— a hopeful sign; the lesser evil.
“Careful,” you hear, breath tickling over your shoulder where Abbot now hovers in observation. His voice is distracting.
You blink. Re-focus. Perform the effusion as clean as it can get. The CVC attached will help with drainage all the way up to the OR. Still, it’d be a miracle if the patient pulls through, even with how quick they’d managed to intervene.
“Solid work.” He radios Walsh in, signals her in the distance with a bloody thumbs-up. “…Guess you can say that was a whiskey move,” he puns.
You snort in spite of yourself.
“Risky?” Robby corrects, unsure.
“Sixty-eight Whiskey,” Abbot says, dismayed at having to explain his very perfectly-executed joke. “68W. Whiskey is military slang for Combat Medic.”
“I was deployed to Kandahar,” you allow, which makes them snap towards you— Abbot moreso. In the late 2000’s it had become one of the main combat flashpoints during the Afghanistan war. But you’re already discarding your slicked gloves to get a move on, blindly quipping:
“It’s why he and I make a decent team so far, I think.”
Robby raises his brows at that. “Only decent? You two were your own field team.”
“Well, I mean,” you shrug, rounding the gurney and having to sidle awfully close past Abbot; close enough he can see you deliberately wrinkle your nose up at him in mock contemplation as you pass.
“…Dr. Abbot still has plenty of room for improvement.”
Abbot scoffs in reply.
Mutters something along the lines of “You’re a damn piece of work, Whiskey,” as he stares down your retreating figure already holding the shaky hand of a new patient rolling in—
…et’s do 3.375 Zosyn for now. Can you tell me anything about yourself, ma’am? Florist! One of my favourite flowers are lilie…
—And Robby’s not sure if it’s the waning adrenaline, the exhaustion, or a strange, delirious concoction of both, that has him wondering if he might’ve just caught sight of Jack Abbot looking almost fond of all things.
Donnie ties off the end of the day with cold beer and laughter.
Your adrenaline had crashed by the last hour, and you could feel yourself fraying, feel the slow crawl of fatigue and aches beginning to settle in your joints. You’d been on your way to take your leave until Samira had somehow managed to inveigle you, and now here you are in the afterparty: communally inducted into their dynamic via trauma-bonding, it seems.
“…aziness, right? To the Pitt Crew,” cheers Donnie, raising his can with a finger pointed right at you. “Oh, and that includes you too now, whether you like it or not. Survived a shooting just to jump right into our chaos— you’re a legend in my books.”
You lift your beer by way of agreement: I’ll drink to that.
“But seriously. We owe you for stepping in to help out today,” Samira nudges, eyes tired but grateful. “I’m glad you didn’t get hurt.”
A lazy wave. “Ah. No sweat. Hell, the only thing I’m owed is a full refund of my damn Pittfest ticket, a few hours of sleep,” you list, between a sip, “and an umbrella.”
Javadi looks puzzled. “D’you lose it in the festival or something?”
“Something,” Abbot replies, glancing up from his seat to meet your cheeky look. He’d forgotten to get it out of his locker earlier.
“Well,” Robby continues, glancing curiously between you two again, “we could use another field medic in our ED. I’m sure Jack will enjoy the company.”
An amused, punched out sound escapes you. Last time I offered him company he iced me out, you think to say. “Ah, I’ll pass. Don’t wanna steal his thunder.”
With his prosthesis set aside, Abbot lets out a snort behind his drink. “My thunder? I’ve got a missing leg. I’m basically a certified badass to these kids wherever I go.”
Kids?! someone cries in mock outrage, just as you nod towards it. “I can steal your leg instead. What’ll you do then, chase me down?”
There’s a split second pause— a collective glance between the others, as if measuring their potential overstep and awaiting permission to react to what’s clearly military humor entitled only to both of you combat veterans; An intimacy.
“Crawl,” Abbot answers, deadpan.
And with that the uncertainty in the air dispels under everybody’s bright laughter; alongside the tension between you two.
Whatever half-hearted, reluctant-alliance that’s been threading you two together the past hours of chaos has finally seem to have knotted into the beginnings of a friendship.
Okay, that’s it for me, Robby taps out, after the conversation eventually had slowed into a sleepy lull. It takes another ten minutes before everyone else begins their exit, space unwinding itself until you find yourself sitting beside Abbot on the bench at last, still resting his bad leg, while Matteo and Donnie are buttoned into their own undertone chatter across from you.
“Getting déjà-vu,” Abbot says, crumpling his empty can. He’d meant for it to be a joke, but it comes off distinctively sincere.
“I barely made it this far into the bench the last time, Abbot,” you tease, nails catching against the tab of your beer in a mindless fidget.
“Jack,” he allows.
An acknowledged beat passes.
“Y’know, Jack,” you relent, softly, “it seems like whenever we cross paths, there’s always somebody dead or dying.”
Foster. Wyndham. PittFest. He fails to hide his wince. “Isn’t it?” he agrees, and looks at his stained shoes— recalls his boots from when he’d stood upon your blood in his nightmare, too. Has to bite back a shudder and let out an exhale.
“I wanna change that,” he murmurs, suddenly.
You turn towards him in surprise, find he’s already staring at you.
Beyond the distant streetlights, a pale moon-glow is limning across your face, softens the bite of the exhaustion in your eyes. Abbot lingers openly for a moment— finally takes the downtime to memorise the slope of your brow down to the curve of your lips, the blink of your lashes from where your hair has come loose from the haphazard style you’d pulled it up to amid the chaos.
He’s sure both he and you look war-torn; battle-weary. If it isn’t for the scrubs, he might’ve mistaken himself back in the cold, dry streets of Afghanistan with a comrade.
“We should grab a drink,” he offers. “Share war stories.” His voice has dropped to that low timbre again. Mellowed out and soft, but earnest. His eyes, still holding your gaze, are the warmest you’ve seen yet.
“Besides, I’m pretty sure I owe it to you, Whiskey.”
You find yourself smiling at the nickname before you realise it.
“Yeah,” you hum. “I’d like that, Jack.”
footnotes.
