Watched the season finale of The Pitt this morning and already churning on a post-season fic. Will someone take away my queer card if I use Langon finding out about Mel hooking up with Santos to launch Kingdon?
Draft opening snippet:
Pittsburgh in August is hot, the air so sticky that Frank's T-shirt under his scrubs feels plastered to his body just from the walk across the parking lot into the Pitt. He takes his piss test as ordered, stashing his bag in his locker before he heads over to the main desk. Whitaker sways on his stool like he's been up all night, the bags under his eyes even darker than usual.
Frank frowns. "You working a double?"
"Huh?" Whitaker's posture snaps back into his new standard rigidity. Frank's still not totally used to this confident, bulked-up version of him, but he's adapting. God knows Whitaker's probably still getting used to the sober version of Frank.
"You look a little…" Frank gestures to the bags under his own eyes. He put concealer on them before he came in, a tube he'd stolen out of one of Abby's drawers in the bathroom while he was throwing everything of his into a suitcase eight weeks ago, the day after he found out he'd been cleared to start back up at work, pretty much the first second that she knew he wouldn't end up homeless if she kicked him out. "Tired," Frank finishes, since Whitaker still looks confused. "Like you've been here all night."
"Oh! Oh. No." Whitaker looks to the side, checking for someone, then leans in. "Mel was over again last night," he says, his voice dropped low like it was a secret.
"And?" Frank squints. He's pretty sure he's been back long enough at this point that if Whitaker and Mel were sleeping together he'd have heard about it. Wasn't Whitaker with that farm girl? Frank glances down; Whitaker's phone is face up on the desk, the same chintzy photo of a cow at sunrise that he mentioned that he'd taken while there earlier in the spring. That whole thing was definitely still happening.
Whitaker plants his elbows on the desk, grinding the heels of his hands into his eyes. "She's so loud."
In Frank's experience of the ED, every time Mel walks into a room, the volume lowers by at least ten decibels, the constant beeping suddenly resistable, like she's got a zone of control around her where everything just a little bit less terrible than it is when she's not around. "Don't you live with Santos?"
"Yes," Whitaker groans. He sounds regretful.
Frank can understand that. Santos, unlike Mel, is very loud. Frank very deeply doesn't understand how she and Whitaker get along so well. Maybe Whitaker just likes everyone. Aside from Mel, apparently, because he thinks she's too loud—which makes no sense. Mel walks in the doors, then, smiling at Perlah, chipper even though it's 7 A.M. and it's only been 10.5 hours since she left last night—Frank knows, because it's been ten hours exactly for him, and he watched her and Santos leave while he was talking Shen through handoff on his last case. He can't hear what she says to Perlah as they vanish around the corner to the lockers. "Mel's a hell of a lot quieter than she is."
Whitaker snorts. "Situationally dependent." He looks down at his coffee then shakes himself like he's cutting off a train of thought, or maybe just now realizing what he's saying. "Never mind."
Frank unlocks the work station, pulls up a chart—42 year old woman complaining of—wait, no, Whitaker definitely means in bed, this is absolutely the sort of gossip that McKay would shank both of them for, but Frank hasn't seen her yet. He blinks, eyes still scanning over the chart but the words not registering. He hadn't realized that he and Whitaker had reached a level of friendship where he'd spill to Frank about cheating on his girlfriend. "You're sleeping with Mel?"
"What? No!" Whitaker looks offended that Frank would even suggest it.
"She's sleeping with Santos." Vivi's been next to them the whole time, pretending to ignore them while doing something on a workstation. Frank hadn't really noticed that she was there.
Whitaker puts his hands up. "I didn't say it."
"Mel's gay?" Something twists in Langdon's chest.
"Sorry, what was that?" Mel appears at Langdon's shoulder, like she's been summoned by Frank saying her name.
Frank winces. "Nothing."
"Dr. Langdon wants to know if you're gay," Whitaker says.
Frank revises his previous assumptions about his workplace friendship with Whitaker.
Vivi coughs loudly, pretending not to look at them.
"Oh. No. Well—how old are you?" Mel asks. She tugs at her stethoscope with both hands.
"What?"
"I just mean—I wouldn't normally use the term gay, but there's been a semantic shift in the term among Gen Z so if you're under age 29 then yes, you'd say I'm gay, but otherwise you probably wouldn't."
"I'm 32." Frank says, flummoxed.
"So no, then." Mel grins at him, looking pleased with herself.
"Gen Z gay means queer," Whitaker clarifies. He closes something on his station, standing up.
Frank can tell he's making the pre-sneeze face he always does when he gets confused.
"Oh, thanks," Mel says, swinging down into Whitaker's vacated seat. "Gender's just not important to my conception of attraction," she adds as she swipes her badge to unlock it. She's barely looking at Frank, delivering this bit of information with the same level of import she'd use for describing a case. Maybe less, actually, like she thinks this doesn't matter. "You'd call me pansexual, probably? Or bisexual, I guess. But Gen Z, which I technically am, says gay. Isn't that great?"
"Oh. Yeah, uh. Really great." Frank reminds himself that learning new things at work is an important part of the residency process.
Mel reads for a few more seconds, then hops back up, striding off towards South 12 without saying anything to end the conversation. Whitaker's already gone, Vivi checking something on the board and then adjusting her chart.
Frank feels a little winded. Mel and Santos, then. That's—good for them, he figures. He was married already when he started residency, but he's seen plenty of doctors get together in his time here. Mel and Santos don't seem like a particularly good fit to him—Mel is so sweet, and Santos is so not, and surely her abrasiveness would end up wearing Mel down. Mel's been through so much already, between Becca and her parents. She doesn't need things to be harder.
He scrolls two pages down, processing none of it, then realizes he hasn't been taking anything in and scrolls back to the top. 42 years old, abdominal pain, physical exam on arrival included—
Hold on. Whitaker didn’t just say Mel’s sleeping with Santos, he said that she’s loud in bed. Little, quiet Mel, with her smooth, shiny hair, with her big sad eyes, the pink bottom lip she chews on when she's nervous—that Mel is loud enough in bed that it's interfering with Whitaker's sleep.
That loud, while she was hooking up with a girl. Santos couldn't even fuck her. Or, well—Frank didn't know what they did. It would be much, much better for his sanity, productivity, and overall well-being if he could keep himself from wondering.
