summary: Jack invites you on a date to the movie theater to watch one of the movies he used to watch with his sister. He plans to ask you to be his girlfriend.
content/warnings: fluff, implied age gap, nervous Jack, cute cute Dr. Abbot.
word count: 1.1k
a/n: it’s been a week since I published the last chapter of Heartbeat, so here’s a one-shot that has been circling my head for a few days. <3 I watched Fool’s Rush In the other day, and if you haven’t watched it yet, I highly recommend it. It’s one of my favorites.
°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･
Jack texts you the address of the theater like he’s confessing to a crime.
Jack: It’s a small place and the movie is old. You might hate it
Jack: We can just go somewhere else
Jack: Forget I said anything
You’re still in your scrubs, badge clipped crooked, laughing at your phone in the PTMC parking garage while the rest of the night shift staff filters out around you. Three weeks of stolen coffees and hallway glances and now actual, real dates, and he’s still nervous like this—like every time might be the one where you change your mind about him.
You type back before you can overthink it.
You: Jack. I have survived a 12 hour shift running on granola bars and spite. I can survive an old movie. Send me the location pls, I’ll be there ❣️
The theater turns out to be one of those single-screen places tucked between a laundromat and a shuttered bookstore, the kind of Pittsburgh spot you’d walk past a hundred times and never notice. The marquee bulbs are half burnt out.
He’s already there when you arrive, hands in his jacket pockets, and the second he sees you his whole face does something helpless and unguarded that he clearly doesn’t mean to let you see.
“Hey.” His voice comes out rougher than usual.
“Hey yourself.” You look up at the marquee.
FOOL’S RUSH IN — ONE NIGHT ONLY.
“Okay. Late 90’s rom-com. Bold choice, Abbot.”
“You know it?”
“I know of it. I was, what, one when it came out.” You watch his jaw tighten, anxious. “Relax. I’m messing with you.”
“I’m not nervous.”
“You’ve checked your watch 4 times since I walked up.”
“That’s a medical habit. Occupational hazard.” But he’s fighting a smile, and he holds the door for you, and inside the theater is nearly empty… a scattering of other people, mismatched velvet seats, the kind of hush that only exists in old buildings that have outlived their purpose and don’t care. Inside it smells like butter, candy, and old dusty carpet with something underneath that might just be decades of other people’s first dates.
You end up in the back row because Jack Abbot, apparently, is a back-row person, and you don’t dislike that about him. Or anything whatsoever.
“So why this one,” you ask, once you’re settled, his arm already finding its way along the back of your seat like he can’t help it. “Out of every movie in the world.”
He’s quiet for a second. Current trailers are still running, throwing blue light across his face.
“My sister loved it. When I was in my residency, when I never had time for anything, she’d make me watch it whenever I came home. Said I needed at least one thing in my life that wasn’t a medical journal or a chart.” He shrugs. “Haven’t watched it in years but I saw it announced on my way to work and thought maybe—” He stops.
“Thought maybe what?”
“Nothing. It’s stupid.”
“Jack.”
“I thought maybe I could watch again with another person I care about.” He says it fast, like ripping off a bandage, eyes on the screen instead of you. “That’s it. That’s the whole reason.”
You don’t say anything right away, because your chest has gone soft and full in a way you’re not used to, and you’re worried if you open your mouth it’ll come out as something bigger than you’re ready for. So instead you reach over and lace your fingers through his on the armrest, and you feel him exhale.
“I like it already,” you tell him. “And it hasn’t even begun.”
°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･
The movie is exactly as ridiculous and charming as you’d expect. Las Vegas neon and impulsive marriage and two people who have no business being together making it work anyway.
The plot feels extremely relatable.
Almost at the end you find yourself humming along under your breath to It’s Now Or Never by Elvis Presley.
“You know this song?”
“Of course,” you whisper. “I have an unreasonable amount of music knowledge from decades I wasn’t alive for. It’s a whole thing.”
He shakes his head, staring at you like you’ve short-circuited something within him. “That’s my exact music taste. That’s disturbing.”
“Weird disturbing, or regular disturbing?”
“Don’t,” he says, but he’s grinning now, wide and unguarded, the kind of grin that makes the almost 20 years between you feel less like a gap and more like a coincidence of timing. “You’re supposed to be nice to me. I’m nervous.”
“You said you weren’t nervous.”
“I lied. Occupational hazard of that too, apparently.”
You laugh, and somebody in the row ahead shushes you both, and you spend the rest of the movie with your head on his shoulder and his thumb tracing slow, absent circles against your hand, and it is, without question, the best old romcom you’ve ever seen.
°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･
The credits roll. The lights come up slowly, like they’re giving everyone a second to remember where they are.
Neither of you moves. A couple minutes pass and then he turns to look at you.
“That line,” Jack says, staring straight ahead at the blank screen like it’s easier than looking at you. “Near the end. Where he tells her he loves her so much it hurts and he realizes he doesn’t want the version of his life where he doesn’t take the chance on her—”
“I remember.” You do… it had landed somewhere under your ribs a few minutes ago and hadn’t left.
“I know it’s too soon but I’ve been thinking about that line for three weeks.” He finally turns to look at you, and for once there’s nothing careful in his expression, none of the hallway-glance restraint, just him. “I don’t want to live the version where I don’t ask. So. I’m asking. Be my girlfriend, sweetheart.”
It’s not smooth. It’s not the speech he probably practiced in his head on the drive over. It’s better than that, because you can tell it’s real and the same man who checked his watch four times and texted you three panicked messages about a movie theater, laid bare in the worst lighting a single-screen cinema in the middle of Pittsburgh has to offer.
“Yeah,” you say, and your voice comes out steadier than you feel, which feels like its own small miracle. “Of course. Yes.”
He kisses you like he’s been waiting ages to do it properly, and somewhere behind you the ancient sound system is still playing the last few bars of the classical rendition of an old song neither of you can name.
And you think, for the first time, that you’d sit through every movie in the world if it meant more nights exactly like this one because you love him too. So much it hurts.
summary: your husband is called to the ED as your emergency contact. You both receive unexpected but happy news.
content/warnings: fluff, slight angst, implied age gap, married reader and Jack, unplanned pregnancy.
word count: 1.1k
°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･
“Where is she?” Jack asks hastily as he runs down the hall. You can hear his footsteps all the way to Central Two.
“Jack, brother, you need to calm down,” Robby says, stopping him before he barges inside. You can hear the commotion from the room.
“What the fuck do you mean calm down? You calm down! If someone doesn’t tell me right now where the fuck my wife is, I’m going to fucking lose it on someone.”
“Calm down,” Robby warns sternly.
Jack takes a deep breath and tightens his jaw. “Robby, I swear to God…”
“She’s here and stable. You can come in now, Dr. Abbot…” Dr. King tells him, stepping out of the room.
A second later, Jack is by your side.
You’re laying in the hospital bed with IV fluids running through your arm and a bandage on your forehead. You got dizzy and collapsed suddenly while helping people in triage, and Mel found you after patients started shouting for help. She’d happened to be outside saying goodbye to her sister when it happened.
“Jack…” you mumble weakly.
“Darling, what happened?” His voice softens immediately at the sight of you.
They had to call him because he’s your emergency contact. He had the day off, and now he’s back at work when he’s supposed to be resting.
“I…” You hadn’t cried until now. Seeing him so worried about you is a lot for your heart to take. You didn’t mean to break down. “I don’t know—they’re running some tests…”
You’re a doctor. You should know better. You should know what’s going on with you, but your mind is running wild and you can’t think straight.
He glances at Mel, and only then do you spot Robby standing in the corner with his arms crossed, watching the entire thing unfold. Definitely not a funny sight—seeing your senior resident, who also happens to be married to his best friend, lying in a hospital bed when she’s supposed to be working.
“What’s wrong?” Jack asks Mel.
“Dizziness, fatigue. Could be exhaustion. She has a superficial laceration from the fall, nothing serious, but we’re running some labs just to be safe. Results should be coming soon.”
He nods, his hands cupping your face as he presses soft kisses to your cheeks.
“Dana called me. I was nearby running errands and my heart just sank. I was so scared…”
“I know. I know. But I’m okay. I’m fine.” You take a shaky breath.
Jack nods softly before kissing you again, this time on the lips.
A knock on the door startles all of you, and Perlah walks in. She hands a tablet to Mel, who immediately shows it to Robby. His eyes widen slightly as he zooms in on the screen.
“What is it?”
“What’s wrong?”
You and Jack ask at the same time.
“They ran it twice?” Robby asks quietly.
Perlah nods.
He exhales and hands the tablet over to Jack.
“hCG levels are in the thousands,” Robby says carefully.
You gasp.
Jack’s mouth goes dry, and your eyes snap toward him.
“What…” you mumble faintly.
“You’re pregnant?” Jack asks, his voice almost breathless.
Your lips tremble.
“I didn’t know…” you whisper. “I swear I didn’t—”
Tears stream down your face as your heart pounds violently in your chest.
“Shhh… sweetheart, it’s okay…” Jack whispers against your temple, wrapping his arms around you instantly.
Mel clears her throat gently, and you look at her expectantly.
“Now that we know what’s going on, I’m going to make a referral to OB. Congratulations, guys. We’re going to monitor you for a couple more hours and then you can go home, okay?”
You hum shakily.
Robby shrugs lightly. “Congratulations, guys. You’re going to be amazing parents. We’ll leave you two alone for now so you can talk.”
“Thanks, brother,” Jack says quietly.
Robby nods once before they all file out of the room, leaving the door shut behind them.
The second you’re alone, you start sobbing.
“Jack… I can’t be pregnant. This wasn’t in my plans…” you cry. “I mean, yeah, I want to be a mom one day, but I’m just finishing my residency, and I wanted us to enjoy being married for a couple more years like we talked about before having children, but now… now…” Your breathing shakes. “I’m so scared, Jack. I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Yes, you can.”
His voice is calm and steady, grounding you immediately.
“You don’t have anything to be scared of. We already are a family, but if this is happening, and our kid is making their grand entrance into the world by scaring their parents half to death, then I already know they’re going to be an amazing addition to our little life.”
“Our little life…” you repeat softly.
“Yes, my love.” He presses his forehead against yours. “You’re not alone in this. I’m going to be with you every step of the way like the husband you love and married, and I’m going to be a dad to that little baby. The one they deserve. We’re going to be a great family.”
His hand slides gently down to rest over your stomach.
“And you?” he murmurs. “You’re going to be an amazing mother. You already love kids. Every time they come into the ER, you’re the best thing they remember afterward. I’m sure of it.”
“You really mean that?”
“Of course I do.” He laughs softly, though his eyes are glassy. “God, I’m scared too. I don’t know how to be a dad. Hell, I didn’t even think being a father was ever going to be in the cards for me until I met you.”
“You’re going to be an amazing dad, Jack…”
His eyes light up at that, and suddenly you start crying all over again.
Now everything makes sense.
The dizziness. The nausea. Why you’ve been more tired than usual even though your routine hadn’t changed.
You’re carrying a baby that’s part you and part Jack.
The love of your life has given you a part of himself, and now it’s growing inside you.
“I’m so happy, baby.” He caresses your cheek with his thumb, wiping away another tear.
“I’m still scared,” you admit with a watery laugh, “but I’m happy too.”
You kiss him softly and breathe in the familiar scent of his cologne.
“Wanna tell everyone so they can start a betting pool?” Jack jokes quietly. “I’m putting fifty bucks on a girl.”
You laugh through your tears.
“You do look like a girl dad to me.”
You nuzzle your face into the crook of his neck and hug him tightly.
“The next one will be a boy,” he says confidently.
You pull back immediately.
“We just found out I’m pregnant with our first and you’re already planning our next kid?”
“Yes,” Jack replies without hesitation. “I want four.”
“Jack!”
—
Hi!! Thank you all for reading Pool <3 I had a lot of fun writing it and this one too. I’m thinking of creating a taglist, so if you wanna be part of it, let me know!! Also, you can check my masterlist here and read my other works. Xx
summary: You show up at Jack’s apartment late at night, needing him, and you both lie in the tension of everything unspoken between you. Wrapped up in each other in the small hours, you both admit out loud that whatever is happening between you is tearing you apart.
content/warnings: angst, pain, casual relationship, unrequited love kinda, jack and reader, implied smut and intimacy, just them being dumb without realizing they can have each other and that’s why it’s short lol.
word count: 900
°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･
“You are the most beautiful woman in the whole world, did you know?” Jack whispered quietly, brushing the locks of hair that covered your sleepy face.
“You’re exaggerating.”
“I’m saying it because it’s the truth… at least to my eyes.” He smiled and you hid your face against his neck, blushing.
God, he drove you crazy sometimes.
“You’re only saying that because you’re obligated to.” You chuckled.
“I’m not.”
"So, that means that only to you I’m beautiful, and to everyone else I’m as ugly as a frog?” You crossed your arms and sat up on his bed.
“No one could ever think you’re ugly, and it baffles me that you could compare yourself to a frog. Two completely different species.” He replied and you chuckled, lying back down and finding again your spot on his bare torso, planting a soft kiss there.
It’s surreal how happy he makes you. No matter what had been going on between the two of you for some time, you couldn’t deny your feelings for each other. It was utterly impossible… chemistry drew you back to each other every time you tried stopping it. Like gravity.
You were trying to make it work, as you always said, but it was becoming harder and harder.
And it didn’t help things weren’t easy at the hospital. All of the new changes the hospital (Gloria mostly) was making, Robby leaving for his sabbatical, training new residents, budget cuts… all of those things were taking a toll on him and you.
Jack was disappointed, angry, and upset with himself — but at the same time, he understood your reasons every time you asked for space.
You weren’t a fresh-out-of-med-school resident anymore. Still, to him you will always be his rookie, but as a senior, now things have evolved. You’re one of the brightest minds he'd ever met, a sharp and clever doctor he’s so proyd of and he’s always known that. He’s always known you’re destined for bigger and better things. But the ever growing desire he has for you hasn’t slowed down and he doesn’t want it to. He was whipped.
“You really can’t let me tease you a little?” He closed his arms around you and sighed heavily.
“No, I can’t baby.” You said and he kissed your forehead as you looked up at him. You are worried, biting your lip and anxious. You stay quiet for a minute and then decide to talk. “Jack… I’m sorry,” you murmured.
“For what, darling?” he replied, his tone concerned.
He knew what was coming, but still had to ask. Your mind is a puzzle he’s willing to solve.
“For everything. For running away from us and at the same time for not being able to control my feelings...” You sit back up and wrap your bare chest with one of his blankets. “I’m sorry for coming here tonight. I just… I just needed to see you.”
“Hey…” He sits up with you and cupped your cheek. “You have nothing to be sorry for. I know I’m not the easiest man, and I don’t always see things the way you do. That’s what makes you incredible… you’re one of a kind, sweetheart. You see things in other perspectives Hell, you practically gave Robby a piece of your mind a few days ago when you didn’t agree with his treatment for that elderly patient and told him to fuck off.”
You laughed, covering your face. “I overstepped, but it had to be done. People need us, Jack… the hospital is falling apart and if us staying casual is what we have to do not to lose our focus and to help everyone else, then that's what we do.”
He sighs. “I know my mind is telling me that’s the most reasonable thing, but my heart is telling me it’s not?”
Your heart settles in your throat.
“I… I know what you mean. And that’s why I’m sorry. I don’t think I’ve been the best person to be around lately, have I?” You mumble.
“Well, I opened my door for you at 1 A.M., so you’re doing just fine right now.”
You chuckled and climbed onto his lap. He inhaled your unforgettable scent and shut his eyes, caressing the back of your head and trying to make the moment last as long as possible.
“What are we going to do?” You whispered against his skin, and a lump rose immediately Jack’s throat. You couldn’t cry right now. It wasn’t fair
“I don’t know,” His voice was barely audible, but you heard him loud and clear. “We can do whatever you want, baby. I’ll follow you till the end of Earth.”
“Jack…”
You wanted him so bad. You wanted everything with him. Mornings, nights, more midnights like this one… you wanted life with him.
“I can feel your heart beating fast,” he mutters, and you nodded. You know he’s counting. Force of habit.
“That’s all because of you.”
A tear rolled down your cheek and he felt it land on his shoulder. You shouldn’t be crying or hurting because you put each other in this situation—but you were, and you know this is your fault.
You were both in deep. This was harder than either of you had thought, and too compromising for you. If the hospital found out, or you tried to be together for real and stopping the secrecy, you would be judged. Gloria would fire you. There was too much on the line now to add up a scandal so big. An attending dating a resident? Your career would be jeopardized.
He loved you far too much to let that happen.
Too much.
“Everything has to make sense, doesn't it?” He asked, and you nodded, his mind drifting back to that night in the roof when he finally kissed you for the first time.
He had found his person. A partner for life. His everything. And he couldn’t have you even though you wanted him with all the fibers on your body.
—
ok so this just destroyed me a little. i needed to write something sad and i’m sorry in advance if this broke your heart like it did mine. also thanks for all the support on all my posts i wanna cry they’re performing so well and so many of you are now reading my fics tysm 😭💗
summary: A routine appointment becomes an emergency when your blood pressure spikes at 38 weeks, landing you admitted to the hospital for an induction the same afternoon. The night is long and frightening, and just when you think you’re through the worst of it, the monitor alarms.
content/warnings: angst, complications in pregnancy, high blood pressure, implied age gap, married Jack and reader, inaccurate medical procedures, light fluff, soft and worried Jack, preeclampsia, mentions of past miscarriage.
word count: 2k
previous - next
°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･ Chapter Five
The appointment was supposed to take 20 minutes.
You’d done this twice a week for four weeks — blood pressure check, urine dip, fetal monitoring, a quick scan to confirm fluid levels. You knew the routine so well you could have run it yourself. You’d started bringing a book to pass the time.
Jack had even stopped coming to the monitoring appointments after the first two weeks because his shifts couldn’t always accommodate it and you’d both agreed there was no point in both of you rearranging everything for something that had, so far, been entirely uneventful.
That was the thing about a Tuesday that looked exactly like every other Tuesday. You didn’t see it coming. But you should have. Because the trend was now Tuesdays.
You were thirty-eight weeks and two days when the number on the cuff made the attending pause.
Not long. Just a fraction of a second… the kind of pause that a non-medical person would never catch. But you caught it, because you’d done it yourself, in that same chair, on the other side of this exact equation.
“Let’s give it a few minutes and try again,” she said, her voice perfectly level. She’s pretending to be calm, I know that tone. You put your book face-down on your lap and didn’t pick it up again.
The second reading was worse. Your heart starts beating fast. 171 over 112. She was already reaching for the door before you’d fully processed the number. “I’m going to get Dr. Al-Hashimi.”
The room felt very small suddenly. You looked down at your stomach and at the monitor strapped across it, the steady line of her heartbeat scrolling across the screen, fast and even and completely unbothered. You caught your reflection in the window and pressed your hand flat against the side of your belly.
“Okay,” you said quietly, to both of you. “Okay. We’re okay, baby.”
Dr. Al-Hashimi came in four minutes later with the kind of calm that told you she’d already reviewed the chart on her way down the hall.
She sat across from you, which is what you did when the conversation required it, and you felt the floor shift slightly beneath you even though you were sitting perfectly still.
“Your levels have been trending up over the last ten days,” she said. “Today’s reading, combined with the labs from Thursday — the protein levels in particular — means we’ve crossed the threshold for severe range.” She held your gaze. “We’re not sending you home today.”
You nodded. You’d known, somewhere in the back of your mind, since the first reading. You know the next steps. “Induction?”
“We’re going to get you admitted and start the process this afternoon. Thirty-eight weeks is a strong position to be in. She’s essentially full term and monitoring after delivery will be routine.”
All the right facts. All the right reassurances. You’d said every single one of these sentences yourself.
“Can I call Jack?” You took a deep breath.
“Of course.” She put her hand briefly over yours. “I’ll give you a few minutes.”
Jack picked up on the second ring.
“Hey, how did it—”
“I need you to come. I’m still here and—” Your voice came out steadier than you expected. “They’re admitting me. My numbers spiked. They want to induce today.”
Silence. One beat, two.
“I’m on my way.” No questions, no reassurances, no wasted words. Just that. “Don’t move.”
“I’m literally about to be admitted to the hospital, Jack, where am I going to—”
But he’d already hung up.
He arrived two minutes later and came through the door of the room they’d moved you to and stopped for just a second when he saw you — propped up against the hospital pillows, IV already in, the fetal monitor strapped across your middle, the blood pressure cuff cycling automatically every fifteen minutes.
His eyes moved across all of it quickly and professionally and then landed on your face, and whatever the professional assessment had told him, it was your face that made something in his own briefly come undone.
Jack crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed and pulled you in without saying anything, and you felt him breathe — one long, deliberate inhale — against the top of your head. God, he smelled good.
“I’m okay,” you said into his shoulder.
“I know,” he said, in the voice that meant he was still deciding whether to believe it.
“She’s okay. Her heart rate has been perfect all morning.”
“I know.” His hand moved to your stomach, spread wide and warm. “I saw the strip on the way in.”
Of course he had.
You pulled back to look at him. The carefully maintained composure was all there. His jaw set, eyes clear, the particular stillness of a man who had spent twenty years learning to be the calm in other people’s storms and he had become yours. But you knew his face better than you knew anything, and underneath all of it he was terrified. You were too. You knew by experience how fast these situations could go sideways.
“Hey,” you said quietly.
He looked at you.
“We’re ahead of it. You said so yourself.”
Something flickered across his face. “I did say that.”
“And you’re never wrong.”
The corner of his mouth moved slightly. “Let’s not overstate it.”
You leaned your head back against his shoulder, and he kept his hand where it was, and for a few minutes you just listened to the sound of your daughter’s heartbeat on the monitor. Steady, insistent, completely indifferent to the fear in the room.
The induction began at 2:17 in the afternoon.
By evening, things were progressing slowly in the way that first inductions often did — which the nurses explained cheerfully and which you already knew and which did not make the waiting any easier. Your blood pressure was being checked every thirty minutes. The medication was doing what it was supposed to do. Everything was, technically, going according to plan.
Jack hadn’t left the room once.
He’d called his parents and yours from the chair beside your bed, keeping his voice low and steady, giving the same careful update to each: “she’s stable, baby’s doing well, we’re in good hands, we’ll call when there’s something to tell you.” He did the same with all your friends who were currently working downstairs: Robby, Trinity, Mel, Cassie, and the rest of our hospital family.
You watched him hang up the last call and sit for a moment in the quiet, his elbows on his knees and his head slightly bowed, and you thought about how much energy it took to hold yourself together for everyone else.
“Jack.” He looked up. “Come here.”
He moved back to the bed and you shifted over as much as the monitor and the IV line would allow, and he sat beside you, close enough that his arm was against yours.
“You’re allowed to be scared,” you said. “You don’t have to do the voice.”
He was quiet for a moment. “What voice?”
“The calm one. The one you use for patients. You don’t have to use it with me.”
He exhaled slowly through his nose. Outside the room, the maternity ward carried on — footsteps, a distant phone, the soft rhythm of a hospital at night.
“If I stop using the voice,” he said carefully, “I’m not sure what’s underneath it right now.”
You reached for his hand.
“I know what’s underneath it,” you said. “And it’s okay. We can be scared together.”
He turned his hand over and held yours tightly, and for the first time all day the composure slipped just slightly… not much, barely visible, just a tightening around his eyes and a single slow exhale that carried more weight than anything he’d said.
“I keep thinking about last time,” he admitted quietly. “I know this is different. I know that logically. But I keep—”
“Me too,” you said. “Every day.”
He looked at you.
“Every single day of this pregnancy,” you said. “I’ve just been living there. And I think maybe that’s okay. I think that’s just what this is and will be until she’s an adult… being terrified and doing it anyway because she’s worth it.”
“Even when she’s an adult I’m going to be worried.” Jack added and chuckled lightly. He brought your hand to his lips and held it there.
°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･
At 9:46pm, the monitor alarmed.
Not the slow, cycling alarm of a routine alert — the sharp, insistent kind that brought a nurse through the door in under thirty seconds, eyes already on the strip.
Her heart rate had dropped. Not catastrophically, not yet, but enough… a deceleration that sat at the bottom of the screen like a held breath, and didn’t come back up the way it should have.
You felt Jack go absolutely still beside you.
The nurse called for the midwife, her voice professionally calm, and within ninety seconds the room had filled in the quiet, efficient way that medical rooms fill when something requires immediate attention — another nurse, the midwife, and then our friend Dr. Al-Hashimi herself moved through the door, coming straight from the ER with her eyes already on the monitor.
“Talk to me,” she said to the nurse, and they exchanged information in the shorthand of people who had done this many times, and Jack was standing now, on the other side of your bed, his hand on your shoulder, and you were watching the strip and watching Dr. Al-Hashimi’s face and trying to remember how to breathe and all your medical training.
The heart rate came back up.
Slowly, and then all at once, the line climbed back to where it should be and the monitor settled, and the room took a collective breath.
“There she is,” the midwife said, almost to herself.
You put both hands on your belly and felt the tears come before you could stop them — not from sadness, just from the sudden release of ten seconds of pure terror, the kind that left your whole body shaking slightly in its aftermath. Your daughter was so loved and wanted. She had to be okay.
“Hey.” Jack was at your side immediately, both hands on your face. “Hey. She’s okay, sweetheart. Look at the strip — she’s okay.”
“I know,” you said, lips trembling. “I know, I’m not — I’m fine, I just—”
“I know,” he said, and his voice finally cracked, just slightly, on the second word.
You looked at each other.
Dr. Al-Hashimi was speaking and explaining the deceleration, what had likely caused it, the adjustment she was making to your positioning and the IV line, what they’d be watching for over the next hour. You heard all of it and registered all of it.
But mostly you were looking at Jack, and he was looking at you, and the fear that had been living quietly in the corner of the room since you miscarried the first time was still right there between you now, out in the open, and somehow that was better than pretending it wasn’t.
“One more night,” Dr. Al-Hashimi said, from somewhere nearby. “And then tomorrow we meet her.”
Jack pressed his forehead against yours.
“Tomorrow,” he said softly.
You closed your eyes and nodded and held on to him. Tomorrow you’ll meet your daughter.
—
I promise the angst will be ending soon. Not just yet, but soon. Thanks for reading and for all your support. I’m touched that this story resonates with you. I love Jack so much. See you next chapter! (if you want to be added to the taglist let me know). <3
summary: After a long and grueling labor, an emergency c-section brings your daughter into the world… crying, perfect, and safe. But before you can hold her, everything goes wrong.
content/warnings: angst, complications in pregnancy, implied age gap, married Jack and reader, inaccurate medical procedures, worried Jack.
word count: 1.8k
a/n: I finished writing this chapter last night and I couldn’t wait to edit it and publish it. So instead of working at my corporate job, I’m here because I love Jack with all my heart and this story. Don’t tell a soul. Chapter 7 will take me a couple days because I’m a little busy, but it’s coming. Sorry in advance for the cliffhanger and thanks for reading and all the support this series has been getting!! <3 i love u all
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°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･ Chapter Six
Morning arrived and the maternity ward grew busier, a change in the rhythm of footsteps outside the door, the night nurse handing off to the day team with the quiet efficiency of people exchanging a weight they’d been carrying for hours.
You hadn’t slept.
Jack had, briefly, in the chair beside you with his hand wrapped around yours, which you’d chosen to count as a victory. You had spent the dark hours watching the monitor, watching his face, listening to your baby’s heartbeat scroll steadily across the screen, and telling yourself that morning would come and morning would mean something.
It did.
At 6:43am, the contractions that had been distant and irregular all night sharpened into something with intention behind them, and by the time Dr. Al-Hashimi arrived for morning rounds, it was clear that today was the day.
Jack woke up when he heard her voice and was on his feet before he’d fully opened his eyes.
Labor, in meaning, is a thing you understand completely. The stages, the timelines, the cascade of events that the body moves through with or without your permission. You had studied it, explained it, reassured people through it more times than you could count.
Labor, from the inside, was something else entirely.
By 9am the contractions were close and serious and the epidural had taken the sharpest edge off without removing the pressure, the weight, the sense of your body doing something enormous and completely outside your control.
Jack stayed beside you diligently. Standing when you needed to move, sitting when you needed stillness, holding your hand through every contraction without being asked and without saying anything unless you needed him to.
By noon, things were progressing. By 3pm, they weren’t anymore.
The word stalled had a particular quality when it came from a medical professional in a situation where stalling had implications. Dr. Al-Hashimi used different words this time... failure to progress, cervical lip, asynclitic position… and you processed each one of them and understood each one of them and felt the anxiety begin to build slowly in your chest like water rising.
They adjusted your position. They increased the pitocin. They gave it another two hours with the careful patience of people who weren’t yet at the threshold but were watching it.
At 5:17pm, her heart rate dropped again. This time it didn’t come back as quickly.
This time the room filled faster, and the voices were quieter, and Baran’s face when she looked at the strip had the particular quality of someone making a decision they’d already been considering.
“We’re going to take you to the OR,” she said, looking at me directly. “I know that’s not the plan we talked about but the baby’s tracings are telling us she’s not tolerating labor well and I don’t want to wait any longer.”
You nodded. Your heart was hammering somewhere behind your sternum but your voice came out steady. “Okay. Okay, yes.”
“We’re going to move quickly. Jack can be present but I need him to be able to stay calm in that room — can you both do that?”
You looked at Jack. He was looking at you.
“Yes,” you both said.
The OR was cold and very bright and filled with familiar people who all seemed to know exactly what they were doing, which should have been comforting and mostly was except that you were the one on the table and the blue drape was going up in front of your face and Jack was being gowned beside you and you were trying very hard to control your breathing and not succeeding especially well.
“Hey.” Jack’s face appeared above yours, close, his eyes finding yours immediately. He’d been given a stool beside your head and he sat on it and took your hand. “I’m right here, sweetheart.”
“I know,” you said. Your voice was thin. “I know, I just—” you stopped and exhaled. “I’m scared.”
“I know.” He pressed his lips to your forehead, the mask pulling slightly. “Me too. But she’s almost here. She’s almost here and then this is over.”
You swallowed hard and nodded and tried to believe him and held his hand with both of yours.
The pressure began — strange and distant and enormous, a sensation that wasn’t quite pain but wasn’t quite nothing either, and you focused on Jack’s face and his voice and the sound of him talking to you about nothing in particular, just words, just his voice, steady and low and only for you.
And then, at 6:41 in the evening, your daughter was born.
She cried immediately.
One sharp, indignant sound that split the room open, and then another, and Jack made a sound beside you that you had never heard from him before — something broken and overwhelmed and completely unguarded — and you turned your head toward the sound of her and felt the tears come flooding down the sides of your face into your hair.
“She’s here,” you said, or maybe just thought. “She’s here.”
“She’s here,” he confirmed, and his voice was wrecked. “She’s perfect. She’s absolutely—”
He stopped.
You noticed the change in the room before you understood it.
Not in anything dramatic… no alarms, not yet… just a subtle shift in the quality of attention around you, the focus of the team at the surgical side of the drape redirecting and sharpening, a word exchanged in a low voice that you caught the edge of but not the meaning.
And then your blood pressure monitor alarmed.
And then Jack’s hand tightened around yours to the point of pain.
“What’s happening,” he said. Not a question. The voice of someone who already knew and needed someone to tell him he was wrong.
“Dr. Abbot.” Dr. Al-Hashimi’s voice was calm and absolute. “I need you to stay where you are.”
“What is happening—”
“She’s bleeding. We’re managing it. I need you to stay seated and stay calm or I will need you removed from this room.”
The words landed like something physical. You saw him absorb them — saw the moment the doctor in him and the husband in him collided with nowhere to go in an internal battle — and his jaw tightened to the point where you could see the muscle in it working.
You squeezed his hand.
“Jack.” Your voice was strange to you. Distant, slightly. The edges of the room were doing something odd. He looked at you. “Stay,” you managed to say.
What happened next came to you in pieces rather than sequence.
The alarm from the blood pressure monitor, changing in pitch. More people entering the room — where they came from, you couldn’t have said. Voices overlapping in the particular controlled urgency of a team that was moving fast without moving chaotically. Baran calling for something you didn’t catch. Jack’s hand still in yours and then — a commotion, movement, his voice raised for the first time, and then another voice cutting across it.
Robby. You recognised the voice a half-second before you placed it. He must have been nearby, must have heard — and now he was there, right there at Jack’s shoulder, speaking to him in the low firm tones of someone trying to reach a person through significant interference.
“Jack. Jack, look at me. You need to step back.” Robby said.
“I’m not leaving—”
“You’re not leaving. You’re moving back two steps and you’re letting them work. Right now. Come on.”
“That’s my wife—”
“I know.” Robby’s voice, level and certain. “I know. And they’re working. But if you don’t step back right now they’re going to remove you, and then you won’t be here at all. Two steps. Come on.”
A pause that seemed to last much longer than it did.
Then the sound of movement.
You wanted to tell him it was okay. You wanted to say something that would reach him through the noise and the fear. But the room was becoming increasingly strange around the edges, and the cold that had been ambient when you arrived was settling into you now in a different way, from the inside out, and the lights above you were very bright and very far away.
She cried, you thought. She cried right away. That’s good. That’s what they say to listen for. Her heart is beating. Are they listening to her heartbeat or mine now?
“Stay with us.” Someone near your head said, focused on your face. “Can you tell me your name?”
You answered. Or you thought you did.
The monitor alarm shifted again — a new sound, lower and more urgent — and the voices around you multiplied and the movement in the room accelerated and you thought about Jack, about where he was, whether Robby was still with him, whether someone was with your baby girl that you hadn’t even had the chance to name yet.
She cried, you thought again, and held onto it.
The lights above you were very white and very bright and then, gradually, without any coherence, they weren’t anything at all.
Jack stood at the edge of the room with Robby’s hand on his shoulder and watched them work on his wife.
He knew what every movement meant. He understood every instruction called across the room, every adjustment made, every number relayed from the monitors to the team. He had the vocabulary and the clinical knowledge and more than twenty years of experience to read exactly what was happening on that table.
He had never wished so desperately to understand less.
“She’s strong,” Robby said beside him. Not a platitude. A fact, delivered plainly, the way Robby delivered most things.
Jack didn’t answer.
Across the room, in a warmer under a bank of lights, his daughter made a small sound. A nurse was with her, moving efficiently and gently, murmuring something quiet.
She was here. She was safe. She was perfect.
And her mother was on that table and the monitors were saying things that Jack could not afford to say out loud and his hands, at his sides, were shaking.
“Jack.” Robby again. “They’ve got her.”
He couldn’t look away from the table.
“I can’t—” he started, and stopped. The sentence had nowhere to go.
Robby didn’t push it. He just stayed where he was, solid and present, and kept his hand on Jack’s shoulder, and the room kept working, and the monitors kept alarming, and somewhere under all of it Jack held on to the only thought available to him:
summary: You survive surgery but are placed under an induced sedation to recover from the trauma of the hemorrhage. Jack refuses to hold his daughter, insisting you should be the first to do so, and instead sits at your bedside completely undone. At the same time, your friends keep a quiet vigil outside the room.
content/warnings: angst, complications after pregnancy, implied age gap, married Jack and reader, inaccurate medical procedures, worried Jack.
word count: 2k
a/n: this is the last angsty chapter I promise!!! Thanks for reading guys. Ilysm. We only have two more left <3
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°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･ Chapter Seven
The surgery took 41 minutes.
Jack knew because he counted. He stood in the hallway outside the OR with Robby beside him and counted every single one of those minutes, which was the only thing he could think to do with his hands and his mind and the unbearable, structureless terror of being helpless in this situation.
Robby didn’t try to fill the silence. That was the thing about his brother… he understood that some silences weren’t meant to be filled, that sometimes the most useful thing another person could do was simply remain present without demanding anything in return. He stood with his shoulder almost touching Jack’s and said nothing, and Jack was more grateful for it than he would ever find the words to say.
At some point someone brought coffee. Jack didn’t drink it. At another time his phone buzzed with both sets of parents waiting for news he didn’t have yet. He turned it face down. Couldn’t bring himself to tell them your life was in jeopardy.
41 minutes.
And then the door opened.
Garcia’s surgeon’s face told him what he needed to know before she said anything. Not good news, not bad news… the particular careful expression of someone delivering a result that was complicated and required precise handling.
“The bleeding is under control,” she said. “She came through the surgery.”
A shuddering breath left Jack all at once.
“However.” She held his gaze. “The hemorrhage was significant. She lost a considerable amount of blood and her body has been through an enormous amount of trauma in a short period of time. We’ve made the decision to keep her sedated for now. Induced sedation, to give her body the best possible environment to begin recovering. It’s not a permanent state. It’s a protective one, as you know.”
“How long,” Jack said.
“We’ll reassess in 24 hours. Possibly longer, depending on how she responds or if she wakes up on her own.” She paused. “She’s stable, Abbot. She fought hard in there.”
He pressed his fist briefly to his mouth and nodded.
“You can see her soon. We’re getting her settled in the ICU.” She touched his arm briefly in a rare, human gesture. At the end of the day, these are both of your colleagues, who on some level, care about their own. “Al-Hashimi told me your daughter is doing beautifully. The pediatric team has checked her over and she’s healthy. She’s waiting for you.”
Jack said nothing.
Garcia held his gaze a moment longer, then excused herself quietly and left him standing in the hallway with Robby and the particular silence of someone who had just been handed an impossible thing to carry.
Robby silently brought his best friend to the nursery first.
He saw her first through the window. She was in a bassinet under warm lights, swaddled in the standard-issue hospital blanket with the pink and blue stripes, her face calm and falling asleep. He found it somewhat overwhelming. A nurse stood nearby, charting, and looked up when Jack appeared in the doorway.
“Dr. Abbot. Would you like to hold her?”
He looked at his daughter for a long moment. Her chest rising and falling. Her fingers curled into small, perfect fists. The dark hair visible above the edge of the swaddle. He loved her. He really did. His heart somehow had expanded to welcome her. But he couldn’t.
“Not yet,” he said quietly.
The nurse looked at him carefully. “Okay. She’ll be right here whenever you’re ready.”
Robby put his hand on his shoulder. “Jack.”
“She should hold her first.” His voice came out rougher than he intended. “She’s been waiting… we’ve both been waiting, and she should be the one to—” he stopped. Pressed his lips together. “She should hold her first.”
Robby was quiet for a moment. “Okay,” he said. Just that. No argument, no gentle redirection. Okay.
Jack looked at his daughter for another long moment—memorizing her, or trying to—and then turned away from the nursery door. His heart breaking.
The ICU room was quiet, the lighting adjusted to something less aggressive than the rest of the hospital, the machines doing its work with steady, rhythmic patience.
You were in the bed at the center of it.
Jack stopped in the doorway and looked at you and did not move for several seconds.
He had seen patients in ICU beds more times than he could count. He understood every line and every monitor and every number displayed on the screen beside your bed, and he wished with a ferocity that surprised even him that he understood none of it.
He wished that he could look at you the way someone without his training would, without the clinical translation running automatically in the background, without knowing precisely what each reading meant and what it would mean if it changed. You needed to be okay.
Robby had walked him here and stopped outside.
Jack crossed the room, pulled the chair as close to the bed as it would go, and sat down. He reached through the bedrail and took your hand in both of his, carefully, around the IV line, and held it.
Your hand was warm. Your heart was still beating. He focused on that.
He didn’t know how long he sat there before it started —the specific, physical sensation of everything he’d been holding together for the past several hours beginning, finally, to give way.
It started in his chest. A tightness that had nothing to do with his heart and everything to do with it. And then his eyes, which had been dry through the surgery and the hallway and the 41 minutes because he had needed them to be, stopped cooperating. He pressed your hand against his forehead and let it happen.
He cried. He’d been suppressing it for too long and cried hard. Not gracefully, not quietly, with the particular helplessness of a person who had run completely out of composure and had nothing left to replace it with. His shoulders shook. His breath came in the uneven increments of someone who kept trying to get ahead of it and kept failing.
Outside the room, through the glass, he was dimly aware of the ER staff giving the room a careful distance alongside Robby. Someone had probably told them. Someone always told them.
When the worst of it had passed (not gone, not even close to gone, just receded enough to allow speech) he lifted his head and looked at your face. Still. Peaceful in the artificial way of sedation, which looked like sleep and wasn’t.
“You have to come back,” he said. His voice was wrecked, barely functional. “Do you hear me, baby? You have to come back.”
The monitors continued their quiet work.
“She’s here.” He swallowed. “She’s here and she’s perfect and she looks—she has your—” he stopped, jaw working. “You have to see her. You have to be the one to hold her first, I told them, I said you should be the one, so you have to wake up and do that.”
He pressed his lips to your knuckles.
“I don’t know how to do this without you. I know that’s not fair to say and I know you’d tell me that’s not true, but I’m telling you anyway because you’re not awake to argue with me about it, sweetheart.” A sound escaped him that was almost a laugh and almost wasn’t. “I need you to argue with me about it. I need you to wake up and tell me I’m being dramatic. Please.”
The room stayed silent.
“We have a daughter,” he said softly. “We have a daughter and she needs her mother and I need my wife and we had—we have—so many things we’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to hold her first. You’re supposed to come home and complain that I’ve made the bottle wrong and be right about it. We’re supposed to have more kids and grow old and insufferable together.” His voice broke cleanly on the last word. “You promised me that. I’m holding you to it. Please.”
He rested his forehead against your hand and stayed there.
°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･
Hours passed.
Maybe 7, maybe more. He didn’t know anymore.
A knock at the glass… gentle, hesitant. He looked up to find Robby in the doorway, and beside him, Trinity, her eyes bloodshot red and her expression doing the difficult work of being both devastated and steady at the same time.
Behind her, Javadi, Mel, McKay, Langdon, Mateo, and lastly, Dana, holding a cup of something warm and looking at him with the particular grief of someone who loved you and didn’t know where to put it. He didn’t want to eat or drink or do anything that would make him leave your side.
Jack shook his head once.
They nodded and didn’t come in. But they didn’t leave either… just arranged themselves in the hallway outside the glass, quiet and present, keeping their own kind of vigil.
He turned back to you.
“You have an audience,” he told you. “The whole ER is probably out there by now, knowing this hospital. You’d hate it. You’d pretend you didn’t love it and then you’d love it.” He smoothed his thumb across your knuckles. “One more reason to wake up. You can tell them all to go home. We could go home…”
The monitor beeped its steady rhythm.
He settled back into the chair and kept your hand in his and watched your face and waited, the way he had learned, over the course of this long impossible year, to wait for things that mattered… without certainty, without guarantees, with nothing but the stubborn, structural refusal to be anywhere else.
It was the change in your breathing that he noticed first.
Subtle and barely perceptible, a slight deepening, a shift in rhythm. His eyes went immediately to the monitor and then back to your face and he leaned forward without deciding to, both hands tightening around yours.
“Hey,” he said quietly. “Hey. I’m here.”
Your brow moved. The smallest possible movement and he caught it.
“Take your time,” he said. His voice was very low. “I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere, sweetheart.”
Your fingers moved against his palm. Barely… just a slight flex, almost reflexive, but he felt it like a current through his entire body.
“That’s it,” he said. “Come on.”
Your eyes opened slowly, fought the light, closed again. Opened once more, finding focus by degrees, until they found his face above yours and stayed there.
For a moment neither of you said anything.
You looked at him and took him in with the slow, careful attention of someone reassembling the world piece by piece. And he looked at you, and the expression on his face was something you had no word for, something that lived in the space between relief and grief and love so acute it had no way to be contained.
Your lips moved. No sound yet, just the shape of something.
He leaned closer. “I’m here. You’re okay. You’re safe.”
You tried again. This time sound came with it… thin, frayed at the edges, barely there.
“The baby,” you said.
His face broke open entirely. You didn’t care about yourself, you cared about your daughter.
“She’s perfect,” he managed. “She’s right here. She’s been waiting for you.”
Your eyes filled slowly, the tears spilling sideways into your hair, and you turned your hand over in his and held on. Jack nuzzled his head on the crook of your neck and cried as well, grateful you had woken up.
summary: you finally hold your daughter for the first time, then watch Jack fall in love holding her too. A few days of recovery later, the three of you go home together. Safe, whole, and finally a family.
content/warnings: fluff, implied age gap, married Jack and reader, inaccurate medical procedures, happy family, taking baby home.
word count: 1.6k
a/n: happy father’s day to daddy Jack! thanks for reading <3 only one more chapter left.
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°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･ Chapter Eight
A couple of hours had passed since you’d opened your eyes, and already the room felt different. The monitors were still there, the IV line still taped to the back of your hand, but the particular held-breath quality of the room had eased into something gentler. You were sitting up against the pillows now, sipping water in small careful amounts, and Jack hadn’t let go of your other hand since you woke up… not once, not even when the nurse came in to check your vitals and had to work around him.
“You should eat something when they bring food up,” he said, for probably the third time.
“I will.”
“You lost a lot of blood. You need–”
“Jack.” You looked at him, and something in your expression made him stop mid-sentence. “I know. I’m a doctor too, remember?”
The corner of his mouth lifted, just slightly. It was the first real almost-smile you’d seen from him since you woke up, and it did something warm and aching to your chest.
There was a knock at the door, soft and deliberate, and a nurse stepped in pushing a small bassinet on wheels. Your heart moved before your mind caught up to what was happening.
“Someone’s been asking to meet her mom,” the nurse said, smiling, and wheeled the bassinet gently alongside the bed.
You looked at Jack with tears in your eyes.
He was already on his feet, but he didn’t reach for her. He stood there instead, looking down at the bassinet with an expression that was equal parts adoration and restraint, and when you caught his eye he just shook his head slightly.
“You first,” he said quietly. “I told you. I’ve been waiting for you to hold her first.”
The nurse helped you adjust, propping another pillow against your side for support, and then carefully, carefully lifted the small swaddled little girl from the bassinet and placed her in your arms.
For a moment you couldn't say anything at all. It was a lot.
She was so small. Smaller than you’d imagined even after months of feeling her move, of watching her on every scan, of memorizing the rhythm of her heartbeat through your stethoscope at home. Her face was scrunched and serious, her dark hair soft on her head, and when her eyes opened… barely, just slits… they found nothing in particular and everything at once.
“Hi,” you whispered, and your voice broke completely on the single syllable. “Hi, baby girl.”
Jack made a sound beside you that he immediately tried to suppress and failed to. You looked up at him through the blur of tears that had started without permission. He was crying too. “Come here.”
He sat carefully on the edge of the bed, his whole body angled toward the two of you like he couldn't help it, and you shifted her slightly so he could see her face properly.
“She has your nose,” you mumbled.
“She has your everything else,” he said, voice thick. He reached out one finger, hesitant, and touched the back of her tiny hand, and her fingers curled instinctively around his with a strength that seemed impossible for something so small.
“Do you want to hold her?”
He looked at you. “Are you sure?”
“Jack.” You laughed, exhausted but happy. “She’s your daughter too. You’re allowed to hold her.”
He lifted her with the particular careful precision of someone who had clearly read every page of every medical book about babies and was still terrified of doing it wrong anyway, tucking her against his chest, one large hand supporting her head with a gentleness that didn’t match the size of his large hands at all.
The baby made a small, indignant sound at the transfer and then settled, her cheek against his chest, and Jack closed his eyes.
You watched him hold her—your daughter, his daughter, the two of you finally a family in the way you’d been imagining for over a year now, through loss and fear and everything in between… and felt something in your chest settle into place that had been unsettled since the very first positive test.
“Hi, darling.” Jack said to her, very softly, like the word belonged only to them. “I’m your dad. I’ve been waiting a long time to say that.”
You reached over and rested your hand against his arm, and for a long moment none of you said anything at all.
°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･
A little while later, when the nurse came back to check on you both, she gently suggested trying to feed her, and you took your daughter back into your arms with the slightly nervous determination of someone attempting something entirely new for the first time.
It took a few tries. A little fussing, a little repositioning, Jack hovering close with his hand resting on your shoulder, the nurse offering quiet, practical guidance.
And then she latched.
The nurse left and the room went very quiet. You felt the strange, overwhelming rush of something instinctive and ancient settling into place in your body… and looked up to find Jack watching the two of you with an expression you would remember for the rest of your life.
“Look at her,” he murmured.
“I am.”
“She’s so sure of herself,” he said, and laughed for real, finally releasing something that had been held tight in his chest for days. “She’s been here for less than a day and she already knows exactly what she wants.”
“Wonder where she gets that from,” you said, glancing at him with a smirk.
“No idea,” he said, deadpan, and you both laughed quietly enough not to disturb her.
You looked down at her face, peaceful now, her small fist curled against your skin, and thought about the very first time you’d heard a heartbeat that wasn't your own… that tiny, frantic, impossible sound and beating on a screen, the sound that had once meant so much hope and then so much grief and now, finally, meant only this.
Her. Here. Alive and warm and yours.
Jack leaned down and kissed the top of your head, then the top of hers, and you felt his hand settle warm over both of yours.
“We did it, sweetheart,” he whispered.
“We did it,” you agreed, and let yourself cry again.
°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･
The next few days moved slowly in small increments of progress, measured and monitored, each one a quiet victory. Your blood pressure stabilized. Your numbers improved. You walked the hallway with Jack’s arm around your waist the first time, steadier the second, almost like yourself by the third.
All your friends who passed your door made a habit of glancing in, just for a second, just to see how you were doing because word had clearly traveled, the way it always did at PTMC. Trinity brought a teddy bear and flowers that were entirely too large for the room. Dana cried again, predictably, the moment she held her.
Even Robby stopped by, standing slightly awkward in the doorway until Jack handed him the baby without ceremony, and the sight of him holding her goddaughter so carefully, so completely undone by something so small, made you laugh until your stitches complained.
On the fourth day, Dr. Al-Hashimi came in with the discharge paperwork and a smile that told you everything before she said a word.
“You’re going home,” she said.
°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･
The apartment was exactly as you’d left it, except now there was a car seat by the door and a bassinet in the bedroom and an entire universe of small, impossible new things waiting to be learned.
Jack carried her in himself, cradled against his chest, narrating quietly to her as he walked through each room like he was introducing her to the place properly. The grand tour, he called it.
“This is the kitchen, where your mom makes terrible decisions about pickles and jam. This is the living room, where we’re going to watch entirely too much television once you’re old enough to have opinions about it.”
You stood in the doorway and watched him, exhausted and sore and more content than you had ever been in your life, and pressed a hand briefly to your own chest… feeling your own heartbeat, steady now, no longer holding its breath.
“Hey,” Jack said, turning to find you watching them. “Come here. Both of you need to be on this couch.”
You crossed the room and sank down beside him, and he shifted their daughter gently into the space between you, and for a long, quiet moment the three of you just stayed there looking at her tiny chest rising and falling against the blanket, her heartbeat steady and small and entirely hers now, out in the world at last.
“We’re home,” you said softly.
Jack pressed a kiss to your temple. “We’re home.”
And for the first time in a very long time, neither of you were afraid of anything at all and of everything all at once.
summary: A persistent headache and swollen ankles turn into a preeclampsia diagnosis sending you both back into the fear you’d been trying to outrun. Jack refuses to leave your side for a second longer than necessary.
content/warnings: angst, complications in pregnancy, implied age gap, married Jack and reader, inaccurate medical procedures and diagnosis, fluff, soft and worried Jack, preeclampsia, mentions of past miscarriage.
word count: 1.4k
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°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･ Chapter Four
It happened on a Tuesday, which felt wrong somehow. Bad news should arrive on a grey Monday or a stormy Friday night… not a bright, ordinary Tuesday morning when you’d had a good breakfast and Jack had made you laugh twice before you even left the apartment and went off to PTMC.
You were thirty-four weeks along.
The headache had been there when you woke up, dull and persistent at the base of your skull. You’d catalogued it the way you catalogued everything in the way you were taught in med school—clinically, efficiently, filed it under probably nothing and got dressed. Your ankles had been swelling on and off for two weeks, which you’d also filed under probably nothing, very common. You were a doctor. You knew the difference between normal and not normal.
Except that by noon, the headache had moved from dull to insistent, and when Dana caught you bracing yourself against the nurse’s station with your eyes closed she didn’t say a word… she just paged Jack.
He appeared at the end of the hallway forty seconds later breathlessly.
You knew his footsteps. You’d told him that once, in the early days, and he’d looked at you like you’d said something that undid him completely. Right now those footsteps were fast and deliberate and trying very hard not to be a run.
“Hey.” He reached you and his hands went to your arms immediately, dipping his head to look at your face. “Talk to me.”
“It’s a headache,” you said. “I’m fine.”
“You’re bracing yourself against a wall.”
“I’m leaning.”
“Let me take your blood pressure.”
“Jack—” I frowned.
“Please.” The word was quiet and direct and left no room for argument.
You let him guide you to the nearest empty room. He drew the curtain and helped you onto the bed, and you watched him wrap the cuff around your arm with the focused efficiency he usually reserved for patients in serious trouble. His face gave nothing away. That was how you knew he was scared.
The reading came back.
He looked at it for just a moment too long.
“What is it?” you asked, even though you already knew. You were a doctor. You knew what too long meant.
“154 over 102.” He set the cuff down carefully. “We’re going to run some labs.”
The number settled over the room like a change in weather.
This number at this stage of pregnancy is dangerous. Protein in the urine, you’d bet, if the headache and the swelling were part of the picture. You’d diagnosed it in other people before. You’d explained it to frightened patients in careful, reassuring language. You’d said we caught it early, that’s the important thing more times than you could count. But after everything you’ve gone through, this feels like dealing with the grief of the miscarriage all over again. Only worse.
“Jack,” you said. He knows what’s going through your head. The same thoughts are spiraling in his too.
“Let’s wait for the labs,” he said. His voice was even and professional and you hated it.
“Don’t do that.” He looked up. “Don’t be my doctor right now. Just be my husband and talk to me.”
Something in his expression shifted. He pulled a chair to the side of your bed and sat down, and reached for your hand the way he always did—not gently, but firmly, like he meant it.
“I’m scared,” he said simply.
“Me too.”
“We caught it early. The numbers are high but they’re not—” he stopped, recalibrated. “You’re going to be okay. She’s going to be okay. I need you to let me take care of you right now.”
You looked at him… at the careful set of his jaw, the steadiness he was working so hard to hold and simply nodded. The baby would be okay.
The labs came back an hour later and confirmed it. Preeclampsia. Dr. Al-Hashimi delivered the news herself, sitting across from both of you with the quiet authority of someone who understood that the hardest patients to treat were the ones who already understood exactly what you were telling them.
Modified bed rest. Twice-weekly monitoring. Blood pressure medication starting today. Delivery no later than thirty-seven weeks, possibly earlier depending on how the next few weeks went.
You asked the right questions. You used the right vocabulary. You nodded at the right moments. And then Dr. Al-Hashimi left the room and Jack closed the curtain and you put your face in your hands crying silently.
“Hey.” He was beside you instantly.
“I know it’s manageable,” you said, voice muffled. “I know we caught it early. I know the outcomes are good when it’s monitored properly. I know all of that.”
“But?”
You lifted your head. “I’m so tired of being scared, Jack.” Your voice cracked on the last word, the first real crack since the morning, and once it started you couldn’t quite close it back up. “I just wanted one stretch — just one — where I could be pregnant and happy like other women without waiting for something to go wrong.”
Jack didn’t say anything for a moment. He just moved closer and pulled you carefully against him, one hand cradling the back of your head, the other resting over your stomach.
“I know,” he said into your hair. “I know, baby. I’m sorry.”
You stayed like that while the sounds of the hospital floor continued just beyond the curtain. The usual ER carried on as if the world inside this room wasn’t holding its breath.
“She’s okay,” he said quietly. “Heart rate is perfect. You caught the signs early because you’re brilliant and stubborn and you know your own body even though you didn’t want to admit it at first. We are ahead of this.”
You exhaled slowly against his shoulder.
“You have to actually rest,” he continued. “Which I recognize is going to be the hardest part of this for you, sweetheart.”
You made a sound that was almost a laugh. “I have residents who need—”
“Covered.”
“And my shift isn’t over and my patients—”
“Covered.”
“Jack—”
“Covered.” He pulled back just enough to look at you, and there was something in his eyes that was both exhausted and immovable. “You and her. That’s the only case either of us is managing right now. Understood?”
You held his gaze for a long moment. You loved this man so goddamn much.
“Understood,” you said quietly.
He pressed his lips to your forehead and kept them there, and you felt the slight unsteadiness in it. The version of him that existed underneath the calm, the one that had been absolutely terrified since Dana paged him forty minutes ago.
“I’ve got you,” he murmured against your skin. “Both of you. I’ve got you.”
And you wholeheartedly knew he did.
°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･
The hardest part wasn’t the medications or the monitoring appointments or even the enforced stillness of modified bed rest. The hardest part was the nights.
During the day there were things to do like online shopping, watching TV, reading books you’d been meaning to finish for two years, video calls with Trinity and the rest of our group that somehow always ran an hour long. Jack worked his shifts switching between days and nights and came home and sat with you and pretended he hadn’t been checking his phone every twenty minutes in case you called.
But at night, when the apartment was quiet and Jack was working or asleep beside you with one hand resting on your stomach even in sleep, the thoughts came. The ones you couldn’t logic your way out of. You’d lie there cataloguing every sensation… every twinge, every shift, every small movement from her and feel the fear from when you lost your first pregnancy.
You sit quietly in the corner of the room or lean on the bed frame, trying to remind yourself that you knew better than most people that some things couldn’t be controlled no matter how closely you watched for them.
On the fourth night, Jack woke up and found you staring at the ceiling.
He didn’t ask what was wrong. He just moved closer, tucked you against his side, and put his hand back where it had been.
“Still here,” he said. He meant all of it. Her. Him. The two of you, doing this together. You covered his hand with yours.
“Still here,” you replied back.
And somewhere between one breath and the next, you finally fell asleep.
—
I have another angsty chapter coming soon. I apologize in advance. Thanks for reading!! <3
let me known if you want to be added to the taglist: @lacy1986 @sparrowespresso @staygoldsquatchling02 @thefemininemystique
