on july 22 at 11:17 p.m., as yolanda sits in bed reading, her phone rings violently. she grabs the device from her nightstand to dismiss the call, annoyed at being disturbed so late, but then she sees that it’s trinity.
they only ever texted, over the course of their fling.
and trinity hasn’t responded to a single one of her texts since the fourth of july two and a half weeks ago. of which there have been just enough to be embarrassing.
yolanda picks up on the third ring.
“trinity?”
“you answered,” trinity whispers, disbelieving.
“are you okay?”
trinity hesitates. then, she says, unconvincingly, “i’m fine.”
“trinity.”
“you—you said i could call.”
and yolanda did. but she had no idea trinity understood the address. or that she ever actually would.
“i did,” yolanda confirms. she thinks she hears trinity breathe a sigh of relief on the other end.
thinking about trinity knowing yolanda’s dad was in town. thinking about yolanda inviting trinity to meet him. thinking about trinity responding with a laugh and “we’re just keeping it casual” because she’s scared and stupid. thinking about yolanda’s dad asking to change the date of dinner to the fourth of july and yolanda not fighting it because apparently she doesn’t matter to trinity the way trinity does to her. thinking about the whole ensuing mess and yolanda still coming to reassure trinity.
yolanda has somewhat of a severe pineapple allergy. one day, trinity kind of almost kills her by kissing her after eating hawaiian pizza.
after yolanda has recovered, thanks to the epipen she jabs in her thigh while glaring at her girlfriend, the near-death experience isn’t even her biggest concern.
“...you eat pineapple on pizza?”
“what?” trinity smiles shyly. “it’s good.”
“absolutely not. that’s disgusting, t.”
“how would you know? it’s not like you’ve had it.”
“i just do.” yolanda shakes her head. “this might be a dealbreaker.”
“i can cut out pineapple.”
“i don’t care about the pineapple, as long as we’re careful. i do care that the pineapple is on pizza.”
(to be safe and to avoid further argument regarding the validity of pineapple as a pizza topping, trinity cuts out pineapple entirely.)
cw: vomit, canon-typical medical stuff, implied past csa (trinity)
also available on ao3
The detail that Trinity can’t stop focusing on, for whatever reason, is that she is wearing Crocs. Despite the pain tearing its way through her stomach, despite the puke bucket balanced precariously on her lap, despite the feverish chills wracking her body. All Trinity can think about is that she is wearing Crocs. They’re not even her Crocs. They’re Dennis’s. Lightning McQueen Crocs that she had given him for his birthday. He had groaned when he opened them, repeated again that he didn’t even like Cars “that much,” and immediately put them on. The shoes now lived near-permanently next to their front door, slipped on whenever either of them ran out to take out the trash, or get the mail. Once, Trinity had worn them to the smoke shop on the corner and Dennis had given her so much shit for taking them out in public that she had vowed never to wear them again. She lasted 36 hours.
They’re Dennis’s Crocs, and they’re her Crocs, and they’ve become a permanent marker of home. Because if she ever came in the door to find the shoes missing, it meant Dennis would be right back. Trinity thinks if the shoes ever moved away forever, to the farm or even just to a different apartment, she would be lost. She and Dennis don’t have a lot of rules in their home, but the Crocs not leaving feels like a big one.
And now they’re on her feet, while she sits in the passenger seat of Yolanda’s car, and all Trinity can think about is that she’s breaking the rule in a big way. She’s bringing the Crocs to work. She should be stoned to death.
“I’m going to pull into the ambulance bay,” Yolanda says, breaking through Trinity’s panic. She can see the lights of PTMC a few blocks ahead.
“No, don’t,” Trinity grits out as another wave of nausea rushes through her. “Just go to staff parking and we can walk in through chairs.” She pukes then, adding to the bile already swimming in a layer at the bottom of the bucket.
“I don’t think you can walk anywhere,” Yolanda says gently as the light turns green.
“Patient parking then,” Trinity groans. “They have wheelchairs by the door there. I don’t,” she pauses to swallow down another rising wave of nausea. “I don’t want you to have to leave me to move your car from the ambulance bay.”
“Okay,” is all Yolanda says, but she brings a hand to rest on Trinity’s leg anyway.
Entering the ED is faster for Trinity than it will be for probably anyone else who walks through the doors tonight. The security guard waves them through without stopping when he spots Dr. Santos hunched in a wheelchair being pushed in by a frantic and street-clothes-clad Dr. Garcia. Yolanda waves her staff badge at the doors bringing them back to triage, skipping registration entirely. Trinity hears some sounds of confusion and discontent from the waiting patients as they speed past. She doesn’t latch on to any specifics. She’s still thinking about her shoes.
She’s thinking about her shoes because thinking about her shoes is easier than thinking about being a patient. Trinity has not been a patient in any meaningful way for a long time. She has had routine appointments, preventative care, meetings with psychiatrists. She has not sat in a thin gown behind a thin curtain in an emergency department in 14 years, which is one year less than how old she was then. Trinity never lets herself think about then. Has spent years carefully building a neat little box to put it in. A box for the nurse with the kind eyes who had swabbed the inside of her cheek even though Trinity knew there was no way she could collect years of cells. A box for all the pictures that had been taken of her body like the bruises from yesterday represented even a fraction of the bruises she had received in her lifetime. A box for how pissed she had been when her favorite hoodie had been collected in a clear plastic bag. So Trinity looks at the rainbow charm attached to the bright red Croc and does not look at Mateo who ushers them past Lena and right into South 15. Looking at the Crocs is easier than looking at all of these people who know her and looking at the Crocs means they can’t be taken and put in a bag. At least not without her noticing.
“Can you get Dr. Whitaker?” Yolanda asks Mateo when they get in the room, dropping a hand on Trinity’s shoulder when she makes a noise of protest. “And Dr. Al-Hashimi?” she adds as Mateo nods and steps out.
With just Yolanda here, it’s easier for Trinity to look around. To take in the details of the bed, the equipment, the bright lights. Easier to notice the pain in her stomach, roaring angrily from her lower right quadrant. She is taking the path of least resistance, she will do what is easiest. She groans when Yolanda starts to move her from the chair toward the bed.
“It’s okay, baby, we’re just going to get you in a gown, then we can start figuring out what’s going on,” Yolanda says softly and then she is more gentle than Trinity’s maybe ever seen her as she lays her down and starts to pull off her clothes, replacing them with a hospital gown. She pulls her feet away when Yolanda goes to remove her shoes. Might as well keep her shame on full display. At least until Dennis has seen them. Until he can take them home.
Mateo comes back and starts taking her vitals, hooks her up to a few monitors, switches out her disgusting puke bucket for a blue disposable emesis bag. He’s quiet, and efficient, and only tries for a joke once before Yolanda fixes him with a hard stare. Trinity wishes he would try again. Humorless is serious. Humorless is scary. She chooses not to think about how scared Yolanda probably is.
Dennis sees the shoes a minute later, bursting in with Baran right behind him. “What’s going o– are those our Crocs?” He asks immediately, and Trinity could kiss him. She’s cut off from answering him by Baran, whose hand immediately goes to Trinity’s forehead, testing for fever, eyes scanning her entire body, checking for injury, trying to diagnose with sight alone. Trinity watches as her eyes catch on the bag in her hand, the way she’s curled inward on herself, the way her eyes go in and out of focus as she breathes through the pain. No one seems interested in answering Dennis’s very important question as Mateo rattles off her vitals and Yolanda explains the story.
Instead of spending her rare solo day off grocery shopping and catching up on laundry as intended, Trinity had woken late in the morning with a stomach ache. A completely routine, normal stomach ache. “Hot girls have tummy problems,” she texted Baran and Yolanda around noon when they asked how her day was going and sent a selfie from their break room lunch date. Yolanda had sent an eye roll emoji. Baran had offered to Uber her some Zofran and Pedialyte. Trinity had declined both, because she was fine, really. She just needed to sleep it off. By the time Yolanda got to her place after work, she was not fine. The pain in her abdomen had become much more acute, much more focused in a zone that would have raised more alarm bells in Trinity if she hadn’t been so distracted by the puking, which had started about twenty minutes before Yolanda arrived. Yolanda, who was dressed in her usual post-work jeans and t-shirt, who was just supposed to be picking Trinity up for dinner at Baran’s house, had touched Trinity’s face once, found her to be burning up, and declared that they were going to the hospital.
Baran reaches out and tries to palpate Trinity’s abdomen to continue her diagnosis, but when her cool fingers press gently to the right of Trinity’s belly button, Trinity screams. The look of panic that takes over Baran’s face is so complete that even Trinity sees it through the tears that have sprung to her eyes.
“I’ll go get Dr. Abbot,” Mateo says, stepping out. Baran tries to follow him, to stop him, but Dennis puts himself between her and the door.
“You, uh, probably shouldn’t be treating her,” he says awkwardly. It’s the first time he’s really acknowledged Trinity’s relationship with Baran out loud. There was a strict ‘no talking about our bosses’ rule in their apartment. For Dennis, that meant not talking about the things he had seen inside of Robby’s place while he housesat. For Trinity it meant a bit more. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Be able to look your attending in the eye at work without knowing what kind of underwear they probably have on. “None of us should,” he adds when Baran doesn’t step back. “As her… people.”
Trinity throws up again and it’s a good distraction from having people. When she was here 14 years ago she had no one.
The puking brings the attention in the room fully back to her, and she does her best not to shrink under the weight of three worried gazes. Baran finally relents, and comes to stand by the head of Trinity’s bed, hands running soothingly through her hair as Yolanda swaps out her used vomit bag for a fresh one. Trinity does not think about how automatically they do this, how they move in tandem to take care of her. Instead she waves her foot weekly at Dennis and asks him to take the shoes to his locker.
“Azizam,” Baran tries gently, “your shoes are very cool, but I’m pretty sure no one is going to take them.” Trinity just looks at Dennis with pleading eyes and hopes he understands. If he takes them then it’s as good as them being home again. If he takes them then she isn’t here and this isn’t real. She’s not sure he understands fully, but he does slide the shoes off of her feet and step out of the room. Good ol’ Huckleberry.
With the Crocs gone, Trinity doesn’t have anything to look at anymore. She leans her head back against the pillow and tries to look at the faces of the two people left in the room with her, but she winces in pain and Yolanda’s eyebrow twitches and Baran does another full body scan, and so Trinity just closes her eyes instead. Tries to focus on the feeling of their hands in her hair and imagine that they’re home, in Baran’s massive bed, and that she’s not here with a capital S, Something capital H, Happening. For half a second, Trinity wonders if Baran has actual patients she should be getting back to, but then the attending is leaning down and pressing a kiss to her forehead, and Trinity decides she doesn’t care. Baran’s shift was supposed to be over an hour ago, anyway.
Baran’s lips stay on Trinity’s face and when Dr. Abbot enters, he wolf whistles. “Alright, what’s going on?” he asks. So the story is recounted again, and Trinity lets herself drift under her girlfriends’ hands in her hair while Mateo sets her up with an IV and draws her blood for labs. Dr. Abbot gives her a full exam and when he gets to the spot on her stomach that Baran touched earlier, she doesn’t scream. But she must not have been quiet, either, because Abbot finally says what she knows everyone has been thinking. “Well, kid, I’m thinking appendicitis but I want Henderson to hit you with an ultrasound just to be sure.”
“Ultrasound? Shouldn’t she have a CT?” Dennis asks from somewhere near Trinity’s feet. She hadn’t noticed him come back into the room.
“Eh, the line’s a little long tonight and Crus is a wizard,” Abbot says before rattling off an order for pain meds to Mateo. Thank god. Mateo pushes them through her IV and then he and Dr. Abbot are gone.
No one really says anything for the long minutes it takes the drugs to kick in. Trinity keeps her eyes shut to it all, anchoring herself in the feel of Yolanda’s hand in hers and the gentle press of Baran’s fingers against her scalp. Slowly, by small degrees, the pain in her stomach begins to lessen. She finds herself releasing muscles she didn’t know were pulled tight, uncurling a little from around her center a little. Finally, finally, she opens her eyes. The look on Dennis’s face makes her want to shut them again. He looks like a kicked puppy. Or a child watching a puppy get kicked, if Trinity lets herself be imagined as the puppy and not someone to whom Nothing Of Importance is happening. She would prefer to be the latter, but the meds have softened the edges of everything a little and she supposes she’s okay existing somewhere more in the middle.
“So…” she drawls slowly when the silence becomes unbearable. “How’s everybody doing?”
“You wore our Crocs to the hospital?” Dennis blurts out, tension in him snapping. Trinity grins. She knew she could count on him to distract her.
“Jesus Christ,” Yolanda mutters to her left. “They were the only shoes by the door!”
“I tried to get her to go to my room for something different,” Trinity says.
“Yeah, and then you almost vomited all over the welcome mat.”
“Why does it matter?” Baran chimes in. “They’re just shoes.”
Trinity gasps. “They are not just shoes,” she says in mock offense. “I gave them to Huckleberry for his birthday.”
“And they never leave the apartment,” Dennis adds, blushing just a little. He grabs Trinity’s socked foot then, rocking it side to side a little. “They’re in my locker now. I’ll bring ‘em home.”
“Thanks,” she says. The drugs must actually be working now because she doesn’t cringe at the earnestness in his voice. Or hers.
... .--. . . -.. / .. / .- -- / ... .--. . . -..
It is appendicitis. Crus confirms as much when he swings by with ultrasound twenty minutes later, and then Abbot is back to talk about pain management and admitting her and surgical consult. Dennis excuses himself to finish his charting, and Baran leaves for a minute to clock out and change out of her scrubs. And Trinity drifts. Everything is fuzzy, and her head feels like it weighs a million pounds, flopped uselessly against the pillow. There’s cool air sticking to her face. The thin blanket draped over her isn’t warm enough. She wants to sleep. She can’t let her guard down enough. Yolanda’s hand is still in hers but she’s stopped moving and there’s not enough input. It’s like holding a warm rock. Her face is wet. She’s crying a little and she doesn’t know why but eventually Yolanda notices and wipes the tears from her cheeks and then she’s being gently moved to the side of her bed and Yolanda is climbing in with her. Yolanda is warm against her side and when she leans down over Trinity her hair falls from over her shoulder too and the smell of her shampoo drowns out most of the smell of the hospital. The bits that remain are the bits that are familiar. And her breathing is even and her hands are soft as she strokes Trinity’s cheek and things are still fuzzy and Trinity still drifts but she’s less afraid now.
yolanda being in a bad mood bc she’s been going back and forth with her dad and she has enough on her own plate to deal with that she doesn’t have the bandwidth to try to deal with trinity’s bad day too when that’s not what they do. because they’re casual.
it’s not like trinity knows about the shit with her family, just like she doesn’t know exactly why everything with langdon got under trinity’s skin so badly.
and she’s about to have dinner with her dad’s latest girlfriend, another reminder why things should stay casual between her and trinity. because nothing ever lasts anyway, not for her family. why bother investing her time when that will just hurt more in the end? when she can just leave it here before they cross some invisible line in the sand by holding hands as fireworks paint the sky above them? before trinity realizes that yolanda isn’t relationship material?
when she says it’s casual and trinity doesn’t argue, it’s for the best. really.
do you remember anything about the whitaker/santos scene that was apparently cut from the finale?
Yes actually, I just didn't transcribe it! Apologies for the paraphrasing but:
Whitaker and Santos are charting / Garcia comes up to them dressed in nice/normal clothes and says that she's having dinner with her dad and his latest girlfriend (the plans that she told Santos she already had). She leaves and then Whitaker asks Santos is she has a scalpel in her pocket and Santos acts like she doesn't know what he means (and also makes a joke about "Or are you just happy to see me"). He says something along the lines of "you pick up things about people when you live together" then he makes a joke about a bathmat incident (?) which was embarrassing for him or something. Then he tells her that he can stay with her tonight if she needs him to. She basically brushes him off again in her usual way and he leaves it at that (from what I remember).
Trinity and Dennis get a cat their first Christmas together. This cat is stupid as shit.
"Your dumb ass cat is chasing nothing again."
"Why is it that when she's weird, she's my cat, but when she's an angel, she's yours?"
"Everything I touch is blessed, Huckleberry, keep up."
The cat falls off the couch one night because she rolled over and overestimated how much room she had. Falls with a thud, and Dennis is distraught.
"Is she ok?! Oh my god, she's still so small-"
and while he's fretting, Trinity's being theater-kid dramatic in the back like, "but when I fell you didn't care! Not even the kid can save this marriage :(".
The cat's name is Lunch because Trinity thinks it's comedy gold to say "I'm gonna go get lunch" and come back with the stupid cat.
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