snippet of an emery walsh char. study/santwalsh hookup fic (with past garwalsh + garsantos duhhh) :)
Emery wants.
She's wanted a lot of things in her life— gotten maybe half of those, lost the others— but she's nothing if not dedicated. If Emery Walsh wants, she'll try her damn best to take, get, steal, whatever it takes.
The week before had her just wanting a break for once in her career, something she had barely even allowed herself when her mother had passed and she was flying home to funeral prep for somebody who barely even knew her and her life was falling apart and she was depressed, and—
Case in point, Emery didn't really allow herself the grace that was giving herself time to fucking decompress.
The month had been awful already. They had had the highest amount of emergency pedes cases Emery had ever been called down for and dealt with in such a short time (only 70% of those kids ended up pulling through, she tries not to dwell on the other 30%— not her department, not her problem), med students were coming in for rotations and fucking up the rhythm of the place, Shamsi was getting on everybody's ass, whether dayshift or not, and that wasn't even counting Emery's personal problems.
The work stuff was easier to manage, to compartmentalize, than organizing her own head. Sterilized tools and sleek cuts and (mostly) textbook anatomy and operations she knew like the back of her hand were like second nature to her. When it came to picking apart her own brain (not with her weapons of choice, not by researchers who would take her tissues and look at the ins and outs of it to help some poor soul in the future) though… She's never been good at it, of figuring out the why's and how's and checking in on her feelings and regulating her emotions.
The whole shtick makes her feel like she's 12 again, some lady with too much blush and a not-quite real/not-quite fake smile, smelling of lemon cleaner and fresh printer paper, pulling her from her class' popcorn reading of Because of Winn-Dixie just to hand her crayons and treat her like a child (or at least younger than she felt at the time), while simultaneously asking her to just point at the word that describes how you feel, there's no judgment here!
She had felt judged the whole time, kind eyes glazing over with a frustration Emery had come to recognize easily, when she shrugged and said dunno. The only thing honesty with these people had ever gotten her was a call home, and parents (technically only one— Jon Abbot would forever be just a step-father, nothing more), doctors, therapists, psychologists watching, monitoring, studying her like a monkey in a zoo, poking and prodding and banging at the glass of her enclosure to see what she would do, when something— when she would finally give.
Their combined efforts were pointless, no matter who recommended who, who said they cared, who was a safe space, who loved her, it was just an endless amount of people who couldn't understand her, didn't want to. Attempting to must've been a Sisyphean task in itself, all leading to the same answers of she'll grow out of it or kids these days, y'know? or try these pills, come back in a month if you aren't back before then (she would be) or, possibly the worst one, she just doesn't try.
What made it the worst was that she had, she had tried. She was honest when everything in her screamed to shut up, tried her best to push down that self-sabotage wanting to creep its way out from the darkest depths of herself. She was cooperative, sat and listened and spoke-when-spoken-to, when all she wanted was to tell everyone to fuck off, tried her best to be her best. Maybe that was her problem, her fatal flaw. Maybe playing along with what everybody had wanted from her, hiding her own self, had fucked everything up. Nobody had understood her, because she never let anybody in, try, whatever.
It kept her safe, with her walls up and guard high, nobody could bring her to face herself, especially the worst parts.
Yolanda had seen it.
Through what must have been a million feet of thick, cold stone, Yolanda Garcia had seen the dark and black and deep and ugly depths of Emery Walsh. Not only seen it, but had embraced it, held it against her chest every night in bed for 5 years, willed it away at a moment's notice with just a kiss, only to bring it back a moment later while begging on her knees, lust in her eyes and pools of hellfire curling in Emery's gut.
Yolanda's ugly matched hers in opposites, though she wasn't afraid like Emery was. If anything, she embraced what a cold-hearted bitch it made her sometimes, used it as her weapon, her tool, her will to manipulate. If Yolanda wanted, she took. They were the same in that aspect (in a way— back then, Yolanda carried all the confidence, helped bring Emery out of her shell, molded her to who she was today).
Yolanda had wanted Emery. So, she took. Took and took and took and took some more (just for good measure) until their thing, their partnership arrangement, their sex, their passion, their love attraction had been drained, dry to the bone. Then she had moved on.
And that was the problem, wasn't it?
Parts of Yolanda's ugly had her running the moment things got too real for her liking, too close to a thing only seen in movies where everybody's happy and nobody's seen a day of despair in their fucking perfect little lives. It was a miracle she put up with them for so long, though the consistent absence of a label and a million redirected what are we's probably helped prolong things.
Parts of Emery's ugly had her holding on too tight, sinking teeth in to the point of drawing blood whenever she felt somebody pulling away, or even just if things weren't going the way she planned. She'd bitten hard towards the end of them, rough and mean and just plain sad and desperate.
Too much drinking just for an excuse to cling and too much sex just to give her a reason to stay the night and too much fighting just for the sake of making up, too much of Emery just deluding herself into thinking this can be fixed.
Yolanda had taken and left, at least having the decency to build Emery's wall back up before she had done so.
Yolanda was Emery's personal problem.
