hello!! lol I’m back 😭 but I have another request! I don’t know if you have done this already but a Jack Abbot x EMT/paramedic reader! It can be either jacks first time seeing EMT reader when she comes in with a patient and Jack is like shocked because he’s never seen her before and tries to flirt with her or whatever take you want to take with it! Another would be same thing but EMT reader is everyone’s favorite EMT person because she always gives them what they need and basically “helps” the ER if that makes sense, and everything she comes in Jack always tries to her! Again or whatever take you want to do!
Thinking about Jack and his fave EMT...
The thing about the Pitt is that it has a rhythm.
Not a gentle one not the kind you settle into easily or carry home without noticing. It's the rhythm of a place that runs on controlled urgency, on the particular cadence of people who have learned to move fast without looking like they're moving fast, who have learned to hold hard things in their hands without dropping them and come back the next day and do it again. You compared it to whatever rhythym Queen were composing when writing Bohemian Rhapsody. It is not a rhythm for everyone.
You had learned it from the outside.
Which was, you had always thought, its own kind of education.
You ran to the Pitt the way you ran to all the hospitals on your route, efficiently, professionally, with the handoff delivered clean and the paperwork tight and the patient transferred in the best possible condition given whatever the last twenty minutes had looked like. You were good at your job. You had always been good at your job. But the Pitt was different from the other stops on your route in a way that had taken you a little while to identify and that you had eventually put down to this: the people there treated you like you were part of it.
Not a visitor. Not a courier. Part of it.
Dana had been the first, because Dana was always the first — she had taken your handoff on your third run to the Pitt, eighteen months ago, listened to your report with the focused attention of someone who respected the information being given to her, and then said, at the end of it, good catch on the BP drop, and gone to work. Two words. But the right two words, said in the right way, by the right person, and something had clicked into place.
After that, the nurses learned your name. Then the residents. Then Robby, who had a way of making everyone feel like they mattered to the floor.
You had a drawer at the nurses' station.
This was Dana's doing. A small drawer, third from the left, which contained a spare pair of gloves in your size, a granola bar, and a phone charger, and which had appeared one day without explanation or ceremony. You had looked at it and then at Dana and she had looked back at you with the expression she wore when she had done something kind and considered the matter closed.
You were not entirely sure anyone argued with Dana Evans and won.
The Jack thing had developed slowly, the way things do when both people involved are very good at not acknowledging them.
You had been aware of him before he was aware of you, which was not how you would have predicted it going. He was not the kind of man who was easy to miss, the particular steadiness of him filling whatever space he was in without him trying. But he had a focused quality about him on the floor that meant his attention went to the work first and everything else second, and for the first several months of your runs to the Pitt you had been, to Jack Abbott, simply part of the procedural background of the ambulance bay.
And then one Monday in August you had come in with a forty-year-old cardiac arrest, done the handoff to Robby, given your report clean and fast, and were turning to go when Jack had said, without looking up from the chart: Good call on the epi timing.
He had still not looked up.
He had nodded, once, and gone back to the chart.
You had walked back to your rig thinking about it for longer than was strictly proportionate, which was the first sign that something was happening that you were not going to be able to manage as easily as you would have liked.
After that, he always came out.
Not always immediately. Sometimes he was mid-case and sent someone else, the way it should work, the way the system was designed, but when he was available, when the floor allowed it, he was at the bay doors when your rig pulled in. You noticed it before you said anything about it. You filed it and let it sit and watched to see if it was real or if you were making something out of nothing.
He met your rigs. He listened to your handoffs with the particular focused attention he gave everything, and occasionally, occasionally, not always, not in a way that could be pointed to easily, he asked you something that wasn't strictly necessary for the clinical handoff. How far out were you when the vitals dropped? or Did she say anything before she went under? or, once, in a way that had no clinical justification whatsoever: You eaten today?
It's a long shift, he had said, with perfect composure.
I had something at the station, you had said.
He had looked at you in a way that suggested he found this answer inadequate and had decided not to pursue it, and gone back inside, and you had stood in the ambulance bay for a moment afterward doing absolutely nothing useful.
You became aware of this gradually, through the accumulation of small evidence — the way Donnie smiled at something above your head whenever you and Jack were in the same vicinity, which was the smile of someone watching something they found entertaining. The way Princess had once said, completely unprompted, he's always like that with you, and then walked away before you could ask what she meant. The way Perlah had handed you a coffee one morning and said from the drawer and then looked very specifically at the middle distance.
Dana, when you had finally looked at her directly and raised an eyebrow, had simply said: He's not very subtle, in the tone of someone delivering a medical opinion.
He's not doing anything, you had said.
No, Dana had agreed. He's not. That's the point.
You had thought about that for a while.
The shift that broke it open was a Thursday.
You had been running since six in the morning and it was now past seven in the evening and the last call had been, well, hard. Not the hardest you'd ever had, because you had a collection of those and you kept them in a specific part of yourself that you didn't open too often, but hard enough. A kid. Eight years old. Bike accident, head injury, the particular helplessness of a case where you do everything right and it still might not be enough and you won't know the outcome because you hand off at the bay and go back to the rig and that's the nature of the job, that's just what the job is.
You had always known that.
You did the handoff to Robby, clean and fast, all the right information in the right order, your voice steady because your voice was always steady at handoff, that was a professional requirement and you met your professional requirements. And then the bay doors closed and you were standing in the ambulance bay in the cooling evening air and your partner was restocking the rig and you were supposed to be helping and instead you were standing very still with your hands at your sides doing absolutely nothing.
You didn't turn around because you were fairly sure if you turned around your face would do something you couldn't take back, and you were in a professional space, and there were standards.
"Hey," you said, to the parking lot.
He came to stand beside you. Not close enough to crowd. Just beside you, in the way he stood beside people when he had assessed that proximity was what was needed and words were secondary.
The evening was doing its thing — the sky going orange and grey over the rooftops, the city carrying on the way it always did.
"The kid," you said, because apparently you were going to say something after all.
"He's in surgery," Jack said. "Neurosurg got there fast. It's, the odds are reasonable."
Reasonable was not good, and you both knew it, and neither of you dressed it up.
"He was eight," you said.
"He had a Spiderman helmet on. It was — the helmet was—" You stopped. Pressed your lips together. "It was cracked. Which means it did its job. Which means it could have been worse. Which I know." You exhaled. "I know all of that."
"Yes," Jack said. "You do."
"Knowing it doesn't always—"
"No," he said. "It doesn't."
You stood there for a moment, the both of you, in the ambulance bay in the cooling evening with the city behind you and the Pitt behind you and the particular weight of a Thursday that had asked a lot sitting between you like something that needed to be acknowledged before it could be set down.
And then Jack did something unexpected.
He didn't say anything. He didn't offer the clinical reframe or the professional perspective or any of the things that were available to him and that would have been — fine, would have been appropriate, would have been enough. Instead he simply turned slightly toward you and put his hand on your back, flat and warm between your shoulder blades, and left it there.
You closed your eyes for a second.
"I'm fine," you said, quietly.
"I know you are," he said. "You're allowed to be fine and still need a minute."
You looked at him then, properly, turning your head to find him already looking at you, and his face was doing the open thing, the real thing, and it was so — it was so there, so completely present and uncomplicated, that something in you that had been very tightly held for the last several months just quietly, completely gave.
"Yeah," he said, like he already knew.
"I think you—" You stopped. Started again. "I think you've been— for a while now you've been—"
"Yes," he said again, in the same even tone, the tone of a man who has decided to stop being managed about something and is finding it surprisingly uncomplicated. "For a while."
"You could have said something."
That was, that was fair, actually. That was entirely fair.
"I run to twelve hospitals," you said, and you weren't entirely sure where you were going with this.
"I'm not here every day."
"This is—" You gestured, slightly. "This is not a simple—"
"No," he agreed. "It's not."
"I'm telling you yes," he said, patiently. "You were getting there and I'm telling you yes. We can figure the rest out."
At this man who had been meeting your rigs for months and asking unnecessary questions and checking whether you'd eaten and putting his hand on your back in an ambulance bay on a Thursday evening, and who had just reduced the entire complicated architecture of whatever this was to yes and we can figure the rest out as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world.
"A while," he said, and the corner of his mouth did its thing, the small tucked-away almost-smile. "Donnie had a timeline."
"I've chosen not to know the details."
You looked at him for one more second, this impossible steady man in the evening light, and felt something that had been complicated become, suddenly and without fanfare, very simple.
His hand was still on your back.
Behind you, the bay doors opened and Donnie Donahue appeared, looked at the two of you, looked at Jack's hand, looked back at the Pitt interior, and said loudly enough to be heard, it happened, before the doors swung shut again.
Jack exhaled through his nose.
"We should probably—" you started.
"Yes," he said. "Probably."
Neither of you moved for another moment.
The city kept going beyond the parking lot, indifferent and alive, and the evening kept doing its orange and grey thing over the rooftops, and somewhere inside the Pitt a small boy with a cracked Spiderman helmet was in surgery with reasonable odds, and out here in the ambulance bay two people who had been not-saying-something for a very long time had finally, quietly, said it.
Your partner appeared around the side of the rig, clocked the situation in approximately half a second, and turned straight back around.
"Take your time!" he called, from somewhere he could no longer be seen.
Jack looked at the space where your partner had been.
"He's going to be insufferable about this," you said.
"Worth it," he said, simply, and his hand was still warm on your back, and the evening was still doing what evenings do, and you decided, without a great deal of further deliberation, that he was right.
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