xczie

“No, you fucking don’t!” JJ called. He had one hand around a beer and the other tucked beneath the chin of a brunette she vaguely recognised from the Wreck. “You drowned in a pool when you were six!”

“I didn’t drown!”

“You stopped breathing!”

“For, like, a second.”

JJ huffed, his arm thrown wide. “That’s drownin’!”

The brunette laughed against his shoulder. JJ looked pleased with himself, which meant any remaining concern had already been displaced by the possibility of getting laid. He pointed two fingers at his own eyes, then at her in an attempt to suggest continued surveillance, though he was walking backward toward the dunes while doing it.

She gave him the finger and turned toward the water again.

John B had disappeared at least twenty minutes ago with a girl wearing his bandana around her wrist. Pope had left before ten because school was technically tomorrow and Pope remained the only person in their social circle troubled by concepts such as attendance. Kiara was still arguing about turtles and treated the fact that nobody had asked her to stop as proof of widespread support.

Nobody needed her for anything. It was nice. The sand became firmer beneath her feet as she moved away from the fire, cool and damp where the tide had packed it flat. 

Music softened behind her, the bass turning into a distant pulse that seemed to travel through the ground rather than the air. Moonlight broke across the water in badly joined pieces. Every incoming wave gathered silver along its edge before flattening itself over the shore.

Her shoes were gone. She had abandoned them near the fire after someone spilled beer over one, and the hem of her shorts had picked up enough sand to scrape lightly against her thighs. A cigarette sat unlit between two fingers because she had lost the lighter and hadn’t asked anybody for another.

The first wash of water curled over her toes. Cold enough to wake a small section of her brain. She stopped there, swaying faintly while the sand softened beneath her feet. The ocean pulled backward, carrying the ground out from under her in a thin, sucking layer. She stepped after it without deciding to. One foot, then the other, water reaching her ankles as the next wave folded in.

Someone caught her hard by the elbow and hauled her backward. She stumbled, twisting immediately with her free hand already raised to shove JJ in the chest. “Get the fuck off–”

It wasn’t JJ.

Rafe stood behind her with his hand still wrapped around her arm, face half shadowed beneath the night. A dark polo sat open at the throat, sleeves fitted around his upper arms, the whole thing annoyingly clean for somebody standing barefoot on a beach where at least four people had already vomited.

There was nothing harmless about him. Particularly when his eyes moved once over her face and sharpened.

“Oh,” she said, every trace of surprise collapsing into disappointment. “You.”

His grip tightened when another wave reached for her feet. “You’re gonna fuckin’ drown.”

She looked down at the water, which had barely reached her ankles. “Devastating. Send flowers.”

“I’m serious.”

“Yeah, I know. That’s what makes you annoying.” She pulled her arm free. 

Rafe let her, though only after his thumb dragged once across the inside of her elbow, the brief pressure catching in her body with the same stupid familiarity as his mouth.

They had been sleeping together for several weeks, though not frequently enough to qualify as routine and not deliberately enough to suggest either of them had made a decision.

It had started at Barry’s. Most bad things did. She had been sitting in one of the plastic chairs behind the trailer, sharing a blunt with Barry beside a fire built from damp timber and an old dining chair, when Rafe arrived with too much cash and the particular restless energy that meant he’d been thinking about cocaine for hours before getting there. 

Barry had taken one look between them, laughed for reasons he refused to explain and left to make a drop. Rafe had stayed. They had argued about the blunt. Then about whether she was old enough to know what she was buying. Then about his truck, because he had told her to stop leaning against it and she had climbed into the tray out of principle.

Twenty minutes later, he had her pressed against the back seat with her shorts around one ankle and his hand over her mouth.

It had felt good. That remained the entire justification.

Afterward, they kept finding themselves in the same places. Barry’s yard. The parking lot behind a closed bait shop. Once in a downstairs bathroom at a Figure Eight party after she climbed through a window and discovered Rafe already inside cutting a line over the sink.

Nobody made plans. Plans implied anticipation. Sometimes they saw each other and fought. Sometimes they saw each other and fucked. Occasionally, they achieved both in the same ten-minute period.

Now Rafe glanced toward the party, then back at her. “Where’s your brother?”

“Why?” She tucked the dead cigarette behind her ear. “You looking to hit him with a golf club again?”

“He hit me first.”

She gestured loosely toward the dunes. “He’s with some girl.”

Rafe’s mouth tightened. “And he just left you down here?”

Her eyes narrowed. “I’m not six.”

“You’re fucked up. You can barely stand.”

“I’m standing,” she muttered, swaying slightly. 

“You almost walked into the ocean.”

“I was looking at it.”

He tilted his head. “From inside it?”

She gave him a bright, ugly smile. “You know, this concern thing is really working for you. Almost makes people forget you’re a fucking cokehead with daddy issues.”

Rafe’s jaw shifted sideways. His nostrils flared once, and something behind his eyes clicked into a colder position. “Careful.”

“Oh, scary.” She widened her eyes, pressing one hand dramatically to her chest. “Big bad Kook might call his father.”

His head tipped. “You think you’re funny?”

“Sometimes.” She looked him over slowly, letting her gaze drag down the clean polo and expensive shorts before returning to his face. “Mostly when I’m standing beside somebody who dresses like their mother still shops for them.”

Rafe laughed once through his nose, though there was no humour in it. “Least my mother could afford clothes.”

The familiar little blade slipped neatly between her ribs, sharp because it had been sharpened by years of people who knew exactly where Pogues kept their softest parts.

Her mouth curved anyway. “Yeah? Shame she couldn’t afford a personality.”

His eyes flashed. “You wanna keep goin’?”

“Not particularly.” She dragged the side of her foot through the wash of water retreating around her ankles, carving a crooked line through the wet sand before looking back up at him. “You’re the one who grabbed me.”

“Because you’re fucked up.”

He said it flatly, like he was identifying a mechanical problem rather than insulting her, but his hand remained half lifted between them as though some part of him still expected to catch her again.

The fire behind him threw brief orange edges along one side of his face and left the other in shadow, sharpening the line of his jaw into something that made her want to either bite him or throw a drink at his head. Possibly both.

She laughed without humour and folded her arms, mostly to stop herself from swaying where he could see it. “So are you. Difference is, nobody asks why your pupils look like dinner plates because you’ve got a nice last name.”

Rafe’s mouth tightened. His tongue pressed once against the inside of his cheek while his eyes travelled over her face, slow enough to make the examination feel deliberate. “I’m not high.”

“No?” She leaned forward slightly, squinting into his eyes with theatrical concentration. The movement made the beach tilt pleasantly beneath her feet, so she widened her stance before he could notice. “Could’ve fooled me. You’ve got that whole twitchy, deeply unwell thing going on.”

“Maybe I’m twitchy because I’m standin’ here arguing with you.”

“Aw.” She pressed one hand to her chest, fingers spread over the thin fabric of her top. “And here I thought it was chemical.”

His gaze dropped briefly to the movement before snapping back to her face. “You always this fuckin’ annoying when you’re wasted?”

“Only around Kooks.” Her smile sharpened. “Something about boat shoes makes me hostile.”

Rafe looked toward the water again, then moved in front of her when she started drifting sideways along the shore. He didn’t touch her this time. He simply placed himself there, broad enough to block the route back toward the waves.

“You need to go sit down.”

He said it without raising his voice, which somehow made it worse. That low, flat certainty he sometimes used when he had already decided the conversation was over and everybody else simply hadn’t caught up yet.

She stared at him for a second, then laughed, the sound dropping out of her low and disbelieving. “You don’t tell me what to do.”

“I just did.”

His eyes didn’t leave hers. He stood with his weight settled evenly through both feet, shoulders loose, one hand hanging at his side while the other flexed once near his thigh. Casual, if someone didn’t know him. Casual, if someone couldn’t see how carefully he was holding himself still.

She could.

“And I ignored you.” She tilted her head, mouth pulling into a sharp little smile. “Seems like a pretty unsuccessful order.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Noticed that.”

“Then we’re both learning.”

Rafe’s jaw moved. “You think this is funny?”

“I think you standing here trying to supervise me is funny.” She glanced past him toward the fire, deliberately dismissive, though the movement made the lights smear briefly at the edges. “Don’t you have some Kook girl to go bother? One with a trust fund and enough self-esteem to mistake this for flirting?”

His eyes narrowed. “You can’t even walk straight.”

“I’m walking fine.”

“You’re swaying.”

“The ground’s uneven.”

For half a second, neither of them spoke. The water slid cold around her feet and pulled back again, leaving a thin shine over the sand. Rafe looked down at her wet feet, then at the cigarette tucked uselessly behind her ear, then finally back to her face.

“You’re drunk,” he said.

She gave him a slow once-over. “And you’re ugly. We all have burdens.”

His mouth twitched, but not enough to become a smile. “Go sit by the fire.”

“No.”

“Maybank.”

“Cameron.”

“I’m not fuckin’ around.”

“Congratulations. Neither am I.”

Something in his expression hardened at that. He stepped closer. He closed the distance at a pace that made the intention unmistakable, one foot sinking into the wet sand before the other followed, until the space between them narrowed to almost nothing.

The fire disappeared behind the width of his shoulders. Up close, he seemed to take up more room than he had any right to, chest broad beneath the dark polo, chin tipped slightly down as he looked at her. He didn’t touch her. He didn’t need to. The point was that he could.

She lifted her chin before her body could do anything embarrassing. “What?”

Rafe looked down at her, eyes cold and steady. “You gonna keep runnin’ your mouth?”

“Probably.” Her voice came out lighter than the tightness gathering under her ribs. “You gonna keep looming like some overgrown country-club bouncer?”

“I’m trying to stop you doing something stupid.”

“That must be exhausting for you.” She smiled up at him, all teeth. “Considering your personal history.”

His nostrils flared. “You don’t know shit about me.”

“I know plenty.” She let her gaze drop to his chest and back up again, making the gesture insolent enough to disguise the way her pulse had started beating too hard in her throat. “I know you think getting in somebody’s face counts as winning.”

Rafe moved another half step closer, and her heel slid in the wet sand. He saw it. His eyes dipped once, then returned to hers, and the faint shift in his mouth said he thought she had finally understood the situation.

That was the mistake.

“Sit down,” he said again, quieter now. “Before you fall down.”

She should have stepped back. Instead, every muscle in her body drew tight beneath her skin.

It was probably meant to intimidate her. Rafe did that without thinking sometimes, used his body like other people used volume. Shoulders forward. Chin lowered. Filling whatever space had existed between them until the air became crowded with him.

Usually, she liked it. In the back seat of his truck, in dark rooms where the argument had already changed shape, his size became something hot and useful. A hand around her jaw. His chest pressing her into a wall. The weight of him holding her exactly where he wanted her while she told him she hated him and opened her legs anyway.

Tonight something misfired. The alcohol and pills softened the beach at the edges, but his movement arrived horribly clear. One second he was several feet away. The next he was close enough to blot out part of the fire behind him, one arm shifting as he reached toward her.

A large man entering her space had meant something long before it meant Rafe. Her body made the decision without consulting the rest of her, and she swung. Her fist caught him clean on the nose.

The impact travelled backward through her knuckles with a thick, ugly jolt. Rafe’s head snapped back, shoulders twisting as he staggered half a step into the wet sand.

For one suspended second there was only the water moving around their ankles and the strange silence that followed violence before sound remembered how to return.

Then blood spilled beneath his nose. It gathered quickly along the edge of one nostril, ran over his upper lip and reached his mouth before he lifted a hand. Rafe stared at the red streak across his fingers.

“Jesus fuck,” he breathed.

“Well, don’t fucking come at me!” she yelled.

His head lifted.

“I told you to leave me alone, and you keep–” Her voice caught strangely, too high at the edge, which only made her angrier. “You don’t get to fucking corner me because you think you own the whole goddamn island.”

Rafe wiped his nose again. More blood came away. He pressed his tongue briefly to his lip, tasting it, eyes fixed on her with an expression she couldn’t read through the dark and the chemicals running interference inside her skull.

“Fuck,” he muttered. “You broke my nose?”

“I hope so.”

It probably wasn’t broken. The line still looked straight, though blood had reached his chin now in one narrow trail. He should have been furious. Rafe Cameron treated far smaller offences like declarations of war. A spilled drink. A wrong look. JJ existing within fifty feet of him.

She waited for it. Her fingers had curled around the fist she used to hit him. The hand had begun throbbing in deep, regular pulses, each heartbeat travelling through the knuckles and into her wrist. She tried to hold it still against her stomach, but it trembled anyway.

Rafe’s eyes dropped.

She tucked them closer to her body. “What?”

He looked at her face again. Whatever had been building across his expression stopped. His anger rearranged itself, shifting behind his eyes until the dangerous part no longer seemed directed at her.

He lifted his bloody hand and pointed vaguely at the sand beside her. “Don’t– don’t fuckin’ move.”

She blinked. “What?”

“Stay there.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Rafe turned before she could say anything else and started back toward the party.

She watched him go, broad shoulders cutting through the darkness until the bonfire began swallowing him into the crowd. For one stupid second, she expected him to return with Topper and Kelce.

iMaybe a group of Kooks eager to turn the whole thing into something bigger. Rafe had never required much encouragement, and she had just punched him in the face.

She could leave. The thought reached her legs, but her knees felt strangely loose. She took one step and the pain in her hand flared bright enough to stop her.

“Fuck,” she whispered. 

She held it toward the moon. Her knuckles were already swelling, skin stretched tight and shiny across the first two. A small split had opened over the middle one where it must have caught his teeth or the hard ridge of his nose.

“Fuuuuck. Ouch.” The words came out embarrassingly small.

She pressed the hand against her shirt and closed her eyes. Behind the lids, the beach changed shape, pieces arriving without permission.

The scrape of a chair across the floor. JJ’s shoulder hitting the wall. Luke’s boots dragging sand through the kitchen. The little warning movement men made before a hand became something else.

Her stomach pulled tight. She opened her eyes immediately and stared at the water until it became water again. Black, restless, dragging foam over her toes. The fire behind her. Music. Somebody cheering because another person had fallen over. Nothing happening. JJ was somewhere in the dunes letting a girl put her hand down his shorts.

Her eyes burned anyway. She blinked hard, furious with them. The pills had made her stupid. Alcohol made people cry about television commercials and lost shoes. It didn’t mean anything.

A shadow moved down the beach. She stiffened before recognising Rafe’s walk, loose through the shoulders and slightly uneven where the wet sand gave beneath his feet. He had wiped most of the blood from his face. A dark smear remained above his lip, and one nostril had begun swelling faintly.

Something silver glinted in his hand. She squinted at it. “What’s that?”

Rafe stopped in front of her and held out a beer can. Condensation ran over the aluminium and down across his fingers. “For your hand.”

She stared at him, then at the can. Condensation had already gathered thickly across the aluminium, beading over his fingers and slipping between his knuckles in cold little tracks. Of all the things she had expected him to come back with, a beer had not made the list.

“Are you serious?”

His gaze dropped pointedly toward the hand she had tucked against her stomach. “Looks fucked.”

The swelling had climbed quickly, skin stretching pink and tight over the first two knuckles, and she curled her fingers inward as though hiding it now might somehow undo the fact that he had noticed.

“Your face looks fucked.”

“Yeah, whose fault’s that?”

“You were asking for it.”

Rafe sucked lightly at the inside of his cheek, the movement making him wince when it pulled at his nose. The reaction was small, little more than a brief tightening around his eyes, but she caught it anyway and felt an unhelpful spark of satisfaction move through her. 

His nose was still bleeding faintly, one thin red line drying toward the corner of his mouth. He looked irritated, slightly stunned and offensively good for somebody she had hit less than five minutes ago.

He pushed the beer toward her again. “Take it.”

She scoffed and smacked at the can with her good hand. It was a stupid movement, immediate and childish, performed before the quieter part of her could point out that he had walked all the way back to the fire with blood running down his face to get it for her.

Rafe’s fingers tightened before it could fall, catching the can against his palm. Cold water sprayed lightly across both of them, darkening a few spots over the front of his polo and landing in sharp droplets across her bare arm.

His eyes narrowed. “The fuck is wrong with you?”

The question came out with genuine offence, as though she had violated some universally accepted rule of first aid rather than rejected a warm gesture from the last person on the island she wanted one from.

“Plenty.”

“Yeah. Got that.”

His answer was so immediate that her mouth almost twitched. Almost. She bit the inside of her cheek instead and looked away toward the water, where the tide kept sliding in and out without requiring anything from anybody.

He held the can out again. This time his arm remained extended between them, elbow locked with the stubborn patience of somebody prepared to stand there all night rather than admit he had brought the wrong thing. She glared at it. Then at him. Then at the blood drying near his mouth.

Rafe raised his brows impatiently. “C’mon.”

“I don’t need–”

“It’s a beer, Maybank. Not a kidney.”

Her mouth tightened. Rafe was easier when he was being awful. Easier when he was laughing at the Chateau or calling her a Pogue like the word came with a smell. She knew how to meet cruelty. Cruelty had rules.

This sat in his hand cold and uncomplicated, leaving her nowhere useful to put the anger still moving under her skin.

“Put it on your hand.”

“I know how ice works.”

She said it sharply, lifting her chin as though he had accused her of never encountering refrigeration. Rafe looked down at the can, then back at her, his expression flattening with exhausted disbelief.

“S’not ice.”

“Then why’d you bring it?”

“Because there’s no fuckin’ freezer.” He shoved the can nearer. “Take it.”

The can nearly touched her chest this time. She looked at his hand around it, damp fingers curled against the silver, the Cameron ring catching a thin slice of moonlight. His patience had clearly reached its end, but he still hadn’t dropped the beer or walked away.

She snatched it from him. The cold bit instantly into her palm and sent a bright ache through the swollen knuckles before beginning to dull it. She hissed and pressed the can against the back of her hand, refusing to give him the satisfaction of looking relieved.

They stood there without speaking. The party carried on behind them with the total indifference of a party that had not noticed anything important happen. Firelight climbed and collapsed over the dunes. Kiara’s voice rose briefly above the music – “No, because they literally can’t digest plastic” – before being swallowed again by somebody shouting for another song.

Rafe pinched one nostril shut and breathed carefully through the other. “Think it’s broken?”

She glanced at him. “How would I know?”

“You hit it.”

“That doesn’t make me a doctor.”

“Could’ve fooled me. Seemed real fuckin’ confident.”

She looked back at the water, but a small laugh moved once through her nose before she could stop it. “It’s still straight.”

“Was it straight before?”

“Debatable,” she mumbled. 

Rafe’s head turned slowly.

She pressed the beer harder to her hand to hide the beginning of a smile. “Little crooked.”

“Fuck you.”

“You keep saying that.”

His mouth shifted at one corner before he remembered he was bleeding and stopped. “Yeah, well.”

The silence returned, easier this time.

Her pulse had slowed. The shaking in her fingers faded beneath the cold can, leaving only the heavy ache of impact and the unpleasant knowledge that she had probably done more damage to herself than to him. Rafe remained beside her without trying to touch her again. That might have been the strangest part.

Most people asked questions when silence became visible. JJ asked them loudly. John B pretended not to ask while hovering in doorways. Kiara watched with her whole face until lying became exhausting. Rafe looked at the ocean.

Eventually, she cleared her throat. “Sorry for…” She moved the can slightly against her knuckles. “Punching you in the nose.”

Rafe shrugged one shoulder. “Good punch.”

She glanced at him. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

The answer was so automatic that she almost laughed again. Instead, she nodded once with the solemnity of somebody accepting an award.

Rafe wiped carefully beneath his nose with the heel of his hand. No fresh blood appeared. “Where’d you learn to hit like that?”

Her body tightened before her face could. She stared down at the can. The label had begun peeling slightly beneath her damp fingers. “Don’t ask.”

Rafe’s expression didn’t soften into anything unbearable, and he didn’t start speaking in the gentle voice people used when they wanted pain explained neatly enough to feel useful.

His eyes moved once across her face, then toward the hand curled around the beer. Something passed through them – recognition, maybe, though she had no idea what Rafe Cameron could possibly recognise in a thing like that.

He nodded. “Okay.”

That was all. The quiet afterward settled over her shoulders without weight. She breathed out slowly and watched it disappear into the wind.

“Thanks for the beer,” she said after a while.

He huffed once and looked back toward the party. “Maybe go find your brother, yeah?”

She followed his gaze. JJ was nowhere visible near the fire, which meant he had either successfully disappeared into the dunes or fallen asleep beneath something flammable. “Yeah,” she said.

Rafe nodded toward her hand. “Keep that on there.”

“Bossy.”

“Stupid.”

“Kook.”

“Pogue.”

The words lacked enough venom to work properly. They dropped into the sand between them and stayed there, familiar and almost useless. She started back toward the fire, beer pressed flat across her knuckles. After several steps, she looked over her shoulder.

Rafe remained near the water. One hand rested on his hip while the other wiped once more beneath his nose. He was watching her go with an expression that changed the instant he realised she had turned, flattening into irritation as if he had caught her doing something embarrassing.

“What?” he called.

She faced forward again. “Nothing.”

“Go find JJ.”

“Go snort something.”

“Fuck you.”

She lifted the beer over her shoulder in a vague salute and kept walking, the cold can numbing her hand while the bonfire grew larger ahead of her.

to be notified when i post new fics, follow @kooksandpearls-library and turn on notifications! i no longer use a taglist for my fics.

The drawer got stuck when Garrett pulled it open. Inside was a stack held together by a thick, blue rubber band he’d stolen from a broccoli bunch God knows how many lifetimes ago. It was getting tight. The band was cracking, losing its stretch under the weight of ten layers of cardstock.

He didn’t read the old ones. He never did, what was the use anyway? He just lifted the pile, slid the new, crisp envelope onto the bottom of the stack, and snapped the rubber band back into place.

Ten years. A decade. It still didn’t feel real.

Year One

The first card was stupid. It had a cartoon dog holding a cupcake on the front, because Garrett had spent forty five minutes standing in the aisle at CVS convinced he might be sick, and it was the first one his fingers closed over.

His handwriting in that letter was shaky, almost illegible. He’d written I don’t know what I’m doing four different times. The ink was smeared at the bottom where his wrist had dragged across the page before it could dry. He’d left it on the kitchen table for three days, half-expecting a breeze to knock it over, before he finally hid it away in the drawer.

Year Three

By the third year, the shock had worn off, replaced by a dull, annoying ache that stayed somewhere right behind his ribs. He bought a plain, blank card with a watercolor tree on it. You loved painting.

Greg got promoted. 

He lives in Chicago now. I still haven't gone to visit him because you're not here to help me with the scheduling shit. I've been eating a lot of takeout. The place on 4th street closed down. You would’ve hated what replaced it.

I still find myself buying the cereal you liked. I don't even eat it. It just sits in the pantry until the expiration date passes, and then I throw it out and buy another box. It feels like if I stop buying it, I'm admitting you're never coming down the hall to eat it again.

Year Five

The fifth card was bent at one corner before he even got to write in it.

Garrett sat cross legged on the living room floor with the card balanced on his knee. The couch was right there, but he hadn't bothered moving.

I had a dream about you. He stared at the sentence for a long time before continuing.

Nothing big happened. We weren't getting married. Nobody was dying. We were just trying to decide where to eat dinner.

You wanted Mexican. I wanted pizza.

You called me an idiot.

It was probably the most realistic dream I've had about you in years. But when I woke up, I spent ten minutes trying to remember what your laugh sounded like.

I couldn't.

The realization hit so hard I ended up digging through three boxes in the closet looking for old photos. Found the album we spilled coffee on. Found that picture from the lake where you were flipping me off. Found the one where you cut your own bangs and cried for three hours afterward.

Still couldn't remember your laugh.

I think that's the part nobody tells you about. Everybody talks about missing someone. Nobody talks about forgetting them.

I don't want to forget you. Not the important stuff. Not the stupid stuff either.

Especially not the stupid stuff.

Year Seven

Year seven was the first time Garrett almost didn't write a card. He bought one anyway. It sat on the kitchen counter for four days before he finally opened it.

I met someone. Her name is Claire. She's funny. Smarter than me, which isn't exactly difficult. She laughs with her whole body. You probably would've rolled your eyes at me explaining that to you.

Things are good. I think they're good. The problem is that every time something happens, I still think about telling you first.

The guy at work backed his truck into a dumpster last week and my first thought was, wait until she hears this.

Except you didn't. And you won't. Claire asked me what I was smiling about. I told her it was something Greg said.

It wasn't.

It was you.

I still do that sometimes. Carry you around like a secret nobody asked me to keep.

I don't know if that's normal after seven years. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't.

I just know she deserves someone who's completely here. And some days I think I am. Some days I think I'm not. I hope you're not mad at me for trying. I hope you're not mad that I still haven't figured out how to let you go.

Year Ten

Now, the bedroom smelled like rain and old laundry. Garrett sat on the edge of the mattress, the tenth card resting against his thigh. It was a simple black and white photograph of a city skyline at dusk.

He unscrewed the cap of his pen. His hands didn’t shake anymore. His handwriting had actually gotten neater over the years, more controlled.

Ten years is a long time to keep talking to a ghost. Claire and I broke up back in April. No hard feelings, we just ran out of things to say to each other. I think I’m okay with it.

I bought a house. It has a yard. A real one, not like that patch of dirt behind our old place. There's a maple tree in the back that's turning bright orange right now. You would have taken a million photos of it.

I don’t think about your voice as much anymore. I’m sorry about that. Sometimes I try to force myself to remember exactly how you said my name, but it’s like trying to catch smoke. But I still remember the way you used to leave your coffee mugs exactly two inches away from the coaster just to annoy me.

I miss you. But it's a different kind of missing now. It's more bearable.

Garrett didn't lick the envelope. He just tucked the flap inside, neat and clean.

He lifted the stack from the drawer, slid the tenth card into its spot at the very bottom, and let the rubber band snap back into place with a small, sharp thwack.

He shut the drawer. It stuck halfway, so he gave it that familiar, heavy shove until it clicked into place, leaving the room quiet again.

◡̈ ◡̈ ◡̈ ◡̈ ◡̈ ◡̈ ◡̈ ◡̈ ◡̈ ◡̈ ◡̈ ◡̈ ◡̈ ◡̈ ◡̈ ◡̈ ◡̈ ◡̈ ◡̈ ◡̈ ◡̈ ◡̈ ◡̈ ◡̈ ◡̈ ◡̈ ◡̈ ◡̈

Taglist: @sunshinevansh, @parker-barnes-af, @ilocuras24, @hagarsays, @antisocialfiore, @mirandameaniepants, @flannelshirts-and-fingerguns, @ethanthequeefqueen, @wiishies, @readinf, @wonderpals02, @aeyoshinyships, @nisarelle, @cherryangel-coke, @nihoshi17, @kataleya21200103, @logans-sweet-cherry-pie, @mos4s4rus, @kode, @bookluver114, @miadreamerss, @abcxrandomx, @missmaddyline, @flashyourgreeneyesatme, @bisexual-and-intellectual, @kmc1989, @bambi-lia, @ralilda, @badasspizzalover, @queensunshinee, @maryyyswift, @kravitzwhore, @leysol, @littlepippilongstocking, @cultish-corner, @kkkkisworld, @winx333-blog, @heyl0lhey, @luckydaisy0317, @yourbigtoe, @mrsjohnlogan, @wildrosewolf, @hagarsays, @superlegend216, @purplerainx1, @dove2007,

At Malone’s, he puts both hands on her hips and shifts her between himself and the bar because somebody keeps bumping into her from behind.

At the hockey house, if she stretches across him for the remote, he catches her around the middle and pulls her into his lap rather than allowing her to block the television.

She has always responded by rolling her eyes, correcting his grip or informing him that she’s perfectly capable of moving independently.

Lately, her body has begun disagreeing. Garrett’s hand lands on her back, and heat follows the shape of his palm through her shirt. He catches her waist, and her stomach tightens beneath his fingers. He pulls her closer by the chair, the ankle, the hips, and some small, humiliating part of her settles immediately, pleased to have been placed exactly where he wants her.

It’s deeply inconvenient information.

Tonight, they’re spread across the hockey-house living room watching an action movie Logan chose because, according to him, the explosion-to-dialogue ratio is scientifically perfect. Nobody asks which branch of science measures that.

She’s curled into the middle of the couch in a matching pale-pink set she bought because the tank made her waist look nice and the sweatpants sat low and soft across her hips. 

Garrett occupies the corner beside her, broad enough to take up more than his allotted cushion, one arm stretched along the backrest and both socked feet planted on the coffee table despite Tucker having told him twice that people eat there.

Logan has claimed the armchair. Tucker is sitting at the other end of the couch with the expression of a man attempting to enjoy himself despite living among animals.

Onscreen, somebody drives a motorcycle through the window of a moving train.

“That’s not possible,” Tucker says.

Logan gestures toward the television with both hands. “You don’t know that.”

She shifts, trying to tuck her legs beneath herself, but Garrett’s feet are blocking half the space. One of them brushes the side of her thigh. She nudges his ankle away. It returns less than ten seconds later.

“Move your feet, G,” she complains, pushing at his shin with both hands. “You’re taking up the entire couch.”

Garrett does not look away from the screen. “I’m sitting in one seat.”

“Your legs are in another fucking country.”

“They’re long.”

“Your feet are gross.”

That earns her a glance. “They’re in socks.”

“I know what’s underneath.”

Garrett’s mouth twitches. “You’ve thought about what’s underneath?”

She glares at the side of his face, which only makes the twitch deepen. “Your feet, loser.”

“Sure, princess.”

She shoves his ankle harder. Garrett lets it fall sideways for a moment, then deliberately rests his calf over her lap.

Her mouth drops open. “Get off me.”

“Stop moving.”

“You stop moving.”

“I’m watching the movie.”

“You’re touching me with your foot.”

“My condolences.”

She digs her fingers into the sole through his sock. Garrett jerks and nearly kicks the popcorn bowl from Tucker’s hands.

Tucker looks between them with exhausted disgust. “Can you both behave for ninety minutes?”

“She started it,” Garrett says.

“He put his disgusting feet on me.”

“They’re clean!” 

Tucker peers into the bowl and frowns. “We’re out of popcorn.”

“There’s another bag in the pantry,” Garrett tells him, making no effort to move his leg from her lap.

Tucker rises with a sigh that suggests the popcorn is the only dependable relationship in his life. At almost the same moment, Logan pauses the movie and pushes himself out of the armchair. “Bathroom.”

“You don’t need to announce it,” Tucker says on his way toward the kitchen.

“I was explaining why I paused it.”

“You could’ve just gone.”

“What if you thought I’d died?”

“I wouldn’t,” Tucker sighs. 

The two of them disappear in opposite directions, still arguing, and the living room falls abruptly quieter.

She watches the empty doorway for half a second before turning back to Garrett. “Move.”

He looks at her now. “Still complaining?”

“Garrett.”

She reaches for his leg again. Garrett moves first. His hand closes around her jaw, fingers spreading firmly over both cheeks as he turns her face toward him.

The breath stalls in her throat. There’s barely enough time to register his thumb near the corner of her mouth before he kisses her.

Hard at first, enough to push the next complaint back behind her teeth, then slower. Deeper. His mouth settles over hers with the calm certainty of someone who already knows she will let him, his palm warm and broad around her face while his fingers press into the soft skin beneath her cheekbones.

She melts so quickly it would be embarrassing if she were capable of thinking about anything except his tongue sliding against hers.

A small sound slips from her. Garrett catches it in his mouth, his grip tightening just slightly, squeezing her cheeks until her lips part more fully for him.

Heat pours down the front of her body. Her hands find his wrist, holding on while she kisses him back with the same hungry pressure. Garrett’s thumb drags once along her cheek. 

His mouth moves against hers slowly enough that she feels every shift, every warm pull of his lips, every quiet breath taken through his nose because neither of them seems willing to separate properly.

She leans toward him without deciding to. Garrett allows it until her shoulder is pressed against his chest and one knee has slid over his thigh, then he gives her lower lip one final, lingering kiss and pulls back barely an inch.

“Stop complaining, princess.”

Her eyes open slowly. Garrett is close enough that his face remains blurred around the edges, dark curls falling over his forehead, mouth flushed and faintly wet from hers. His hand is still holding her cheeks.

She nods.

The grin begins at one corner of his mouth. He leans in and pecks her lips, soft and almost sweet compared to what he’s just done. “Good girl.”

Something inside her drops. Her stomach tightens at once, thighs pressing together beneath the low waistband of her sweats while her fingers curl harder around his wrist.

She blinks at him. Then nods again.

Garrett’s grin widens with slow, devastating understanding. He kisses her one more time, only a brief press of his mouth to hers, and releases her face just as Tucker’s footsteps approach from the kitchen.

By the time he reappears with a fresh bowl balanced against his stomach, Garrett is facing the television again, expression perfectly neutral.

She’s still staring at his profile.

Tucker stops beside the couch. “Logan’s still peeing?”

She clears her throat. It does nothing. Her voice still emerges softer than usual. “Mhm.”

Tucker nods and moves to sit in the narrow space on her other side.

Before she can shift herself, Garrett reaches down, wraps one hand around both her ankles and yanks. A startled breath leaves her as she slides across the couch, sweatpants dragging over the cushions until her hip bumps against his and both legs land across his lap. 

Garrett hooks his forearm over her shins, securing her there without looking away from the paused movie.

Normally, she would object on principle. She would tell him she had been comfortable, kick at his stomach or demand that he stop treating her like a carry-on bag.

Instead, she bites the inside of her lip and stares determinedly toward the television. Garrett’s hand rests around her ankle. His thumb begins moving absently over the exposed strip of skin between her sweatpants and sock.

Tucker sits down, sets the popcorn in his lap and reaches for the remote. “Why do you look weird?”

“I don’t,” she says too quickly.

Garrett’s thumb strokes her ankle again. She keeps her eyes fixed on the frozen motorcycle hanging impossibly above the train. Beside her, Garrett shifts one corner of his mouth into a smile he probably thinks she cannot see.

Logan returns and the movie starts again. Another building explodes. She hears none of it.

Garrett’s fingers remain closed around her ankle, loose but certain, keeping her legs stretched over his lap exactly where he put them.

Sneaking around is hot. Garrett manhandling her is hotter. And judging by the satisfied little squeeze he gives her ankle when she finally risks glancing sideways, Garrett has already worked out both.

She is so completely fucked.

to be notified when i post new fics, follow @kooksandpearls-library and turn on notifications! i no longer use a taglist for garrett fics.

And at the Pitt, you don’t have room for softness.

Jack Abbot notices everything about you. The way you triage with incredible efficiency. The way you steady shaking hands without making a show of it. The way you don’t flinch when someone yells.

He’s never noticed you squint.

Until today.

It happens mid-shift. A trauma rolls in, fast and loud and chaotic, and you’re at the bedside for nearly an hour straight. The air is dry. You blink too much. Your vision starts to blur at the edges. By the time you step out into the hall, your eyes are burning so badly you can barely keep them open.

You duck into the staff bathroom, hands braced on the sink.

“Not now,” you mutter.

The contacts have shifted and one is definitely torn. You recognize that scratchy, wrong sensation immediately. After washing your hands, you take them out carefully, blinking against the sting. The relief is instant—but so is the realization that hits you a second later.

You don’t have spares.

“Great,” you sigh, staring at your blurry reflection.

For a second, you consider just powering through it—squinting your way through the rest of the shift and pretending the sting in your eyes isn’t driving you insane. But you know better. You won’t last an hour like this, and the last thing you need is to misread a chart or medication label because you were too stubborn to grab your backup.

Which means leaving the safety of the bathroom.

You dry your hands slowly, take one last look at your unfocused reflection, and step back into the hallway. Without your contacts, everything feels slightly off-kilter—the lights too bright, the edges of people and gurneys a little too soft. 

You keep your gaze down as you walk toward the lockers, hoping no one stops you on the way.

When you get to the lockers it is mercifully empty. You crouch in front of your locker, fingers fumbling with the zipper of your bag until you find the hard case tucked into the side pocket. In it, wrapped in an old cleaning cloth, are your glasses.

You hesitate again before unfolding them.

They’re simple, with thin metal frames, a little too big for your face, the kind that make your eyes look wider and a touch more exposed. You slide them on and blink a few times as the world snaps back into sharp focus. The clarity is immediate, almost jarring.

There’s a small mirror on the inside of one of the lockers. You glance at yourself, head tilting slightly as you take in the difference. 

You look… different but not worse. Just less guarded somehow, like a layer you didn’t realize you were wearing has been peeled back.

You exhale slowly, straighten your shoulders, and throw the ruined contacts into a nearby trash bin, slide the glasses on, and step back into the chaos of the floor.

It takes exactly thirty seconds.

“Oh my God,” one of the nurses says dramatically. “You wear glasses?”

A couple of heads snap up from charts. Someone actually leans closer, squinting at you like they’re trying to confirm it’s really you.

Shen swivels in his chair, openly staring. “Wait, hold on. Since when have you been hiding these? This is a betrayal.”

“A betrayal?” You repeat flatly.

“Yes,” he insists. “We work twelve-hour shifts together. I thought we told each other things.”

You roll your eyes. “Can we focus on the patients instead of my face?”

“Sorry,” another nurse chimes in. “You just look… adorable.”

Adorable.

You groan. “If anyone says the word adorable again, I’m transferring departments.”

Ellis smirks at your irritation. “Noted. Adorable is off the table. We’ll workshop alternatives.”

There’s laughter. A few exaggerated double takes. Nothing malicious—just the kind of teasing that happens when something shifts in a place that rarely changes.

You try to brush past them, pretending none of this is getting to you, but the teasing follows like a wave. It isn’t cruel. It’s just new and impossible to ignore. And in a place where everything is routine and muscle memory, new stands out.

You adjust the bridge of your glasses self-consciously, wishing your face didn’t feel like it’s under a spotlight.

And then you feel it.

That shift in the air that has nothing to do with Shen or Ellis or any nurse.

You glance up almost immediately.

Jack is standing at the end of the nurses’ station with a chart half-lowered in his hand. He isn’t laughing or smirking or joining in. He’s just staring, his eyes fixed on you like he’s trying to recalibrate something he thought he understood.

His eyes drag over your face like he’s trying to recalibrate something. Like he’s seeing you for the first time.

“What?” You ask when you get closer, trying to keep your voice steady.

Jack doesn’t answer right away. He blinks, slow and deliberate, as if surfacing from somewhere else. “It’s just…” he trails off quietly. “I—”

His jaw flexes. You’ve seen that look before—usually right before he says something sharp or carefully controlled—but this isn’t sharp. It isn’t controlled, but instead stunned.

“You look…”

Your stomach flips despite yourself. 

“Different?” You offer, a hint of defensiveness creeping in.

His gaze softens, and the shift in it makes your pulse stutter. “Yeah,” he murmurs. “Different.” A small pause stretches between you before he adds, lower, “Good different.”

The hallway noise seems to dim at the edges. Someone wolf-whistles from behind you. “Oh, he likes it.”

You feel heat climb all the way up your neck. “Can we not do this right now?”

But Jack doesn’t break eye contact, and that’s what makes it unbearable. 

Later, when the rush finally ebbs into something manageable, you find a computer at the end of the nurses’ station and start charting. The department hums around you—monitors beeping, phones ringing, Shen arguing with pharmacy over speaker—but it’s background noise now. 

Your glasses have stopped feeling foreign on your face, though you’re still hyper-aware of them every time you glance down at the screen.

You don’t notice Jack approach until the chair beside you scrapes softly against the floor.

He pulls out the chair beside you and sits—not across from you or at the next computer, but right next to you.

“You don’t wear them often,” he says after a moment, voice low enough that it doesn’t carry past the two of you.

You keep your eyes on the screen, pretending your pulse doesn’t immediately spike. “No. Contacts are easier.”

“For who?” He asks mildly.

“For me.” You huff a quiet laugh. “I get less comments about my sight—or lack thereof—this way.”

He hums at that, but he doesn’t look away. You can feel his gaze tracing over your profile, lingering at the bridge of your nose, the way the thin frames rest against your cheeks. It makes your fingers stumble over the keyboard.

“They suit you,” he says finally.

You snort softly, trying to deflect the sudden tightness in your chest. “That’s not what everyone else thinks.”

“I don’t care what everyone else thinks.”

The words land heavier than they should. You glance up at him, and immediately wish you hadn’t. He’s closer than you realized, one arm resting along the back of your chair, his knee angled slightly toward yours.

“I like seeing your eyes like this,” he continues, voice quieter now, steadier. “They look bigger.”

Your heart stumbles. “They’re the same eyes,” you whisper.

“Yeah,” he says, holding your gaze. “But now I get to see them clearly.”

You swallow, suddenly very aware of how close he is, of how easily someone could glance over and notice the way he’s looking at you.

Your glasses slide slightly down your nose when you look back at the screen.

Without breaking eye contact, he reaches up. There’s a split second where his hand hovers, giving you time to pull away if you want to. You don’t. His fingers gently nudge the frames back into place, the touch light and careful.

It’s brief, but it lingers.

“You should wear them more,” he says quietly.

“So the entire department can keep bullying me?” You let out a small, shaky laugh. 

He almost smiles, something warm flickering in his eyes. “Let them,” he replies. “Gives me an excuse to stare.”

“You stare anyway,” you murmur before you can stop yourself, pulse ringing in your ears.

He doesn’t look embarrassed or caught. Just nods once, slow and certain.

“Yeah,” he admits. “I do.”

And the way he says it makes you think maybe the contacts weren’t the only thing that shifted today.

At first you assumed construction or flooding because of the weather, but then smoke curled upward through the rain and your stomach dropped immediately.

Cars sat mangled across three lanes of traffic at impossible angles. One SUV had spun into the median while another sedan looked almost folded around the back of a delivery truck, its front end crushed so badly it barely resembled a vehicle anymore. Hazard lights blinked weakly through the storm while people stumbled across the interstate in shock.

Your body moved before your brain fully caught up.

“Oh my God.”

You were already unbuckling your seatbelt before the car completely stopped.

Adrenaline sliced straight through your exhaustion hard enough to make your hands shake as you reached for the trauma bag in the passenger seat. Rain hit you instantly the second you shoved the door open, cold water soaking through your clothes within seconds while distant screaming echoed somewhere through the storm.

Someone yelled that a driver was trapped.

Another voice screamed for a medic.

A woman near the shoulder sobbed hard enough she could barely breathe, blood running down the side of her forehead while a man beside her stood completely frozen, staring blankly at the wreckage like his brain had stopped processing reality altogether.

You were already running.

“I’m a doctor,” you shouted over the rain. “Move back and give me some room.”

People listened immediately.

The trapped driver looked somewhere in his forties, pinned awkwardly behind the wheel of the crushed sedan. Blood streamed from a scalp laceration down the side of his face while the airbags hung deflated around him. His breathing came too fast beneath the sound of rain hammering against twisted metal, panic beginning to sharpen around the edges of every inhale.

You crouched carefully beside the shattered driver’s side window, ignoring the glass biting through your scrub pants into your knees.

“Hey,” you said, forcing calmness into your voice despite the adrenaline roaring through your chest. “Can you hear me?”

The man blinked slowly toward you, dazed. “Think so.”

“Good. That’s good.” You adjusted the flashlight between your fingers while quickly checking his pupils. “What’s your name?”

“Leon.”

“Okay, Leon. I’m Dr. Y/L/N.” Your voice stayed steady automatically, years of emergency medicine taking over before panic had a chance to settle in. “Don’t move your neck for me, alright?”

A shaky breath of laughter escaped him. “Wasn’t planning on it.”

Despite everything, you smiled a little.

“You’re doing great,” you assured him quietly. “Stay with me.”

And he did.

His eyes kept finding yours every few seconds like you were the only stable thing left in the middle of the chaos.

Your hands moved automatically after that.

Pressure against the head wound. Monitoring responsiveness. Keeping him conscious and talking while you assessed what you could from outside the vehicle. Rainwater mixed with blood beneath your fingers while traffic backed up for what looked like miles behind you, headlights glowing dimly through the storm.

Leon kept looking at you every few seconds like you were the only stable thing left in the middle of the chaos.

“You work at the PTMC?” he asked weakly after spotting the hospital logo embroidered onto your soaked jacket.

“Unfortunately.”

That got a real laugh out of him, brief and pained but enough that relief loosened slightly in your chest.

“You always this calm when you see a car crash?”

You let out a tired breath through your nose. “No. I’m panicking beautifully internally.”

That made him laugh again.

Patients relaxed faster once they laughed. It was something you learned early in residency, fear loosened the second people felt human again instead of helpless.

So you stayed with him.

Even after the paramedics arrived.

Even after they started finishing the extrication, peeling back what remained of the driver’s side door while rain poured endlessly over the wreckage.

You stayed crouched beside him talking him through every step because shock was already creeping in around the edges of his expression, and every time panic threatened to overwhelm him again, his eyes found yours immediately.

“You’re okay,” you kept saying quietly. “Stay with me. You’re okay.”

The interstate blurred around you in streaks of red brake lights and flashing hazards. Rain soaked through your jacket and scrubs completely now, damp fabric clinging uncomfortably to your skin while your hair stuck to the back of your neck. The adrenaline that had carried you through the crash scene was already fading, leaving behind an exhaustion so heavy it felt physical.

An EMT looked up from the stretcher and did a double take.

“Dr. Y/L/N?”

You snapped back into focus automatically.

“Male, approximately forty-two. Restrained driver. Brief LOC reported by witnesses. GCS fifteen currently. Complaining of left-sided rib pain. Possible concussion. Neuro status intact for now, but keep an eye on him.”

The EMT nodded once while adjusting the cervical collar. “Got it.”

They moved quickly after that, securing straps, checking vitals, loading equipment through the rain while Leon tracked every movement with the wide-eyed focus of someone trying very hard not to think too much about what had almost happened.

Your knees ached from kneeling on broken glass. Your hands had started trembling slightly now that nobody urgently needed anything from you anymore.

But you stayed beside him anyway.

Leon caught your wrist weakly just before the paramedics closed the ambulance doors.

“Hey.”

You looked up immediately.

His face looked pale beneath the blood and rainwater, eyes glassy with pain and adrenaline, but there was something steadier there too.

Gratitude maybe.

“Thank you for taking care of me.”

The words landed somewhere deeper than they should have.

You swallowed hard before giving his hand one quick squeeze.

“Yeah,” you said softly. “Of course.”

For a second, you just stood there breathing.

The interstate still smelled like gasoline and smoke. Somewhere farther down the road another paramedic shouted instructions while tow trucks crawled through the rain toward the wreckage. Traffic in the opposite lanes slowed almost to a stop as people stared through fogged windows at what was left of the crash.

“You riding in with us?” one of the EMTs asked.

You glanced once toward your abandoned car still trapped in unmoving traffic nearly half a mile behind the accident scene. The thought of trying to get back to it right now felt impossible.

“Yeah,” you answered tiredly.

The ambulance doors shut behind you a second later, sealing you inside with the sharp smell of antiseptic, wet clothing, and adrenaline.

Leon talked for almost the entire ride to the hospital.

Nervous talking.

The kind trauma patients did when they were scared enough to fill every silence because silence meant thinking too hard about how close they came to dying. You’d seen it hundreds of times before. Some people cried. Some got angry. Some went terrifyingly quiet.

Leon talked.

So you let him.

He rambled about his job, about his daughter’s soccer game this weekend, about how his wife was going to kill him for wrecking the car because they still hadn’t finished paying it off. Every few sentences his voice shook slightly before he forced another joke out anyway.

You stayed beside him the whole ride, monitoring pupils and vitals while keeping him talking just enough to assess mental status without making it obvious you were doing it.

“You always pick up patients on the highway on your day off?” he asked weakly at one point.

You let out a tired breath of laughter. “Only the lucky ones.”

That earned another shaky smile from him.

The ambulance doors burst open, paramedics already rolling the stretcher down the bay entrance while rainwater dripped steadily from the wheels onto the floor.

By the time the ambulance rolled through the bay doors at The Pitt, you were freezing hard enough your teeth almost hurt. Your scrubs were soaked completely through, your shoes squelching against the floor while trauma staff moved around you in organized chaos.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Santos called across the ER the second she spotted you climbing out of the ambulance bay. “Always a pleasure seeing you this early, Iron Woman.”

You groaned immediately.

You earned the nickname after accidentally mistaking a patient for Robert Downey Jr. during a twenty-hour shift.

To be fair, the goatee had been identical.

“Dana,” you called immediately, falling into step beside the stretcher. “What’s open?”

Dana barely looked up from the nurses’ station. “Trauma Two’s clear.”

“Perfect.” You pushed damp hair back from your face before glancing toward the department. “Whitaker, Javadi, you’re with me. Perlah, can you help set up Two?”

Perlah nodded immediately and disappeared ahead of the group while Whitaker grabbed gloves from the wall dispenser on his way past.

“You look cold,” Whitaker informed you conversationally.

“Thank you,” you replied flatly.

Javadi appeared beside the stretcher while all of you pushed through the trauma bay doors together. “What happened?”

“Restrained driver, approximately forty-two,” you answered automatically. “High-speed MVA during the storm. Brief LOC reported by witnesses. GCS fifteen on arrival, complaining of left-sided rib pain and worsening headache. Possible concussion.”

“Vitals stable en route,” one of the paramedics added while helping transfer Leon onto the trauma bed.

Whitaker immediately started attaching monitors while Javadi pulled supplies from cabinets with the frantic efficiency of someone still trying very hard to look calmer than she actually felt.

Then Jack looked up from the computer station.

And somehow, in the middle of the packed emergency department, everything softened slightly around the edges.

You caught the exact moment recognition crossed his face. The exhaustion behind his eyes shifted immediately into concern as his gaze moved slowly over you. Soaked scrubs, blood smeared across your gloves, rainwater dripping steadily from your hair onto the floor beneath you.

Jack crossed the trauma bay almost immediately.

“You okay?” he asked quietly. “What happened? I thought you went home.”

His voice grounded you in a way almost nothing else could anymore.

Maybe it was because he always sounded calm even during chaos. Maybe it was because after years together your body recognized him before your brain consciously caught up. Or maybe it was simply that exhaustion hit harder the second somebody else arrived to help carry it.

“I’m fine,” you answered automatically while stripping off your soaked gloves and replacing them with clean ones. “Probably need a head CT.”

Jack’s expression tightened instantly.

“For you?”

You blinked at him before realizing what you’d said. “What? No. For the patient.”

Behind you, Perlah had already started cutting away Leon’s soaked shirt while Whitaker attached cardiac leads to his chest.

“BP’s holding,” Whitaker called.

“Sinus tach at one-ten,” Javadi added while checking another monitor. “Probably pain and adrenaline.”

“Good,” you answered automatically before stepping back beside the bed.

“Where’s Robby?”

“Overdose in Four,” Dana answered from the doorway.

You nodded once and reached for your penlight again, checking Leon’s pupils carefully while rain continued tapping faintly against the ambulance bay doors behind you.

Santos wandered into Trauma Two looking personally offended. “Why does huckleberry and crash get invited? I can help.”

“You can stand there and look pretty while actual doctors save lives,” you shot back immediately.

Santos gasped dramatically. “Dr. Abbot, your girlfriend is bullying me again.”

“She bullies everybody,” Jack muttered.

But there was no heat behind it.

His eyes lingered on you a second too long.

You knew that look by now.

Jack had spent years in emergency medicine learning how to bury concern beneath sarcasm and exhaustion, but you still caught it every time. He noticed the dark circles under your eyes. The slight tremor beginning in your hands now that the adrenaline was wearing off. The way your shoulders sagged whenever you thought nobody was looking.

“You’re freezing,” he said quietly.

“You are correct. I am freezing.”

Without another word, Jack pulled his hoodie off the back of the nurses’ station chair and draped it carefully around your shoulders before you could protest. It was still warm from him, smelling faintly like coffee, antiseptic, and the cologne he only remembered to wear maybe twice a month.

Something in your chest tightened stupidly at the gesture.

Behind him, Santos gagged theatrically. “Oh my God. Romance in the trauma bay. I’m going to throw up.”

“Go chart something,” Jack said flatly.

Whitaker looked up from the monitor leads. “Actually, I think it's very sweet."

“You’re all miserable,” you informed them while pulling the hoodie tighter around yourself.

“No,” Javadi corrected while checking Leon’s blood pressure. “You two are just aggressively in love in public.”

Jack looked genuinely offended. “Aggressively? I don't get it."

Despite yourself, you laughed softly while stepping back toward Leon’s bedside.

Leon noticed the interaction immediately.

“That your boyfriend?” he asked weakly from the trauma bed.

“Husband to the emergency department,” you corrected while snapping fresh gloves on. “Boyfriend in real life.”

Jack rolled his eyes while typing orders into the computer. “Don’t encourage her, Leon.”

Leon grinned despite the pain. “You guys are disgustingly cute.”

Under the brighter trauma lights, bruising had already started blooming dark purple across his ribs beneath the rain-soaked skin.

“Headache worse?” you asked while checking his pupils again.

“A little.”

“You nauseous?”

“Not yet.”

“Good,” you answered. “Let’s keep it that way.”

Javadi palpated carefully along his left side while Whitaker adjusted the blood pressure cuff.

“There’s something strangely comforting about you people,” Leon admitted weakly after a moment.

“You say that now,” Javadi muttered.

That earned another tired laugh from him before he winced sharply afterward.

“There it is,” you said softly. “Still joking. Good sign, buddy.”

There was something oddly comforting about patients who stayed conversational. After years in emergency medicine, you learned to appreciate moments where humanity still existed between procedures and bloodwork and trauma assessments.

Sometimes those tiny conversations mattered almost as much as the medicine itself.

Jack stepped beside you while reviewing Leon’s vitals, his shoulder brushing yours briefly in the cramped trauma bay. The room smelled faintly of antiseptic, damp fabric, and rainwater now that Leon’s soaked clothing had finally been cut away.

“You should change,” Jack murmured quietly while adjusting one of the monitor leads. “I got this, baby.”

You barely glanced at him, still focused on the chart. “Don’t worry. I’ll survive.”

A tired look crossed his face immediately.

“That’s usually what people say right before passing out.”

You shot him a look over your shoulder, though exhaustion dulled most of the energy behind it. “You’re dramatic.”

“You’ve been awake how long now?”

“Eighteen hours.”

Jack stared at you flatly. “That’s not comforting.”

“You stopped at a major accident scene after an eighteen-hour shift?” Javadi asked incredulously.

You shrugged slightly.

And that alone made Jack’s jaw tighten, because that was exactly the kind of thing you always did.

The adrenaline carrying you through the crash scene had almost completely faded now, leaving behind exhaustion so heavy it felt physical. Your wet clothes clung coldly to your skin beneath Jack’s hoodie while every muscle in your body ached now that the immediate crisis had passed.

Jack exhaled softly through his nose before lowering his voice.

“You don’t always have to run yourself into the ground trying to save everybody.”

The words landed harder than they should have.

You focused instead on adjusting Leon’s blanket over his chest, smoothing the fabric carefully just to give your hands something else to do.

Jack knew you too well by now to push after saying something like that.

That was part of what made loving him dangerous sometimes. He noticed things you worked very hard to hide from everybody else.

He noticed the way your hands trembled after bad trauma calls once the adrenaline wore off. How you skipped meals without realizing it during difficult shifts. How every patient death stayed with you longer than you ever admitted aloud.

Jack had spent years in emergency medicine learning how to compartmentalize just enough to survive it, which somehow only made him better at recognizing when you weren’t doing the same.

His hand brushed briefly against the small of your back as he moved toward the monitors again.

“Don’t worry, Leon,” Jack said easily while checking the cardiac tracing. “You’re in good hands.”

Leon looked toward him before his gaze drifted back to you.

“I figured that out already,” he said softly. “She stopped on the interstate for me.”

You glanced up from the chart, slightly surprised by how steady his voice sounded now despite everything.

“You didn’t have to do all that,” Leon continued quietly.

You shrugged lightly, pushing damp hair away from your face. “Part of the job.”

“Maybe,” he answered softly, still watching you carefully. “But most people would’ve kept driving.”

Something warm and uncomfortable settled low in your chest at that.

Most patients never saw the moments in between all of this. They saw calm voices and steady hands. They saw competence because that was what they needed from you in moments like these.

They never saw the aftermath.

The exhaustion. The panic doctors swallowed in real time just to keep functioning. The way people occasionally locked themselves in supply closets for thirty seconds after bad cases just to breathe before walking back out like nothing happened.

But Leon had seen you kneeling beside twisted metal in freezing rain with blood on your hands while traffic screamed past only feet away.

He’d seen the human part too.

And somehow that felt far more exposing than expected.

Before you could answer, something shifted.

Subtle.

Small enough most people in the room probably would have missed it entirely.

But after years in emergency medicine, your body noticed changes before your brain consciously caught up.

Leon’s breathing changed.

One second it was slow and uneven with postictal exhaustion.

The next it caught strangely in his chest.

His eyes lost focus somewhere over your shoulder while every muscle in his body tightened beneath the blankets all at once.

Your stomach dropped instantly.

“Leon?”

Jack looked up from the monitor station at the exact same moment Leon’s entire body stiffened violently against the mattress.

“He’s seizing!”

Everything exploded into motion.

The seizure hit hard and fast, violent enough that the entire trauma bed rattled beneath him. His back arched sharply while his arms convulsed uncontrollably, knocking equipment sideways as monitors erupted into sharp screaming alarms throughout the room.

“Clock started,” Perlah called immediately.

“Two minutes on the seizure pads,” Whitaker added while grabbing suction.

“Turn him,” you ordered.

You and Javadi moved together automatically, carefully rolling Leon onto his side while his body continued jerking violently beneath your hands. Blood appeared at the corner of his mouth where he’d bitten through his tongue while every breath came in horrible choking gasps between convulsions.

“Airway’s clear,” Javadi said quickly, though her voice still sounded tight with adrenaline.

Across the room Jack was already pulling medication from the crash cart while Dana called CT from the doorway ahead of transport.

Then finally, slowly, the seizure broke.

Leon’s body slumped heavily back against the mattress drenched in sweat while ragged breaths tore unevenly from his chest. The room fell briefly into that strange silence that always followed emergencies, where everybody still moved quickly even though the worst part had passed.

For now.

“Let’s get a CT stat,” Jack said immediately.

You nodded once, trying to ignore the tremor beginning in your hands now that the adrenaline spike was crashing again.

“I’ll stay with him until transport.”

Jack hesitated.

Only briefly, but long enough for you to notice.

Something unreadable crossed his expression while his eyes flicked from Leon back toward you.

Concern maybe.

The same quiet tension he always carried after particularly violent trauma cases.

“You sure?” he asked softly.

You frowned slightly. “Yeah.”

Whitaker glanced briefly between both of you like he noticed something too, but before he could say anything Dana appeared in the doorway again.

“Trauma Three needs help now.”

Jack’s jaw tightened.

His fingers brushed briefly against your wrist before he stepped away toward the hallway, disappearing almost immediately back into the noise and chaos outside the trauma bay.

The room quieted afterward.

Machines beeped steadily while rain tapped faintly against distant ER windows somewhere down the hall. Whitaker and Javadi had already been pulled into another room, leaving you alone beside Leon while he lay motionless in exhausted postictal confusion.

You dimmed the overhead light slightly before adjusting the blanket higher over his chest.

“Hey,” you said gently when you noticed him beginning to stir. “You’re okay. You had a seizure.”

No response.

His eyes stayed fixed upward, unfocused and confused.

Postictal.

You had seen it hundreds of times before. Disorientation. Confusion. Agitation sometimes. Patients waking terrified because their brains had not fully caught up to reality yet.

Your shoulder ached dully now that exhaustion was settling deeper into your body again. You reached absentmindedly for the chart at the foot of the bed, mentally running through differentials and imaging priorities while waiting for CT to call back.

You missed the shift in him by less than a second.

One moment Leon lay motionless against the mattress, the next his eyes sharpened violently.

Not recognition.

Fear.

Pure terrified instinct.

Your stomach dropped.

“Leon—”

He surged upright before you could finish the sentence.

His hand closed around your throat with terrifying force, slamming you backward into the cabinet hard enough to knock the air violently from your lungs. Pain exploded across the back of your skull as your head cracked sharply against metal.

“Leon!”

The sound came out broken and strangled.

But he wasn’t seeing you.

That was the horrifying part.

His eyes looked completely wild now—unfocused, terrified, empty all at once. Pure neurological panic stripped entirely of recognition.

For one terrible second, training overrode fear.

“Leon,” you gasped desperately, grabbing his wrists instinctively instead of striking him. “Listen to me. You’re in the hospital. You’re safe.”

Nothing reached him.

His grip tightened harder around your throat.

Air stopped.

Panic slammed through you instantly now, sharp and animal and overwhelming in a way you almost never allowed yourself to feel. Your vision flickered violently while you clawed uselessly at his hands, trying desperately to drag in even one full breath.

You needed help.

Safe word.

Your mouth opened automatically.

“H—”

Nothing came out except a rasp.

Leon shoved you backward harder, your skull slamming against the cabinet again hard enough that white exploded across your vision.

The hospital safe word.

You just needed to say it.

“Hula—”

The sound collapsed into another strangled gasp as his fingers crushed tighter against your airway.

Your lungs burned.

Tears blurred your vision from pain and lack of oxygen while movement echoed faintly somewhere outside the trauma bay. People were still moving through the ER completely unaware of what was happening behind the curtain.

Your body was weakening fast.

You forced one shredded breath into your lungs and screamed:

“HULA HOOP!”

The entire department reacted instantly.

The trauma bay doors burst open hard enough to slam against the wall while voices shouted over each other.

Hands grabbed Leon, trying to drag him backward while he fought wildly in blind confusion and terror.

But before anyone could fully pull him away, he shoved you violently across the room.

Your shoulder struck the edge of the cabinetry with a horrible crack before the rest of your body collapsed hard onto the tile floor.

Pain tore through your arm instantly, sharp and wrong enough it barely felt real.

You couldn’t breathe.

Couldn’t think.

The room blurred violently while alarms screamed overhead and people shouted your name somewhere nearby.

And through all of it, through the pain and chaos splitting apart around you, your brain found one thing instinctively.

Jack.

You thought about the way he always found you in crowded trauma bays without even trying. The way his hoodie still smelled faintly like coffee and antiseptic around your shoulders. The quiet brush of his hand against your back only minutes earlier.

You wondered irrationally if he was going to blame himself for leaving the room.

That thought hurt almost as badly as the pain itself.

Your eyes slipped closed just as the world dissolved completely into noise.

Jack was halfway through finishing a chart when he realized he had not seen you in several minutes.

He looked up automatically, scanning the department for you out of habit more than anything else. Usually he could spot you immediately no matter how crowded the ER became. You moved quickly when you worked, sharp and focused and impossible to miss once he knew what to look for.

But you were nowhere.

“Hey, Javadi,” he called while signing off medication orders. “Have you seen Dr. Y/L/N?”

Javadi looked up so quickly, like she was a deer caught in headlights. “Uh… no,” she answered quickly. Too quickly. “I haven’t seen her since I left Leon. Sorry.”

Then she disappeared almost immediately toward another patient before he could ask anything else.

He pushed himself upright from the workstation, the familiar ache radiating faintly through his prosthetic. Long shifts always made it worse. The socket rubbed raw after enough hours on his feet, especially during busy trauma nights when he barely sat down.

Normally he ignored it.

Right now he barely felt it at all.

“Dana,” he called, already moving toward the nurses’ station. “Have you seen Y/N?”

Dana barely looked up from the chart she was reviewing. “Pretty sure she’s still with Leon. Why?”

Jack turned the iPad slightly toward her. “They haven’t gone to CT.”

That got her attention.

Her eyes flicked quickly toward the tracking board before settling back on him. “They’re probably backed up upstairs.”

“Maybe.”

But something still felt wrong.

Dana sighed softly. “Jack, she’s a big girl. She can handle herself.”

He knew that.

God, he knew that better than anybody.

You were one of the strongest people he had ever met. Smarter than most attendings twice your age. Calm during trauma activations that made residents freeze completely. You handled combative patients, pediatric codes, catastrophic MVCs, and grieving families with a steadiness that still amazed him after all these years.

But that feeling in his chest would not go away.

Dana pointed down the hallway. “I actually need you in Central Fourteen. Chest pain rule-out and Dr. Garcia wants another set of eyes before she calls cards.”

Jack exhaled through his nose, still staring at the tracking board.

“Right,” he muttered distractedly. “Yeah. Okay.”

He turned reluctantly toward the direction of Central Fourteen, adjusting his pace automatically as the prosthetic clicked softly against tile beneath his scrub pants. Fatigue had settled deep into the joint hours ago, making his gait slightly uneven now that the adrenaline from earlier trauma activations had worn off.

Then he heard it.

“HULA HOOP!”

Everything in his body stopped instantly.

The voice was barely recognizable.

Raw. Ragged. Strangled around obvious pain and panic in a way that made every hair on the back of his neck stand upright immediately. For one horrible second his brain refused to process it properly because it did not make sense. Not your voice. Not like that.

And then recognition hit him all at once.

The hospital safe word.

Trauma Two.

Jack’s heart dropped so violently it almost hurt.

No.

The thought hit him before anything else.

No no no.

Adrenaline detonated through his bloodstream hard enough to make him dizzy.

Then instinct took over completely.

“No,” he breathed aloud, already moving before the word fully left his mouth.

He pivoted so sharply pain shot violently through his prosthetic, the sudden turn grinding pressure through the socket hard enough that under normal circumstances it would have staggered him. But right now he barely felt it beneath the sheer overwhelming panic flooding his system.

Fear swallowed everything else whole.

Not the controlled fear he knew from trauma medicine. Not the clinical kind that sharpened your focus during codes and mass casualty calls.

This was different.

This was personal.

Jack shoved past a stretcher hard enough that the wheels screeched across tile while people all around him started reacting at the exact same time. Nurses turned toward Trauma Two instantly at the sound of the safe word. Dana’s head snapped upward from the nurses’ station. Santos was already running before half the department fully understood what was happening.

But Jack got there first.

The curtain outside Trauma Two jerked violently as shouting erupted from inside the room. Monitors screamed overhead loud enough to echo through the entire department while equipment crashed hard against the floor somewhere beyond the drapes.

“Get him off her!”

The words barely registered through the roaring in Jack’s ears.

His pulse was so loud now it drowned everything else out.

He hit the doorway hard enough that the curtain ripped halfway off the track as he shoved inside.

And then he saw you.

Lying on the floor.

Motionless.

For one horrifying second his brain simply stopped functioning.

You were crumpled unnaturally against the tile beside the cabinets, one arm twisted wrong beneath you while blood streaked across the side of your face from where your head had struck something hard enough to split skin open. Jack noticed everything all at once in the brutal hyperclarity trauma doctors developed after years in emergency medicine.

The bruising already forming around your throat.

The abnormal angle of your shoulder.

The way your chest barely moved.

And somehow that was the part that terrified him most.

You were not moving enough.

Leon was still screaming somewhere nearby while Ahmed and two nurses fought to restrain him against the opposite wall, his face wild with postictal confusion and terror. Somebody was yelling for sedation meds. The entire trauma bay had dissolved into complete chaos.

But Jack barely registered any of it.

Because you were on the floor.

And you were not getting up.

Something inside his chest seemed to cave inward violently.

“Oh, honey.”

Then he said your name, and the sound that came out barely resembled the steady, composed voice Jack used during traumas and codes and every impossible shift the hospital threw at him.

This was different.

There was no clinical calm left in him now.

Only fear.

Pure terrified fear.

He dropped beside you so fast pain tore sharply through his prosthetic as his knee hit tile, but he ignored it instantly. His hands shook hard enough he almost missed your carotid pulse the first time he checked.

Then finally.

There. Weak, but there.

Relief hit so hard it almost made him nauseous.

“Oh my God,” he whispered shakily, one bloodstained hand cradling the side of your face carefully while the other pressed against your neck searching for injuries. “Hey. Hey, stay with me. Come on.”

You did not respond.

Jack’s stomach turned violently.

Training forced itself back online in fragmented pieces despite the panic threatening to choke him alive. Airway. Breathing. Circulation. Neuro. He assessed automatically even while his brain screamed at him that this was you beneath his hands.

Not a patient.

You.

Blood pressure crash from trauma? Concussion? Cervical injury? Shoulder dislocation? Fracture? Internal bleed?

His eyes flicked instantly toward your throat again and rage flooded him so suddenly it nearly stole his breath.

Finger-shaped bruises were already darkening against your skin.

He hurt you.

The realization nearly made Jack physically sick.

“Jack,” Dana’s voice cut sharply through the chaos as she dropped beside him. “We need to move.”

But Jack could barely hear her.

Your eyelashes fluttered faintly for half a second before falling closed again and something inside him broke completely at the sight.

“No no no,” he whispered frantically, brushing damp hair away from your face with shaking fingers. “Stay awake. Baby, stay awake for me.”

His voice cracked hard on the last word.

That terrified him almost as much as the sight of you bleeding on the floor.

Because Jack Abbot did not lose composure.

Not during traumas, not during mass casualties, not while pronouncing deaths.

But right now panic was tearing straight through him so violently he could barely breathe around it.

And for the first time in years, he had absolutely no idea how to separate being a doctor from being the man who loved you.

“What the hell happened?”

Robby’s voice cut sharply through the chaos as he pushed into Trauma Two with Mohan directly behind him, but for half a second, both of them stopped cold.

The room looked catastrophic. Leon was still fighting violently against security near the far wall, his movements frantic and disorganized while Santos shouted for more sedation. Equipment littered the floor around the trauma bay, overturned trays and scattered supplies crunching beneath people’s shoes as alarms screamed overhead loudly enough to make the entire room feel claustrophobic.

And in the middle of all of it, you were lying motionless on the floor with Jack kneeling beside you.

Blood streaked down the side of your face and disappeared beneath the collar of his hoodie still hanging around your shoulders. Bruising had already started darkening visibly around your throat, ugly fingerprints blooming beneath the fluorescent trauma lights, while your left arm rested at an angle that made Mohan’s stomach immediately drop.

“Jesus Christ,” Mohan breathed.

“Security’s got the patient,” Dana snapped, already dropping beside you with Santos. “Probably postictal aggression after the seizure. He went after her.”

Robby moved instantly after that, years of trauma medicine overriding shock the second he reached your side. “Get her on a gurney now. C-spine precautions. Santos, I need vitals. Dana, page CT and tell them we’re coming immediately. Mohan, get me neuro and ortho on standby.”

Everybody moved except Jack.

He stayed frozen beside you on the tile floor, one hand still cradling the side of your face like he physically could not force himself to let go.

“Jack,” Robby said.

No response.

Jack was staring at you with an expression Robby had never seen on him before. Not panic exactly. Worse than panic. Helplessness, maybe, like his brain had short-circuited somewhere between doctor and boyfriend and now could not figure out how to function as either.

“Jack,” Robby repeated more firmly.

That finally seemed to pull him back enough to blink.

“She isn’t breathing right,” he said hoarsely, voice rough enough it barely sounded like him anymore. “He had her by the throat. Her head hit the cabinet, probably. Possible LOC. Shoulder’s definitely dislocated, maybe fractured too.”

The words came out clipped and automatic, pure trauma assessment forced through panic, but his hands were still shaking.

Dana and Santos carefully slid a backboard beneath you while Mohan cut away the remains of the hoodie around your shoulder to assess the injury better. The second the fabric moved, Jack saw the full extent of the bruising spreading across your throat, dark purple already beneath your skin.

“He squeezed hard enough to leave petechiae,” Santos muttered quietly while examining your neck. “Shit.”

Robby’s jaw tightened immediately. “We need airway monitoring. Neck trauma protocol.”

You stirred weakly then, letting out a broken sound somewhere between a gasp and a whimper as Dana stabilized your shoulder. Jack moved instantly at the sound.

“Hey,” he said, voice softening so fast it almost hurt to hear. “Hey, don’t move. You’re okay.”

Your eyes fluttered halfway open for barely a second before unfocusing again.

“She’s awake,” Jack breathed.

“For now,” Robby answered grimly while checking your pupils with a penlight. “Possible concussion. We’re not ruling anything out yet.”

Jack knew that tone. It was the same one they all used when things might be much worse than they looked initially.

Around them, the room was finally beginning to settle into controlled chaos instead of outright panic. Security had Leon restrained now while Santos pushed sedatives through an IV line with tight, controlled movements. Leon’s terrified shouting dissolved into confused, exhausted mumbling as the medication began taking effect.

“He didn’t know what he was doing,” Mohan said quietly, mostly to fill the horrible silence hanging over the room.

Jack did not answer. Rationally, he already knew that. Postictal aggression, neurological confusion, severe agitation after seizure activity. They had all seen it before. But none of it mattered right now, because every time Jack blinked, he saw your body hitting the floor again.

“On my count,” Santos said firmly while positioning herself near your head. “One, two, three.”

They lifted you carefully onto the gurney, and the second they moved your shoulder, a sharp cry tore from your throat despite your barely conscious state.

Jack physically flinched.

Robby looked at him immediately. “Jack, I need you with me here.”

But Jack still looked frozen. His prosthetic locked slightly as he stood too quickly, pain shooting sharply through the joint while exhaustion and adrenaline crashed violently together inside his body. Normally, he compensated automatically for it. Years of physical therapy had taught him exactly how to move through pain without thinking.

Right now, he barely noticed it. All he could see was you strapped to a trauma gurney instead of standing beside one, and somehow that felt profoundly wrong in a way his brain could not fully process yet.

Dana squeezed his arm briefly as she passed him. “She’s alive,” she said quietly, firmly enough that it sounded almost like an order. “So stay with us.”

Jack swallowed hard, then finally nodded once.

The second the gurney locked into place beside the trauma bed, the room shifted fully into trauma mode. Controlled chaos. Fast hands. Sharply clipped orders. Monitor alarms blending into the constant noise of the ER outside while everybody moved around you with the kind of practiced coordination that only came from years of emergency medicine.

“BP dropping,” Santos called from the monitor station. “Ninety-two over fifty-six. Heart rate one-forty. Pulse ox ninety-four.”

Robby swore quietly under his breath before stepping beside the gurney. “Dana, I need another large bore IV. CBC, CMP, coags, type and screen, lactate. Full trauma panel.”

Dana was already moving before he finished speaking.

Mohan carefully stabilized your cervical spine while Perlah adjusted the collar more securely around your neck. Blood stained the side of your face now, dark against pale skin beneath the fluorescent trauma lights, while bruising continued spreading visibly across your throat.

“She’s tachycardic from pain and adrenaline,” Mohan said quickly while palpating carefully along your ribs and clavicle. “Left shoulder deformity obvious. Could be anterior dislocation, maybe proximal humerus fracture too.”

“She hit hard,” Dana added grimly while cutting away the sleeve of your scrub top completely. “Look at the swelling already, poor baby.”

Jack forced himself closer finally, though every instinct in his body screamed at him to stop looking entirely.

Your shoulder looked wrong. Not subtly wrong, catastrophically wrong. The joint sat visibly displaced beneath skin already darkening with bruising while your arm rested protectively against your torso in unconscious guarding. Even barely responsive, your body was trying to protect the injury.

“Y/N?” Robby called firmly while shining the penlight into your eyes again. “Hey, stay with me.”

Your eyelids fluttered weakly, and your lips parted slightly before a small broken sound escaped you, more pain than words.

“There you go,” Dana said softly. “That’s good, hey sweetie.”

“She’s responsive,” Mohan confirmed. “Pupils reactive bilaterally.”

“Any obvious neuro deficits?”

“Hard to assess until she’s more alert.”

Jack swallowed hard. Normally those words would have sounded clinical. Routine. Hearing them about you made him feel sick.

Robby’s fingers moved carefully along your scalp before stopping near the back of your head. “She’s got a laceration here. Probably where she hit the cabinet.”

“How bad?” Jack asked immediately.

Robby looked up briefly. “Needs staples. I’m more concerned about intracranial bleed.”

Jack felt the room narrow sharply around him as his brain supplied every possibility instantly. Subdural. Epidural. Contusion. Diffuse axonal injury. Years of trauma medicine suddenly felt less like a skill and more like torture because now he knew exactly how bad this could become.

“BP’s still dropping,” Santos called sharply.

“Hang another liter.”

Dana connected fluids immediately while Mohan checked your abdomen carefully for rigidity and tenderness.

“She guarding?”

“Little bit.”

“Could just be pain response.”

“Or internal injury,” Robby answered grimly.

Jack closed his eyes briefly. Only twenty minutes ago, he had been teasing you for refusing to change out of wet scrubs. Twenty minutes ago, you had been standing beside him alive and exhausted and rolling your eyes at him. Now you were strapped to a trauma gurney while your coworkers discussed possible brain bleeds.

The trauma bay doors pushed open again.

“What do we have?”

Garcia entered already pulling gloves on, clearly expecting another routine consult before her eyes landed on the gurney. Then she froze.

“Is that...?”

Nobody answered immediately because suddenly saying it aloud made everything feel horrifyingly real.

Garcia moved closer automatically, surgical instincts taking over even while shock still flickered visibly across her face. Her eyes swept quickly across your injuries, taking in the bruising around your throat, the unstable shoulder, and the blood matted into your hair.

“Oh my God.”

Jack looked away sharply at the sound in her voice. He could handle panic, trauma, blood, failed resuscitations, and catastrophic injuries. But he could not handle hearing pity directed at you.

“What happened?” Garcia asked quietly.

“Postictal assault,” Robby answered while reviewing your vitals. “Patient seized after MVC. Became combative during recovery.”

Garcia’s jaw tightened immediately. Her eyes flicked briefly toward Jack, and somehow that made everything worse. Everybody in the hospital knew about the two of you. Not because either of you talked about it much, but because some things became obvious after enough years working together. The way Jack unconsciously searched for you in crowded rooms. The way your voice softened around him even during impossible shifts. The way both of you somehow always ended up side by side during difficult traumas without discussing it first.

And now everybody was watching him try not to fall apart while you lay bleeding in front of him.

“Y/N,” Garcia said gently while stepping closer to assess your airway. “Can you hear me?”

Your brow twitched faintly at the sound of your name.

“Good,” she murmured softly. “Stay with us.”

Jack finally moved closer again until he stood directly beside the gurney. For a second, he just stared at you. Really stared. At the bruises darkening beneath your jaw, at the trembling rise and fall of your breathing, at the blood drying against your temple.

Then very carefully, he reached down and took your hand.

Your fingers twitched weakly against his palm almost immediately.

Tiny movement. Huge relief.

“Okay,” Robby said firmly, forcing the room back into focus. “Let’s move. I want CT angio head and neck immediately. We’re ruling out intracranial bleed and carotid injury.”

Garcia nodded once beside him, already assessing your airway with practiced hands. “Neck swelling’s getting worse.”

Jack saw it too now that she said it aloud. The bruising around your throat had spread darker beneath the fluorescent lights while swelling gathered visibly beneath your jawline. Every breath you took sounded wrong now. Wet. Shallow. Strained enough to make every survival instinct in his body start screaming.

“Pulse ox is dipping,” Santos called sharply. “Ninety-one.”

“Jaw thrust,” Garcia ordered immediately.

Dana repositioned carefully at your head while Garcia leaned closer, studying the bruising around your airway with growing concern. “She may need to be intubated before CT if the swelling progresses.”

The word hit Jack like a physical blow. Intubated. His brain immediately supplied images he did not want. Ventilator settings. Sedation drips. ICU monitors. Neurological checks every hour.

“No,” he said automatically before he could stop himself.

Everybody looked at him.

Jack swallowed hard immediately, realizing too late he had said it aloud.

Robby’s expression softened slightly. “Jack.”

He hated the way Robby said his name right now. Carefully. Like he was one bad second away from falling apart completely.

“I know,” Jack muttered quickly, dragging a shaky hand down his face. “I know.”

But he didn’t. Not really. Because his brain kept splitting violently between two impossible realities. One side of him catalogued injuries automatically. Airway trauma after strangulation. Possible cervical instability. Hypoxia. Concussion. Internal bleeding. Shoulder fracture-dislocation. The other side could barely process the fact that you were lying here at all.

Your breathing suddenly hitched sharply.

Jack’s head snapped toward you instantly.

Your eyes fluttered weakly before opening. Confusion crossed your face immediately while you tried weakly to move, but pain flashed across your expression so fast it made Jack physically tense.

“Don’t,” he said immediately, stepping closer. “Baby, don’t move.”

Your gaze drifted slowly around the trauma bay like you were trying to understand where you were. The bright lights. The people surrounding you. The monitors beeping overhead. Then finally, your eyes landed on Jack.

Relief flickered there instantly. Small. Barely there. Enough to nearly destroy him.

“Hey,” he said softly, gripping your hand tighter without realizing it. “Hey, I’m right here.”

Your lips parted slightly, but nothing came out at first except a weak breath.

Jack leaned closer immediately. “What?”

Your brow pinched faintly in confusion.

“...Leon?”

The room went quiet for half a second.

Even now, barely conscious and injured and terrified, your first instinct was still the patient. Something inside Jack cracked painfully at that.

“He’s restrained,” Robby answered gently before Jack could. “You’re safe.”

Your eyes shifted again, slower this time.

“Hurts,” you whispered faintly.

Jack looked immediately toward your shoulder. “I know,” he said quietly, voice finally cracking despite how hard he tried to control it. “I know, sweetheart.”

Garcia’s eyes flicked sharply toward him at the sound. Jack almost never lost composure at work. Not like this.

You tried to swallow and immediately winced.

Garcia noticed too. “Throat pain?”

A tiny nod.

“Difficulty breathing?”

Another weak nod.

Garcia looked immediately toward Robby. “Airway’s worsening.”

Robby swore quietly under his breath. “We tube here or risk losing it in CT.”

The room shifted instantly again. More movement. More urgency. Dana reached for airway equipment while Santos prepared sedation meds with visibly tighter movements now. Mohan adjusted oxygen flow quickly while Garcia moved toward the head of the bed.

Jack felt suddenly frozen all over again.

Your eyes moved back toward him weakly, panic beginning to flicker beneath the pain now that you were awake enough to understand pieces of the conversation around you.

“Jack,” you whispered hoarsely.

His chest tightened violently. “I’m here.”

Your fingers curled weakly against his hand.

“Don’t...” Your breathing hitched painfully. “Don’t leave.”

That finally broke him.

Because you sounded scared. You, the person who stayed calm during pediatric arrests and mass casualty incidents and catastrophic traumas that made residents physically sick afterward.

Jack leaned down immediately, pressing his forehead briefly against yours despite the blood and chaos surrounding both of you. “I’m not going anywhere,” he whispered shakily. “Okay? I’m right here.”

Then your heart rate spiked sharply.

“One-fifty,” Santos warned.

Your oxygen dipped again.

“Eighty-eight.”

Garcia looked up instantly. “That’s it. We’re securing the airway.”

Panic flashed visibly across your face, and Jack felt your hand tighten weakly around his.

“Hey,” he said immediately, brushing damp hair carefully away from your forehead. “Look at me, sweetheart.”

Your unfocused eyes found his again.

“You’re okay,” he whispered, even though his own heart was pounding hard enough to make him nauseous. “Just keep breathing for me.”

Garcia stepped beside him carefully. “Jack,” she said quietly. “I need room.”

And suddenly he realized there was nothing else he could do. No medication to order. No procedure capable of fixing this himself. No trauma protocol separating him from the overwhelming terror flooding his chest.

All he could do was let go of your hand and watch other people try to save you, and somehow that felt worse than anything he had seen in his entire career.

And somehow that felt infinitely worse than any injury he had seen in his entire career.

The intubation blurred together afterward in fragments Jack knew would probably stay with him for the rest of his life.

Garcia’s voice turned sharp and clinical the second she stepped fully into procedure mode. “Etomidate ready?”

“Ready.”

“Succinylcholine?”

“Ready.”

“Pulse ox?”

“Eighty-seven and dropping.”

The room moved quickly around you after that. Packaging tore open, monitors screamed softly overhead, and Santos pushed medications through your IV with controlled precision while Dana stabilized your cervical spine at the head of the bed.

Jack stood rooted beside the wall, feeling completely fucking useless.

He had watched hundreds of intubations in his career. He had performed them himself during impossible traumas, with blood filling airways and families screaming outside the room. Usually, the procedure grounded him. Medicine always grounded him because medicine made sense. Algorithms. Protocols. Airway, breathing, circulation. Find the problem and fix it.

But this was you, and suddenly none of it felt clinical anymore.

Your eyes found his one last time before the sedatives fully took effect. Fear still flickered there beneath the exhaustion and pain, but so did trust. Complete trust. The kind that made his chest ache violently because you were still looking at him like he could somehow fix this.

Then your body relaxed beneath the medication.

Garcia moved immediately. “Going in.”

The room fell quieter for a second except for the ventilator alarms and the sound of Jack’s own pulse hammering violently in his ears. He watched Garcia guide the laryngoscope carefully while Robby monitored your vitals from beside the bed.

“Visualized.”

“Tube.”

“Advancing.”

Jack swallowed hard enough that it hurt.

You looked so small suddenly. That was the thought that kept repeating in his head while he stared at your motionless body beneath trauma lights that suddenly felt much too bright. You had always seemed larger than life somehow. Loud when you wanted to be. Brilliant. Sharp-edged. Impossible to intimidate. The kind of doctor residents followed instinctively because even during disasters, you carried yourself like you could handle anything thrown at you.

Now you were lying completely still while somebody else breathed for you.

“Tube’s in,” Garcia confirmed.

Relief swept through the room instantly, subtle but collective.

“End tidal color change confirmed.”

“Breath sounds bilateral.”

“Secure it.”

Dana taped the ET tube carefully into place while the ventilator connected with a soft mechanical hiss. Your chest finally began rising in slow, controlled breaths afterward, steady and artificial and horrifyingly impersonal.

Jack hated the sound immediately.

The ventilator transformed you from injured into critical in a way his brain could no longer avoid.

Robby was already moving again. “Okay, we transport now. I want CTA head and neck, cervical spine imaging, chest CT, trauma series. Somebody call ortho and tell them she’s likely got a fracture-dislocation.”

“She’s still hypotensive,” Santos warned while adjusting fluids.

“Pressure?”

“Ninety systolic.”

“Hang another liter.”

Everything continued moving around him after that, but Jack could barely process any of it fully anymore. The room had narrowed into snapshots burned violently into his memory. Blood staining the collar of your scrub top. Finger-shaped bruises spreading darker around your throat. Your hand slipping weakly from his when they rolled the gurney toward the doors.

He followed automatically beside the bed while they rushed you toward imaging. His prosthetic protested immediately beneath the sudden pace, sharp pain radiating through the socket with every uneven step, but he barely registered it now. His entire body had narrowed itself into one singular instinct.

Stay close. Do not lose sight of her.

Hallway lights blurred overhead while the gurney rattled violently across tile. Nurses moved aside instantly when they recognized who was lying on the stretcher, and somehow that silence hurt worse than panic would have.

People stopped talking when they saw you.

A respiratory therapist physically froze near the elevators before whispering, “Oh my God.”

Jack looked away immediately. He could not handle watching other people realize how bad this was.

Then suddenly, he was left standing alone in the hallway.

The silence hit him all at once.

He stared numbly at the closed doors for several long seconds before finally turning back toward Trauma Two because he genuinely did not know what else to do with himself.

By the time he returned, the room was mostly empty again. The chaos was over. Only the aftermath remained.

One overturned tray still sat abandoned near the wall where it had been kicked over during the struggle. Wrappers and syringes littered the floor beside shattered plastic packaging while a monitor continued beeping pointlessly beside an empty bed.

And blood.

Your blood was still everywhere.

Jack stopped walking.

For a second he just stood there staring at it. Tiny streaks across the tile floor. Smears against the cabinets where your head had hit. Dark fingerprints dried against the bedrail.

His stomach twisted so violently he thought he might actually throw up.

Because the only thing left of you in this room now was blood.

Not your laugh echoing across the nurses’ station during overnight shifts. Not your sarcasm when Santos annoyed you on purpose. Not the warmth of your body curled against his after impossible shifts when both of you were too exhausted to even speak properly anymore.

Just blood.

Jack looked down slowly at his own hands. There was still dried blood caught beneath his fingernails from where he had held your face trying to keep you conscious. More stained the sleeves of his scrub top in dark rust-colored smears that made his chest tighten painfully every time he looked at them.

You were intubated upstairs while trauma surgeons searched your brain for bleeding.

The thought cracked something open inside him.

If he had stayed. If he had trusted his instincts. If he had checked sooner.

“Jack.”

Dana’s voice came softly from the doorway behind him.

He did not turn around immediately. For a second, neither of them spoke while she took in the scene around him. Dana had worked in emergency medicine long enough to understand what trauma aftermath looked like, not just physically, but emotionally too.

Jack looked wrecked. Not outwardly hysterical. That almost would have been easier. Instead, he looked hollowed out from the inside.

“You should sit down,” she said gently.

“I’m fine.”

The answer came automatically, immediate and empty.

Dana almost sighed because they both knew it was complete bullshit. She stepped further into the room slowly, careful with him now in the same way people approached trauma patients who had not realized how badly they were injured yet.

“You’re shaking.”

His hands were trembling badly now that the adrenaline had started wearing off, small uncontrollable tremors moving through his fingers no matter how tightly he clenched them into fists.

“I left her,” he said quietly.

Dana’s expression softened immediately. “Jack.”

“I left her alone with him.”

The guilt in his voice nearly hurt to hear.

Dana moved closer. “You could not have predicted postictal aggression escalating like that.”

“But I should’ve checked sooner.”

Jack laughed once under his breath, but there was absolutely no humor in it. Just panic and exhaustion and guilt twisting together so tightly he could barely breathe around it anymore.

“She sounded scared,” he whispered roughly. “Do you know how bad it has to be for her to sound scared?”

Dana’s chest tightened painfully because she did know. Everybody in that hospital knew how terrifyingly calm you usually were under pressure. You were the person comforting other people during disasters. The doctor residents looked for during bad traumas because your voice never shook.

But tonight it had.

Dana stepped directly in front of him then and reached up without hesitation, gripping the back of his neck firmly enough to ground him.

“Listen to me,” she said softly but seriously. “She is alive.”

Jack swallowed hard. “She squeezed my hand before CT.”

“Then hold onto that.”

His eyes burned immediately at the words.

For a second, he looked terrifyingly close to falling apart completely.

“She was looking at me like she thought she was dying.”

Dana’s face crumpled slightly at the crack in his voice because Jack Abbot almost never sounded fragile. Not after everything life had already put him through.

But this was different.

This was you.

“You know her,” Dana said quietly. “You know how hard she fights.”

Jack closed his eyes briefly because somehow that made this hurt even worse. He did know. He knew the exact stubborn determination living inside you, the way you worked through exhaustion and grief and pain because your body physically did not know how to stop caring about people.

And suddenly, the idea of losing you felt so catastrophic he genuinely could not imagine surviving it.

When you woke up, the first thing you felt was pain.

Not sharp at first. Not localized enough to understand. Just heavy.

A crushing ache spread through your entire body like every bone had shattered somewhere deep beneath your skin. Awareness dragged itself slowly upward through layers of medication and exhaustion while fluorescent hospital light glowed faintly red through your eyelids. For one blissfully empty second, your brain stayed blank enough that you did not remember anything at all.

Then your chest tightened violently around the ventilator tube lodged in your throat.

Panic hit instantly.

Your eyes snapped open as your body reacted on pure instinct, trying desperately to fight the foreign object forcing air into your lungs. The movement sent agony ripping through your throat and jaw so violently it nearly knocked you unconscious again. A horrible choking sound escaped around the tube while pain exploded across the side of your head hard enough to blur your vision immediately.

The monitors beside your bed erupted into sharp alarms.

Then suddenly Jack was there.

He moved so quickly the chair beside your ICU bed nearly tipped backward onto the floor. One second the room felt empty and terrifying and unfamiliar, and the next his hands were hovering carefully near your face like he wanted to touch you everywhere at once but was terrified of hurting you more.

“Hey, hey, don’t fight it,” he said immediately, voice low and urgent. “You’re okay. Breathe with it.”

You could see his mouth moving. Could see panic written all over his face.

But you could not hear him properly.

Everything sounded distorted beneath the ringing in your ears, voices muffled and warped together like you were trapped underwater. The ventilator hissed rhythmically beside you while your chest rose mechanically against your will, and the sensation was horrifying enough to send another wave of panic crashing violently through your body.

Jack kept talking anyway.

You recognized the cadence of his voice more than the words themselves. Calm. Steady. But underneath it there was something rawer now, something desperate he usually hid much better than this.

Your entire body hurt.

Your throat burned every time the ventilator pushed another breath into your lungs. Your jaw ached violently from the intubation while your left shoulder throbbed with deep nauseating pain that radiated all the way down your arm. Even breathing hurt despite the machine doing most of the work for you.

Then memory came back all at once.

The trauma bay. Leon seizing. Hands crushing around your throat. Your head slamming violently against the cabinet. The floor.

You started crying before you even realized it was happening.

Tears slipped silently sideways into your hair while panic clawed straight up your chest hard enough to blur your vision again. You could not stop shaking. Every instinct in your body still screamed danger even though logically you knew you were safe now.

Jack’s entire expression broke the second he realized you were crying.

“Oh, baby,” he whispered hoarsely.

At least you thought that was what he said.

He sat carefully on the edge of the chair beside your bed before reaching for your hand, avoiding IV lines and bruises with practiced gentleness. The second his fingers touched yours, you grabbed onto him desperately enough that pain shot violently through your injured shoulder again.

You did not care.

Jack was here.

And somehow that meant alive. Safe.

Your grip tightened harder around his hand while your breathing turned ragged around the tube again. Jack immediately leaned closer, his thumb brushing shakily across your knuckles while he tried to calm you before you exhausted yourself further.

“It’s okay,” he murmured softly. “You’re okay. I’ve got you.”

Only then did you really look at him.

And God.

He looked awful.

Dark bruising sat beneath his eyes like he had not slept once since this happened. His hair looked messy in a way that suggested he had spent hours dragging anxious hands through it, and there was something hollowed out in his expression now that made your chest tighten painfully.

You mouthed the question anyway despite the ventilator.

What happened to you?

Jack watched your lips carefully before understanding finally crossed his face. His throat worked once visibly while emotion flashed so openly across his expression it almost scared you more than the pain itself.

He still looked terrified.

Even now.

Instead of speaking, he carefully turned your hand over in his and began tracing slow letters against your palm with his thumb.

Patient attacked you.

The memory crashed back completely after that.

The pressure around your throat. Leon’s empty unfocused eyes. Your body hitting the wall. The terrifying realization that he genuinely did not recognize you anymore.

You jerked violently on instinct before you could stop yourself, panic surging through your bloodstream so fast your vision blurred instantly while the cardiac monitor erupted into another wave of alarms beside the bed.

Jack reacted immediately.

“Hey, hey, look at me.”

You could not fully hear the words, but you knew his voice. Knew the shape of it. The desperation underneath it.

Your breathing turned frantic around the ventilator while terror clawed violently through your chest again. You remembered thinking you were going to die. Not abstractly. Not distantly.

Really die.

And for one horrifying second, lying in this ICU bed unable to speak or breathe on your own, that feeling came rushing back all over again.

Jack kept one hand wrapped tightly around yours while the other hovered uncertainly near your face. He looked like he wanted to pull you against him and protect you from everything all at once but knew touching you too much would only hurt you further.

“You’re safe now,” he kept saying quietly. “He can’t hurt you. You’re safe.”

Safe.

Your eyes darted weakly around the ICU room instead. Machines. IV poles. Bandages. Your leg elevated and immobilized beneath blankets. Soft restraints loosely secured around your wrists so you would not accidentally pull the ventilator tube out while disoriented.

You felt trapped inside your own body.

The panic became unbearable.

Then your eyes landed on the PCA pump beside the bed.

Jack noticed immediately.

His entire face fell.

“Baby…”

You reached weakly toward the button anyway with trembling fingers.

Jack looked absolutely shattered watching you press it. Not angry. Not disappointed.

Heartbroken.

Because he understood immediately what you were doing.

You could not stop the fear. Could not stop the pain.

So you were choosing unconsciousness instead.

Medication flooded slowly through your bloodstream almost immediately afterward. Warmth spread outward in gradual waves, softening the sharp edges of panic first before the pain finally began loosening its grip around your body. The terror still lingered somewhere deep beneath everything else, but it no longer felt sharp enough to suffocate you alive.

Your grip weakened slightly around Jack’s hand as exhaustion dragged heavily at your eyelids again.

Jack stayed exactly where he was.

You could barely keep your eyes open anymore, but you still saw the way he looked at you while the medication slowly pulled you back under.

Completely devastated.

Like watching you choose sedation over consciousness hurt him almost as much as the attack itself.

Your fingers twitched weakly against his palm before your eyes finally slipped closed again.

The last thing you felt before unconsciousness dragged you under completely was Jack lifting your hand carefully toward his mouth and pressing one shaking kiss against your bruised knuckles.

The second time you woke up was somehow worse because this time you stayed conscious long enough to understand what had happened to you.

Pain existed everywhere now.

Not sharp anymore. Not even severe enough in one specific place to focus on. It had settled deeper than that, heavy and constant, wrapping itself around your entire body until even breathing felt exhausting. Every inhale pulled painfully against bruised ribs while your jaw throbbed in slow aching pulses that spread all the way into your skull. The medication dulled the edges enough to keep panic from swallowing you whole again, but not enough to make you forget.

Nothing let you forget for very long.

Garcia stood beside your ICU bed when your eyes finally opened again, flashlight moving carefully across your pupils while monitors hummed steadily around the room. The overhead lights had been dimmed sometime while you slept, leaving everything washed in pale blue-gray shadows that made the hospital feel strangely unreal.

“Hey,” Garcia said softly the second she noticed you were awake. “Welcome back.”

Your hearing still came and went in fractured bursts after the concussion. Some sounds arrived painfully sharp while others disappeared completely beneath the relentless ringing inside your ears. Voices felt warped and distant, like everybody speaking stood underwater somewhere far away from you.

You blinked slowly toward the doorway and spotted Santos hovering there awkwardly holding a bouquet of flowers that looked aggressively stolen from the hospital gift shop. Half the stems bent sideways beneath crinkled plastic wrap while one of the price tags still dangled visibly from the bouquet.

You stared at them for a second before a weak breath of laughter escaped you despite the pain immediately punishing the movement.

Santos looked so relieved at the sound she nearly seemed close to crying herself.

“You scared the absolute shit out of us,” she said quickly, like humor was the only thing keeping her from saying something genuinely emotional instead.

The ghost of a smile tugged weakly at your mouth.

Garcia stepped back after finishing the neuro assessment while Santos moved a little closer to the bed, still clutching the flowers awkwardly against her chest.

“Abbott threatened like six people,” she muttered after clearing her throat.

Your eyes shifted toward her slowly.

“He almost went through security trying to get back to Leon.”

Your stomach twisted instantly.

Leon.

For one horrible second you saw him again exactly as he looked before the attack happened. Pale and exhausted beneath ambulance lights while rain hammered against the windows around both of you. Laughing weakly through pain. Asking if you were always that calm. Looking at you like you were safe.

You swallowed hard against the sudden nausea crawling into your throat.

“What happened to him?” you asked quietly, each word dragging painfully through the ache in your fractured jaw.

Santos’ expression changed immediately. The sarcasm disappeared first. Then the humor.

“He’s okay,” she answered after a moment, voice softer now. “Physically, I mean.”

You closed your eyes briefly.

Santos hesitated before continuing more carefully. “He doesn’t remember anything after the seizure started. Robby thinks it’s the postictal state mixed with the head trauma.”

The room fell quiet after that.

Not awkward quiet.

Heavy quiet.

The kind that settled directly into your ribs and stayed there.

Because the worst part was that you believed her completely.

You knew exactly what postictal violence looked like. You understood the neurological confusion, the blind panic, the total loss of recognition that sometimes followed severe seizures. Rationally and medically, every part of your brain understood exactly what had happened inside Trauma Two.

But emotionally, it still hurt in ways you did not know how to untangle yet.

A strange grief wrapped itself around the fear sitting inside your chest because less than an hour before the attack, Leon had been sitting beside you in the back of an ambulance talking about his daughter and his wife and soccer games and stupid jokes while rain pounded against the windows. You remembered thinking he seemed kind, the sort of patient who apologized too much for being in pain.

You had liked him.

And then suddenly he became the person who nearly killed you.

Emergency medicine was cruel like that sometimes. One second somebody was human to you. The next they became trauma.

Santos stepped closer quietly before squeezing your foot gently through the blanket. “We’ll come back later, okay?”

You nodded weakly.

After they left, the ICU room felt unbearably quiet again. Machines hummed softly around you while rain tapped faintly against distant windows somewhere beyond the hallway. Pittsburgh looked gray outside the narrow ICU window, the city blurred beneath another storm rolling slowly across the skyline.

You drifted in and out for hours after that.

Sometimes nurses came in to check vitals and neuro responses. Sometimes transport arrived to wheel you toward imaging. Sometimes you only woke long enough to register pain before medication dragged you under again.

Then sometime deep into the night, consciousness returned slowly enough that you realized somebody was sitting beside your bed.

Jack.

At first you thought he was asleep.

His head rested bowed carefully against your hand where it lay on top of the blanket, broad shoulders slumped forward like exhaustion had physically crushed him downward into the chair. The dim ICU lighting softened the edges of him enough that for one brief second he looked strangely fragile.

Then you noticed he was shaking.

Your heart cracked instantly.

Jack was crying.

Quietly. Almost silently. But hard enough that his shoulders trembled every few seconds beneath the dim blue ICU lights.

The sight hurt worse than any fracture in your body.

You had seen Jack exhausted before. Angry. Burned out after impossible shifts and mass casualty nights and pediatric codes that left entire departments emotionally gutted afterward.

But you had never seen him like this.

Very slowly, ignoring the pain shooting through your ribs and shoulder, you lifted your fingers weakly toward his hair.

The movement alone was enough.

Jack lifted his head immediately.

His eyes were bloodshot and red-rimmed beneath exhaustion so deep it looked painful. There was stubble shadowing his jaw now like he had not even thought about himself since this happened, and the healing cut near his cheekbone stood out harshly beneath fluorescent light.

Destroyed.

That was the only word your exhausted brain could find for the way he looked.

Jack Abbott was always the steady one. The person everybody else leaned on during disasters because he never seemed to break no matter how catastrophic things became around him.

Until now.

“I should’ve stayed.”

The words came out rough enough they barely sounded like him at all. Raw. Torn open somewhere deep inside.

You frowned weakly despite the pain. “No.”

“I knew something was wrong.”

“You couldn’t know.”

“I did.”

Jack stood abruptly then, pacing once across the small ICU room before turning back toward you like he physically could not force himself to stay still anymore. His prosthetic clicked sharply against the tile beneath his scrub pants while one trembling hand dragged hard through his hair again.

“I left you alone in there.”

“Jack.”

His face crumpled so suddenly it stole what little breath your bruised ribs could manage.

“When they pulled him off you...” His voice broke completely for one horrible second before he forced himself to continue anyway. “You weren’t moving.”

Your own eyes filled instantly.

Jack pressed shaking fingers hard against his mouth, trying desperately to regain control of himself and failing anyway.

“There was so much blood,” he whispered finally.

The confession hollowed the entire room out around both of you.

You reached toward him carefully despite the pain.

Jack moved back to your bedside immediately this time, like he physically could not tolerate distance from you anymore, and leaned down slowly until his forehead rested carefully against yours.

For a long time neither of you spoke.

Machines hummed softly around the room while rain tapped gently against the windows again. Jack’s breathing still shook every few seconds no matter how hard he tried controlling it, and you realized with sudden aching clarity that he had been holding himself together by force ever since the attack happened.

Probably for everyone else.

For the department.

For you.

Until now.

Finally, through the ache in your jaw and throat, you whispered softly, “You saved me.”

Jack closed his eyes immediately like the words hurt almost as much as the memory itself.

For a long moment he did not say anything at all. His forehead stayed pressed carefully against yours while his breathing shook unevenly every few seconds, and you realized suddenly that he was trying very hard not to completely fall apart in front of you. The effort of it sat visibly in every tense line of his body, in the way his fingers curled tightly around yours like letting go might physically destroy him, in the way his shoulders remained rigid even now like some part of him still expected another disaster to happen the second he stopped bracing for it.

“You almost died.”

The words came out so quietly you nearly missed them beneath the hum of machines surrounding both of you.

Jack pulled back just enough to look at you again, and the expression on his face made something ache deep inside your chest because he looked terrified still.

Not panicked anymore. Not frantic.

Just deeply, genuinely terrified in a way you had never seen before.

“I couldn’t get to you fast enough,” he admitted roughly, eyes fixed on your face like he needed constant proof you were still here. “I heard the safe word and I ran, but by the time I got there...” His throat tightened visibly. “You were on the floor.”

You swallowed painfully.

Bits and pieces still came back in flashes more than complete memories. Leon’s hands around your throat. The cabinet slamming against the back of your skull. The overwhelming certainty that your body was beginning to give out beneath you.

Then Jack.

Your eyes drifted slowly across his face now, taking him in properly for the first time since waking up. The exhaustion. The fear. The sleepless hollowing beneath his eyes. He looked like somebody who had been surviving on adrenaline alone for far too long.

“You did get to me,” you whispered carefully.

Jack laughed once under his breath, but the sound cracked painfully in the middle. “Barely.”

“That’s not true.”

His jaw tightened immediately.

You knew that look. The same one he got after bad outcomes. After losses he carried around long after everybody else moved on. Jack had always been harder on himself than anyone else could ever be, especially when the people he loved were involved.

And God, he loved deeply.

Even when he pretended not to.

You shifted your hand weakly against his, ignoring the ache radiating through your shoulder and ribs.

“Jack.”

His eyes lifted back to yours instantly.

“I’m here.”

Something inside him seemed to break completely at those words.

Jack lowered his head again, pressing one trembling kiss carefully against your bruised knuckles before holding your hand against his chest. His heartbeat pounded hard and uneven beneath your fingers, fast enough that you could still feel the leftover adrenaline vibrating through him.

For a while neither of you spoke again.

The ICU remained dim and quiet around you while rain continued tapping softly against the windows outside. Nurses’ footsteps echoed faintly somewhere down the hallway, distant enough that it almost felt like the rest of the world existed somewhere very far away from this room.

Your eyelids had started growing heavy again by the time Jack finally spoke.

“You scared me,” he admitted quietly.

The confession sounded small somehow. Honest in a way that made your chest ache more than the injuries did.

You looked at him for a second before squeezing his hand as tightly as your exhausted body would allow.

“I know,” you whispered.

Jack nodded once, eyes never leaving your face.

Then very carefully, like he was handling something impossibly fragile, he leaned closer and pressed a kiss against your forehead while exhaustion slowly began pulling you back under again.

This time, when sleep finally took you, Jack’s hand never left yours.

Once you’re dressed, the day officially begins. Despite yourself, you find your eyes jumping from person to person, eagerly looking for one doctor in particular. 

But he finds you before you do him. You jolt when his arm brushes against yours as you stand near the charge station. You angle your head in his direction and you feel your heart skip a beat as you focus fully on him.

“Hey,” you say to Jack, trying—and failing—to refocus on the schedule in front of you. 

He doesn’t even try to look busy as he drags a hand through his silver curls, eyes twinkling despite their exhaustion. “You’re starting early.”

You half-shrug, flipping the page over, scanning quickly through the patient list. “Lena needed another nurse on deck… something about Jacob’s paternity leave. So, here I am.”

“Here you are.”

You look at him fully then, an affectionate smile creeping across your face. “How’s the shift been? Chaotic?”

Jack shakes his head. He rubs his temple as if doing so would release every worry from his head. “Uh, it’s been about the same. So, catastrophic on every level. I had—“

Your Apple Watch suddenly buzzes twice in quick succession and your attention is unintentionally diverted. You frown, again confused why you were receiving nonessential notifications. When you open the screen, two text messages are there from an unknown number. You can’t preview the messages from your watch before the screen goes black, so you have no idea what they might contain.

“Everything okay?” Jack reminds you of his presence when he asks this, and you briefly look up at him to let him know you heard his question.

“Yeah, not sure what’s going on today.” You push and hold to silence the watch. “Spam callers are having a field day, I guess. Bet they just texted to let me know I have to click this sketchy link to prevent my nonexistent car from being repossessed.”

“Better get on that,” your boyfriend says with a light chuckle, “you know the United States government has an invested interest in your nonexistent car and those nonexistent toll fees.”

You grin at his sarcasm. Finally dissuaded from checking your notifications, you look up at him. “Now if only they could adjust their pitch to match Pittsburgh public transportation.”

“—Yo, lovebirds,” Lena’s voice commands attention from every corner of the room, and you feel your spine immediately go ramrod from her tone. “I got patients back here that would love an ounce of your undivided attention.”

Despite her tone, you know she’s not truly angry. You place a quick kiss on Jack’s cheek, then head over to your charge nurse. The text messages, phone call, and even Jack migrate to the back of your head as you get sucked into work.

You haven’t thought about your ex in a long ass time. It’s hard to reconcile that at one point in your life, he’d been all you thought about.

You had met in nursing school. He was the sweet, handsome, charismatic guy who sat next to you in pharmacology. It was hard to see in your young, 20-something-year-old brain the glaring red flags. Or perhaps you had ignored them in favor of the relationship.

You had the habit of focusing on the positives more than you did the negatives of any situation, especially regarding relationships. You focused on the fact that he always brought you a coffee when he got himself one, the fact that he would wrap his arm around you and tug you to his side when talking with friends, how he’d always make up for arguments with gifts and affection.

But as time wore on, his negatives only became more pronounced. He was not used to working hard for his degree in college—that is what happens when daddy pays for you to have good grades in undergrad—and flunked out. He blamed you for being a distraction to his schooling, but never dared breaking up with you. He started getting too adventurous with his drug usage, to the point finding his next fix took priority over everything else.

You broke up with him a year ago. Six months ago, you started dating Jack.

Jack is everything that he wasn’t. He’s responsible. Everything he has he’s had to work for. He loves you, and does not put you on the back burner when life gets messy, instead, he tries to make it work. Most importantly, though? He doesn’t fucking blame you for all his problems.

You stare at the phone in a stunned silence.

All it takes was two texts for you to remember why you hated being single those six months you were. The audacity of some men was truly astounding.

???: did you really just ignore my call? who the hell do you think you are?

And then, literally, seconds later:

???: are you in town, babe? maybe we could grab some drinks?

One might wonder how you knew it was him, but it’s just so obvious. No one else would be texting at five in the fucking morning looking to get drinks after a year no-contact. It’s the kind of insane behavior one could only expect from him. 

You shake your head after a few moments of staring blankly at your phone and stand. You throw the last bits of your meal away and drop your phone back off into your locker. As you step out of the nurse’s area, you notice Lena waving you over from across the room.

You make it over to her in two quick strides, eager to get your mind the hell away from whatever those texts were. 

Those dreams are dashed the second you notice Lena giving you a concerned look.

“Hey hon.” Hon? She never calls you that. “We have a man in North 2 asking for you by name. Want to take it?”

You cock a brow, mind moving a mile a minute as you try to quickly go through who that could be. But the texts still linger in your mind from moments before and you get stuck on one thought. Would he really be so stupid… so deplorable… to get himself admitted to your ER?

You sigh and nod, straightening your scrub top nervously as you approach the patient room door. You pause for a moment, trying to will yourself to just knock on the door. When you finally do, a smiling brunette answers it—not exactly what you’d been expecting.

“Are you the doctor?” she says, entirely too caffeinated and hyper for being in a hospital at five in the morning.

“I’m the nurse,” you tell her, smiling tightly. “Can I come in?”

“Oh, right.” She lets out a laugh. “Sorry, I see that on your badge now.”

She steps aside and you take at most two steps before your stomach drops to your feet. There he is, in all his glory. Considering the fact that you haven’t seen him in a year and he’s gained at least thirty pounds, you applaud yourself for recognizing him so quickly. He’s got one arm covered in gauze, and blood seems to have already soaked through.

The woman who’s with him goes to his side, stroking his unhurt arm gently. Poor girl, you think, if only she knew what she was getting herself into.

“I’m just going to take your vitals.” Strict professionalism. That is your aim for working with him. You grab the blood pressure cuff and loop it around his upper arm.

“Babe, how about you go get me a coke?” His voice is just as dry and grumbly as you remember. Once upon a time, you’d found it attractive. Now it was just grating.

You squeeze the cuff as the girl nods cheerily and practically skips out of the room. He lets out a quick breath through his teeth when you maybe squeeze it one time too hard. An honest mistake, really. You type down his blood pressure dutifully in his patient chart.

You gesture toward the door where the woman just slipped out. “Where’d you pick a girl like that up at?” 

“Eh, she’s just some squeeze.” He shrugs. “Nothin’ compared to you, babe.”

“I see your limitless assholery has remained the same.” You type a few more numbers into his chart, refusing to give him the eye contact he so desperately searched for. “So, what? You just so happened to cut yourself after texting me for the first time in a year?”

He winces as you reach over to pull back the bandage. It’s not too bad. You probe the edges of skin once, twice, then pull the bandage back over it. It looks like it might need stitches, which means, unfortunately, he will have to stay longer.

“Would you respond to me otherwise?” He makes a good point. You would never answer the phone if you knew he was on the other line. However, faking an injury and taking the bed of a person who might actually need it? Now that’s just wrong.

You snap your gloves off and go to add one more note to his file. Do not administer Oxycodone-based medications. That last bit of information comes from personal experience.

“Well, do you want the good news or the bad news first?” you ask, leaning up against the door of the room.

He doesn’t have to think on it for long. “Good.”

“The good news is that you will not be seeing me much more for the rest of your stay here. The bad news is you will have to stay a little longer. A doctor will need to come assess your wound.”

“How’s the good news good? I came here specifically to see you,” he says, his tone annoyed.

You give him your best attempt at a smile. “Oh right–that’s good news for me, not you. Have a good day.”

You leave the room quickly after that, ignoring his protests as you do. You pass the brunette on your way to the charge station, and you offer her a pitying smile. Poor girl really has no idea who she’s getting involved with, does she?

Leaning across the charge desk, you pinch your nose bridge in between your fingers and attempt to take several deep breaths.

Of all the things you’d seen in this profession; all the people that had been lost along the way… somehow, the hardest struggle was having to face your ex. How ridiculous was that?

“You good?” The sudden question is punctuated by a loud slurp of a drink, and you know who it is before you even turn your head.

“Hey Shen,” you greet him curtly. He shakes around the Dunkin’ drink in his hand, the ice cubes clinking together.

“You and Jack having some trouble in paradise?” Shen says before taking another loud sip of his drink. 

You can’t help the short laugh from snorting out of your nostrils. “No, no,” you tell him, “if only it were that.”

Shen narrows his eyes. He looks you up and down as if trying to discern the issue.

You sigh. “My ex. He’s in North 2. He faked an injury to see me.”

“No way.” Shen laughs. “Listen, I have some pretty crazy exes, but even they haven’t done anything that crazy.” His tone shifts when he realizes you aren’t in the same jovial mood. He steps forward, expression drawn tight. “You need help?”

You look off to the side, pondering. It would suck if Jack had to meet him. It wasn’t so much that you didn’t want Jack to know as it was that you didn’t want to have to deal with the embarrassment of having dated that thing for a brief point in your life. 

“You free? Think you could inspect his wound? Maybe put in some stitches?” 

Shen cocks a brow. “You sure you don’t want Jack to do that? Need him to go all macho on him?”

“I’d rather Jack not be involved.” You shift uneasily on your feet. “Not because he’s possessive, but because I worry my ex might get… unruly.”

Shen nods, then puts his drink down on the counter, even though Lena had explicitly requested he not do that. “Give me fifteen. I’ll meet you back here for consult.”

You watch for a few seconds as he strides away, then you avert your eyes to your hands. They’re shaking, but you’re not sure why. You aren’t scared of your ex—but that doesn’t mean you aren’t upset by his reappearance in your life.

You hadn’t been one of those couples that said “let’s just be friends!” even once they broke up. You’d been more so the type that you blocked each other’s numbers and you moved your entire career and livelihood to get away from him. It felt like two worlds colliding, him being here, where you were now a successful nurse and not his overly-reliant girlfriend.

As you continue to stand by the desks, you notice Jack stepping out of a patient’s room down the hall. You turn your back and attempt to look busy in sorting paperwork, but you know he’s seen you.

His voice breaks through your thoughts just as you begin to think he’s not coming over. “Working hard or hardly working?”

You smile despite yourself. “Hey,” you say, turning your head. 

His eyebrows furrow as he gets closer to you, able to see you more clearly. He leans beside you on the counter, chewing the inside of his cheek. He’s worried about you—he always does that when he is. “You alright?” 

You knew he was going to ask this, but it still catches you off-guard.

You don’t want to lie to him, but you don’t want to tell him the truth either. Subjecting Jack to your ex was not high on your to-do list. If all went well, no one would have to deal with him other than Shen. Besides, you don’t need a man to stick up for you. You could handle him just fine on your own.

You shrug. “Sometimes I forget how chaotic the night shift can be.”

He leans forward, voice soft. “If you’re struggling, I’m sure Lena will be understanding…”

You put your hand on his bicep and give it a squeeze. “I’m okay, Jack. I promise. Besides, your shift is over in, what, an hour and a half? Don’t worry about me.”

“I’ll try,” he tells you, “but you have a way of making it into my head whether I want you to or not.”

You let out a breathy laugh. “Funny, I was just thinking the same thing about you.”

“—You ready to go, my favorite nurse?” you hear Shen say from behind you. He reaches between you and Jack to grab his drink, taking a long sip. The seriousness of the conversation he just interrupted is completely lost on him. He turns to Jack. “Oh, hey man. Didn’t see you there.”

Your boyfriend cocks a brow at you. “What’s going on?”

“A consult,” Shen replies simply.

Jack looks at you like he’s expecting a more in-depth explanation. You smile teasingly and pat his arm. “Back to work, doc. Patients won’t save themselves.”

Jack rolls his eyes affectionately as you step away, but once your back is turned, the expression falls away.

You clutch the suture kit cart as Shen knocks on the patient door then uses his hip to push it open. He stands to the side as you enter. Your ex’s new girlfriend shoots to her feet as you push the cart in, her eyes wide. You offer her what you hope is a comforting smile.

“Hello, hello,” Shen says as he takes a seat on a rolling stool next to his bed. “I’m Dr. Shen and I’m going to be taking care of you today. I hear you have a cut on your arm?”

Your ex doesn’t look at him as he replies, his eyes on you and the suture kit. “I slipped.” He reaches over to remove the gauze on his arm.

“Is it going to need stitches?” The girlfriend asks from behind you.

Shen inspects the wound carefully, eyes moving slowly across the ripped skin. He pulls away and nods. “Yeah, I think a few stitches. It’s pretty deep and jagged along the edges. What was it you slipped on?”

He moves out of the way so you can begin flushing the wound. You ignore the fact that your ex is flexing his muscles as you grab the cleanser, completely locked into your work.

“My damn hunting knife,” he says, “it’ll leave a pretty nice scar though, huh?”

You roll your eyes without even really meaning to, and you feel your ex’s glare on you.

“Go ahead and put some lidocaine in,” Shen tells you. He turns to your ex. “Don’t want you to feel your skin being pulled together with a needle, do we?”

Your ex goes pale as you grab the syringe and fill it with the liquid. “Uh, could I… does it have to have stitches?”

“Trust me, honey, you do not want sepsis,” his girlfriend says, “my cousin got it and—“

“—Just be quiet,” your ex snaps at her. You flinch at the tone, and accidentally spill a little bit of the liquid on the table.

Shen steps up behind you, crossing his arms in front of his chest. You know he wants to comfort you, but you’re glad he keeps his distance. “Your girlfriend is right,” he says, “lots of nasty things can happen if you let a cut like that not heal properly.”

You gently guide the needle into the skin above his wound and push the liquid inside. You turn to your ex as you pull the needle away. “It should be completely numb in a few minutes.”

You step back to let Shen take the seat again. You turn to look out the window of the room only to lock eyes with Jack. He’s talking to Lena, but his eyes are on you. You look away. You nervously shift on your feet, clutching your hands across your front.

“So, uh.” Your ex’s eyes are on you as he starts to speak. Your lips draw into a thin line. “You guys get out much? Have boyfriends, girlfriends?”

Shen knows who the question is aimed at, yet he answers anyway. “Eh, it’s kind of difficult,” he says, poking and prodding the arm. “I’m not much for commitment.”

You refuse to reply. 

“Okay, I think it’s numbed up, I’m going to go ahead and start,” Shen tells him. “Maybe try not to look at it. I find my patients who don’t usually have the best time with this.”

You hand Shen the threaded needle and help clamp the skin together with forceps. 

“And you?” His fucking mouth. 

You barely look up from his wound as your ex says this. “What?” 

“Are you dating anyone?” 

“Honey, I think they’re concentrating right now,” his girlfriend butts in. You shoot her an appreciative smile and keep your hands steady as Shen guides the needle through the first point.

“Surely she can answer a question,” he huffs, “I mean she’s just holding a clamp. I can do that.”

You shake your head and barely murmur, “I’m not doing this here. Not now.”

Shen goes through the third point, drawing the skin together tightly.

A few moments pass and you think he’s given up. Then, he says, “I just don’t understand what the big deal is. Why can’t you answer the question?”

You clench your jaw, barely able to conceal your irritation. Shen shoots you a look, but then goes back to sewing.

“Cmon, really?” he continues. 

“I have a boyfriend—is that what you so desperately want to hear?!” your voice is unexpectedly loud, and you immediately regret the outburst after it leaves your lips.

The girlfriend looks shocked—hurt, probably realizing that your connection with her boyfriend goes beyond a normal patient-nurse relationship. Your ex looks equal parts annoyed as he does satisfied with your outburst. Like he’d just proved some point in his head about how you weren’t all perfect.

Shen turns his head and says, “scissors.”

You hand him the utensil and he pulls the thread taut before snipping it. 

Your ex lets out a short laugh. You cock a brow, worried that someone had slipped him something.

“I don’t believe you.”

You roll your eyes. “Good thing I don’t care if you do or don’t.”

Shen turns to you. “I can wrap up here if you need to step out.”

You’re already halfway out the door by the time he says this. You move quickly to the stairwell, passing concerned nurses and doctors as you do. Once you are out the door, you have to bend over to catch your breath. Pressing the palms of your hands hard against your eyes, you will yourself not to get upset.

Only he could get you that flustered with hardly a word. And you fell for his bait every single time. You lean against the wall and try to steady your breathing.

A few minutes pass. More than you are sure that Lena would allow. The doors to the stairwell open and you turn to the side, hoping the person there can take a hint.

Unfortunately, Jack is persistent.

He gently grabs your arm and pulls you to his side. You allow him, and the stress of the day flows out of you with your muffled tears. You cushion your head against his chest, wrapping your arms around his shoulders. He strokes the top of your head while the other arm holds you just as tightly.

Once you’ve released all the emotion you can handle, you pull back a little, wiping your eyes. Jack doesn’t let you get far, keeping you close to his chest.

“Shen told me you were upset,” he says, “what’s going on?”

You sniffle, trying to look away. He gently guides your head back to meet his eyes with his thumb on your chin. His fingers slide up to cup your cheek and you melt into his grip. “Talk to me, love.”

A fresh set of tears escape your eyes at the sweetness of his voice. The caring, affectionate man in front of you was so much better than anyone you’d ever been with. It makes you feel silly for crying, silly for complaining.

“This morning, when my watch buzzed.” You hiccup. “It wasn’t a spam number. It was my ex-boyfriend.”

You watch Jack’s face carefully as you say this, trying to predict his next words before he says them. You thread your fingers in his scrubs, anchoring yourself to him.

“Then, he showed up as a patient. He intentionally hurt himself to see me. And he’s been rude and crass, sure, but that’s not even what bothers me the most.” You wipe your eyes with the palm of your hand, knowing you must look a mess. “I don’t want him back in my life. Never. He… just doesn’t belong here. It makes me sick thinking he’s trying to worm himself into my perfect life that I’ve built without him.”

You pause, taking a panicky breath in. “I don’t want him to come between us. I don’t want you to think… I don’t want you to think less of me because of him. I mean, I can’t believe I ever dated him. He’s awful.”

Jack strokes your cheek, letting you get it all out. When he’s sure you’re finished, he speaks.

“First of all,” he says, “I’m never going to judge you for people you no longer have in your life. If you chose to get rid of them, I know there’s a hell of a good reason. And, personally, I think you’re a great judge of character. I don’t want to hang out with someone you don’t like.” You avert your eyes bashfully, but Jack angles your head so you’re still looking at him.

“Secondly, don’t blame yourself for the choices of stupid people. Just because you once associated with him, doesn’t mean you still stand by his choices today,” he says. “I love you. I mean that. And that means I trust you, implicitly. I wouldn’t have tried to get in the way—well, let me rephrase that. If you weren’t in imminent trouble and I thought you had it handled, I wouldn’t intervene with your issues.”

You let out a soft laugh at that last part. 

For a moment longer, the two of you stand there. He strokes your hair, you clutch his scrubs. Finally, you release him.

“I’ve got thirty more minutes left before the day shift inevitably arrives,” he says, “so, what do you want to do?”

You shake your head. “Honestly? I hope he disappears.” You push open the door with your hip. “But if he doesn’t, then I’ll let you know.”

You step into the buzzing ER and let out a deep breath. You start to head to the bathroom, when your eye gets caught on a figure quickly headed in the other direction. Her dark hair bounces against her back as she jogs away, her hand covering her face. The girlfriend. You imagine that their conversation didn’t go over well.

Your ex steps out after her, clutching his now-bandaged arm. He looks at her retreating back for a moment before he rolls his neck back, peeved. As he turns to go back in the room, he halts. Then his eyes lift and immediately lock onto yours.

A rehearsed grin spreads across his mouth. You turn your back, but he reaches you before you can push open the door to the bathroom.

He grabs your shoulder and you spin around, pushing him away disgustedly.

“Don’t ever touch me,” you say through gritted teeth.

“Woah, woah,” he says, raising his hands in surrender. “Easy there, tiger.”

He jumps in front of you when you go to push open the bathroom door.

“Hey, just listen to me.” His eyes are like a weasel’s, predatory and conniving. “Just let me say my piece.”

“I’m not interested,” you tell him. “What part of that can’t you get through your thick skull?”

“Is this about the cheating thing? Are you really still mad about that?” 

“You really are oblivious, aren’t you?” You roll your eyes. “You can stick your dick in any hole you like. It’s none of my business. Why? Because we aren’t dating.”

You turn your back when you remember you have makeup wipes in your bag. But you can’t get far before a hand wraps around your wrist like steel. You don’t have a moment to think, your body reacts before your mind can. You turn and punch him squarely in the jaw.

He releases you immediately and lets out a loud groan, falling back against the bathroom door. He clutches his jaw with a fury in his eyes unlike you’ve ever seen.

“I said, don’t touch me, asswipe.”

He comes toward you, as if to retaliate, but then you feel an arm pushing you behind a sturdy body and your view is cut off.

“Who the hell are you?” your ex says, gesturing to Jack with a foul expression.

You look down at your hand and realize it’s bleeding. Your thumb might be sprained—you aren’t sure. It throbs painfully, but you can move it at least.

“I’m her boyfriend.” You peer around Jack’s shoulder and realize that your ex looks about ready to piss himself. “But that doesn’t matter. When someone asks for space, that’s when you back the fuck off.”

“—What’s going on here?” A voice cuts in. You turn your head to see Ahmad there, his hand resting on his holster.

You step forward. “Ahmad. Could you escort this patient out? He should be ready for discharge. I’ll fill out all the proper HR paperwork—this is all just a big mistake.”

“Hey, hey,” your ex says, waving his hand toward Ahmad,  “I’m not taking the fall for this.”

Ahmad grabs your ex’s shoulder before he can reach out and grab you. You look back and see Jack and Shen are there, both willing to corroborate.

You look back at your ex. “It’s time to go. And don’t come back.”

“Unless you get seriously injured in the vicinity of our hospital, then you can—“ Shen starts to say, but Jack elbows him in the side.

Your ex stares at you for a full second. Then he turns his head. You think he’s given up, then he mutters a very clear, resounding bitch underneath his breath and Jack is stepping forward before you can stop him.

“What the fuck did you just say?”

“Jack,” you call out.

Your ex looks at him square on. “She heard me.”

Jack clenches his fists. You reach forward to grab his shoulder. You look over at Ahmad, who then forcefully turns your ex around and leads him away.

“Jack, it’s okay,” you say. “I’ve heard worse, believe it or not.”

“He can’t just…” he starts to say, then shakes his head. 

“I love you,” you tell him softly. “And I’m okay.”

Shen gets drawn into an incoming trauma and hurries away. You clutch your still-bleeding hand to your chest, which draws Jack’s attention.

“Shit,” he curses. “Why didn’t you say you’ve never punched someone before? I could’ve done it.”

Your hand is still shaking as you follow him to an empty exam room. He opens the door and you shuffle in.

“It’s really not that bad,” you say, “it’s mostly the adrenaline making me shake.”

Jack keeps his back to you in the room, looking through cabinets quickly. You sigh.

“Really, Jack, I needed to punch him. For my own mental well-being. I’d be kicking myself later if I hadn’t,” you say with a soft laugh.

Jack retrieves some bandages and disinfectant. He takes a seat on a rolling stool in front of where you sit perched on an exam bed, swinging your feet back and forth. Jack gently grabs your hand and looks over your injuries.

“How are you so calm right now?” he asks, unfolding a disinfectant swab. “Your ex just verbally assaulted you in front of the entire ER floor.”

You hiss through your teeth as he dabs the swab against your torn knuckles. He gives you an apologetic look, but doesn’t let up. 

“I’m sure I’ll start panicking later, once everything settles in.” You wince again as he wraps your knuckles. 

“Can you move your thumb?”

You move it side to side, then up and down. Confusion washes over you as he inspects it. “How’d you know I hurt my thumb?”

He laughs. “I haven’t seen a fist that bad since I was sixteen. You can’t tuck your thumb inside your fist when you punch—you’re lucky you didn’t break it.”

You pout. “I thought I did good.”

He lets go of your thumb to cup your cheeks together in his palms. “I didn’t say it was terrible. You still packed a pretty mean hook.”

You can’t resist. You lean forward to give him a kiss. He returns it wholeheartedly, angling your head with his palm. 

You pull away before it can devolve into something inappropriate for a hospital setting. He strokes the back of your neck even as you pull apart, his eyes soft and heavy-lidded.

“You better go brief the day shift,” you tell him, “I’m sure they’ve already heard plenty about your eventful night. You know Shen loves to gossip.”

He bites his lip and throws his head back with a groan. “God, all I want to do right now is go to sleep.”

“At least you don’t have to do HR paperwork with a hurt hand.”

“You got me there,” he says, gently tugging you to his side as he heads to the door. “You’re off tomorrow, right? Want to come over to my place?”

You grin at him. “I’d love nothing more.”

So that’s why you don’t even blink when you notice him leaning across the counter talking to a pediatrics nurse from upstairs, his pearly teeth glittering beneath the fluorescent lights as he lets out a soft laugh. He looks unfairly handsome, especially at this time of night. His dark scrubs fit him a touch too well, and it is a bit hard for you to focus when he moves in your peripheral because your eyes are drawn to the fabric stretching around his forearms. You’ve definitely reached crazy girlfriend status, you think, standing just feet away, trying to look focused on the empty patient chart in front of you but quietly listening into their conversation.

The nurse from pedes lets out a high-pitched, nasally laugh at that very moment and you swear your ears are ringing from the assault. You bring your eyes up to see if you could figure out what was so funny, but her hand’s on his forearm and you suddenly feel dizzyingly sick.

Jack is a good attending, there’s no doubt about that. You started working for him a year ago. He would casually flirt with you in a way that he didn’t with other women. The path to dating followed after that quickly. Soon, you and Jack were spending almost every hour outside of work together. When things got serious–and they did, quickly–some ground rules had to be set.

A year ago, you thought that keeping your relationship a secret would be the best option for you. You thought that it would alleviate any issues involved with HR or people thinking you had slept your way through your residency. You were beginning to think, though, that you would rather have the rumors over having to watch every woman within a quarter mile flock to him.

“If you stare any harder, your eyes might pop out of your skull.”

You flinch when Dr. Parker Ellis’s voice interrupts your train of thought. You turn around to see the woman standing behind you, smacking a piece of gum in her mouth.

“What are you, a ninja? I thought you were with a patient?”  

“I was with a patient,” she replies with a mischievous smile, “but as I was leaving, I couldn’t help wondering why you weren’t with one”--she lowers her voice conspiratorially–“could it have something to do with the new pedes nurse hanging out with Dr. Abbot?”

You wrinkle your nose in your best attempt at seeming disgusted by the notion. “I’ve told you before…” you chide the woman, “I’m not into Jack.”

“Sureee,” Dr. Ellis says. “That’s why you’re hiding behind that empty chart in the middle of rush hour. Because you don’t like Abbot.”

“Maybe I’m actually trying to get work done,” you tell her, “like, maybe it’s actually good I’m not playing around when I should be working.”

Dr. Ellis smirks like she knows something you don’t. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone this far in denial before.”

You roll your eyes at your friend’s comment. Dr. Ellis seems amused by your irritation and that only makes you more annoyed.

She looks like she’s going to say something else, but then her eyes get caught at something behind you. She ducks her head down as if trying to seem busy and her lips barely move as she mumbles: “incoming.”

“--And here are some of my wonderful residents.” 

You turn your head so fast toward the voice that you worry you’ve gotten whiplash. You immediately cringe at your overenthusiasm when you remember you’re trying to play it coy. Jack and the nurse stand there, wearing near-identical smiles on their faces.

Jack’s eyes linger on you for a moment too long. They soften and trail down your face. You clench your tablet so hard you’re afraid it will crack under the pressure.

Ellis shoots a nonchalant nod toward them. You just smile, hoping it doesn’t come across as robotically as you think it does.

Jack grins proudly as he gestures to you both. “Julia, meet Dr. Ellis and—“

“Hey, sorry, I’ve got a patient I have to check on,” you interrupt with your best attempt at a pleasant smile, “nice to meet you, though, Jackie.”

The new nurse frowns. “It’s Julia.”

You look over at your boyfriend, who stares at you like you’ve got two heads. You grit your teeth and give the nurse a closed-mouth smile before you duck your head and step away.

Good job playing it cool, you think to yourself as you head toward Central 11. Why are you such a bitch? It’s not Nurse Jolene’s fault Jack is so… himself. 

“Hey, wait up—“ Speak of the devil and he shall appear. 

You stop and look back at Jack as he lightly jogs toward you. Behind him, Nurse Joy looks around confusedly, probably wondering what soap opera she’d mistakenly stumbled into.

“I was just about to see how my scarlet fever patient is doing,” you tell him even though you know that is not why he stopped you. Perhaps a small part of you hoped that was what he’d ask.

“What was that back there?” Jack says, his light eyes sweeping over your face as if trying to read it like a book. “You doing okay?”

“I’m fine… how are you doing?” 

“Fine…” he trails off, eyebrows furrowed. You notice, peculiarly, that his eyes seem wider than normal. They dart in between the two of yours like a tennis ball jumping a net.

“Well I’m glad that’s settled.” You turn to walk away when he doesn’t immediately say anything else. “And if that’s all you needed…”

He grabs your arm before you can turn your back and turn tail, and you jolt at the pressure. When he’s got your attention, he immediately lets go. You automatically look to see if anyone noticed the transgression, swallowing nervously.

“Sorry,” he says immediately, “I just… I want to make sure you’re okay.”

You feel yourself soften at the admission. You step closer, but not too close in fear someone might think it improper. You offer him a smile.

“I should be the one that’s sorry,” you say, “I’m just a little on-edge, that's all.” You decide not to tell him that when you saw that nurse put her hand on his arm, you had wanted to kiss him in front of the entire ER staff. Now is not the time for grand admissions like that.

Jack looks relieved. A quick smile flits across his face. “Well, the ER will do that to you.”

“You would think four years in, I’d be used to it,” your words are closely followed by a small laugh. 

“Sorry to say, love, but it never gets easier,” he says with a coy grin and your chest flutters at the nickname, “unless you somehow figure out how to turn your empathy off.”

“I hope I never do that.”

There’s a lapse in conversation for a moment too long. You furrow your brows when you notice him looking at you, studying you like you’re a puzzle. 

You touch your hair subconsciously. “Something wrong?” 

His response is immediate. “No, no, there never is with you,” he says. He leans forward and his voice lowers. “I just can’t get over how fucking hot you are.”

“Jack,” you groan. Despite your attempt at pretending to be annoyed, a small smile pulls at your lips.

“There’s something about you in your scrubs and work mode that really gets me going,” he tells you. “All studious and shit.”

“--I’m leaving,” you say, turning your back. A smile lingers on your lips as you turn away. “Bye, Jack.”

“Bye, love,” he says just loud enough for you to hear as you step away. “Have a good shift.”

12:00a.m.

You think the signs that your shift is about to go from bad to worse lies in the empty coffee maker in the break room. 

No good shift starts with an empty coffee maker. It’s just one of those superstitions that you believe in that inevitably and inexplicably ends up coming true. Tonight is no exception. 

Your scarlet fever patient barfed all over your scrubs when you shined your light down her throat. She’s only five, so you just have to force a smile and try not to combust. Right after you change your scrubs, an emergency comes in that you have to jump on. It's a stabbing victim. You can’t resectate her. You’re there when Shen tells her parents. Their cries ring in your ears for an hour afterward. Another young kid comes in with a nose bleed that turns into hemorrhaging that you have to seal up–unfortunately, blood gets all over your arms and you have to clean all that off and get tested for a variety of blood-borne illnesses.

An hour later, you’re clued into the bet.

You’ve just gotten the blood cleaned off, a bandage wrapped around the crook of your elbow where the nurse had drawn your blood. You’re shuffling from room to room, staying on top of patient charts on your quick breaks and updating diagnosis and treatment plans. 

You let out a heavy sigh when you feel the back of your neck begin to cramp, the telltale signs of overwork pulling at your muscles. 

It’s safe to say that the very last thing you need to hear is what you do next.

You bump into the security guard on shift, Ahmad, when you’re walking. You immediately apologise, but he just shrugs. 

“I didn’t know you were on the night shift tonight,” you say to him.

He shrugs. “Yeah, been trying to get some extra hours.”

You give him a pat on the arm. “Just make sure not to overwork yourself, okay? I’d hate to have you end up as a patient.”

“Okay, mom,” Ahmad laughs. “Maybe you should take your own advice sometime, huh?”

You hadn’t realized your overtime had been noticed by anyone other than Jack, who always complained about your absences. You offer a smile and go to walk around him when you notice him going to say something else.

“Have you gotten in on it yet?” he asks. He gestures to a whiteboard in his little office behind him, a teasing grin pulling at his lips.

You can’t help the reciprocal delight that comes across your face. Ahmad’s gambling pools have been a thing since you first started as a resident at PTMC. They weren’t often, but whenever they started up you were always happy to participate. It provided a fun distraction to an extremely bleak work environment.

“What’s it about?” You suddenly grin as you remember something you saw on the way into work that morning. “Oh, is it about what caused that powerline to fall outside the park?”

“Nah,” Ahmad tells you, “it’s about Abbot.”

You freeze. You hug your tablet to your chest in an attempt to keep your hands from fidgeting. Abbot? What could that be about? Do they know…

“Abbot?” you echo. You put on your best attempt at a genuine smile. “What’s he done now?”

“It’s not so much what he’s done, as what he might do,” Ahmad says. You cock a curious brow. “We’re betting on what woman in the PTMC will ask him out first.”

Your blood runs cold. You try to force yourself to smile, but you think it might come off as a grimace instead. You caused this, you try to tell yourself, you were the one that made it a secret.

“Surely there aren’t that many women to list.”

“Eh, you’d probably be surprised,” Ahmad continues, “we have at least twelve right now. People keep adding candidates.”

Twelve. Twelve women that people in this ER think would make a better partner to Abbot. You tug at your stethoscope and your eyes subconsciously dart to your feet. You don’t want to know more, you don’t think you can take more, but Ahmad continues.

“I think most people are voting for Dr. Mohan, but there have been quite a few for… hey, you okay?”

You hadn’t realized your eyes had gotten foggy with tears. You force a smile on your face.

“Sorry, uh, I’m not going to participate,” you tell him, wiping your eyes with the back of your hand, “it’s not like I have a bunch of extra cash laying around.” (That part is technically true, but it’s definitely not the reason you’re crying.)

Ahmad continues to look at you like he knows you’re hiding something. He doesn’t press on it, and he nods slowly. You take that as permission enough to leave.

You weave around Ahmad and pretend you don’t feel his eyes staring holes into the back of your head as you do. Nurses and doctors move around you like schools of fish navigating deep oceanic waters, and you’re a shark that they automatically go to avoid. You set your expression as you head over to Ahmad’s office. You glance up and down the busy hallways before you stop completely, peering in through the slats of the blinds to the board.

You see the names Doctor Mohan, Nurse Julia, Doctor Al-Hashimi–it goes on. Your name is the very last addition. There’s only a few dollars under you. Your heart sinks and you feel disappointment roll over you like a tidal wave.

You mull in the feeling for a moment too long, then you force it away. You remind yourself that at the end of the day, you were the one that asked for this. Jack has no role to play in your own self-imposed misery. You, and only you, had been the one afraid of what others might think. You made your bed, now you have to sleep in it.

You don’t want to face this fact, so you instead open up your tablet to check for any new updates on your patients. 

4:00a.m.

You stare at the red numbers flashing on the microwave in front of you with bleary eyes. It lets out a high pitched chiiiirp when the meal you’d packed is done being reheated. You grab the container and take a seat near the back of the breakroom. 

You put your forehead into your hand and begin to fork through the food you’d packed with a heavy sigh. 

The scarlet fever patient was in the ICU now. Her fever had spiked and after the emergency ice bath, she still hadn’t fully woken up from it despite her temperature being lower. A teenage boy had been shot in the shoulder and had waited an hour before coming in. He ended up being fine, but it was so stressful your hands still trembled for thirty minutes after. An older woman woke up with chest pain and rushed to the hospital. She died on your emergency table.

You force another bite of your food into your mouth.

Suddenly, the door to the breakroom opens and Jack waltzes in with that same nurse–Julia–-on his heels. You stab a piece of food particularly hard with your plastic fork at the sight.

“Isn’t that crazy? I mean, I wonder what it is that is making people think we’d be good together,” she says, a huge smile pulling at her lips. 

Jack looks over at you immediately as he walks in. You meet his eyes and flinch at the concern on his face. He twists his lips and turns to pull his lunch out of the fridge. You had packed it for him. Jack always insisted you didn’t have to, but you liked doing it, so you always did. 

“I think the whole thing is silly,” he tells her. She doesn’t get the hint he’s giving her and lets out another giggle.

You know what they’re talking about–it has to be the betting board. You had checked it at least three times over the past hour. Pure curiosity, of course. It’s not like you were secretly a masochist or anything.

The last you’d checked, Julia’s pool had officially surpassed the lead’s. Yours still hovered around the same amount. A part of you had wanted to put some money down on your name just to get in the running, but you thought it’d probably look weird to see you betting on yourself.

Instead of taking a seat at the other table, Jack walks over to you. “Hey, got room here?”

You look over at Julia and cock a brow. You shrug a shoulder lazily. “Sure, I’m just about to wrap up.”

They take the seats across from you, and you shoot a small smile toward your boyfriend. He rolls his eyes and gestures slyly to Julia, who’s currently discussing all the cases she’s had today to nobody but herself. You laugh under your breath at his annoyance. Knowing Julia now, you wonder if the ER staff’s hypothesis that pedes makes you go crazy was true after all.

He pops open his lunch and you notice him pick up the note you’d carefully written. He smiles lovingly down at it, stroking the creases from where it had been folded. You bite your lip to hide your smile and look down at your food.

“Who’s that from?”

Julia reminds you of her presence by asking the question. You flinch and your eyes shoot up to look at her. She’s staring at the note in Jack’s hands with furrowed brows. 

You stop eating mid chew, staring at Jack’s reaction. He hesitates, eyes darting up to meet yours. His lips part, then close, then part again. Julia looks between the two of you confusedly, jealously. The anger at her audacity to feel jealousy roars up out of you before you can control it.

“It’s from me.”

Jack’s eyes widen to an almost comical size. Julia’s mouth drops open.

“You two are…?”

“Yep,” you supply, standing up from the table with a sharp jolt. “And I’d appreciate it if you kept that information to yourself. Oh, and if you could, please stop flirting with my boyfriend.”

Julia nods slowly. 

You grab your lunch and dump the rest into the trash. As you put the empty container back in the fridge, you hear him standing, giving apologies to Julia about your behavior before slipping up behind you. You notice Julia leaving the break room as you turn around.

“I need to go,” you say, trying to weave around him.

He just steps in front of you. His arms are crossed in that delightfully sinful way he knows you like, a cocky grin on his face.

“So was I going to be told we are telling people about our relationship now or…?”

You look up at Jack and try to smile but it just feels as stretched thin as you do. You notice him deflate when you pinch your nose bridge in between your fingers.

“I’m sorry,” you tell him, “I should have told you. It was more of an in-the-moment type of thing.”

“You got jealous, didn’t you?” he continues grinning at you like he’s won the lottery. He stretches his hand out to softly stroke your upper arm. You feel your skin tingle where he touches.

“I mean, what girl wouldn’t, seeing her boyfriend get treated like a piece of meat all day?” you scoff, frustration flaring up with your words but falling away with the gentle strokes on your arm. “I think I should be rewarded for lasting as long as I have.”

He tilts his head. “Really?” a grin pulls at his lips. “How would you like to be rewarded, love?” A mischievous flirtation pulls at his words, his strokes now leaving hot imprints on your skin.

You duck your head, a smile pulling at your lips despite yourself. “Jack.”

He lets out a laugh and pulls his hand away. You mourn the touch the second it leaves your skin.

“I still think we should wait,” you tell him softly, “at least until the shift is over. Anything that comes after that can be handled, but I don’t need to have any more distractions today. It’s been bad enough having to see Joanna hanging off your arm all day.”

“Julia,” Jack corrects. You shoot him a faux glare. He chuckles. 

“Well, it might be hard…” Jack says, “I mean, I’ve already waited 12 months to tell people you’re mine.”

You pat his arm unsympathetically. “Well, that means you can wait a few more hours, can’t you?”

“You’re really going to make me put up with those flirty EMTs the rest of the night,” Jack deadpans.

“I’m sorry?” you really don’t know what he’s talking about.

“Being in a secret relationship works both ways, love,” he tells you, walking backwards to the door, “you have to be jealous about nurses, I have to be jealous about hot first responders. We both got it bad.”

6:45a.m.

“Waaait, where aaam I?” the young, blonde, completely shitface-drunk college girl asks, her eyes wide and bloodshot to all Hell.

“You are in a H-O-S-P-I-T-A-L, hospital. Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center,” Nurse Mateo says from where he adjusts the blood pressure cuff on her forearm.

You stifle a laugh. Sure, Mateo’s a bit grumpy with the girl, but she had tried to throw a chair at him when she was first admitted. She missed by about two feet, but the intent was there enough that Ahmad insisted on putting a pair of handcuffs around one of her wrists to her bed.

The girl just frowns. “Why’m in a h-o-sss…”

You lean over and pull up one of her eyelids, flashing your pin light into her left eye. It retracts normally, but she hisses like a vampire and pulls away with all her strength.

“You fell and hit your head,” you tell her, “almost got run over by a car. You’re lucky some friendly samaritans stopped to help you.”

She doesn’t reply. She stares at something over your shoulder. You take her distraction as an opportunity to look closely at the cut along her hairline. 

It’s got quite a bit of dirt and gravel in it, and is certainly deep enough to require stitches. 

“Well, hon, I know you’re drunk out of your mind right now, but I'm still going to let you know what we have to do,” you tell her, trying to get her to meet your eyes, “we are going to have to clean and put some stitches in that laceration on your head so it doesn’t get infected.”

The girl just stares past you. You finally turn. You look through the window to see Jack there, reading a patient chart on his tablet.

Your eyes roll without you even meaning to. Of course, yet another woman is interested in your boyfriend. You’re starting to think you’ll need to get him a neon sign to hang around his neck that says taken.

“She might listen to him better,” Mateo offers, “or I can sedate her. I am not trying to get another code hoola-hoop.”

You look back at the girl who’s clearly very out of it–staring at your boyfriend, even though it’s unlikely she could fully make him out–and let out a heavy sigh. You shrug one shoulder and snap off your gloves in the same swift movement. You stand and leave the room, headed to where your boyfriend stands next to desks.

Once you reach his side, you don’t have to say anything to grab his attention because he suddenly looks up like he sensed your presence. You offer him a weary smile and he returns it in full, turning his body to offer his full attention.

“What’s up?” he asks.

He’s in Dr. Abbot the ER attending mode now, all professionalism and seriousness. You smile to yourself at the memory of your first few shifts as a resident, crushing furiously like half the other women on the night-shift.

“I have an incredibly drunk twenty-one-year-old, BAC of .16%, large forehead contusion,” you say, “and… she’s been making goo-goo eyes at you since she first came in. She’s been fairly combative, so maybe you could come in and ‘work your magic’?”

“What I’m hearing is you want to use me as eye candy?” Jack’s words end in a soft laugh. “Man, maybe I should go to HR…”

You laugh at how ridiculous it all sounds. Just a few hours ago, you’d been upset at the very idea of your boyfriend being looked at by another woman. Now, you were using his good looks to win patients over. Screw it, your shift’s almost over. Anyone who tries to take your boyfriend in the last hour of your shift will have hell to pay.

“All I need is for her to be distracted enough that I can put some stitches in her cut,” you tell him with a grin. “Shouldn’t be that hard for you to stand there and look appealing, right? I mean, that’s what you do all the time anyway.”

Jack lets out a chuckle, but he nods his head and gestures for you to lead the way. You grin and walk him to the patient’s room.

The girl’s eyes immediately widen as she sees Abbot step into the room, like she’s looking at a movie star or something. You can’t fault her. Jack in his form-fitting scrubs and hair all disheveled is really a sight to see. 

“I got your boyfriend,” you tell the girl, shooting an amused glance to Jack, “now how about I look at that cut on your forehead, hm?”

She continues to smile all dopey and lovestruck as you put on a new pair of gloves and Mateo wheels a cart near you. The spot’s been numbed for hours, so she won’t feel a thing.

As soon as you reach to probe it, though, she shoots away from you. 

“Wait, waaait,” the girl says urgently. You stop, eyebrows furrowed as you look at her. “Can’t he do it?”

You sigh and look over your shoulder at your boyfriend. Jack shoots you a smile and a shrug as if to say “I don’t mind” and you can’t say you’re opposed to the idea. Anything you can do to get this girl treated and gone is what you’re going to do.

“Sure,” you tell her, “but play nicely.”

You stand and move toward where Jack stands, gesturing with a slightly annoyed smile toward the girl. “She’s all yours.”

Jack settles down in the rolling stool you abandoned and the girl immediately lets out a high-pitched, excited giggle. 

You watch Jack and the girl quietly talking together; him asking her what she was celebrating, her replying that it was her birthday, him asking what she’s studying, her telling him she’s in law school. All through the applying of the cleaning of the wound, the sutures, and then the bandage, the girl is calm and patient. Watching Jack work so nicely, so empathetically toward the girl reminds you why you fell for him in the first place. You stifle the fond smile pulling at your lips. You look over at Mateo and he gives you a shrug. 

Your eyes get drawn back to your boyfriend as he stands from the chair and walks your way. 

He stops in front of you and crosses his arms. “She’s all patched up.”

You nod. “I’m thinking I might order a head CT just to rule out any head injury.”

Jack smirks like he’d been hoping you’d say that. “Attagirl.”

You follow him out of the patient’s room and into the main foyer. You look around at all the doctors standing by desks and mentally prepare yourself for switching shifts. Dana’s already catching up with Lena, Javadi and Mohan are chatting and updating patient charts from their previous shifts.

You look over at Jack, whose body is angled toward you next to desks.

“You hungry?” he asks you. He’s looking at his tablet to give the impression to any nosey Nancys that he’s not talking to you. You bite back your smile.

You nod, thinking back to the small meal you’d had a few hours ago. “I could eat.”

“Chinese or Italian?”

You angle your body toward him. You draw a hand to rest upon his bicep. He turns his head toward you, surprised.

“I could eat an entire gallon of fried rice right now,” you tell him, a small smile curling on your lips. “How about you?”

Jack’s too preoccupied with the hand on his arm to answer immediately. “Uh, I guess I could get a stir fry.” As he speaks, his eyes draw up to meet your own. You squeeze his arm gently and he leans forward. “Are you coming onto me, Doctor?”

“If I was?” you say with a small smile curling at your lips.

“I’d tell you we still have ten minutes left on our shift,” he says teasingly, “I thought you didn’t want any distractions?”

You pull your hand away from his arm to rest back on the desk in front of you. “I don’t know about you,” you say, filling out the order form for the CT scan as you do, “but I'm tired of hiding.”

Your boyfriend chuckles softly from beside you.

You put the completed form into the outtake area. You go to turn toward Jack when your eyes get caught on a gathering of people near the front of desks. You pat his shoulder to get his attention and then follow the crowd forming near the front.

Ahmad’s at the center of the formation, and he has a big grin on his face. You watch confusedly as Jack weaves through bodies to get to Ahmad.

Your heart drops, now realizing the cause of the big commotion. Ahmad wraps an arm around Jack’s shoulder as he looks around the crowd. “And I’m happy to announce that the person with the highest bids is none other than our wonderful—“

You catch a glimpse of the paper in Ahmad’s hand as he gesticulates to the crowd and the words come tumbling out of your mouth before you can stop them. “It’s me?” you say, surprised. 

Pleased cheers go around the room. You look between Ahmad and Jack confusedly. Who’d put you in the lead? Last you checked an hour ago, Mohan was still the highest.

“In a stunning turn of events, an anonymous donor broke the tie and put her in the lead,” he continues.

You frown for just a moment as you look around the gathered faces, wondering who would do that, before realization strikes you like lightning. You grin as your eyes dart to Jack who innocently shrugs when your gaze lands on him. 

Something comes over you in that instance that has you moving through the crowd to your boyfriend. You gently grasp his face in your palm and place a chaste kiss on his lips. You don’t have a chance to savor it before a few more cheers ring out and you pull away, embarrassed by the display. Jack wraps an arm around your shoulders and gives you a side hug, leaning over to place a kiss on your cheek.

“Okay, okay,” Lena says as she breaks through the crowd, “this isn’t an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. You all have patients to see.”

The crowd disperses quickly after that. People give each of you thumbs up and congratulations as they leave, Ellis tells you to ‘find her later’ — obviously displeased about not being the first to know, and soon you and Jack are left alone.

“Well that didn’t go as bad as I expected,” Jack says, squeezing your shoulder once more before releasing you.

You cock a brow. “If you think that’s the last of it, you’re sorely mistaken. Robby hasn’t even found out yet and I think Ellis is going to brawl me in the parking lot.”

Jack lets out a soft laugh.

You look up at him with soft eyes, a small, flirtatious grin curling on your lips. “I’ll see you after rounds are shifted over. Want to order the food so we can have it back at my place?”

“If I ever say no to coming over to your place,” Jack says, “you can just shoot me, okay?”

You let out a barking laugh as you go to leave. Before you get more than a few steps, you look back at him over your shoulder.

“Oh, and tell any women who flirt with you that you’re off the market,” you say, “I’d hate to be fired because I assaulted a patient.”

It started like any other check-in. The patient was a difficult male in his late fifties, admitted for diabetes complications.

When you walked in to check his vitals and update his chart, he was in no mood for kindness.

When you tried to gently explain his new medication regimen, he snapped.

"Do you always talk like that? I know what I have to do, don't try to slight it up," he spat out, his voice was sharp. "You stand there smiling like an absolute idiot while people are suffering. You’re completely stupid. Everyone on this floor would be a hell of a lot better off if you just stopped showing up."

Under normal circumstances, you would have let it roll off your back, it was part of working in an ER. But in your current state, on days of fighting your own mind, his words echoed the exact thoughts you had been trying to drown out all week.

Everyone would be better off if you just stopped showing up.

A pain shot through your chest. Your smile froze on your face, cracking at the edges.

"I... I'll get you another doctor, I'm sorry," you managed to whisper before you forced yourself to walk out.

You spent the remaining hours of the shift moving on autopilot.

Every breath felt heavy.

Tears pricked at your eyes constantly, but you swallowed them back down, biting the inside of your cheek until you tasted copper.

You kept your eyes down, charting in silence, desperately counting down the minutes until you could go home.

The thing was, Dr. Jack Abbot noticed your shift immediately.

Jack was observant to a fault.

He knew your routine.

He knew how you usually interacted with staff and patients.

Seeing you slumped over a computer, completely silent, immediately set off alarm bells in his mind.

He watched as you signed off and practically bolted toward the breakroom.

Jack followed you, slipping into the breakroom just as you were gripping the edge of the sink, taking shallow breaths.

"Hey, my little sunshine,"

You jumped slightly. "Dr. Abbot. I... I was just heading out. Shift's over. i just needed some water."

Jack didn't move from near the door, his eyes taking in the subtle tremor in your hands. "I saw you with a patient earlier," he said softly. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," you said quickly, the words coming out a little too fast, a little too strained. You forced a smile that didn't reach your eyes. "I'm just tired. Long week, you know? Night shifts catching up to me."

"Are you sure, sunshine?" Jack took a step forward, his brow furrowing with concern. "You look pale. If something happened, or if he said something—"

"No, really, it's nothing," you interrupted, wrapping your arms tight around yourself as a fresh surge of tears threatened to break through your resolve. If he stayed any longer, if he was any kinder, you knew you would completely fall apart right in front of him. "Just exhausted. I really just need to go home and sleep it off."

Before he could push further, you grabbed your bag and moved past him toward the door.

"I'll see you tomorrow, Abbot," you murmured without looking back.

Jack stood alone in the breakroom, with an unsettling feeling tightening in his gut.

-

Jack's drive home felt unnaturally heavy.

He gripped the steering wheel tight, his eyes fixed on the road, but his mind was miles back in the ER breakroom.

Just exhausted. I really just need to go home and sleep it off.

Your voice kept repeating in his head, along with the desperate look in your eyes right before you ran out.

He had seen hundreds of exhausted residents in his career, but this wasn't burn out.

This was someone standing on the edge of a cliff.

Something isn't right.

Unable to shake the feeling, Jack pulled over and grabbed his phone. He dialed Lena instantly.

"Abbot?" Lena's voice answered after three rings. "Did you leave something here?"

"Lena, listen, I need a quick favor," Jack said. "Do you have the resident directory? I need one of the residents home address."

There was a brief pause on the line. "Why? Is everything okay?"

"I just... need to give her something she forgot. Just search for the address, Lena. Please."

Recognizing the dead serious tone in Jack's voice, Lena stopped asking questions, looked up the file, and read out the apartment number and address.

Ten minutes later, when he reached your door, he stopped right outside.

From inside came the sound of breathless sobbing. It was a sound that made Jack’s blood run cold.

He knocked firmly. "Sunshine? It’s Jack. Are you okay?"

No answer, just the sound of crying.

He rattled the doorknob. To his surprise, the latch clicked and slid open. It hadn't been fully locked, just pulled shut.

Jack pushed the door open, expecting a cozy apartment.

Instead, his breath caught in his throat.

The living room was a disaster. Pictures had been swept off the entryway table, glass shattering across the hardwood. Books were tossed from the shelves and a mug lay smashed near the kitchen counter. It looked like a storm had passed through.

Jack called out your name softly, his heart pounding in his ears.

The crying was coming from the bathroom.

Jack pushed the bathroom door open, taking in the scene in a terrifying second. You were sitting inside the bathtub, curled with your knees pulled to your chest.

His sunshine was completely gone.

In your trembling hands was an open bottle of sedatives. You were staring down at the pills, tears streaming down your cheeks, sobbing so hard your entire body shook.

Jack didn't make any sudden movements. Slowly and carefully, he sat on the toilet by the edge of the bathtub. He kept his hands open, visible, and low, his gaze fixed on your face.

"Hey," he murmured gently. "Hey... look at me."

Your head snapped up, your tear stained eyes were wide with shock and humiliation. "J-Jack? What... what are you doing here?"

"Just... had a feeling."

"Oh." you breathed through the tears.

"What are you doing, kid?" Jack asked calm but terrified at the same time. "Please tell me what is going on."

You looked down at the orange pill bottle resting in your trembling palm. The white pills inside seemed to gleam under the bathroom light.

When you spoke, there was no screaming. There was no explosive rage or wild hysterics. Your voice was quiet and completely exhausted; a dead tone that cut deeper than any scream ever could.

"I’m just... need to make it stop," you whispered, your eyes fixed on the pills. "I’ve been trying so hard, Jack. I wake up every day and tell myself that everything will be alright… but they make so much noise. They never shut up."

You pulled your knees a little closer to your chest, shivering violently.

"It’s like... there’s this constant noise in my head," you continued, your voice breaking on a shuddering exhale. "Telling me I’m taking up space. Telling me I’m a burden. Telling me that everyone is just... waiting for me to get out of the way. A-and, and, he said those things… it felt like the truth finally caught up to me. Maybe the noise in my head is all truth, maybe I shouldn't ignore it."

Jack felt a knot tighten violently in his throat. He reached out closer, his hand hovering over yours, desperately wanting to pull you out of that dark grave, but terrified of startling you. "Whatever he said it isn't the truth," he choked out. "He was a bitter old man, you know how they get."

You gave a small nod, a sad smile touching your lips for a split second before vanishing.

"I don't want to die, Jack," you whispered, the confession coming out so quiet he had to take a breathe to process it. The quiet hopelessness in your voice was suffocating you. "I really... I really don't want to die. I- I- I just want to stop feeling this."

Your fingers tightened slightly around the bottle.

"...but the voices, the noise, won't shut up," you sobbed softly, the tears flowing silently now, washing over your pale skin. "They just won't stop screaming at me. They tell me it's the only way to get some rest. I just want it to be quiet. I just want my head to be quiet..."

Jack couldn't hold back anymore. Hearing the agony in your defeated tone broke something inside him.

Very slowly, his hand enveloped yours, his thumb resting over the plastic cap of the bottle. He didn't rip it away; he just held your hand, grounding you, offering his calm against the pain consuming you.

"Let me help you make it quiet," Jack breathed, his own eyes were glossy now. "You don't have to carry the noise by yourself anymore. Give it to me, sunshine. Please. Let me help you."

It took time.

Jack didn’t force your fingers open. He didn't pull or pry or treat you like a threat. Instead, he just stayed there, his hand gently wrapped around yours, his thumb softly tracing circles over your knuckles.

"I know it's loud," Jack whispered. "I know you're tired. But you don't have to fight it alone. Let me take the weight for a little bit."

Every second stretched like an eternity. You stared down at the orange bottle, your chest heaving with ragged breaths as the darkness in your head warred with the warmth of the man sitting beside you.

"What if it doesn't get better?" you whispered in a fragile plea.

"We'll take it one step at a time," Jack replied without hesitation. "As slowly as it has to be. But I'm not going anywhere, kiddo. I've got you."

Slowly, the tension in your fingers began to yield. Your grip loosened.

Jack moved with care, sliding the bottle out of your palm. He slipped it into his jacket pocket, sealing the danger away, before immediately bringing both of his warm hands back to hold yours tight.

The moment the pills vanished into his jacket pocket, something in your brain snapped. A blind panic appeared. The sudden realization that your only way out, your only guarantee of making the noise stop, was gone.

"No, no, Jack,"

You lunged forward, your hands scrambling blindly against his jacket, clawing at his pocket. "Give them back, please."

"Stop. Hey, look at me, stop," Jack said, his voice was firm as he immediately intercepted your trembling hands.

"I need them! I need-" You wrenched your arms, trying to twist out of his grip. A physical agony ripping through you as you fought him. "Please, Jack, please, just let me—"

"I'm not giving them back," Jack snapped. He moved closer, released your hands to place them under your armpits, and pulled you out of the bathtub. "Come here," he said, gently but firmly holding your body against his. "I'm not going to let you do this."

"But it hurts," you sobbed, the scream finally tearing from your throat, raw and ragged. You pulled against his hold with everything you had left, your whole body shaking violently as tears blinded you. "Jack, please, give them to me, I can't stay in my head anymore, I can't do it."

"Listen to me," Jack choked out, he shifted, pulling you tighter against his chest until he felt your hands pressed flat against his chest, not fighting him anymore. "I know it hurts," he repeated, "But I'm not giving them to you, I'm right here, and I’m not letting you do this."

Your breath hitched into a gasping choke. You tried to pull back again, but your strength was completely spent under the firmness of his grip. Your forehead dropped forward, thumping hard against his collarbone as the panic burned itself out, leaving only grief in its wake.

"Why are you doing this? Why would you-" you wept into his chest, your hands twitching uselessly against his body.

Jack loosened his grip just enough to keep locking you against him in a protective vise. He buried his face into your hair, his breath trembling almost as hard as you were.

"Because I care about you too damn much to let you do this." Jack rasped and stripped of every drop of professional distance. "Even if you don't believe it. Even if you hate me for stopping you. I am not letting you drown in this. As long as I'm breathing, I am not letting you destroy yourself."

He held you, rubbing your lower back to calm your mind. You squeezed your eyes shut, clinging to him as the ugly sobs wracked your entire frame. You hated the exposure, hated the agony, hated that he was seeing you like this.

"It's okay, you're okay," Jack murmured again and again, his hand resting on the back of your head, pressing you close to his shoulder. "You're safe with me. We'll fight them."

You wept into his shoulder, crying real tears, letting all the hidden pain, the exhaustion, and the suffocating noise overflow into the quiet room.

And Jack just held you through all of it, offering his own heartbeat to drown out the noise in your head.

⋆｡˚☤🩺✧˖°.｡⋆💉

the pitt masterlist

The family watched Damian meet you and did not understand, at first, that they were witnessing the beginning of his undoing.

It happened slowly. Quietly. In fractions too small to recognise until the shape of him had already changed. Damian began returning from patrol before sunrise instead of lingering on rooftops until his muscles stiffened in the cold. He stopped treating injuries as inconveniences and allowed Alfred to examine them because you had once looked at the blood soaking through his shirt and said, very softly, You do not have to prove you can survive everything.

He began carrying snacks in his utility belt that had no nutritional efficiency whatsoever because they were your favourite. He rolled his eyes whenever anyone pointed this out, but he never removed them.

He permitted your feet in his lap while you read on the sofa. He allowed you to interrupt his work, to touch his hair, to steal the blankets, to speak to him when he was angry and remain beside him when he could not find words gentle enough to answer.

You were the only person who had seen him wake from a nightmare with his hands already shaped around an invisible throat. The only person who knew he sometimes stood in the doorway of your shared bedroom simply to assure himself you were still there. The only person who could say his name in a way that made it sound like a life rather than a legacy.

To everyone else, Damian remained composed. Dryly amused on good days, insufferably arrogant on most, and frighteningly controlled whenever something went wrong.

With you, he was different. With you, he rested his head against your chest and listened to your heartbeat as though committing it to memory. He kissed the inside of your wrist where your pulse fluttered beneath the skin. He let you hold his face between your hands, let you see the fear he had been trained to murder before it could fully form.

He told you things he had never said aloud. That sometimes he worried love was simply another weapon someone might eventually use against him. That he did not know how to be gentle without feeling exposed. That every good thing he possessed seemed temporary, and he had spent most of his life braced for the hand that would rip it away.

You had kissed the crease between his brows.

“Then we’ll be temporary together,” you whispered. “For as long as we get.”

He had hated the answer. He had held you tighter because of it.

Years later, when the universe finally came to collect, Damian remembered those words with such perfect clarity that he wondered whether some cruel part of you had always known.

The mission was supposed to be routine. That was what they always said after disasters, as though tragedy were more offensive when it arrived without proper ceremony.

There had been reports of unstable energy beneath Gotham’s east end. Strange electrical storms in cloudless skies. People vanishing from one street and appearing several blocks away with no memory of crossing the distance between. Windows reflecting rooms that did not exist. Shadows moving a heartbeat out of time with the bodies that cast them.

Tim had called it a spatial fracture. Bruce had called the entire family in.

You had insisted on coming. Damian had objected, which meant the argument lasted nearly twenty minutes and ended with you standing in the Cave in your suit, arms folded, watching him grow increasingly furious because neither of you was willing to admit the fury was fear.

“You are not invulnerable,” he snapped.

“Neither are you.”

“I possess considerably more training.”

“And I possess the specialised equipment Tim needs carried into the fracture zone.”

“Drake can carry his own equipment.”

Tim, who had been standing three feet away, wisely pretended not to hear.

You stepped closer to Damian. His jaw was tight enough to ache, and his gloved hands flexed at his sides as if he wanted to grab you, shake you, or pull you against him until the world reconsidered its plans.

“I’m going,” you told him. “You can either spend the mission fighting beside me or waste it fighting with me.”

His eyes narrowed.

You lifted a hand and pressed two fingers to the centre of his chest. “I’ll be careful.”

“You say that as though the universe has ever rewarded caution.”

“Then you’ll just have to watch my back.”

“I always do.”

The answer came too quickly. Too honestly.

Your expression softened, and Damian hated that too because tenderness made him feel as though his ribs had been pried open.

You leaned in and kissed the corner of his mouth. It was brief, little more than a promise pressed into skin. “Come on, Robin.”

He followed you because he always did.

He would spend the rest of his life wishing he had locked you in the Cave.

The fracture was beneath an abandoned rail terminal, buried deep under rusted tracks and old Gotham stone. By the time the family reached its centre, the laws of reality had begun to buckle. The tunnel stretched and contracted around them. Concrete flickered into marble, then steel, then something wet and organic before snapping back into place. Their comms filled with voices that sounded like their own but spoke words no one had said.

Damian heard Bruce shout his name from somewhere behind him. Then from somewhere ahead. Then in his own voice, directly beside his ear.

He turned and saw himself standing at the end of the tunnel. Older. Bloodied. Dead-eyed.

The apparition vanished before he could raise his sword.

“Do not engage with anything you see,” Bruce ordered through the static. “Stay focused on the device.”

Tim’s stabiliser had to be anchored at four points around the fracture. Once activated, it would force the overlapping realities apart and seal the breach. Simple in theory. Catastrophic if mistimed.

Damian remained at your side as the others separated.

He could hear your breathing through the comms. Quick, but controlled.

He counted every inhale.

One.

Two.

Three.

The tunnel shook. A fissure of white light split the air in front of you, and for half a second, Damian saw another Gotham on the other side. Its skyline burned green beneath a violet sky. Wayne Tower had been cleaved in half. The Batsignal shone upside down through the clouds.

Something moved within the opening.

A figure in black and red.

Damian’s own face looked back at him. This version was smiling.

Then the fracture collapsed inward with a sound like a scream being swallowed.

“Anchor three is placed,” you said.

Damian released a breath. “Return to my position.”

“I’m ten metres away.”

“Return to my position.”

There was a pause.

Under any other circumstances, you might have teased him. Instead, you only said, “On my way.”

The stabiliser activated before you reached him.

Tim shouted something through the comms. An error. A power surge. One of the anchors had been compromised. Damian never learned which words came first because the world erupted around him.

The fracture expanded. The tunnel disappeared into white.

Damian felt the ground leave his feet. He saw pieces of other worlds overlapping one another in impossible layers: the Manor abandoned and choked by ivy; Gotham flooded to the rooftops; Bruce kneeling in an alley over the bodies of two children; Dick wearing a cowl that had never belonged to him; Jason laughing at a kitchen table with white in his hair and a baby on his knee.

Then he saw you.

A thousand versions.

You, beside him at the altar. You, holding his hand in a hospital room. You, old and silver-haired beneath a flowering tree. 

You walking away. You dying. You killing him. You cradling his body and screaming.

Damian reached for you.

The stabiliser’s central core tore loose from its housing. It came towards him like a meteor, metal burning blue-white, fast enough that even his reflexes could not save him. His body twisted, but there was nowhere to go. The fractured air held him suspended.

He saw it coming. He understood, with perfect clarity, that he was about to die.

Then you hit him from the side.

Your shoulder struck his chest. The force threw him beyond the core’s path, and for one suspended, eternal second, your eyes met.

There was no time for words. Only the widening of your eyes. Only Damian reaching. Only the stabiliser core passing through the space where your body had been.

The light vanished.

Gravity returned.

Damian struck the ground hard enough to crack his shoulder. Dust filled his mouth. His ears rang. Somewhere, Tim was shouting that the fracture was closing.

Damian pushed himself upright.

You lay several metres away. Too still. There was blood beneath you.

At first, his mind rejected the sight. It sorted the details without understanding them—the angle of your arm, the ruined section of your armour, the dark pool spreading through the dust.

You could not be dead. The thought was not denial. It was fact.

You had kissed him less than an hour ago. You had promised to be careful. You were temporary together, but this was not long enough. This was not what the words had meant.

Damian crawled to you. His damaged shoulder screamed. He did not feel it.

He turned you over with shaking hands and saw the wound. “No.”

The word was quiet.

Almost calm.

Your eyes fluttered. For one delirious second, hope detonated inside him.

“Damian,” you breathed.

“I am here.” His hands moved over you, searching for pressure points, for something to bind, something to repair. There was too much blood. It slipped between his fingers, hot and impossible. “Do not move. Father is coming. Drake will stabilise you.”

You looked at him.

Not at the injury. Not at the blood.

Only him.

“Are you hurt?”

His breath caught. “You—” His voice fractured. He forced it steady. “You do not concern yourself with me.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No.”

It was a lie. It did not matter.

Your face softened. “Good.”

“Do not.” Damian pressed both hands against the wound. “Do not speak as though— You will conserve your strength.”

You coughed, and blood touched your lips. Something primitive tore through him.

“Father!” Damian screamed.

The tunnel had gone silent around them.

Bruce was already running. Dick was behind him. Tim stumbled through the dust, mask cracked, one hand clamped around his ribs. Jason emerged from the fading light with his helmet missing.

They all saw you.

They all stopped.

Damian understood their expressions. He hated them.

“No,” he said, louder now. “Do not look at them that way.”

Bruce dropped to his knees beside you. His hands replaced Damian’s, pressing hard against the wound, but Damian would not move away. He held your face. His thumbs smeared blood across your cheeks.

“Stay awake,” Bruce ordered.

You barely seemed to hear him. Your gaze remained fixed on Damian.

“I love you,” you whispered.

His entire body went cold. “No.”

“I love you.”

“You may tell me when we return home.”

“Damian.”

“That is an order.”

You smiled. It was small. Trembling. It was the smile you used when he was being impossible and you loved him anyway.

“You never could order me around.”

“Then I am asking.” His voice shook despite everything he did to control it. “Beloved, I am asking you.”

Your fingers twitched against the floor.

Damian caught your hand and pressed it to his mouth. You breathed in.

You did not breathe out.

For several seconds, Damian continued holding your hand.

Bruce’s hands had stopped moving.

No one spoke.

The fracture sealed itself with a distant, thunderous crack, and the tunnel became only a tunnel again.

Damian stared at your face.

He waited. Your eyes remained half-open, fixed on nothing.

“Continue,” Damian said.

Bruce looked at him. “Damian.”

“Continue compressions.”

Bruce’s mouth tightened. “Damian, the damage—”

“Continue.”

“There’s nothing—”

“Do not tell me there is nothing.”

The words came out low and deadly. Bruce did not flinch.

Damian grabbed his wrist and dragged his hand back towards the wound.

“You have survived worse,” Damian said. “Todd has survived death itself. There are Lazarus Pits. There is magic. There are alien technologies capable of cellular reconstruction. We will take them to the Cave and determine—”

“Damian,” Dick whispered.

He reached towards him.

Damian struck his hand away. “Do not touch me.”

Your hand was growing colder in his.

He looked down at it. His mind supplied the biological reasons automatically. Circulation had ceased. Heat was dissipating. Muscles would slacken before stiffening. Cells were already dying from oxygen deprivation.

He knew death. He had been raised by people who dispensed it. He had watched it happen in a hundred different ways. He knew exactly what it looked like.

“No,” he said again.

This time the word collapsed. His chest seized.

He pulled you into his arms so abruptly that Bruce nearly fell forward. Your head rolled against his shoulder. Damian adjusted it with unbearable gentleness, tucking your face into the space beneath his jaw as though you had merely fallen asleep.

“Wake up.”

No response.

“Beloved.”

Your blood soaked through the front of his uniform.

“Wake up.”

His voice rose.

The sound that tore from him next did not resemble language. It was not a sob. Not yet. It was something rawer, dragged from a place beneath speech, beneath dignity, beneath everything the League had trained into him. Damian curled around your body and screamed until the tunnel threw the sound back at them.

Dick covered his mouth. Jason turned away. Tim sank to the floor.

Bruce remained beside his son with blood on his hands and helplessness hollowing his face.

Damian screamed your name. He screamed at you to wake up. He screamed at Bruce to do something. He screamed at the sealed fracture, at the universe, at God, at every dead ancestor who had ever claimed Wayne blood was destined to suffer.

His body began to shake. Not delicate tremors. Not tears slipping quietly down a composed face. His entire frame convulsed so violently that your armour rattled against his. He clutched you tighter, one hand locked behind your neck, the other fisted in the ruined fabric at your back.

“No, no, no, no—”

The words fell apart beneath his sobs.

No one had ever heard Damian sob. They had not known he could make sounds like that.

He bent over you, forehead pressed against yours, and wept with his mouth open because he could not breathe through the grief. Tears poured down his face unchecked. Saliva and blood shone at his lips. Every attempt to draw air ended in another broken cry.

Bruce reached for him. Damian tried to shove him away, but there was no strength in it.

“You were supposed to save them,” he choked out. The accusation struck Bruce like a blade. “You save everyone. You always— You were supposed to—”

“I’m sorry.”

“Do not apologise.” Damian’s voice became a shriek. “Fix it!”

Bruce said nothing.

That silence was the final confirmation.

Damian looked at you again. Your face had gone slack against him.

He made a small, wounded sound, then turned abruptly and vomited onto the tunnel floor.

His body heaved until there was nothing left. He never released you. Even while choking, even while Bruce braced a hand between his shoulders, Damian kept one arm locked around your body, as though loosening his grip would permit death to take something it had not already stolen.

When the spasms stopped, he sagged over you.

His forehead rested against your chest. There was no heartbeat beneath his ear.

For years, he had listened to it in the dark.

Now there was only silence.

They had to sedate him to remove your body from his arms.

Jason was the one who finally did it.

Bruce could not. Dick could barely stand. Tim had disappeared into the Cave’s laboratory, already searching for answers no one had asked him to find.

Jason knelt in front of Damian while he rocked on the floor of the transport, your body held against his chest.

“Demon,” Jason said quietly.

Damian did not react.

Jason swallowed. “Little brother.”

Damian lifted his head. His eyes were swollen nearly shut. Blood had dried across half his face. There was vomit on his uniform and a smear of red beneath his mouth where he had kissed your forehead again and again during the journey home.

“They will be cold,” Damian whispered.

Jason’s expression crumpled. “I know.”

“They dislike the cold.”

“I know.”

“I must take them upstairs.”

“You can’t.”

Damian’s arms tightened.

Jason glanced at Bruce. Bruce looked away.

“Damian,” Jason said. “You’re hurt. Let us help.”

“I am not leaving them.”

“No one’s asking you to.”

“You are.”

The tranquiliser entered Damian’s neck so smoothly that he did not feel the needle.

His gaze flicked towards Jason’s hand. Betrayal moved over his face.

“You—”

“I’m sorry.”

Damian lunged. His body failed him halfway.

Jason caught him as the sedative took hold, absorbing the first furious strike and then the second, weaker one.

“No,” Damian slurred. “No, give them back. Give—”

His knees buckled.

Bruce caught your body. Jason caught Damian.

Damian fought even as consciousness left him, his hands clawing towards you, his mouth shaping your name.

Then he went limp in his brother’s arms.

Jason lowered his face into Damian’s hair and cried.

The funeral took place beneath a grey sky.

Damian did not cry. The family had expected him to. They had prepared themselves for another collapse, though no one knew what preparation could possibly mean. Dick remained close enough to catch him. Bruce watched every movement. Jason had removed all weapons from Damian’s room without mentioning it.

But Damian stood beside your grave perfectly still.

His face was blank. His hands were clasped behind his back. Anyone who did not know him might have called the posture dignified.

His family knew it was the stance he used when awaiting punishment.

When the service ended, everyone left except him.

Rain darkened his suit. It gathered in his hair and traced cold lines down his face. He stood before your grave until the soil became mud and the flowers bowed under the weight of the water.

Bruce returned at dusk. “Damian.”

Damian did not turn.

“You’ll become ill.”

“I am aware.”

“Come inside.”

“No.”

Bruce stood beside him.

For several minutes, there was only rain.

“I should have stopped them from coming,” Damian said.

Bruce closed his eyes. “This was not your fault.”

“They were only present because I failed to persuade them.”

“They made their own choice.”

“They chose to save me.”

“Yes.”

“I should have been faster.”

“You could not have been.”

“I should have anticipated the core’s trajectory.”

“No one did.”

“I should have died.”

Bruce’s head snapped towards him.

Damian continued staring at your name carved into stone. “They would have survived had I not been there.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I saw the path. It was intended for me.”

“They chose to push you out of it.”

“They made the incorrect choice.”

Bruce grabbed his shoulder.

Damian turned with sudden violence, knocking his hand aside. “Do not.”

“They loved you.”

“Then they should have allowed me to die.”

Bruce recoiled as though Damian had struck him.

The rage vanished from Damian’s face as quickly as it had appeared.

What remained was worse. A terrible, exhausted emptiness.

“They would have survived,” Damian whispered. “They would still be here.”

Bruce’s voice failed before he forced it steady. “And you would not.”

“That is the point.”

Grief did not make Damian kinder.

It made him precise.

He returned to patrol eleven days after your death and broke three men’s bones before Bruce ordered him back to the Cave. He dismantled criminal operations with the cold efficiency of an executioner. He stopped speaking unless information was required. He slept less than two hours a night and woke from those hours with your name tearing out of him.

He could not enter the bedroom you had shared. The first time he tried, he made it three steps past the door.

Your clothes remained folded over the chair. A mug sat on your bedside table with the faint print of your mouth still visible on its rim. Your book lay open, facedown, exactly where you had left it the morning of the mission.

Damian stood in the centre of the room. He stared at the depression your body had left in the mattress.

Then he folded to his knees.

The family found him an hour later with your pillow crushed against his face, shaking so hard he could not speak.

After that, he slept in the Cave. Sometimes in the chair beside the Batcomputer. Sometimes curled on the medical cot where Bruce had first placed your body after bringing you home. Once, Dick found him beneath the display case containing his old Robin uniform, staring into the dark.

Titus searched for you.

That nearly killed him. The dog wandered from room to room, sniffing beneath doors and whining whenever footsteps approached. He slept outside the bedroom for weeks. Alfred the cat sat on your side of the bed and hissed at anyone who attempted to move him.

Damian began leaving the bedroom door open.

“For them,” he explained when Dick noticed.

Not for himself. Never for himself.

He fed the animals. He continued your routines. He watered your plants according to the schedule on your phone. He answered the messages sent by people who did not yet know you were dead until Bruce gently took the device away.

He spoke to you when he believed no one was listening. He told you about patrol. He told you Titus had finally eaten a full meal. He complained that Drake had reorganised the computer files incorrectly.

He stood in the doorway of your room each night and said, “I have returned.” Then, after a pause, “You need not worry.”

As though you might still be somewhere, waiting. As though the dead could be reassured.

Tim became obsessed with the fracture. It was, perhaps, the only form his own grief knew how to take.

He reconstructed every energy reading. He ran simulations until the Cave’s systems overheated. He mapped the brief glimpses they had seen of other realities and theorised that the fracture had not truly sealed. It had scarred.

“A weak point,” he told Bruce. “Like tissue that heals badly. It could reopen.”

Bruce looked towards Damian.

He stood at the edge of the platform, listening. Hope was too bright a word for what appeared on his face. It was hunger stripped of all humanity.

“Can it be reopened deliberately?” Damian asked.

Tim hesitated. “Maybe.”

Bruce said, “No.”

Damian did not look at him. “What would be required?”

“Damian,” Bruce warned.

“What would be required, Drake?”

Tim’s eyes dropped. “More power than we can safely generate. A dimensional anchor. A way to select a specific reality out of an infinite number of possibilities.”

“Then begin.”

“We don’t know what opening it could do.”

“I do not care.”

“It could destroy this universe.”

Damian’s gaze sharpened. “Then improve your design.”

Bruce stepped between them. “We are not tearing reality apart.”

“You have violated the laws of nature before.”

“And paid for it.”

“You permitted Todd to return.”

“I did not bring Jason back.”

“You have worked beside magicians, gods, time travellers, and beings who rewrite existence according to whim. Do not stand there and tell me death is immutable when our lives have proven otherwise.”

Bruce’s voice softened. “They would not want you to risk the world.”

Damian laughed. The sound had no humour in it. “Do not use them against me.”

“I’m trying to protect you.”

“You are attempting to make my grief convenient.”

Bruce flinched.

Damian moved closer, eyes burning. “You want me to accept it. To sit quietly in a chair and discuss my emotions with a stranger until I can say their name without making you uncomfortable. You wish me to return to patrol, to attend dinners, to continue breathing as though that is not an obscene thing to ask of me.”

“No one expects you to be fine.”

“Then stop asking me to survive them.”

He turned away.

Tim watched him leave.

That night, he continued working on the fracture.

It reopened three months after your death.

Not because of Tim. Not because Damian had found some forbidden Lazarus ritual or threatened a magician into cooperation.

It opened on its own. A vertical wound of white light appeared in the middle of the Cave at 3:17 in the morning. Alarms screamed. The ground shook. Glass shattered in the trophy cases.

Damian was awake before the first siren.

He reached the central platform with his sword drawn as Bruce descended from above. Dick and Jason arrived seconds later, Tim stumbling behind them with his laptop clutched against his chest.

The fracture widened.

A figure fell through. They struck the stone floor and rolled, coming to rest beneath the Batcomputer.

The fracture sealed behind them.

Silence followed.

Damian stopped breathing.

You lay on the Cave floor.

Your hair was longer. Your suit was unfamiliar, black threaded with gold instead of the colours he remembered. A scar cut from your temple to the edge of your jaw.

But it was your face. Your hands. Your mouth.

For one impossible moment, Damian’s mind removed the differences.

You were alive.

The sword fell from his hand. It struck the floor with a ringing clang.

Your eyes opened.

You inhaled sharply and pushed yourself upright, one hand reaching for a weapon at your hip. You scanned Bruce, Dick, Jason, Tim.

Then you saw Damian.

Every part of you went still.

His name left your mouth like a prayer. “Damian?”

He crossed the distance before anyone could stop him.

You rose to meet him.

His hands closed around your shoulders, hard enough to bruise. He stared into your face as if searching for seams, for a mask, for evidence of illusion. His fingers moved to your jaw, your throat, the scar at your temple.

Warm skin. A pulse beneath his thumb.

“You are alive,” he whispered.

Your eyes filled. “So are you.”

Damian’s face twisted.

He pulled you against him.

The sound you made was strangled and desperate. Your arms locked around his neck, and you buried your face against his shoulder. Damian held you with enough force to hurt, one hand cradling the back of your skull while the other pressed flat between your shoulder blades.

His knees gave way.

You fell with him.

Damian struck the floor and did not seem to notice. He dragged you into his lap, touching your face, your hair, your wrists, unable to stop confirming you existed.

“You returned,” he breathed. “You returned to me.”

Your expression changed.

The grief within it became visible all at once.

“Oh,” you whispered.

Damian froze.

You lifted a trembling hand and touched his cheek.

It was the same gesture. The one you had used when nightmares pulled him awake. The one you had used before kissing him in the Cave on the day you died.

But something in your eyes was wrong.

Not absence.

Recognition. You knew his face, but you were looking at it like a ghost.

“You’re not mine,” you said.

The words entered him slowly.

Damian’s hands loosened.

Around them, the others remained silent.

Tim’s face had gone pale with understanding.

Damian stared at you. “What?”

Your thumb traced the edge of his cheekbone.

“My Damian had a scar here,” you whispered. “From when we were twenty. He tried to stop a blade with his face because he was showing off.”

“I did no such—”

His voice failed.

You laughed once, brokenly. “He always said that too.”

Damian looked down at your suit.

Black and gold.

Not yours. Not the one they had buried.

The scar on your face had not existed before.

He noticed the ring hanging from a chain around your neck.

His ring. A simple dark band engraved on the inside with words no one else knew.

You saw him looking and closed your fist around it.

“He died,” you said.

Damian’s body became rigid.

Your tears spilled over. “The fracture opened beneath Gotham. The core came for me.” Your breath hitched. “He pushed me away.”

No one moved.

The symmetry of it was too cruel to interrupt.

“I held him,” you continued. “I kept telling him Bruce was coming, that we had help, that he only needed to stay awake. He asked if I was hurt.”

Damian made a sound as though the air had been punched from his lungs.

You gripped the ring more tightly.

“He said, ‘Good.’ Then he—”

Your voice shattered.

Damian stared at you. You stared back.

Two survivors facing the shape of the person they had failed to keep.

Your hand slipped from his cheek.

“I’m sorry,” you whispered. “I thought you were him.”

Damian’s face emptied.

He released you. The absence of his touch seemed to wound you both.

He moved backwards, only half a metre, but it looked like an ocean opening.

Dick stepped forward. “Damian.”

He did not respond.

Your eyes moved over him with aching hunger. You knew the angle of his shoulders. The severe line of his mouth. The tiny crease beside his right eyebrow that appeared when he was fighting not to show fear.

“You look exactly like him,” you said.

Damian’s chest rose once. Twice.

Then the air stopped reaching him.

His hand went to his mouth.

The first sob came quietly.

A small fracture in the silence.

You stared.

Damian folded in on himself.

The grief he had spent months forcing into narrower and narrower spaces exploded. He bent forward until his forehead nearly touched the floor, his fingers clawing at the stone as if the Cave had begun to tilt beneath him.

You moved without thinking.

Your arms wrapped around him.

Damian fought you for one startled second.

Then he realised how you were holding him.

One hand behind his neck. The other spread between his shoulder blades.

Exactly as you had held your Damian. Exactly as his you had held him.

He broke. His body convulsed against yours. He seized the front of your suit and screamed into your shoulder, the sound muffled by fabric but no less terrible. Months of silence poured out of him in great, tearing sobs.

“They died,” he choked.

“I know.”

“They died for me.”

“I know.”

“I could not save them.”

“I know.”

You were crying too.

Damian clung to you like a drowning man clinging to the reflection of land.

“I buried you,” he gasped.

Your hand tightened in his hair. “I buried you, too.”

That sentence destroyed what remained of him. He sagged fully into your arms. You held his weight and rocked with him on the cold stone floor while the family watched two people mourn the same love through different faces.

No one tried to separate you. No one pretended it was a reunion.

It was not.

It was something stranger. Something crueller.

Something sacred.

You stayed at the Manor because there was nowhere else for you to go. Your universe had not vanished, as far as Tim could determine, but the fracture that had brought you here could not be reopened safely. You existed in their world without documentation, without a home, without anyone who knew you except for the shape of the person they had lost.

The first few days were unbearable.

Dick cried when you entered the kitchen wearing one of Damian’s old shirts. Jason avoided looking directly at you. Bruce became so formal that every conversation sounded like an interrogation conducted at a funeral. Tim asked questions until you snapped at him, then apologised for snapping, then wept when he apologised because your voice sounded exactly like the one in his memories.

Damian disappeared.

He remained in Gotham for four nights.

On the fifth, you found him seated beside the grave.

Your grave.

The sight of your own name carved into stone stole the strength from your legs.

Damian heard your breath catch and turned.

For a long moment, neither of you spoke.

Then you sat on the wet ground beside him.

The grave was covered in flowers. Fresh ones, despite the rain.

“They hated lilies,” Damian said.

You glanced at him. “My Damian hated lilies.”

“They smell like funerals.”

“That’s what he said.”

Damian’s mouth tightened.

You looked back at the stone. Your date of death stared at you.

Three months ago.

In your world, Damian’s grave bore the same date.

“What were they like?” you asked.

His eyes sharpened.

You almost withdrew the question, but then Damian looked at the grave again.

“They sang badly,” he said.

A wet laugh escaped you. “So do I.”

“They knew. This did not deter them.”

“It never has.”

“They cheated at card games and claimed that noticing was proof I lacked commitment to the spirit of entertainment.”

You smiled through the tears. Damian’s gaze lingered on it.

“They disliked tea unless it contained enough sugar to qualify as syrup. They stole my clothing despite owning more than I did. They spoke to animals as though expecting a response.”

“I do expect one.”

“Titus encouraged this delusion.”

You touched the grass near the headstone. “My Damian pretended not to enjoy dancing. He did, when no one could see him.”

Damian looked offended. “I do not dance.”

“You do in the kitchen.”

“I have never—”

“When you’re cooking, and you think I’m reading.”

He stared at you. You stared back.

Something fragile passed between you.

Not recognition, not exactly. The echo of it.

“He drew me,” you continued. “Constantly. I used to find sketches tucked into books and case files. He acted annoyed whenever I mentioned them.”

Damian’s eyes lowered. “I drew them.”

You nodded. “I know.”

The rain began lightly, whispering against the leaves.

Damian looked at your hand resting in the grass. There was a pale band around your finger where a ring had once sat.

“You were married,” he said.

“Engaged.”

He touched the inside of his coat, where the ring he had planned to give you remained hidden in a small velvet box. He had carried it every day since your death.

The universe had almost been symmetrical.

Almost.

“I intended to ask them,” he said.

Your face crumpled. “When?”

“The night after the mission.”

You pressed your fist to your mouth.

Damian turned away, but not before you saw the tears gathering in his eyes.

“My Damian proposed two weeks before he died,” you whispered.

“Were you happy?”

“Yes.”

The answer came instantly.

Damian nodded. “So were they.”

“You know that?”

“They told me.”

He did not explain when. He did not need to.

You sat beside one another until the rain strengthened.

Before leaving, you placed your hand against the carved version of your name.

Damian watched your fingers trace the letters.

“I’m sorry I’m not them,” you said.

His brow furrowed. “You have no reason to apologise.”

“Sometimes you look at me like you’ve forgotten.”

His gaze dropped. “I know.”

“And sometimes I look at you and forget too.”

Damian’s voice was almost inaudible. “I know.”

You stood first.

After a moment, you offered him your hand.

Damian stared at it.

Then he took it.

There were rules. You created them together because grief made careless people of you both, and neither wanted to turn the other into a mausoleum.

No entering bedrooms without permission. No using private nicknames from the other universe. No asking the other to recreate memories. No pretending.

The rules lasted three weeks.

The first one broke when Damian woke screaming.

You heard him from across the hall. By the time you reached his room, he was on the floor beside the bed, breath coming in ragged bursts. His hands were pressed over his ears. Sweat soaked through his shirt.

You stopped in the doorway. “Damian.”

“Leave.”

You did not.

His eyes lifted. For a second, they were wild with hope.

Then the hope died.

You felt it die.

“I said leave.”

“I heard you.”

“Then obey me.”

“No.”

His face twisted with anger. It was so familiar that your chest ached.

“You are not them,” he spat.

You flinched. Regret struck him immediately, but Damian had always been better at drawing blood than bandaging it.

You stepped into the room. “And you’re not him.”

The words silenced him.

Your own tears rose. “I know that every time you speak. Every time you stand too far to the left because he favoured his right knee after an injury you never had. Every time you call Tim ‘Drake’ with a different inflexion. Every time you look at me and I think, for one second, that the nightmare is over.”

Damian’s anger collapsed.

You knelt several feet away.

“But you’re still in pain,” you whispered. “And so am I.”

His breathing remained too fast.

You placed your hand on the floor between you, palm up. “May I?”

Damian stared at it.

Then, slowly, he crawled forward.

He did not take your hand. He pressed his forehead into your palm.

You closed your fingers carefully against his hair.

His breath stuttered.

“You do not have to be him,” you said. “I don’t need you to be.”

Damian’s eyes closed. “And you do not have to be them.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

You looked at him.

“No,” you admitted. “Not yet.”

His hand closed around your wrist.

Neither of you pretended the touch belonged to anyone else.

Spring arrived. The flowers around your grave began to bloom. You visited Damian’s grave in your own world through photographs Tim had managed to recover from the energy residue embedded in your suit. They were distorted and incomplete, but one image showed a grey headstone beneath a cedar tree.

You kept it beside your bed. Damian kept your counterpart’s photograph on his desk.

The Manor slowly learned how to contain you both. Jason began arguing with you about books. Dick stopped going silent whenever you laughed. Tim discovered that your technological knowledge had developed along a different path than theirs and recruited you into dimensional research. Bruce began saying your name without hesitation.

Titus followed you everywhere. The dog knew. Perhaps not the details, not the impossible mathematics of parallel worlds, but he knew you had the same hands. The same voice. The same habit of scratching beneath his collar before smoothing the fur between his ears.

The first time he fell asleep with his head in your lap, Damian stood in the doorway and stared.

You looked up. “I can move.”

“No.”

Damian entered the room and sat in the chair opposite you.

For several minutes, he sketched Titus.

Then his pencil shifted.

You noticed but said nothing.

When he left, the page remained on the table.

It showed your hands resting in the dog’s fur.

Not your face.

Not yet.

But yours.

Love did not return like lightning. It did not rise from the graves fully formed and demand to be recognised.

It came quietly. Guiltily. In moments neither of you trusted.

Damian began making your tea the way you liked it in your universe, not the way his you had taken it. You learned that he preferred silence after patrol, whereas your Damian had always needed music to come down from the adrenaline.

He discovered you hated being touched unexpectedly. You discovered he needed to know where you were in crowded rooms.

You did not fit into the spaces your counterparts had left. The edges were wrong. The weight was different.

Slowly, painfully, you made new spaces.

One night, nearly a year after you fell through the fracture, you found Damian on the roof of Wayne Manor.

Gotham glowed in the distance, ugly and golden beneath the clouds.

You sat beside him. Your shoulders did not touch.

“It is the anniversary,” he said.

“I know.”

In both universes.

One year since you had died. One year since Damian had died.

You took the ring from beneath your shirt. His counterpart’s ring turned slowly between your fingers.

Damian reached into his coat and removed a small velvet box.

Your breath caught.

He opened it.

Inside was the ring he had never given you.

“I considered burying it,” he said. “It seemed dishonest. They never wore it.”

You looked down at the band. “It’s beautiful.”

“They would have complained that it was too expensive.”

“I would have.”

“You are not helping your argument.”

A laugh escaped you.

Damian’s expression softened.

The silence that followed was not empty.

That was new.

“I loved him,” you said.

Damian looked out over Gotham. “I know.”

“I still love him.”

“I know.”

You swallowed. “Sometimes I think loving anyone else would mean I’m leaving him behind.”

Damian turned the velvet box between his hands.

“I once believed grief was the final proof of love. That if I permitted it to lessen, it would mean they had mattered less than I claimed.”

“What do you believe now?”

His gaze found yours. “That grief is not love. It is merely the shape love takes when it has nowhere to go.”

Your eyes burned.

Damian looked back at the ring. “They would despise what I became after their death.”

“That isn’t fair.”

“They would say the same.”

“My Damian would be furious with me for spending a year wishing I’d died instead.”

Damian’s jaw tightened. “As he should be.”

“You’re one to talk.”

“I have never claimed not to be a hypocrite.”

You smiled. Then the smile faded. “What do we do with it?”

“With what?”

“All this love.”

Damian was quiet for so long that you thought he would refuse to answer.

Then he closed the box.

“We carry it.”

“And if it gets heavy?”

“We allow someone to help.”

Your heart beat painfully.

Damian heard the change. You knew he did from the slight shift in his posture.

You reached for him slowly, giving him time to move away.

Your fingers touched his. Damian looked down at your joined hands.

“This does not belong to them,” you whispered.

“No.”

“And it doesn’t belong to him.”

“No.”

“It’s ours.”

His fingers tightened around yours. “Yes.”

You leaned closer.

Damian’s eyes closed before your forehead touched his.

For a while, that was all it was.

Warm skin. Shared breath. Two people alive beneath an indifferent sky.

“I have loved you in another world,” you whispered.

Damian’s throat moved. “As I have loved you.”

“I think part of me always will.”

“I would not ask you to stop.”

You drew back enough to look at him. “What are you asking?”

Damian opened his eyes. There were tears in them, but he did not turn away.

“For the opportunity to know you in this one.”

Your breath shook. “That sounds suspiciously vulnerable.”

“Do not ruin it.”

You laughed, and Damian smiled.

It was not the smile your Damian had worn. There was no scar at his cheek. No old injury in his knee. His mouth tilted differently, and sorrow had carved unfamiliar lines around his eyes.

He was not the man you had buried. You were not the person whose name waited in the cemetery below. Perhaps that was why you could finally lift your hand and touch his face without pretending.

Damian leaned into your palm.

“I cannot promise this will not hurt,” he said.

“It already hurts.”

“I cannot promise I will never look at you and see them.”

“I’ll probably look at you and see him.”

His hand covered yours.

“But I will learn the difference,” he said.

“So will I.”

When he kissed you, it was not a resurrection.

The dead did not rise. The universe did not apologise.

Your Damian remained beneath a cedar tree in a world you could no longer reach. His love remained in the ring against your chest, in the memories no new touch could erase.

Damian’s beloved remained beneath spring flowers on the Wayne estate. Their laughter still lived in the Manor walls. Their unfinished book still waited beside a cold bed.

Nothing was repaired. Nothing was replaced.

But Damian kissed you with tears slipping down his face, and you kissed him back with grief trembling between every breath.

You loved the dead. You loved the living. Neither love diminished the other.

Perhaps, in another universe, there was a version of you who had grown old beside him. Perhaps somewhere beyond the fractures and branching stars, Damian was grey-haired and irritable, still stealing the blankets while accusing you of doing the same. Perhaps there were worlds where you never met, worlds where you hated one another, worlds where one of you arrived a moment too late.

There were infinite possibilities. Infinite endings. Infinite graves. But here, in this wounded world, Damian held your face between his hands as though life were something precious precisely because it could be lost.

“I found you,” he whispered.

You pressed your forehead to his.

“No,” you said softly. “We found each other.”

That woke you a little more. You cracked an eye open, finding him in the dim, Dr. Micheal Robinavitch, a face that looked permanently carved by too many years of fluorescent light and bad coffee, and eyes that still, somehow, softened when they landed on you.

“I will,” you reminded him, voice rough with sleep. “I’ll be safe. I’ll be with Riley.”

His mouth twitched like he wanted to argue with the concept of safety itself.

You reached up and caught his wrist before he could pull away. “You take it easy today.”

He didn’t say yes. Robby almost never promised things he couldn’t control. Especially because he knew what today was.

Instead, he nodded once, small, and kissed your forehead like it was a seal, like it meant something official.

Then, close enough that his breath warmed your ear, he whispered, “I love you.”

And he left.

You listened to the soft sounds that followed, his bare feet padding down the hall, the muted click of the bathroom light, the whisper of the shower starting. Somewhere downstairs, the house gave a sleepy creak as it settled around itself.

You lay there for a moment, staring at the ceiling, letting the quiet wrap around you, letting yourself have the simple, stupid happiness of it.

Three years.

You still sometimes couldn’t believe you were here.

Not just with Robby, but with Jack too, your life braided together in ways that would’ve sounded impossible when you were twenty, bright eyed and brand new in scrubs, thinking love was supposed to look like it did on TV. A neat little box. A single name.

Now it was two men, two toothbrushes crowded into your same holder, two sets of hands that knew you like home.

Robby, quiet intensity, a storm held behind his ribs.

Jack, steady warmth, calm as a held line.

You rolled toward the other side of the bed.

Jack wasn’t there.

Of course he wasn’t. He’d worked last nights shift. You exhaled and buried your face in the pillow, trying to steal a few more minutes of sleep.

But your brain, your nurse brain, was already running through checklists. PittFest. Riley. Sunscreen. Water. Your phone charger. The tickets, 

The tickets.

You sat up so fast the sheets slid to your waist.

“Robby,” you muttered to the empty room, like calling his name could rewind time. “No.”

It wasn’t just the tickets in your head. It was the memory of him tucking them into the junk drawer because he didn’t trust himself not to lose them. It was you teasing him for that. It was him giving you that deadpan look and saying, “You’re the one who once lost her ID in her own scrub pocket.”

The junk drawer.

You threw the covers off and padded downstairs, the hardwood cold under your feet, the house still dim and quiet. You opened the junk drawer and rummaged past batteries and rubber bands and a half used roll of tape.

No tickets. Did I imagine that?

Your heart sank, slow and sour.

You checked again, like the tickets might appear out of spite.

Nothing.

You stood there in your oversized sleep shirt, Jack’s shirt, staring at the drawer like it had personally betrayed you.

Then you heard the front door. A soft close. Footsteps.

Robby appeared in the kitchen doorway in scrubs, hair still damp, jaw already set in that familiar expression he wore like armour.

He froze when he saw you standing there, wide eyed, junk drawer open.

“What’s wrong?” he asked immediately, voice low. Robby didn’t do casual “good mornings.” In his world, questions like that were always triage.

You swallowed, resisting the urge to jump him. “Where are the PittFest tickets?”

His face went blank, then tight. A slow blink.

“Oh, for—” He dragged a hand down his face. “I had them yesterday morning.”

“You had them?” you repeated.

“I know.”

“Robby.”

“I know.” His voice went softer, guilty in a way that made your chest ache. “I meant to give them to you before I left. Before I forgot. I forgot.”

You stared at him.

He stared back.

A beat passed.

Then, because you were you, and because the absurdity of it was too perfect, you started to laugh. Not even mean laughter. Just the tired kind that bubbled up when life insisted on being ridiculous.

Robby’s mouth twitched, like he wanted to smile but didn’t know how to allow it. “Don’t laugh at me.”

“I’m not laughing at you,” you lied through a grin.

“Yes, you are.”

“Okay, I am.”

He moved closer, slipped his hands around your waist, and pressed his forehead to yours. “I’m sorry.”

You kissed his jaw, a quick brush. “It’s fine. Where are they?”

He huffed. “In my jacket at work.”

You leaned back to look at him. “So… what do we do?”

Robby’s eyes flicked toward the clock on the microwave, automatic, like time was something he could control if he just looked at it hard enough. “Call me when Riley gets here. Swing by the hospital. I’ll hand them over.”

“Okay.”

He kissed your forehead again, then your mouth, brief, careful, like he was already turning toward the day.

“Be safe,” he repeated.

“You already said that.”

“I’ll say it a hundred times if I want.”

You smiled. “You take it easy.”

This time, he didn’t nod.

He just looked at you, like he wanted to store the sight of you away for later, for the moments when everything went wrong.

Then he said, “I love you,” and left.

☆·❋▪︎◇▪︎❋·☆ 

Robby liked the roof because it was one of the only places in the hospital where the air didn’t smell like disinfectant and fear.

The morning was cold enough to wake him fully. The city spread around him like a living thing, buildings catching the early light, roads still half asleep.

Jack was already there, leaning on the railing with a paper cup of coffee in his hand, shoulders slightly hunched against the wind.

“Thought you were done for the day,” Robby said as he stepped out.

Jack didn’t turn right away. “I was. I slept. Kind of.”

“Kind of,” Robby echoed, because they both knew what that meant.

Jack finally looked at him. His hair was mussed, eyes tired, but he still offered a small smile. “You look like you’ve been awake since 1998.”

Robby’s mouth twitched. “That’s funny.”

“It is.”

They stood in silence for a moment, the kind of silence that didn’t need filling. Three years into this strange, complicated life, they’d found a rhythm, partners in the ER, partners at home, two men who had learned to share space and love and responsibility without letting it become a battlefield.

Jack took a sip of coffee, then said, “How’s she?”

Robby’s gaze went distant for a second. “Sleeping. Excited to go to PittFest with her nephew.”

Jack’s eyebrows lifted. “That’s today? Isn’t that—”

“Yep.”

Jack exhaled slowly. “That’s a lot of people.”

Robby didn’t answer. He didn’t have words that fit the shape of his worry.

Jack watched him for a beat, then bumped his shoulder gently. “She’ll be okay.”

Robby’s laugh was quiet and humourless. “That’s what people say when they don’t know.”

Jack’s eyes softened. “Robby.”

Robby shut his eyes for a second, forcing himself to breathe. “I forgot to give her the tickets.”

That made Jack blink, then grin, brief and real. “You did not.”

“I did.”

Jack’s grin widened. “How are you alive.”

Robby shot him a look.

Jack lifted a hand in surrender, still smiling. “Okay. Okay. She’s going to swing by later?”

“Yeah.”

Jack nodded once. “Good. She’ll get to check on you today.”

Robby’s expression tightened again, like the thought of seeing her in the hospital, herself dressed for a festival instead of in scrubs, did something to him he didn’t like. It made the lines between his worlds too thin. He ignored why it was important she saw him today.

Jack seemed to understand without Robby saying anything. He looked back out over the city.

“Ready?” Jack asked finally.

Robby’s jaw set. “No.”

Jack’s mouth curved faintly. “Yeah.”

And they went downstairs.

☆·❋▪︎◇▪︎❋·☆ 

Back at home, you tried to reset your morning.

You showered, pulled your hair into something neat, then did what you always did when your nerves felt itchy, you cleaned.

It wasn’t frantic cleaning. It was the slow kind. Wiping counters, sweeping crumbs that didn’t exist, folding throw blankets like the house might fall apart if the edges weren’t straight.

Your phone sat nearby on the kitchen island, waiting.

When it buzzed with Riley’s text—outside!—your chest eased.

He was sixteen, all limbs and sarcastic humour, tall enough now that he made you feel like time had taken a sharp turn without asking permission. When he walked in, he had that teenage mix of swagger and softness, hoodie half zipped, earbuds dangling.

“You ready?” he asked.

“You have water?” you countered automatically.

He rolled his eyes. “Yes.”

“Sunscreen?”

“Yes.”

“Phone charged?”

“Yes.”

You pointed at him. “Don’t ‘yes’ me like that. You’ll thank me when you’re not a fried lobster.”

He grinned, and it hit you, hard and sudden, how much you loved him. How much he reminded you that life could be simple sometimes.

You grabbed your bag, then paused.

“The tickets,” you said.

Riley’s face went blank. “Tell me you have them.”

You sighed. “I do not.”

Riley stared at you, then at the ceiling. “I—okay. Okay. Cool.”

“Don’t panic,” you said.

“I’m not panicking,” he said, voice already climbing. “I’m just—why don’t we have tickets?”

“Robby forgot. We’re going to swing by the hospital and grab them.”

Riley froze. “The hospital? Like—your hospital?”

“Yes.”

He pulled a face. “Can’t he just, like… email them?”

“They’re physical,” you said. “And also Robby is a creature of habit who probably printed them on thick paper like it’s 2004.”

Riley snorted. “That checks out.”

You called Robby as you headed toward the car.

He answered on the second ring, voice brisk. “Hey.”

“Riley’s just got here,” you said. “We’re going to swing by, maybe in like 20 minutes, depends on traffic.”

There was a pause, small, but noticeable, like his brain had to move from ER mode to you mode.

Then, very softly, like it was only meant for you, “Fuck, baby. I completely forgot, again.”

You smiled despite yourself. “I know.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” you repeated, because it was. It was tickets, not tragedy.

“Come to the ambulance bay entrance,” Robby said. “I’ll meet you. Quick.”

“Okay.”

A brief exhale on the line.

“I love you,” he said, quieter now.

“I love you too,” you replied.

When you hung up, Riley gave you a look. “You guys are disgusting.”

You gasped. “Riley.”

“I’m kidding,” he said, grinning as he got into the passenger seat. “Mostly.”

You drove to The Pitt with the radio low and your brain half in festival mode, half in nurse mode. You knew every shortcut, every light that always took too long, every street where an ambulance might come flying through.

The hospital appeared like it always did, too big, too bright, too alive.

You parked near the ambulance bay and texted Robby—here.

Riley stayed in the car, slouching in the seat, pretending he wasn’t curious.

Robby appeared within minutes, moving fast, a man who belonged to hallways and urgency. He had the tickets in his hand, held like they were evidence.

You stepped out and met him halfway.

“Hi,” you said.

His eyes flicked over you, jeans, cropped shirt; all white, hair down. Not in scrubs. Not in his world.

Something in his face softened, then tightened.

“Here,” he said, pressing the tickets into your hand.

You took them, then reached for him instinctively.

Robby stopped like he’d forgotten how to accept softness in public.

Then he stepped into you anyway, pulled you into his chest, arms wrapping around you with the kind of force that made your breath catch.

“Mikey,” you murmured, surprised.

He didn’t answer. Just held you.

You let yourself melt into it for a moment, hands at his waist. You could feel his heartbeat through his shirt, fast, controlled.

“How’s the day been?” you asked quietly.

Robby’s throat worked. His gaze went past you, toward the ambulance bay, toward the doors, toward the endless possibility of disaster.

He didn’t answer.

Instead he pressed his mouth to your hair, breathed you in like he needed proof you were real.

Then someone shouted inside, some name, some call, and Robby’s body snapped into motion.

He pulled back, eyes sharp now, already gone.

“I have to go,” he said.

“I know.”

He squeezed your hand once, hard, then turned and ran.

You watched him disappear into the hospital, heart tugging in a way that didn’t make sense for something as small as tickets.

Then you forced a smile, turned back to the car, and waved the tickets at Riley like a victory flag.

“Told you,” you said.

Riley leaned out the window. “Thank God. Let’s go before the universe changes its mind.”

You laughed.

And you drove toward PittFest.

☆·❋▪︎◇▪︎❋·☆ 

It was loud before you even saw it.

Music rolled over the park in heavy waves, bass thumping, voices rising, laughter spiking. The air smelled like fried food and sweet drinks and sweat and sunscreen. Stages were set up across the park like little worlds, one blasting pop, another pulsing with EDM, another hosting a band that sounded like they were trying to make their guitars cry.

The crowd skewed young, teens and twenty somethings in clumps, hair dyed, arms linked, phones held high. There were older people too, parents hovering at the edges, couples strolling, staff in bright shirts.

Riley’s eyes lit up immediately. “This is insane.”

“Stay with me,” you warned, but you were smiling because it was impossible not to.

He groaned. “I’m sixteen, not six.”

“You’re still my responsibility,” you said.

He opened his mouth to argue, then closed it, because he knew you’d win.

His friends found him quickly, two boys and a girl, all of them lanky and restless, bouncing with excitement.

They greeted you politely, because Riley had warned them you were a nurse and therefore terrifying.

You let them go a little ahead, watching them like a hawk anyway.

You’d been in crowds like this before, but never without that low grade awareness humming in your bones. In the ER, chaos was controlled by walls and protocols. Here, chaos was open air and a thousand moving bodies.

Still, it was fun.

For a while.

You walked with Riley and his friends, bought them overpriced lemonade, rolled your eyes at the price of festival fries, laughed when Riley tried to act too cool for a selfie and failed.

You let yourself breathe.

You let yourself be a woman in her early twenties at a festival with her nephew, not a nurse who could hear sirens in her sleep.

And then, at some point, you felt the shift.

It was so subtle you almost missed it.

The music kept playing. The crowd kept moving. But there was… a ripple.

A pause in laughter somewhere. A cluster of people turning their heads in the same direction.

You saw a man, just a shape at first, moving fast through the crowd, shoulders tight, arm too rigid.

Then a sound cracked the air.

Not fireworks.

Not a speaker pop.

A sharp, awful crack that sliced clean through music and noise like a blade.

For half a second, your brain tried to reject it.

Then the second crack came.

And the crowd, thousands of bodies, reacted like one animal.

Screams. Shouts. A rush of movement so sudden it felt like the earth lurched.

People ran.

They didn’t run in a line. They ran in every direction, colliding, shoving, pushing, climbing over each other like the only rule was: not here, not here, not here.

You stood frozen for one heartbeat.

Then your nurse brain snapped on like a light.

“Riley!” you shouted.

You spun, searching, heart slamming.

He was there, thank God, eyes wide, face pale.

“Move!” you snapped, voice sharp enough to cut through panic.

He grabbed his friends automatically, pulling them close.

Another crack. Closer.

Someone fell nearby. Someone screamed your name, maybe, maybe not.

You grabbed Riley’s wrist and yanked him toward the edge of the crowd, toward a gap between a vendor tent and a fence.

“Go, go!” you barked, shoving his friends ahead.

They stumbled, but they moved.

A surge of bodies slammed into you from behind. You staggered, caught yourself, kept going.

Riley suddenly cried out, sharp, high.

You whipped around.

He was on the ground.

A girl was trying to pull him up, tears streaming down her face. “He fell—he fell—”

Riley’s arm was bent wrong.

Your stomach dropped.

“Riley,” you said, voice steady despite the roaring in your ears. “Look at me.”

His eyes locked onto yours, terrified. “Auntie—”

“I know.” You crouched, hands already assessing, already triaging. Clean fracture, likely radius or ulna, swelling starting fast. Pain sharp enough to steal breath.

“Can you stand?” you asked.

He shook his head, face twisted.

You glanced around. People were stampeding past, some tripping, some helping, some just running.

Another crack, closer still.

The shooter was moving.

“Okay,” you said, decision landing like a stone. “We’re getting you out.”

You grabbed his hoodie and hauled him up with every ounce of strength you had.

He cried out again.

“I’m sorry,” you said through clenched teeth. “I’m sorry, baby, I know. But we have to move.”

You wrapped his uninjured arm around your shoulders, then turned to his friends. “You—” you pointed at the girl, “stay on his other side. Help him walk. You—” you pointed at one of the boys, “stay close. Do not let go.”

They nodded frantically.

You moved as a unit, half dragging, half supporting Riley, toward the parking lot. You remembered there was a service road on the far side that led to a police checkpoint during festivals. If you could get there, you could get him to actual safety. Actual medical care.

Shots cracked again, rapid now, like the sound itself was chasing you.

The crowd surged, pressed, shoved.

Someone slammed into Riley and he screamed. You snapped your elbow out, hard, shoving the stranger away without thinking.

Your heart was loud in your ears. Your mouth tasted metallic.

And then it happened.

It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t slow motion like movies.

It was a punch.

A hot, sickening impact in your thigh that stole the ground out from under you.

For a second, your brain refused to label it.

Then pain erupted, white hot, blooming outward, and your leg buckled.

You gasped, teeth biting down on a scream.

Riley stumbled, half falling with you. “Auntie!”

“Keep moving,” you choked out.

The girl was sobbing, hands shaking. “You’re—oh my God—”

“Keep moving,” you repeated, voice suddenly hard. “Now.”

You could feel blood immediately, warm, fast, soaking into your jeans.

The bullet was lodged. You knew it in that same instinctive way you knew vitals at a glance. The pain had weight.

But Riley was still upright, still trying, eyes frantic.

So you moved.

You didn’t run. You couldn’t. Your leg screamed with every step.

But adrenaline is a liar and a miracle.

You hauled Riley forward, one step, then another, grinding your teeth so hard you thought they might crack.

You used your body like a shield when the shots cracked again.

You shoved the kids ahead when you saw the parking lot opening, the service road beyond it, the distant shape of police barricades.

“Go!” you screamed, voice raw. “GO!”

A police officer turned, startled by the sight of you, blood on your jeans, limping, half dragging a teen with a broken arm.

“Help!” you shouted. “He’s hurt—he’s sixteen—”

The officer moved fast, catching Riley, pulling him toward safety.

Relief hit you like a wave.

You’d done it.

You got him to the police.

You got him—

Your knees went weak.

Your vision tunnelled.

Your ears rang like the world was underwater.

You tried to take one more step and your leg simply… stopped obeying.

“Ma’am!” someone shouted.

Hands grabbed you, strong, urgent. Someone lowered you to the ground.

You fought it instinctively, still trying to sit up. “Riley—”

“He’s okay!” the officer yelled. “He’s okay, we’ve got him!”

Riley was crying, reaching for you with his good hand. “Auntie, don’t—don’t—”

You tried to answer, tried to tell him you were fine.

But your body was already tipping into darkness.

The last thing you felt was cold pavement against your cheek.

And the last thing you saw was Riley’s face, terrified, helpless, calling your name—

Then nothing.

☆·❋▪︎◇▪︎❋·☆ 

The call came through the radio like a curse.

Active shooter. Multiple casualties. PittFest.

Robby heard it and his blood went cold.

He didn’t think. He didn’t process. His brain did what it always did when the world tried to break, he went into motion.

But his heart— 

His heart remembered you in the ambulance bay, your arms around him, the way you’d asked how his day was and he hadn’t answered because he’d had this sudden, irrational need to hold you like you were something the universe might steal.

Now the universe was trying.

“Incoming trauma’s from PittFest!” a nurse shouted. “Two minutes out!”

Robby’s hand went to his pocket so fast it was automatic.

He called you.

No answer.

He called again.

No answer.

Again.

Again.

His chest tightened so hard it felt like a physical injury.

Dana, sharp, competent, eyes like a scalpel, caught his expression in a flash.

“What?” she demanded.

Robby didn’t look at her as he called again, knuckles white around his phone. “My partner’s there.”

Dana’s face shifted, professional concern, then something softer.

“Give it to me,” she said, holding out her hand without waiting.

Robby hesitated for half a second, then shoved the phone into her palm like it burned.

“Keep trying,” he said, voice rough.

Dana nodded once, firm. “I will. Go.”

Robby forced himself toward the trauma bay. Forced his hands to stay steady. Forced his breathing into something that didn’t look like panic.

Because patients were coming.

Because lives depended on him.

Because that’s what he did, even when his own life was cracking open.

☆·❋▪︎◇▪︎❋·☆ 

Jack heard it over the police scanner in the kitchen.

He’d come home after shift, showered, barely eaten, and crawled into bed. You’d been there, bright, alive, greeting him at the door with a kiss, hands on his face like you could wipe the hospital off him.

He remembered the way you’d guided him to the bedroom, your voice soft, your fingers gentle at his temples, easing the tension out of his shoulders.

“You’re shaking,” you’d murmured.

“It was a night,” he’d said, eyes closing.

“Breathe,” you’d told him, and he’d obeyed because he always did when you asked.

He remembered the weight of your hand on his chest, grounding him.

Then, later, he remembered the sight of you dressing, pulling on jeans, tying your shoes, while he drifted toward sleep, watching you like you were the best thing he’d ever seen.

Now his phone buzzed with the alert.

Active shooter. PittFest.

Jack sat up so fast his sheets slid to the floor.

“No,” he whispered, because the word came out like a prayer and a denial.

He grabbed his keys, his jacket, his wallet. His hands were steady, but his heart was a wreck.

He couldn’t get to you. Not into that chaos.

But he could get to the hospital.

Because if you were hurt, you’d go there.

And if you weren’t hurt, you’d still go there, because you were a nurse and you’d help and you’d forget your own safety for strangers.

Jack’s stomach twisted.

He ran.

☆·❋▪︎◇▪︎❋·☆ 

The ER became a pulsing machine.

Doors bursting open. Gurneys rolling in. Blood. Screams. The metallic tang of panic mixed with antiseptic.

Robby stood at the foot of a bed, hands already gloved, eyes already scanning.

“Twenty-year-old male, GSW to abdomen,” EMS called. “BP dropping—”

“On my count,” Robby snapped, voice like iron. “One, two, three—”

They transferred the patient.

Robby moved. Ordered. Directed. His world narrowed to airway, breathing, circulation.

But in the back of his mind, like a knife pressed against his ribs, was your name.

Dana kept trying.

Each failed call felt like a stone added to Robby’s spine.

Then the next ambulance came.

And the next.

And the next.

Jack burst through the ER doors like a man pulled by gravity.

Robby saw him and for half a second, half a dangerous second, his composure cracked with relief.

Jack’s eyes swept the room, frantic, searching.

“She’s not here,” Robby said before Jack could speak, because he could read him like a chart.

Jack’s throat worked. “Have you—”

“No.”

Dana held up Robby’s phone. “Still trying.”

Jack nodded tightly, jaw clenched. He moved to Robby’s side like he belonged there, because he did. He didn’t need to ask permission.

“Put me on trauma,” Jack said, voice steady despite the storm in his eyes. “Whatever you need.”

Robby swallowed hard, nodded once.

And the machine kept moving.

☆·❋▪︎◇▪︎❋·☆ 

It happened fast, and slow.

Fast in the way trauma always arrived, sudden, brutal.

Slow in the way Robby’s brain tried to process what his eyes were seeing.

A gurney rolled in.

A young woman.

Blood on her jeans.

Hair tangled.

Face pale.

For a fraction of a second, Robby’s brain refused to recognise her. Like if it didn’t label her, she wouldn’t become real.

Then her head turned slightly, and he saw the curve of her cheek.

The shape of her mouth.

The faint freckle near her ear that he’d kissed a thousand times.

Robby’s world tilted.

“No,” he whispered, so quiet it might’ve been swallowed by the noise.

Jack was at his side in an instant, eyes locking onto you.

His face went stark.

“Jesus,” Jack breathed.

EMS rattled off details, words tumbling, “Female, early twenties, GSW to left thigh, heavy blood loss, bullet still lodged, found unconscious near police barricade, O2 sat dropping—”

Robby’s hands were moving before his mind caught up. Gloves. Pressure. Commands.

“On three,” he said, voice shaking only once. “One, two, three—”

They slid you onto the trauma bed.

Your skin was cold.

Your lips were slightly blue.

Monitor leads slapped onto your chest, numbers flickering.

“Sat’s eighty-two,” a nurse called.

“Bag her,” Robby ordered, voice tight.

A mask was fitted over your face. Someone squeezed the bag, pushing air into you.

Your chest rose.

Then fell.

You didn’t wake.

Robby leaned close, eyes scanning your pupils, your skin, the blood soaking through the makeshift dressing on your thigh.

His hands pressed hard over the wound, trying to stop what was already escaping you.

“BP?” he demanded.

“Eighty systolic,” someone said.

“Large-bore IVs,” Robby snapped. “Two. Now. Type and cross. Start fluids. Get blood ready.”

Jack was already at your leg, cutting the jeans away with trauma shears, exposing the wound.

Blood welled immediately.

Jack’s jaw clenched, hands steady. “Tourniquet?”

“High and tight,” Robby said.

They applied it, the strap biting into your skin.

Your body twitched faintly.

Not awake, just reflex.

“Her airway’s not protecting,” Dana said, voice sharp. “She’s not responding.”

Robby’s chest tightened. He looked at your face. Your eyelashes. Your mouth, slack under the mask.

The room blurred for one dangerous heartbeat.

Then Robby forced himself back.

“Prep for intubation,” he said.

Jack’s head snapped up. For a fraction of a second, Jack’s eyes met Robby’s, two men silently acknowledging the line between doctor and lover, between saving you and falling apart.

Robby nodded once, like, hold me up.

Jack returned it, like, always.

Robby positioned himself at your head.

“Sedation?” Dana asked.

“She’s hypotensive,” Robby said, voice clipped. “Minimal. Etomidate. Roc.”

His hands were steady, but his throat burned.

“On my mark,” he said.

The meds went in.

Your body relaxed further, slackening into the bed.

Robby opened your mouth, slid the laryngoscope in.

The world narrowed to your airway, to anatomy, to the simple brutal task, keep her alive.

“Tube,” he said.

Someone passed it.

He guided it in, watched it pass through the cords.

“Confirm,” he demanded.

They listened. Breath sounds. Capnography.

“Good color,” Dana said.

Robby exhaled like he’d been holding his breath since sunrise.

They secured the tube. Hooked you to the ventilator.

Your oxygen saturation climbed, eighty-five… eighty-eight… ninety-one.

Robby’s hands remained on your face for one half second too long.

Then he forced himself away.

Jack’s voice was low now. “Bullet’s still in.”

“Get it out,” Robby said, voice hoarse. “We’re not taking her anywhere until we control the bleed.”

Jack nodded, eyes hard with focus. He moved closer to your thigh, gloved hands working with practiced precision.

Robby watched him, watched the way Jack’s control wrapped around the chaos, watched the way Jack’s hands didn’t shake even though they were touching you like this.

Jack widened the wound carefully, using instruments with the efficiency of someone who’d done this too many times.

Blood pulsed, dark and steady.

“Clamp,” Jack said.

Someone passed it.

Jack worked, searching, fingers steady, eyes narrowed.

Then, there.

A glint.

Jack’s breath hitched.

He grasped it.

Slowly, carefully, he pulled.

The bullet emerged slick with blood, small and ugly in the light.

Jack placed it in a tray without looking away from you.

“Bleeding’s slowing,” he said.

Robby swallowed hard.

“Good,” Robby managed.

His voice broke on the word.

He turned his head slightly, eyes flashing down to hide it.

Dana saw anyway. Dana always saw.

She stepped closer, voice softer than she ever used in trauma. “She’s here. You’re doing it. Keep going.”

Robby nodded once, hard, like if he nodded too gently he’d shatter.

They stabilised you. Packed the wound. Blood transfusion started. Fluids adjusted. Vitals slowly, painfully improved.

And through it all, Jack stayed at your side.

Robby stayed at your head.

Two men holding the line between life and death, refusing to let you slip.

☆·❋▪︎◇▪︎❋·☆

Riley arrived later, escorted by police and a social worker and a nurse who looked like she’d been crying.

His arm was splinted. His face was blotchy.

When he saw you, tubes, machines, pale and still, he made a sound that didn’t belong to a teenager. It belonged to a child.

“Auntie,” he whispered, voice cracking.

Jack stepped toward him immediately, blocking his view just enough to slow the shock, to protect him.

“Hey,” Jack said, voice gentle. “Hey Riley.”

Riley’s eyes were wild. “Is she—”

“She’s alive,” Jack said, firm. “She’s alive. She’s sedated. She’s on a ventilator so her body can rest.”

Riley’s breath hitched. Tears spilled fast.

Robby stood near the head of your bed, one hand on the rail, knuckles white. His face was composed in that terrifying way that meant his emotions were locked behind a steel door.

Riley looked between them. “This is my fault,” he sobbed.

“No,” Robby said sharply, too sharp. He forced his voice down, steadier. “No. Do not do that.”

Riley shook his head. “If I didn’t fall—if I didn’t—”

Jack stepped closer, hand on Riley’s shoulder. “Riley. Look at me.”

Riley did, barely.

Jack’s voice softened. “None of that is on you. Not a second of it.”

Riley’s lips trembled. “She got shot because of me.”

“No,” Jack repeated. “She got shot because someone chose to hurt people. She chose to save you. That’s who she is.”

Riley’s eyes crumpled. “I didn’t want—”

“I know,” Jack said quietly. “I know.”

Robby looked down at you, then away, jaw tight.

Riley took a shaky breath. “Can I—can I stay?”

“Yes,” Robby said, immediate.

Jack nodded. “We’ll tell you what everything is. We’ll explain. Okay?”

Riley nodded, clinging to the word like a rope.

☆·❋▪︎◇▪︎❋·☆ 

Hours later, time blurred into something thick and strange, you began to wake.

It wasn’t gentle.

It was like surfacing into a nightmare.

Your eyes fluttered open, heavy and confused, and the first thing you felt was wrongness in your throat. Something foreign. Something invading.

You tried to inhale and it fought you.

Panic slammed into your chest so hard you jerked.

Your hands moved instinctively toward your mouth.

Robby was there immediately, because of course he was, grabbing your wrist gently but firmly.

“Hey,” he said, voice low, urgent. “Hey, no, don’t. Don’t pull. You’re intubated. I’m gonna take it out, ok?”

Your eyes widened, terror exploding.

You tried to speak. You couldn’t.

Your heart rate spiked on the monitor.

You thrashed weakly, breath hitching around the tube, gagging against it.

“No, no,” Jack’s voice cut in, calm but urgent. He appeared on the other side of the bed, hands landing on your shoulders, grounding. “You’re okay. You’re safe. You’re in the ER. You’re with us.”

Your eyes darted between them, Robby, Jack, your brain trying to make sense of their faces through the fog.

The tube made everything feel like drowning.

You shook your head violently, trying to sit up.

“Hold her,” Robby snapped to someone behind him, voice cracking on the edge of fear.

Hands pressed gently but firmly to keep you from tearing yourself apart.

You sobbed around the tube, a sound muffled and awful.

Jack leaned close, eyes locked on yours. “Listen to me. You’re safe. You were hurt, okay? You need to relax so we can take it out. You’re ok,”

Your tears streamed sideways into your hair.

You tried to inhale again and the ventilator pushed air in, too controlled, too mechanical.

Your body fought it.

Panic attack, full body, unstoppable.

Robby’s voice broke. “Baby, please—please—look at me.”

You couldn’t focus. You couldn’t.

The room narrowed into fear.

Jack glanced at Robby, then at Dana. “She’s to be sedated. She’s going to self extubate.”

Dana nodded, already moving. “Sedation.”

Robby flinched like the word was a betrayal, then forced himself to nod.

“I’m sorry,” Robby whispered to you, and you could see it on his face, raw grief, love so fierce it looked like pain. “I’m so sorry.”

The medication slid into your IV.

The world softened at the edges.

Jack’s hands stayed on you, steady, warm.

Robby’s fingers held yours like he was afraid if he let go, you’d vanish.

The panic dulled, fading like a storm moving away.

Your eyelids slid closed.

The last thing you heard was Robby’s voice, broken, small, saying your name like it was a prayer.

☆·❋▪︎◇▪︎❋·☆ 

When you woke again, it was quieter.

Your throat hurt, raw and sore, but the tube was gone.

There was oxygen cannula at your nose. Tape on your skin. A heaviness in your leg that made you remember pain before you even moved.

You opened your eyes.

Jack was in the chair beside your bed, leaning forward, forearms on the mattress, his hand wrapped around yours. His head was bowed like he’d been praying, like he’d been holding himself together by sheer force.

Robby stood on the other side, arms crossed tightly, eyes red rimmed in a way you’d never seen on him.

When your gaze landed on him, his face crumpled.

“Hey,” you croaked.

Jack’s head snapped up. His eyes widened, then softened. “Hey, sweetheart.”

Your lips trembled.

Robby stepped closer, like he didn’t trust his legs. His voice was rough. “Hi.”

You tried to swallow. It hurt.

“What—” Your voice broke. “Riley.”

Jack squeezed your hand. “He’s okay. Broken arm. He’s here. He saw you. He’s safe.”

A sob tore out of you. Not delicate. Not pretty. A full-body release.

Jack stood and leaned over you, one hand cupping the back of your head carefully. “Hey. Hey. You did it. You got him out.”

“I—” You tried to breathe and it turned into another sob. “I got shot.”

Robby’s chin trembled. He looked down at you like he couldn’t believe you were talking.

“Yes,” Robby said, voice breaking. “You got shot.”

Your eyes squeezed shut. The memory slammed in, gunfire, crowd, Riley’s scream, the hot impact in your thigh.

You started shaking.

Jack’s arms went around you carefully, mindful of your IVs and monitors. “You’re here. You’re here with us.”

Robby made a sound, half laugh, half sob, and then he was leaning down too, pressing his forehead to your shoulder, gripping the bed rail like it was the only thing keeping him upright.

“I thought—” Robby tried to speak and failed. His voice shattered. “I thought I was going to lose you.”

You turned your head as much as you could, finding him. “Mikey.”

His eyes were wet. His face was open in a way you’d rarely seen, unguarded, devastated.

“You were scared for me,” you whispered.

“I know,” he choked.

Jack stroked your hair with slow, repetitive motions, grounding you. “You’re okay. We’re right here.”

You sobbed again, quieter now, tears leaking into Jack’s shirt.

Robby’s hand found your cheek, trembling. He wiped your tears with his thumb like he couldn’t stand the sight of them.

“I’m sorry,” you whispered again, because guilt always crawled into you even when you didn’t deserve it. “I’m sorry.”

Robby’s voice turned sharp, immediate. “Don’t. Don’t apologise.”

Jack nodded, firm. “No apologies. Not from you.”

You stared at them, breath shaky, heart aching.

“How long?” you whispered.

“Couple hours since extubation attempt,” Jack said softly. “We kept you sedated. Your body needed it.”

You swallowed. “I tried to pull it out.”

Robby’s mouth twisted, pain flickering. “Yeah.”

You flushed with shame. “I panicked.”

Jack’s voice was gentle. “Anyone would.”

Robby leaned closer, voice low. “You were fighting. That’s all.”

Your eyes filled again.

Jack kissed your temple. “We’re going to get you through this. Okay?”

You nodded weakly.

Robby pressed his lips to your forehead, the same kiss he’d given you that morning.

“Be safe,” he whispered, voice cracking.

You let out a shaky laugh through tears. “I tried.”

Jack huffed softly. “You did. You were a hero.”

You shook your head. “I was just—”

“You were you,” Robby said firmly. “And that’s the problem. You never stop.”

Jack’s hand tightened around yours. “We’ll help you learn how to stop sometimes.”

You looked between them, your two men, your two anchors, and something inside you unclenched.

“Can… can I see Riley?” you whispered.

Jack nodded immediately. “Yeah. We’ll bring him in. We’ll do it slowly.”

Robby swallowed, eyes still wet. “And we’re not leaving your side.”

You exhaled, the first real breath you’d taken since the park.

“Okay,” you whispered.

Jack brushed your hair back gently. “Okay.”

And for the first time since the gunfire, your body believed it,

You were safe.

You were alive.

You were loved.

The problem was Frank.

He didn't mean to leak your domestic life into the hospital, but off duty habits were hard to break.

The second the stress spiked, his filter completely vanished, and the habit of calling you baby slipped out effortlessly, everywhere, and in front of everyone.

"Hand me those trauma shears, baby," Frank murmured without looking up, his gloved fingers holding pressure on a lacerated thigh.

You passed them to him instantly, seamlessly anticipating his next move. "Suction is ready."

"Good girl," he hummed, flicking his possessive gaze up to meet yours.

Later at the nurses' station, you were furiously typing up chart notes when a hot cup of coffee was placed near your elbow.

"Drink up, baby. You’ve been on your feet for ten hours," Frank said, resting a hand briefly on the small of your back, just long enough to send a quiet spark through you before walking off to check on another patient.

You took a sip, smiling to yourself, entirely oblivious to the tall figure standing by the whiteboard.

Dr. Robby spent the next hour observing. First, it was Frank at the central desk: "Baby, where's the lab report on the abdominal pain in Bay 2?"

Then, in the trauma bay: "Watch that line, baby, patient's slipping."

Finally, near the breakroom, as you handed Frank a fresh pair of scrubs: "Thanks, baby, you're a lifesaver."

Dr. Robby blinked, slowly processing the density of pet names dropped in a single hour span. He crossed his arms with a slow smirk spreading across his face.

"So," Robby said, stepping into your line of sight as Frank finished tossing his dirty scrubs into the hamper. "Baby, huh?"

Frank paused. "What about it?"

"I mean, I knew you guys were a solid team, but 'baby' three times in the last hour?" Robby’s eyes darted between you, standing flushed by the counter, and Frank, who was trying, and failing, to keep his cool exterior intact.

Robby snapped his fingers, his grin widening. "Oh. Oh. You two are dating!"

You swallowed hard, your cheeks burning. "Dr. Robby, it's-"

"Don't bother," Robby chuckled, holding his hands up in defeat. "Just try to keep the pet names down to two per shift, alright?"

Frank rolled his eyes, but a helpless grin broke through as he reached over and lightly tugged your arm closer to his side. "No promises, Robinavitch."

As Robby started walking away down the corridor, you buried your face in your hands, groaning softly. "He's going to be insufferable."

​Frank chuckled, reaching out and pulling your hands away from your face.

​"As long as I can keep calling baby at least two times per shift," Frank murmured, his thumb gently catching your chin to lift your gaze to his.

​Before you could protest, he leaned down and pressed a kiss against your lips, lazy, warm, and entirely unbothered by the location. When he pulled back just an inch, his lips brushed against yours as he murmured with a playful smirk, "You doing okay, baby?"

A voice interrupted the moment from afar.

​"I HEARD THAT! AND NO KISSING HERE!" Dr. Robby shouted.