portrait of a dead girl

Before she can expertly dodge your question, everyone — Shen, Walsh, and Mateo — come back with their drinks. You slowly rise to your feet and take a sidestep, so Mateo and Walsh can slip into the booth. Having already been squished enough, you're willing to take only the corner this time.

You settle in again, next to Walsh, the leather under you creaking with every drag of your thighs.

“Are you both always so fun at parties?” Emery sips through a straw, eyes darting between you and Santos.

“This one —” Shen points a thumb at you “— is already uptight as it is. And Santos is just a poor influence. Don't think I've ever seen her smile, actually.”

“Yeah, she only smiles on her day shift when huckle– Dennis gets pissed on. Or, something of the same sorts,” you join in, ignoring the dig at you.

However, everyone's attention is quickly stolen away by the lives of the party again.

‘CAUSE I STILL FUCKING LOVE YOU, BABE OOoooOohhhOOO

You cannot stifle your laughter anymore when Mateo cheers them on, hooting with his palms cupped around his mouth. The best part is that he looks genuine and sincere, rooting for them no hint of mockingness.

Yeah, you wish you could be 13 again.

It's your turn to miserably and longingly watch the teenager birthday party taking its full swing, completely drowning out the overlapping conversations — and petty arguing — of your colleagues.

You smile at one of the young girls on stage, giving her a lazy wave. Suddenly, she's flushing and whispering in her friend's ear, presumably about a “cool adult” that interacted with her. You wish you could tell her that even though you might look the part — the sitcom adult who sits in a booth with a friend group and drinks — your life couldn't be less boring.

You work at the PTMC, go home, watch TV, fall asleep in front of the said TV, and daydream of a certain honey-eyed doctor. Maybe he's your rebound crush after your recent breakup. Not to mention, a deeply inappropriate one, both work and age wise.

Speak of the devil.

Your face snaps up when you hear your name in that low, raspy, voice. You register his face, tired under the dim lights, and his perfect salt & pepper curls frazzled from the ride over. He's in a white t-shirt stretched taut across his pecs, and a simple pair of black jeans. Though, nothing about how he looks is ‘simple.’

“Doctor…” you speak slowly, narrowing your eyes, and making a show of thinking very, very deeply. You snap your fingers in front of your chin, Before pointing your index at him, “aha! Doctor Abbot, attending of the nightcrawlers. What will you drink?”

The corner of his lips quirk up, amused by your liquor-induced playfulness. “Two of whatever you're having,” he replies, smoothly stealing the glass right out of your hands, holding it in front of his eyes to examine the brown liquid.

“Long island?” 

“Yep. L-I-I-T, it's pretty L-I-T. Lit. It means cool.”

“I know what lit means.” He takes in your sluggish blinks, the drop in your usually tight shoulders, and the almost giddy smile on your lips. “How many have you had?”

You hold up one digit, wiggling it back and forth for emphasis. 

Jack tuts, “L-I-G-H-T-W-E-I-G-H-T”

“F-U-K-C-Y-O-U,” you proudly smile at your mature retort, mind completely unbothered that your mouth just sweared at your boss. 

He shakes his head, contemplating if he should tell you that you spelled your insult wrong.

“Jesus…” he watches you carefully for a second, before handing your cocktail back to you. His thick fingers brush against yours, sending a jolt up your arm.

“Jack! Man, we thought you abandoned your children,” Shen exclaims, realising along with everyone the presence of the new arrival, and bringing you out of your head.

“Well, Shen, daddy's gotta come home.” 

Daddy. 

Well, technically, he is the attending, so he is the daddy. Daddy of the department, daddy of the floor, daddy of your–

Getting a little off-track there.

You clear your throat, trying to push the sinful thoughts away, putting them back in the compartment that only opens itself in sleepless, late, horny, nights.

“Do you wanna sit orrrr…?” Trinity trails off, jutting her chin towards the karaoke stage.

You bring your glass to your lips again, savouring the citrusy taste on your tongue. You expect to hear the scrape of a chair's legs dragged along the floor — Jack, as always, hauling an extra seat to sit at the head of the table. You always thought it was a way to maintain boundaries even outside the workplace, to make sure there's a tangible difference to avoid misuse of power dynamics. Your attending was quite easygoing, as far as bosses went, but that never deterred his ability to be responsible. 

Instead, “Yeah, there's some space here.”

You don't realise you're being spoken to, until you look and everyone is staring expectantly at you. “Wha– oh.”

You try to visibly measure the space next to you, barely larger than your hand. You look back up at the towering man, raising his grey brows in impatience. 

You move your ass.

As soon as he's shifting next to you, your senses are overwhelmed by his dominating presence. Your entire side is pressed against his. And he must've showered before coming here, because you can smell the soap he must use — cedarwood. You're thankful for the alcohol in your system, calming your nerves enough to not send a body-wide emergency signal.

“So…” you begin, taking in his face, which is so, so close to you. The disco lights of the place dance on his features, and you try not to chase the shine with your fingers. 

“Sorry for crashing. Must be a bummer to have your boss here,” he speaks louder than usual, voice trying to carry over the singing, though his attention is on waving over a server.

You wait until Jack orders a whiskey for himself, continuing after the waiter leaves, “oh, you're not a regular boss. You're a cool boss.”

“Yeah? Is it because I yell a lot less than Robby?”

“That and more.”

“Care to explain, nurse?”

Biceps. Charming. Funny. Biceps. Competent. Sexy. Hardworking. Generous. Biceps.

“No.” You lean forward to catch the view of the little pop-stars again. It seems they've moved on from Olivia Rodrigo to…more Olivia Rodrigo. It's a song you've only recently heard — something about higher standards and expectations.

THEY SEEM SO DESPERATE FOR LOVIN’, BUT BABY, I'M NOT…

The loud singing must have called for his attention too, because now he’s focusing intently on the concert since the first time he came here. 

NOW I TAKE CAREFUL CONSIDERATIONS

I'M NOT KISSING ANY BOY THAT IS PASSIVE…

His eyebrows draw together in concern, and almost to himself, he murmurs, “they shouldn't be kissing any boys right now.”

“They're 13, grandpa,” your voice snaps his gaze to you again, “kissing at that age is normal.”

“I'm 50. Anyone under 25 is a kid to me. They—” he gestures to the pack, “—are practically toddlers to me.”

“To remind you, you also have staff in their 20’s working for you. We, very much, aren't kids.”

That makes him pause. If you would've blinked, you would've failed to notice how his gaze dropped to your lips for just a second, before flicking up.

The server brings his order, and Jack is quick to take a swig. “That's what I try to remind myself, too.”

“Do you think Stacy would mind if I join them?” you whisper in Jack's ear with the eager expression of a dog waiting for its owner. You're practically vibrating in your seat, knee bouncing from the third drink you definitely should've refused. 

But it's not like you're the only one stupidly drunk. Santos and Mateo are at the pool table, losing to strangers. Shen is in a corner on a facetime with his wife — like, just go back home — and Walsh is nowhere to be seen. So, it’s a thing to wonder why you and your senior are still sitting glued together. You are drunk. What reason does the most rational man you know have?

“Who is Stacy?” He shifts, trying to maintain some semblance of a physical distance between you both, but you just end up closing the space again.

“The birthday girl, Dr. Abbot!”

“The 13 year-old on the karaoke with her friends?”

“Yes!”

Jack sighs, “you don't have to exclaim everything, you know.”

“YES, I DO!”

He physically recoils at your sudden raise in pitch. He takes in your erratic energy: the restless leg, the speedy talking, eyes blown wide. His palm slowly reaches out, firmly cupping your knee, bringing the bouncing to a halt. “Okay, exclaim away. But–”

“But?”

He pinches the bridge of his nose, taking the deep breath of a man who wasn't expecting to babysit his drunk colleague today. 

“Okay, this time, we let me finish talking. Yeah?” You immediately nod your head. In reality, you have no idea what he just said. You only heard the “yeah?” in his authoritative voice, and agreed.

“I'm very concerned you know her name.”

“Who? Stacy's?”

“Exactly. You're referring to a random teenage girl as if she's a close, personal, friend,” he explains carefully, like he's talking to a child.

“Nooo! She's not a friend, doc.”

“Of course, that would be creep–”

“But I want to be her friend sooo bad,” you whine, staring adoringly at Stacy and friends like they hung the moon. “Just look at them! They did Olivia, moved to Glee's soundtrack, and are now doing Olivia again. They're sooo cool.”

Jack shoots them a quick look and lets out a small huff of laughter when he sees the deep longing in your eyes, a pure look of awe. 

He says your name, and your gaze darts straight from the stage, and into his eyes again. It always steals your breath when he calls you by your first name, anchoring you completely to him with just one word. One person should never have so much power.

“I'm cutting you off.”

“What?” Your mouth hangs open, words blurting out from shock, “like, from your life?”

“What? No–” he uses his free hand to pry the drink out of your hand. He lifts the glass, swinging it in front of your eyes, before setting it far on the table. Out of your reach. “From drinking. No more alcohol for you.”

A huge sigh of relief leaves you, and you dramatically clutch your palm to your chest. “That's nice. It would've been hard to work together with beef between us.”

“It's already hard to work with you, sweetheart,” he says under his breath, scanning your face for any signs of distress.

Your brows draw tight in confusion. Huh, what does that mean?

OH BECAUSE MY HEAD IS FULL OF POISON 

AND MY HEART IS FULL OF DOUBTS…

The sound of collective cries panics you before you realise sad girl hours have started. You look from Stacy to her other two friends, fortunately not knowing their names. They're clutching the mics tightly enough that you're sure one of them ought to break the device. The singing is a little uneasy on the ears, but you find yourself softly smiling. 

Then frowning.

And next you know, your eyes are welling up with tears when the song comes to an end.

IT'LL NEVER BE THE CURE

IT'LL NEVER BE…

Poor girls. They're crying thinking about their eighth grade crush, but they have no idea what's coming for them. One day, they'll be in their 20's and a stupid man with a stupid name will tell them he loves them, and they will believe him, even though he does nothing to prove it. Poor, poor, girls.

You're not sure if it's them you're upset about, since you feel like the only poor, poor person in this entire room.

“Are they okay?” Jack has forgotten his drink, attention fixated on the young girls. His hand unknowingly slides off your knee, hovering near the edge of the table, as if he's about to get up any second. “Why is the girl in the green dress crying? She can't possibly relate to this. Where are their parents?”

“I'm gonna go make sure–” He turns to look at you for assurance, but he sees a fat tear rolling down your flushed cheek. Suddenly, the concern in his eyes is replaced by panic. “Woah, hey, what's wrong? Do you feel dizzy? Overstimulated?”

His head tips down to map your face. You were fine just a few minutes ago. Now, you're tearing up, and your breath is hitching, and his hands are hovering unsurely near your face.

“It's just,” you sniffle, “it's just so…”

“Sad…?” He prompts.

“Yes!” Your eyes flash like he just invented a new word. “Exactly! See, you have the heart of a teenage girl.”

He shakes his head, “I'm 50, but thank you.”

“Why do you tell me you're 50, like 50 times a day? We get it, grandpa.” You sniffle again, trying to look at the stage. But Jack effectively blocks your view with his sturdy frame, instead offering you his handkerchief like some sort of a gentleman from a 60's rom-com.

You wipe your nose in what you hope is in a dignified fashion, barely hiccuping a thank-you to him. “Is it that you forget it too? And you have to keep reminding me so you don't forget it yourself?”

He sighs, finally swiping his thumb under your eye to brush the wetness away. 

“Believe me, I try to forget it.”

As if catching up to what he just did, his hands rush towards the safe territory of your upper arms.

You nod thoughtfully, “that makes sense.”

“Yeah?” You watch as hope flickers in his eyes. He worries his lower lip between his teeth, as if contemplating if he should say something. “You understand why?”

“Mhm,” you nod again. “If I was 50, I'd be trying to forget my age too,” you say completely sincerely, eyes swimming with sympathy. 

His head falls forward, and his shoulders shake. For a second, your drunk mind makes you believe you made him cry. But when he looks up at you again, he's flashing an amused grin, shaking his head at you.

“Real funny.”

“I wasn't trying to be funny.”

WENT TO THE DOCTOR AND SHE SAID I WAS FINE

BUT EVERY MOVIE THAT I SEE MAKES ME CRYYYyyYY…

Oh, no. When did they start singing this one? It's that song. The one you've had on replay since your breakup, the one you've been singing in showers, in cars, and in the kitchen.

You feel a fresh wave of tears clawing their way up again. Your lower lip juts out in a pout, and you flush in embarrassment when Jack's laugh dies. “I'm fine.” 

He gently squeezes your arm, “up.”

Before you have any mind to be confused, your world tilts when you're suddenly hauled off your seat. You sway on your feet for a moment, before Jack steadies you, firmly planting his hands on your elbows.

“Are we finally going to join Stacy?”

“No. Not while you're doing your best impression of a kicked puppy.”

I CAN'T SLEEEEEP

I CAN'T EAAAATTTT

I THINK YOU'RE WHAT'S WRONG WITH MEEEE…

A soft sob escapes your throat. What is wrong with you? 

“Nothing. Three-drink-you is just not as fun as two-drink-you,” Jack assures you, his fingers twitching at your elbows without his permission, stuck between staying noble and wiping away the hot tears that are rushing from your ducts again.

Oh. You hadn't realised you'd said that out loud. You can't believe you're breaking down in front of your attending. Because of a breakup song. Because you're drunk. That's, like, top 3 tell-tale signs you need some help. Or, another drink. But you're quite sure that four-drink-you is a horny you, so, maybe not.

The surrounding noises get muffled when Jack spins you around, and starts walking you towards a hushed corner. He swiftly steers you away from any table, chair, or a group of people that comes in your way, before you even register it.

You're disappointed when his hands drop to his own sides, when you're both tucked away in a corner. You look around, and the lights are even dimmer in here, painting everything a dull shade of yellow. There's a door behind you, presumably leading to a bathroom, because you can see the universal signage for a male. Before you can ask Jack to move from here, you notice a lock on the door.

“No one's gonna come here. Talk.”

You clear your throat, managing to speak through your watery throat, “It was just really–”

“Sad? Yes, we covered that,” he catches the sharp edge in his tone, and quickly smoothes it over, gentling himself for you, “but as sensitive as you are, I know that you're not really sobbing because some little girls are crying along to a sad Taylor Swift song.”

“It's Olivia, not Taylor.”

“They're all the same.”

You immediately gasp, narrowing your eyes at his disgusting comment, “I take my words back. You have the heart of a cold, unfeeling, man.”

Jack bites the inside of his cheek to not burst out laughing. “I'm sorry. Will you please tell me why you're worrying yourself over an Olive song?”

“OLIVIA!”

He raises his palms in surrender, but instead of giving up like you'd expect anyone to, he apologises again. Now he's looking at you expectantly, as patient as a saint, and you feel your sob story tumbling out of your mouth.

“I had a break-up recently. And it's,” you click your tongue in frustration, “I don't even miss him. He was a mistake. A big one. But…”

“But?”

You sigh, “I don't know. It's humiliating. Can we go back?”

“What's humiliating?”

You scramble for words but all that comes out is, “this! You! Here!” 

“I'm humiliating?”

“Gosh, no. You're– you're not. You're anything but. You're sweet and patient and kind–” you immediately lock your lips when you realise you're verbally fawning over the man in front of you. “That's not what I mean.”

“So, I'm not sweet and patient and kind?” His eyes are crinkling with amusement, and you would want to wipe that smile from his face if it wasn't so goddamn beautiful. 

You take a deep breath, “what I am trying to say is, It's humiliating because we work together. You're my senior. Like, super, super senior.”

“And that makes me unempathetic towards one of my staff having a meltdown in a public place?”

“Okay, I think we're throwing the word ‘meltdown’ a little too easy here.”

Jack pretends to ponder for a moment, observant brown eyes scanning your face slow enough to make you squirm. “I think not. Look at yourself.”

You immediately straighten up. “Huh, do I look like a mess?” Your hands rush to your face, trying to harshly rub the messy tears away.

His eyes immediately soften. “No, hey, that's not…You just look so upset is all. Otherwise, you look fine. Good. As always.” He says it like it's obvious, like it's a rule he learned in medical school.

Almost hesitantly, he pries your wrists away from your face, leaving them in his grip, hanging between you both. You have no option but to look straight at him.

“I'm sorry. You've just caught me on a bad day.”

“What do you mean? I'm having a really good time.”

You let out a watery laugh. “You don't have to make me feel better.”

“Gloria is always on my ass about keeping staff happy. Consider this a part of my duty.”

You have a good couple of inches between you, but the distance seems really, really little right now. You're not sure if it's him or you who takes a step closer. Probably you, since his thumb is stroking the side of your wrist, and you're feeling floaty again.

“I'm not sure this is what duty looks like, Jack,” your voice comes out barely more than whisper.

He tuts in disapproval when you use his first time, voice dropping an octave lower. “No, it doesn't. You should be thankful. Robby just yells at people and tells them to pack it up.”

“Don't joke.”

“If I stop joking, I'll have to tell you that you have no reason to cry for a fuckin’ idiot who owned forty different colors of the same polo t-shirt.”

For a second, you're taken back enough to not speak. “How…how do you know that?”

“Used to see him everyday when he would pick you up, remember?” He reminds you as you watch irritation flare up in his eyes, “and he was 20 minutes late. Every single day.”

“20 minutes is not a lot. He was, after all, picking me up.”

“If you're gonna do something, do it right. I wouldn't even be 2 minutes late for someone who spent the entire night working their ass off.”

You downcast your gaze to avoid his sharp eyes. “Shame you're not the one picking me up, then.” You try to play it off as a joke, but it only comes out as wistful.

“Shame,” he murmurs. “So, you don't miss him?”

You shake your head. “No, but it gets lonely.” You sigh before continuing, admitting with a hint of shame, “I like the whole routine — the dates, the places, the high while it lasts.”

“So? Go on a date again.”

“Right,” You laugh in self-deprecation, “It's not like I've queues outside my door, people waiting to take me out.”

“Impossible. Look at you,” he replies, without missing a beat. You examine his face, trying to gauge the intent behind his words. Mindless affirmation or meaningful compliment?

“You're just saying that,” you whisper.

“What reason do I have to lie?”

“Getting me off your hands, and back to your whiskey again.”

His breath mingles with yours when he tips his face forward, gaze locking in on your soft lips. “I'm not so eager to get my hands on whiskey. I've got better things going on for me,” he speaks, voice dropping low and intimate.

“Like me having a meltdown?”

“Like you allowing me to be here for it.”

“Of course. You're sweet and patient and kind.”

“Pray tell. Don't let me stop you from singing my praise.”

“And…calm and funny and…” you pause, trying to even out your shallow breaths, “incredibly, stupidly, frustrating.”

“Careful. Still your attending.” Irony is that right as he's saying it, he's letting go of your wrists to cup your hips instead — long fingers curling around the fabric of your shirt, settling heavy and firm, grounding you in place.

“You're not acting like it.”

He playfully squeezes your hips, “why am i frustrating?”

“Because…sometimes, I come to the shift, and I get to hear from Santos that somebody decided to play the hero and got shot. And I'm obviously never there, because it all happens during the day shift.”

“You worry?”

“You're not a man with ill styling choices. I can worry.”

“As long as you don't cry.”

“Are you one of those people who don't like people crying? You get all awkward and uncomfortable?”

His hand drags up your arm to swipe across your cheekbone, brushing over the dried tears. “I don't like when you cry. It makes me frustrated and insistent.”

“Insistent to do what?”

“To fix whatever caused it. Or whoever.”

Your throat dries up, your tongue darting out to wet your lips. “It's not recommended to go causing trouble in the name of nurses.”

“What if it's a pretty nurse?”

Red rushes to your cheeks, and you feel yourself warming up. You urge the alcohol in your system to deliver you courage, but all you feel is like wet noodles in front of him.

“That's not a valid reason,” you murmur.

“My floor, my rules.”

“Careful. Next thing you know, it's 20 missed calls from HR.”

“Shit,” he says, not sounding concerned in the slightest.

You clear your throat, “now that I'm not actively sobbing, we should head back. Somebody will notice we're gone.”

“They're all too busy being idiots. Besides, there's nothing to notice. I'll just tell them–” your eyelids flutter when he lightly blows air into your right eye, “–there was something in your eye.”

“And you were helping me while using your bedroom voice?”

Jack sputters a small laugh, “oh, this is not my bedroom voice.” His hand on your hip moves, leaving a trail of fire up your side, settling high on your waist. “Or my bedroom hands. Or my bedroom acts.”

Your eyes flutter close, and heat melts low in your belly, leaving an ache between your thighs. Your thoughts wander, trying to imagine his ‘bedroom acts.’ 

You snap your eyes open before your body can take control from you, and start acting on its own accord. 

“HR. 20 missed calls,” you breathily say, not sure if it’s him or you you’re trying to remind.

He sighs as he backs away from you, and you feel sharp dissatisfaction at the loss of his burning, comforting touch. He holds his arm out towards the small hallway from where you both entered. “Pretty nurses first.”

I KNOW THAT THE BAR CLOSES AT ELEVENNN

I HOPE YOU NEVER FINISH THAT BEEEERRR…

What do you know? Your colleagues were indeed too busy being idiots to notice any change. You sit in the booth again, next to Jack, watching the girls be happy and bright again.

You on the other hand feel disappointment settling deep in your chest. You're suddenly wishing that you hadn't urged Jack to come back out here. Something could've happened. Something you had been wishing and hoping for. And now you have let the moment pass.

OOOO, ONE NIGHT, I WAS BORED IN BED

AND STALKED YOU ON THE INTERNET…

“So, I'm gonna leave.”

You turn to look at him, trying very hard not to let your dismay show, instead sweetly smiling at him and nodding your head a little too quickly.

A pause.

“You can leave 10 minutes later. I'll be in my truck.”

Your brows snap together in confusion, lips parting to say something, but Jack is already getting up, grabbing his leather jacket from where he kept it in the booth.

“They're idiots, yes, but it's better if they don't see us leaving together.”

You scramble for words but nothing comes out.

‘CUZ I ALWAYS HAD A VISION OF US STANDING LIKE THIS

ALL PRESSED UP IN THE BATHROOM LINE…

“Where will we go?” you dumbly ask.

Jack shrugs, “dates, places, chasing the high while it lasts.”

Your heart leaps out of your ribcage, body unable to do anything but watch his back as he walks towards the door. Your lips open. And close again.

What.

Deep breaths. It’s chill. All good. Just a normal hangout with Dr. Abbot. Surely, nothing will happen.

Fuck.

You give a final glance towards the cheerful trio of girls, a luminous grin finally breaking out on your face.

They'll be okay. So will you.

You take out your phone and tap the screen awake. One minute passed, nine more to go.

KISS MEEE AND I MIIIGHTT

KISS ME AND I MIGHT DROP DEAD.

Sigh…i missed my husband. Now everyone say, “thank you, stacy” and then everyone who liked this, please glaze all over me. Likes, comments especially, and reblogs increase one minute of my lifespan.

Jack looked up at the ceiling, shaking his head as his hands went to rest on his hips. When he looked back down, he found you walking toward the nurse and it suddenly made complete sense. 

He let out a sigh. “This has to be a joke.”

His eyes, as they did more often than was appropriate, caught on you, hair coming down loose from where you’d pinned it, the scrubs lopsided at one hip, riding lower than where they’d started at the beginning of the night. You turned to say something to the guy quickly, and the movement caught the slip, your scrub top moving up half an inch, and Jack’s eyes went there before his brain could tell him that was wrong, some groove in him that noticed you before it noticed anything useful. He had a second of pure, unhelpful distraction before his brain reminded him that he was an attending and had things to do. 

“I actually think it’s funny,” Lena said, shrugging.

Of course it had something to do with you. He should’ve figured it out the second he saw the guy standing there with his hands in the pouch of his scrubs, rocking heel to toe like the floor was just too exciting to be standing on. Nobody loitered around the ambulance bay at midnight for good reason. People came through those doors bleeding or they didn’t come through them at all, and this guy had shown up with nothing wrong with him, except maybe a case for some lovesickness. 

“I’m gonna make this stop,” Jack said, already pushing himself away from the nurse’s station.

Lena’s eyes widened slightly. “Don’t say anything that gets you sat down with HR.”

“She can goddamn try me,” he said, and went. Also because Jack was fairly sure you would never report him to HR. 

He crossed the floor and caught the tail-end of your conversation as he closed in.

“ — just tell me when you’re free, that’s all I’m asking,” the guy was saying.

You were already half-turned, already gone as you waved a hand loosely beside you. “I don’t know, I just don’t think we should try again.” 

Jack blew out a breath, standing a few feet short of you, your back facing him. Why was he not surprised? He’d been keeping tally without meaning to, and he knew that was embarrassing. There was the radiology fellow who’d started hand-delivering films that very well could’ve gone through the system; the travel nurse who’d washed through in six weeks and left the floor faintly weird in his wake; the anaesthesia resident who now took the long way around the department if he saw you at the end of it, as though he were a dog who’d learned the fence was electric. And now this one, apparently, Peds with his whole hopeful heart hanging out in Jack’s department. 

“You’re so sweet for coming down here,” you practically crooned at him, shifting on your heels, eyes flicking down to the form in your hand. “But I really do have a whole long night ahead of me, and I know my answer’s not gonna change, so I won’t make you wait around for it, okay?” 

Jack fought the urge to roll his eyes when you said the words with the upward lilt of a woman sending a toddler back to his mother. He wanted to laugh a little when he saw that the guy had taken it standing up like it was a gift. 

The hell of it was that Jack understood the man. He understood every last one of them because he stood next to you fifty hours a week, had been doing so for three years, and whatever the department thought of him after his consistent therapy, he was not carved out of stone. 

Jack was afraid that if he hadn’t been your attending these last four years and a little younger, wearing his heart on his sleeve, he’d have been eating out of the palm of your hand. 

You gave the guy a there-there pat, and it was only then did his eyes land on Jack, who he probably knew was your fucking attending. You turned then, and immediately said, “Oh, Dr. Abbot, I’ve got the guy in six’s labs back, the potassium —”

“Mhm.” Jack’s hands came up and landed on your shoulders before you’d finished the sentence, squaring you off the spot where you stood and turning you bodily back toward the floor like you were a gurney. 

“It is four-point-nine, but the EKG’s good, so I was gonna recheck in —” 

“Let’s recheck it now,” he said. He kept you moving, his palms broad through the cotton of your scrubs, steering you a few feet till your own feet caught onto the idea. 

You grumbled something under your breath, and once he’d stopped you right in front of six, you turned to face him with your brows raised.

“Say something?” he asked, tipping his chin down.

“You seem like you’re mad at me,” you said. 

“Huh. I do?” He let go of your shoulders — noticing, distantly, the exact second his hands came off and suddenly felt too empty — and reached past you to pluck six’s chart off the tray, more to have something to do with them than needing it. “You’re right. You should recheck in ten minutes.”

“You’re mad at me,” you said again, crossing your arms over your chest. 

He blew out a breath, and suddenly felt just a little silly at getting worked up over a nurse by the doors when there was a large, glowing board behind him full of names that needed his complete, undivided attention. 

You were a senior resident, after all, four years deep, one of his sharpest — you’d treated the guy in six, hadn’t you, you’d flagged it and called for the EKG and made the right call on the recheck before he’d even asked, all while dismantling some man’s hopes. Somehow, your mess and competence ran on the same current. You never let the first touch the second. He’d have loved, some nights, to have an excuse to be mad — a missed lab, a blown line, anything he could write up and point at — and you kept declining to hand him one. All of this meant he was left with this vague swampy irritation, and Jack wasn’t the sort of mentor who liked to hound upon that. 

“No, sweetheart, I just love it when you get random men hanging around the department,” he settled on saying, feeling his shoulders visibly loosen a fraction.

You winced, eyes darting over to the emptiness in front of the doors now. “Sorry.” 

“You’d say it won’t happen again, but we both know better.” He shrugged. Then, he reached out his hand — he wasn’t sure why, except that it just happened naturally — and patted you once on the shoulder, then on the second turned you to face the curtains leading to your patient. “Doctor up.”

And you did, the loose, embarrassed shape of you being replaced in the space of a single breath, being replaced by something Jack had watched grow into you over the years and still hadn’t quite gotten used to. 

Trauma called it in nine minutes later, an MVC, unrestrained driver, GCS dropping in the field. Jack was working on a laceration in four when he heard the crackled warning, and by the time he’d looked up out the curtains, you were already moving, gowned and at the head of the bay calling out assignments like you’d been doing this for a decade.

“I need two units O-neg before he rolls in,” you said, voice pitched high enough to carry without yelling, cutting clean through the perpetual noise of the department. “Somebody get me a second eighteen-gauge ready, and I want an ultrasound in here.”

Donnie and Mateo were already moving, and so were the people around you, falling into your orbit like the room had easily reorganized itself around your voice the second it went up. Jack stood by the curtain, gloves from the lac still on, and found he couldn’t make himself move just yet.

The doors banged open. EMS wheeled the stretcher through fast, calling out vitals over each other, and you were already on the patient’s side before the gurney had fully stopped moving, hands moving on his neck, chest, eyes scanning his pupils in a matter of ten seconds. He began walking over, catching your voice as you called out your reads as someone hung the blood and someone else prepped the ultrasound wand. “Page neuro now.”

“On it,” Mateo said, already moving.

You had both hands on the patient, running the primary survey quickly, confirming, checking, discarding possibilities out in short, clipped sentences Jack recognized as the sound of your brain running six steps ahead of your mouth. Sweat had started on your hairline. You called out for OR to be on standby, eyes flickering around the room and landing on Jack. “OR, please,” you said, aimed at him, brows going up. 

“On it,” Jack said, because there was no way he was going to let you be wrong about needing something and didn’t make sure you got it.

The next six minutes went by fast and loud, in bursts and then suddenly quiet, the room narrowing down on functionality. You stood at the center of it; you called it and ran it. You got the man upstairs stable enough that Walsh didn’t sound worried for one second, and that was a compliment from her. 

Jack watched the whole thing from four feet back, arms crossed, and chipping in when your brain had snagged. He was feeling a heat in his chest helplessly and entirely unprofessional, it was always present when he was able to see, in real-time, how far you’d come from your first day of residency when your hands were a second too slow on the central line and how your voice would pitch up at the end of every read, asking for permission every time instead of stating it like a fact, eyes finding him across the room each time, checking.

There was none of that left in you now, he realized, had done so a long time ago. He thought, watching you now, that this was the closest thing he’d let himself do to falling in years, standing uselessly riveted as he watched a woman he’d taught outgrow the need for him in real time, and finding that instead of the loss he’d expected to feel when the day finally came, all he felt was warm and terrifying and too much like pride. 

When the room had started clearing out, he watched your mouth drop open as you let out a heavy breath, eyes going over to him. The second he watched you realize he was still there, your face shifted, the relief turning into something sharper. 

“Why didn’t you jump in?” You crossed the floor toward him in four hard strides, gloves already peeled off and balled tight in one fist, snapping the second one free with a motion that looked terrifyingly like it wanted to be aimed at him. “His pressure tanked for thirty seconds and you just watched.”

“You had it.”

“You didn’t know that,” you said, voice going up an octave, adrenaline still thrumming through you, hands coming up the gesture at the blood-streaked floor. “I could’ve missed something. You’re the attending, Jack, you’re supposed to catch if I missed something —”

“I would’ve,” he interrupted, stepping in close enough that you had to tilt your head back to keep glaring at him properly. “The second you needed me, I would’ve stepped in. I wasn’t gonna take it from you before you did.” 

“You can’t gamble like that with a patient —” Your chest was rising and falling fast, gloves now crushed in your fist, and he could see the fear catching up now that everything around you had gone quiet enough to let it, something that looked more like fear of yourself than for the patient. “What if I’d frozen —?”

“I knew you wouldn’t.” He reached his hand out, thumb catching a smear of the blood at your jaw you’d accidentally smeared on yourself, wiping it off carefully with the pad of his thumb, and felt you go still under it. “You don’t trust my judgement?”

“You know I do. You just could’ve said something.”

“I could’ve. He dropped his hand from your jaw only to catch your wrist instead. “Didn’t wanna interrupt you being brilliant. Kinda liked watching it happen.”

Your mouth opened, surely to let out some unnecessary retort, and died there when he pressed one slow stroke of his thumb against your wrist, raising a brow. 

“Relax,” he said, voice going rough as he leaned in a little, forcing you to meet his eyes properly. “Just take the win. That’s an order.”

“Now you wanna give orders,” you mumbled.

He barked out a short laugh, letting go of your wrist. “Only when you’re being stubborn for no reason.”   

It was sometime during the second year of your residency when he’d started catching your drift. It had started with a random Friday shift. He’d seen you at the station, elbows on the counter, telling Lena something conspiratorially. Jack was meant to be reading a chart but couldn’t help how his ears had perked up. Anything to get through the shift, he supposed.

“ — no, but he was perfect on paper,” you were saying, “kept his house clean and everything. He told me he kept his plant alive for six years —”

“So, what happened?” Lena said flatly, like she already knew what you were going to say but wanted to hear anyway. 

“He wanted to take me bowling on the second date,” you said through a sigh. “I know how it sounds, but you’ve gotta hear me out —”

“I’m genuinely not going anywhere.”

“ — for the first date, bowling’s fun. But he took me to a nice dinner the first time, he set a standard, and then the second date he goes bowling, which means the effort’s already —” You created a little downward slope with your hand. “And if it’s already sliding on date two, where’s it at on date two hundred? I can already see my marriage with him and it’s bad.”

It seemed you had a criteria, Jack learned then. It was proven even more when he’d heard you talk about your other failed dates, seen them, and learned — without ever wanting to — what they were, to an extent. 

He knew you couldn’t stand a man who ordered for you without asking. He knew you’d written off a fellow for the way he talked about his mother, and another one — an accountant, a rare specimen who had no clue what an EKG was — over a text message you’d read aloud to Ellis in a voice of complete horror, though Jack had never caught what it actually said, only your face while you read it. He knew you gave people precisely three dates, that this was a rule you held if the first and second date went well, three apparently being the magic number at which a person could no longer hide the demon they were going to turn out to be (your words).

He knew, too, that you only allowed one kiss after the first date, if even that. It was never up for negotiation, no matter how beautifully the night had gone, for you never wanted to end up “emotionally overdrawn on an account you hadn’t even opened yet.”

He knew you a man lost real points if, over the three dates, if it involved drinks, he ordered the same one. He knew a man gained them, silently and instantly, for being able to sit in a lull without narrating his way out of it, and that you considered this the single rarest trait in modern dating.

He knew you were looking for something you had no name for and would recognize on sight, which struck him as a hell of a way to run a search.

He’d have told you, if you asked, that he tuned most of the station chatter out as a matter of survival, for while he enjoyed the occasional gossip, he couldn’t very well absorb everyone’s business. And that was true about everyone’s business but yours, apparently, because yours came in clear.

Your business he retained against his own better judgement, and he realized — once, during a slow shift — that he could’ve drawn you a better map of your taste than you seemed to carry yourself. He could’ve told you, if you asked, exactly the kind of man who’d finally clear your bar, and exactly why he had yet to show up. 

It was almost nice, some nights, watching you try anyway. The ER was a place where everyone was kept tethered to the world by a thread, and everyone who worked in it long enough to develop some version of the same calluses. Jack had grown his years ago, and he wore them invisible, occasionally aching, and had come to terms with it being permanent.

Love, for Jack, had stopped being a real noun before you’d shown up, somewhere between things he used to want and things he’d decided weren’t for him anymore.

You still believed in it. You’d watched this place take everything soft out of grown men twice your seniority and somehow walked through the same fire hopeful, still convinced, against every scrap of evidence, that somewhere there was a person worth all that hoping.

For that reason, he had decided to not interrupt your endeavors, not until now, when he noticed you during hand-off before your night shift with him started, in front of Robby, of all people. 

While Jack loved Robby like a brother, he had a documented, department-wide, actuarially reliable seven-week expiration date on every woman he charmed out of this building. He’d heard intra-departmental gossip about him. There was, Jack was fairly sure, a running joke about it that predated your residency by years. 

He knew you definitely were not finding love in his best friend. But Jack felt the buzzing in his mind go quiet and mean watching how you with him.

You laughed at something and Jack lost, for one humiliating second, the thread of what he’d walked over to say. It happened sometimes, more than he’d admit to anyone. Ordinary noises out of you hit him somewhere in his chest before the better part of him flagged it as a problem, and he had to physically clear his throat before finding his footing again. 

“ — Italian’s always good after pulling a double,” Robby was saying. “But I do love some microwave ramen, too, when I’m missing my med student days.” 

“Oh, so your standards have been raised being chief?” you said, and Jack could hear the smile and wariness in it. 

“For sure —”

Jack let out a huff, something resembling a laugh, as his feet planted him between the two of you. He was close enough that his shoulder nudged yours and you had to step back to keep your balance. He felt your weight land for a second against him with a satisfaction he had no, absolutely no business feeling for something so small. So childish.

He turned to Robby, spreading his hands wide, mock outrage. “My resident.”

Robby looked mildly amused, unbothered, so Jack added, before he could respond, “Go home before I report you to HR.”

“You’d do that to me?” 

“In a heartbeat. Have some shame.” Jack kept his shoulder where it was still angled half in front of you, an old, unexamined instinct keeping the line drawn even though Robby had already backed off.

He tipped his head toward the doors, toward the gold light coming up in them, the day shift draining out around you both. “There’s a whole rich life waitin’ for you out there.”

Robby just smiled and pushed off the counter, giving you a small wave before he left.

Jack turned to you then, brows furrowed. “Seriously?”

You let out a short laugh. “Work hard, play hard?” 

“Soundin’ a lot like a frat brother right now. Never have those words been said in an ER,” Jack said. 

“I wasn’t actually going to do it,” you said, rushing the words out with something more honest in them. “For the record. I know what — he’s got a reputation.” You picked at the counter. “I was just talking to him. He’s funny.”

Jack had to recalibrate for a second. “You were talkin’ sweet to him.” 

“I talk sweet to everyone.” You lifted a shoulder, completely unbothered. “You should try it sometime.”

He rolled his eyes at that. He reached over for your cup of coffee sitting between you — closer to his elbow than yours — and drank a sip, eyes going up to the ceiling at the sheer volume of syrup you’d decided you needed in your bloodstream today. “The hell?” he muttered, turning the cup slightly as if that would help. “Are you trying to embalm yourself?”

“Give it back.”

“In a minute.” He took a second sip, slower this time, and watched you over the rim of the cup. Then, he set it back a few degrees off how you’d had it, just to see your jaw tick.

You pulled the cup back in, thumbed it around until the lid faced you again, and drank from it without breaking your explanation. “I’m offended you think I’ll get wine and dined by the chief attending.” You tilted your head. “Give me some credit here. I won’t be his seven weeks.”

“Huh.” He rubbed the back of his neck, which was warm. “Well, good. Don’t think he’ll clear your bar anyway.”

“See, you get it,” you said, pointing a finger at him. “At least someone around here does.” 

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, tipping his head slightly forward that even he hadn’t realized that he had shifted the distance just slightly. “Better than most.”

Your eyes widened slightly at that, and Jack took that as his cue to step back, clear his throat, as he jerked his chin toward the board.

“Alright, time to work. Stop the play,” he said, trying to get his voice the right level. “Go look at chest pain on three.”

“So bossy,” you said, but you were already turning around to go to three.

Well, that’s what he was, wasn’t he? For some reason, he had to remind himself that. 

It was what he had to remind himself as his hands hovered your trembling ones as you tried to pump air into Mrs. Foley’s lungs, knowing she was already gone — had been for a while now, if he was honest — longer than it took you to admit. He knew it, he’d grown the grim ability to recognize when a body stopped being a patient and being someone you were performing compressions on for the family’s sake, for your own need to have done everything. 

He’d let it run anyway, because you hadn’t accepted it yet, and he’d wanted to give you that extra minute to arrive at it on your own. 

Mateo had come up to Jack’s side, snapping his gloves off, the sound of it overshadowed by your own heaving. 

“She has to call it,” he murmured. “You want me to —”

“No.” Jack’s eyes, he felt, could not move away from your distress. “I’ve got her.” 

Mateo looked at him for a moment longer than the moment warranted, and then he stepped back and let Jack be. You were still going, your compressions had gone harder, faster, less like genuine medicine and more like you were pleading with Mrs. Foley herself now. Sweat had gone to the hair at your temple. Your jaw was set in a clench Jack recognized all too well, and for a moment, Jack wished that he didn’t have to be so acutely tuned into watching what the job did to others, the same way it did to him. 

He stepped in behind your shoulder, close, and brought his hand down over yours where they were locked on the old woman’s chest.

“Look at the clock,” he said quietly into your ear.

“One more round —” 

“You’ve done plenty.” He pressed, gently, until your hands stilled under his, and felt your entire body resist it. “You know she was gone before we could’ve even done anything —”

“She’s been my patient for years —” 

Jack knew then that while you may have been an excellent doctor, his senior resident that had bloomed under his mentorship but still could’ve gone without him and done just the same, it wasn’t a good feeling to wonder if the job would dim you the way it had him. 

“I know.” He kept his hands over yours with enough pressure so as to not let you drive them down again. “That’s why it’s yours to call. But you’ve gotta call it, Doctor.”

Your breath hitched as you turned your neck to face him, and there was a pool brimming on your lashline that you kept at bay, nodding. Your hands under his stopped straining upward, and he felt the exact second you accepted it, for it moved through your shoulders and down your spine and left you a little smaller standing there, the fight trickling into the moment after, which Jack always thought was worse. 

“Time of death,” you said, forcing your voice back into the procedural tone, “oh-three-forty-one.” You peeled your gloves off finger-by-finger.

His hand found the small of your back after taking the minute, leading you to the little family consult room with the boxed tissues and fake ficus with a couch that had absorbed more bad news since longer than you or he had worked there. He shut the door with the flat of his hand and let the floor’s noise cut to a hum through the drywall. 

You stood in the middle of the room with your arms crossed, holding yourself, and stayed silent. 

Jack propped himself against the table, arms folded, as he breathed out a small sigh through his nose. He knew you weren’t a talker after the bad ones. Some residents came out of a loss with their mouths running, narrating it into something survivable, and some went quiet and small and had to be waited out, and you were the second kind. So he waited.

You broke it eventually, like he always knew you would have. “I’ve got a butterscotch she gave me seven months ago in my locker still,” you murmured, craning your neck so you were looking at the ceiling. You wiped under your eyes with the heel of your hand roughly. 

“Think I’ve got one, too,” he murmured, wincing as he tried to shift his weight. 

It had been building up for the past few hours, a hot ring of wrong down below the knee where the socket had gone slick and furnace-warm because it was past hour fourteen, when he’d sweated the fit and never changed the liner because there’d been no window that wasn’t already accounted for. He shifted his weight off it, trying again, and reached down to thumb the release, breaking the seal. 

He let out a short, punched out sigh as he pulled himself down onto the chair behind him, one hand balancing himself on the table. “Sorry,” he gruffed out, jaw clenching. 

Your eyes flickered down to the prosthetic limb he was balancing against the pole of the table and you were already moving before he could finish apologizing. You never asked if he needed a hand. You’d learned sometime during your second year that asking him gave him a chance to say no, and you’d quit handing him that chance sometime during your second year, so now you just came. You went down on one knee at the pole of the table.

“Don’t say sorry,” you mumbled, eyes not meeting him.

His jaw stayed tight and he didn’t fight it, fight you. That was a formality and you both knew it, a thing he did with his shoulders and not his hands, but he watched the top of your head and thought — like he always did, each time, and never said out loud — there was no one else on god’s green earth he’d let do this in the way you did. Not the prosthetist, who did it clinically. Not the VA, who did it tired. You did it each time like it was nothing and everything at once, as though this something not worth remarking on. 

He very badly wanted to thank you, despite how small he always felt when you did this. He wanted to tell you that you were, without question, better at this than anyone who was paid to do it.

Your fingers found the socket and went for the liner because you knew the fit went bad and the sweat before it went bad anywhere a person could see, knew he’d have to run it slick and furnace-hot than spend the fourteen minutes off the floor. You rolled it back with the flat of your thumb, easing the trapped heat out of it, and he felt the pressure of the ring of raw below his knee and had to clench his jaw to not let the relief show on his face. You spared him anyway by keeping your eyes down where they’d been.

“You’ll strip your skin doing this,” you said conversationally, the roughness still present in your voice from the code. “You know that. You keep running it past twelve and one of these nights it’s cellulitis and I’m admitting you.” 

“If only I could be so lucky.”

He ducked his head slightly, a part of him wanting to catch the reaction, and he saw how one corner of your lip was barely turned up. 

You thumbed a line of red where the socket’s edge had bitten in, checking it, and your touch went careful around there. “This is new. The edge is catching higher than it was.”

“Went to a new liner last month,” he said, voice low. “Not broke in yet.” 

“Then you break it on your days off. Not on a fourteen hour.” You finally looked up at him, shaking your head with this flat, fond expression he’d come to realize was your favorite way to look at him. “You’d write me up for less.” 

“I’d write you up for a lot less,” he agreed, thinking back on the time you’d fought him tooth-and-nail over staying through a migraine, refusing, point-blank, to hand off a soft rule-out chest pain at eleven when the migraine had started very visibly began creeping up on you. 

He’d caught you before you’d said a word about it because you’d begun squinting at the numbers and pressed the heel of your hand against one eye for a moment too long between patients, thinking nobody was watching. He was, he realized, always watching you in some way.

“Go home,” he’d said quietly, catching you by the elbow outside the curtain. “That’s not a request.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’ve got a migraine.”

“I’ve got a job.” Your jaw had clenched, stubbornly, and Jack had thought that even if he’d put all his strength into it, he wouldn’t have been able to unclench it for you. “I’m not handing off a chest pain because my head hurts. This guy has waited long enough for a bed. I’m not the priority here.”

He’d wanted to tell you that you were, actually, that you were exactly the priority, and watching you white-knuckle forms with your pupils blown different sizes from pain scared him more than any board full of critical pains ever had. But he’d just pulled down the light two notches, told the nurses to shadow eleven’s discharge, and put a bottle of water and two Tylenol on your desk without a word. And thank god, you’d taken the Tylenol and finished the shift standing up because sitting made the room tilt worse, and only taken on non-critical cases. You’d refused until the end that you should’ve gone home three hours earlier.  

Now, you huffed something that was nearly a laugh, your first real once since the code, and went back to setting. And Jack sat there with his arms crossed in the dark with your hands on the worst-guarded part of him and the door shut against the whole floor, and thought about how he believed nobody deserved you. People were vile and sucked and cut in line and let doors swing shut behind them, and you handed out three dates to men who wrote sonnets in your voicemail and couldn’t clear a bar you’d never once lowered for anyone. He’d thought, more nights than he liked to admit, that these people had no idea what they were auditioning for. 

His eyes snagged on you because there was nothing else in this small room worth looking at. There was still salt dried in your lashline from the code. You were a wreck and you were fixing his leg anyway, still half-shaking from a woman you couldn’t save, and it hadn’t occurred to you to stop and put yourself back together first. It never did. Jack had seen the care run out of you before you ever decided to spend it. 

“I’m sorry about Mrs. Foley,” he said.

You shook your head, face still angled down, thumb pausing mid-motion. “I’ll be okay,” you murmured, lifting up one shoulder. “I just hate that she couldn’t get here sooner.”

“You did nothing wrong,” he said plainly. “Family said she’s been feeling off for two days now.”

“I know.” Your voice cracked, betraying the flatness you were trying to present. “Doesn’t make it easier.”

You lifted your head for a moment, then, looking at him with a sad smile he knew you were painting on to get him to stop talking.

He nodded stiffly, tipping his chin down. “Alright. Finish my leg and we’ll run this floor together.”

Up in radiology a few nights later, Jack had gone himself to sort out a reading that had been sitting long and he’d cornered a tech and got what he needed and was already halfway out the door, jacket sleeves still rolled from the last set of compressions, when he saw the guy standing off by the light boxes. 

Younger. A resident, he supposed, in scrubs a size too crisp for someone who’d actually been on the shift long enough to earn wrinkles in them. He’d been watching Jack the whole time — Jack could feel it, the itch of being observed — shifting his weight heel to toe against the linoleum floor. 

“Somethin’ on my face?” Jack said flatly because he really did have to get back to the floor.

“You’re — sorry, you’re Dr. Abbot, right?”

“Last I checked.” 

The guy’s hand came out of his jacket’s pocket, and there was a piece of folded paper in it. Jack looked at it like it was a spider, hoping — no, praying — it had something to do with work.

“Could you give this to her?” the guy asked, and Jack’s hope died, as he stepped closer. “The senior resident on your shift. She’ll — she’ll know who it’s from.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jack murmured, brows pulling in together. “You ever heard of texting, kid?” 

“I did,” he said, and Jack could practically feel the heat radiating off of him. “She stopped answering, so I figured, maybe on paper, she’d actually —”

“Take the hint,” Jack grumbled, snatching the paper out of his hand. Then, as he turned to the door, he said, “You know I work in the ER?” When the guy only nodded quickly, he added, “You know she works in the ER?” 

“I — yeah. Obviously.”

“Then you know she doesn’t need this.” He held up the paper between him and the guy. “She’s got enough on her plate without some guy too chicken to call her handing me a note like I’m her mailman.”

The guy opened his mouth, nose scrunching at Jack’s words, but nothing came out. 

“Yeah.” Jack was already walking, note tucked in his pocket, done with the conversation. “Try calling next time. Or don’t.” 

The guy looked at least a little sheepish, a little ashamed, and Jack thought good, he should feel ashamed. He wasn’t sure what the protocol in dating was now — he’d been just a little rusty and out of the stretch for a stretch of years he preferred not to count in single digits — but he was fairly certain that whatever the rules had curdled up to, this could not possibly be inside them.

He rode the elevator down with the note in his pockets, and he could feel the small stiff square of another man’s hope pressing over the outside of his thigh. 

He found you at your desk, hands running restlessly through your hair as you spoke into the microphone, charting. The words were coming out of you bluntly, mechanic and after saying the same variation a thousand times over. There was a pen behind your ear you’d forgotten about and the residue of a lab value gone blue across the back of your hand where you’d scrawled it hours ago and never washed off.

He stood there for a second before you noticed him, and thought — not for the first time and with the same low irritation he always felt about it — that he had no earthly business being the man this got routed to.

Jack leaned down so his head hovered beside yours, scanning your work on the screen, close enough that his shoulder nearly brushed yours, head tilted to read your screen at an angle that had nothing to do with actually needing to see it. 

“The man wants an espresso martini?” he asked, furrowing his brows as he read over your notes, right by your ear. 

You jumped just slightly and swivelled on your stool to face him, then back at the screen. “Shit — Jack. Announce yourself.” You scanned the words on your notes, shaking your head and already backspacing. “No, that was me talking to myself. Stupid mic picked it up.”

“Long as it’s just the one,” he drawled, staying there in your space a little longer, watching the side of your face instead of the screen now. “Those things sneak up on you.”

“Speaking from experience?” You turned on your stool to face him fully, chin tilting up to meet his eyes, something playful and a little challenging in it. 

“I’ve got a couple decades on you. Everything’s snuck up on me.” 

You held his gaze a little longer, then looked away first, tongue coming out over your lips for a second. He took a small satisfaction in not being the one who blinked first. 

He blew out a breath through his nose, remembering, with reluctance now, what he’d actually come here to do. “Speaking of sneaking up.” He pulled out the note from his pocket. “I got something to deliver to you —”

You furrowed your brows when he handed it to you. “Secret admirer?” you asked jokingly. 

He barked out a short laugh. “Nothin’ secret about it. You ignoring some radiology fellow?”

You grimaced, opening the note and scanning over the words quickly. He could’ve left, but stayed instead and watched you read it. The frown only pulled deeper, and he saw your eye twitch once as you scanned the words.

Against his better judgement, he murmured, “That bad?” 

“Uh — no, it’s okay.” You shrugged stiffly. 

“Huh,” he breathed out, studying you outright now. “Wonder what you’re doin’ to these guys to get them so wound up.”

You chuckled, mostly to yourself. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”  

His chest tightened at that. It was unfair how you could make anything to him sound like something he’d been waiting to hear. He swallowed. “Suppose I would.”

“That an offer, Dr. Abbot?” 

“Might be,” he said, shrugging one shoulder. 

You laughed — surprised, the tension in your shoulders breaking slightly — and shook your head, folding the note back up. “You’re ridiculous. Well, thank you for getting it to me. I’m sorry he bothered you with this —” You swivelled, placing the note on your desk before picking up your phone. “That’s really weird.” 

“That’s one word for it,” Jack said, and left it there, because you’d already turned and had your phone in one hand and the microphone in the other. The small furrow was back between your brows, and he’d learned there was a point past which pushing you got him a brighter, smaller version of whatever you were covering. 

He drifted toward the far end of the station where Mateo was crouched at the crash cart running his palm along the drawers, checking seals, restocking and checking the fact of it on slower nights like this. 

“She okay?” Mateo asked, snapping the drawer, seemingly having caught the interaction. 

“Oh, you know.” Jack leaned a shoulder into the wall, arms crossing. “The belle of our ball. Can’t clock in without collecting a proposal.”

Mateo huffed. “She loves love.”

“That she does.” Jack watched you across the station, the phone lit against your ear now. “Don’t know why she keeps doing that to herself, though.”

“She’s an optimist.” Mateo clicked a seal into place, then moved down the cart. “Thinks someone’s gonna turn out different.”

Jack hummed, then, because the question had been sitting low and unlovely for a couple hours, he asked, “You two give it a run ever?” 

Mateo turned his neck to look up at Jack. “Me and —” He jutted his thumb behind him to vaguely gesture at you. “Her?”

“Mhm.” Jack kept his eyes on you. “You’re close.”

“Nah.” Mateo went back to the cart, shaking his head as he chuckled softly. “I don’t think I’d pass a single one of her tests. Besides, I got my eye on someone.”

“Apparently I don’t make the list either, I guess,” Jack murmured.

Mateo laughed through his nose, eyeing Jack with something new now. “You want to?” 

Jack caught it, reaching his palm and smacking it against Mateo’s curls with no force. “No. Now, do your job.”

“I am —” He laughed through the words, eyes scanning over Jack’s stiffened posture now. “It’s good you don’t, then. Couldn’t handle her anyway.” 

“Sure, I could,” Jack said immediately. 

Mateo’s head turned again, lips curving upwards at Jack’s words, and he felt momentarily blindsided by his own mouth, entirely too honest for something that had started as a joke. 

“Sure, you could,” Mateo teased, drawing out the words.

“Shut it.” Jack grabbed a box of gloves off the cart and set it down two shelves lower than it needed to go, purely to do something with his hands that didn’t involve reaching for Mateo’s collar. “Wasn’t a real question.”

Couldn’t handle you? As if he didn’t know, without having to think about it, that you took the stairs two at a time instead of the elevator when you were annoyed and needed somewhere to put your extra energy, or that you’d started drinking your coffee black on nights a patient reminded you of someone, syrup and cream abandoned, like sweetness felt wrong to have that shift. As if he hadn’t noticed, months ago, that you hummed the same four off-key notes from a jingle neither you nor Jack could place when a chart was boring you to death, or that you double-checked every single IV line now, ever since one bad mistake in your first year. He could very well handle you, he simply hadn’t been given the chance to do so.

Most of the time, Jack was fine with watching your love life play out in 3D. More often than not, he knew they’d never work out. You were just too good for anyone who came sniffing, and there was a grim comfort in that, in knowing the fellows and the nurses would wash through and out and leave you exactly where he found you, three feet down the counter from him, close enough to keep.

Tonight the comfort wasn’t coming. Mateo’s accidental interrogation had rubbed Jack wrongly, somewhere he had yet to fully locate yet, and was sitting in his chest like a splinter he kept forgetting was there until he turned the corner over the night, saw you, and noticed it was there. He should’ve let it stay as nothing, but his brain had apparently decided three hours later was the correct time to relitigate the whole exchange, turning it over at odd intervals between patients like a tongue worrying a chipped tooth.

It was the bad sort of slow in the ER, the sort that let his brain fill up with things he’d have no time for on a real night. Ellis had wandered over to your desk with two energy drinks and placed her arms loosely beside your computer.

Jack was distantly aware he had misplaced labs to hand back to you because they’d gotten lost in the system, and he told himself that was the whole reason his body had started moving in your direction. 

“I got a rundown from Marge,” Ellis said, dropping into an empty stool beside you. “Apparently he wrote it out of the OR.”

“You’re joking,” you muttered. “I don’t understand it.” 

Jack stood there with the labs in his hand, close enough to hear it. 

“I’m still wondering if I should respond,” you were saying, half into your hands. “Is this romantic? This one’s never happened before.”

Ellis laughed slightly with you, and the two of you had built one of those small pockets that slow nights sometimes allowed, thirty seconds of being people instead of clinicians.

Jack set the labs down at the edge of your keyboard harder than he meant to, the papers slapping flat against the desk, and both of you looked up at him like he’d grown two heads. Fuck — had he? It sure felt like he was operating off of whatever chemical cocktail his brain had whipped up for nights like this, some ugly little compound of jealousy and exhaustion. He was fairly sure if you pulled his labs right now they’d look like a man in the middle of a bad reaction to something not yet figured out in the scientific world. 

“Labs on eight got lost.” His palm stayed on the sheet for a few seconds too long, some instinct telling him to keep his hand on something solid before the rest of him did something stupid. “You’ll want to recheck the trop.” 

His eyes cut, against every ounce of better judgement he had left, to the note still folded in your hand, the same one he’d carried down like it was radioactive, the same note that had clearly done something for you that four years of Jack standing next to you clearly hadn’t. An unreasonable, low feeling creeped up behind his ribs at the sight of it, hot and out of proportion to a piece of folded-fucking-paper. 

Ellis’s smile went uncertain as he felt her gaze snag on him. 

You blinked up at him, and whatever had been sitting easy in your face a second ago curdled itself away, the corners of your mouth retreating. He knew this same retreat, had watched you recalibrate your muscles, swiftly, built to be unreadable against anyone who hadn’t spent four years learning your face. 

His stomach dropped and heat climbed up the back of his neck, jaw tightening on its own. He hated that his body had learned to answer you the way it answered a motor alarm. He hated more that some raw, cornered part in him — still smarting about Mateo’s offhand comment and sore from that folded note — felt it wasn’t soothed.

You blinked up at him, and the laugh faded off your face, and you said, easily, warm, “Yeah — course. I’ll get right on that.”

He shrugged up one shoulder, lips pressing into a thin line. He turned, already walking away. “Whenever there’s a gap on your social calendar, I guess.”

He heard the small silence that opened behind him, and he could practically imagine you and Ellis looking at each other. Then, he heard you push back from the desk, the stool wheels catching, and your footsteps coming after him like he’d known they would, because you were the last person to let something like that go. 

“Hey.” You fell into step beside him, voice pitched low, still giving him more benefit than the doubt had earned in the last ten seconds. “What was that about?”

“Nothing.” He tilted his neck up slightly to do a quick scan of the board, some stubborn muscle in his neck refusing to let him meet your eyes. “Got a department to run.”

“And you’ve been running it great. You just became weird right now.” He could feel you working it over beside him, shifting on your feet as you toed the line between resident and the hard-won territory neither of you had ever named. “Jack.” 

“You want to laugh about your shitty dates, that’s your business,” he said instead of letting it go, sounding too far from the man who’d had his hands hovering over yours an hour ago, watching you put in a chest tube, telling you that you’d done well. “Do it a little quieter. This is an ER, not a lunch table.”

His words stopped you for half a step. Jack kept walking, an ugly, cowardly momentum carrying him three more steps before you caught back up.

He heard you recalibrate your voice in real time when you said, “I was charting on a slow shift,” carefully. “You’ve made worse jokes when it’s even more busy. What’s this about?”

“It’s about you treating this place like it’s your dating pool and not your place of work.” The words came out much uglier than he meant, and he didn’t have it in him to call them back. “It’s not professional. It reflects on the department. Reflects on me. Somebody’s gotta say it, and apparently that’s me, since you clearly enjoy it too much to stop.” 

You stopped walking altogether this time. He turned to face your stillness whole, then, and found your eyes narrowed at him, looking like you’d been hit from a direction you hadn’t been completely guarding against. 

He let out a breath, fingers going up to his forehead to wipe at sweat that wasn’t there. “I’m just saying what —”

“I’m sorry,” you said, voice going level and courteous, as you nodded quickly. “You’re right. You’re my attending, it reflects on you. I’ll keep my personal life out of work.” 

“That’s not —” he tried, but you were already turning away, shoulders squared and chin level, professional armor snapping into place just like he’d told you to. It should have made him feel better to watch you take it so cleanly, to not make a big deal out of it. All it made him feel was like something had been surgically removed from him. 

“Stop —” he tried again, to your back now, and the sentence died somewhere between his teeth and the air. That was okay. There was no end to the sentence that didn’t sound worse than the beginning anyway. 

He blew out a sharp breath through his nose, standing in the middle of the floor with his hand still half-raised toward you, fingers curling back into his palm when he realized you weren’t there to reach. Jack felt, distantly, uselessly, like the only thing standing still in the entire building. 

“Great going,” he heard Lena say, trailing past him, a tray tucked against her hip, not even breaking stride. “You got rid of the one entertainment we’ve got around here.”

His shoulders stiffened, and he caught up with her in three steps, jaw working around words that wanted to spill out defensively and came out simply tired. “It’s not entertainment if she keeps getting hurt,” he grumbled. “She’s not a show. Stop treating her like one.” 

“Didn’t look like she was the one getting hurt tonight,” she said, rounding a corner and leaving him standing there.

Jack let out a low groan, running a palm down the lower half of his face, and dropped his hand only when he’d scrubbed enough friction into his jaw to feel it sting a little, which was at least a sensation he’d chosen, at least tonight. He stood there a second longer, staring at nothing in particular. His hands found his hips on reflex. 

“Fuck,” he muttered to himself, and dragged both hands back through his hair, gripping once at the roots before letting go. 

He rolled his neck, felt it pop unsatisfyingly, and pushed off the wall he hadn’t even realized he was leaning against. His leg fucking ached, the burn starting behind his knee. He ignored it like he always did and started walking anyway, jaw still held tight, hands shoved deep into his pockets like he could physically hold himself together with the seams of his own black scrubs.

It was by the lockers after hand-off that Jack saw you next. Both of you had conveniently managed to work over-time; he because there was nothing to get home to, and you — he’d heard through the grapevine — because one of your patient’s little sister was coming in toward close, and you simply wanted to talk with her instead of handing the situation off to one of the day residents.

Usually, nobody had asked you to stay when you did. Most times, there was no version of staying that showed up in your favor; he and Shen were gone, so there was no attending grading you on it; no hours that counted. It was just for a kid who was going to get bad news from a face she’d seen before, so you cost yourself hours of sleep you most definitely needed to be the soft spot for a stranger’s little sister, and hadn’t mentioned it to a soul, and he knew you would’ve been embarrassed if he brought it up. 

He found you using the little mirror inside your locker to apply some kind of pink-tubed gloss with one hand while the other ran its fingers through your hair. Jack pursed his lips, eyeing you from the doorway, because he was pretty sure you’d done something different to it in the last ten minutes. 

“Look nice,” he tried, biting the bullet and walking toward his own locker. “Goin’ somewhere?” 

You caught his eyes in the mirror instead of turning around. “Just breakfast,” you said, and there was none of the earlier lilt in it, the warmth that you’d always aimed at him gone functional. You capped the gloss with more force than it needed and dropped it into your bag. 

Jack stood there a second too long with his hand over his own locker without opening it. He’d expected — and he knew he was more optimistic than usual for doing so — your easy back-and-forth, his slip-up from earlier forgotten. He wasn’t sure what to do with the quiet or you not looking at him properly, hairbrush working through your hair in short strokes. 

He’d saved around thirty lives tonight, and that was what he was good at. He was not good, and had never claimed to be good, at the aftermath of hurting a person he’d have put his own body between a stretcher and wall for, without meaning to, over something that had never been about the radiology fellow at all. 

He opted out of opening his locker and chose instead to lean his bicep against the locker, eyeing you in front of him. “Mad at me?” he murmured. 

You let out a short breath, shaking your head, and he tracked all your micro-expressions through the mirror. “On the clock?” 

“Well, we’ve both been off it for a while now,” he said, watching the shape of your mouth in the mirror, waiting for it to give something away. It didn’t. “But no. Asking as your —” He stopped himself, because ‘friend’ seemed not to be the honest word though it was the first one that popped up. “Off the clock. Whatever I am to you right now.”

You set the hairbrush down on the little shelf with more care than the moment needed. “It’s okay, Jack,” you said, shaking your head.

“Don’t think it is. Try again.”

You watched him for a second in the mirror, then you turned. 

“It’s just embarrassing,” you said, and the words came out smaller than anything he’d heard out of you in years. You crossed your arms over your chest. “I respect you and I hate that you’d think for one second I don’t take this place seriously.” Your voice cracked on the last word, just barely, and you pressed your lips together. “So, yeah. It’s embarrassing to have my attending confirming I’m exactly what people think I am.”

He was shaking his head before you could even finish the sentence. “Nobody thinks —”

“You do,” you said, voice rising slightly. “So, off the clock, I’m embarrassed, and tonight, I’m going to be your resident. Because I agree with you. It’s been unprofessional of me to keep dating within the hospital —” You threw your arms up halfway by your side, and you let out a short laugh that came out dry and wrong. “And I hate that you’ve probably been thinking it for four years.”

“I haven’t,” he said too fast. God, he’d come here to make tonight better for you, not to make you re-evaluate all your years working with him. “Sure, I thought it was none of my business how you spend your good nights off. Didn’t stop me from thinking they didn’t deserve ‘em.” 

You rolled your eyes. “You’re just saying that now ‘cause you feel bad.”

“Wish it were that simple,” he said, and chose to leave it unelaborated because it wasn’t that simple and he had no intention of explaining exactly why. “Half the time, you know it’s not gonna work out. You’re breaking my heart by making me watch you break yours.” 

You blinked, and he watched the fight loosen out of you by inches. “It’s just a free breakfast, Jack. Nothing to get your heart broken over.” 

Jack let out a huff through his nose, mouth opening to say what, he didn’t know. “Is that all? ‘Cause I can get you free breakfast for the rest of your life.” 

You laughed, disbelieving, through your nose, some of the night’s weight finally cracking off of you. “You’ve got a weird way of apologizing.” 

“Just to my favorite resident.” He pointed his index finger at you, lazy, and pushed himself off the lockers. His shoulder blades left a faint dust-print on the metal where he’d been leaning. He thumbed in the combination without looking at the dial — muscle memory, years of the same locker — and the door swung open with a rusted squeak. He pulled out his bag. “So?” 

“So what?” 

“You ditch the fellow.” He slung the bag up over his shoulder, close enough now that he caught the tail-end of the perfume you’d lightly spritzed over yourself. “I buy.”

You looked at him for a second too long, lips pushing to one side, as though you were gauging whether this was a bit or not, another line he’d tossed and wanted to let die on its own. He stood there, jaw set and features relaxing to show you he did mean it, more than he wanted to admit, if he was being honest with himself. 

“You’re serious.” 

“Do I look like I’m not?” He nodded once at your locker, your bag sitting on the shelf. “Grab your stuff. We’re going.” 

“Fine,” you said finally, reaching over and zipping your backpack all the way before throwing it over one shoulder. “Can you drive? I’ve been taking the subway.”

“Why?” he asked drily. “You’ve got a car.”

Jack realized, as he watched you slide in across from him and folding both hands around the coffee before it was all the way poured, that he’d never once been on a date where the woman had no idea it was one. 

It wasn’t lost on him what that made him, a man old enough to know better, letting a thing be one thing on his side of the table and another thing entirely on yours, saying nothing to square the difference. But he’d meant what he’d said, and he was going to feed you. 

You ordered a short stack, eggs, hash brown, decaf on loop. She wrote it down, definitely having heard worse from better.

“Thanks for the treat, Jack,” you said when Dina left, bringing the rim of your cup to your lips. “Don’t think I could’ve done another breakfast to let him down gently.”

“We have to make some changes to your lifestyle,” Jack replied, voice rough, as he eyed you. 

“Oh, yeah?” you murmured. “We?” 

“Well, I did have to deliver a note to you today. In all my life working here, that’s never happened.” 

You laughed around the rim of your cup. “In my defense, I don’t think anyone’s wrote me a note out of an OR either. That’s a first for both of us.”

“Glad we share the experience.”

Dina came by with a pot and topped you off without being asked, and placed the food in front of you. Jack watched you reach for the salt before your fork had even touched the eggs, shaking it twice over the plate.

“You’re gonna give yourself a stroke by forty.”

“You’re gonna give me a stroke right now if you comment on my food.” But you set the shaker down after the third shake, which he noticed and had to bite back a smile.

Dina dropped his plate in front of him — bacon, eggs, no pancakes — and you were reaching for it with a piece of your fork before she’d even finished setting his fork down. He gave you a faux-frown, picking up his fork and, without looking, spreading a piece of your hashbrown off the opposite plate in trade. He wasn’t sure when the two of you had started stealing bites and sips off of each other’s stuff, only that it’d started somewhere and calcified into something neither of you mentioned. 

“Rude,” you said, mouth already full.

“Learned it from you,” he muttered, nudging his plate an inch closer to your side of the table, which you took full advantage of. 

Dina’s radio crackled through something twangy and close-to-familiar behind the counter, competing with the clatter of a skillet somewhere in the back, the whole place smelling like batter and grease soaked into decades of countertop, syrup that had dried a hundred small amber rings nobody had ever fully scrubbed off. 

“I’ve never been here before.” You absentmindedly cut the hashbrown in half as your eyes raked over the place. “This a regular spot for you?”

“Since before you joined,” he said easily, but his brows furrowed as he realized he’d been coming here alone for years. He was in the same booth when he could get it, ordered the same order, and it struck to him only now, watching you eat your hashbrowns, how much smaller and less lonely a booth felt with you taking up the other half of it. “Used to be the only quiet I got on some weeks.” 

You hummed. “And now?”

“Guess the quiet’s pretty negotiable.” He shrugged. “I can go without it.”

You smiled down at your plate, something easy working at the corner of your mouth. A thread of syrup had gathered at the seam of your lips — you hadn’t noticed, too busy considering his answer — and before he’d cleared the impulse with the rest of himself, his thumb was already moving, catching it at the corner quickly, no different than when he swiped under your lashline for salt after a bad night.

You stayed still, having gotten used to his hands somewhere during your residency.

“You’re a mess,” he said, wiping his thumb off on the paper napkin folded under his elbow. 

“You’ve got coffee on your scrub top,” you said, eyes flicking down to his chest. His brows furrowed and he looked down, and you were right. “Pot, kettle.”

He’d been about to say something else, he could’ve sworn it, but had lost every word of it watching you smile so unguarded, free enough to let him look at you. He had to reach for his coffee just to have something to do with his hands. 

When the check came, folded in its little plastic tray, you both reached for it at once. Your hand landed flat over his knuckles. Neither of you moved it for a second, for his hand stayed exactly where it was, broad and unmoving under yours, and something unspoken passed through the two inches of fornica between your faces as he raised a brow at you. He slid the tray out from under you slowly.

“Said I’m buying,” he said, shaking his head slightly.

The drive back had been quieter than the one there had been. It was nearing ten in the morning, and he knew both of you had stayed up longer than intended, especially for two people who had to clock back in in a shorter amount of time than he deemed plausible to reset completely.

He’d cracked the window down an inch, and the air coming through carried the smell of wet pavement and the sound of a garbage truck grinding its gears three streets over. Your neighborhood, he was learning, woke up slow; there was a paperboy on a bike, a guy in scrubs different from yours locking up his own car after a shift that wasn’t at the PTMC, and Jack drove through it with two fingers loose over the wheel. Neither of you had bothered with the radio.

You’d gone somewhere billowy around your third cup of decaf, all the sharp edges of the night replaced with something looser and sleepier, and you gave him directions in a voice gone thick from exhaustion as you were likely starting to feel it behind your eyes. 

He pulled his car along the curb and let it idle, one shoe braced against the floorboard, watching the numbers of your building.

“Gonna sleep?” he asked.

“Gonna try.” You were already working the bag strap over your shoulder, hair falling loose out of the knot you’d put it up in at some point at the diner, strands of it catching the early light. “I’ve got no idea how you do this then take SWAT calls.”

“You’d be able to do it, too, if I put you on the field.” 

You mumbled something, letting your head drop against the window for a second, before picking itself back up. “Stop threatening me, Jack.” 

He watched you fight your eyelids, his mouth pulling up at the corners at the sight. “C’mon. Get inside before I gotta carry you up.”

You snorted, half-hearted. “You can’t. You’d throw your hip out.”

“Try me.” He was already rounding the hood before you’d gathered your bearings, boots loud on the quiet street, and you let out another laugh and let him get there first, too tired to argue about who gets to open what.

He walked you up the cracked path, palm settling at the small of your back, and you leaned back into it, half your weight given over without you noticing it. 

At the door, you fumbled with your keys out from under a granola wrapper and a capless pen, missed the lock twice, and gave up trying on the third. You turned to face him instead with your back against the frame and your bag slowly sliding off one shoulder.

“Thank you,” you said, words coming out loose and filtered by the exhaustion even as you tried to meet his eyes head-on. “For the — everything. The explanation. And the breakfast.” 

Jack felt his lips curve up, fingers flexing at his sides. “Anytime.” 

“And for driving me there — thank you. And for the drive back.” 

“Uh-huh. You gonna go inside?” he said, voice going quieter as he looked down at the ground, at how the toes of your shoes were almost touching. “Or keep thanking me until you fall asleep standing up?” 

You cocked your head to the side, your lips moving upwards into a fuller smile. His own mouth curved as he shifted on his feet slightly, closing the barely-there inch between his shoes and yours. 

“Jack?” 

He hummed, and you went up slightly onto your toes before he’d finished deciding what to do with you. Or maybe he’d moved in first, or maybe there was no real order to it at all. His mouth found yours somewhere in that uncertainty, slowly despite it, because he’d already worked out every version of this moment and this one had simply appeared in front of him.

His hand came up to cradle the side of your jaw, thumb settling into the soft hollow just beneath your ears. Your skin was warm despite the cold snap in the air, much softer than he’d let himself imagine, and he felt the exact second your breath caught against his mouth, a small stutter that made his fingers curve around your jaw, index resting against your cheekbone. 

He kept it slow, it was the only thing he had any real control over right now, the pace of it instead of the fact of it. He used what little he had left, dragging his mouth against yours, like he could somehow make up for four years of nothing by refusing to rush the first thirty seconds of something. His other hand found your waist, and his palm felt how your back curved into him, the hitch of your ribs on an inhale, and he pressed you back the last inch against the doorframe more to ground himself. 

Your fist found the front of his canvas jacket, dragging him in the last stubborn space he’d been too careful to close himself, and a sound came out of his chest that embarrassed him a little. He felt you smile against his mouth, and his entire body felt warm at having been caught enjoying this entirely as much as he was. 

He tilted his head so his forehead pressed against yours and pulled his mouth away. His lips jutted out slightly, feeling suddenly empty and unwilling to put the full distance back between the two of you.

Your eyes were still shut, and you were breathing unevenly. “Thank you,” you murmured. 

He huffed a short laugh, and in it, realized how breathless he, too, was. 

You tipped your chin back up, already chasing him.

Jack felt the want knot up inside him, greedy and unreasonably leaning back in to meet you halfway before the rest of him had caught up and made him stop. He made a small sound in his throat and pinched his eyes shut, letting you get right up to the edge of it, breath already tangling with his, wanting so badly to just let it happen, before his finger came up between you, pressed light against your bottom lip to stop you a hair short. It was more for his own sake than the words he remembered you telling someone years ago ringing in his head.

“Ah-ah.” His voice came out rough with want, entirely at odds with his actions. “Your rule. Only one kiss after the first date. I’m trying —” he exhaled hard, almost dramatically, “— trying real hard here to make it to the second.”

“Huh?” Your eyes peeled open. “This was a date?” 

“Best one you’ve had I’m guessing, with the way you’re breaking your rules.” His finger stayed right where it was, and he watched your eyes struggle to focus, still glassy from the kiss. He could feel the warm huff of breath breaking unsteady against his fingertip, could feel your mouth soft and parted underneath it, waiting on him. 

You pressed a peck against his finger instead, your mouth barely dragging against his skin as a shy smile formed behind it that he felt more than saw. “Maybe.”

“Well, good.” He smiled, despite himself, and pushed himself off your forehead, opting instead to press his lips there. “Get some sleep,” he murmured against your hairline, lips lingering a little longer there. “Might be able to get a full seven hours.” 

“Will you?” 

“Doubt it.” He pulled back enough to look at you properly, thumb tracing a line along your cheekbone — his touch feather-light, tracking the exact curve of it, memorizing the route — before he made himself drop his hand entirely, fingers curling loosely at his sides because suddenly he had no idea what to do with them without you under them. “Kinda got a lot on my mind now.”

“Yeah?” You bit back a smile, still not quite steady on your feet. “Anything you wanna share with the class?”

“Not a chance.” He bent a fraction and hooked two fingers under the strap of your bag where it’d slid down to your elbow, dragging it slowly back up to your shoulders, knuckles grazing your arms the whole way. “You’ll find out. Eventually.”

He forced himself to step off the mat — one step back, then the second, putting real distance between you now — forcing ease into his expression that he definitely wasn’t feeling. He stopped a few feet away from you anyway, unable to fully commit to walking away, watching you stunned and still in your doorway, mouth a little kiss-soft. He felt so completely helpless and pleased at the sight. “Text me when you’re up and I’ll get to planning date two.” 

You raised a hand into a wave, fingers curling in the air.

“Bye, Jack,” you said, and his name came out of your mouth softer than you probably meant it to, smooth and cushy the way it never sounded on shift.

I

London, 1599

Some say if you dance with the devil, he might follow you home. That may be true, but so was what your Grandame always told you: “Once the devil gets a good look at you, he’ll never forget your face.” And isn’t that worse than being followed? The real horror is of being seen, and known, and remembered. 

You didn’t believe in the devil. Not really. Not in the way the Mortals did; the horned imp with cleft feet and fangs and a curling tongue. Mortals saw darkness everywhere, dark magic, evil intent, when the truth was so much simpler: there was nature, forces seen and unseen, life and death. No good, no evil. Only power, only energy. Of course, alongside that, there were people and beasts, plants and fish and spirits, and there were beings like you, existing on the faultline between the physical and the intangible, the magical and the mundane. 

That was the true dichotomy. Mortals and the Others; shape changers and bloodsuckers and spirits and witches, like you and Grandame. 

These things all coexisted together, cluttering the rocks and plains of the earth, entirely distinct from the Mortal concepts of good and evil. That being said… while the devil may not exist, while dark magic might be the paranoid mutterings of Mortals afraid of what they didn’t understand, evil was real. It existed in Others, as much as it did in man. You just hadn’t looked it in the face before. Not until that night. 

September in London. The summer hadn’t released its sweaty hold on the capital yet, and the heat remained in the dusty, stinking air long after the setting sun dyed the skies umber. The river was putrid and brown, lapping lazily against the south bank and the oars of the wherrymen, smelling of ripe decay.  It would be another rowdy night, though Bankside knew no other kind. Barely six and the taverns were already full to heaving, punters pressed sweatily against each other above their cups; the brothels rang with screaming laughter, raucous singing and tinkling music. In the alleyways between the ale- and pleasure-houses, brawlers and lovers alike tangled together groaning amidst the trash heaps, beset by rats. The streets were dust choked and dry in the drought, the only moisture to be found was in the gutters; standing water, piss and spilt beer, inching in yellow streams towards the river. 

At the bear baiting the people’s champion, a ferocious black-furred beast named Stormcloud Ned, swung his paw at one of the bloodhounds tormenting him and split the creature’s spine in two with one clean strike. Its vengeful litter-mate leapt at Ned’s throat and ripped out a lump of hairy flesh the size of a child’s skull. The watching crowd roared: the sport was good, and Ned kept things interesting enough to bet on. Their stamping feet in the stands sent ripples through the blood-clotted sand dusting the floor of the pit. Bankside had built itself a colosseum, and in the bear had forged itself a gladiator. Until it would inevitably die, and another poor beast would be brought in in chains to curry favour in blood and broken teeth. 

For yourself, you had pursued other entertainment for your afternoon off; less cruel, but no less bloody. A trip to the theatre. Another trip to the theatre - this playhouse was newly built this spring and you were already a regular. You swallowed the plays like bread and honey, like the roasted nuts the vendors sold outside for a penny. It was a portal, a stifling, sweat-stained portal, to other worlds. Tonight’s fare, bloodsoaked, tragic, dramatic, and funny by turn, was The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. You’d stood amidst the Groundlings slackjawed and wide-eyed as the two hours’ traffic of the stage whipped by, blind to the shifting mass around you, their smells, their gasps and whispers. There was just you and the tale, the boys in their robes and painted faces, their voices flowing like wine over the crowd. When real pigs’ blood poured from their doublets during the fight scenes, you were close enough to the stage for some to spatter your face, and you shrieked in delight. At the final bow, the applause was so raucous it drowned out the Beargarden next door. You hollered and cheered with all the rest, screamed for an encore, for the playwright to come onstage and bow, and clapped so hard the deepening sky was fractured into a thousand tiny pieces between your stinging palms. 

The walk back along the river passed quicker than the walk to the theatre earlier that afternoon. Your mind was reeling with the tale, with treason and violence and prophecy and plot. You recited your favourite parts to yourself, lips moving around borrowed words. 

The fault, dear Brutus, isn’t our minds but in… no, that wasn’t right. Hold on. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in ourselves… 

You wished you could command a room like the actors did, even without magic. You imagined spreading your hands wide and speaking words that a hundred people would hang upon. 

Of course, it would be a tough sell. Women weren’t allowed on the stage. And even if you were, you could never remember all the bloody lines. 

The fault, dear, Brutus…is not… in our...something… but in… something…

No use. You had to hope the meter would click, that later the line would come back to you. The only other option was waiting for the piece to be performed again (which was never guaranteed, the censors came down hard on new plays, banning offensive ones after one performance), or keeping your eyes peeled for a pirated version that some quick-scribbling thief had copied out during the performance to sell for a profit later. Though those were never entirely accurate. 

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our…hearts?

Dusk was falling now, and the city was still so hot, so loud. You stepped down onto Green Walk, your boots sinking into the stinking river-wet marsh. It was a lawless part of the city, and not safe for those who could not defend themselves without a knife or a well-timed hex. But you were armed with both, and had no fear of anything but the stink of the mud on your skirts and the wrath your Grandame would bring down on your head if you were really late, and the labour had started in earnest before you got back to Mistress Phillips. She was an illustrious client, the wife of a wealthy merchant. She’d been complaining of birthing pains all morning, begging to push, but Grandame had held firm. Drawing her head conspiratorially close to yours while you both stood at the fire laying out fresh towels and linens to use later, she muttered: 

“She’s barely ready to pass a blueberry, let alone the babe. Nay, it’ll be a few hours yet. Get thee out of doors for a while, come back at eventide. Before seven bells, mind you!” You nodded, and left the Phillips’ house calmly, with all the dignity you could muster. But inside you were dancing jubilantly. Freedom! If you hurried upriver, you could get a ticket for The Globe! Grandame knew where you were headed; where you always went, if you could afford a ticket. She didn’t mind. She’d winked as she sent you away. 

She’d mind that you were late, though. Eventide, she’d said, and it was eventide now: the stars were just pricking through the dusty reddish-mauve of the deepening sky. 

Stars. 

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings. 

“YES!” Your smile flashed in the dusk, your shout disturbing an owl. It shrieked; a shrill puncture in the sweltering dark.

You were still beaming as you made your way up to the house, as you kicked the foul-smelling marsh dirt from your boots and rubbed fruitlessly at your muddied skirts with a handful of moss torn from the garden wall. You swung the knocker, greeted the Phillips’ maid, and traipsed past Goodman Phillips with barely a nod, back up the stairs to Mistress Phillips’ chambers, where a reedy moaning was slipping through the gaps around the door. Being a midwife allowed you certain privileges; a wage, of course, and a way to use your power discreetly and in service of the most vulnerable and needy; but more excitingly, it enabled you to strut past the master of any house into a room he feared, into the secretive space of women and apothecary, into the birthing den, where women’s word was law. 

Mistress Phillips was labouring properly now, the sheen of sweat on her brow gelling her pale hair to the pain-crumpled flesh. Grandame was easing her onto all fours on the bed, rubbing firm, soothing circles into her spine, encouraging her in a low voice. She looked up as you entered, her silver eyes flashing. 

There you are, you luskish pigeon! What time do you call this? Eventide, I said! Her voice rang clear in your head, like a church bell heard across the river when the air was especially still. Coven mates could speak telepathically like this, use it for channelling spells and murmuring incantations nonverbally. Grandame mostly used it to talk without being overheard by Mortals, who thought her a woman of few words simply because they could not hear her. 

I’m sorry, Grandame.

“Boil some water, and help me get her into the birthing stool,” she said aloud, as the voice in your head added: I’ll give you a flea in your ear later, girl. She wasn’t angry, not really. Just exasperated. This job was easier with two, especially if magic was needed to ease things along, which, given Mistress Phillips’ slow travail, was likely. You did as Grandame directed, easing Mrs Phillips onto the stool and setting the kettle over the flames to boil. You ground willow bark into a paste with a pestle, brewed raspberry leaf tea, and prepared tinctures of shepherd’s purse and yarrow flower in sight of the labouring mother, while Grandame silently performed her spells at her back. The secrecy was vital, or you risked your magic being outed. And to be outed was to court witch hunters, persecution, and death on the scaffold. 

A midwife was already a suspicious figure, and one who walked through the world like Grandame did? Six feet tall, wire-haired, silver eyed, broad shouldered and strong despite her advanced age? A satchel of herbs and homemade concoctions at her hip and ancient magic in her bones, so vibrant even the Mortals could sense it even if they couldn’t give it a name? Even if countless babes were saved by virtue of being helped into the world by you and Grandame, it would not save either of you if an accusation of witchcraft came your way. Your Coven had learned that the hard way in Berwick, nine years before. 

When Grandame tired, you would take over. A tag team of witchcraft, magic volleyed back and forth across the branches of a genealogical tree. Hours. Contractions. The dusk deepened into bistre darkness. The moon rose. The temperature did not drop. Both you and Grandame were sweating as much as Mistress Phillips, who was desperate and bad-tempered with exhaustion. 

“It must be a son,” she moaned. “My husband wants for a boy, to take over his business. He has no use for girls. You must deliver me a son! It must be a boy. It must-!” 

You couldn’t keep the irritation from rising inside you, brushing up the inside of your sternum like the barbs of a stinging nettle leaf. So often, you heard these words; or worse, the whimpered apologies of a mother still bleeding on the birthing bed, presenting a newborn girl to her husband. The reign of King Henry and his thwarted prayers for boys may have passed into the golden age of Queen Elizabeth, but nevertheless; her subjects wanted boys, boys, an army of boys to carry on after their fathers. What about the girls? You always wondered. What do they carry on? What do they inherit? Where do their legacies go? 

Grandame knew you too well; she caught your eye again and gestured you behind Mistress Phillips to support her shoulders. It was a vital role, but also an invisible one: your distaste at her words would be concealed. As would your spell, the incantations whispered in the mind, strengthened by Grandame’s voice in your head; the beam of power unfurling from you into the labouring woman’s spine, unfurling like lotus petals, blooming… the spell took root and helped the baby turn, giving Mistress Phillips strength to bear down again. Grandame moved forwards, and took the woman’s hands in her whorled old ones, and didn’t once flinch when she squeezed. 

Between you, you supported Mistress Phillips, now transformed into a primal being of survival and pain. Blood. Pressure. A keening wail, rising like wolfsong. And then: a cry. Young Master Phillips emerged into the world. Grandame caught him, wailing and red faced and wet, and cut the cord. She handed him to you to bathe and swaddle him while she attended his mother. This done, and the babe cradled against his mother’s breast, Grandame straightened up with the agility of a much younger woman and crossed the chamber to open the door, calling in Goodman Phillips to meet his son. The relief was palpable on the merchant’s face. 

Grandame joined you at the fireside, where you were gathering up the tools of your trade; the scissors, the paring knives, the linens, the vials of tinctures and herbs and potions, the mortar and pestle. The hare pelt that had been wrapped around Mistress Phillips’ belly to promote a speedier labour. The geodes and runestones in their protective pouch. All went into the worn leather satchel. 

Was it a good yarn, at least? Grandame’s voice, smoky in the mind. You dared a glance at her, found her smiling wryly into your face. You grinned back, dipping your head to her shoulder briefly.

–Wonderful. It was a new one by the young man. Master… Shakespeare, I think he’s called. He’s fantastic. Almost as good as Master Marlowe was—

Ach, Grandame tutted, and she kissed her teeth aloud. You and your Master Marlowe! If you like him that much—

What you should do, you didn’t find out. Grandame’s words, whispered directly into the brain, were stalled by the sound of knocking downstairs. 

Grandame looked up, her silver eyes suspicious. You wondered what she’d sensed, and let your own instincts probe the house, the sharp edge of the sound as a second round of knocks punctured the air. 

“Where’s that Agynes?” Snapped Mistress Phillips, furious at the intrusion into the warm serenity of her new motherhood. Her son squalled at her breast. “Stupid girl! She’ll be dreaming over the stove again, the halfwit–” More knocking. 

“-Go see to that, child,” murmured Grandame, and you nodded, glad to escape the stifling heat of the chamber for the equally stuffy hallway. You descended the stairs, collecting a candle to guide your way, and approached the door as another round of knocking commenced. Still no sign of the maid. You seized the wrought iron handle and opened the door.  

It was a man, bathed in the sputtering glow of the taper in your hand. He was standing close, too close to be polite; framed in the doorway, halfway between the dark without and the light within. His eyes, glittering in the candlelight, fixed on you and held your gaze unflinchingly, even as he bowed politely and greeted you in a clipped, courtly English voice. It settled in your stomach like stones. Something about his voice, his carefully chosen words, his manner, reminded you of the actors on stage. 

“My lady,” he choked out, sweeping his cap from his head and wringing it in his slender, white hands. “I have to throw myself on your mercy. I beg you - implore you - for charity.” 

“Why?” you asked hesitantly. “What’s happened?” 

“Sanctuary,” he begged. “Please, madam. Sanctuary, I beg you. I was attacked on the road by the river there, on the marsh. By robbers. They’re still out there! I barely got away! If they find me—!” 

In the folds of your skirt, you clenched your fist, felt your power thrumming in the hollow between your palm and your fingers. A hex, a warding spell, a defensive curse? You weren’t sure yet. But that voice was like silk fraying over a blade. Smooth, cool, and with a lethal undertone that chilled your blood. He was solidly built, handsome and well dressed in unusual clothes; a high necked yellow jerkin and a pale doublet beneath to match, the quilted fabric patterned with gold darts. He was dripping with yellow, the same hue as saffron flowers, and with gold: a chain at his throat glinting in the candlelight, rings on every finger, tipping the hem of his ruff. 

“You’re well dressed for having just been robbed,” you said, bluntly, and the stranger stilled like a snake willing to strike. You realised that he had not blinked since his eyes found your face, a realisation that made you want to run and hide. He put you in mind of the witch hunters that had descended on you in Berwick. They knocked politely at first, too. 

“It’s like I told you. I barely got away. But they’re out there still, and won’t just take my money. They will slit my throat as soon as catch me. Here—“ he slipped his rings from his left hand, and held them out to you entreatingly. The gold caught the candlelight as his eyes did; gleaming and glinting. “Take these, as payment for your hospitality. Please, sweet lady. Grant me sanctuary. Save my life! Let me in.” There was a desperation in his voice that his eyes did not reflect. “Let me in!!”  

His mantle, a defiant yellow gold around his shoulders, brushed the dusty earth as he dropped to his knees before you, fistful of gold still outstretched, straining against the threshold as though a pane of glass stood between you. He was the picture of vulnerability, of supplication, of weakness, but it wasn’t enough to overpower the suspicion, the chill of dread that had taken root in you. Instinct. The jangling nerve-endings of your power, sensing another, an Other. 

A vampire. 

Of all the Others who shared the shadows with you, of all the faefolk and the immortals, vampires were the only ones Grandame feared. That alone was enough to instill terror, even though you had never met one. Until now. 

“No.” You whispered, drawing backwards, away from the door frame, away from him. “No. No–!” You threw up your hands, palms pulsing with the feverish energy of every protective ward you knew to reinforce the threshold, fingers flared wide and crackling with power. The vampire’s eyes widened, his nostrils flaring at the smell of ozone; the sour, electric kick of magic in the air. 

“Oh,” he breathed, and his full lips curved into a terrible grin, as though he really saw you for the first time. “Oh, I see…” 

You dug in your heels, braced all your might against the intrusion of him, cold as steel between the ribs and toxic as hemlock in the mouth. With a shaking hand you reached for the pouch at your hip, made by Grandame: portable protection, sealed with the sigil of a witches’ knot. A bag of magic-charged salt and powdered eggshell, ground rosemary from the kitchen garden you kept, crumbled balsam soaked in frankincense; all to charge your shielding spell, the incantation clamouring in your head and hot on your lips. The vampire watched with a sly, hungry sort of interest, totally unphased at the display of your magic. His ears were pricked for your racing pulse, the tang of your sweat and fear budding against the hum of your magic in his nose. Still his lips wore that terrible curl. 

You tore the pouch free and upended it, dusting the threshold, grounding the spell, reinforcing the ward. Desperation made you bold. You smeared your sweaty fingers through the powder and scrawled sigils on the doorframe that glowed faintly in the deepening darkness.  The vampire’s eyes glossed over the powdery line between you, up over the shaky symbols you’d drawn, onto the plains of your body, the thrumming palms of your hands and the curve of your throat. They lingered there a moment, then climbed up into your face, staring deep as though inspecting the bottom of a pool. For a moment, there was brittle, electric silence. 

And then he laughed; a cold, arrogant sound, a single bark on the balmy air. 

“Ara,” he chuckled, the clipped accent slipping, vowels lengthening melodically. “Ya dote, I’m scarlet for ya. It’ll take a lot more than that to hold me back, once I’m in there with ya, darlin’.” Before you could reply, the parlour door behind you swung open with a clunk.

“How now, Miss!” cried the maid, her heavy footfall breaking the chill silence as she advanced up the hall towards you. “Why have you answered the door? ‘Tis not your place!” 

“Goodwife Phillips was angry you couldn’t be roused, so I came instead,” you said without looking at her, your gaze caught in the trap of those strange, glittering eyes. You steeled yourself as Agynes reached your shoulder, staring confusedly at the scattered dust on the threshold and the mess of daubed shapes around the doorframe, before volleying between you and the vampire. 

“-Who is this?” 

You replied: “A stranger,” as the vampire yelped: “-A friend!” 

He had transformed once more into the timid, fearful Englishman. Still on his knees, the stranger turned to Agynes, fixing her with that stare, that beseeching, desperate need writ large on his pale, handsome face. Agynes was a rosy-cheeked girl of nineteen, a village girl freshly arrived in London for work, heart ripe like a peach ready to be torn apart with sharp teeth. You saw her soften towards him, saw the shiver of sympathy pass through her.

“Please, sweet lady,” he gasped, clasping his hands supplicatorily beneath his chin. “Grant me sanctuary. I was set upon on the road, attacked by robbers. I have told your Mistress of my trouble, but her heart is hard–” 

“-She’s not my mistress,” Agynes blurted out. “Goody Phillips is in childbed. This is just the midwife. She cannot dictate who comes into my Master’s house, and who does not.” You spun to stare at the girl, shellshocked; your movement sent the flame of your taper dancing and the light shifted over the stranger’s face. In the rapid shift of light and shadow, the strange glitter of his eyes became a glow: a pure bloody red. Terror licked its icy tongue up the nape of your neck and into your spine. 

“Aye, but you are kind,” the vampire said gently, his voice full of honey. His lips were glistening and wet in the sputtering light. “What’s your name, chuck?”

“-Agynes,” the girl replied, charmed, her cheeks flushed. A weight dropped into your guts like a stone; she’d softened so readily for him, presented her creamy throat up to the snap of his jaws. “And this is—” You gripped her shoulder, cutting her off and turning her roughly toward you. Agynes grunted in surprise. It was mere superstition on your part, carried over from your dealings with the faefolk, but you believed it nonetheless. Names were powerful. You did not give over yours easily. 

“Stop,” you spat. “He is not what he seems. He’s dangerous. He lies–!” 

“Agynes, show mercy,” the vampire’s voice came again from the threshold, turning the maid’s head. He had risen to his feet again, two spots of dust on his pristine pale hose. “I am  but a humble soldier of the queen, landed from Ireland this morning. The men who attacked me were Irish - supporters of the rebellion no doubt, sympathetic to their countrymen in revolt against the Crown - and they would have killed me if I hadn’t gotten away–!”

“-Ignore him, Agynes,” you groaned. “Think. He’s a soldier? Where is his sword, his scabbard? His clothes are strange. He has gold, but was robbed? He was attacked down by the river, he says. But his clothes are clean. Look at his shoes! Why are his shoes clean, if he walked in the marsh?” You held up the hem of your own dress, still dark with mud from your own walk by the river. Agynes looked, but your words didn’t seem to land. “Agynes!” 

“-Agynes! What’s all this clamour?” You jumped, and Agynes did too: Goodman Phillips was himself descending the stairs, and behind him - you could have cried with relief - was Grandame. “Who knocks?” 

“A gentleman, robbed on the marsh, begging for our help,” Agynes said. She fixed you with a pointed stare. “He is a soldier, a hero who fought in Ireland on behalf of the Queen. But he has been denied aid, barred from your door. By her, a guest of your house.”

You ignored the barb, stared back up the stairs, into the face of the Grandame, pleading, begging inside your head. She nodded stiffly, her mouth a grim line, eyes on the threshold. Goodman Phillips had reached you. He looked the stranger over cynically, and hope flared in your chest.

“-You served in Ireland, sir? With the Earl of Essex?” 

“-Aye sir, at Curlew Pass. The Earl himself gave me leave to return to London, after our defeat to the rebels.” The stranger’s voice was calm, smooth and cool as a stone. The affected desperation he had shown you had melted away. When his eyes met yours, which they did often, they were sly and smug. 

“-He was robbed on the Green Walk, attacked by a band of Irish sympathetic to the rebel cause!” Agynes cried. 

“-So he says,” You snapped. “I didn’t see any roving bands of Irish on the Green Walk earlier. I don’t believe him. Sir - don’t let him in!!” Goodman Phillips turned on you, incensed. He was a big man, bigger than you, bigger than the stranger, and his rage was blustery. 

“-Unfeeling wench! Where is your Christian charity, to deny a member of the Queen’s army sanctuary into an Englishman’s home?” You could have snarled in anger. Your voice, when it came, was brittle as a snapping branch.

“You stupid old fool! Can’t you see he’s not what he seems! You cannot - you must not let him in! He’ll kill us all!!” 

“Granddaughter.” Grandame’s voice was heavy as lead. She stepped forwards, seized your shoulders.  “You have overstepped yourself, to speak to Goodman Phillips thus. We must take our leave. Now.” 

“But–!” You gasped, but she cut you off. 

“Now. The babe is delivered, Goodman Phillips has paid our fee. Our work here is done.” 

“Aye, I think that is for the best,” Goodman Phillips said loftily, and you glared at him. He didn’t notice, turning instead to the stranger. “Come in, sir. Any servant of the Queen is welcome here.” The words passed over you like an icy wave, humming with power. The meagre protection the threshold had provided melted away like snow in July heat. Your own spell faltered, flickered, died. The sigils around the doorframe were mere pictures now, their glow dying; the line of salt across the door just powder, dust to be swept away with a broom. You opened your mouth, raised your hands once more to defend, to ward, to protect—

Let go. There is nothing we can do. Grandame’s voice rang clear and commanding in your head, stopping you in your tracks. We must get away, save ourselves. 

-NO!!! I won’t leave them!!

Grandame’s eyes flashed at your retort. She seized your shoulders roughly, and as her hands connected with your body you felt the heat of a spell, compelling you forwards. She was the leader of your Coven, the font of your power. You were powerless to resist her. 

In the doorway, the stranger was grinning at you, directly at you, and his teeth were white and sharp. 

“A shame, sweeting,” he said silkily. “I should have liked to know you better. Pray, what’s your name?” 

Your jaw was locked by Grandame’s spell, not that you would have opened your lips in response anyway. You did all you could, and spat at him. 

He laughed and stepped aside, bowing gallantly and bidding you goodnight as Grandame pulled you over the threshold. He stepped in behind you, scuffing the line of salt with the heel of his boot. Agynes closed the door with a snap in your face. The last thing you saw was the flaring ruby red gleam of his eyes, boring into your face as though committing every line and curve to memory. 

Grandame dragged you home, deaf to your protests. She didn’t release you until you passed the threshold of your own narrow cottage, the tiny one-up-one-down abode that had been home since you arrived in London. It was built flush to the northern bank of the Thames, near to the wherry steps and the stinking docks at St Katharine’s. It was poky and damp, but had a small kitchen garden and a modicum of privacy. Privacy meant solace, but also safety. For all you yearned for friends, for the companionship you lost with your Coven and your sister, when danger pressed close to the nape of your neck you were grateful for the dark, sombre cottage you shared with Grandame. It was warded from the foundation to the chimney flue, and perhaps the most magically fortified place in London. But your thoughts returned continually to the chill that passed over you as the threshold’s protection at the Phillips’ house evaporated.  

Grandame scarcely let you through the door before setting you to work reinforcing the wards, grinding up bones and eggshell and salt crystals into a powder, tearing wild garlic flowers from the stems until the entire cottage hummed with the stink. She dictated your moves from where she stood, hunched over her battered Grimoire reading aloud while your cat Greymalkin weaved between her feet, the faintest tremor in her voice the only thing betraying her fear. 

“I didn’t realise there were vampires in London,” you ventured, smearing your streaming eyes with your sleeve. You’d moved on to garlic cloves now, ripping them from the bulb and grating them up small. The smell was permeating your pores, stinging your eyes.

“They’re rare. But they can be anywhere. Like rats. There’s always one closer than you think.” Grandame’s voice was grave. 

“Couldn’t we have told them? The Phillipses? Warned them, or—?” 

“It’s no use, child. Speaking of monsters to the Mortal folk will only invite their eyes on you.” 

That word stuck out to you: monsters. As though a vampire was a baser being than yourself, as though their violent existence rendered witches closer aligned with mortals than with them. As though a mortal wouldn’t put both to the fire, vampire and witch alike. 

“…They’re like us,” you mused. Grandame spat on the ground in disgust, her fingers fluttering around a sigil to ward off evil. When she spoke, it was venomous. 

“That creature is nothing like us.” You swallowed, cowed. 

“I know. I… I’ve never seen one before, that’s all. I didn’t expect—”

“Thank your lucky stars you’ve not seen one, girl. I saw you back there; you would have stood your ground, and wouldn’t have left without a fight. But trust the wisdom of my years. I have seen a vampire take down a coven of ten, singlehanded. They cannot be stopped, nor slain. Only slowed down, and evaded.” Grandame kneaded her forehead with an aged fist, her knuckle bones straining against the papery flesh like knots in the bark of a tree. “It is a point of pride that you’ve never seen one. It means I have protected you well. But I will not lose you, not as I lost thy mother, and thy sister. And our coven-sisters in Berwick, and all those before, lost to the fires, or the noose.” Her eyes gleamed, wet with unspilled tears. In her six hundred years, she had seen so much loss. So many of your kind lost to paranoia, fanaticism and hatred. So many killed simply for what you could do, slaughtered by those who were too wrathful in their fear to attempt to understand. Her next words were gentler, had softened in her mouth. “Thou art brave, child. So brave! But you have forgotten an important rule. A witch ought never be alone. You cannot fight things yourself. Sometimes all you can do is protect your coven, and run.”

Those words would echo in your mind many times over the following days.  When the gory scene at the Phillips’ house was discovered the following day; the entire household slaughtered, their blood soaking into the floorboards and witchmarks around the door. When the shiver of terror at this grisly discovery rippled outwards, over London Bridge to the City and along the banks of the Thames to Wapping. When the eyes of your neighbours and clients became cold, stony, suspicious. When the whispers reached you that, as the last people to see the Phillips family alive, the wise old midwife and her granddaughter were now suspects.  On the morning when the heat finally released its grip on the city and the air held the first delicious snap of autumn cold, when the constables and armed officers came for you and Grandame, they echoed once again. Should you have run, both of you, as you had from Berwick? 

You saw them coming up the lane, peeped them from the window and hollered for Grandame; mortal men armed to the teeth, toting bibles and warrants, with a baying crowd of your neighbours assembling behind them. There were so many of them, as though they expected a legion of darkness to reside in the tiny cottage. Perhaps if they’d come ten years ago, they’d have found it, and been made to pay for their invasion; your Coven had once been twelve women strong. But the witch hunt at Berwick had claimed more than half your number and many innocents besides, and the plague six years prior had claimed your mother and sister, and now that left only you and Grandame. Scarcely enough to channel a spell strong enough to summon up a rainbow, let alone a fearsome tempest. There were so few witches left now; so many lost that you wondered how many covens remained at full strength. And yet the Mortals feared witches still.

You tore around the cottage, sweeping the tools of your craft into hiding places, or directly into the banked coals of the stove to burn. You hollered for Grandame again, shooed Greymalkin out the back door, a whispered prayer cast over his sleek body that he would melt into obscurity and anonymity among the strays that gorged on fish guts at the docks. You were bundling Grandame’s books into the stove, now a hearty blaze, when she appeared on the back doorstep, coming in from the kitchen garden with a spade in her hand and fresh dirt on her skirt. She said nothing; merely squeezed your shoulder and shook her head as the door crashed in. 

You acted on your rawest instincts, and fought like a cornered bear at the baiting, scratching and foaming and screaming. The officers dragged you bodily from the house, wrenching your hands behind your back so you couldn’t cast a single spell nor shield your ears from the accusations hurled at you by your shrieking neighbours. 

Witch! Murderer! Babe-killer! Lover of the devil!! 

You let their screams wash over you, weightless as sunlight, and kept struggling, pulling against your restrainers, desperate for freedom, for flight, for a glimpse of Grandame. 

The constables tore the cottage apart for evidence. Every bundle of herbs, every tincture, every almanac in the house was vilified. Some unlucky officer scorched his hands pulling half-burnt books from the stove. The herb garden was trampled into pulp beneath their boots, your midwifery supplies tipped out and shattered against the kitchen flags. No sign of Greymalkin. This small relief offered a shred of comfort you could cling to until Grandame was dragged onto the street. 

They pulled her roughly from the house and threw her to the ground, no respect for her wisdom or care for her age, and you roared and spat with rage at the sight. Grandame didn’t say a word, didn’t flinch, didn’t react. She seemed unafraid. Eerily calm,  in fact, and her eyes met yours in perfect serenity. It didn’t soothe you. The constable announced your charges to the waiting crowd, who cheered with glee at the apprehension of two witches in their midst, the instruments of the horrible slaughter at the Phillips house. You  argued, screaming your own defence, naming the vampire as the true killer. You may as well have been whistling. No one was listening to you. 

They bundled you and Grandame into a waiting carriage, and drove you directly to Newgate prison. There, you were crushed into crowded cells, tortured, stripped, starved and interrogated until your trial, where a sallow-faced justice of the peace charged you both with witchcraft, heresy, and murder, and sentenced you to death. 

Newgate, cramped and stinking and festering as it was, became a kind of chrysalis around your body. Like a caterpillar, once you entered it you could never return to what you had been before. Over the months that followed, you began to consider your life before that night at the Phillips’ house as a kind of dream; a foreign country, a half-forgotten wish. Had you really once been a trusting, smiling girl, who ran up Bankside to watch the shows at The Globe? Had you really readily entered mortal homes to help them when they were labouring and vulnerable? Had you really held their babies when they were fresh-born and innocent, eased them gently into this world only for them to grow up and bare their teeth at you, spit at you, hunt you down like a hare? It all seemed so inconceivable, so obscenely naive. You’d had a strange fantasy of performing on stage. 

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings. 

Autumn set in. London’s palette transformed from sunbaked bronze and topaz into a slick wash of grey and silver and brown. The stench of the city remained, sharp and tangy on the frosty air. Soon it would be Christmas, then New Year, then a new century. You wondered if you would live to see 1600. 

Grandame, who had seen six new centuries dawn at least, was stonily quiet throughout your incarceration; both in spoken words and in the private chamber of your mind. She was holding up well, painfully thin and more aged and frail-looking than she had ever appeared, but still vital, vibrant, strong. You had no idea what you looked like, and hadn’t seen your reflection in months, but you hoped you mirrored her strength. 

At night, you would lay curled together on the straw, manacled by the ankles to the wall.   Grandame would sleep. You would chase escape plans around your head, knowing they were futile; without your tools, beaten and tired and cold and starving, your magic had weakened to a barely-discernable humming in your marrow. You’d tried a hex on the cruellest guard, and barely ruffled his hair. The sense of powerlessness was so fathomless, you’d thought you would drown in it. Hopelessness settled around you like tar, thick enough to smother when the sun went down. Around you the other condemned prisoners snored and wept and coughed, warm wet sounds amplified by the cold stone of the cell’s walls. There were six other “witches” in the cell with you, all condemned to die, all Mortal and without a speck of magic in them. They were as innocent of the charge of witchcraft as you were of the charge of murder, and the injustice of it made you feel as though you’d swallowed lead shot. You watched the moon wax and wane and wax again through the barred slit of a window near the ceiling.  

The morning of your execution was grey and cold. You were woken at dawn from an uneasy sleep, where you had dreamed once again of the vampire, of blood and sinew, of the glowing red eyes in the handsome pale face, of the sharp-edged smile and the stray curl of dark hair falling over his forehead. Inexplicably, the dream made your guts writhe like snakes, and you were considering this when the cell door opened; the sneering turnkey and a posse of guards entered the cell and ordered you to your feet. 

“Oh God,” you moaned. “Is it time? Is- is it–” You twisted against your manacles, desperate for the familiar warmth of your magic simmering beneath your skin, for the comfort of knowing you could defend yourself. None came.

Grandame seized you firmly, pulling you into a bone-crushing hug: her silver eyes were burning, her face set and powerful. For the first time in days, she spoke. Her voice in your head was like birdsong, like raindrops on the roof tiles after a drought, so blessedly welcome after her silence. 

Courage, child. Courage! Don’t make them a gift of your fear. 

You gulped thickly, and promised aloud, your lips moving against the wiry brush of her filthy hair. The guards had to prise you apart.

The gallows at Tyburn were surrounded by a braying crowd, the square where they stood still swaddled in the early-morning mist. It had been specially adapted to execute up to twenty-four condemned at once. Death en masse, without discernment. They called the frame of the scaffold the Tyburn Tree, and soon you would hang from its branches like overripe fruit, like bunting on Beltane.

It was November, and the nights had lengthened, greedily swallowing up the daylight. Though it was almost eight bells, the sun had scarcely risen, its weak light barely penetrating the veil of grey cloud and silvery mist. You were shivering with cold as you approached the scaffold, and it made you ashamed. You had promised to show no fear, and now you seemed to tremble with it. The watching crowd would gorge on your terror like crows, a delicious morsel before the feast; the death of an accused witch, the triumph of good over evil. 

Beside you, Grandame was still, her eyes on the gallows as though daring it to take her life. You didn’t have to wonder if she was afraid. Of course not. She was resolved. You felt a swoop of hope, enough to make you giddy. She had a plan. You could see it prickling in her silver eyes, tensing the corners of her mouth, tugging them downwards. Her posture was still straight as an oak tree, despite Newgate’s attempts to fell her; no amount of beatings could bow your grandmother, no Mortal torture could crush her spirit, and this gave you strength. You drew back your own shoulders, stiffened your spine, angled your chin to mirror hers. You repeated her words to yourself, over and over, as you and your fellow condemned were forced onto the scaffold and roughly placed before the dangling ropes that would take your life. Don’t make them a gift of your fear. Don’t make them a gift of your fear. Don’t make them a gift of your fear. 

“Grandame,” you breathed, as the Justice approached, flanked by a priest, and began reading off the charges of the women on the scaffold. She was beside you, her wrists bound before you as yours were. “Grandame, what would you have us do?” 

She did not answer, but smiled reassuringly, glossing her eyes over the simmering crowd, the gallows, the grey-faced priest and the droning judge. He had reached the elderly woman beside you, bowed with exhaustion and sickness and years of starvation in the pits of Cheapside. 

“-Mistress Margaret Baker, you are accused of the capital crime of thievery, that you did steal from Goodman Geoffrey Arundell a silver cup…” 

“-Grandame? What do we do?” It was becoming harder and harder to mask your terror. What was the plan? How would you escape?

“Aye, guilty,” wheezed Mistress Baker. “I pray the Lord have mercy on my soul…” The crowd cheered, the Justice scoffed.

“Grandame–!” 

“-And finally,” The Justice stepped in close, blocking your view of Grandame.  His breath was wine-sour as he bellowed your name to the jeering crowd. 

“-For the capital crimes of witchcraft and murder! You stand accused of the slaughter of Goodman Thomas Phillips, his wife, Mistress Elizabeth Phillips, and his unbaptised babe, newly born, for usage in your dark magic rituals! You did then slaughter the Phillips’ maid Agynes Perrot, and drained both her and the Phillips family of their blood, feeding it unto your familiars and the dark demons that you draw into this world with your evil! You did leave behind witchmarks on the door as part of your ritual, and–”

“-No!” You cried out, unable to listen to any more. “No, no! We didn’t! It was him–” The Justice didn’t even falter, as though you hadn’t spoken at all. 

“-How do you plead?”

“NOT GUILTY!!” You screamed. “Not guilty! We didn’t, we would never–” Your words were swallowed whole by the roaring crowd. Someone threw a rotten apple; it exploded against the wooden frame of the gallows, spraying juice and brown-red flesh everywhere, like viscera. The Justice raised his hand, waiting for the shouts to subside before he continued, his voice icy as the misty air.

“-You are sentenced this day to die, by hanging.” He stepped away, moving onto Grandame to read her charges, deaf to your cries. Panicking now, you strained against the bindings at your wrists, casting your eyes over the crowd for an ally, for a shred of kindness. There was none; the watching crowd were bloodthirsty as hounds, jeering and shouting to see witches and murderers and petty thieves put to death. Between the hostile, snarling faces filling the square before the gallows, standing in the alleyway beside an alehouse crammed with spectators for the occasion, you caught sight of a flash of yellow, dulled by the swirling mist.  

It felt as though the trapdoor beneath you had already fallen away. You tried to keep it in sight, to see the face, to know for sure if it was him, if he’d dared– 

“-How do you plead?” the Justice droned on, his nose inches from Grandame’s face, still proudly angled upwards as though she were the Queen, as though the gallows were a throne and all of us beneath her.

“Guilty,” she replied, simply. 

Your head snapped to the side as though the rope had already pulled taught around your neck. The flash of a yellow cloak vanished from your mind as quickly as it had from your sight. Your head and heart were full of her now, of Grandame, stood tall and ancient and unafraid before the noose, her voice calm and ringing on the air as though she was alone in the square; as though you weren’t screaming for her in your mind, begging her to stop.  

“I am the very witch who did threaten the Queen’s cousin, King James of Scotland, in Berwick these nine years’ hence. I did summon up a storm to drown his young bride on her voyage across the sea. I did commune with the devil. I did send my familiars into the town to spread pestilence and wickedness. I did curdle milk and smother babes. And when King James hunted me down, I did escape justice and curse his lands, fleeing to fair England to spread my Master’s mischief here!” Grandame was grinning broadly now. She was enjoying herself, enjoying the bizarre yarn she was weaving, a pack of lies and sensational tales to whip the crowd into a frenzy. It was working; the Justice and his guards had lost control of the spectators, who were howling like wolves, crowding the scaffold, throwing rubbish and insults. Your fellow accused were shuffling uncertainly, the priest had gone pale. And you - you were desperately trying to quiet Grandame, to stop her tirade, but one look at her silver eyes and you were frozen. She dropped her voice dramatically for the continuation of her tale. The crowd, still broiling with fury, leaned in to catch her every word, as transfixed by her as you were. 

For a moment, you were back at The Globe, and instead of a painted boy on stage reciting his lines, it was Grandame; she commanded the square like an audience, like the hero of an epic play, and you were more awed by her than any of Master Marlowe’s plays or Master Shakespeare’s soliloquies. She was electric. 

“I flew into your stinking cesspit city on a stormcloud, and set to my wicked work. I poured poisons in men’s ears, stirred up malice and violence. I soured women’s hearts, sowed bitter sickness in their bellies. I summoned up the great plagues, sending souls to the grave for my dark master. And this very September, I did slaughter the entire Phillips household, did drain their blood for my dark and demonic rituals. I did leave witchmarks around the door to mock the sanctity of their home; did offer up their souls to the devil! It is true, I am guilty, and I have no regrets!” 

The crowd erupted in fury and terror, but Grandame wasn’t done. “My granddaughter is innocent! I killed her mother with plague, and imprisoned her, cursed her to do my dark bidding, all against her will! She was not with me that night, and when I did summon her to the bloody scene she did weep and pray. There isn’t a drop of magic in her - her soul is so pure it burns me!” 

What are you doing?! You begged desperately, as tears carved tracks through the grime on your cheeks. You said a witch should never be alone! You said we had to protect the coven!    

She turned to you, acknowledging you fully for the first time since the prison. 

I am. 

She lifted her bound hands, and twisted them against the ropes, releasing a pulse of magic you felt in the buds of your teeth. It emanated out like a wave; knocking the priest to the ground and making the Justice drop his scroll, buffeting the faces of the shrieking crowd and cracking the windows of every building on the square. The nooses dangling from the scaffold whipped upwards like kites on a stiff breeze. The magic pressed harder, making your ears pop and your eyes burn, churning the grey clouds above and channelling swirling patterns in the mist. There was a crush at the entrance of the square as the spectators tried to escape. Grandame’s voice rang in your mind, calm and true:

It’s all alright, my darling. It’s all alright. You remember what I told you? Sometimes you cannot fight. Sometimes all you can do is protect your coven, and run. Leave the first to me, and the latter job is yours. 

The guards recovered first, and reacted violently. They threw Grandame to the ground and pummelled her with their fists and boots as her magic wavered and strained. The priest was next, bellowing prayers through pale lips. And you: you were screaming her name, begging, howling, fighting, crying so hard you scarcely noticed another guard loosening your binds as the Justice directed everyone but Grandame down from the scaffold as she was dragged back to her feet, back to the noose. And yet she was still calm, still proud, still straining to stand straight and tall. 

NO, GRANDAME!! NO! NO!! PLEASE–!! 

Go back to the house. Gather what you can, tend my garden, and go. He saw your face, that thing, and he will come for you again. You remember what I always say about the devil? You must run. Her eyes were on you, her voice urgent and strong in your head even as they tugged the noose around her neck. I  love you. I love you. I love you. I lo–

The trapdoor beneath her opened, and the wave of her magic dissolved as soon as her life was extinguished, leaving a stink of ozone in the air strong enough to burn the back of your throat. All around you was calamity and terror, and yet you were numb: your eyes fixed on the limp form at the end of the rope just visible beneath the scaffold, and a silence like you had never known in your head; dark and cold as the open maw of a grave. 

Your pardon came, heavy as lead, unwelcome as a wolf at the door. Every other woman on the scaffold that day was granted a stay of execution until the following morning, because the square had descended into chaos that the guards nor the Justice could quell. As for you, Grandame’s performance left the authorities in no doubt that you were a victim of witchcraft and possession yourself.  They returned you to Newgate in a covered cart with the rest of the condemned, and sat you in a small private cell behind the guards’ mess hall. A guard was posted at the door, and he stared at you unashamedly through the bars. The priest entered, prayed over you, left again; you sat mutely through it all, completely numb, tears streaming silently down your cheeks. The sun had risen high in the sky and begun its descent once more towards darkness before the door opened once more, and you were formally set free. The pardon itself was somewhat anticlimactic - a roll of parchment marked with the seal of the Chief Justice, a final clatter as your manacles were removed, and the squeal of Newgate’s barred gates swinging closed behind you. You were free. And for the first time in your life, you were utterly, completely alone. 

The telepathy of witches, which had been there since before you were born - sacred, comforting, warm - had fallen silent. Where before there had always been the flickering presence of magic, of other spirits attuned with yours, now there was only cool, lonely silence. 

Grandame was really gone! It was unimaginable, irreconcilable. It was as though the entire world had inverted somehow; as though the colours had faded to greys, or the earth and sky had swapped places in her absence. Thinking of a world without her knocked you sideways; you leaned into a wall. Her horrible final moments. Her final words. I love you. 

Who were you without her? Where would you go? What would you do now? It was sundown. You had no home, no family, no Coven. You were alone, as witches should never be. Your powers were weak and your body weaker still. All you wanted was to go home. Why? Home was an empty shell now. But it was yours, and Grandame’s final instructions had been clear: Go back to the house. Gather what you can, tend my garden, and go. 

You closed your eyes, rolled your head back against the rough plaster of the wall. Why did Grandame want you to tend to her garden? She knew as well as you did that the cottage was likely destroyed, vandalised, looted, and unlivable, the garden burnt and earth salted. You could never return to living there, even as a free woman: your neighbours wouldn’t allow it, and to try would incite violence. You couldn’t work as a midwife. The corruption of a witchcraft accusation would cling to you like tree sap. Whichever way you looked at it, your life in London was over, returning to the cottage was pointless, and tending to the garden was downright fanciful. But it was Grandame’s final instruction. 

You pushed off the wall and painstakingly walked from Newgate back down to the river with your head bowed, terrified that someone would recognise you. No one did. The Londoners streaming around you at Blackfriars and on the road that sloped down St Andrew’s Hill to the river barely noticed you were there. An innocent woman died at Tyburn, not the first and certainly not the last, and the city bustled merrily along as though your world hadn’t fallen apart. Grandame was dead and London lived on unchanged: stinking and noisy and careless. You pulled your tattered cloak tight around yourself, flinching when someone walked too close. 

Your footsteps were slow and leaden with pain. You stopped frequently, your bruised, aching limbs trembling under your weight after weeks in shackles and enduring the beatings of the guards. You descended the wherry steps and climbed into the boat with difficulty. The wherryman had to help you, handing you aboard as though you were a much older woman. You stared blankly into the brown Thames, knuckles blanched as you gripped the railing of the boat as it trundled back to Wapping. 

As expected, the cottage was a gaping wound. It had been vandalised, its windows smashed, door daubed with curses and spattered with rotten fruit and shit. You forced the door and picked  your way across the carpet of shattered glass and clay pots littering the floor, sidestepping the overturned table and chairs smashed to matchsticks. The cottage, once full of warmth and humming with magic, was cold and hollowed out. You found yourself collecting whatever relics of your former life the looters hadn’t stolen or destroyed: the chipped mortar and pestle, a dented copper cauldron, a pewter cup. Carved bone runestones, scattered over the kitchen flags like broken teeth. The small spade that Grandame had been holding, that final day, when she came in from the garden before the constables kicked in the door. 

You thumbed the wooden handle thoughtfully. Tend to my garden. She’d had mud on her skirts that morning. Something fluttered in your chest, something warm and enticing that felt like hope. You hurried outside, dropping to your knees in the churned up mess of weeds that was once Grandame’s immaculate kitchen garden, and hacked at the ground with the spade. 

The dusk was deepening to nightfall. You had to light a candle and return to the garden, digging fruitlessly for a while before you were rewarded with a dull clunk under the spade, spreading up your forearm as you struck the earth. You tore up clods of dirt with your fingers when the spade was too slow, eventually pulling up the small wooden chest that had once been kept beneath Grandame’s bed. It was engraved with runes, anointed with protection spells, and under your hands it glowed with warmth. Its clasps were wrought iron and very heavy, but they popped open easily as you tried the lid. The smell that rushed up at you was so familiar it brought tears to your eyes. Grandame. Grandame, condensed into an essence. Rosemary. Frankincense. Lavender. Mint. Rose petals. Pine resin. Old paper. The slightest whiff of ozone, the ghost of old magic.  The contents of the box were tightly packed. Grandame’s Grimoire. Her satchel. Stubs of enchanted candles. Her silver ring, which fit perfectly onto your thumb. Pouches of herbs. Seeds and dried cuttings, enough to grow a garden of your own. There was enough here to start again, to rebuild, to continue living the only way you knew how; as a witch, even if you were coven-less and weakened, exiled and alone. Grandame’s final act took on new meaning, as did her quiet stoicism for the duration of your imprisonment. It was a sacrifice. She knew she would not survive it, knew that the Mortals’ suspicion and fear and vitriol demanded blood, and at Tyburn, she offered hers up. It was not merely for safekeeping that she buried the box, a witches’ toolkit. It was insurance, preparation, a promise already kept. From the start, she was accepting of death. She was protecting her coven. She was protecting you.

You sat for a while silent and still, filling your lungs with the smell of her as your tears flowed freely down your cheeks. The night air was full of noises from the riverbank; footsteps, the shouts and snatches of songs from a nearby tavern, the muffled steps and voices of workers returning home, the din from the distant wharf, the yowl of a cat. 

It was only when footsteps approached behind you, too loud to be from the wherry steps, that you were jolted from your sobs. You spun quickly, upending the box in your haste to stumble to your feet. There, leaning against the garden wall with Greymalkin in his arms, was the vampire. 

Your first emotion, burning white-hot and ferocious, was rage. 

“YOU!” You spat, venom bubbling in your throat. The vampire didn’t respond straight away, merely drew his slender fingers over Greymalkin’s sleek black head in a deft, firm stroke. Greymalkin wriggled, shedding dark hairs over the yellow jerkin, and you stared in exhausted, furious astonishment. Your words stumbled in your throat. “You–! You–” 

The vampire’s eyes, glittering as they had before, slipped from Greymalkin up to your face. His eyebrows quirked, as if to say take your time, and your already simmering blood ratcheted up to a boil. There was no space for fear, only your thundering rage. “Give me my fucking cat!” The vampire’s lips curved; you recognised the lethal angle of the arc from that first meeting, from your dreams every night since.

“Ara,” he exclaimed, his voice melodic and accented as it had been the last time you spoke privately. “He’s quite happy here with me. I won’t do him any harm.” A beat; silence crackling in the bitter air. “I don’t mean ya any harm either, sweeting.” You scoffed, the sound sharp and ragged in your throat. 

“Oh, really? You expect me to believe that, you repulsive creature? My Grandame is dead, hanged, because of you! I was locked up, tortured, starved, because of YOU! After what you did to the Phillipses?” The vampire, who had been half-heartedly listening while scratching Greymalkin behind the ears, looked up.

“-Who?” 

You ground your teeth in fury, your hands shaking at your sides as you curled them into fists. Your blood was up, your humours bubbling. Deep inside, barely a quickening, the tiniest flicker of magic awoke. You tried not to react; tried to fan the spark into a blaze without drawing his attention. Your body was weak. Your magic dulled. But you still had fight in you yet. 

“The Phillips family. You killed them, and ate their baby.” Your voice was trembling now, vocal cords raw from crying and unspent rage. Greymalkin twisted in the vampire’s arms, sensing your distress, and your attention snapped to him. “-Greymalkin, come!” 

The vampire’s brow furrowed slightly. You could see his grip tighten around the cat’s sleek body as he stroked him again, his voice thoughtful when he eventually answered. 

“...Ah. Aye, I did do that. But see, I only do what I have to, to survive. Ya can’t blame a man for not wanting to starve.” You spat on the ground in disgust. 

“You’re no man. Grandame was right. You creatures are nothing like us. You’re foul. You’re a parasite! You’re a filthy baby-murdering monster—” The vampire snorted, laughter burbling in the space between his nose and his mouth, and your temper splintered, sending a crackle  of energy to your fingertips. “—Don’t you dare laugh at me! And GIVE ME MY FUCKING CAT!” He shrugged, smile still curling his lip, and released Greymalkin, who leapt nimbly down from his arms and gave a satisfied little shiver on reaching the ground. Bizarrely, he was unafraid, and settled down on the ground between you and began to preen before slipping behind you into the ruin of the cottage. You stared after him in disbelief as the vampire began picking at the black hairs on his doublet. 

“It’s funny you’re so attached to them, sweeting. The Mortals I mean. They’re mayflies, here for a blink and then they’re rotting in the ground, good for nothing but fuel for us, and they hate you. But here you are calling me a murderer. They’re the murderers. They strung up the old woman, not me. And I’m sorry. Truly, I’m so sorry for it. I wish I could’ve gotten to her first. I was there, you know? At the hanging. I wish I could’ve helped her, could’ve spared her the—”

“I know you were there, you loathsome fucking cockroach. I saw you from the scaffold. You’re hard to miss with that hideous fucking outfit you have on.”

“It’s good, isn’t it? I dyed the mantle myself. Did it the old way, the way old fat King Henry outlawed for us. But where’s he now? In a vault somewhere, rotten. And where am I? Or any of my people? Alive and fighting and holding onto the old ways. Like you.”

“I’m nothing like you,” you spat, though his words had stirred up something in you, buried deep in the murky pond of two centuries of memory. The Saffron Ban. The old King had outlawed yellow, and forbade the dyeing of cloth with saffron, convinced that the colour was a symbol of independence, of defiance against the Crown. But only in Ireland; the land he was determined to subdue, home of a culture he was desperate to crush. 

The yellow. The voice. The slippery way he wove his true heritage into the lies he spun on the Phillips’ doorstep. “You’re Irish then. I knew that was nonsense about the Earl. You didn’t fight at Curlew, for or against the Queen.”

“Nahhh, ‘course I didn’t!” he chuckled dismissively. “Sure, I’m Irish, but I don’t go back too often as of late, not with ye Sasanachs carving it up. I’m hardly after fightin’. Here now, what would I go and do a thing like that for, pet? What good’s a battle for me?”

“Easy pickings for a carrion bird like you, I’d imagine.”

“Ah, ye dote. Only when the sun goes down. And by then the blood’s all dried up. I like my meat fresh, when I can get it.” Bile rose in your throat. The Phillipses were fresh meat. Agynes was fresh meat. The baby was fresh meat. And so were you. You couldn’t take it any longer - the surface tension of your reunion had to rupture. 

“You’re here to kill me?” Unbelievably, the vampire looked flabbergasted. 

“Kill ye? No, no. I don’t want to kill ye, pet. I want to ask somethin’ of ye.” You scoffed as his words landed. 

“You really think I’d give you anything? After everything you’ve done?! You ruined my life!! I wouldn’t piss on you if your ugly fucking cape was on fire.” Your heart was hammering now, loud enough that he could surely hear it. His eyes were fixed on yours, glittering gold and scarlet in the glow of your taper, which was burning low. You eased your weight onto your back foot, inching painstakingly back to the shell of the cottage. Some wards remained, a threshold too, and that might be enough— 

“—ah, ye aren’t too friendly are ye, sweeting? No matter. I’m sure we’ll see plenty of each other. And all I ask of ye is a little favour. An exchange really. Ye give me somethin’, and I’ll give ye somethin’ back…” Your guts twisted, hot and heavy as stone in your belly, the way they had when you’d woken up from dreams of him, of the sharp toothed smile held at bay by the threshold. You retreated back a little further, inch by agonising inch, glaring at him with fists clenched as you tried to coax the crackle of power thrumming there into something strong enough to shoot at him. You knew you would probably only have the stamina and opportunity for one blast: you had to make it count. The vampire took your silence as consideration, and continued. 

“—See, what I need is a rare thing, and it occurred to me a while back that a witch might be able to get it for me. But there’s not so many of ye around these days, is there? There’s not so many of my kind, either. And my people, my real people? Ara, they’re all long gone, sweeting. Just like you, all alone now, hm? And see, this house stood empty after they came to get ye, so I know you’ve no Coven kickin’ about. Shame. Ye must feel awful lonely, up here.” He tapped his temple with his index finger; a ring that once sat on Goodman Phillips’ pinky glittered there. “-But I can help ye. See, witches aren’t the only ones connected to each other. Our kind, Others, we’re not supposed to be alone, are we? We need… fellowship. Community. Friendship. I can give ye that, and ye can give me my people back. Should be easy enough.” You realised with a start that he had advanced as  you had retreated; he nudged Grandame’s Grimoire with the toe of his boot. “There might even be some spells in this book here.” 

Does he ever shut up? You thought numbly, even as his words permeated your skull. His voice was lilting and entreating and honey-gold, slipping over his slick lips. His face, a broad, handsome face, was open and smiling; a tempting face, a vulpine face, a placid freshwater pool that concealed a whirlpool just beneath the surface. He stepped forwards again, his eyes flaring in the candlelight. You had stopped breathing. He hadn’t blinked since he entered the garden. A string of drool, viscous and milky, slipped down his chin. You spun on your heel, dropped your taper,  and made a break for the house. 

He was faster, and caught your wrist in a vicelike grip, before you made it two paces, spinning you effortlessly into his chest like a dance partner. You struggled, aching bones straining against his grip as the chill memory of your arrest submerged your brain in icy adrenaline. They’d caught you. They’d dragged you hands behind your back, so you couldn’t summon a spell. They’d taken you away, and beaten you, and killed Grandame. You would not be trapped again. You kicked out, striking him hard in the side of the knee, and twisted into him as he buckled, breaking his grip on your wrist. You were running before the heat of his palm could leech from your skin into the cold air; the same air that rushed past your ear as the bulk of the vampire’s body collided with yours, his boots hitting the earth with a thud as though he had jumped. Or just landed.

His arms encircled you like vines, his breath hot against the nape of your neck. Every hair on your body stood on end, your skin bristling, and a shrill gasp tore from your throat. 

“Shh sweeting,” the vampire purred, his voice like a noxious gas. “You don’t have to struggle. Don’t cry…” You ground your teeth together so hard the enamel squealed. Your own voice, when it came, was a hiss, fracturing as you writhed.

“You don’t–tell–me– what to do!– You– creeping– crumb of shit!” Your elbow, the joints sharpened by starvation, drove into the thick plain of his torso beneath the ribs, and as he grunted in surprise you spun against him again, slipping out of his arms and driving a fist into his nose as you turned. The impact ricocheted from your knuckles up to your underarm, the sensation of bone striking bone flooding your gut like nausea, but you struck again. The vampire was winded, but caught your fist and wrenched it back against your wrist almost to the point of snapping the bones; in wild desperation you lashed out with your free hand and clawed down the length of his face with your fingernails. The scratches you left behind were wet and red and angry, and little half-moons of his flesh were bedded in under your nails as you ripped your hand away. But it wasn’t this that made him scream, his cry puncturing the air like the shriek of a fox. 

It was Grandame’s ring. It had scorched his face, leaving behind a furious, swollen weal. He reared back, but you struck again, seizing his head like a ball and forcing the ring flush against his eyesocket. Agony made him clumsy, shock slowed his reaction. He dropped your wrist and you scrambled backwards to the house, tripping over the threshold and catching yourself on the doorframe, spinning around in panic. It was only by the moonlight and the glowing coals of his eyes that you could make him out; he was clutching his face, one eyelid sagging as another weal swelled the flesh. Blood dribbled from the wound, running down his cheek like tears. His expression, what you could see of it, was murderous. 

You brought your hands together, funnelled the energy crackling between them into a beam of power, and threw everything you had behind the hex you lobbed at him. It caught him between the throat and the shoulder, a sizzling brand that cauterised the flesh, and he roared again, charging forwards against the threshold, colliding against the barrier.

The handsome mask he wore had degraded; melted, like beeswax. His face had contorted, grown waxy and hollow; the mouth was pooling with saliva and lethal with rows of narrow, white, razor sharp fangs. His hands had gruesomely lengthened, fingers lethally sharp and tipped with claws. The eyes burned, red and terrible. For a moment, you faced each other; chests heaving, eyes flashing, Immortal forms on full display. The darkness beyond the garden was suddenly splintered by howling dogs and angry men; your confrontation was drawing attention. 

“Go,” you snarled, your entire body trembling with the effort of standing. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll go now. LEAVE!” 

The vampire, still staggering against the heft of your spell and the burning weal on his face, let out a crackling, rasping laugh. He probed his face with a clawed hand, inspecting the damage. 

“Ah, sweetness. Ye didn’t have to do all that. See, I’d have made it so you never felt grief again. I’d have taken all your pain…” 

“No one could do that,” you replied. “Certainly not you.” 

“Suit yourself,” he hissed, pulling his hideously engorged hand from his swollen, sizzling face. “I’m sure you’ll be quick to beg me, next time we meet.” 

“There won’t be a next time,” you  snarled. He just laughed. 

“Sure there will, ye dote. I like that waspish sting o’yours. And remember, I have a favour to ask ye.” He spread his arms wide and bowed theatrically, inclining his head to best show the ruined, blistering side of his face, grinning broadly all the while; when he straightened up, he smoothed out his mantle and pulled his doublet straight with a flourish, before turning on his heel and retreating up the garden the way he came. His monstrous form melted away as he walked; the claws retracted, the hands shrank. On reaching the gate he called out once more, taunting and smug, over his shoulder. 

“I’ll be seeing ye, sweeting. The name’s Remmick, by the way.” 

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