lucine

But he is the embodiment of that colour, and wears it almost always. It’s apparent in the way that his stethoscope hung loosely around his neck, as well his scrubs, his prosthetic leg, and even the way he takes his daily coffee: no cream, no sugar, just pure raw bitterness of the grounded roasted beans to keep him awake during his night shift and again afterwards, when he tries to fight off his sleep at the aisles of the grocery store in the early hours, making sure that his blend doesn’t run out. 

Black doesn’t scream at him or transform. Black is dull, bland, predictable, quiet. It gives him something that he can hold onto. Something that he can control and navigate around in a world that is rarely calm.

So when you, the new attending who struts into his ED and taps him on the shoulder with your clipboard — you, with your violet-purple scrubs, and your yellow Nikes, with auburn hair tied into a messy knot, Jack is taken aback. And almost drops his coffee. It unsettles him. You introduced yourself, with a tight lipped smile that is nowhere near warm, but a hint of it is there. Your wandering eyes that scanned him from head to toe as if you’re memorising him in real time.

It must have been at least a minute, because the next thing he heard was you calling out his name.

“Dr. Jack Abbot?” 

He blinks. 

“Dr. Abbot, Attending Physician. Salt and Pepper hair? Brooding, senior citizen, grumpy doctor?” 

Jack blinks again, and nods. 

He grunts a response, “Yeah, I’m Jack, and I’m not brooding.” 

You laughed.

He turns back to the monitor in front of him, hoping you will take the hint and move along. But you don’t. Instead, you’ve come up to him, shoulder to shoulder, looking at the trauma board like you own the place, and are used to the rhythm of the never-ending chaos of Pittsburgh’s ED. 

There’s something rattling about you, he thought to himself. 

You’re dressed too colourful, it disrupts his routine and eyesight. Yet at the same time, it feels as if you were shining in a quiet way.

He decided then and there that he doesn’t like it. But he quickly dismisses the thought, and reminds himself that it’s probably the coffee, bitter in his throat, that’s making him feel this way. He takes another sip anyway.

He heard you muttering something to yourself, something about a stab wound in Trauma 2, your tone rushed and clipped but not cold. It sounds like music to his ears for some reason, and he’s never felt this way. 

He’s confused. 

And when he glances up to look at you again, you’re gone. Off to take care of the stabbed patient, your sneakers squeaking on the floor that smells like disinfectant. He watches you go. He tries to shift his focus back to the monitor, but he’s unable to. 

Black is supposed to be predictable. So why does it feel like his entire world just turned upside down?

⸻

At first, everything about you bothered him. It feels as if the colours that you wore everyday screamed at him, and when you’re quiet, the colours spoke for themselves. 

He sees your leaf-green mug in the break room, with lavender tea, he notes while looking at the tag. The charge nurse told him that you’ve just lost a patient, and he sees it in the way that your posture is sunken, you’re fiddling with the mug’s rim, eyes downcast and you’re silent. 

You didn’t even acknowledge his presence when he walked into the room. He doesn’t say anything. Only pulled out a chair, sat next to you, and just stayed by your side until you pulled yourself back together and squeezed his shoulder as a sign of thank you when you walked out, and he observed how you undid your hair and redid it again with your pink claw clip, he glints at the small shiny rhinestones on it.

Since then, something has changed. Your colours now begin to crawl obviously towards the edge of his peripheral vision. He tells himself he’s only feeling this way because you are new to the ED.

It’s nothing deep. 

But it’s not, because there’s just something about you that shakes him. Even when you don’t interact with him outside of patient care, he can sense your presence from a mile away.

Because unlike the over-confident interns, or the stubborn residents who float in and out of the ED with extreme rashness, you stay. You’re the calm in a storm. He starts to notice that you began to orbit him, when you two are working on a patient together, he realises that you hand him the tools that he requires before he even realises that he needs them. It’s like you were able to read his mind, it also helps the fact that you’re a fellow attending as well, but there’s something about you that he can’t quite put a finger on. You ask for an opinion from him on difficult cases, you talk to him more now about your day, ask about his day, what he does for fun. He realises that he wants to get to know you better..

And slowly, he finds himself to be at ease with you.

Your colours begin to thrive more in the chaos instead of fading. It sort of reflects certain things back at him. Silent reminders of what he has long tried to not see in himself, tried to ignore ever since his wife’s passing.

Of course Jack tries to ignore you. He tries to keep his conversations with you to a minimum. Keep them short. Never answer beyond what is necessary. Keep his answers as brief as possible when it comes to patient care. You don’t need an explanation on why he does things the way he does, you're a goddamn attending too. You would understand why. 

He will not fall down into that hole of trying to hope for the start of something new, he doesn’t deserve it. 

Jack Abbot doesn’t get second or third chances.

But one day, when he was sipping on his tasteless, too bitter for his own good long black, you walked into the break room, took the mug out of his hand, and replaced it with a navy-blue thermos, with a little post it note that says, 

“Try this. It’s better than whatever the hell you’re drinking.” 

You didn't say anything, and just poured his coffee down the sink, left his mug there, and walked out.

He takes a peek inside the thermos. 

It’s fucking cappuccino. 

He scoffs in disbelief.

Yet he takes a sip. Not bad. He thought to himself, and took another. 

Shift after shift, you brought him new coffee flavours for him to test out to find his new favorite. And he drinks them all. Even the ones he hates.

Not too long after, you found a yellow post it note on your locker that says, 

“Flat White’s good.” 

You grinned.

You’ve never made fun of his silence. In fact, you embrace it like an old friend. You don’t ask questions about his prosthetic like the meddlesome interns, there’s a mutual silent understanding between the two of you that you knew he had a rough past. 

In Jack’s eyes, you kept turning up, with your stupidly bright shoes, yellow, orange, neon blue, depending on your mood. Yellow on a good day, red when you feel like you’re about to start a fight with a patient, and to an extent; him, and blue when you’re feeling calm. 

He starts to notice the little things about you too — your nail polish, your perfume scent. All that while it seems that you’re unafraid of him, when most usually do when they hear of the ever dark tales of Jack Abbot and his military ways when he was in the Army or even in the ED. 

He begins to lose track of how long it’s been since black was the only colour that he was familiar with in his lonely world.

And for the first time, Jack wonders what his life would feel like if he let just a little colour in. Not to change who he is. Not to betray the quiet comfort of black. But maybe, just maybe, to make space beside it. For violet. For auburn. For yellow. For you. 

⸻

It happens on a night like any other when it’s past 3AM, the ED is in a low hum of hull, a rare pause between silent and chaos that feels oddly unnatural. A patient in Trauma 6, snoring like a caveman he is. Jack is reviewing a patient’s chart with his eyes burning at the back of his skull, lacking sleep from the afternoon before, when he focused too much on the Steelers rerun. 

You suddenly appeared beside him, holding two mugs. But when he looks up, something in him relaxes visibly, like he was waiting for you. He could smell the flat white emanating from the navy-blue mug in your left hand. The leaf-green mug, that same one from that night smells like hot chocolate. He raises an eyebrow. 

“Are you ten years old?”

You shrug. “Hey, if it works, it works. I’ve got a sweet tooth.” You extend your left hand towards him. 

He accepts the mug without a word, fingers brushing yours briefly, a touch that really means nothing but at the same time feels too much all at once. It overwhelms him. Clouds his senses.

You lean back against the counter beside him. For a moment, neither of you speaks. The hospital hums around you, distant and alive. “Why is it that everything you own is in black?” you ask, voice soft, not prying but just curious.

He thought of just saying something basic like it’s his favourite colour. But he doesn’t. He tells you the truth.

“Black is quiet,” he says. “It doesn’t expect anything. It’s like…a room with the lights off. I know where everything is. Nothing surprises me. I’m used to the dark, even when I was in the army. That kind of silence just sort of becomes a companion to me.”

You hummed. “And me?”

“You’re the damn sunrise.”

Silence. 

Your lips twitch, almost a smile, almost something else there too. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

He doesn’t answer right away. He looks at the mug in his hand, then at you. There’s a tension in him, coiled and reluctant. But something in him shifts. Maybe it’s the exhaustion. Maybe it’s the months of small kindnesses and squeaky shoes and post-it notes. Maybe it’s just time.

“I don’t know how to be around it,” he says finally. “How to be around you. All that colour. All that warmth. I’ve spent a long time building a life in the dark.”

You meet his eyes, and your voice is quiet, almost unsure. “Do you want it to stay that way?” Your hand crossed in front of you at the nurse’s station.

He doesn’t answer immediately, but his hand finds yours on the counter, almost thoughtlessly, and he holds his eye contact with you. 

“No,” he replies. “Not anymore.”

⸻

A week later, he shows up in navy-blue scrubs. It ain't rainbow that's for sure, but it's small steps. You grin when you see him, and he rolls his eyes like it’s nothing. But his ears flush slightly. He doesn’t tell you that he almost didn’t wear it. He could not bear to wipe the thought of not seeing your smile.

And when you pass him that evening in the hallway, your fingers trail along the edge of the sleeves of his scrubs, a brief touch, you whisper, “Hey cowboy, blue looks good on you.”

And for once, Jack doesn’t deflect. Doesn’t retreat into silence.

He just looks at you and says, “Yeah. I’m starting to believe you a bit.”

To Jack, it feels like the whole palette of only black paints consisting of his life has shifted. And that maybe the quiet, colourless world of his wasn’t meant to stay that way forever.

Not with you in it.

—