ju

He’s been awaiting news on you for the past hour.

You’re under the knife, still, with Garcia and the OR team’s finest. He’s been counting down the minutes since he’d awoken.

“Abbot, you know how rare it is for patients to die on the table,” she offers, clinically. “They’re doing an exlap on her last I checked. But you have to remember that her wounds—” Walsh cuts herself off. Sighs. “Look. Say she pulls through. She still has to endure recovery in the ICU, which is where most her actual troubles might come up.”

Abbot inhales stiffly. Runs the data and numbers in his head. Purpose, after all, will sober him into clarity:

Annual medical reports. Case journals he’s read. Statistics from studies regarding perisurgical complications; And on post-operative mortality rates in comparison to intra-operative ones, so that he can calculate the odds of Death; can rationalise and brace himself for if it’d be taking you from him all over again this time aro—

Jack Abbot’s been changed out of his SWAT fatigues into spare civvies and is still, by right, a patient himself. 

The medical gauze plastered over his brow and the rebreather loosened at his neck is crude proof of that.

“I promised her,” Abbot finds himself abruptly saying. His voice is thin. “I owe her my fucking life.”

Walsh uncrosses her arms. “Whatever it is that happened on your SWAT mission this morning—”

“No,” he overrides, “Not that.”

She watches as he sinks to lean on an armchair edge in defeat, resting his good leg and the hand he’s been using to prop himself up with on a forearm crutch. From what she could gather, he’d wrecked his prosthesis sometime during the incident that had sent his unit here.

It takes a moment of looking at the empty space where his leg should be, before Walsh realises what he means.

“…Kandahar,” she pieces, dismayed. “That wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t anybody’s but the damn insurgents that decided to smoke out your outpost.”

“Yeah, well, you weren’t there, were you?” he says bitterly. “The PJ’s medevaced us to you waiting out in a field hospital. We were just patients for you to cut and patch up before sending home.”

Walsh may lock horns with Abbot all the time— but she isn’t a heartless enough bastard to argue with a fellow comrade of hers clearly in pain and traumatic stress: She allows the dig to pass without remark. 

“PJ’s said that she saved your life first by tying up your blown leg,” Walsh ignores. “What they also told me, is that you packed her wounds and administered ketamine. You saved her life in return; kept her tensive enough to survive the trip over.”

“Yeah, ‘cause she went after my damn medkit,” he mutters, earning him a frown in confusion.

“What do you mean?”

She shifts her head to catch his eyes, watching him go somewhere far away in his head. 

“When our convoy got struck returning to base,” he begins slowly, “she patched my leg up behind one of the trucks. After that she— she risked dragging my ass into the nearest building for cover, because the assholes are raining down on us too heavy.”

“We get in, and then she’s asking for the ketamine so she can give it to me.” His voice cracks, but he shakes it off in irritation. “But I fucking— I didn’t take it with me— I’d left my medkit all the way back at the damn truck—”

“Jack, you forgot it because you were in traumatic shock,” Walsh reasons, carefully. She’s not sure if he’s noticed she’s decided to call him by his first name now, let alone the fact he’s been recounting his memory in the present-tense; reliving it. “Nobody can think straight concussed out their minds, you know this.”

“Yeah, but I still fucked up, didn’t I?” he disagrees, sniffing and averting his gaze uncharacteristically towards the ground. “Next thing I know another mortar lands; One moment I’m watching her run off, and the next she’s limp on the open ground, shrapnel to the jugular— Medevac still minutes out.”

The story comes to its end there, much to Walsh’s relief. The rest is what had been allowed unredacted in military reports: that the deployed Surgical Forward Team alongside a unit of PJ’s had extracted Abbot’s team, and flown everyone straight for definitive care.

Walsh makes a noise of assent, then lets out a tense breath. She hadn’t even noticed how reflexively strung up she’d gotten from listening to that tragedy until he’d finished spea—

She frowns, pausing in calculation. 

“She never made it to the kit.”

Abbot turns to look up at Walsh. She has her face pinched, appearing to mentally map something together in her cocked head. 

“You said she was blasted, what— maybe fifteen yards? From the convoy?”

“Twenty, more like,” he recalls painfully, only to earn a dismissive wave from her and a deeper look of confusion. 

“But the PJ’s said she had ketamine in her already.”

“It was the last vial left in the kit. The rest was broken,” Walsh hears him say easily, as if that isn’t another damning, heroic detail. “I gave it to her instead.”

“Jack,” she blinks, incredulously, “how the hell did you get all the way to her while bleeding with a missing fucking leg?”

Abbot meets Walsh’s gaze like the answer is obvious enough— like he would’ve done it a hundred times over.

“I crawled for her.”

There’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

Something beckons you towards it.

Death, perhaps. 

It sounds, awfully, like Jack Abbot.

---o, how copy? Ov---

You blink weakly. It’s useless in the pitch dark. Other than the dustmotes floating across the weak slivers of light filtering somewhere faintly beyond you in the distance, you can’t see anything. Can’t reckon where you are, let alone reconcile left to right; or whether you’re even lying rightside up or wrongside down.

How did you get here?

Kilo, d--- you ---py?

There’s construction gravel, you think, in your boots. You can feel granules chafing all over your body. Sense liquid heat trickling down your head. Taste something metallic; pennies in your mouth. 

Think. Think. How’d you get here?

You can’t gauge your distance to the light. Somewhere close enough to its surface, you figure, because you can vaguely hear the desperate scratching of paws as Mowgli whines and barks for you through the hole piercing through the vastness of the void. 

You try to call out. Or maybe answer the staticy radiochatter you can hear. Can you find me? All that comes out, however, is a dry, broken rasp. 

Instantly, something dull protests like an ache in your gut when you cough reflexively, muscles twitching and spasming uncontrollably from your back up into your abdomen when you reach to touch a trembling hand on it.

Metal. Ridged. It comes away sticky with something. 

Your heart begins to race.

Synapses fire now. You’re stuck in something— or no, something is stuck in you.

Kilo? K---, I repeat, d--- copy?

You’re getting a sick sense of déjà-vu.

The pieces come together, now. Kandahar? No, you remind yourself sharply. The war is over. You’re back home. Where’s home? Pittsburgh.

Right. You’re part of the Pittsburgh Police Bureau’s SWAT team. A number of units had been mobilised for… for a bomb threat at the Acrisure Stadium at North Shore.

It’d been a false alarm, hadn’t it? You remember that much. They’d barricaded the area regardless, but then somebody must have caught wind before proper evacuation could take place, because all hell broke loose.

A screaming stampede. Crowds pushing and shoving through blockades. The scaffolding supporting the cornerstone arris of an under-construction building suddenly buckling, echoing as it rained down clanging debris: loose bricks and—

Steel, you piece, hand blindly seeking where the throbbing pain in your flesh meets around the metal. A rebar.

Oh, fuck, you choke. The words don’t form. Your breath hitches in a frigid panic as realisation sets into clarity.

K---o, do you read m---?

You’re impaled. You can feel a stiffness from the left of your back, the flat end of the pole only just protruding out to your front side and breaking skin. 

---Kilo?---

It’s shallow enough. If you try, you can yank yourself out. Crawl to the light, maybe, and unbury yourself from the rubble.

Abbot, can you? You try one last time. Can you find me? 

You cannot die here.

You refuse.

You can’t—

“—fucking give up,” Teddy curses, smacking his cards down in defeat: a Full House, yet trumped by your winning hand. “You’re a goddamn cheat, Kilo, y’know that? How’d you win a third time in a goddamn row?”

On the shin-height, rickety coffee table of the squad’s improvised barracks, another round of makeshift Poker comes to its end. The winning pot (candy and m&m’s) is slid over to your side, where you hoot from where you’re curled up in your seat: A low and squeaky, spring-broken armchair that’s tattered and seen far better days.

“Quit moving, Kilo,” Abbot reminds, hovering over you from the side. He’s gloved up and stood close beside you, busying himself with an open cut on your brow that’s fortunately shallow enough not to require stitches. “Also, I can see her cards from here. She didn’t cheat. I'm a witness.”

Hah! you flip Teddy off with a grin, earning a disapproving click of a tongue from Abbot once more at your shifting. Sorry, Doc, you crane your neck for him again.

“‘Sides,” Diaz snorts, recollecting the scattered deck to reshuffle the cards in that expert flourish he always does with tattooed hands, “Kilo had a royal flush, dumbass. None of us would’ve won either way.”

You turn your palms up with a smile. “Guess I’m just that good, Corporal.”

A shock of red hair ducks into the room. It’s Skinner, returning from sentry patrol, groaning dramatically as he stretches his limbs like a ginger cat. Another hand automatically materialises on the table for him as Diaz dishes out the cards again as Dealer. 

“You’re not good,” Skinner narrows, after divesting and dragging himself a spare seat— somebody’s army bed cot, probably Abbot’s— over to join the game. “We just keep your dumbass around because of Duchess.”

You snort, glancing to where she’s sound asleep at the other end of the room. Fair enough.

“We can still throw Kilo out, right, Doc?”

“No promises,” he snorts. “But if she keeps fuckin’ squirming—”

“Alright, alright,” you sheepishly withdraw.

“Oh, Ted’s just a sore fuckin’ loser,” Diaz says, arranging his (chocolate) chips by colour as a new game starts.

The room crumbles away into laughter as Teddy lets out a barrage of insults back at everybody. “Look how defensive he is,” Skinner taunts, idling as he waits for his turn on the round. “He’s worse than my kids back home.”

“Speakin’ of,” Diaz says, sliding a number of m&m’s to raise his bet, “how’s your girl, Teddy?”

Jeanine, you recall. 4-months along the last time you’d heard about her. Teddy, however much of a rough-around-the-edges grunt he likes to behave as, is a family man through-and-through at heart: he’d tucked the ultrasound pictures his wife had mailed to him into his vest no matter where he went like a token; a reminder to get back home safe.

“Still pregnant as hell,” Teddy replies, softened by the topic now that banter has been waylaid. “Yours, Skinner?”

Conversation of family buoys the round. Skinner’s rowdy fraternal twins are climbing up to second grade now; Diaz’s younger sisters are graduating highschool with honors. You recognise them all by name— seen the keepsakes of polaroid pictures shared every now and then.

“Ow,” you flinch, rearing reflexively as Abbot swipes a cottonbud of antibiotic ointment on your cut. 

A hum. “Don’t be a baby, Kilo,” he teases, voice a low murmur from how focused he is. 

You try not to tarry on the sound of it. Smother the beat of wings taking flight in your chest when he eventually finishes up, and makes an off-hand comment going, Want me to kiss it better for you?

“You mean ‘Don’t be a pussy’,” Teddy amends for Abbot, only to get a back-of-the-head smack from Diaz, like the natural, older protective brother he gets to be again around you.

“Technically, she’s the only actual chick in this damn squad,” comes Skinner’s snide comment. “Wait, no, we forgot about Diaz—”

“Fuck off,” the Sergeant fails to ignore the jab, seemingly soured by his unlucky hand. He knuckles the table for his turn: Check. “What about you, Doc?”

Abbot’s answer is quick now that he’s pulled away from poring his undivided attention on you.

“Mh. No girl waiting on me back home,” he replies indifferently, which makes you snap to look up at him in curiosity. You’ve seen the ring he wears on on his finger; caught the way he’s fidgeted with it more times than you can count before every mission you’re all sent out on. 

Nobody asks because he usually dismisses the topic and never tells— until now, that is.

“What?” he muses down at you, meeting your owlish gaze steadily as he slides his gloves off. 

(You only just manage to stop yourself from glancing down too obviously at his hands to check for that unmistakable grey band.)

Abbot’s doing that indecipherable thing again he’s been doing since you first met him early on in the year: staring at you with a cocked head, nonchalant and perfectly stonewalling any of your attempts to read him through the bright of his eyes. 

You open your mouth, then close it. There’s no point in asking about his personal life if he’d already deliberately kept his answer curt enough. 

“You should Fold, by the way.” He nods to your poor hand with a hint of amusement, dimpling at you. 

(You wonder if the wisp of affection you’re sensing from him is just a delusion.)

Again, you ignore the treacherous stumble in your chest at the sight; stifle the buzz when he lingers his warm presence over your shoulder to peer into the round.

Dude, wait for the next game, Jack! someone groans, You’re biased, why’d you—

“—help her, c’mon! Keep her head steady,” you hear, the next time you come to. “Careful, careful. Don’t move her too much.”

Something is licking your hand. Mowgli. Your working dog. Good boy, you want to tell him, You must’ve led them to me, huh?

They’re swiping away concrete dust from your face when they set you down, you think, somewhere on asphalt. Your whole body is bristling. The sky above you is a sunless, cloudless blue as you try to understand the muffled, frantic conversation between the faceless figures crowding around. Skinner? You wonder. Diaz? Teddy? A—

“…bbot,” you muster, between shallow breaths. “Abbot.”

From where he’s been laid crippled on the cracked curb twenty yards away from you, Jack Abbot’s ears manage to hone in on your name being shouted in an instant— Despite the shock running rampant through his body; despite the deafening tinnitus ringing in his ears. 

It kickstarts him back to consciousness.

“Kilo,” he chokes in reply, wrestling himself up with a rasp. “Agh, fuck—”

Sir, you need to sit back down! Somebody calls out from another far distance, their hands too full with another downed officer in worse condition to physically stop him.

Abbot staggers up. Ignores the protests. Zeros in only on the familiar sight of fatigues, and goes to take a step towards the scattered SWAT unit.

Or tries to.

His right foot drags. For half a step he mistakes it as debris, brain not catching up yet to the situation since he’d first been yanked out the rubble gasping. Abbot tries to plant a foot forward, weight shifting—

His prosthetic gives. 

“Fuck!” he seethes, biting through the shrill pain electrifying his leg and up towards his spine. He blinks down to his feet instantly: 

The metal of his prosthesis is a mangled twist, crushed and bent out of shape into an impossible angle from the concrete he must’ve been caught under.

His camo pants are seeped with blood, fabric twisted and shredded where the socket of his false leg is now torqued tight and pinching against muscle and skin.

Abbot buckles hard to one knee, gloves scratching.

Something’s wrong. Not just the leg. A throbbing pain comes with each harried breath he takes, radiating from the left across his chest. Blunt force trauma, he triages swiftly, picturing the wound in his mind’s eye: an angry black-and-blue contusion underneath his skin, fractured ribs, maybe?

He looks blearily back at you; your head lulled to your side and facing him. There’s a growing puddle of blood leaking underneath you despite the officers’ efforts to keep pressure. Under half-lidded eyes, you’re looking right at him— but not seeing him.

Arterial, comes his instinct. Catastrophic haemorrhage. Blood on the floor and four more, as the saying goes.

An old, harrowing haunt creeps in his mind. Sickening déjà-vu. Go to her, he recalls the Afghan heat years ago. Crawl to her.

He sucks in through his teeth. Bites back the burning in his lungs.

Then— Abbot unlatches his prosthetic, and abandons the thing entirely. Forces the distance to shrink. A second isn’t spared as gravel crunches and he slides a blood red drag path into a grisly sight: palms digging into crumbling dust, one knee driving forward and then the other, and then again. 

Wait for me.

Fighting the pain shooting up at the uncomfortable angle of his crawl, forearms protesting and splitting open in abrasions.

Crawl to her. You’ve done it once before.

Fifteen yards. Ten.

Your eyes are glassy. Breath agonal. 

Wait for me.

Mowgli has caught sight of him and begun barking for everyone’s attention. 

“Holy shit— Hey, get Doc the fuck over here!”

Doc? You think. Jack.

Abbot’s face comes into view. It’s filthy. Dried blood running down his ear and features ashen with dashed debris as he speaks. There’s alarm in his eyes as he takes you in, and you’re suddenly hit with a shock of memory again: Kandahar, the outpost, a later youth.

When you’d been drowning in your own blood, and he’d stopgapped the laceration in your neck shut as he soothed your gasping, tearful panic; eclipsing you from the glaring sun, sheltering you from the throes of a firefight happening all around you by using his own body as a shield.

And here, now— 

“Kilo, heyheyhey, no,” he calms, moving your hand away from where you last remember your wound is. A gaping hole of torn flesh in your side. “Don’t touch it. We’ve packed it, got pressure on it. You’ll be alright. EMS’s on the way, yeah? You copy, Kilo?”

Your back is wet. Somewhere in your head, you know it’s from lying flat in your own blood. I pulled myself off the rebar, you whisper, hoping the words will resound. I’m sorry, Jack. I shouldn’t have, but I did.

“It’s okay. It’s alright,” Abbot hears you, knelt close. His hands, in spite of the adrenaline zipping into his veins, effortlessly work the needle into the vial of Ketamine. That’s pointless, you want to say. You don’t feel the pinprick at your thigh at all. Too out of it to register hardly any pain anymore other than a slow chill washing over you.

“You’re gonna be fine, Kilo,” he rattles, pressing to feel for a carotid. It’s thready. A feather to wind. “We’ve gone through worse, remember? And we survived that, too.”

We have, haven’t we? you want to agree. Abbot bows to touch his forehead with yours in a bid of desperate comfort. Palms cradling your face. You can’t feel him, anymore. Only that you’re cold.

“You’re not dying today. I promise, yeah? I promise.”

Inhale. Exhale. 

You’re tired. You want to remind him moribund promises are usually a hail mary; a foregone conclusion to fail. Desperation makes empty promises all the time.

Inhale. Exh…

“Kilo? Hey. No, no, hey, Kilo—?”

Your hand falls—

“—limp?” you repeat, surprised. “Only a limp?”

“Lucky bastard, huh?” Abbot inhales, the embers of his cigarette glowing with an orange hiss. “Any higher through the knee and he might’ve needed to be sent out for amputation. Wouldn’t wanna be him.”

In the freezing chill of the Afghan night, your sticks are a welcome respite between the both of you now that your replacements for changeover from guard duty have come to relieve your post. 

The cold escapes from your marrows as you lean, hidden with Abbot, behind one of the many rows of humvees parked south of the perimeter, in the loneliest corner of the entire temporary base. Without a doubt, the pack you’d manage to trade for has been a lifesaver for quiet hours like these.

“Dunno how you deal with it,” you muse, flicking the ash to the ground. “Stitching bloody people up all the time with the other Whiskeys, let alone training them how to.”

“Yeah, someone’s gotta do it,” he laments, leaning his head to the door as he glances up. Incandescent moonlight limns him into an ethereal thing when he blows out a puff of smoke, watching it curl up in thready wisps. You find yourself struggling to look away at the scene. 

“I guess ‘cause it puts my mind at work. Triage and treatment have their own steps, and sometimes you gotta work out the diagnosis like a puzzle depending on a hundred different variables while on a time crunch. Kind of like a game.”

“Only the stakes are life or death. I’m guessing you enjoy it?” you ask, still rapt with his profile; still taking the opportunity to etch the features of his face into memory, now that you’re this close to him tonight, trying to suffuse each other’s space in shared warmth. “Serving people, I mean.”

“Well, I’m in the military, aren’t I?” he jerks his head in jest, shooting you a crooked smile that’s boyish and infectious: you find you’re breaking into a small laugh too. “What about you?”

“I do like helping people,” you shrug. “Was thinking I get Duchess come along with me after all this. Continue the same MOS in urban or civilian operations instead together in the future.”

He nods at that, keeps his eyes glued to yours. “Back home, huh? Anybody waiting on you?”

You don’t let yourself take it as a loaded question, though an undeniable instinct in your gut is telling you that it is.

“Family, yeah,” you dismiss, playing around with Skinner’s lucky zippo in your hand in a bid to avoid Abbot’s classic gaze. The eye-contact has you jittering out your skin. You take a drag instead, and excuse the goosebumps as a reaction to the breeze. “But, uh, yeah. No partner.”

“Hm,” he says, noncommittal. He’s still, you can palpably sense, looking at you. (A self-indulgent part of you wonders if he’s etching your moonlit profile into his memory too. If he finds you just as beautiful as you find him.) 

“What is it, Kilo?” he asks, suddenly. 

A blink. Now you do look at Abbot. “What?”

“You look like you’re dying to ask me something.”

“Am I, Doc?” you counter, but his tilted head of curls is all it takes for you to slowly give in. “…You’re not going to let me off.”

“No promises,” he smiles, dimpling at you— which, again, has you swallowing your saliva out of reflex. Then he narrows his eyes. “Hold on, if Tommy said something stupid—”

“Skinner didn’t say anything,” you refute.

“You sure?” his brows raise, inquisitive. “God. Did he tell you that made up story of how I got ‘Pope’ as my callsign—?”

You make a face. “Well, no, but now I’m curious about that—”

“That’s for me to know and for you to never find out, thank you very much.”

“Boo,” you eyeroll.

“Don’t change the subject.”

“You started it!”

“Kilo,” he drawls humorously, voice low and coarse from the scratch of cigarette smoke. He leans on his shoulder, dipping slightly closer to you and— God, surely he’s aware of the effect he has on you, doesn’t he? That’s the only sensible reason he’d act like this. “Don’t make me pull rank on you.”

“Asshole,” you sniff, turning your nose up in defiance when he cracks a smile. And then, once you’ve gathered the courage: “I just… Remember you said you didn’t have a girl back home.”

You wince at how that sounds like a come-on. Pray he doesn’t get offended; doesn’t take you the wrong way. (You could live with suffocating your affection for him so long as he remained your friend, at the very least. You’d never dared imagine anything further than that; anything delusional.)

“That’s ‘cause I don’t,” Abbot says, truthfully. And it’s only when he lifts his hand to take a drag, lips around the filter, that he notices your eyes lingering on the glint reflecting from one of his fingers. 

Ah. 

“It is a wedding ring,” he answers, definitively, interrupting you before you can protest and say something along the lines of Forget I ever asked, or It’s none of my business. “From my late wife. We married young. She got sick. It was a long time ago.”

He lets out an easy breath. “There’s not enough salt in the world you can rub into that wound, Kilo, so you can relax. I’ve moved past it.”

A long, pensive beat passes.

“And don’t apologise,” Abbot overrides again, just when you finally open your mouth to speak. “We’re good.”

That silences you again. Your mouth shuts with a comical click, loud enough it makes him break into a laugh; and with it dispels the uneasiness that’s seized you as you shake your head in mild amusement. 

“Alright,” you relent, sticking your cigarette between your lips to pocket Skinner’s lighter. “You get to ask me one question too, for fair game, so think on it for now. We gotta head back to the others before they start realising we’ve already done shift handov—”

Abbot grabs you before you round out the humvee, tugging you back close. 

You startle at the proximity. Watch as he uses his free hand to toss his cigarette down with a flick. Snuffs it out with his boot. All in efficient motion.

“I’ve, uh, already thought of one,” he says, gently. His fingers reach up to slip the stick out from between your lips. Heavy gaze flickering between the slope of your mouth and the flutter of your flashes. “I’m curious if there’s room for me.”

You’re too stunned to reckon his question. Distracted by the gunpowder and antiseptic scent of him, the light grasp he has over your wrist. An open option for you to pull away, if you wished. There’s a look in his eyes you can only discern as nervous anticipation. Hesitation.

The both of you have dealt in active combat. Been through literal hell and back together. 

Never once have you seen him anxious for anything.

“In your future, I mean,” he specifies.

You catch the there-and-away glance at your lips this time.

Oh. Oh.

So it had been a loaded question after all.

In fact, everything has been the past year, hasn’t it? The way his eyes always finds yours first among the squad; the nameless thing that stretches between you both that feels just that tenuously more than trust. Everytime he brushes close to you in briefings; every time he cautions his rank as a slight override whenever a joke about you toes that line too far.

You find yourself nodding before you’re whispering out your answer. “Yeah, Jack,” you say, so softly he wouldn’t’ve heard it had he not been this intimately close to you. “I’ve got room.”

Abbot swallows. You watch the bob of his Adam’s apple. 

“For the record,” he informs mildly, “you can punch the shit out of me for this if you want.”

You hardly have time to understand what he means before his palms are sliding up to cradle your face, and he’s ducking his head down to kiss you.

Reciprocation comes quick. 

Your hands snake up the kevlar of his vest and coil around his neck. Nails scraping the grown out curls at his nape. Abbot tastes like cigarette ash and something heady; something dizzyingly masculine— all of which are softened by the tenderness in how he’s moving his lips with yours; in how he’s holding you like you’re—

“—the only thing that matters, right now,” Abbot croaks out to them, after they’ve muscled him down onto the gurney beside your own in the ambulance. “No, focus on her. I’m fine. I ditched my prosthetic. I, fuck, I’m, I’m A-and-O. Just— Can you focus on her, please?”

He’s hooked up in an instant regardless. Gets a light shined in his eyes and masked for oxygen when they read the garbage state of his O2 sats after fussing over the ugly purpling contusion across the left side of his chest. 

EMS pore over the vitals of your unconscious body, and all Abbot can helplessly do is rattle off whatever he knows from his gurney to attempt to be as useful as possible: mechanism of injury, blood type, medical history. 

That when he’d found you you’d already lost too much blood and gone hypotensive; her veins are shot, drill her with an IO instead; run crystalloid and fluids wide, whatever keeps her tensive enough to tide her over for the trip until she gets proper transfusio—

Getting to PTMC is both the fastest and the slowest it’s ever felt. 

When the doors of the ambulance bursts open it’s pure chaos. A suffocating traffic jam of wounded civilians being rushed left and right. The stampede and the structural collapse must have triggered an MCI for the trauma centre, because the first thing he sees is Dr. John Shen in blood-streaked PPE’s and a waistbelt of coloured disaster tags at the ready.

“What the f— Jack?!”

“John, listen to me— she, fuck, she needs— blood. She needs an OR right now—”

His mind is scattered from hypoxia, pain and panic; completely forgets his prosthetic is gone. Damn near tumbles when he tries to swing his legs over and off the gurney. To get out of everyone’s way and wheel you into the trauma bay himself.

“Woah, woah, woah, take it easy! Ellis, I need a hand here!” John frazzles, struggling between lying Jack back down and keeping an ear on the report from EMS who’re already halfway into clearing the ambulance free from choking the bay further.

Traumatic crush injuries on both patients from structural collapse. Male has Altered Mental Status, rib fractures, airway non-patent, poor O2 and dropping. Female is unresponsive on-site, penetrative wound through abdomen. Lost her femoral pulse on transit ov…

Shen slaps a pink on Abbot before the words are even done. Ellis is quick to wheel him away. And then Shen is thumbing at your carotid, focusing past the frenzy of sirens and screaming and feels… Nothing. 

His fingers are already automatically reaching for a black tag to—

Someone seizes his wrist. 

Ellis has no choice but to halt the gurney before she accidentally snaps Abbot’s outreached hand. 

“Don’t—!” Abbot chokes, between gasps in his non-rebreather, “No— John, please— Please. Please don’t do it.”

If the pure anguish on his face isn’t heartbreaking enough, the utter raw desperation in his voice is enough to stop anybody cold.

Neither John nor Ellis has never seen the great Jack Abbot look this small.

Appearing child-like, almost; eyes blurred with tears and voice fraught with fear.

“Red. Not a Black tag. She’s a Red,” Abbot begs, words splintering from distress. He’s white-knuckling Shen with an impossibly unmatched strength despite the horrible state he’s in, practically leaning halfway over the railing of his bed to plead for your life. “I promised her. Please, she’s— give her a chance. Tag her Red. She’s a Red.”

“John,” Abbot continues, breath shallower now, eyes flicking to your peaceful face and to the Black tag— the final nail in your coffin— in his fingertips. “Please, I can’t— I can’t lose her. Please.”

His grip slips unwillingly as his body gives out.

Ellis is shooting John a final, disheartened look as she races Abbot towards Trauma-1 herself. Rumbling from the bay and down towards the path of least resistance, calling out for Robby and Dana in a frenzy as medical staff do a double-take in horror: Is that Dr. Abbot—? Holy shit, it’s Jack— Jesus, Ellis, what happened to him—

“You better not die on us, Jack,” she hisses, stricken. “You got that? I’ll kill you myself if you do. Just don’t—”

“—fall asleep, you bastard,” you curse, jostling him back awake. “Keep your eyes open, Abbot. Hey! Don’t doze on me, do you copy?”

Abbot blinks.

Something whizzes past. Bursts at the distant ground and kicks up sand. He can’t hear it past the deafening ringing in his ears.

Live fire, he recognises quickly, remembering the last thing he heard being screamed out. Incoming! 

“Shit,” he gasps out, blearily blinking back down at the tourniquet you’ve tightened above the mangled joint where his leg was. “Holy sh— Fuck. My fucking— My leg—!”

Is gone, you don’t deign to tell him, too busy communicating a sitrep amongst the panicked radiochatter from the outpost’s units now scattered and returning fire. You turn frantically back to Abbot, where you’d dragged him from the detonation and behind the closest vehicle for cover. 

It’s still too exposed for your taste, but decent enough to protect you both from the ridgeline north of where the hail of mortars must’ve initially rained down an ambush of hellfire on your convoy.

“Doc, tell me where your emergency bandage is,” you distract, instead, already tearing open a Quikclot with your teeth and making quick work with the bloody stump in your hands. “Heyheyhey! Look at me, Jack, focus! Where is it?!”

Purpose sobers him into stuttering clarity. Sharpens his hearing vaguely enough to understand you. Abbot finds himself thinking rapidly through the slow shock rattling his body as he begins to palm blindly at his kevlar. Where’d he put it?

He unclips the medkit from his waistbelt. Unzips it with a frantic hand when it thuds onto the ground.

“Fuck,” he chokes, shakily tugging the bandage out. “Here, here, I need, uh, I need— fuck! Jesus christ—”

“You’re good, Jack, keep going, keep going,” you calm, hurryingly slinging your rifle away to give yourself more space to work; more leeway to tighten the bandage over the hemostatics you’ve choked his wounds shut with. “Stay with me, Doc. Stay w—”

Another fusillade of bullets crack too close. Both of you duck instinctively, your body kneeling closer over where Abbot’s sat leaned against the upended humvee. 

Somewhere off in the distance, Skinner howls at you to get the fuck in here, I’ll cover you! and in a last burst of extraordinary strength— you’re snagging Abbot by the crook of his vest and hauling ass towards one of the few buildings still standing, nothing but blind faith and sheer force of will kicking you into action.

By the grace of God, you suppose, both of you make it indoors. Abbot is stuffed to the corner by the open doorframe where Skinner is emptying an entire clip. A jumble of soldiers from multiple other units have convened in here, too: Captain Grant is ordering ranks to positions and barking at their signalman to radio in for back-up between the raucous mess of chatter.

—We need a fucking medic here!— Anyone see where the sons of bitches came from?!— Sandstorm is comin’ in, Cap—  PJ’s are two klicks out— Go for Show of Force, Sir— Has anyone seen— 

“—Duchess?” you ask aloud, retightening the tourniquet above Abbot’s knee. The drag had only served to agitate the wound and skin the gauze. 

“Shit, Kilo. I’m sorry,” comes Diaz’s panting, and it feels like the world has opened up at your feet to swallow you whole from the graveness in his voice, “Fuck. I think— I think she’s gone. I saw her last when I was dragging in Thaddeus—”

“Fuck! Teddy too?” you blanch, craning to follow his sightline: a limp figure on the floor. Eyes devoid of life. Blood gushing from a gaping hole through his skull. You can see the wrinkled corner of a picture peeking out his vest: the ultrasound Jeanine had sent him.

“Oh, God,” you stutter, battering down the horror and the grief with a choked sob before it could subdue you. There’s no time. You have to refocus on the situation: Abbot still needs you. If you stray now, if you crumble now, then he’s next to be sent home with an American Flag over his coffin.

“Fuck, I— Okay,” you sniff, shaking your ringing head, “Okay. Abbot, heyheyhey, look at me. Where’s your morphine?”

Morphine? Abbot blinks. No, ketamine. For the leg. Right. Yes. He needs it before his brain catches up with the pain and knocks him out cold from shock. “Ketamine,” he fumbles, and lands his hand beside him in a red slap.

His palm hits the floor. Empty.

“Abbot, where’s the kit?” you start, going pale. But you know where it is, already, don’t you? Back at the humvee, out in the open. Left behind amidst the crisis. “Fuck! Alright. Hey, it’s okay. Just stay awake, you copy?”

“Kilo, no,” Abbot begins, already calculating your next move. “Leave it. Kilo, that’s an order! Hey, nonono—!”

A thunderous, deafening engine roar of the F16’s low fly-by sent in as Air Support kicks up a hurricane of swirling dust up into the skies: a Show of Force intended to scare off enemy forces into retreating. It chokes everybody’s vision instantly into a muted, pallid grey of dust particles.

Perhaps that must’ve been why you’d missed the whistle of the next incoming mortar.

Only felt the impact radiating through the ground and the shrill reverberation travelling like electricity through your marrows, half from the detonation and half from where your shoulder connects in a sickening crunch with the earth.

Then the dust settles, and the taste of pennies are flooding in your mouth, and you look back with the corner of your eyes, and—

…Abbot is crawling to you.

Between the peripheral blur, it comes down to a brutal math: twenty yards. An entire world away, it feels like, for a man missing a leg and only breathing out of sheer fucking spite and desperation.

Wait for me. He crawls between the thunderdrum of his head and heart and the hellfire around him. Down a lonely road that would only certainly lead him to Death’s hands. Down and across the metaphorical River Styx you’ve gone beyond.

Fifteen yards to you. To Hades.

Don’t, you want to beg. You can hear the choppers in the distance, as the tinnitus peals in and out. It must be the PJ’s; the ground support. They’ll come get you. Evacuate you and Abbot, and the rest of the unit; the rest of the base. Don’t risk it. Jack, don’t come—

“—here!” Robby hurries, clearing a path into the trauma bay for Ellis as a crowd of nurses jump to work. Abbot’s case is presented in a second, and then she’s whizzing back away to deal with triaging again, unable to spare a second glance amid the time crunch.

“Heyhey, take it easy, brother,” Robby greets, between the steady line of medical orders he’s giving. The familiar terminologies fade away into incomprehensiveness now, as Abbot’s cognisance begins to ebb away. “What’d I say about dying on my shift, huh, Jack?”

He musters a defiant huff. It’s hoarse. The drugs they’ve begun running into him are doing their work, little by little. Unmoors him adrift into numbness; Into a liminal space of his mind he can’t reconcile— caught somewhere between the ill-defined margins of reality and fragmented memory.

He’s in Pittsburgh, but on the deck of a Black Hawk helo while strung up with IV’s swaying from the force of the rotors. The Pararescue Jumpers communicating amongst themselves as they stabilise his freshly-blown leg are Robby, Dana and Jesse crowding over him in military fatigues, strangely enough.

His head lulls to avoid the blinding hospital fluorescents, only for his eyes to land on you lying limp beside him on the floor of the helicopter too. “Kilo,” he murmurs, weakly. You’re the only thing he can focus on. The only rational thing he can understand in this delirious, waking dream. 

He’s in Kandahar, crawling amid smoke and ash while Skinner lay unconscious at his feet, and then crawling towards you twenty yards away. He’s in Allegheny, crawling out the concrete rubble of Hell with the help of an officer, and then crawling towards you twenty yards aw—

Walsh is here. Has he been medevaced already? She’s in fatigues too. Atleast he thinks so. Perhaps under the sterile PPE’s. She’s looking down at him with utter determination in her eyes and speaking with someone in an undertone too rapid for him to follow.

The diagnoses for his own sustained injuries run through Abbot’s own head. Multiple blunt traumas? Potential tension pneumothorax from a complex rib fracture? Maybe even a hemopneumo if he’s feeling particularly cynical. Perhaps an internal haemorrhage: Bleeding into Morrison’s pouch, depending on where the impact landed. Nipples to navel is no man’s la—

It doesn’t matter.

Should Jack Abbot meet his end, he’d be at peace with that.

Only—

“Walsh,” he rasps, clutching weakly at her hand. I’m here, brother, comes the answered squeeze. A shock of déjà-vu runs through them both. He’d begged this of her once before, in a distant time: “Save Kilo.”

Abbot’s vision tunnels into darkness as he looks into Trauma-2 right across his own bay, where he can see a glimpse of your cut uniform and limp body seizing up, then back down onto your gurney: you’re being shocked, it appears, back from bradycardia and into proper sinus; back to your second shot at Life.

John must have given you that Red tag, after all: he’s personally working on you at Abbot’s behest.

“Please,” he begs Walsh uselessly, again. “I can’t…”

A rebreather is slipped over Abbot’s face. 

It feels like he’s floating, again. Back in that Black Hawk, being ferried away by avenging angels.

I can’t lose her.

And then he’s gone— somewhere far, far away.

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ The military combat outpost you’re going to spend your 12-month deployment in is moreso, in reality, the rubble-strewn vestiges of a modestly-sized local settlement long since left abandoned. 

After a bit of fortification, barb-wiring, and sandbagging from the army, however— It does its job with a bit of round-the-clock sentries on patrol, for what it’s worth: temporary shelter; A secure base for multiple active units to roll in or out and safely hunker down.

Upon arrival, you’re directed into the crumbled remnants of an old household, now gutted out and repurposed into a lively, quasi-barracks situation.

“Yo-ho! Lemme pet this funky guy!” the Specialists greet instantly, clamouring to as they light up at the sight of your K-9, whose tail is betraying her calm demeanor while sitting obediently at your side. “Who’s a good boy?”

“Girl, actually. Go ahead. She’s off-duty for now,” you correct with an amused hum, loosening your grip on her leash entirely. “Belgian Malinois. She responds to Dutch, but her name is Duchess.”

“You must be our attached 31-Kilo,” muses a ginger-haired Corporal, regarding you with a nod of assent. “Military dog handler, huh? Tight competition for that MOS. I trust you’ve earned it.”

“Ea–sy now, Teddy,” someone sing-songs in the distance. “Cap’n will skin you alive if y’haze the lady.” It must be the unit’s Designated Marksman— you can see tattooed hands dismantling the scope of his rifle with experienced ease as he jerks a chin your way. “Her dog’ll be the only thing standin’ between you and an IED one of these days. Welcome. S’good to finally have a Kilo with us, what’s your name, Ma’am? I’m Sebastian Diaz, Specialist.”

You don’t get the chance to reply.

“We’ve got ourselves a Kilo?” comes a new voice. It’s strained; sounding exasperated, perhaps, from the sweltering Afghan heat outside as he ducks into the cool shelter of the room and tosses his helmet aside.

“Figured the brass was gonna wait for somebody to get their dick blown off before they sent one up. ‘Bout time they attached a goddamn 31K with…” He trails off as he turns up to face you. “…us.” 

It’s a sturdy-looking soldier in his field fatigues, sun-tanned at the collar as he freezes mid-fuss of a flexed hand through his sweaty hair. A curly brunet, with a hard and steady gaze that didn’t quite match the deceptive lightness of his eyes. 

You shrewdly glimpse the morale patch on the man’s broad shoulder. SO OTHERS MAY LIVE, it reads, proudly emblazoned. 

“And you must be the goddamn 68W,” you parrot, countering easily. You narrow at him with a sharp smile. “Duchess and I assure you no dicks will be blown, Whiskey— Full disclosure to you and everybody in this room.”

The deliberate innuendo and thinly-veiled admonition sends the room dissolving into laughter. Hah, you’ll fit right in, Ma’am! someone hoots.

“Well, I’ve made a shit first impression, haven’t I?” the Combat Medic deflates, letting out a defeated chuckle as you offer him a dismissive wave. No harm no foul. 

“Sergeant Jack Abbot,” he greets, shaking your hand after you introduce yourself and rank properly to him. He’s taking you in with a once-over; admiring. “I’m responsible for keeping these shitheads alive.”

Unfortunately! Someone ribs.

“S’nice to meet you, Doc,” you laugh. “And I hope that includes keeping me alive now, too.”