Of All the Gin Joints in the World

DO I????? 😭😭😭😭😭😭 i think they're probably in my top list of ships that got away (aka robbed of endgame by their writers). even with that whole bribe storyline they had me fooled thinking leyren were slowly finding their way back to each other only to abruptly torpedo them with the most half assed write off of leyla... sick to my stomach. but since lauren never had a love interest after leyla and she ended the series at peace with herself, they can't take away my belief that lauren would always view leyla as the one who got away and they'd find their way back together one day 😭

in MY gin joints i'd like to first of all, just see them interact more onscreen 😭 i touched on this a bit in my previous asks but i yearn for us to continue getting titration drips of their relationship evolution throughout the seasons. we got first meet/courtship, situationship/crashout, now give me the makeup/breakup/i wanna be With You confession, the stable and sappy relationship era, What's Our Future talk, all of it! i do find something alluring about getting dropped, point in time, in the middle of all these life events and piecing together where they stand. if we weren't permanently fixed in the ED, there could be such a juicy storyline between garcia and santos and santos' desire to double board in surgery and garcia realizing oh this is not a relationship she wants to break off when santos makes that transition and now she's grappling with not wanting santos to come of unfavorably to the other surgeons because garcia does favor her. ideal steady state though? these freak4freak in a committed relationship and back to their s1 dynamic on steroids where garcia breezes in to hype santos up and makes eyes at her at every opportunity while santos half heartedly tries to reign her in and whitaker suffers in a corner about it.

i think garcia functions nicely as an injection of the surgical department presence which as we've seen, is often needed in the ED. so i don't see why the writers' wouldn't keep her around and she's obviously talented enough to be the type of doctor PTMC would want to retain as an attending after her fellowship is done. santos still has 2 years left of residency AND a potential fellowship that it seems she'd be a shoe in for. but i've been in the shipping game long enough to know endgame is at the mercy of writers' fancy and actors' willingness to stick around. so it always the safest bet to hope for the best and expect the worst 😭