I should probably be sleeping

Paragraph #1: This section is in Jack's POV. It opens with the weather in Pittsburgh in July, and I'm leaning into description here, really trying to build the picture: the humidity, the way the heat sticks to your skin.

From there, Jack reflects internally on how long the two of them have been doing this, slipping past that railing. He takes a moment to register the height, and the weight of being up somewhere that high. Mostly he's sitting with the irony of it: he and Robby spend their working lives fighting to keep people off ledges, and yet their "safe place," their calm spot, is a ledge where a single fall would kill them.

There was no underline but I think you're asking about this line: "The view had stopped registering as a view a long time ago. I'd have noticed instantly if it changed, yet I almost never noticed it at all."

What was going for there is that the view from the hospital roof is so familiar, so burned into him, that it doesn't land as scenery anymore. To Jack it's just work, nothing special. But he also knows that if anything in it changed, like a new building going up, he'd clock it immediately. I was trying to reflect the paradox of something you've stopped consciously seeing but would still notice the second it shifted.

Paragraph #2: The "most" here is the help. Specifically the unasked-for kind. The quiet, already-there help that someone who loves you and wants to look after you offers without you ever having to ask.

Paragraph #3: The "surrogate parents" framing lightly casts Jack and Sawyer as the unit's mother and father. Since parents in a healthy home usually share a romantic bond, I added "not in that way, never in that way," to shut the door on any romantic or sexual reading between them. They're better understood as the eldest siblings in a dysfunctional family who've taken on the parenting--trauma-bonded, never romantic.

Paragraph #4: Definitely. Reader delivered "waaahmbulance" with a teasing, mocking edge, the way a parent gently mocks a kid to soothe them out of a hurt.

Paragraph #5: Just before this, Jack says, "Your actions are my responsibility. Do not make me regret taking that on." In the silence that follows, he realizes the outburst told the entire room two things he'd rather have kept private: (1) that he was asked to take her on, and, beneath that, (2) that part of him resents the weight of it. He's clocking that he just exposed the closeness between them, and its true shape, to everyone listening.

Paragraph #6: I want to preface: I am not an amputee and cannot say that this is true. I do extensive research, however, cannot guarantee that this is medically accurate.

This is how I visualize a (transtibial) below-knee amputation:

Residual limb -> roll-on liner -> prosthetic socks (ply) -> socket/ pylon/foot -> suspension sleeve

"Sock plies," refers to the multiple separate socks layered to fine tune the fit of the prosthetic. It could be 1-ply, 3-ply, 5-ply, etc., not just one bunched sock. In my research I found that they are typically taken off one at a time.

Thank you again, for reading, for coming back and following this version of 'The Pitt' universe. Thank you for caring enough to ask for more information. Please do not feel bad, it made my lunch break a lot more enjoyable, lol.

Anyways, I hope this made things make more sense for you.

See you in Chapter 6 :)

The cell was cement on every side. Walls, floor, ceiling, all of it sweating, dark with moisture, with things you had stopped trying to name. The only light came from a single industrial lamp in the corner, its filament working a part-time job, guttering down to almost nothing before it caught again throwing the wet patches on the floor into brief streaks of yellow relief.

Somewhere overhead, water moved.

You could hear it travelling through the structure above you, finding the cracks. You had learned not to be grateful for the sound of it.

You were down on your knees.

You had lowered yourself to the floor because there was rice sprawled across it.

A plate of food had been thrown through the door, half of it spilled before landing. You had been picking the grains up one at a time. Single grains, between your index finger and your thumb, your hands wearing a visible skin of dirt and dried blood. You could see the grime of the floor, the remnants of every boot and body that had crossed this room before you, ground into the wet cement.

Without thinking, you lifted one grain and put it in your mouth.

You had not decided to.

Your hand simply brought it up.

It tasted like nothing, really. If you searched for a flavour it was only dirt and cold.

Your hand, again without thought, went back for the next one.

Food.

The hunger in your stomach was so intense it dulled the shame of eating off this disgusting floor.

You had to sacrifice a few grains to the puddles. Shallow puddles, shallow to anything but a grain of rice. Just deep enough to lose one.

When you had gathered what you could, you picked up the plate itself and assessed what they had given you to eat.

Plain rice. Chunks of something soft worked through it, greyish pink in the lamp light, the kind of thing you would not have been able to identify on a good day and refused to identify now. In another life you would not have fed it to your worst enemy.

In another life you would have laughed at that.

You ate it fast. Faster than you wanted to, but the hunger gnawing inside you was insatiable, and your body had stopped taking instructions from the part of you that knew better.

When it was gone you held the empty plate for a moment.

Then you threw it at the door with everything you had left. The scream that came with it rose up out of something with no bottom.

Not fear.

Rage.

The metal plate rang off the door and clattered back across the floor. The sound of your own scream coming back at you off the cement with nowhere to go.

Six meals.

That was the only clock you had. They did not come evenly. Some close together, some so far apart that you started to believe they had forgotten you.

This last stretch had been the longest of all. Long enough that the hunger had become the smaller problem.

The thirst was the larger one.

You were a doctor. You knew, in clean clinical order, what your body was doing to itself.

The mouth that had stopped producing anything to be dry with. The headache sitting behind your eyes like a fist. The way your skin had stopped springing back when you pinched it.

You knew the numbers.

You knew how this goes... where this went.

They had given you no water this time, or the last.

What made it worse was the running tally of everything they had taken. They did not let you keep anything. Bare feet on the cement, your uniform trousers, a tank top gone stiff with dirt and torn at the hem, all of it soaked through with old sweat. The smell of too many days in the same skin.

And the walls would not stop sweating.

That was the cruelty of it, the part that felt almost designed.

You could hear water everywhere, and in the far corner it had found a way through, coming down one drop at a time into a puddle it had been building longer than you had been here.

You had gone to it once, out of desperation.

Five paces from the centre of the room.

The water under the drip was dark, murky. You could only half see it when you dragged the lamp as close as its cord allowed.

It had a distinct smell of gasoline and rot.

The bacteria will kill you faster than the dehydration.

You knew that. You went to it anyway.

You had learned the drip by then, after enough empty hours in that box with nothing to do and nothing to look at.

Eight seconds.

Every eight seconds a drop gathered enough weight to fall, dense enough to dent the surface of the puddle you refused to drink from.

You lay your tongue out and tried to line yourself up along the path of its descent. You counted.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight.

The drop hit your cheek.

You missed the first attempt, but you were determined.

You adjusted, fast, and waited again. Mouth open, eyes trying to focus on the dark seam in the ceiling.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.

Then, cold on your tongue.

Barely anything.

A point of cold the size of a golf tee.

You closed your mouth around it and swallowed as though swallowing meant anything at that volume.

You did it twice more, and somewhere between drips the taste arrived. Bitter and salt and sour all at once. The taste of something that had run off a surface it should never have touched.

You shuddered at the memory of how fast your body had rejected it. You had gagged and spat, shaking your head, heaving against nothing.

The rage bubbled up through you again. You had nowhere to put it.

So you put it into the wall.

Your right fist made contact with the cement, then your left.

You did not feel yourself lose control. You only knew you were swinging, again and again, until the skin over your knuckles split.

You stopped, a sliver of a second, just long enough for your eyes to drop to your split knuckles and weigh the damage you were doing.

There is no point.

It was not the only part of you that was broken and bleeding, and it would not be the last. You went back to beating the wall like it made a difference.

It was not the pain that undid you.

It was the unfairness of the whole thing.

You could not even argue your case, because you could not speak the language. Pashto. The tongue this corner of the world ran on, the eastern mountains near Salerno.

Though where exactly they had moved you to since then you could not have said.

You had no idea where you were.

You knew a handful of words, the kind you pick up because you hear them over and over.

ډاکټر Ḍāktar (DAAK-tar) [Doctor]

هو Ho (haw) [Yes]

نه Na (nuh) [No]

مرسته Mrasta (MRUS-ta) [Help]

ژوندی Jwandai (JWUN-dai) [Alive]

مړ Mr̥a (mor) [Dead]

That was most, if not all of it.

The Pashto phrasebook the Army had issued you was sitting three feet from your bunk back at Salerno with its spine uncracked.

Adam was the fluent one.

Years of being shipped from one place to the next, leaning on interpreters until he didn't have to anymore, had left him with a handful of languages. Where you had a handful of words. Pashto was just one of them.

They asked you their questions in a tongue you had filed under "later.'"

You had nothing for them.

You were no use to them.

A heavy bolt a fast, flat boom of struck steel rang through the room, and the door came open.

You flinched, the whole of you jerking back. An animal reaction you no longer had any say over.

A body came through it.

He had been thrown head first, no hands to catch himself. He hit knees, then chest, then face. You heard the crack of what had to be his nose or his teeth meeting the cement.

He cried out.

His wrists were bound behind him and he squirmed against the rope, trying to get free.

Shirtless.

Blindfolded.

A strip of cloth wrenched between his teeth.

Blood everywhere.

Your eyes were still refocusing from the slap of light, tracking the line of his back.

Your stomach turned over.

His back was open. Lash marks, deep, the skin laid apart in long welts that crossed and recrossed. Under the blood you could still make out the wreck of what had been there before.

A tattoo.

A big one, finely done, hours of someone's hand in it, a design you could no longer read because a whip had gone through it again and again until it was just skin and ink and ruin.

You knew him.

O'Donoghue. Benjamin O'Donoghue.

Benjie.

You were across the floor before you decided to move. They had taken him, you did not know how long ago, and now they had given him back. He was past the point where giving him back meant anything kind. You bent and eased him onto his knees, pulling the gag from his mouth first, because that was the thing keeping him from the air.

He gasped. Loud, full, the whole of his chest pulling for it.

Behind you the door slammed into its frame. Then came the long whine of the lock turning, the heavy wheel on the outside that took two hands to move, screaming on its threads until it seated with a final clunk.

You did not look at it. You worked the blindfold up off his eyes.

"Benjie. It's me. Abbott."

You knew you looked like something out of a nightmare.

You felt like it.

His eyes would not settle on you, sliding past your face and coming back and sliding past again.

You kept your voice level even though you were not sure it was reaching him. "Hey. Hey. I've got you. I'm going to look at you. You're going to be okay."

You had your hands on the rope at his wrists now, trying to read the knots by feel and watch his face at the same time. The rope had been on long enough to burn the skin raw beneath it.

"They," he started, and a cough took him, hard and wet, blood spraying out of him mixed with spit. He turned his head and got the rest of it onto the floor, "they killed Carter."

His good eye was filling. The other was swollen most of the way shut, every colour a bruise comes in, purple going to black going to a sick yellow at the edges.

"They just killed him."

The knot gave under your fingers.

His wrists came apart, raw and shaking.

"What?" you asked. It came out barely over the drip. You did not want it to be true, so for one moment you simply refused it. "Why? Why would they kill him?"

Then the doctor in you took stock of what you had to work with to help Benjie.

The answer was nothing.

Not a dressing, not a clean cloth, not water to irrigate. Even the shirt off your own back was a bad idea, filthy as you were, the kind of help that traded a wound for an infection. You had your hands and your training and an empty room.

"They want the sources," he said, the words coming in pieces between breaths, "the locals feeding the task force. Names. Where they sleep," he swallowed, "the only one of us who can understand a word they say is Adam."

Adam.

You had not seen him since your third meal. Whenever that had been.

"Adam?" You took his face in both hands, careful of the swollen side. "Adam was with you? Who else is in there? Where? When did you see him?"

He pulled his head out of your hands, not unkindly, just past the strength to hold it up.

"Adam was still there when they dragged me out," he was trying to move, dragging himself toward one of the only dry patches of ground. His eyes were closing, "he's still there."

You needed him awake.

Not because sleep was the enemy, the way the movies tell it, but because the minute you could not rouse him was the minute you would know how bad the bleed in his head had gotten.

You needed to keep reading him for as long as he would let you.

You followed him down, staying low.

"Benjie. Eyes on me. Stay with me."

You got your hands on him and started to assess. The thirst and the hunger had gone somewhere far away, adrenaline doing the work your body could no longer fuel on its own.

You checked his pupils as best you could with the bad light.

One a shade wider than the other, slow to answer. You asked him to follow your finger and he could not hold his eyes open long enough to try. His breathing had a hitch in it you did not like and when you laid your hand flat on his chest you felt how shallow it had gone.

There's a bleed somewhere in his head.

"You're not in good shape, Benjie. I need you to look at me. Look at me," you raised your voice, trying to drag his attention back.

He did not look at you.

He had flopped down, off his side and onto his back, onto the raw ruin the whip had made of it.

He did not flinch.

A man whose body has stopped reporting that kind of pain is telling you something and the thing it was telling you was bad.

His chest was barely lifting.

No. No. No.

There was nothing here that could help him, which left one option. And it was on the other side of the door.

You turned to stand, moving fast. Too fast, the room tilted and the lamp smeared across your vision, your body reminding you what you had and had not put into it. You steadied yourself and crossed to the door.

"HEY!"

You hit it with your fists, both of them. Then the heel of your hand, the flat of your palm, your forearm, your shoulder, every part of you you could throw at it.

"HEYYYYY!"

You did not care about the split skin over your knuckles or the new blood it left on the steel.

"IN HERE! HELP ME IN HERE!!"

You did not care about the ache in your stomach or the way your joints had started to scream.

"FUCK!!!"

None of it reached you. There was only the door and the need to make a sound big enough that someone on the other side would have to answer it.

"FUCK YOU MOTHER FUCKERS!"

You hit the door again, the way you had hit the wall, like it owed you something.

"WE NEED MEDICAL ATTENTION! YOU PIECES OF SHIT!!!"

You hit it and you kicked it and you screamed at it. Over your shoulder you watched Benjie's chest rise smaller and smaller, his open eye losing its hold on the ceiling.

"HELP! FUCK! HE--"

The clunk of the lock cut your voice in half.

YES!!

You stepped back and put your hands up, fingers spread wide, your whole body trying to say "I am not a threat" before the door was even open.

You knew how it worked: anyone who is not you is a threat.

The smartest thing you can do is hold up two empty hands so the men with the guns have no reason to use them.

The door whined open and the light that came through it blinded you.

Your eyes had given themselves over to the dark, the doorway was a column of piercing white. You stood in the glare with your hands up while your pupils fought to catch up.

Air came with the light.

Cooler, cleaner, moving, circling slowly into the dead air of the cell, and despite how cold your hands and your skin already were, you found yourself wanting it. A single full breath of something crisp and clean, instead of the thick, fouled air you had been pulling for days.

You were squinting at shapes when they resolved. The muzzle of an AK-47, close and steady. Behind it, three men. Behind them, the hallway.

They were shouting at you, fast and overlapping, the consonants hard.

It has to be Pashto, right?

A man with a rifle in your face does not need translating. He wanted you on the ground, lower, hands where he could see them. Your body was already trying to give him all of that.

You said the words you knew.

"ډاکټر Ḍāktar (DAAK-tar) [Doctor]!" You put a flat hand on your own chest, naming yourself, "مرسته Mrasta (MRUS-ta) [Help]! ډاکټر Ḍāktar (DAAK-tar) [Doctor]!"

You pointed at Benjie on the floor behind you, then back at yourself.

"ډاکټر Ḍāktar (DAAK-tar) [Doctor]! Please!" You were begging, something you did not do easily.

"He needs help! I'm a doctor! I can help him!" You surrendered back to English.

Something moved through the three of them. They looked at one another. The shouting dropped into something faster and quieter, traded over the top of you. The man with the rifle lowered the barrel and lowered himself to your level.

"ډاکټر Ḍāktar (DAAK-tar) [Doctor]," the accent was thick, but the word was unmistakable. "You are doctor?" His tone was more curious than accusing.

"Yes." Your whole chest lifted with it. You thought you had found the one thing that might matter. The shift in his face told you, a half second too late, that you had handed them something.

You said it anyway, "yes. I'm a doctor. I need suppli--"

He stood before you could finish, as if the rest of it did not concern him. He said something short to the others, then pointed at you and jerked his chin toward the door. The meaning carried across the language with no trouble at all.

Bring her.

Your body tensed as a hand closed around your upper arm, hard enough that you felt the bruise forming under the grip. They hauled you up and toward the door.

"No!" You tried to pull away from him, and fighting did nothing.

You were starving and weak.

Your body had no leverage left to give.

"No! No!" The squirming was pointless. "Please! Please let me help him!" You looked back. "Benjie!"

A second man took your other side as your flailing got worse.

You screamed it behind you. "Benjie! Stay awake! Benjiiieeeee!"

The last thing you saw was Benjie on his back, not moving, every shade of bruise the body knows.

The metal door swung shut on him with a deep, ringing slam.

CLANG

Shut with such violence the vibrations that went through the floor and up into your teeth, lock cranked into place behind it.

You jolted up off the mattress, the scream of his name caught in your throat, unable to finish.

Your hands were already moving. You were panting, searching the room for Benjie.

For a few full seconds you did not know where you were.

You were in a room.

What room? No cement.

The wall in front of you was wrong, too pale, too smooth.

For half a breath it was cement again, slick and dark and dripping. Then a wall, plain and boring.

There was a voice in the language somewhere, low, the hard edges of it. Your whole body went cold before your mind caught up and offered the only sane answer it had: a radio, a television, somebody else's morning bleeding through the floor from another unit.

Not here.

Not them.

A radio.

You were on the floor of the cell with Benjie's body, the two of you alone in the dark where they had put you back.

His chest finally still.

You had counted his stillness the way you had counted the drip.

You were in your bed.

You were screaming on a wet floor.

You were in your bed staring at the edge of the blinds. Focusing on the daylight through the gap, low and gold and ordinary.

Your phone went off on the nightstand, a flat electronic buzz that belonged so completely to this room and no other that it pulled you the rest of the way out by the wrist.

Pittsburgh.

Your apartment.

Your bed.

You dragged in one breath, then another, your heart slamming at the inside of your chest like something trying to get out.

Your shirt was soaked through and stuck to you.

When you shifted, you could feel the damp print of yourself in the sheets, a stain in the rough shape of a body that had not rested at all. You turned your head to look at it.

You were safe.

This was routine by now: the waking in a panic and a sweat, the sick little rotation of dreams that took turns with you.

That one always left you in bad shape.

You reached for the phone that had hauled you out. Two messages, from a number that was not saved.

(412)-345-6789: Pulled your number off your file. Don't read into it. (412)-345-6789: Two days from now you're coming with me to see my prosthetist. Not a suggestion. Consider it a mandatory field trip.

You huff at the screen, roll your eyes and leave him on read. You'll see him soon enough.

Then you let your head drop back against the headboard and breathed out another heavy breath. The panic loosening one notch at a time as the present took the room back for good.

You checked the alarm clock on the nightstand, 3:37 PM.

Woke up before the alarm. Nice.

You shifted to the edge of the bed and swung your leg and a half over the side.

If he can look at it, you can look at it.

Your eyes went down to the limb. You did not inspect it the way you had in flashes before. This time you tried to sit with it, to see it for what it was.

Somehow it felt easier.

Maybe because Dr. Abbot had taken it apart with his bare hands and not flinched at a single part of it.

You couldn't look long. Just a few seconds.

Tomorrow you would try for longer.

Now your eyes went searching the floor for the prosthetic, which had surely tipped over.

Of course.

It always did this.

When you got into bed it stood there, just to the right of you. By the time you woke it had fallen and rolled an arm's length out of reach.

You lowered yourself to the floor, scooted to the artificial leg and dragged it back to the bed. You hauled yourself up and sat the way you had to in order to put it on. You rolled the liner up over the end of your leg, eased the limb down into the socket until it seated, rolled the suspension sleeve up over the rim of it and onto your thigh, sealing it to you the way it was meant to hold.

You stood.

It felt fine.

It always felt fine, those first few seconds, before the day went to work on it.

Except there was something under the fine today. Low and wrong and wordless, a twinge of something you had never felt before. You stood a second longer than you needed to, shifting your weight back and forth, waiting to see whether it would come again.

It didn't.

You decided not to care.

You took a few steps toward the bathroom and through the door, your eyes caught the dent in the cabinet.

The corner of your mouth curved into a smirk. You had zero intention of fixing that.

Time to start the ritual of humiliation.

You tugged the cuff of the long sleeve under your scrub top to the middle of your forearm, small adjustments, the kind that made the rest of a night bearable. You were headed for the nurses' station to catch a few of the day staff before they cleared out. Lifting your hand palm up to check the watch riding the inside of your wrist, it read:

6:31 PM

"How come your watch is face down?" It came from behind you.

You turned, Javadi stood there, doe-eyed, a small confused crease between her brows.

God. She makes you feel old.

You answer, "in the desert, the glare blinds you. You can't be elbow-deep in a chest cavity and blind," your hands settled behind your back, clasped, the way you stood when you weren't thinking about it, "old habits die hard I guess," you pause, "or whatever the saying is."

Something flickered across her face.

You knew the look she was reading on yours, the almost-angry look that was really just your thinking face. Dr. Robinavitch had pointed it out to you between shifts laughing while telling you, "it's the same face Abbot makes when he's deciding what to eat."

"You were in a desert?" Her voice was so soft. You wondered, for a second, whether you had ever sounded like that.

Probably.

"Almost ten years in the Army," you kept it flat, "did my residency deployed, mostly in war zones. Most of the medicine I know I learned somewhere the power kept cutting out and the heat tried to kill you slower than the work," you left Salerno out of it.

Salerno was not a story for the nurses' station.

"Right," she gave a small laugh, "I guess that's why you use a real watch and not a smartwatch. Nowhere to charge it out there?"

Your face did something you didn't entirely authorize, a small scrunch that on anyone else would have read as "are you serious."

"No." You said it plain, no heat in it. "I use an analog watch because it's better than a smartwatch," you let the word analog come out slow, with a little weight on it, the kind of weight a question earns when a doctor should know better than to ask it.

"An analog watch doesn't die in the middle of a code. It doesn't want a charger or a signal or a software update. It does one job. And it does that job in a sandstorm, in a blackout, with a cracked face and blood on the glass and it lets you count a pulse against the sweep of the second hand without thinking about it. A doctor who needs a screen to tell the time has handed away a skill she might need on the exact day the screen is gone," you let it land, "but that's just me."

She looked like you had reached out and flicked her in the centre of the forehead.

You didn't meant to.

It was a side effect.

"Woah, Crash. What's got you all shook?"

Another voice came over your shoulder. From the words you assumed it was aimed at Javadi, but you wanted to be sure.

"Crash?" You didn't turn to look, you were still sizing up Javadi and she was starting to come apart a little under it.

"Yeah. Crash." Santos pointed at her with one finger, "I gotta tell you that story sometime."

A smirk tugged at the corner of your mouth.

"Huh. I'd have put money on something like girl genius. Or the prodigy," you tipped your head, "maybe Doogie, if anyone here's old enough to land it."

"Listen to you," Dana said, coming around the counter with a stack of charts, not even slowing down. "Talking like the rest of us got dropped off by horse and buggy. You're, what, twelve yourself?"

You put a hand up in mock surrender.

"The older the berry," you said, "the sweeter the juice."

It got a laugh out of someone, but it felt like the end of a conversation and you wanted to find something more interesting to do, you turned towa--

The floor under you.

The cell floor, the wet cement, your own knees pressed into it, picking grains of rice with your fingers.

Flashed up behind your eyes.

Gone before you'd finished the step.

Then something drove up through your left leg with no warning at all. A spike of it, white and total, it pulled a sound out of you before you could close your mouth on it.

It came from your foot. The arch of your left foot, that exact place.

Your knee buckled.

You do not have a left foot. What the fuck?

It was gone as fast as it came, a switch flipped and flipped back, nothing left behind but the held breath in your chest and the memory of a pain that had no business existing.

You straightened.

You shook the limb out.

Maybe the socket had caught a nerve, pinched a fold of the liner, some small mechanical insult your brain had decided to translate into a foot you no longer owned. Maybe.

You filed it under later. You were good at later.

You checked the watch again:

6:37 PM.

Time to kill, no one left to talk to and a building you had half memorized without meaning to. Grabbing a patient early was tempting and pointless, because Dr. Abbot ran that little huddle of his before every shift and would only pull you back out of whatever room you'd buried yourself in.

You'd heard mention of a roof. In passing, the way people mention a thing they don't expect you to go looking for.

So you went looking for it.

Not the main elevator. The main elevator was the obvious answer and the obvious answer was never the interesting one. You stood a moment and let the shape of the place assemble in your head, the way you used to read a building before you had to move through it.

Somebody had mentioned a helipad once, which meant there had to be a freight elevator big enough to run a gurney straight up to a roof. That car would not be sitting in the public lobby.

Left, then a right past the supply alcove, then left again down a service corridor that smelled like floor wax.

Then, there it was.

A wide steel elevator door with scuffed bumper rails. Right where it ought to be.

You stepped in and the panel of buttons climbed past six.

Seven.

Eight.

Nine.

You had never once thought about how tall this place was, now that you did, nine felt like the top of it. Hospitals were never as big as they pretended to be from the outside.

The doors opened on nine to a blank corridor, almost no signage. To the right, a hallway running off toward what were probably clinics, the daytime business of the floor. To the left, a short stub of corridor ending in a single grey metal door, a stairwell symbol, an arrow pointing up.

Bingo.

You pushed through and started up, on the landing between flights your left leg lit again. That same searing spike, your face pulled tight around it.

What the fuck!

And again, the second it arrived, it was gone.

You shook the limb out, again. Then kept climbing.

Two flights. Then your shoulder met the push-bar at the top, and the door gave.

The light hit you before anything else, bright and blinding in the best possible way, slanting low and gold across the gravel and the ductwork and the lip of the roof. White at the centre where you couldn't look straight at it, then the gold cutting out around it, warm and enormous, the last real heat of the day pouring down over your skin like it had crossed time and space just to land on your face.

A deep sigh left your lips. Something close to relief washed over the whole of you.

Your legs moved before you told them to, following the pull of the sun toward the edge of the roof, where a waist-high safety bar ran the lip of the building and a generous few feet of ledge sat between the bar and the long drop to the street.

You leaned against the bar with your eyes shut and let the sun have you.

Your face, your shoulders, your hands, all of it warming through. The wind came up off the river and you could smell the water in it. It lifted the loose hair at your temple and laid it back down, just brushing your skin, and for a moment that was all there was.

For a moment you were in Salerno.

The good part of Salerno.

The part with the sun and the dust and the heat and Adam somewhere close.

Before any of the rest of it.

You wanted to be closer to it. Closer to the sun, closer to that version of yourself.

You opened your eyes and looked over the bar.

There's a good amount of room out there.

You debated it for a moment. Then you ducked under and crawled through to the far side. Out onto the ledge, two feet of concrete--maybe. Your back to the building, your hands hooked behind you on the bar.

A flicker of fear came and went. Paid off fast by the sun finding your face again.

This, you understood, was a stupid place to be. You did not particularly care.

You weren't aware you'd started to lean, but suddenly you were tilted out over the edge. Hands still light on the bar, just tight enough that a gust would have found you ready.

Your heart was going hard.

The adrenaline of it ran clean and bright through you, the closest thing to good you had felt in days. You lifted one hand off the bar and let it hover, daring yourself, just to see.

Then you closed it back over the steel and leaned a little further.

Imagine.

You scoffed at the thought of it.

Imagine getting out of everything you got out of, every one of those twenty-seven days, only to die because you wanted the wind on your face a little more than was sensible. It would be the dumbest possible ending.

The thought did not stop you.

It sat right alongside the rest of it, the sun and the height and the pull. And somehow it sharpened the whole thing, made it more alive, your hands loose and ready on the bar and the city a long way down past the toes of your shoes.

Your pocket buzzed.

It went through you like a current. You startled and your weight went with the jolt.

Your left hand caught the bar, your right missed. You swung out over nothing for half a second before you hauled yourself back and got both hands locked on the steel, heart in your throat.

Okay. That one was close.

Still on the wrong side of the bar, not yet pulled back to safety, you dug the phone out of your pocket.

(412)-345-6789: Lena swears you're here. Either she's lying or I'm going blind.

Dr. Abbot.

His number still sitting unsaved in your phone.

You typed back:

Old age is coming for you fast, huh. Just grabbing a coffee. Be there in 5.

You climbed back over the bar and went for the stairs.

You came back into the ED at something close to a jog, slowing yourself before you crossed into the rhythm of it.

They were already gathering, the night shift folding into its loose half circle around Dr. Abbot.

You checked the watch:

6:56 PM

Not late. Technically.

You tried to slide in along the back unnoticed but you felt him spot you before you'd found a place.

You did not make eye contact.

"Nice of you to join us, Dr. Abbott," the words came straight at you.

You were forced to look up.

He held your eyes and gave you a single nod.

You tucked your chin, the way a soldier does, setting your hands behind your back--right over left. You were suddenly very aware of the coffee you'd said you were grabbing and very much did not have.

Hopefully he doesn't notice.

He went on.

You were half-sitting on a stool at one of the mobile computers, putting the last of your notes into a chart, when he came up beside you.

"You've been off tonight," no softening on it.

You narrowed your eyes and gave him a side glance without turning your head, fingers still moving on the keys.

"What does that mean?"

Had you?

"You've been," he said, leaning a little into your line of sight, "a little to the left today."

That stopped your hands.

You side-eyed him again, then went back to typing, "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Really? Because you keep slipping off down some side hallway after every case," he let a beat of nothing sit there, "that's why the coffee took so long?"

Had he been following you?

"What?"

"Don't play dumb," he said, shifting again, trying to pull your eyes off the screen, "you're in pain. Right?" He paused before prodding the underlying conversation, "you walked up with no coffee in your hand."

You stopped typing and turned to face him.

"Yeah. Okay. I get it. It was irresponsible not to see a prosthetist," your tone went flat and fast, the fact-delivery setting, "but weren't you the one who texted me this morning that you were going to drag me to one?" You let the other thread have its turn, "and maybe I'm just a fast drinker."

"I didn't say drag," he held the eye contact, steady, that level stare that did not move off you, "it was irresponsible. And stupid." He let it sit. "And the part that makes it worse is that you're a doctor, so you know exactly what damage you're doing." His voice dropped under the banter, into the real conversation running beneath it. "You're shortening a long game, and we both know coffee was never the holdup."

That had teeth in it.

"I agreed to go. Why are you on my case?"

"You didn't agree," his voice stayed even, "you stopped arguing. Those aren't the same thing."

You'd had enough.

The chart could wait.

"Fine. Let's pick up a new case and you can manage me in front of the whole department," it came out sharper than you fully meant, though not by much.

You pushed off the computer cart to stand. The second your left foot took the floor, your leg detonated.

The sound that came out of you was short. A single wail, clear and impossible to take back.

The pain shot hip to knee to foot, and you pitched forward, stumbling, hands flying out to catch the floor.

But the floor never came.

Two hands, big and certain, caught you around the waist. His body suddenly in front of yours, taking your weight, getting you back up.

You were upright again but this time the pain did not switch off. It stayed, aching, worst of all in the foot.

The foot you did not have.

Your breathing had gone quick and shallow. You could feel the sweat coming up under your skin.

"Hey. Look at me," he had you, the two of you folded back into a side computer cubby, out of any sightline that wasn't looking for it. He held you up, your body pressed to his, "you're okay. What are you feeling?"

The words came out tight and clipped. "It hurts. In--" you gasped, "my foot-- Ahhh!"

You weren't looking at him.

Your neck was craned up, your eyes locked on the fluorescent tube overhead, like you could trade one burn for another, let the light scorch your eyes enough to drown out the fire in a limb that was not there.

"Okay. Look at me."

You couldn't. You shook your head.

"It's okay. Trust me. Look at me."

You dragged your eyes down to his making yourself meet them. You knew there were tears sitting on your lash line. You did not want him, of all people, to see you like this.

"Now I need you to look down."

"What?" Nothing in you could follow him.

"Come on. Look down," he tipped his chin toward the floor, his hands still holding you steady.

You snapped your gaze down.

He had his foot on top of your left foot.

His weight, pressing down on it.

You could not feel it.

Not the pressure, not the contact... nothing.

The part of your brain that had been screaming about the burn went quiet, trying to make two facts agree.

The foot it could see. The foot it could not feel. And somewhere in the gap between them, the pain let go.

It was gone.

Your body stopped bracing all at once. The breath went out of you and your head, already down, dropped the last inch onto his shoulder.

You pressed into him without deciding to.

The relief of it was better than anything you had words for.

You could still feel his hands on you, firm without gripping. His right hand sat low, at the base of your ribcage where it met your waist. His left came up to the side of your face and tilted it, lifting your eyes back to his.

Under the thin sheen of sweat you let out a breath and leaned your cheek into his palm.

"Thank you."

"I've gotchu , kid."

Kid.

You did not feel like a kid.

Not pressed against him like this.

You liked the way his hands felt at your waist, the left coming back to steady you as you shifted your weight, resetting the prosthetic under you.

You were still moving in his arms when Mateo came around the corner.

"Are there any Abbotts back her--" he stopped.

Whatever else he'd been about to say went nowhere, because he'd found you half folded into Dr. Abbot's arms, slightly out of breath.

"Um. I don't know what to say right now," and he turned to go.

Nothing unprofessional had happened. You could see exactly how it looked anyway. And you knew, with total certainty, that he was walking straight to Ellis with it.

You pushed yourself out of his hold.

The instant he felt you resist, he let go. He wasn't trying to trap you in it.

Something still hummed through the leg but you made yourself move, out of the cubby and back toward the bright open centre of the department.

Anywhere but there.

You'd checked your watch as the radio crackled.

It was just past 1:00 AM when the call came in.

It was you, Dr. Abbot and Donnie, who normally worked days but was covering for Jesse tonight. You stood ready in the ambulance bay.

The adrenaline hadn't found you yet.

The shift so far had been the ordinary churn: a forearm fracture in a kid who'd come off a skateboard, a COPD exacerbation you'd nebulized and admitted, a drunk college kid with a chin laceration that took six stitches.

Nothing that made your heart race and hands go still.

You heard the siren before you saw the rig.

When it swung into the bay you caught the driver's face through the windshield.

It stopped you for half a second.

EMT's do not look like that. They carry things most people never see and keep their faces smooth doing it.

This one looked like he'd seen something that got past all of that.

He looked like terror.

The ambulance jerked to a stop and the three of you moved for the doors.

You could hear the screaming before they opened.

When they did, the sound that came out was deafening, a high continuous wail that filled the whole bay.

Dr. Abbot took point, Donnie on his left, you on his right.

The medic in the back was covered in blood, both hands and most of one forearm dark with it, leaning his whole weight down onto the patient's legs. The second medic, the woman riding the head, started talking the moment she saw your faces, fast and clean, the way you talk when seconds are the currency.

"Twenty-seven-year-old female, restrained driver, T-boned at speed, prolonged extrication. GCS fifteen, she's been screaming the whole way. Pressure's ninety over palp and trending down, heart rate one-forty. Two large-bore lines, a liter of saline in, a unit of O-neg running. Tourniquet's been on the left leg twenty-two minutes." She didn't slow. "Degloving injury, left lower leg, mid-shin down. Skin's peeled off the whole calf. Open tib-fib, bone's out, foot's dusky, I couldn't get a pulse below the knee."

You heard all of it.

You saw all of it.

And for a second that lasted too long, your body would not move.

Twenty-seven. A left leg, below the knee. A dusky foot, no pulse, a clock already running on it.

It was you.

It was you on that gurney with the sun gone and the screw still warm in your foot, someone counting the minutes you had left to keep the leg.

"Abbott."

You didn't move.

"Abbott," his voice, low and flat and right at your ear, under the screaming, meant only for you, "not here. Not now," his hand pressed once, hard, between your shoulder blades, "that's not you. That's her. And she still gets to walk out of here. But only if you're in the room," his tone was certain, "so get in the room."

The wail, the dusky foot, all of it snapped back into focus as a problem with steps.

"You're on it," That was all he gave you, and it was enough.

You were in it.

Your hands came back.

You moved.

The pressure dressing reinforced over the wound. The tourniquet time called out and logged. A third line going in, blood and TXA hung, the trauma protocol unrolling around the table while she screamed and you talked her through a thing she could not hear.

"We need ortho," you called over your shoulder.

"Paged them two minutes ago," Kim answered from the foot of the bed.

"Any response?"

"No."

Fine. I'll reduce it myself.

You knew how to do it.

A deformed fracture can kink the vessel that feeds everything below it. Realign the bone and the blood can come back and the limb buys time it does not currently have.

You had done it in the dirt with less than this.

You shifted your stance and reached for the leg.

Then you stopped--you looked at Dr. Abbot.

"I'm not allowed to do this. Am I?"

"No," he wasn't angry about it. He just agreed with you, which was worse, "you're not. Page ortho again."

You were provisional. Ninety days, no independent procedures, nothing without an attending's hands and an attending's name on it, and a fracture reduction on a crashing trauma was not a thing you got to own yet.

The rules of where you were.

You hated that he was right.

You stepped back from the leg.

Her pressure dropped again. You pushed blood and you watched the foot go from dusky toward grey.

"Ortho says at least six minutes," Kim called from the phone.

Six minutes?!

You stood there a moment.

You could not watch a twenty-seven-year-old lose a fight she could still win, not when the right person was sitting six minutes away. You looked at Dr. Abbot and said all of it with your eyes. "This is wrong and you know it and you know I can do it." He held your look and shook his head.

Still no.

"Fuck it."

You stepped back, stripped your gloves off, dropped them in the bin on your way to the phone Kim was holding.

You put your hand out. She passed it over.

"Listen to me," your voice came out level and absolutely cold, the one you used to use on a radio when the answer mattered more than the feelings on either end of it, "this leg does not have six minutes. In six minutes I will not need you for a washout and a fixator. I will need you for a below-the-knee amputation on a twenty-seven-year-old. I will put your name in every line of why. I don't care what VIP you've got open upstairs. Get. Down. Here... Or I will come up there and get you myself."

You slammed the phone back in its cradle without waiting for whatever he said.

You stepped back to the table, where the others had kept their hands moving the whole time.

This time you did not look to Dr. Abbot first, "let's get her ready for a reduction and a washout, so ortho can go the second they're through that door."

Nobody hesitated.

Maybe forty-five seconds later the doors of trauma one slid open.

A man came through them in the dark navy of surgical scrubs, head down. The look on his face was a closed fist, brow low, lashes nearly touching it. The glare of a man who has already decided the room is wasting his time.

He did not walk to the prepped leg. He walked the bay instead, slow, his eyes moving over the faces he knew until they found your. His gaze stopped, flat and assessing, the way a shark holds still in the water--right before an attack.

He had the unmistakable bearing of a man with an ego the size of the building.

You had a long-standing problem with men who had egos the size of the building.

He came to stand with you, squared up, close, then turned to the patient for a quick assessment. Hands sure despite everything else about him.

Without looking at you he told you what he needed.

You assisted.

You were furious, but you listened, because she came first and both of you knew it.

You did the reduction with him, hands steady, bone coming back into line. The foot was the part that mattered, the dead grey toes at the far end of all that ruined calf. Under your hands they pinked up as the blood found its road again. They took her up a few minutes later, a washout, fixation and a vascular team already scrubbing.

You were fairly sure the two of you had just saved her leg.

When she was gone, the room went quiet. The people who had been assisting were all still standing throughout the room, not moving--watching.

You could feel his glare burning into the back of you skull, you turned to face him.

You felt the whole bay tighten around it.

Even Dr. Abbot went still at the edge of your vision.

You did not walk a straight line at him. You mimicked the way he'd moved, following an unhurried arc across the floor. He read it and answered, drifting the other way.

The two of you circling, neither giving an inch.

The only question left was who would give first?

"And who are you?"

"Dr. Abbott," you let it sit a second, "nice to meet you. I look after people's lives and limbs. Both. At the same time. Even the ones I don't feel like getting up for."

"What's that supposed to imply?"

"Nothing. I'm not implying. I'm telling," you lifted your chin, refusing to back down from the challenge, "you let yourself take your time upstairs," your eyes narrowed to match his glare, "what exactly is the point of a page? Of a whole emergency line? If the plan is to answer it when it suits you?" You jab, "she's twenty-seven. She had minutes. And you spent some of them deciding whether she was worth the walk."

"I didn't ignore anything."

You saw him then.

Not his name, you didn't have that yet, but the shape of him underneath.

An ortho god who had decided a long time ago that the ground he walked on had been laid there specifically for him.

"I don't have the time or the patience for inflated egos like yours," you closed the distance until there was almost none, looking up, because he was taller, "you've got the big hard exterior. The strut," your hand came up, gesturing the whole of him, "the entire performance of how sure of yourself you are. It bought that girl exactly nothing tonight."

You placed it, clean, where it would do the most damage.

"What's your name?" You dropped your eyes to the badge clipped at his chest, then brought them back up, "hmph," you held his eyes and did not blink, "here's some free advice, Dr. Park. Find whatever you've got buried where your heart's supposed to go and learn to pick up the phone like the people on the other end of it are running out of time. Because one day it'll be someone you can't afford to keep waiting."

You watched it land somewhere he couldn't armour.

He didn't move, not on the outside, but something went behind his eyes, a wall taking a hit it hadn't braced for.

He said nothing.

His gaze cut once around the room, still brooding. Then he turned and moved off, unhurried, giving the room back.

You heard the door slide open and shut.

You didn't look.

You didn't move.

Your eyes went to the rest of them, the ones still standing there watching.

You scanned the faces.

You glared, a silent suggestion that they all had somewhere else to be.

They scattered. You told yourself it was nothing, that not one of them would take it personally.

You weren't entirely sure you believed it.

You took a few steps to leave, then you felt it coming. The same heat gathering low in the leg, winding up.

You had to stop to let it pass.

You got out of the trauma bay turning to the nearest counter, leaning onto your wrists, lifting the weight off your legs. The pain came up the left side of your body anyway, burning.

You thought about the girl's leg, pinking up under your hands, the leg you got to save.

The pain climbed with the thought.

You leaned harder, more of your weight into your forearms, your "feet" nearly off the floor, past caring who saw. Surely there were more interesting things in this department than you white-knuckling a countertop.

Your whole face drew tight around it, the burn impossibly alive in a foot you did not have.

"Come with me."

Over your left shoulder Dr. Abbot's voice came, his hand flat on your lower back, guiding your tensed body up off the counter, "come on. I've got you."

He started walking you away from the bay.

You stopped.

"I can't--" you were panting, "what's happening?" You could not make it make sense.

Pain this total in a limb that was not there. Pain loud enough that you could not have said your own name.

"My guess is phantom limb pain," as he said it he stepped in front of you, leaned down to place his forearm under you and lifted. Effortlessly.

You struggled in his grip. He took a few quick steps out of the way, clearing a gurney coming fast down the lane, then set you back down on the far side of it.

"Sorry. Didn't want you turned into roadkill."

Mateo walked past you both after the gurney, asking if everything was okay.

Dr. Abbot answered without missing a step, "she's good, I rolled the cart over her foot, my fault, give us a minute," and he kept you moving, "let's go."

He walked you the rest of the way to the locker room, taking more of your weight with every step.

You made it through the locker room door. Then the pain took everything.

You were on the verge of screaming.

The tears had stopped asking permission and were just coming now.

And to make it worse, you were not in Pittsburgh anymore.

Part of you was somewhere with a cement floor and a yellow light. Part of you was in a white room in Washington with people saying your name. Part of you was in the dirt at Salerno with the sun gone down, your foot a ruin, and Adam's voice somewhere close, telling you to stay with him.

"It's in my foot," you heard yourself say. You weren't sure who you were saying it to.

"There's a screw through my foot. Get it out!!! Adam!!"

You were lost to it now.

"There's something in my foot!!"

Everything was starting to fade and blend, flashes of every version of you mixing together.

Hands were on you. A voice was saying something steady. You couldn't reach it.

Jack's POV

I knew the look before she said a word.

I have worn that look.

I have caught it coming back at me out of a mirror in a bathroom I keep too clean. The eyes go long, past the wall, past the room, fixed on a horizon that isn't in the building.

She was staring at a place that wasn't here, talking to a man who wasn't here, and her body was folding around a pain in a part of her that wasn't there either.

All three of those things were true at once, and not one of them could be argued with.

"Hey." I got her face in my hands, "you're in Pittsburgh. You're with me."

She didn't have it.

Her gaze slid off me, going back to wherever she'd gone.

The phantom pain, I could do something about.

The flashback was riding on top of it, but the pain was the engine. If I could break the pain I could buy her enough quiet to find the rest of the way back.

I'd had it done to me once, in a worse room than this one, by a man who didn't explain it first.

The brain is screaming about a foot. So you show the brain the foot.

You give it something it cannot argue with.

I let go of her and went for the door.

"Stay with me. Thirty seconds," to her, to the room, I didn't know. I went down the hall at a dead run, pulled a scalpel from a supply cart, and came back through that door faster than I've moved in a year.

She was still gone, pushing, mumbling and clawing at nothing.

I got back in front of her, my hand on her jaw.

I made her see me.

"Look at me. Right now," I searched her eyes for any sign of her, "you see me? Say it."

Something caught.

Her eyes snapped to mine and held. The first real contact since the door.

"Good. Now watch."

I held the scalpel up where she had no choice but to see. Then I drove it down into the toe of her left prosthetic--hard. The blade cutting through her shoe, biting into the foam shell of a foot that could not feel a thing.

Your POV

You blinked at the scalpel standing ninety degrees out of your foot.

Where the pain should have spiked, should have whited out the whole world, there was nothing.

Nothing at all.

Everything that had been roaring through your head at a thousand miles an hour came to a dead stop.

The sweat, the ringing, the screaming. Yours, the girl's and Adam's braided together.

All of it cut out at once.

Like a wire pulled.

You let a few heavy breaths out and looked into his eyes.

He was still breathing hard himself. Looking at you, no pity in it, only recognition.

Wherever you'd just been, he'd been there too.

You were sure of it.

You patted the loose hairs down against your head. Your eyes shifting between his face, the scalpel standing up out of the toe of your prosthetic and the foot that absolutely should have had something to say about a blade in it--but didn't.

"Thank you," you panted.

"No need," he patted your shoulder. The way you'd pat a kid who'd done a brave thing, or at least that's how it landed on you, "I just wrecked your foot... and shoe. Which means you now have no choice but to come with me to get a new one."

You scoffed, "nah," you were still catching your breath, "I figure I can squeeze a few more rounds out of this one."

"Don't," he almost smiled, "my heart is old enough without you testing it."

"You say that like the paramedics don't already know your gate code."

That got a laugh out of him, short and surprised, "aways ready with a come back, even when you're the one who needs help. Huh?" The laugh was there and gone.

Then his face closed back into the attending's, "go home."

"I'm fine," you pushed off to straighten.

The leg reminded you that you were not fine.

"You're not, and that's not the point," he didn't raise his voice, "this is me being your supervising attending. Gloria wants this done right, which means you don't get to bend the rules," he gave you a small nod, "yet," he smiled, "not even the ones you've decided are stupid. You can't use this leg now anyway," he glanced at the scalpel, "which is on me and I'm sorry for that," he extended a hand to help you up. You took it, and he tugged you to your feet, "so go home. Rest. I'll come get you in two days, and we'll go see about a better one."

"What if I had plans?"

"Oh," he looked at you, flat, almost daring you to make one up, "you had plans?"

"…Well. No," the corner of your mouth twitched despite everything, "but I did want to go grocery shopping."

"Grocery shopping can wait," he said it gently. You were too tired to keep fighting a thing he was right about, "before you go, "he looked at you deeper this time, "the pain. When it comes back, and it will, you don't always need a scalpel. Sometimes you just need to show your brain the foot's still there. A mirror works. Put the good leg where the missing one should be, watch it move. It's stupid. But it works. Try it."

You nodded.

You let him win.

This time.

He wished you a goodnight.

You changed then left.

Jack's POV

I went to Gloria before leaving because the alternative was her hearing Mateo's version. And I'd rather get ahead of it.

I told her what happened: the phantom pain, the flashback, the call I made to send her home. I told her the prosthetic I'd wrecked was mine to answer for.

Gloria listened the way she listens, all the way through, no face on it. When I finished she nodded once, agreeing it was a reasonable call.

I know she'd have made the same one.

Then she said she had something for me, "since I was the supervising attending."

She slid a folder across the desk.

CPT (Y/N) Abbott, MD

Printed across the centre.

The whole thing. Service record, medical, all of it.

Everything Robby had offered me weeks ago. Everything I'd turned down because I'd told him she gets to be the one to tell me, not because I went looking behind her back.

I didn't open it.

I didn't even turn it over.

But it was in my hand now and it is a great deal harder to set a thing down once someone has put it in your hand than it is to refuse to pick it up in the first place.

I put it in my bag.

I told myself I'd give it back.

Your POV ~ 2 Days Later

Bzzzzzzzzz.

Dr. Abbot was buzzing into your apartment.

You clicked the button and dull ring let out. You heard the door open and shut before the intercom cut out.

This was the first time he'd been actually invited here.

The only reason he was coming up at all was because Kalista had left on a date and there was no one to help bring the broken prosthetic down. You'd have managed on the crutches alone, but you needed the leg to come with you.

You'd run out of ways to pretend you didn't need the help.

You left the door unlocked, balancing against the back of the couch when a knock came.

You flinched but caught yourself, then called out, "it's open," the door opened and he stepped through.

He toed his shoes off at the door, one hand braced on the frame.

You let your eyes go where they wanted, which was up, slow, from the worn boots to the denim soft and worn, close to the shape of him. Up the flat plane of him under a henley pushed to the elbows. Those forearms were right there again, the ones you'd clocked the first night. Corded and scarred, ending in hands that knew exactly what they were for.

Up the set of his shoulders, grey coming in at his temples and through the stubble like the years had decided to sign their work. The lines bracketing his mouth and fanning from his eyes that made the whole weathered map of his face. Up to the eyes, that changeable hazel the low light of your apartment had pulled most of the way toward grey.

His eyes which were, you realized a half second too late, already on you.

He'd caught you.

He held it long enough that you knew he'd caught you. Then he lifted the bag in his hand.

"I'll these in your kitchen."

"What? What is that?"

"Food. Basics. Things a person generally keeps around," he was already moving toward your kitchen, "you said you wanted to go grocery shopping. Figured I'd save you the trip."

You hopped after him on one leg, hand skating the wall, "you didn't have to do that."

He opened the fridge.

It was, to put it kindly, empty. A jar of something. A takeout container of uncertain age. A lonely row of condiments standing guard over nothing.

"Huh," he looked at it for a second, "you really did need to go grocery shopping."

"Yeah," ou leaned in the doorway, "I've been putting it off. I've got those frozen meals, though. The ones that aren't actually bad."

He started putting things away.

Then he said it without turning around, no edge on it, just a thing he'd noticed, "I've never once seen you eat. Weeks now and not a thing."

"Yeah, well," you watched him find a home for the eggs like he'd been in this kitchen a hundred times, "now you know why."

He waited, which was somehow worse than asking.

"It's not that I can't cook," you argued, "put a recipe in front of me and I'll follow it fine. I just never had to learn the rest of it. What to buy. What goes with what. There was always a chow hall, or an MRE, or somebody else's plan," you shrugged, "so I get the freezer stuff. And the chips. Things that are already ready to go."

He nodded, slow, opting not to push it.

You were grateful for that more than you let on. He just closed the fridge on a shelf that had food on it now.

"Let me help get you down the stairs."

"You can carry the leg," you were already reaching for the crutches, "I've got the rest."

The clinic was twenty minutes out.

You spent the first ten of them looking out the window.

He let you.

"You're going to hate the first five minutes of this," he said eventually, eyes on the road, "then you're going to be fine."

"That's encouraging."

"It's true, which is better than encouraging," he changed lanes, "the guy we're seeing is the best and he owes me. I cashed in a favour to get you on his table this week instead of in two months. So when he tells you something you don't want to hear, hear it anyway. He's only trying to help."

"And you're getting what out of this, exactly?" You'd been wondering, "you came in awful eager for somebody else's appointment."

The corner of his mouth moved, "I'm getting a running blade. A whole separate setup. Carbon foot built to put load through at speed instead of just stand around on," he said it like a man talking about a new truck, " a leg I can actually run on."

You looked over at him.

"I'm a patient too," he looked over the centre console, "don't look so surprised. I want to run more than this one lets me. Today's a good day to be greedy about it."

You felt it the moment you came through the doors.

It was a rehab floor full of people who were missing pieces of themselves.

A man with a sleeve pinned up over a shoulder. A kid younger than you working a set of parallel bars on two blades, jaw set, sweat coming. A woman in a chair with one leg and a service dog asleep at the wheel of it.

Every one of them was some version of you, some angle on the same loss. The room held up a mirror in every direction you looked. And you wanted, Immediately, to leave.

"Hey," he was close at your left shoulder, "it's all right. Nobody in here's going to look at you twice. They've all got their own... things."

You made yourself breathe, and you walked.

He knew the place.

He nodded at people as you went, traded a word here and there and more than once said your name like a small introduction, "This is Dr. Abbott," something inside you started to enjoy the confused look you both received.

He led you down a corridor toward a door with your name scrawled on the whiteboard next to it:

ABBOT(T)

He smiled, nodding at the sign as he held the door for you. Inside, mats and bars and a treadmill ran along one wall. The other was covered in limbs, dozens of them, every shape and size and shade. Hung up in tidy rows like something between a workshop and a thing you didn't want to look at too long.

A man came out from behind a workbench and the second he saw Dr. Abbot the professional expression fell off his face. He crossed the room, took Jack's hand, pulled it in, and clapped him hard across the back. The two of them holding the grip a beat too long--the way old friends do.

"Look what the cat dragged in," the man said.

"Calum," there was something warm in Dr. Abbot's voice you didn't hear at work. He stepped back and tipped his head toward you, "this is who I called you about. Another Dr. Abbott."

No look of confusion from him.

Calum put his hand out, you took it.

"Calum. I run this circus," he had a steady, unhurried way about him, an easy weight. When he looked at you it was with the look of a man who had seen the whole catalogue and was not going to flinch at your page, "heard you've been working with this one."

You wonder what he's said?

"Yeah," you let go of his hand, "it's been nice working with Dr. Abbot."

"Maybe it's time you call me Jack," Dr. Abbot cut, "to avoid any confusion," he leaned in slightly.

It landed somewhere in the middle of your chest.

You have never once called him that.

"Jack." You corrected.

It came out a half beat stiff, like a word in a language you'd only ever read. The shape of it felt strange leaving your mouth.

It was not a big deal... right?

You told yourself it was not a big deal.

But you caught his eyes and saw the shift move across his face when his name came off your tongue.

Not a smile. Just a flicker, gone as fast as it came.

The look of a man who had filed something away.

You moved on, because moving on was the only thing to do with it.

Calum did not move on so fast. He looked at the two of you for a second, side by side.

Something quiet and amused settled over him.

"Christ," he said, "they really did just print another one of you, didn't they," eyes gliding from Jack to you and back. "Same face. Same standing-still. Same leg, even, give or take a side," he shook his head. "sit up here for me."

He had you up on a table, his hands on the limb inside of a minute. He read it the way you read a chart, fast and total. His hands were gentle, he kept his voice low while he worked. The way you'd talk to a spooked animal, which, you supposed, was about right.

"Relax this for me. I've got you. Nothing happens here you don't say yes to."

He found the friction burn high on the inner thigh where the sleeve had been rolling for months and made a low sound about it. He found the place where the socket had been loading wrong and pressed it until you hissed.

He turned the residual limb in his hands, looking at the end of it, at the scar line, at the way the muscle had wasted from how long you'd favoured it.

He gave you the truth in flat sentences, "this socket doesn't fit you," he set it down beside you, "it fits who you were the day they cast it. A limb changes more in its first year than it ever will again, the swelling comes down, the muscle settles, the whole shape of it shrinks in on itself, and a socket built at the start gets loose and wrong inside of months unless somebody chases it. Nobody chased yours," he looked at you, "and I'd bet money the first fit was off to begin with. Holding the whole leg tight as a fist when they cast it? Bracing?" He was searching your face for an answer, "they molded you mid-flinch and you've been walking on a flinch ever since."

You didn't answer. He didn't need you to.

"You've been paying for it up the chain. Hip, back, the other knee. The skin's breaking down where it pulls. And that phantom pain that's been jumping you?" He nodded once, "that's the fit. A bad socket lights those nerves up like a switchboard, and yours has been bad for a long time," he set the limb down gently, which did not match the weight of any of it, "none of that is a moral failing. It's a maintenance failure. And maintenance, we can fix."

Across the room, on the treadmill, Dr. Abbo-- Jack was up on the slim running blade. Going through a gait Calum had set him, building from a walk toward something quicker, testing it.

He caught you watching, again. He didn't say anything, again.

He just kept his rhythm, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world to run on a thing like that.

Like it was a door and not a wall.

Calum took a mold of your leg, "easy," he said, when he felt you tense, "just relax into it. Let it be heavy. That's all you have to do," he wrapped it and let it harden around the shape of you, and once, while it set, you caught his eyes lifting off you. Instead they were glancing across the room to Jack. You could see sentence passing between their gaze.

You looked away letting them have their conversation without your wondering eyes.

While the mold set, he talked. You listened even though every cell in you wanted to argue.

He talked about the care you'd been skipping, the doffing and the lotion and the daily inspection. The small maintenance of a body that needed it now. He talked about physical therapy like it was non-negotiable, which it was. He talked about the groups, the rooms full of people who'd lost similar things and could say so out loud.

You went stiff at that.

He saw it and didn't push. He just left it next to everything else.

"What did you used to do," he asked, "that you've stopped?"

You almost didn't answer, "I used to run," you breath slow, calming yourself, "box, lift. I used to be able to stand an eighteen-hour day on my feet without thinking about it... I used to be strong," you hadn't meant to say that last part.

He nodded, like you'd handed him a measurement.

"Then here's what I'm building you," the mold had set, and he eased it off, "something that lets you stand the long days again. Something with enough give to jog on, to start. Enough weight to get you back under a bar when you're ready. Enough rotation in the foot to let you pivot off to put a fist into a heavy bag," he looked at you, over the shell of your own leg in his hands, "you won't be where you were on day one. But you'll be moving toward it instead of away from it, which you have not been. And I'll rush it. Because he asked me to... and because you've needed it for months."

He held the shell a moment longer, like he was deciding something.

"Has Jack told you what he's been through?"

You glanced across the room at the man on the treadmill, "no."

"No. He wouldn't," Calum set the shell down, "maybe you should ask him sometime. Not because I'm telling you to. Because you two wear the same face and bear the same marks. A thing like that is a lot lighter to carry when you know somebody who's already carried it the whole way to the other side."

You sat with that for a second longer than you meant to.

You were finishing up with him, a temporary socket fitted in the meantime, snug in a way nothing had been in months, when Jack came back across the room with a towel around his neck and the blade traded back for his everyday leg.

"How'd it go?" you asked.

He nodded, "good. Better than good." There was something loose in his shoulders that hadn't been there on the drive, "yours?"

You looked down at the temporary leg, at the way it sat against you like it had been asked your opinion for once.

"Good," you said, and were a little surprised to mean it.

You'd nearly made the doors.

You were almost out.

Then someone caught Abbot by the arm near the exit.

An older man with a coin in his handshake, "they are starting in a few minutes," he glanced at you over Jack's shoulder, "maybe you should come in."

Jack looked at you, asking with his eyes.

You should have said no.

You didn't.

The two of you ended up in folding chairs at the back of a room that smelled like burnt coffee. It ran the way those rooms run. Somebody keeping a soft kind of order.

Then the question, the one they always ask, "anybody new tonight?"

Jack lifted his hand. Then he pointed it, lazy and certain, straight at you.

What the actual fuck.

Heads turned.

Somebody made a welcoming sound. You let Jack know exactly what you thought of him with the side-eye you cut his way.

But you stood.

Somewhere on the way up out of the chair you thought about what Calum had said. About asking, about the same marks, and you figured maybe there was no cleaner place to start than here, with your own.

You walked to the front of a room full of people who had earned the right to ask, and you stood there.

"I lost my left leg below the knee," you started, "transtibial. Eight months ago," the clinical words came easy. They always did. They were the railing you held when the rest of it dropped away, "to an infection."

The room waited.

You went somewhere else.

You were on a table under hard white light.

You were not in your body--not really.

You were up near the ceiling, watching yourself thrash and scream while people held it down.

You can't remember all of it.

You were told, after, that it was Sawyer who made the call in the end, because you were too far gone to make it yourself.

Fever-blind and out of your mind with the pain, no use to anyone, least of all to the decision about to settle the rest of your life.

The infection had come up out of your foot.

There had been a hole punched clean through the arch of it.

You remember packed it, on the run, with a strip torn off your own clothing.

A packed hole hurts less than an open one and you needed to keep moving.

A wound that had no business in the desert sand and was never once in clean conditions. Shoeless in the dirt and sand through the whole escape.

The foot already broken from the day you tore it off the screw they had twisted through it.

By the time anyone could do anything for you, it had stopped being a foot problem. It was racing the bone, up the shin, toward everything above.

They had tried to ask you.

You understand that now, even if you understood nothing then.

Save what we can and gamble the rest? Or take it clean and high enough to be sure?

You couldn't answer. You couldn't have told them your own name.

You came back into the room.

"Ultimately, Sawyer made the call. Below the knee, to save the joint," there were tears on your face. You weren't looking at any one person, just at the middle distance, the stare you defaulted to when talking about the decision. A stare that made a room of hardened veterans go quiet.

"Eight of us were taken. Three of us made it out... I'm the only one who survived."

Nobody moved.

They knew, the way that room would know, what kind of medals get pinned on a sentence like that--and what they cost.

"So," you bent your left knee, just slightly, a small flex of the joint you still had, letting the corner of your mouth go up. Because you didn't know how else to land the plane, "I guess I'm grateful I still have this much of it."

You ran out of words.

You stood there, not sure how to step down off a thing like that.

It wasn't applause.

It was a silence with weight in it, until the older man with the coin said, low, just the two words that room keeps for its own.

"Welcome home."

It moved around the circle, quiet, a few voices, a few nods, no performance in any of it.

Jack stood.

You stepped down and crossed to him.

He put a hand flat between your shoulder blades and gave you a pressed-lip almost-smile that said more than the room had. The two of you walked out into the hall together.

At the doors he glanced over at you.

"You good, kid?"

"Don't call me kid."

"Noted," he pushed the door open.

The evening was waiting on the other side, ordinary and gold.

AN: Thank you so much if you got this far! I appreciate all ove you <3 If you want to be added to the taglist please ask in the comments.

Pittsburgh in late July was already decided by seven in the morning. The heat came up with the sun and didn't negotiate about it, that thick wet warmth a river city wore in summer, the kind that got into your clothes and the back of your throat and the flat silver surface of the Monongahela if you stood at the right angle to see it. We crossed to the far edge, where we always went. Years ago we'd started climbing through the safety bar to sit on the outer ledge, facing the city, a single step from a very long drop, and neither of us had ever said a word about why two grown men who'd spent their lives keeping people off ledges chose to sit on one. Robby ducked under the rail and lowered himself down. I followed. The view had stopped registering as a view a long time ago. I'd have noticed instantly if it changed yet I almost never noticed it at all.

Below us the city was already running. Traffic stacking on the bridges. A barge on the river, unbothered. A siren somewhere, then nothing.

Robby leaned back against the bar with the ease of a man who'd been doing this long enough to forget the height.

He didn't look at me, "tonight was your first shift with the other Dr. Abbott."

"Yeah."

He waited for my answer, shifting uncomfortably beside me in the one kind of silence he could stand, the kind that was waiting on someone else.

I looked at the river, "she did well," which was true and was not the whole sentence, and Robby had known me long enough to hear the part I left off. I tried to give him more of it anyway, "It's--she's--"

I stopped.

Like looking in a mirror.

I didn't say that. "She's carrying a lot under the surface," I said instead, "more than she lets out. But she worked clean all night. Didn't freeze until the MVC, and even then she came back fast," I paused, "considering."

"Considering," Robby said, in the tone of a man who knew more than I did and was deciding how much of it to spend, "that she lost a leg, took an honourable discharge, and has been hauling around God knows what since she got back?" He cut his eyes at me.

Honorable discharge.

I'd assumed. Sawyer hadn't put it in those words, but she would have told me if it was anything else. Hearing it stated flatly, from Robby, the way he stated things that were simply true, it landed somewhere.

"And she's got the face," he added.

"What face?"

He gestured at me, vaguely, the way you pointed at something too obvious to name, "that face."

I narrowed my eyes at him.

"The almost-angry-but-actually-just-thinking face. The one you've worn since the day I met you. The one that makes a brand-new resident think you're about to fire them when really you're deciding between the turkey and the Italian."

"I do not--"

"You absolutely do," he wasn't unkind about it, he was never unkind about this kind of thing, "and she's got it. Plus the leg, plus the posture, plus Sawyer's fingerprints all over her career. Which makes her--"

"Don't."

"I'm observing."

"I know what you're observing."

"Then finish the sentence," he was taunting me.

I looked back at the river and let the quiet run. I'd have let it run all morning. There was a peace in it, in the darkness and the height and the not-talking, that I'd stopped trying to explain to people a long time ago. Robby was shifting again, ruthlessly restless. He never could just sit in it. Where I went quiet to find the bottom of something, he filled the silence before it could close over his head.

"I'm not anyone's pseudo-father figure," I broke it, "before you go there."

"I wasn't going there."

"You were thinking about it."

"I was thinking," Robby said, carefully, "that Sawyer pushed her the same way she pushed you. And that she looks at Sawyer the way you used to look at Sawyer."

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. I closed it and exhaled, "that's fair."

Down in the street a delivery truck pulled up and double-parked with the magnificent indifference of a vehicle that had given up caring what anyone thought of it.

"Has she told you anything?" Robby asked. "About what happened over there?"

"No. Sawyer gave me an outline. Said the rest was hers to give."

He nodded slowly. Then, in a different register, "I could tell you. I was in the meeting with Gloria. And you're her supervising physician, which technically means--"

"No."

He stopped.

The word had come out of me before I'd finished deciding it and once it was in the air I knew it was the right one.

"She tells me when she decides she wants to," I ran a hand down over my jaw, the stubble three days past where it should have been, "not because I read her file."

Robby looked at me for a moment. Then he looked back out at the water, "alright."

It was the alright he used when he respected something. I'd learned the difference between his alrights years ago.

The city kept moving under us. A small ferry crossing. The heat settling in for the day like it had nowhere better to be.

"I hope you and your mini-me are at least getting along," Robby said.

"Don't call her that," my head dropped back, eyes rolling at the sky, "she's not a mini-me. She's a colleague." I brought my eyes level with his and held them. Stern.

That's all she is.

"Mm-hm," Robby nodded, "whatever you say, brother."

I looked at him. He was staring at the skyline with the smug face of a man who'd won something small and was being gracious about it.

"You ready for today?" I asked.

He breathed out through his nose, long and slow, the exhale of someone whose tiredness had stopped being about sleep a long while back. The smug look he'd had on his face a second ago now skewed into something else. He rolled his shoulders once, a movement so worn-in it had stopped being a movement resembling something more like a tic.

"No," he paused, "but I'm here."

I looked at the river.

"Yeah," I said, "I get it."

Then he ducked back under the bar and turned for the door. I followed him in.

Your POV (Four Days Later)

It had been four days since your first shift.

The integration plan was a sequence somebody in administration had clearly felt good about: one shift, then a day, then a shift, then a day, and now you'd apparently "graduated" to the big leagues with two shifts back to back starting today.

Thrilling.

The day off after that first shift you had spent the way it demanded to be spent. On the couch in one of Adam's sweaters, prosthetic off, your residual limb tucked up under you. The folded burial flag held to your chest. His urn within arm's reach. His wedding band loose in your palm.

Not crying, at first. Just sitting with him. Holding the weight of the flag they'd handed you in the waiting room and letting the apartment go quiet around it. Then the crying started, soft and controlled, the kind you could still have talked through. Then it stopped. Then it came back louder, uglier, the snotting, wailing, fold-yourself-in-half kind that doesn't ask permission and doesn't take it back. Then quiet again. Not the gentle kind. The kind that sits down in the room with you and doesn't move, so complete you half wonder if you've gone deaf, if anything is still out there making sound at all.

Which was as close as you'd ever gotten to an honest definition of grief--not the crying, but what it leaves behind.

You'd been carrying his death close to a year. The weight was familiar. You knew its edges.

The burial flag was the new part. The fact of it. The formality of it. The way it had all happened out loud, in the lobby of The Pitt, at seven in the morning, in front of Dr. Shen, Dr. Ellis, Mateo, Dana, Dr. Abbot, and thirty people you'd barely met and were still quietly hoping to impress. That was what was new. Not that you were a widow. You'd known that.

It was that they knew it now.

That was the part you hadn't been ready for.

You sat with it anyway, because there was no alternative, and because you'd learned that most of the things you weren't ready for arrived on their own schedule.

Your second shift, the day after you'd re-grieved Adam on the couch, had been almost identical to the first. Same rhythm, same floor, same sense of learning the room from the inside. The medicine was the medicine. The rest of it was hospital geography, the names, the faces, the personalities that made up a department you were slowly being let into.

Dr. Trinity Santos you'd clocked early on, she was abrasive in the efficient way of someone who didn't have time for the social performance of not being abrasive, which you respected more than most people's warmth. She'd introduced you to Dr. Javadi, who looked young enough that you briefly checked the back of your own hands for age spots, and Dr. King, who went by Mel and had a quiet settled air of competence around her.

Santos had also been your source on the tall fair-skinned man with the blue eyes you'd hit like a door in the locker room on your first night. You described him to her and without blinking Santos spilled, "oh, that's Langdon. Frank Langdon. He was probably rushing off to pee in a cup." There was, apparently, a story involving benzos the prior year. Santos offered more. You decided you didn't need it.

Then there was Dr. Huckleberry, who looked like her was in the early stages of realizing the job was harder than the degree had implied. You couldn't help but have a soft spot for the poorbguy, even when, especially when, he had the misfortune of a name like Huckleberry.

Today, just under two hours before your third shift, you were on the couch with your good leg tucked under you, looking at the bookshelf.

The afternoon light had moved across the room making its way towards Adam's frames, the three of them in a row, his face waiting to catch the golden beams the same way it used to catch them over the base perimeter in Salerno.

You were just sitting with him. Letting yourself appreciate that he had somewhere to be now. A spot on the bookshelf dedicated to just him.

The funeral came back without warning. Arriving in your body before it arrived in your mind, a tightness behind your sternum, a coldness in your hands, and then you were there.

You were in a wheelchair.

You were so ashamed of it. You'd spent a career around people who needed them and felt nothing but tenderness toward every single one. Now that you were the one in it, things were different. The visibility of it. The way it announced that something bad had happened to you in a room where everyone already knew tragedy had struck.

Though nobody knew the shape of it, so they filled in the shape with the chair.

You spoke to almost no one. Tissue pressed to your nose rubbed raw. It wasn't hard to avoid people, because most of them took one look at the chair, at the face you were wearing, the shell of a woman who had been allowed to fall in love and know him just long enough to start a life before it was ripped out of her grasp, and decided, mercifully, to let you be.

Some greeted you anyway.

His parents stood with you and took the condolences you couldn't, a buffer made of his family.

His mother's face you would carry for the rest of your life. She put her hand against your cheek and held it there, the way a mother touched someone she had decided to claim. In that one touch was the whole of her. A woman who had raised a son into someone extraordinary and was trying to hold on to every last thing that had ever defined him, including you. "He's my boy. I can only imagine what this is doing to you, and I am so sorry, sweetheart." She didn't say it out loud, she didn't have to.

At the ash distribution, held in a smaller room after the service, she asked you, quietly, if you remembered what he'd wanted.

Your voice went flat. Tears ran silent down past your raw cheeks into the puddle they'd already made in your lap, "he wanted to go everywhere."

His father laughed, a short wet sound. His mother smiled the smile of a woman who was not surprised. Not even slightly.

It had been his idea. He'd brought it up out of nowhere, no lead-in, no occasion to attach it to. But there was nothing casual about it. He said it directly, without dressing it up, like he'd been carrying it quietly for a while and had simply decided it was time to say it out loud.

You were sitting on the perimeter wall in the late afternoon, the base laid out below in the long orange of the desert evening. Adam on his back along the wide concrete ledge, one arm behind his head, watching the sky change. You sitting with your knees pulled to your chest, watching the same sky from a slightly different angle.

The two of you, forever doing the same thing in slightly different ways.

He'd been quiet a while. Long enough that you knew something was coming.

"Hey," he said, not looking over.

"Hmm."

"If anything ever happens to me--"

"Adam."

"I mean it. Just--"

"I don't want to have this conversation."

"I know," he turned his head and gave you that look he had, the patient warm certain one, "but I do. For one second. Then we never talk about it again."

You looked at the horizon, "fine."

He looked back to the sky, "I want to go everywhere," he said simply. "That's it. I don't care about the ceremony, I don't care about the arrangements, I don't care about any of the official stuff. Your judgment's better than mine on all of that anyway." His mouth curved. "But wherever you go. Whatever missions, whatever trips, whatever the next idiotic mandatory redeployment to some base in Kuwait--"

"That was one tim--"

"Bring a little of me," he talked over you, easy, "just a tablespoon. Less, if you're flying carry-on. Spread it. Let me see it too."

You were quiet a long moment.

"Anywhere?"

"Anywhere."

"Kuwait?"

"I said anywhere, I meant anywhere."

You looked at him, admiring the profile of him against the orange, the comfort of a man fully at peace with what he'd just said.

"Okay," you agreed, thinking in the moment you would never have to follow through on this promise.

"Okay?"

"Yeah," you turned back to the horizon, "okay."

You were still looking at the sky when you heard it. The unmistakable click of a shutter, the quick flash going off behind you. You turned. He'd taken a photo of you against the sunset. Of course he had. He was already lowering the little camera with that look on his face. You smiled. You leaned over and kissed him.

He reached out without looking and found your hand. You let him hold it.

The photo with your head turned away was in front of you.

You'd come back to the present without quite registering how you got there. The small album that was only him, only the two of you, was open across your knees.

There you were against the sunset, twenty-something and unaware, the orange you'd grown to love behind you the exact orange you'd watched change a thousand times. The version of the sky he'd been looking at the second he decided to keep you forever in a four-by-six.

You had spread some of him at Salerno before they flew you out. Early morning, the wheelchair maneuvered somehow to the edge of the perimeter wall, your face turned up into that same sky. His ashes sat unceremoniously in your lap. You reached in and took just a small amount, because he'd already spent years there with you, and let it go into a gust of wind and sand.

You'd spread some of him in Washington too. The garden outside the rehabilitation unit where you'd spent most of the spring. Where you went every morning the weather allowed. A dry warm April afternoon, the garden empty except for you. Near the flowers you thought were most beautiful. Just a tablespoon, the way he'd wanted.

His parents had spread some in his hometown. They told you at Christmas, in a card written by his mother's hand, which you had read more times than you could count.

The urn on the shelf held what was left. About three-quarters of what you'd started with.

There was still so much of the world to show him.

The bookshelf had taken two days to get right. Not two full days. Two days the way a thing took two days when you did it slowly on purpose, when the doing was as much the point as the finished product.

You'd started at the bottom and built up. A sequence. A structure. Something that would hold.

The shelf itself was solid wood, thick and dark, the kind that didn't complain when you set something heavy on it. One of Kalista's finds, bought your second week and left standing empty too long.

It wasn't empty now.

The bottom shelf you'd given to the trailing plants, deep green things whose stems spilled over the edge and reached for the floor, soft and loose, growing with their own opinions about which direction to go.

Above that, your books. Medical texts you'd kept not because you needed them but because you might want them again, spines out, ordered by no system anyone but you could name.

Above that, the photo albums. First the ones of your family, then, medical school, the deployments, the whole life that existed in prints and Polaroids and glossy four-by-sixes, sorted roughly by date and event, but mostly by the private logic of memory.

You'd driven to a craft store for the right albums. Fitting the loose prints from Sawyer's package into pages one at a time had been a strange kind of therapy. Sad and funny and angry and nostalgic, the slow procession of every version of you there had ever been. All the faces you'd worn across all the years, arranged into something you could hold in your hands and call a life.

Until the whole shelf said what you needed it to say: This happened. Here is the proof.

Then the shelf for Adam.

You stood back and looked at it.

Three frames, arranged with the care of someone who'd thought about this for a long time.

The first was the Polaroid, framed properly now. Adam on promotion day, that contained proud smile, and if you tilted it toward the light at exactly the right angle, the faint ghost of his lips lived in the gloss. Your own kiss on the back was no longer visible, but you knew it was there, which was all you needed.

The second was the wedding photo, taken by someone you would never be able to name, though the angle gave them away as tall and patient and good with a lens. The two of you leaned into each other, foreheads nearly touching, both in your army uniforms because a base in a war zone didn't offer much in the way of venue and neither of you had cared even slightly. Confetti thrown by everyone who could be spared that afternoon, because Adam had always had the kind of friends who showed up. Both of you laughing at something that had happened a half-second before the shutter. Not posed. Caught. The best kind.

The third was him alone. A squad photo, flat midday light, looking straight down the barrel of the lens with the face he wore when he was wholly at ease. Not performing. Just there. Him as the subject. Him as the whole point of the frame.

Behind everything, standing upright against the back of the shelf, the folded triangle of his burial flag. Red and white stripes precise at the edges, the blue canton at the peak tight and even, bearing the full formal weight of what it was and what it had cost.

Beside the frames, tucked away but not invisible, his urn. Dark ceramic, plain, the way he'd have wanted it. Behind it, an incense holder you'd found and couldn't have explained wanting. A small pale-grey ceramic mountain with a channel carved into it so the smoke ran down instead of up, a slow grey waterfall pooling at the base. You'd sat and watched it the first time you lit it, this thing that fell when everything about smoke said it should rise, and found it, for reasons you couldn't get to words, exactly right.

On the shelf above, the dark oak box with ABBOTT engraved across the face of it in clean block letters, turned outward so anyone walking by could read it. Three small urns set around it. The worn little photo book of before, balanced half-open and standing upright against the side of the box.

Leafy green plants spilled over every edge. In the afternoon, as the sun crossed the back windows and started to fall, the light caught the whole thing and soaked it through with gold.

You'd sat and watched it happen the day before, eyes red and full, the warmth moving across the hardwood floor until it reached the shelf and lit everything from below with the unhurried certainty of something that had been doing this forever and intended to keep doing it.

You'd built something. Not a memorial, exactly. Not a shrine, in the sorrowful untouchable way the word wanted to mean. Something closer to a chair being pulled up to the table for someone who hadn't come yet.

A place in the room that said: These people were real. They are still real. They are allowed to be here.

You made one small adjustment. Stepped back. Made another. Checked it. Adjusted again, the way you'd checked sutures and field dressings and the seating of a tourniquet, until you were sure.

When it finally felt right you turned around.

Two envelopes sat on the coffee table. The last thing left. The final object in the apartment that wasn't put away, the last thing standing between you and being, officially, moved in. You'd shifted them off the bookshelf earlier in the week to make room, and now they sat one on top of the other with the patient air of things that had been waiting a long time.

Ninety-nine percent done. You've got this.

You took a slow breath and sat on the couch, both envelopes in front of you.

The larger one official, sealed with the finality of something that had passed through several sets of hands before yours. Sawyer's letter on top of it, smaller, one corner bent from weeks of being moved and not opened.

You picked up Sawyer's first. It felt more approachable. More like a person and less like a process.

You turned it lengthwise in your hands, an old habit, and tore the top in one clean line. You slid the pages out.

Her handwriting was tight, slanted, unmistakable.

Y/N, I've started this letter more times than I'll admit. Every time I get to the part where I try to be useful, I remember who I'm writing to. A doctor, a soldier, one of the most clear-eyed people I've ever known. And I remember you already know everything useful I could say. So I'm going to stop being useful and try to be honest instead, which I'm worse at. You changed something in me. I spent thirty years in a place that has opinions about feelings, that has a way of convincing you that you don't have any, that you handed them in at the recruiting office with your civilian clothes. I believed that for a long time. Then you walked into my unit, eighteen and furious about being underestimated, and it turned out I had something to feel after all. I won't write that I'm proud of you, because you'll read it in my voice and roll your eyes and it'll lose all meaning. But maybe you'll hear it anyway. When the report came through that eight people had been captured at the perimeter and I couldn't locate you, something in me knew. I need you to know I tried. I need you to know that trying wasn't enough, and I will carry that for the rest of my life. I have spent my whole career fixing things. I couldn't fix this one. You lost your leg. You lost Adam. And all I could do was stand on the other side of a desert and be too late. And "sorry" is too small a word for what I mean. You are alive. You are in Pittsburgh. You are starting over.

Which is the hardest thing a person is ever asked to do, and you are doing it whether or not it feels like it from the inside. I keep coming back to that. I have to. I have two things to ask of you: 1. Trust the place I sent you. 2. Trust the man on the ground. His name is Jack. I knew him before you were born (yes I'm old, save it) he is more like you than either of you is going to enjoy admitting. He has lost the things you've lost and he found a way through. Not cleanly, not quickly, not in a straight line. But through. Let him show you the parts of the map he's already walked. That's all I've got, kid. I love you. (Don't tell anyone.) Sawyer

You read it twice.

You didn't cry. Something settled in your chest instead, not happiness exactly, but a near neighbour of it. The warmth of being known inside and out by someone who chose you on purpose. The knowledge that far away, in a place you'd left behind, the people who shaped you were still standing in it, still holding their post.

You set the pages on the cushion beside you and let them sit.

Then you picked up the second envelope.

Heavier. Not dramatically, just the density of official things, of documents processed and filed and signed across several departments before they came to rest in your lap. You worked the flap. Inside, a stack clipped together, and clipped to the top of it a typed contents sheet, the kind someone generated so nothing important went missing in transit.

CONTENTS — HANDSCOMBE, ADAM J. / SGT DD Form 1300 (Report of Casualty) AR 15-6 investigation summary (redacted) SGLI disbursement record; beneficiary designations; death gratuity DIC reference Sealed: account credentials (see attached) Personal effects: 1 item

You went through it the way you'd been trained to go through anything. Top to bottom, no skipping.

The DD Form 1300 you didn't read. You'd seen it during discharge. His name in the field where his name went. His military identification number. The date and the place of his death. You set it aside.

The investigation summary you didn't read either. Portions of it had been read to you in a debrief. Portions of it you had given--your account of the twenty-seven days folded into the record in the clean passive grammar the Army used for the worst things that ever happened to a person. You set it on top of the form.

The financial packet. The accounts, the beneficiary lines filed the week you married, the gratuity and the DIC you'd already learned to navigate in Washington. A small sealed envelope inside the big one, labeled in someone's unfamiliar hand: passwords and accounts. You set it aside for a practical day.

Today wasn't that.

Then your fingers found something at the bottom that wasn't paper.

A small clear bag. Inside it, a flash drive. Black casing, no brand. A strip of masking tape along one side, three characters written in a hand you didn't recognize.

H2A

You held it in your palm.

Not on the contents sheet. Not official. Slipped in by someone, off the record, in handwriting that belonged to no one you could place.

Something in you started to reach toward what it might mean. You caught the thought before it could finish forming and set it somewhere you kept the things you couldn't get to yet. Not because you were afraid. Because you weren't ready to be right about it.

Not today. Not yet.

You set the drive aside, sealed, unplayed.

At the very bottom, a second clear evidence bag, this one sealed at the top. Inside it, two tags on a single chain.

Stamped metal, the edges worn soft from years against skin.

His name. His blood type. His religion.

You opened the bag and took them out.

You had your own set. You'd worn tags for ten years. You knew exactly what they weighed, knew the small cold sound the chain made pooling into a palm, the way the stamped letters caught under a thumbnail. None of that was unfamiliar.

What was unfamiliar was the arithmetic of it. That these were his, and that now they were yours, and the only reason both of those things could be true at once was that he was dead. The weight in your hand was the same weight it had always been, but everything around it had changed.

You sat with them for a while. No tears. Just the memory of him held quietly in both hands.

Then you got up, crossed to the bookshelf, and draped the chain over the corner of his frame. The squad photo, him looking straight out, wholly at ease. The chain settled against the wood. The tags hung against the glass, his face visible behind them and through them.

You stepped back.

There.

That's what had been missing.

The afternoon light had moved while you read. It sat at the foot of the bookshelf now, starting its slow climb, the gold rising the way it always rose, certain of exactly where it was going. You watched it find him. Warm beams pouring across his face the way they used to stream across yours at Salerno, except this time there was no camera--no click. Only you, and the room, and the light doing what light did.

You looked at the time. 5:56.

You had to go.

You turned to your room to change quickly and grab extra scrubs, your stethoscope and your bag. Contents mostly unchanged--an extra liner, backup shrinker, the ibuprofen that you shook into your palm and dry-swallowed before zipping the bag shut. Getting ahead of the swelling before twelve hours of standing made it a problem.

You opened the door to leave. No bye to Kalista tonight, her door was shut and the apartment was quiet on the other side of it. She was probably already out for the evening. You turned toward the elevator, the shift already starting to arrange itself in the back of your head. Tonight felt different from the first two. You weren't sure why yet.

God. How long does credentialing take?

The elevator doors binged and let you enter.

You parked on the third floor, still refusing the handicapped spaces on the ground level of the structure, the placard still buried in your bag where it would stay.

You had the whole night crew now, all of them confidently. The day shift you were maybe halfway through. You'd pick up a few more at handoff if the universe was cooperative.

You sat down on the bench in the locker room and dragged your hands down your face, scrubbing off the last day and a half of grief like it was something that could be physically removed. You did not like to let it surface in public. It didn't always cooperate, but the intention mattered. You pulled in a breath and pushed it out slow.

Then you reached down and rolled your left pant leg up to look at the sleeve. You had to tug hard on the scrubs to just barely see the mark. There on the inner thigh, where the top edge of the silicone suspension sleeve rolled up over the knee and onto the lower thigh, a welt was coming up red and angry along the line where the silicone met skin. The size and temperament of a friction burn, which was exactly what it was--an edge working the same patch of skin for hours, every step, a fit that had never been quite right and had gotten worse the longer you'd ignored it.

You knew the band-aid wouldn't hold under the sleeve. You knew it would bunch and slide and probably make things worse. You put it on anyway, smoothed it down with your thumb, and fought the pant leg back into place. It was a field fix. The kind you reached for when the right fix wasn't available, which lately was always.

You stood and crossed to the mirror. Turned the prosthetic a few different ways, checked the drape of the fabric, the line of the pant leg, the place where most people's eyes would go.

No visible sign of a fake leg.

You reached for the door.

It opened first.

A body came through with the full momentum of someone who'd badly misjudged the timing of an empty room, and you had half a second before his chest met your face. Two hands gripped your waist, certain and immediate, and you both stilled.

You looked up.

Hazel eyes, just slightly wide with surprise, the pupils adjusting to the new distance between you. Salt and pepper curls that fell just past his ears, faintly damp at the edges. A jaw that was defined and deliberately structured, maybe two days of silver-threaded stubble sitting well against it. The breadth of him across the shoulders and chest was something you registered at this distance whether you meant to or not, the scrub top pulling across it with the particular tension that happened when a frame had been built through use and the fabric hadn't been cut to accommodate it. His hands on your waist, large and certain, the grip already softening from a catch into something steadier.

He was not Adam's height. You registered that the way you registered it about everyone now, like a reflex, and then registered something underneath it: that you didn't mind. You put that second thing, unnamed, somewhere it couldn't cause trouble and left it.

A huff of air left you on contact. You had no idea what your own face was doing. His had already moved out of the surprise into something easier his grip had softening to a steadying hold, warm through the fabric of your top.

Normally, you would have had a line for this. A comeback, the reflexive volley you ran on anyone who gotten too close too fast. But you'd spent the last twenty minutes scraping a dead husband off the surface of yourself and came up empty. No line. No punchline. You just stood there in the half-circle of his embrace and let the silence go a beat too long.

"You with me, Abbott?" He waved a hand gently across your eyeline, "can't lose you this early into a shift." He stepped back, releasing your waist glancing at his watch. "It's 6:34. You've got time to pull yourself together if you--"

"I'm fine," you straightened, shoulders back, chin level. The automatic geometry of a soldier's posture. "Just," you stepped back too, giving him room to get to his locker, hands finding the stethoscope at your neck, "things can get tough. You know."

He turned from his locker to you, "that's vague," he said. And then nothing else, just waited, like he had all night and the rest of the week to talk about it.

"I finished his spot today," you said. You watched it land in him without a name attached, watched him fit it to the burial flag and the two soldiers and the 7 AM ceremony in the ED few days prior--he'd been there, he'd seen it. You didn't give him more than that. "It was tough."

A woman of many words, you were.

"Did it help?"

"Help what?"

He tilted his head, considering you, "we haven't talked much outside of the floor. I've been keeping my focus on the medicine, on getting you onboarded. That's the supervising part of the job," he shuffled through his locker, leaving a small pause, "but there's a part that isn't in the job description."

You shifted to face him, "what would we even talk about, off the floor?"

He looked at you like you'd said something faintly insulting, "when I lost my leg," he said, "I had someone. The whole way through. And it was," he caught your word and set it down carefully between you, "tough. But there was someone there every day for the practical things. The shower. The fit. The hundred small adjustments you make to a body that moves differently now." A brief pause. "That kind of help is not nothing. That was most of it, actually."

You held still.

"It's good that it's done," he went on, easier now, like he'd decided to risk something, "his spot. That's real work, finishing something like that," he shrugged, like it cost him nothing, which you suspected was untrue, "the part nobody warns you about is that finishing it doesn't mean it's over. It just means they have somewhere now. A shelf. A countertop. Somewhere in the room you can see them and can't change it. Somewhere they are allowed to be," what he said next was specific in a way that could only come from personal experience, "that's not nothing either," he turned to look you in the eyes, "I'm just trying to help."

You had your hand on the door.

And selfishly, because you were tired and hadn't finished grieving yet and didn't know what to do with the particular thing he'd just said, you said, "nothing will help."

True.

And you walked out.

Jack's POV

"Nothing will help," and the door snapped shut behind her.

I let out a breath in the now empty room.

I understood it. Really. When I lost Claire I'd been a disaster in ways I still didn't enjoy revisiting, and that was a different shape of loss entirely. Claire hadn't been in the service. Hadn't worked beside me. Hadn't died for a country in front of God and everyone. This woman had a lost limb stacked on top of a lost husband, and somewhere under all of it a story that the burial flag and ceremony had only sketched the outline of. I knew there was a floor to it. I hadn't reached it yet.

Her last shift, two days back, she'd done well. Same as the first. Still half-amazed by the supply rooms. Still reaching for a kit that wasn't on her body before she caught herself and recalibrated. I remembered the exact same disorientation, the phantom reach for equipment that didn't exist, learning all over again to trust that the room would answer. The medicine had been the same. The method had changed.

The problem wasn't her medicine.

How do I break into that?

Her walls were poured, not stacked. No visible gaps. She ran off exactly two settings: ruthlessly honest or ruthlessly avoidant, nothing in between, and I didn't know her well enough yet to read which one was load-bearing and which was the trap.

I'd never tried to reach someone from this particular angle before. In Kosovo, Sawyer and I had been the surrogate parents of a young squad, not in that way, never in that way, more like a brother and sister keeping a household from burning down--and Sawyer hadn't exactly been a fountain of emotional technique. But Sawyer knew this woman down to the foundation. If anyone had a crowbar, it was her.

I pulled out my phone before I left the locker room and typed.

The walls she's got up are concrete. You need to give me something. A seam, a soft spot, anything. Or this is going to take ten years I don't have. Throw me a bone, Sawyer.

I hit send, pocketed the phone, and went to work.

They were already gathered at the nursing station.

We had this thing that resembled tradition but fell closer to ritual. A huddle that hadn't started as a huddle but evolved into one over time, the way the best rituals did, accreting out of habit until somebody would've objected if it stopped. Practiced. Worn smooth. But tonight there was an addition to it whose presence made something in my chest shift in a way I hadn't named yet.

Maybe it was recognition. Maybe it was seeing my own posture standing across the room wearing a different face.

Robby said she had the same face I did. When I looked at her though, I saw more than stoicism. I saw the flicker behind her eyes that she'd gotten very good at covering. The tell. The small leak of pressure that said a person wasn't calm, just sealed, and that the seal had a rating it hadn't fully tested at yet.

She was mid-conversation with Santos, back turned to me.

I didn't mean to interrupt.

I interrupted.

"Nightcrawlers." I grabbed both ends of my stethoscope and slung it behind my neck and she turned. I did not miss Santos's small efficient eye-roll. "Quick one before you scatter. Cruz, night before last, witnessed an arrest in the waiting room, downtime was under two minutes because somebody was paying attention. Good compressions, early shock, ROSC on the floor before the rig was even cleared. That's the job. That's it exactly." A few nods. "Ellis, angioedema that went from a fat lip to a closed airway in about ninety seconds. Read it early, didn't wait for it to get ugly, surgically cleared the airway--clean. Patient is upstairs breathing through their own neck because she didn't blink." Ellis tipped her head. "That's two people who saw the problem before it was obvious, which is the entire game down here. Everybody else, match that."

I let it sit a beat, then leaned in.

"We're the nightcrawlers. We get the weirdest and the wildest. Because-!"

They came back without missing, "We are the weirdest and the wildest of them all!"

"That's right." I clapped once. "Go get some!"

"HOOAH!"

And to my right, just under everyone else's, a half-second behind and quieter, "hooah." I heard it. I tried not to look but my eyes found hers for exactly one second before I let go.

The huddle broke. She didn't move with them. She turned back to Santos.

"So his name isn't actually Huckleberry?" I couldn't see her face.

"Not technically, no," Santos said, with the long flat look you gave a dog you'd decided to put down, aimed across the bay at Whitaker.

"I can't believe you," she nudged Santos, "I called him that to his face."

Santos laughed louder than I'd ever heard her speak, "Dr. Huckleberry. I am absolutely using that. So, how's nights treating you?" her eyes moved up and over y/n's shoulder to me, because I was hovering, and I knew I was hovering, and I kept doing it.

"Um. Hi?" Santos said, eyebrow raised with an attitude.

"Hello." I replied, flat.

Y/n turned, the confusion on her face quickly bleeding into something nearer to curiosity.

"Hey," she said leaning a hip and an elbow against the desk, loose.

I haven't seen you lean before.

Not a large thing. It registered anyway, because you were always squared up, always standing like there was a sergeant somewhere behind you.

"You waiting on me?"

I tilted my head, "yeah. But if you're busy, you can find me."

"Oh, no, I think we're done," she glanced at Santos, "right?"

"Yep. Got a brand-new nickname to ruin somebody's night with and a stack of charts." Santos pushed off toward a free computer. "Later, 2.0."

Y/n's head dropped back and I watched her roll her eyes behind a closed lid, "why did I agree to that."

"What? You don't like it?" I stepped into the space Santos had left.

"No offence to your branding, but for the last decade I've been Abbot(t). The one and only. The original recipe," she made a small gesture, "now I've got a number after my name. It's strange."

"Hate to be the one to tell you this, but I knew Sawyer before she knew you. So technically you've always been the second Abbot(t)."

"Ha. Shut up," she knocked my shoulder with hers as we started for the board, "Sawyer never even mentioned you."

"Well," I put a hand flat over my chest and turned to her as we reached the board, "that hurts."

"Oh, come on," another eye-roll then her eyes came back to mine and her face did something deliberate, a put-on softness, a mock-tenderness, "you need a waaahmbulance?"

It got me. I laughed a real laugh--loud and full--loud enough to turn heads at the station. I shook it off looking at the floor while something in my stomach turned over quietly.

"I think I'm okay," I said, looking back up.

"You sure?" She still had the mockingly soft face on.

Her hands came up and her fingers settled at my left wrist, two of them on the inside, the lateral edge below the thumb, finding the radial pulse in a flat second. Her other hand braced my forearm. She didn't break eye contact. I could practically hear her counting through her eyes.

"Pulse is climbing," she said, the put-on softness shifting into something more genuine, "wait-" her brow drew, "it actually just shot up." She pulled my wrist closer to get a cleaner feel but I pulled my hand back.

"I'm fine," I said, "just keyed up for tonight."

That's true.

I tried to convince myself it was true. But my heart was doing things it had no business doing at quarter to seven, and the cleanest explanation available was the start of a shift, so I took it.

She looked at me a beat longer than that explanation needed, "whatever you say."

I didn't answer.

I looked at the board.

I was cherry-picking, I was allowed, it was a privilege of the position and one of the few perks that came with it. I ran my eye down the column until I found something I wanted.

My pocket buzzed.

Please let that be Sawyer.

"How about this," I said, "South 11. Twenties, called in blue. Sats reading low and not coming up on oxygen, but they're sitting up talking. No real distress to match the number."

"Sounds far-fetched," she said, "you think it's what I think it is?"

"If it is, I think I've got it in me," I started us walking.

We didn't talk for a few steps. I noticed her gait was off today, the specific hitch I recognized from the inside, the tell of a day when the leg was winning. Mine had been behaving lately. Good fit, low complaints.

Hers clearly wasn't.

"How are you doing with being on your feet twelve hours a day?" I asked.

"First of all, I don't have feet. I have a foot," deadpan, dead level, "second, fine. Some soreness. Nothing Tylenol and Advil won't handle."

She turned her face forward, shoulders set, chin up.

I wonder if that's what I look like.

"How's the prosthetic?"

I caught the start of a twist in her face before my peripheral vision lost the detail.

"It's a prosthetic," she said.

We reached South 11. I put my hand on the door and looked at her.

"And how's it fitting your residual limb?"

That got her.

She stared at me. I stared back. My hand stayed on the door--one of us was going to break first, and it wasn't going to be me. I kept my face out of angry, aimed it at curious, and hoped I'd landed it. Her face ran through a short sequence then settled, unfortunately, on exactly the expression Robby had named on the roof. The "almost-angry-but-actually-probably-thinking" scowl that we apparently shared.

Those walls are reinforced.

I let her win this one, turning to open the door tablet in hand.

The patient on the bed was dusky. The blue-grey you didn't see often and never forgot once you did. Lips and fingertips the wrong colour entirely, and yet sitting up, irritable, fully oriented, complaining mostly about the mask. The pulse ox glowed at 85 and would not move no matter what we did with the oxygen, which was the whole tell. The number wouldn't budge because the meter was reading a pigment that wasn't carrying anything.

"Saturation gap," she said quietly, half to herself, already there, "what's the gas show?"

A nurse had sent blood earlier. When it came back, the draw was the giveaway. Dark, the brown of old chocolate, the colour that meant the iron in the hemoglobin had been oxidized into a form that couldn't hold oxygen and wouldn't release what it had. Methaemoglobinaemia. Co-oximetry confirmed the level. Somewhere in the history was the cause: a numbing spray, a party favour, something topical that had quietly converted his blood chemistry out from under him.

"Methylene blue," I said, "one to two milligrams per kilo, IV, over five minutes."

She watched it go in. Watched the colour come back. The kid pinked up from the centre out as the dye performed its strange chemistry handing the hemoglobin its job back.

"Huh," she said soft, watching the line where blue became not-blue on his hand, "I've read about it. Never seen it in real life."

"They don't walk in often," I countersigned her order, "that's part of why I picked it. Wanted to see your face."

She gave me a look. But the corner of her mouth curved upward.

I filed that the way I'd been filing everything about her all night without quite admitting to the filing.

12:50 AM

"I NEED A GURNEY!!"

Her voice came through the ambulance bay doors and cut the department in half. Loud, square, pitched to carry to everyone who was listening, the voice you learned in places where being heard was the difference.

What stopped me wasn't the volume.

It was the blood.

It was all over her. Soaked into her hands, the dark saturated red of it covering them past the wrist. Sprayed in a fan across one cheekbone. Spattered across her neck, the black of her scrubs now a shade of burgundy that read almost invisible even under the bay lights, still obviously wet--a few drops still moving across her skin.

She'd gone outside for five minutes. She'd gone outside to breathe.

What happened out there?

Henderson was already running. My feet went before the thought finished. A gurney came up behind me with Mateo pushing it. I dropped back half a step to help guide it through the doors, then I saw the rest of it.

A man had walked to the entrance. The blood trail leading to him told the story--a long dark path from somewhere past the bay's edge, a stagger that had somehow covered at least 30 meters delivering him here. His abdomen was open. Not bleeding-from-a-wound open. Open. A transverse slash through the abdominal wall, his hands the only thing keeping the inside of him from becoming the outside. Loops of bowel pushing between his fingers, a fist of omentum visible between a gap, the dark red-brown shine of liver catching the light where the wall had given way. He was screaming. Screaming meant airway. Screaming meant pressure.

"Oh my god," Mateo breathed behind me.

She was already moving. "Trauma one. Two large-bore, sixteen-gauge, both ACs. Type and cross, four units to start, activate massive transfusion." One hand on the man's shoulder, guiding, her voice flat and fast and completely level over the top of his screaming, "Sir, we've got you. I need you to keep your hands exactly where they are. Don't push. Just hold," to the room, "nobody reduce it. Moist saline gauze, occlusive cover on top. Keep him warm. TXA on the clock, somebody get it drawn," then lower, to the man only, "you walked here. That was the hardest part. You already did it."

We got him through the doors and onto the table, the room filled around him. Henderson on the right line, Mateo running products, Ellis at the head with the airway kit. The monitor started giving numbers, none of them were good but they were numbers, which meant we still had something to work with.

"Pressure's 80 over 40 and dropping," Ellis called.

"Surgery is paged, scrubbing now, two minutes to the table," Henderson said.

She had the abdomen. Gauze down, soaked saline, her hands working under the man's and taking the weight off his grip with a gentleness that didn't look like speed and got everything done. Then her shoulders changed. I knew that change before she said anything.

"He's got an arterial bleeder in the mesentery," her voice dropped into the register people used when they'd stopped talking to the room and started talking to the problem. "Spurter. Upper mesenteric, I can see it pulsing. He's going to empty before surgery gets here. I can clamp it right now and buy him two minutes on the table instead of giving them a cod--"

"No."

She didn't stop. "Are you serious, he is bleeding faster than we can hang it, the pressure is telling yo--"

"No. You clamp blind into an eviscerated mesentery, you sacrifice bowel he might have kept, you contaminate the field that surgery needs clean--they are two minutes out," pressure infuser, products, keep him moving toward the table, it is the right call, the same call I'd make for anyone, "pressure and product. We get him there breathing and we let the people in the OR do the rest."

"He doesn't have two minutes," she had a Kelly clamp in her hand, God knows where she'd gotten it, her body already angling it, "I have done this in a tent with a headlamp. I can do it clean in eight secon--"

"You don't have privileges to do it at all."

"That's what you're worried about right now? Privileges? While he's bl--"

"ENOUGH! I AM THE ATTENDING." It came out loud and harsh, loud enough that it cut through the monitor and the screaming and everything else in the room, "your actions are my responsibility. Do not make me regret taking that on."

I was staring her down, she knew it, the room knew it.

Every head turned. Henderson's hands froze on the IV line. Ellis looked up from the airway. For one full second the only sounds were the monitor and the man's laboured breathing, and what I'd said sat in the air between us--not a military command, not a reflex, something more specific than that. A thing said in front of everyone that named exactly what this was and what it cost me.

She went still then straightened, slowly, and her face closed like a hatch. She peeled the gloves off, one and then the other, and placed them in the bin with a control that was somehow worse than throwing them. She gave me a look that I felt in my back teeth. Then she turned and walked out of trauma one, fast, but even when moving quickly I could see the limp. The leg winning in front of God and everyone. And she didn't slow down for it, didn't hide it and that was the part that got to me.

"Pressure infuser on the second unit," I said to Henderson, and put my eyes back on the man on the table, because there was a man on the table and he was the entire point. "TXA in. Where's surgery?"

"Doors," Ellis said.

They took him through 90 seconds later. Still bleeding, still breathing, still a patient and not yet a code. Which had been the whole argument. But it didn't make me feel like I'd won anything.

I came out of trauma one and made for the nursing desk, scanning the bay. She wasn't there.

Gone to change out of those blood soaked scrubs I bet.

I went to Lena and opened my mouth but she beat me to it, "you looking for Abbott 2.0?"

I nodded.

"Said she was getting clean scrubs. My money's on the locker room."

"You okay if I step off the floor a minute?" I asked, because I ran nights and it was a real question and not a courtesy.

"I think we'll survive. I'll page if it's a 911."

I nodded and turned off.

On the way I finally did what I'd been failing to do for hours and checked my phone.

One text from Sawyer.

She takes pictures. A lot of them. Digital camera and polaroids, no phones. Her father was a photographer, it's how she keeps people. She drives a thrice dead man's car and won't let it die. If you want a seam, Jack, it's the past, not the present. She'll defend and deny the present to death. But she's already mourned a lot of the past, so she'll let you near it. Don't be obvious. She'll smell obvious from across a room.

Print photos. Dead men's cars. She's attached to what she has lost.

I got to the locker room, badged in, pushed through. I went around the second bank to her locker. She was sitting on the bench, back to me, elbows on her knees, head in her hands. She didn't move. She knew it was me.

I didn't move either, for a moment.

She straightened without standing and turned half toward me. Still covered, the blood had dried dark on her neck and hands, soaked through the shoulder of her scrub top by the look of how much had set.

"I can't get into the shower," she said it calmly, like I hadn't just screamed at her in front of the whole department. She wouldn't look at me,"I brought extra scrubs. I didn't think about the shower."

I took a few steps toward her. She still didn't look.

"Want me to show you a very well-hidden secret?"

Her head came up. Those eyes I'd been failing not to stare into all night came with it. I sat down beside her.

"What kind of secret?"

"You have to agree to keep it a secret before I show you."

"What? Why?"

"Because if I show you and you haven't promised," I kept my voice flat, deadpan, "I'd have to kill you. That's the rule. Non-negotiable."

She looked at me for a beat, then almost despite herself, a smile. Close-lipped and tired but real, "how can I say no to that?"

"You can't. Follow me. Bring your stuff."

We left the locker room, her bag over her shoulder. I led.

Third floor, a couple of turns most people never took just past Respiratory, past the back of the old materials-management corridor, down the route that went nowhere on any current floor plan in this building. I nodded at the two people we passed because I knew everyone here, which was its own kind of camouflage. Down a hallway that narrowed and went dim and finally just ended. Two supply carts parked against the wall and a janitor's closet, the kind of dead end that collected forgotten things and asked no questions about them.

She turned a slow circle. "Where are we?"

"Remember. You promised."

She raised her left hand and drew an X over her heart with her right index finger, "scouts honour."

I motioned her to the side and walked toward the door marked Maintenance 3B. She followed, eyes moving around the dead end the way someone looked at a place when they were trying to understand what they were missing. I tapped the panel the sign was mounted on. It shifted slightly, the whole face of it swinging out on a hinge that nobody would ever find if they weren't looking for it, and there behind it was the sign that had been there originally, before whoever redrew the floor maps decided this hallway didn't exist anymore.

A handicapped accessibility symbol. The small white figure on blue, slightly dusty, completely unbothered by the years it had spent hidden behind a maintenance placard.

She went still.

Then the smile broke across her face, wide and open and entirely unguarded, the kind I hadn't seen from her yet and wasn't prepared for, and I held up the key before she could say anything.

"Oh my god," she said, and stepped forward. Shock and awe in equal measure and something that looked, just for a second, like genuine delight.

"Accessible call room," I said, "left off the floor map years ago, after some minor renovations and somebody redrew the layout never putting it back. I found it by accident one night looking for somewhere quiet to not exist for twenty minutes," I held up the key, "and before you decide I'm some kind of phantom of the opera, anyone with the right credentials could pull a key for the call rooms. There's no magic. I've just been the only one who knows this one exists. And I've been careful about keeping it that way," I unlocked it and swung it open, "I'm just an adrenaline junkie who works too much and needs somewhere to crash that nobody can find. That's it."

That was not it. Not the whole of it anyways.

She followed me in and I shut the door behind us.

Inside: a single bed instead of the usual four. A private bathroom with a real shower, a built-in chair, a sink with an outlet beside it. I'd made it a little mine over the years. New sheets had been the first thing, a charger in the outlet, a spare stethoscope on the hook by the door and a half-read paperback on the nightstand.

Even Robby didn't know about this room.

"What is this palace?" her voice raised at the question.

"It's my secret. Now it's our secret," I turned and found her eyes and held them. She was still smiling it was just more contained now. "There's a shower chair in there. Soap, shampoo, all of the good stuff. It's mine though so you're going to come out smelling like a man, but you've got bigger complaints right now, so," I kept it light on purpose. "there's lotion on the shelf too. The good kind. For the limb."

"The good kind? What do you mean?"

Now I was confused, "what do you mean what do I mean?"

"For the limb?"

"Yea the good lotion doesn't just sit on the surface, it absorbs, keeps the skin from breaking down where the liner pulls against it," I said it like it was weather, "you put it on after you doff every time, like brushing your teeth."

She tilted her head slightly.

"Taking the leg off," I clarified. "Donning is putting it on. Doffing is taking it off. Standard terminology."

Her face filled with recognition, "Yeah... I don't do that."

I gave her a look, "you don't doff, or don't put lotion on?"

"The lotion. It's--" she shrugged one shoulder, "it's not for me."

"Not for you?" I looked at her steadily. "You don't have a foot. The list of things that get to be "not for you" has gotten shorter, whether or not you've accepted that."

"Well, I still don't."

"Maybe that's why you've been limping all night."

That earned me an eye-roll and a pointed limp over to the bed, where she sat down with an audible hmph.

"I've been limping," she said, "because this sleeve," she gestured at the prosthetic with pointed irritation, "digs into me. And some days I cannot stand it."

"Let me see."

Her brows pulled together, "What? No."

"Look I'm not trying to push," I kept my voice even, "but you are clearly in pain, and I am the only person in this building who has been through anything remotely similar. My first prosthetic was a disaster. Yours will be too unless someone looks at it. That's not an opinion. That's just the sequence these things follow."

Her face, the thinking scowl we apparently both owned, softened at the edges.

"So let me see," I held her gaze and didn't look away, "let me help." It came out quieter than I intended and more honest than I planned.

She sighed muttering something under her breath that I didn't try to catch. Then she nodded at the floor, which was the closest thing to a yes that I was going to get.

She reached down and grabbed the hem of her scrub pants rolling it upward. But the fabric bunched at the knee coming to a halt. She tugged once, hard, it still wouldn't clear the socket. She tried again, pulling with both hands now but the pant leg refused to give. I watched her jaw tighten at the indignity of it, this small ordinary thing that should have taken three seconds just wouldn't cooperate.

She let go. Looked at her lap. Didn't look at me.

"It's further up than that," she said, "the mark."

"Do you have something to change into in that bag?"

"Just another pair of scrubs."

"I'll step out. Cover yourself with the blanket." I was already heading for the door. Professional. Clinical. The same register I'd use with any patient.

She made another comment quietly, something along the lines of "this is ridiculous," but she agreed.

I stepped out.

I went to the supply rack in the corridor to grab a few things: non-adherent pads, a roll of soft gauze, tape, antiseptic solution, the things you used to dress a friction wound cleanly before anything else touched it. She was about to shower and she'd need the dressing after. I gathered it without overthinking.

I knocked as I came back in.

She was sitting on the bed half-turned away from me, reaching for something on the far corner of the mattress. My book. The black scrub top was gone she was in just an athletic shirt now, burgundy, and lifting with the lean, riding up from her waist. She hadn't put the blanket across her lap. Instead the new scrub pants were folded in half, a small rectangle of fabric sitting just above where a low waistband would fall, and with the way she was turned they were not covering what they were meant to cover.

I couldn't look away. The slope of her waist, the curve of her hip falling away from it and where the fabric ended and her skin didn't, a black lace thong, thin enough that it was less a garment and more a suggestion, the dark edge of it sitting against her skin like a line drawn deliberately.

I tore my eyes away.

I did it fast, holding the dressings in my hands looking at them with the desired focus of a man reading the most important document of his life.

She hadn't noticed. She straightened back up, book in hand, and turned toward me.

I had my eyes up and my face composed by the time she did.

Half a second. Maybe less.

I set the supplies on the bed to her right. She had straightened back up. In her hand was my book, turned cover-out, facing me like evidence.

"Seriously," she said, "A Man Called Ove." She looked at it. Looked at me. Rolled her eyes with her whole face. "You've got to be kidding me."

"Ironic, right?" I kept my voice straight. "May as well have called it A Woman Called Y/N Abbott."

"Oh my god," she dropped her head back, "ugh," she stuck her tongue out and made a sound that was unmistakably fake-vomiting, brief and committed. She turned the book over once in her hands, looked at it one more time like it had personally offended her, then tossed it over her shoulder. It landed somewhere on the bed behind her. "

"You don't want to read that book. I promise you it is not very interesting."

"Something in me says that's not true," my eyes narrowed at her.

She opened her mouth but nothing came out. She closed it and gave me a look that was half offended and half something else she wasn't going to name.

I knelt down in front of her, "okay," I said, and motioned her forward.

She shifted to the edge of the bed and watched me with the wariness of someone about to let a person see the thing they didn't let people see.

I rolled my own right pant leg up in two motions and let her look. The pylon, the foot built for long shifts on hard floors, the whole unbeautiful, unhidden reality of it.

"I've got my own, this is nothing new to me. There's no version of this where I'm surprised," I reached for the suspension sleeve, "I'm going to take it off. You don't have to watch. Just let me."

She turned her face away. I caught the brightness at the lower edge of her eye before she turned it out of view--the brimming that hadn't fallen yet.

I worked with the precision and care the moment required. Released the suspension and eased the socket off the residual limb slowly, supporting the weight of it, not letting it drop. Then I rolled the liner off inside-out the way you're supposed to, peeling rather than pulling. I took down the sock plies one at a time, then the sleeve rolling it down.

There it was.

It was a clean amputation. Military clean, the kind that came from a team that knew what it was doing under pressure. Sawyer had said infection.

Probably sepsis moving fast.

I could see the evidence of decision making. The doctor that amputated had likely gone several inches above where the tissue would have been compromised, sacrificing length to get clear margins, clean vascularized muscle for closure.

The right call.

The only call, if the infection was bad enough. I recognized the work, transtibial, well-shaped residual limb, the closure scar sitting where a military surgical team would put it, the kind of clean lines that came from people who had done this before and would do it again before the week was out.

I'd been laying on that table once. Different theatre, different team, same math.

I looked at it the way I looked at myself in the mirror on the hard mornings. Not with pity, not with anything that required a name, just with the recognition of someone who knew what it had cost to get here and what it cost every day after.

Then the rest of it came into focus.

The limb was angry. Red where the socket had pressed too long, the skin shiny and irritated along the socket lines. And there on the inner thigh, where the top edge of the sleeve had been working against the same patch of skin for hours with every step she'd taken, a blister had come up and burst. The skin around it raw. The band-aid placed earlier bunched uselessly off to one side.

"Who's been managing your adjustments?" I asked.

She took a sharp breath, "no one."

I looked up at her, then back at the limb, "is it okay if I touch you?"

She still had her face turned away. She let out a heavy breath and nodded, fast.

I put my hand to her skin carefully. Assessing the heat of it, the give around the blister, the alignment of where the socket had been sitting versus where it should sit. A poorly fit first socket with no adjustments, a stubborn patient who hadn't gone back for the dozens of small corrections any first prosthetic needed.

All of it fixable, which was almost the worst part of it, because it meant she'd been hurting for nothing.

"Okay," I said quietly, "first, this gets cleaned and dressed before anything else touches it. Shower and I'll take care of it after, while it's clean. Don't scrub it, just let the water run over it."

I'd set everything she'd need within reach and looked at her, at the turned-away face and the wet she wasn't letting fall.

"And then I'm taking you to my prosthetist. Not a referral you'll lose in your inbox. I'll drive you myself. Because this," I gestured at the raw welt on her thigh, "is not what it's supposed to feel like. It's fixable you've just deciding not to fix it."

She didn't answer. But she nodded a single tear falling before she could catch it--she wiped it before it cleared her jaw. Then pretended she hadn't. I let her have the pretending.

I helped her up and got her to the bathroom door where she took the wall and waved me off the rest of the way.

Which was right.

Which was hers to do.

The door shut and a moment later the water came on.

I sat back down on the edge of the bed letting out a breath I didn't know I was holding. Trying to capitalize on the unplanned escape from the ED I let my mind wander.

That was my mistake.

With my hands empty and the sound of the shower on the other side of the door, it came back. Not the blood, not the wound, not the limb I'd held with clean clinical hands and a clean clinical head.

The half-second I'd tried to forget.

The curve of her hip. The black lace at the edge of everything.

Coming back with no medicine in it at all, lighting something in my chest that had no right to be lit. The same something that had kicked my pulse up under her fingers at the board, the thing I'd called "keyed up" because that was the nearest available lie.

Stop.

I dragged a hand down over my face trying to wash the image from my mind.

She is half your age. She is your junior. She is a grieving widow you met three weeks ago who you are, at this exact moment, supervising.

I looked at the closed bathroom door, the water was still running.

She's a colleague.

I'd said it to Robby on the roof like it was a settled fact.

That's all she is.

I did not believe a single word of it.

I forced myself think of other things: the box score from Tuesday's game, the trade rumour I'd read about that morning. I replayed the game in my head.

I got approximately two innings in before the image of her ripped through my thoughts. And I let it because fighting it was getting me nowhere.

The specific, unhelpful, completely uninvited image of her that had lodged itself somewhere behind my eyes and showed no interest in leaving.

Her waist, the way it lead to the curve of her hip and the black lace sitting against her skin like it had been put there specifically to ruin my concentration.

I knew it hadn't been, which made it worse somehow, the total indifference of it. She hadn't been thinking about me at all. She was reaching for a book.

And I was sitting in a room I'd made my own years ago for the specific purpose of having somewhere quiet to think. Yet I was not thinking quietly about anything.

I stared at the wall.

The wall was not interesting enough.

The lace sitting soft against her skin, patient and vivid.

I gave up on the box score entirely.

I was still sitting in it when the door handle moved, then stopped.

"I don't want to put the scrub pants back on," her voice came through the door, careful, "can you close your eyes and I'll come sit?"

"Yeah," I said covering my eyes with both hands and shut them tight.

The irony was immediate. The second my eyes closed, she was right there.

The way her waist dipped. The black lace. The specific, unhelpful detail of all of it, uninvited, with absolutely nowhere to go.

Stop. Right now.

I heard the door open. Heard her navigate the space between, the careful sound of someone moving on one leg. Felt her weight settle beside me on the bed.

"Okay," she said. Her voice was smaller now. Almost scared.

I uncovered my eyes and moved to kneel in front of her.

She had the scrub pants folded across her lap again, this time slightly off centre. So slight that if I hadn't spent the last ten minutes consumed by the thought of that lace, it never would have registered. But I had, so it did.

The burgundy shirt from before was gone, replaced with one that looked exactly the same in every way except the colour, a deep navy. It pulled tight across her chest and shoulders the way shirts made entirely of spandex tended to. Leaving very little to the imagination of a man who was already working too hard to keep his imagination out of the room.

I looked at the wound.

The wound was the point. That was the only point. I am a doctor and she is, in this moment, my patient.

She was sitting with her hands loose in her lap and her face balanced somewhere between braced and exhausted.

I reached for the antiseptic and began cleaning the wound with deliberate, unhurried hands.

Very professional, very doctor-patient.

Those were the rules of this room and I intended to follow them.

Her skin beneath my fingers was soft. The kind of soft that arrived as a surprise, something you noted and set aside. I set it aside.

"This is going to sting," I said.

"It's already stinging."

"More, then."

She made a small sharp sound through her teeth as the antiseptic hit the raw skin. Then, as I worked, my thumb pressing firmly at the edge of where the sleeve had been sitting hardest, I found it, a deep tension knot in the muscle of the upper residual limb. The size and density of a month's worth of skipped adjustments and compensatory loading. Something that had been building silently under the skin without anyone pressing into it to find it.

I pressed into it.

"Ah! No, tha--" she flinched hard, "that hurts."

"I know. It's a tension knot. It's built up because the fit's been wrong and your muscles have been compensating for it. It needs to be worked out. It's going to hurt for about ten seconds."

"That's what everyone s--"

"Ten seconds. Trust me."

She went quiet.

I held the pressure, working in a slow deliberate circle. I felt the exact moment it began to shift, the muscle was slowly releasing what it had been holding.

Ten seconds. Maybe twelve.

She exhaled.

Long and loose, a low sound from somewhere deep in her chest. The kind that had nothing polite about it, the sound of something that had been held tight for a long time finally giving way all at once.

Her whole body dropped back against the bed. One arm went over her eyes. The scrub pants shifted with the movement and the hem of her athletic shirt rode up with the lean of her.

I could see the sharp jut of her iliac crest, the narrow strip of skin at her waist, the edge of black lace sat just above the mons.

Just sitting there. Not by design, just the geometry of a person who had stopped thinking about what position they were in.

I looked at the wound.

She shifted slightly, a small involuntary adjustment of comfort and I looked up.

I looked back at the wound.

She shifted again, settling and my eyes went up before I could tell them not to.

I looked at the wound. I kept working.

"Oh," she said, still to the ceiling. "Oh, god."

I said nothing. I kept my hands moving and said absolutely nothing and focused on the dressing with the intensity of a man whose entire career had prepared him for high-pressure situations and none of it for this one.

"How did you do that," she said.

"Tension knot," I said it too quickly, "you've probably got a few of them. That one's broken up now but the others won't work themselves out on their own." I reached for the non-adherent pad, "if you don't stay on top of them they only get worse."

"You have to show me how to do that myself."

"That's what the prosthetist is for."

"The prosthetist isn't here."

"No," I taped the last edge of the dressing, "they're not."

I sat back on my heels and looked at my work.

Clean. Covered. It would heal fine with a properly fitted socket and about a week of rest.

I looked at her. Still on her back, still staring at the ceiling with a shockingly peaceful expression. The folded pants doing a somewhat reduced job of covering her at this angle.

The lace at her waist is still visible.

You are a medical professional Jack.

I stood up and picked up the spent antiseptic wrapper from the floor.

My pager went off.

I looked at it.

911 — Trauma 2 — all attendings.

I looked at her.

"Go," she said, sitting up, already reaching for her prosthetic, "I'll be right behind you."

I picked up the packaging, "I'm serious about the prosthetist."

"I know."

"Not a suggestion."

"I know. Go."

I turned for the door. I was halfway through when she called.

"Dr. Abbot."

I looked back.

"Thank you," said quietly, directly, without dressing it up, "genuinely."

Something in my chest settled at the simplicity of it.

"Don't skip the lotion."

Then I went.

The rest of the shift went by in fragments.

A woman in her late twenties, abdominal pain she'd called heartburn with right shoulder pain she'd almost forgotten to mention.

Y/n asked about it first, before I could. When the answer came back she said, quietly and precisely.

"Diaphragmatic irritation. That's free fluid."

The FAST confirmed it--free fluid everywhere it shouldn't be. A ruptured ectopic, bleeding into her abdomen from a tube she hadn't known was compromised.

We had her in the OR in eleven minutes.

In the brief quiet after, I was reviewing the chart on the cart and became aware, at some point, that I'd stopped reading it.

I looked back at the board.

A while later, a young man brought in by friends who'd said he was drunk. Nystagmus running in a pattern that didn't match any intoxication I'd catalogued, ataxia, confusion, the specific triad of a brain being starved of something it had no way to produce on its own.

Y/n tilted her head, watched his eyes track for three full seconds, and said, "Wernicke's? Look at the ophthalmoplegia." I did.

She was right.

Thiamine 500 IV. Not Narcan. Not a psych hold.

She was right before I'd finished the differential, and she ran it cleanly without showing off about it, which was its own kind of impressive.

I stood back and let her work. I watched her with the attention I'd been paying her all night without fully accounting for it.

After that it didn't let up. Cases kept coming in waves. It was the kind of night where the board never fully cleared before the next ambulance called ahead. I'd lost count somewhere past fifteen. I'd lost count of her too, in the sense that I'd stopped tracking her every movement and started just feeling where she was in the room.

Then the board updated again.

A teenager was brought in by his roommates with a petechial rash that was still spreading when we first assessed him, non-blanching, his neck stiff, his temperature climbing fast. The photophobia was clear before we even dimmed the lights.

Meningococcemia.

No time to deliberate. She was already calling for the lumbar tray, already talking to the patient in the voice made for exactly this level of urgency, steady without being soft.

"I know it's scary. We're going to take care of you. Hold very still for me."

Ceftriaxone. Dexamethasone. ICU on the line. Contact precautions. Public health notified. The two of us moving around each other in the trauma bay with the coordination of people who'd been paying close attention to how the other one worked.

We got him upstairs.

In the hallway at one of the mobile units afterward I was supposed to be finishing a chart.

I was thinking about black lace against her skin.

She was walking away from me down the corridor toward the nurses' station and my eyes were already moving before I could stop them.

Shoulders.

Waist.

Lower.

I had stopped pretending I wasn't watching.

She turned back for a pen she'd left on the unit and caught my eyes exactly where they shouldn't have been.

Her expression moved through something dry to knowing in about half a second.

"Anything interesting back there?" she asked.

"Chart," I said. I looked at the chart.

"Mm-hm," she said turning back towards the station.

I looked at the chart very intently for several more seconds.

7:04 AM

The day team started filing in and the handoff assembled. I went through the board with Dana, flagged the ectopic for surgical follow-up, noted the meningococcemia admission. Handed off the overnight.

Y/n stood a few feet away doing the same with the incoming resident, professional and contained, the shower and clean scrubs covering everything the night had done to her.

I need to get out of here.

At 7:13 I came through the staff locker room doors and made my way down to the ED. I didn't normally rush out like this but I needed out of the building.

I was passing the nurses' station and she was still there, unmoved since I'd left, now talking to more than just the one resident. I jutted my chin at her, the small upward motion that passed for a greeting between people who'd spent enough time overseas.

It got her attention.

"Hey," I said, "good shift." Because it had been. That was true and she'd earned it.

But I needed to leave before I said something else.

"Prosthetist," I added, more pointed than I meant it, "I'll text you a time."

She tucked her chin--the same gesture back.

I adjusted my bag on my shoulder and left.

I was home by 8:15.

I stood in the kitchen reheating whatever was in the container on the second shelf because I couldn't remember what I'd made and didn't particularly care. I ate at the counter. Washed the container. Put it in the dishwasher.

Then I stood in the kitchen.

She's never called me Jack.

The thought arrived sideways with the quality of a detail you'd missed on a first read but suddenly couldn't let go of.

The whole shift, every exchange, every room we'd stood in together "Dr. Abbot," every time.

Professional.

The correct formal distance for a junior with a supervising attending.

"Dr. Abbot."

It echoed through my head--loose and low. I could almost hear her. I put the dish away and went to take a shower.

I moved through the routine of showering. Crutches against the wall where they always were, the angle worn into the habit of my hand by now. Sat on the tub edge, released the prosthetic, set it aside. Shower chair already in position, because it had been in position for years. Grab bar where it needed to be, non-slip mat, towel within reach. None of it required thought anymore. That had been the entire point of building it this way.

A cold shower was a sensible response to a long hot shift and an unreasonable amount of thinking about a woman I supervised.

It helped, the way cold showers helped--immediately and for approximately six minutes.

I got out. Dried off. Got into bed.

I stared at the ceiling.

The room held the quiet it always held. I'd made my peace with that quiet years ago. Right now it had a quality to it I couldn't attach to anything reasonable.

I thought about the box score. I thought about the rotation question for the next board meeting. I thought about Robby on the roof.

I thought about the lace.

The way it had just sat there. Plain and unbothered, like it had no idea what it was doing to me.

I told myself not to. Several times, in the specific internal register of a man who had made his position clear and expected compliance.

A decision had been made on a level I couldn't identify.

My hand moved, wrapping around myself. I let it. Because there was no version of stopping that felt like it belonged to me anymore.

Stop.

I didn't.

The image came back without invitation, and this time it didn't fade. It sharpened.

The black against her skin. The sound she'd made, low and unguarded, the sound of someone who'd lost control for one single second and hadn't known I was close enough to hear it.

My breath had already gone short and rough. My hand moved slow, at first.

I could picture her arching back. The line of her spine, the way her whole body would curve into it.

I quickened my pace, just a little.

Her falling back against the bed. The squirm of her hips, restless, the black lace shifting with it.

I was not gentle with myself. I had lost the patience for gentle.

The sound echoed in my head, low.

"Oh."

Then the rest of it followed, the thing I had no right to want but wanted anyway.

"Dr. Abbot."

That was mine. I'd added that. She had never called me anything else, not once, not all night, and some part of me had apparently been keeping score, because that was what came back to me now.

Her voice, my title--in a context that it had never existed in before.

Heat built, low and fast.

The mons. The lace. The iliac crest, the soft jut of it under my palm if my palm had been there. The squirm. The "oh."

I pressed my head back into the pillow, my mouth open, jaw tight.

I'd stopped pretending this wasn't happening. There was no way out of it now. There was only through, and through had already started, low in my throat, my breath laboured and building toward something I didn't have a name for yet.

Black Lace. A breath catching in her chest. The shape of her under that navy shirt.

All of it, half-formed and soaked with the ache of wanting her. Someone I had absolutely no business wanting, this badly, this soon, this completely--at all.

"Oh god," her long unraveling exhale, "Jack."

I had no right to imagine her moaning my name.

It pushed everything over the edge faster than I wanted. My head pressed back hard into the pillow, my whole body went tight, my back came up off the mattress.

"Fuuuuckk Y/--"

My breath went out of me all at once, ragged, release moving through me in a wave that left nothing behind but the quiet.

For one full second there was nothing else in the room. Nothing else in the world.

Just her.

Just the want.

Just the falling away of it.

I stared at the ceiling for a long time after that.

"What the hell are you doing?" I asked the room.

A rhetorical question. I already knew.

I lay there for a moment, breathing, eyes closed. Then I reached for the shirt I'd discarded on the floor and wiped myself off and the whole thing, the heat of it, the want of it, collapsed instantly into something a great deal less poetic.

A man in his late forties, alone in his bed at eight in the morning, cleaning up after himself like a teenager who'd gotten caught by his own hand. I felt, distinctly, like fifteen-year-old. I felt like an idiot.

The ceiling offered nothing useful. Pittsburgh moved quietly outside, running its early morning routine. Completely unbothered by the fact that I was lying in my own bed having apparently misplaced every scrap of professional judgment I owned over a woman I had known for three weeks. Whose hands I had held while she bled and while she didn't, whose name I had been one syllable away from saying in the dark.

I closed my eyes.

Get it together.

Sleep did not come quickly.

AN: If you made it all the way through this one, thank you, genuinely. This chapter asked a lot of both of them (and a lot of me, lol), and I hope it landed the way I wanted it to.

The paint had once been Lime Gold, a particular saturated yellow-green that had probably turned heads off the lot in 1971 and now turned them for different reasons. Now chalky at the edges, paint lifting near the rear quarter panel in pale dry curls where the elements had found their way beneath it. Rust had set in along the wheel wells, patient and thorough. The chrome had gone dull, the brightwork reduced to a suggestion of itself. And the body carried dents the way a person carried old arguments, some of them yours, some of them Hunter's, some of them belonging to the decade the car had spent in storage where ordinary settling and neglect had done what neglect does.

You ran your thumb along the deepest dent as you reached her. It had been there since you were seventeen, and without meaning to, you were back in your grandparents house.

You were small. Small enough that the chair felt large, small enough that your feet did not quite reach the floor, small enough that you still thought of him as enormous even though in photographs from this time he is simply a regular-sized man with grey at his temples and a way of telling a story that made the room pay attention.

He was leaning back in his lounge chair, the one he always used, something in his expression had changed, from how it was when he talked about most things, to a more energetic version of himself reliving something from the past. Warmer. Like the story itself generated heat.

"I was twenty-two years old." He touched the centre of his glasses, pushing them up his face. "Your grandmother had just told me she was pregnant with your father and I had a car but it wasn't a family car. So I went to the lot, and as soon as I saw her," he pretended to wipe sweat from his forehead, one broad swipe of the back of his hand, "a 1971 Pontiac LeMans Safari in Lime Gold." He bellowed a laugh, loud enough that you heard it echo through the kitchen where you grandmother shift behind you. "She was mine."

You asked why he called the car she.

He looked at you over his glasses with the expression of a man who found the question both obvious and charming.

"Because you have to treat a car like a lady." He pointed at you with one finger, the way he did when he was making a point. "She'll take you anywhere you want to go. But you disrespect her, she'll leave you on the side of the road."

"Anyways," he restarted, after allowing himself a detour, "I drove straight from the dealership to pick up your grandmother." The smile that came was slower now, the specific one he reserved for stories about her. "She was standing on the front step when I pulled up."

He paused for effect.

"Arms crossed."

From the kitchen, your grandmother made a small sound, the kind that was not quite a laugh and did not pretend to be.

"We had a plan," he continued, with the tone of a man who had made peace with having abandoned the plan and never once regretted it. "Something sensible. Something practical. A family car, room in the back." He spread his hands. "And I came home with this. Lime Gold. Long as a boat."

He refused to repeat verbatim what she said about it. Every time anyone asked, he just laughed and waved it off, the gesture of a man who had won and could afford to be generous about the rest.

"What I will tell you," he said, "is that she came around."

Behind you, from the kitchen, your grandmother laughed, a real one, full, the sound of a woman laughing at a story she had heard so many times it had become less a story than a fact of life, something as familiar as the kitchen itself.

You stood in the bar parking lot with your thumb resting in the dent and let the memory go.

He died of a heart attack the year after your grandmother passed from a stroke. 

Your father said he died of a broken heart, that he had missed her so completely, missed her in such a specific and structural way, that the body that had been operating next to her for more than fifty years simply decided it was finished.

You are a doctor now. 

You know that's not how it works. 

You still believe it is true.

You opened the driver's door. It groaned, the way it had always groaned, like the low complaint of a hinge that had been in use for fifty-three years and had opinions about it.

The interior smelled like stale leather and time, the particular combination of dust and warmth that very old cars accumulated and never fully lost. Underneath it, something else that had no clean name, the residue of a family that had sat in this car together, of laughter and bad singing and your father saying, “we’re gonna arrive in style,” with the certainty of a man who meant it every time.

You glanced up at the sun visor before you sat fully.

The polaroid was still there. Tucked into the felt, held in place by decades of pressure, slightly yellowed at the edges and still perfectly itself: your grandparents standing beside the car, young, her laughing at something mid-sentence, his arm around her with the ease of a man who had already decided how the rest of his life was going to go. Your father was in her arms. Weeks old. Eyes shut. Entirely indifferent to the car.

You looked at it for a moment.

Then you looked at the gear shift.

Manual. Five-speed. The clutch pedal on the left, which had been a problem when you first got the car back, and then a different kind of problem after Washington. Left foot below the knee was functional for many things and for this particular mechanical action required relearning from the beginning--not the motion, but the feel. Feeling the bite point through carbon fibre was not the same as feeling it through flesh, and the first weeks back behind the wheel had been a specific and humbling education. 

You figured it out. You always figured it out.

You turned the key. The engine coughed, rattled, and caught with the low grumbling roar that had always been hers, rougher now, the sound of a machine that had been idle too long and was still clearing its throat.

I know. I gotta take you to a mechanic.

You let her warm up for a moment, then put her in gear and pulled out of the lot.

At the first red light you checked the rearview mirror.

The back seat was empty, but you wouldn’t have said the car felt empty. That was not the right word for it. It felt like a room does when the people who filled it are gone but the impression of them hasn't fully lifted yet. Not grief. Something more specific than grief. The particular sensation of being in a space where laughter used to live, where it had happened so many times the walls remembered it even if no one was there to hear it.

Your ninth birthday was the last time you’d all been together in the Pontiac.

You had not known that then. You were nine years old and it was your birthday and were pre-occupied with being newly nine.

Somewhere in the echo of this car, a smaller version of you was making the case of her life.

“Pllleeeeaaaasssee, Dad! Hunter got to steer on his birthday!”

You were on your knees, which was both theatrical and strategic. You had been planning this argument for months, since Hunter's fourteenth birthday, since you watched your father cave to the same request and unknowingly set the precedent. You had waited for your moment.

Your father was crouched down in front of you and tried to look firm. He had the face of a man attempting authority but not convincing either of them. He had already decided the moment you asked, thats the way it always happened. Whatever stern architecture he maintained with Hunter, with you and those eyes, he never stood a chance.

He opened the door and sat down.

“Sit on my lap. I do the gas and the brake.”

You had climbed in before he finished the sentence. The fairy wings from your costume, bent wire, thin nylon, three weeks past their prime, had gone directly into his face as you settled onto his lap and gripped the wheel with both hands. He did not say a word about the wings. You had the complete conviction of someone who has been waiting for exactly this moment and knows what to do with it.

“Put the pedal to the metal!”

He laughed. He was still laughing when he put the car in drive and helped guide you off the driveway and into the road, your hands on the wheel, his covering yours just enough without making it feel like you were in charge. He let you feel the weight of the wheel. The way the car moved.

And you drove.

The light changed.

You pulled forward.

The back seat remained empty in the rearview, and somewhere behind you, the shape of that birthday, the last one, sat in the car the way it always had. You had not known at nine--that last was about to gain new meaning. That the word would start to arrive differently in you, weighted and specific, collecting things it had no business holding.

You drove home.

The apartment building had a handicap space with your unit number painted in it. The space had come with the lease, arranged without your input, and you used it the way you did most things you had not chosen and could not practically argue with--without enthusiasm and with a resentment you acknowledged was not entirely rational and did not stop feeling.

You pulled in. Cut the engine.

Upstairs, the apartment was exactly as you had left it. The bathroom door was still closed. The hole in the lower cabinet was still there, the ghost of the burst face wash still faintly marking the wall above the tub. You stood in the doorway for one moment and looked at both of these things.

Then you turned away, changed into soft clothes, and brought your laptop to the couch.

863 unread emails. Jesus.

Eleven months... approximately. Eleven months of the world sending things into a void and not getting an answer back.

You scrolled.

The first hundred were exactly what you expected:

A clearance alert from the tactical gear brand you had ordered from twice before everything happened SALE ENDING TONIGHT!

Presumably the fourteenth time they had sent that particular subject line.

Three alerts from a scrubs retailer whose clearance section you had browsed one sleepless morning in the spring of 2024 and apparently never unsubscribed from.

A TRICARE service notification, No Action Required.

The AUSA Weekly Newsletter, subscribed in 2019, read perhaps twice.

Fifteen Army Times Digests.

None of them consecutive in the inbox because nothing in an inbox was consecutive, each one separated by something else.

A VA Claim Status Update you had filed six months ago and forgotten.

Next to a LinkedIn notification from someone whose name you recognised without a face attached.

A follow-up from the prosthetics clinic in Washington: Socket Fit Check-In – Please Respond. Sent six weeks after discharge.

You had not opened it then. You did not open it now.

Two emails from a Veterans' Peer Support Committee, subject lines about connection resources and benefits navigation.

Another scrubs sale.

You kept scrolling.

Then, deeper: names.

Amber. Three separate threads, three different dates. The first sent four days after your discharge from the Army. You did not open any of them.

Benson. Twice.

Gomez. Once, a month since you left. Subject: Checking in.

And then, a thread that made you stop. Lukas. The first message sent the week you arrived in Washington. The most recent from five days ago. Every week between, consistent as a clock. Subject: Still here. 

Just that, every time. No pressure, no escalating urgency. Just, still here. 47 emails in 47 weeks, none of them requiring anything from you in return.

You were going to respond to them.

Just not today.

Near the top of the queue, one day ago, from an address ending in @ptmc.org:

CONDITIONAL OFFER — Observer Physician, Emergency Medicine, Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Centre.

You clicked it.

The language was clean and did not waste words:

Observer Physician, Provisional. Reporting structure: Dr. Jack Abbot, Senior Attending, Emergency Medicine. Minimum ninety-day observation period, subject to extension at departmental discretion.

Then the scope of practice during that period, laid out in plain terms.

Chart review and documentation: permitted, with required attending countersignature on every entry. Patient assessment: permitted under direct supervision. Procedural assistance: permitted with attending physically present. Independent clinical decisions: none. Independent ordering authority: none. Prescriptive authority: none.

Great. I'm a fucking intern again.

Two and a half years in the field. Clinical decisions made in under thirty seconds with whatever was at hand. Bilateral chest decompressions in the back of a moving vehicle, damage control surgeries in a tent, keeping people alive with whatever was in the gap between what you needed and what you had filled entirely by stubbornness and field improvisation. And now you required a countersignature on your documentation.

“You have to follow the rules of where you are.” UGH!

You had met him once, properly, for less than an hour, and he was already getting to you.

You read to the bottom. 

In-person signature required.  Contact Dr. Gloria Underwood, Director of Operations, at the number below.  Both Director Underwood and Chief Attending Dr. Michael Robinavitch would be in attendance at the signing meeting.  Please call at your earliest availability.

You set the laptop down.

Looked at the bookshelf.

Sawyer's letter was still there, still sealed, sitting where you had placed it the day the package arrived, the larger sealed envelope beside it. You had walked past both of them for too long.

You had not been able to open either one. Not because you were afraid, exactly. It was more specific than that, you had not been able to open them because doing so required something of you that you were not finished preparing for. The letter you wouldn't read until you'd gone through the photos first. All of them, the whole chronological box of them. You had only made it through perhaps a third of before you had to stop. You had not reached the end of it yet.

You looked at the envelopes a moment longer.

Then you picked up your phone, typed the number from the email, and pressed call.

It rang once.

Twice.

"Gloria Underwood." Clipped, efficient.

"Director Underwood." You kept your voice level. "This is Y/N Abbott."

A brief stillness on the line.

"Two T's," she said, and you could hear the smile in it.

"Two T's," you confirmed.

12 Days Later

The mirror in the front hallway was almost too large. It had come with the apartment and on most mornings you walked past it looking slightly to the left of your own reflection without deciding to. Tonight you were standing directly in front of it, which you were not finding pleasant.

Hospital-issue black scrubs. Off-white long-sleeve athletic shirt underneath, sleeves pushed to mid-forearm, which was where they were always going to end up anyway. The habit had calcified overseas. You spent years working in heat, in conditions that required rolling sleeves up dozens of times a shift until eventually you started every shift with them already rolled, a shirt that held the sleeve there without a second thought. You owned this shirt in six colours. The off-white was for tonight because it sat clean against the black. 

Dark grey New Balances. Broken in. Quiet-soled.

Hair secured at the back of your head, relaxed but anchored, not a single strand given the opportunity to fall into your field of vision.

Eyebrows filled in at the ends. Mascara. The ring on its chain sat below your collarbone, just under the neckline.

You reached up and lifted it, dropping the chain beneath your shirt. Gone. Hidden for no one to ask about.

You bent over to adjusted the left pant leg, then turned your remaining limb through two rotations, checking the socket's tracking. Checking the drape of the fabric.

Nothing visible.

You straightened.

The apartment was quiet behind you. And then, without deciding to, you started to relive the meeting.

The conference room at PTMC had been ordinary in the specific way that institutional spaces were ordinary, a rectangular table, a ring of chairs, a pitcher of water no one had touched, fluorescent overhead light that did its job without enthusiasm. You had registered all of this and sat down.

Gloria Underwood had been exactly what you expected. Efficient. Warm in the specific way of someone who understood that warmth was professionally useful and deployed it with precision. She had looked at you when you walked in and said, with a smile that was controlled at the edges, she understood you had already made something of an impression on the emergency department.

You had not asked her to elaborate. She elaborated anyway.

“I hesitated, initially, when I received Sergeant Major Sawyer's request, because of the incident in the ambulance,” she said. “That cannot happen again. I want to be clear with you about that.” Then, in the same register, “But Sawyer explained the context. I understand what you came from. And I have a great deal of respect for both.”

Dr. Michael Robinavitch had been to her left.

He looked like a man at the far end of something long. Not burned out--that implied a flame that had extinguished, and this was not that. It was more that he had been running on will and commitment for so long that the two had become indistinguishable from each other, that the part of him that wanted to be there and the part of him that had no choice had merged into a single continuous motion he no longer examined. His eyes were attentive in the way of someone whose attention was not free, who had to choose where to spend it. He had looked at you when you sat down and not looked away.

"Call me Robby," he said, about three minutes in.

You nodded. You were not going to call him "Robby". He was your superior officer in every practical sense except the name, and you had been trained for the better part of a decade to address rank correctly, and a conference room in Pittsburgh was not going to override that.

He looked at you for a moment with an expression that was entirely unreadable and then let it go.

Gloria opened a folder.

She went through it the way she might go through a shipping manifest: name, discharge status, training history, deployment record, functional designation, each item in the same even register, without adjusting her voice to indicate that some items carried more weight than others.

Then the medals.

“Purple Heart. Prisoner of War Medal. Combat Medical Badge. Bronze Star with Valour Device.” She read the citation language, “For actions taken during captivity, demonstrating conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in the face of enemy action. 27 days of unlawful detention. Following escape, attempted treatment and extraction of two fellow service members under hostile fire. Sole survivor.”

The room was quiet.

You looked at the table and kept your face still.

Robinavitch had gone very still beside her, the attentive quality of his gaze shifting into something else entirely, something you could not name because it was aimed inward.

Gloria moved forward. 

Dr. Osei's letter. Your PT's letter. Both landed on the same conclusion through different routes: "Re-entry, not immersion." "Structured, supervised, monitored." "She is not adjusting. She is functioning." 

Then Gloria closed the folder, set it to one side, and looked at you directly.

"The details discussed today remain between the three of us," she said. "I also received correspondence from Dr. Abbot, who confirmed his connection to Sergeant Major Sawyer and has indicated he would serve as your direct supervising physician." She set her pen down. "I imagine having a supervisor who has navigated something similar will be a useful support. For the adjustment."

Silence arrived in the room.

Not a long silence. Just long enough.

You looked at Robinavitch. He looked at you. His jaw shifted, just slightly, in the way of someone who has specifically chosen not to respond. Neither of you said anything. Both of you moved on.

The second half of the meeting had been paperwork, HR protocols, a brief conversation with the accommodations coordinator about the locker situation and the parking marker. Robinavitch had been quieter through all of it, present but not leading, watching more than he participated. You had caught him doing it twice. That specific quality of attention, holding on you a beat longer than the content of the meeting required, as if he had arrived at something and was keeping the conclusion to himself.

When you stood to leave he stood too, looked at you one more time with those tired, careful eyes, and said goodbye.

Three knocks at the door.

You did not need to check the peephole.

You opened it and there was Kalista, oversized sweatshirt, hair loose, nose still bandaged, the bruising had gone yellow at the edges. She looked significantly more like herself. She also already had her arms open.

Oh no.

"I wanted to come and wish you luck," she said, and had her arms around you before you finished processing the sentence.

You stood there for a moment, arms at your sides, but then you raised them and held on. She was slowly and systematically making a “hug person” out of you, without announcing it and without asking permission, and you had apparently decided somewhere along the way to let her.

You pulled back first and pressed two careful fingers along either side of the bridge of her nose, checking the tissue.

Swelling resolving on schedule, alignment holding.

"It's healing well," you told her.

"I better be." She released you entirely and walked directly into your apartment, heading for the kitchen with the easy authority of someone who had stopped asking permission somewhere around the third visit. "I've always wanted a nose job. I just wish I'd had some notice."

You followed her. "Maybe I shouldn't have turned my head."

She opened the freezer, found the ice pack. "Then we'd be matching."

"Your face is proportioned correctly. You didn't need a nose job."

"Perfectly proportioned," she corrected, and pressed the pack lightly to the bridge with the resigned competence of someone who had done this enough times to have developed technique. "So." Her tone shifted to the mode that performed seriousness without committing to it. "Since my nose is broken, and it is at least partially your fault-"

"HA! You told him I could take him in a fight. Not me."

"He punched me because of you."

"He punched you because he was taking steroids. That anger was a character trait that was already present before you rage baited him."

She blinked at you. You looked at the bag of chips she had opened on the counter and took one.

"Duly noted," she said, already smiling. "Sooo. You are going to find me a hot doctor? That is literally the minimum you owe me."

"I am not Meredith Grey."

"You work in a hospital-"

"Yeah, a hospital is a place where sick people come to receive clinical care."

She raised one eyebrow. Just the one.

You looked at her. She held the eyebrow. You both said it at the same time, "So pick me! Choose me! Love me!"

Then you were both laughing, the kind that arrived before you could organise it and didn't stop cleanly. She slapped your arm. You let her. When it settled you were both slightly breathless and the tightness that had been sitting in your chest since you woke up had been pushed into a smaller space for the moment.

You had watched the show for the first time in her hospital room the afternoon she was allowed visitors, mid-season, no context, just sat in the bedside chair and started watching from wherever she was. You had spent the first few episodes pointing at the screen every time the medicine was wrong. When you got home you had started from the beginning.

Overseas, bandwidth on the base was allocated for operations and communications. Entertainment moved on hard drives, shared and copied, never guaranteed. You had mostly listened to music. You had never watched the show before and had not noticed the absence, not until you sat in a hospital room in Pittsburgh and discovered that it was the exact right kind of ridiculous for the moment you were in.

You were now 31 episodes in and had no intention of stopping.

"You're going to be great tonight," Kalista said.

The straightforwardness of it found a gap in your defences that you had not accounted for. You were still getting used to receiving things like that.

"I appreciate it," you said, and meant it more than it came out.

You returned to the front door and reached for your bag and ran through it: extra liner, backup shrinker, water bottle, the compact first-aid kit that had lived in every bag you owned since 2016 without requiring a conscious decision, granola bars, stethoscope. You found the ibuprofen. Shook a pre-emptive dose into your palm, a doctor's calculation, not a patient's. Getting ahead of the swelling before twelve hours on your feet made it a problem.

You had not been on your feet for twelve hours sin-

The smell arrived first.

Thick, humid, the stale damp air of an enclosed space not designed for people to stay in, that held the moisture on the floor and walls and never released it. You knew the smell before you realized you were remembering it.

Your arms were above you, tied tight. They had been above you long enough that the ache had become geography. Your tank top was soaked through. Your field shirt was gone. Your boots were gone.

You were standing on both feet. You could feel the grit of the cement and dirt against the soles of your feet.

A man in front of you was yelling at you in a language you could not understand. He said it again, the same flat cadence.

“Please,” your voice was unrecognizable, “I don't know anything, I don't know.” 

His eyes moved downward. 

The screw was large. Maybe six inches in length, an inch in diameter. The kind of hardware meant for structural things, for load-bearing things, for things that were not supposed to move.

You had felt every inch of it.

It went in slowly. One turn at a time, the way you turned something when you wanted to be certain it would hold. You could feel the pressure arriving before the pain did, the tissue giving way in a sequence your body reported to your brain in real time with a specificity that was almost clinical, almost, except that you were the patient and there was no anaesthesia. The sound that came out of you hit the cement walls and came back with nowhere to go. You heard yourself. You could not stop it.

"Pleeeeaaase! STOP! Pleaaaaaseeee!"

By the third turn it had gone through the arch. Rust against flesh, metal against bone. Both sounds at once, intimate and impossible.

By the fifth rotation, it hit the floor.

You were pinned.

You blinked.

Pittsburgh. Your kitchen. The ibuprofen in your palm.

You shook your arms out, hard. 

Once. 

Twice.

The ghost of sensation was moving through your leg, the echo of pain firing along pathways that led nowhere now. You breathed through it.

One. Your keys on the counter.

Two. The plants in the front hallway.

Three. The pairs of shoes by the door.

Four- four-

"Well, I know it's going to be a great night," Kalista said, from right behind you.

You turned.

She was watching you with the quality of attention that was not pity, not alarm, not the terrible careful gentleness of people who had decided to treat you like something that required handling. She had seen the arms shaken out. She did not say anything about it. Her eyes just said: I see you. We're still here.

Your pupils were still adjusting. You could feel it.

"Thank you," you said.

You took the ibuprofen. Dry swallow. Then shouldered your bag.

Kalista put her hand briefly on your shoulder as you passed. "Don't forget… hot doctors."

The laugh that came out was small and real. "Goodnight, Kalista."

"See you tomorrow!"

You turned toward the elevator and watched the numbers change.

You took the route that ran past the river.

It was wide and flat and silver at this hour, the sky behind it still holding the last of the evening light. A thin burnt pink sitting low at the horizon, the water catching the sun spreading it out in long flat reflections that moved slowly with the current. Something about a body of water that size did something to your nervous system that you had never examined directly, only relied on. In Salerno when the sun had set over the base perimeter and you had always loved it. But there was no water, just sand and distance and the way the sky shifted into a rich orange before the dark of night fell. 

But this, this was different. 

This was Pittsburgh.

You kept driving.

The staff parking at PTMC was a concrete structure, six levels, attached to the hospital. You turned in and came around toward the ground level.

The handicap spaces were there, well-lit, clearly marked, empty, close to the stairwell door. The placard was in your bag, you could grab it and put it in place before you finished parking.

Nope.

You drove past.

Took the ramp. Third floor. Fourth row back from the stairwell.

You cut the engine and sat with the ticking quiet for a moment. The Pontiac, your car looked like an old, beaten, lived-in station wagon that had been run into the ground. Faded and dented and not worth a second glance from anyone who did not know what they were looking at.

You got out of the car and made your way towards the entrance.

Locker 25. End of the row, bench angling away to the left before it reached you, sightlines of the room would not naturally fall to this corner.

Some small fortunes still remained in the world.

You had one earbud in. Can’t Get You Out Of My Head by Kylie Minogue came through low, the particular rhythm of it occupying the space where your thoughts would otherwise start running. Adam complained about this song every single time you played it. Too repetitive, he said. Always the same. You had played it specifically because of this opinion, which in retrospect was a slightly juvenile position. But now every song he had complained about was entirely yours, belonging to no conversation, answering to no one's preferences but your own.

The temporary code for your locker was 1-2-3-5-6-7.

Sawyer would have things to say about this.

You reset it: 0-8-1-2-9-6.

August 12, 1996. Adam's birthday. The same six digits you used for everything. Completely predictable to anyone who knew you. Sawyer would have had opinions about that too.

You loaded the locker. You keep the water bottle out, placed a granola bar into your left pocket and hooked your stethoscope around your neck. Then you checked your watch: 6:23 PM. 

Nice. I got lots of time to look around. 

You closed the locker and waited for the confirmation beep.

You made your way towards the door but it opened before you reached it, fast, full momentum, you had half a second before the impact. His chest met your face. Two hands caught the bend of your elbows, his grip certain and immediate, and you both stilled.

You looked up.

Tall. Fair skin, slightly flushed. Dark hair, almost black, and eyes that were a particular shade of blue that registered before anything else did, the kind that arrived in your visual field and simply sat there, certain of itself. He was looking down at you from a height that for a half-second, at this angle, in this light, was Adam's height.

Stop. Filed. Gone.

His breath was warm against your face. You could see a faint scar at the corner of his jaw, small, old, the kind that had been there long enough to be unremarkable to everyone but you in this particular second.

"Sorry," he said, on an exhale, and then he was past you. Three seconds to a locker across the room, something grabbed, three seconds back, clearing you without breaking pace, the door clicking shut behind him so fast you felt the shift in air pressure before the room settled.

You stood in the empty room.

Then you crossed to the full-length mirror. Just one final check, left pant leg, collar, ring tucked below the neckline. 

You reached for the door handle.

It opened again.

Unhurried this time.

Dr. Abbot walked through with a small duffel slung over one shoulder, the strap held in his left hand, his arm carrying it with the particular ease of someone who carried things with intention. You registered the forearm, the clean definition of the muscle there, the line of a vein along the inside of it, the kind of detail that arrived without invitation, and redirected your gaze to his face in the same motion.

He met your eyes. The corner of his mouth moved.

"Abbott." He let the door fall behind him. "You're early."

"You told me to be on time."

That got a small, genuine smile from him, brief and contained. He punched his code into his locker, back to you, opened it, dropped the duffel in with the efficiency of a routine. Then he closed it, turned, and sat down on the bench facing you.

The expression that settled over his face was deliberate. He had something specific he wanted to say and had thought about when to say it.

"I want to tell you something now," he said, "so you're not carrying a question around all shift." He held your gaze steadily. "Sawyer told me about your leg. Left, below the knee."

Every muscle in your body now frozen in place. 

He had said it the way doctors said things and the way soldiers said things, which were not always the same thing but in this case were, cleanly, directly, without softening it into something easier to hear than it was.

Your face did not move. Your mouth was closed. You were aware, distantly, that you did not have a response yet and were not sure what shape one would take.

"She told me because," He reached down. Rolled his right pant leg up in two efficient movements.

The prosthetic was functional and unornamented. A thing that had been integrated long enough to stop requiring adaptation, to simply be part of how he moved through the world. A mid-tibial right leg, the carbon-fibre pylon visible below where the suspension sleeve ended, the foot system built for long hours on hard floors. Not dressed up. Not apologised for.

In your apartment you had seen the hip compensation. The barely-there adjustment, the practised redistribution of weight when he turned in the kitchen, the quality of stillness that came from years of knowing exactly where his body was.

What. The. Fuck. Sawyer.

He let you look.

"Kosovo," he said.

One word. Carrying all of it.

He rolled the pant leg back down. Straightened. Ran one hand over his jaw, the faint rasp of several days' stubble, grown in rather than simply present, sitting well against the structure of his face in a way that was not your business to observe.

Not the time. Stop.

"So now you don't have to wonder how much I know," he said. "That's it. I don't know how. But I do know it was over there."

You nodded. Words still had not come.

He did not appear to need them. He tilted his head toward you, eyebrows lifting slightly.

"And because you're with me tonight, you're going to sit down when I tell you to sit down."

The eyebrows stayed up.

You nodded again.

"Good."

He stood up, looked at you a moment, then extended his arm--not a handshake, not the civilian version of it, but the other kind, forearm to forearm--a gesture that meant something specific between people who had learned it from the same source.

You took it. The grip, the brief hold, then release.

It was only afterward, when he had already let go, that you registered you had not hesitated to fill his grip with your own. You hadn't even thought about it. You simply took the grip the way you had taken it hundreds of times before, in places far removed from a locker room in Pittsburgh. You had not noticed the comfort of it until it was already over.

He tucked his chin, short, downward, precise. The greeting that was not a greeting, the acknowledgement that lived in a different register from anything civilian.

You returned it. And for just a moment you felt something click back into place, some recognition of yourself in a language you had not spoken in almost a year.

Then his eyes left yours and he moved to the door. You followed him into the corridor and under the sterile fluorescent light of a hospital.

He gave you the tour efficiently and without a single wasted motion. 

The Pyxis unit, the automated medication dispensing system, “your ID badge accesses it, all pulls are logged, you are not independently ordering anything so anything your pulls needs my countersignature.” The crash cart locations, “north bay, south bay, trauma one, trauma two, know where they are before you need them.”

The supply rooms, the imaging order terminal, the on-call paging system for surgical and neuro and ortho consults. The board, which tracked every patient currently in the department and their status in real time.

You took all of it in the way you took in everything, quickly, without needing it repeated.

By the time you finished, the night team had gathered near the bay entrance.

Eight-ish people in the loose formation of a group that knew each other well enough not to need to perform it. They cohered when Dr. Abbot arrived without being asked to, the way groups shift around certain people naturally, not from authority alone but from something more specific to the person.

Dr. Ellis was there. You recognised her from South 7, the particular quality of her stillness that communicated more than movement usually did. She looked at you when you came in and the expression on her face became fractionally more specific, not quite a smile, not quite relief, something between them.

Beside her was a young man with shoulder-length curly hair who looked at your name badge, looked at Ellis, and then looked back at you with the undisguised expression of a man who had been waiting for this moment and found it did not disappoint.

Great. Everyone in this room already knows my fuckin’ name.

Dr. Abbot stood front and centre of the loose cluster. Weight distributed evenly, arms loose, the same quality of stillness you had seen in the trauma bay and in the locker room and in your hallway at six in the morning--the kind that meant he was entirely present and the room knew it.

He looked around the group and let a beat of quiet settle before he started.

"Alright, I see the eyes." He looked around with the dry acknowledgement of a man who found his team predictable and did not mind it. "I know what you're all wondering. So let's deal with it." He gestured toward you with a slight tilt of his head. "To my left is Dr. Abbott. Yes. Dr. Abbott. Two T's. I know. We will get to the implications of that in a moment." A brief pause. "She comes to us from overseas. Specifically a forward surgical environment, which for those of you who have spent your entire careers at institutions where the supply room has what's in the supply room, I want you to understand that she has been practicing medicine in conditions that would make most of your worst nights look like elective procedures." He let that land. "She is functionally an R3 and she is joining us tonight in an observational capacity. What that means is she is with me, she assists when I say she assists, and all documentation from her requires my co-sign. Shen, if I'm not available, she can go through you." He nodded to a man on the far side of the cluster, lean, attentive, holding a cold drink. "Clear on all of that?"

General nods.

"Good." His tone shifted, fractionally lighter. "Now. For the record. And I say this because I know one of you," he looked at the curly-haired man with something adjacent to patience "have already been thinking about this. If your documentation involves both of us, which tonight it will, you need to differentiate. The paperwork needs to be distinct. If I find a chart that has combined us because someone forgot a second T, I will be very disappointed and slightly impressed, but mostly disappointed."

A ripple went through the group. Ellis was pressing her lips together.

"So," the curly-haired young man said. "What do we call you?"

What followed was several seconds of people thinking out loud simultaneously, with the particular collaborative chaos of a night shift team that was comfortable with each other.

“Senior Abbot and junior Abbott?”

“Boy Abbot and girl Abbott?”

“Attending Abbot and resident Abbott?”

“Old Abbot and young Abbott?”

That one earned a brief silence and a side eye which everyone pretended not to notice. 

Then the curly-haired one.

Mateo.

You read his badge, who had clearly been waiting for his moment "Generic Abbot and Brand Name Abbott. Jack is generic, same active ingredient, one T, no frills. She's brand name," he gestured toward you "full formula, two T's, premium."

Dr. Abbot looked at him with the long-suffering expression of a man who had made the mistake of encouraging this.

"Or," someone said, "Abbott 2.0."

That one settled differently. Landed cleanly. A few people nodded.

Ellis said it again under her breath, “Abbott 2.0,” as if trying the fit of it.

Dr. Abbot looked at you.

You looked at him.

You had given a quick "hello" to the group when he introduced you in the beginning, accompanied by a small wave that you were already regretting. You said nothing now but gave a small smile and the faintest nod.

Abbott 2.0 isn’t the worst.

"2.0," he said. "I like it. That works. Anyone who puts it in official documentation goes home."

"Noted," said Mateo, who clearly had no intention of following this.

Dr. Abbot looked around the group one more time, and something changed in his face. The lightness clearing, the thing underneath it becoming visible, the specific quality of a person who cared genuinely about the people in front of him and expressed it in almost no words at all.

"We are the nightcrawlers," he leaned in as he spoke, "we deal with the weirdest and the wildest. Because-!"

They came back at him together, without hesitation, "We are the weirdest and the wildest of them all!"

"That's right!" He clapped your shoulder once, firm, his other hand gripping the stethoscope around his neck. "And tonight they are reaaaaally going to be crawling. So." He looked at the group. "Go get some."

The room shifted. Something warm and specific moved through it.

Again, in unison, "HOOAH!"

You caught it just above a whisper, "hooah," the cadence already there in your chest from years of something similar, from circles like this one in places far from a hospital corridor in Pennsylvania. It came out quieter than everyone else's, a quart-second behind, but it came out.

He heard it. His eyes found yours for just a second.

The team dispersed with the efficiency of people who knew exactly where they were going.

Ellis passed close enough to nod at you with the expression of someone who had questions and was choosing the right moment for them.

Mateo fell into step beside her and you caught, just, the tail end of what he said to her, "so we are absolutely calling them Abbott squared, right," and Ellis laughing as they moved away.

Jack stayed where he was. You stayed beside him.

"Stay close tonight," he said, looking toward the board. "Don't go looking for something to prove."

"I'm not trying to."

He looked at you sideways.

Partially true.

"Mm," he said. And walked toward the board.

You followed, one step behind, his left foot leading, your right. Into the shift.

The first case he brought you to was a 30 year-old male, abdominal pain, presenting from triage.

"Good place to start," he said, outside the bay. "I can asses. See where you're at." He tilted his head slightly. 

You understood “where you're at” actually meant he wanted to asses where you were beyond your clinical ability.

The patient was sitting up in the bed, arms wrapped around his midsection, the posture of someone who had been hurting for long enough that bracing had become automatic. He looked up when you came in.

"Hello, Mr. Ramirez." Dr. Abbot kept his voice easy. "My name is Dr. Jack Abbot. This is Dr. Y/N-" brief, unavoidable pause "-Abbott."

Mr. Ramirez narrowed his eyes.

"Unrelated," he clarified. "This is a teaching hospital, are you comfortable with Dr. Abbott assisting today?"

He looked between you both. "...Sure?"

You moved to his bedside. Started at the beginning, the way it always started: history first, presentation, onset, quality, radiation, associated symptoms. He had woken with the pain, four on a ten-point scale, which had climbed steadily. Nausea since this morning. Low-grade fever he had assumed was nothing.

You palpated his abdomen, beginning at the left upper quadrant and working methodically clockwise. When you reached the lower right quadrant--McBurney's point, two-thirds of the way between the navel and the right anterior superior iliac spine--he flinched hard.

You pressed the left side. He gasped from the right.

Positive Rovsing's sign. "What is... appendicitis."

"We're going to get an ultrasound to confirm what I think is going on," you told him. "In the meantime, we can get you something for the pain." You glanced at Dr. Abbot, who gave the small nod of someone countersigning a decision he had already made himself. "Do you have any allergies?"

He did not. You ordered four of morphine with Dr. Abbots co-singing your credentials. He watched you administer the drug and the tightness across Mr. Ramirez's face gradually release as the medication reached him.

"Thank you," he said, on an exhale, and you could hear in those two words how long he had been carrying the pain before coming in.

You closed the bay door behind you.

"How'd I do," you said, without inflection.

He looked at you with the expression of someone who was choosing what to say from a longer list.

"You were good," he said.

He said it plainly, without elaboration, the way he said most things. But you had spent years alongside Sawyer, reading the space between what she said and what she was holding and you could feel the same shape in him. He was satisfied. He was also watching something more specific than your technique.

You filed it and moved on.

Jack's POV

The board was quieter than most days by midnight, which meant Shen, Ellis and Mateo had a few minutes to be themselves rather than purely functional. This meant they were standing near the north nursing station making the kind of conversation that only night shift people made.

I was across the bay with a chart I was not fully reading.

I was distracted watching her.

She was in trauma two with the latest arrival. I checked on her twice and she did not need me yet, her hands steady, her head down, doing the work with the quiet competence of someone who had done harder work in worse places. The version of her that existed in this room was already different from the version that had stood in my locker room two hours ago. Not more open, exactly, but more present. Like she had found a register she recognized. 

She was working the patient with the kind of focus that didn't perform itself. No sideways checks to see if anyone was watching. No adjustment for the audience. Just her hands, and the work, and the thing underneath the work that she was holding back with everything she had.

That was the part that caught me. Not the competence--I expected the competence. It was the effort running parallel to it, invisible if you weren't looking for it, the quality of someone keeping two things completely separate from each other--what her hands were doing, and everything her mind was carrying while they did it.

I knew that effort. I had logged the same hours.

I had looked away twice. I was aware of having looked away twice, which meant I was aware of looking back, which was its own kind of information I was not particularly interested in examining right now.

There was something specific about watching her that I could not organize into a clinical observation and leave there. Something that went past what I was looking for, past the question of whether she was going to be alright in this room, whether the field training would hold or fracture under the particular pressures of a real facility.

Past all of that. 

Something that was just her, the way she moved through a space, the quality of attention she brought to a thing once she committed to it. Its made something in my chest shift.

That's… new.

I was still looking at her when Shen said something across the bay. Ellis laughed. Mateo pointed at trauma two, then turned and pointed at me with the expression of a man who had caught something and was not going to pretend otherwise.

I looked back at my chart.

I had felt this before. I recognised what happened in a room when someone arrived and the room recalibrated itself around them.

I looked back at the chart.

Then, despite myself, despite the other eyes, back her.

Sawyer. What have you gotten me into?

Your POV

An MVC brought in three critical patients within four minutes of each other.

The third one was yours. 22 year-old male, ejected from the vehicle, chest trauma, compromised airway. You moved through the initial assessment fast: airway, breathing, circulation, in that order, A-B-C. Dr. Abbot was to your right, working the second patient with Shen, available without crowding you.

Henderson called out, “Abbot, I need you over here.” 

Both your heads turned.

Henderson looked between you, recalibrated. "Uh- sorry. Dr. Abbot. Jack. The actual--” He pointed. "Him."

You turned back to your patient. Dr. Abbot gave your arm a brief touch before he moved. "You good?"

"Yes."

"You sure?"

"Yes." 

True. 

Your hands were in this man's chest and somewhere beneath all of the training and the months away, you felt more like yourself than you had in a long time. Practising medicine with your hands, a patient in front of you, a problem to solve. The rest of the world had gone quiet in exactly the way it needed to.

He moved to Henderson.

You kept going.

The bleed revealed itself under careful retraction, arterial, requiring immediate control. Your left hand found the angle and your right went automatically to the backpack, the Kelly clamps that lived in the left exterior pocket, the ones that had been there for two and a half years--

Wait.

You did not have a backpack. You did not have a kit. You were in a trauma bay in a hospital where things lived in specific places that were not on your body.

Your eyes went left. Right.

You needed a clamp.

The sweat was immediate and started at your hairline. 

You needed a clamp.

You looked at the instrument tray, at the walls, at the absolutely extraordinary abundance of organised and catalogued supplies in this room that you did not yet know how to find.

You needed a--

"Hey." His voice came from directly over your right shoulder, low and certain, cutting through the sound of your own heartbeat. "We're gonna follow the rules of where we are."

You met Dr. Abbots eyes.

His hand came alongside yours, the other one extended. "Kelly clamp," he said, and the nurse from earlier, Mateo, expression entirely matter-of-fact, had it in his palm. Clean, uncapped, ready.

He placed it in your hand. His voice, still low: "Now ask for a--”

"Sponge," you said, the word arriving on its own.

A hand clad in the blue latex-free glove, appeared at the edge of your field of vision. The sponge was already there.

"Good. Now--”

"Bovie," you said, to no one in particular, or to the room in general, and the room answered.

It kept being true. Every time you called out a tool to be used the room would give it to you in a gloved hand, waiting, exact, as if the space itself had anticipated you.

Dr. Shen appeared at your elbow somewhere past two in the morning with a plastic cup, Dunkin' Donuts, orange and pink lettering across the side, with the easy manner of someone performing a welcoming gesture without making it feel like one.

"You drink coffee?"

"Yes," you said, and then registered what he was holding. The cup was sweating. There was ice in it.

He set it on the counter beside you. "Wasn't sure what you liked. It's got two pumps of vanilla, no cream."

You looked at it. "It's cold."

"It's iced coffee."

"Coffee is hot."

"Not always." He looked at you with the mild curiosity of someone who had not expected this to become a conversation.

"In Salerno there wasn't ice to put in water," you said. "The idea of putting it in coffee," you picked the cup up and looked at it, "why would someone do that?"

His eyes went slightly wider than the topic warranted. "You've never had iced coffee?"

"I've never had iced coffee."

"Try it."

You tried it. The cold arrived first, sharp and immediate, then the sweetness threaded through it, and then underneath both of those things the actual coffee, present and correct despite everything that had been done to it.

You held the cup for a moment.

Hm.

Shen was watching you with the satisfied expression of a man who already knew how this was going to go.

"Oh my god," you said.

"Yeah," he said.

The night moved in the particular rhythm of an ED shift: compressed and then dilated, moments of full-speed action followed by the strange suspended quality of waiting. In the intervals you started to know the room a little.

Cruz Henderson found you during a brief quiet stretch, leaning against the wall in your vicinity with the ease of someone comfortable in most spaces.

"Hey, 2.0." He was now committed to the nickname. "What do you do for fun?"

The question arrived and sat there.

Fun had a shape you recognised from before, from a version of your life that had existed prior to the last few years, but the specific contents of it had reorganised themselves in ways you had not yet fully mapped. You opened your mouth.

Before you could say anything, an ambulance pulled into the bay with a new case. 

"To be continued," Henderson said, and was already moving.

Ellis found you near the end of an hour you would not have been able to number. She came to stand beside you with the deliberate intention of someone who had been waiting for the right moment.

"I didn't actually expect to see you here again," she said. Not unkind. The opposite actually, said with the warmth of someone who meant it as a compliment.

"You said you needed a change in conversation," you reminded her.

"When Abbot told me I went home and thought there's no way she's actually starting here,” She shook her head, smiling. "I have about 50 follow-up questions from that night."

"I'll answer some of them."

"Some."

"Probably not the ones about privileges."

She laughed. Behind her, Mateo arrived into the conversation with the timing of someone who had been waiting nearby.

"Abbott squared," he said. "That's what I keep calling you in my head. Or like… Abbot to the power of 2T." He looked at Ellis. "Is there a medical joke there? Like two T cells?”

"Please don't," you laughed.

"She said don't," Ellis smiled with you.

Mateo looked delighted by this.

At some point past the halfway mark of the shift, one of the radiology techs asked--not to you directly, but in your general vicinity, the way people asked things they wanted answered--"so both Abbots were military, right?” 

The question landed in a brief quiet and Ellis picked it up. “Both Army,” she clairified. 

Then someone else within ear shout but out of eyesight, “But… Jack was honourably discharged. Right?”

Dr. Abbot, a few feet away near the board, nodded once. Did not look up. Did not elaborate.

You noted the particular quality of the chosen silence.

Later, much later, in the quiet of a night that had opened into something more manageable, you turned to Dr. Abbot and just above a whisper you said, “you know what I can't get over?” you looked up into his eyes, “you say the word and it just appears," you flutter your fingers to make the word dazzle.

He looked at you with the expression of someone revisiting a specific memory.

“I know exactly what you mean,” his eyes glued to yours with a sparkle of recognition, “I remember the first time I asked for something and it just showed up. I thought someone was pranking me.”

“How long until it felt normal?”

He took a moment to think. “Six months? The asking. The trusting that it would come,” then, “but the medicine was the same. The medicine is always the same.”

You nod. You knew what he meant by that.

"You know what I didn't expect?" you said.

He looked at you.

"Iced coffee." You nodded toward Dr. Shen's half-empty plastic cup sitting on the counter. "Coffee is supposed to be hot. It has always been hot. That is the entire point of coffee."

The laugh that came out of him was real and loud enough that it turned two heads at the nursing station, the kind that seemed to surprise even him slightly.

"I’m still not used to that one," he said, when it settled.

The lull came around 4:40 brief and real.

You were on your feet, moving through it, when Dr. Abbot came to stand in your path with the deliberate positioning of someone who had thought about this.

"Sit down," he said.

"I'm fine."

"I didn't ask."

You were amped, not manic, just fully alive in the way that twelve hours of useful work made you feel, like a circuit that had been open for months had finally been connected. You had not felt this in close to a year.

"Why don't you sit?" you challenged.

He looked at you.

You looked at him.

He sat down.

Hmm.

You sat across from him, because what else were you going to do, he'd let you win.

He extended his right “foot” and tapped it lightly against your left "foot" the prosthetic toe against yours, a small deliberate contact, not quite a knock, not quite a nudge.

You rolled your eyes a smirk tugging at the corner of your mouth.

He said nothing. Just looked at you with the expression of a man who had won without speaking.

Across the bay, you did not see Ellis nudge Shen. You did not hear what Mateo said quietly that made Shen give a tight lipped smile and stifle a laugh.

At 5:57 in the morning, you were standing in the ambulance bay with Dr. Abbot, debriefing a case that had closed well. The air was cool. The sky outside the bay doors was still dark but differently dark, the particular darkness that preceded the first pale edge of morning.

Something moved in your chest that you caught and examined before it could grow into anything larger.

Nope.

But it was there. The first fragile thread of something that might, given time and enough of nights like this one, grow into something you could trust.

Then headlights swung into the bay. Not an ambulance. A regular car, moving too fast, horn going.

You both ran.

The mother was in the back seat holding her son in her arms the way mothers hold things they are terrified will disappear if they let go for even a second. She was screaming before the car had fully stopped.

"Please! Please help him! He was fine, he was sleeping, he was fine!"

The boy, maybe eight or nine years old was grey, lips already bluish at the edges.

Secondary drowning, the diagnosis came fast, the way they did when the picture was complete before you had consciously assembled it. The child had been in water earlier and had come home, seemed fine because children after submersion often did. Then he had gone to bed. The water in his lungs had been working against him while everyone thought the danger had passed.

"When was he in the water?" you asked the mother.

"This afternoon-- the pool at the Y-- he coughed a little after but he was fine, he was laughing, I put him to bed and he was--” Her voice broke. "He was sleeping and I went to check on him and he wasn't--" Then she was wailing, like she had made a conclusion she wasn’t ready to cope with. 

Now inside, youd started compressions by the time the gurney reached the room.

1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14-15-16-17-18-19-20-21-22-23-24-25-26-27-28-29-30. Stop. Two breaths from the ambu bag. Again.

You were sweating through the back of your scrubs. Your arms burned. But you did not stop.

The team moved around you.

Another 30 compressions.

A rhythm built and then changed.

Another 30 compressions, this time you felt his ribs break.

And as it did when the picture was becoming clear, you could feel it in the room, the quality of attention shifting, the quiet that came before the harder quiet.

Another 30 compressions.

"Another amp of epi!" you called.

No one moved.

You kept the compressions going and looked up.

"What are you doing? Another amp of--"

"We've given three," Dr. Abbot said calm and flat. Quietly, from behind you.

You did not stop.

"We've gotta call it," he said.

"No. He's coming back." Your arms did not stop.

"Come on." His hands were at your shoulders, not pulling you, offering a way out. "We gotta call time of death."

You felt his hands and you pushed them away then one hard shove centre-chest that rocked him back a step. You reached past him for the epi.

His hand closed around your wrist.

You stopped.

You looked at him.

He looked at you. And in the way that two people can have an entire conversation in three seconds when they have been paying attention to each other. You had him, you did not want to stop. Abbot was telling you that stopping was the only thing left. You didn’t want it to be. He knew that, and it made no difference to what was true, and he was sorry for that and you could see it.

Your hand loosened on the epi.

You stepped back.

He looked at you warily. Waiting.

You squared your shoulders. Breathed out once. Grabbed everything that had come up in the last few minutes and pressed it down into the place you kept things you could not afford right now, pushed it deep and locked it there.

Your face was still.

"Time of death." You checked your watch. "6:07 AM."

You left the room.

The family was in the corridor.

You walked toward them because someone had to, and the person who had been there at the end was usually the one who delivered the news.

The mother looked at you and knew before you said a word. The way mothers just... knew.

You told her. You said the words clearly and without softening them into something less true. Her husband caught her when her legs stopped working. She made a sound that was not language, that was below language, that belonged to a frequency of grief that no vocabulary had ever needed to describe because there was nothing to do with it but let it exist.

You stood with them. You stayed. For several minutes, you stayed, because leaving would have been the wrong thing and you had been trained long enough in the wrong things to know one when you saw it.

Then you excused yourself.

The women's bathroom near trauma one.

You stood at the sink and looked at yourself in the mirror.

There was a version of you that should have been here. That you looked for and could not quite locate. She felt very far away right now.

You could feel the tears starting. Not a wave, just the first pressure of them at the edge, the signal before the signal. You inhaled sharply through your nose, once, utilizing technique that had served you in many rooms with people watching--the sniff pulled the sensation back, reset the baseline, bought you ten seconds that became thirty that became however long you needed.

You closed your eyes.

The sun over the Salerno roofline. The specific quality of the morning light over the base perimeter, the way it turned the dust gold before the heat came, the few minutes of each day when even that place had been clean and quiet and purely itself.

You let yourself be in it for three seconds.

Then you let it go.

You opened your eyes.

You straightened your scrubs, pressed the back of your hand briefly to your face, and walked out.

Dr. Abbot was in the hallway.

He straightened when you came out.

"Hey." His voice was careful. Not careful in the way of someone managing you--careful in the way of someone paying attention. "You okay? I didn't mean to push you back in there."

The box inside you, filled with every emotion, held. Not a crack in it. 

You rolled your shoulders back, "never better," you said. It came out with more edge than you meant.

"Hey," he stepped into your path lightly, not blocking, just present. His hand landed briefly on your shoulder. "You gotta be honest with me. That's the deal."

You looked at him for a moment.

Then you breathed out. "I guess... I haven't lost someone in a while. With the recovery, the time off. And it hits different when it's a kid."

It was true, and it was not the whole of it, and you both knew. He did not push further.

"Come on," he said. "Let me show you how we hand off."

The day shift charge nurse was at nursing station when you and Dr. Abbot walked up, already mid-handoff with the outgoing night charge Lena. Reading glasses on with the easy authority of a woman who had run this floor for long enough that the floor ran itself around her.

She looked up when you and Dr. Abbot were close.

"Dana, this is Dr. Abbott…  2.0." He said it with the particular dry affection of someone who had not chosen the name but had decided to keep it. 

She looked at you over her glasses for a long moment.

"I finally get to put a face to the name," she said. "Been hearing about you since Tuesday, kid."

"Good things, I hope."

"Mostly." Her eyes were kind, "Dana Evans," her hand was stretched to yours, you shook it, "first shift?"

"(Y/n) Abbot, nice to meet you. And, yes, first shift," you confirmed.

"Likewise. How was it?"

You thought about it honestly. All of it. The locker room. The handshake. The clamp appearing out of nowhere. The iced coffee. The name debate. The child.

"It was good," you said. "It feels good to get back into the medicine."

That was true. 

As true as anything you had said all night.

Dana looked at you for just a moment longer than the sentence required. Then she looked at Dr. Abbot, once, with the quick and knowing look of a woman who had noticed things.

She did not say whatever she was thinking.

She looked back at her paperwork.

Dr. Abbot glanced at the time. "7:13. Handoff's done. You’re good to get your stuff from the locker room." He stepped back. "I need to find Robby before I leave.”

You nodded. 

You peeled away from the nursing station, already mentally in the stairwell, already halfway to the parking structure and the long drive home, when something stopped you.

Not a sound. A quality in the air had shifted in the light near the entrance, the particular stillness that preceded something that was not ordinary.

You turned.

Two soldiers were coming through the waiting room doors.

Army Service Uniforms--the dress blues, dark and precise, hats on, gait squared. Between them, held in both hands with the careful flat-palmed carry of something that was not to be dropped, was a folded triangle of fabric. Red and white stripes at the edges. The blue field of the canton visible at the apex, tight and even, the way they folded it when it came off his casket.

Every cell in your body came to a violent halt.

In the back of your mind you knew they were coming for you. Not today, not this specific morning, but in the general sense of eventual--you had known, and had been avoiding it the way you avoided things that required you to accept a finality you were not ready to accept. You had refused all visitors and had been difficult to contact and had let the distance between you and everything and everyone from before grow.

The soldiers were still twenty feet away.

And then you looked again and they were not strangers.

Amber, on the left. Taller than the image your memory had preserved, her hair shorter, a corporal's chevron on her sleeve. She walked with the particular straightness of someone who had been in dress uniform enough times to have forgotten they were wearing it. Her eyes found you immediately, the way eyes found people they had been looking for.

On the right, Lukas. His jaw was set the way it got set when he was working to keep something in. He had emailed you every week for almost a year. Every week, without asking for anything back. Subject: Still here. Every time.

The space had gone quiet in the way that rooms went quiet when something was happening that people recognised even without a program. You were aware of eyes at the nursing station. Ellis and Mateo, somewhere to your left. Dana. The incoming day shift who did not know you at all and were watching anyway.

The two soldiers came to a stop three feet in front of you.

Amber spoke, her voice was level and formal, "Captain Y/N Abbott." She held her gaze steady. "On behalf of the United States Army, and in recognition of the service and sacrifice of Sergeant Adam Handscombe," she glanced at Lukas, who transferred the flag to her hands with the careful coordination of something rehearsed, "it is our honour to present to you this flag, which flew over the base at FOB Salerno in his name."

She held it out.

At first you couldn't move.

The emergency department, this enormous loud functional space, suddenly contracted around you until it was just this. Two soldiers, a folded flag, and every eye in the room landing on you at the same moment. The walls came in. The sounds of the floor dulled. Your pulse, which had been steady, kicked, hard, like a door being tried from the other side.

Not here. Not now. Absolutely not here.

You could feel your hands wanting to do something with the type of alertness you couldn't put down, the kind that arrived before the spiral did. You breathed in through your nose, held it, then let it go.

Your face did not move. You had built that particular architecture over a very long time and it held.

Then you bent your elbows, lifted your hands, and took it.

The weight of it was almost nothing. A few yards of folded fabric, precise and tight. And it was the heaviest thing you had held in a long time.

You were aware of every eye in the room. You were aware that something had just been said out loud and answered questions everyone had been too polite or too busy or too uncertain to ask. You were aware of all of it and none of it mattered for the next several seconds while you stood holding a triangle of flag in a hospital corridor at 7:15 in the morning. You looked at your two closest friends from another life.

Amber raised her right hand.

The salute was formal and precise and absolutely personal at the same time.

Lukas, beside her, did the same.

You had not been in uniform for almost a year. You were in scrubs, with yesterday's mascara probably doing its own thing, holding a folded flag in a hospital waiting room. None of that mattered.

You raised your right hand.

The three of you held it for a full three count.

Then you lowered yours and Amber's face changed.

She stepped forward.

You were already reaching for her.

She put both arms around you, hard, the full grip of someone who had been waiting to do this for a long time, and Lukas stepped in from the other side, and the three of you stood in the middle of a room full of people who had stopped pretending not to watch, you pressed your face against Amber's shoulder and let yourself feel the specific relief of being found by people who had known you before you had to learn yourself again.

It was not a clean feeling. Nothing about it was clean. Happy and devastated and relieved and terrified all in the same moment, layered over each other, the sorrow running through all of it like thread.

But it was real. You were standing. All three of you were standing.

After a while the three of you pulled back enough to put your foreheads together, close, the way you had done a hundred times in a hundred different circumstances in a place very far from Pittsburgh. Lukas's hand at the back of your neck. Amber's at your shoulder.

"We're still standing," Amber said.

"Still standing," Lukas confirmed.

You breathed in and said it with them, "Still standing."

Jack's POV

I was standing at the edge of the corridor when it happened. About to turn toward the elevator when something told me to stop and look back.

I watched them come in. I watched her recognise them. 

I had seen this before, a long time ago. Not this exact thing. The moment when the war finally finds the door you have been living behind and knocks on it in a way you cannot pretend you didn't hear.

I watched her take the flag.

But, the half second before she took it--the stillness, the quality of it, the particular controlled nothing of her face, that, I recognised as the opposite of nothing. I had worn that expression myself in rooms I could not afford to come apart in.

She thought she had hidden it.

She had hidden most of it, her face gave almost nothing. But I could see behind her eyes she was trying to contain something bigger.

Then the other two stepped forward.

The woman was a corporal, the chevron on her sleeve catching the light as she squared up. Her voice carried across the floor--clear and formal, “On behalf of the United States Army, and in recognition of the service and sacrifice of Sergeant Adam Handscombe.”

The name landed in the room like a stone dropped in still water.

I went stiff.

“It is our honour to present to you this flag.”

A husband? She had a husband.

Past tense, present weight, the specific gravity of a loss that did not get smaller with time, only more precisely shaped. 

Sawyer.

I watched her face stay still in a way I now understood, watching it from the outside for the first time, was not stillness at all.

Then the corporal stepped forward and her arms went around you and the face that had been still stopped being still, and something in me flinched away from watching it-not from discomfort, from recognition. 

She had a husband. 

She had lost a husband. She had come to Pittsburgh with all of that packed down somewhere below the surface and had spent a full shift beside me moving through this floor like someone who had decided, somewhere along the way, that if she just kept moving nothing could catch her.

I knew that exact calculation. I had made it myself. I had made it for years.

My thoughts, now aimed squarely at Sawyer.

Of course you didn't tell me. Because if you had, I would have handled her differently. And you knew that handling her differently was exactly the wrong thing to do.

I stood there another moment.

The three of them had their heads together now, something passed between them too quiet to reach me. Something old and specific to those three people and no one else.

I thought of Robby. The particular tired quality of his face lately, the way he had been carrying the weight of the ED on will alone for longer than anyone had asked him to. I had been meaning to find him.

I turned toward the elevator.

The doors opened as I reached it. Robby was inside, coming down, coat on, the end of something written across his face.

We looked at each other.

He read whatever was on mine.

He stepped back. Stayed where he was as the doors began to close.

I stepped in.

Neither of us said anything.

The doors shut.

Your POV

You walked toward the stairwell unsure of the exact time, the flag tucked under your arm.

The stairwell door swung shut behind you.

You stood on the landing between floors for just a moment, alone, in the concrete quiet.

You looked down at the flag.

You had been carrying the absence of this for almost a year. The shape of what you had not allowed yourself to receive, what you had walled off and worked around and refused to acknowledge in the specific way you refused to acknowledge things that had the power to completely undo you.

It was in your hands now.

You pressed it once, briefly, against your chest.

Then you went down the stairs, through the parking structure, and into the early morning.

The Pontiac was where you had left her. You got in, put her in gear, and drove home into a sky that was beginning, very slowly, to go light.

AN: Thank you guys again for being so interested and so kind. I really really appreciate it! I've made a taglist for those who asked! If you'd like to be added just let me know and I'll do my best. Comments, reblogs, and thoughts are always welcome <3

You left out the part where you could not quite remember how long you had been hitting that man before someone pulled you off. You left out the part where, for a few seconds, you had not been in Pittsburgh at all.

Something told you he noticed the omissions. The way his eyes had stayed on you a beat too long after each answer, reading the negative space around your words instead of the words themselves.

But he let you have them.

For now.

He cleared you eventually. Mild concussion, dressed temple wound, cleaned knuckles, and discharge instructions you had no intention of following with any particular discipline.

"Someone is at home to check on you every few hours?" He held the discharge papers with the practised stillness of a man who had asked this question a thousand times and still meant it every time.

"Yes," you said.

Lie.

The only person who could have checked on you was Kalista, and Kalista was currently somewhere beyond a set of doors you were not allowed through. He told you that her next of kin had been contacted. She was going to imaging as a precaution. She was being cared for. 

You asked to stay.

He said you were not family.

It was delivered without cruelty, the way most impossible things were delivered in hospitals, as plain fact dressed in professional courtesy. You understood that. You had said the same thing yourself, on the other side of that conversation, more times than you could count. Understanding it did not make it easier to hear.

She was somewhere you could not follow and there was no version of sitting in a waiting room under fluorescent lights that you were capable of managing right now. Not after tonight. Not like this. So when the opportunity to leave came, you took it.

You walked through the ED doors with your jacket pulled close, one hand already in your pocket reaching for your keys.

Then you stopped.

Oh. Fuck.

Your car was still at the bar.

For a moment you stood in the ambulance bay, staring at nothing in particular. Then you pulled out your phone and opened Uber, typing your new address with more force than the app deserved.

Eight minutes.

A short, humourless sound left your chest.

Ironic.

The air outside was cold enough to cut through the heat still trapped under your skin. The adrenaline had burned off somewhere between the paperwork and the discharge signature, and without it your body had started reporting every ache–all at once. Your face ached. Your knuckles pulsed. Your left hip was tight and overworked from compensating too long, the socket having shifted during the fight, and with each step a pinch ran high along your inner thigh that made you set your jaw.

You checked the time.

6:06 a.m.

There had to be somewhere to sit. You looked left, then right, and found the designated smoking area tucked off to the side of the ambulance bay. A concrete ledge ran along the wall, just wide enough. Apparently the irony had no plans to let up.

You made your way toward it carefully. By the time you lowered yourself onto the ledge the relief was immediate, weight coming off your leg, your eyes briefly closing on their own. You let out a breath you had not realised you were holding.

For a few minutes, you sat there and did nothing at all.

The city was waking up around you. Traffic thickened on the road beyond the hospital. A truck somewhere nearby reversed with a slow, flat beep. The streetlamps overhead clicked off one by one as the sky began to change.

The dark pulled back from the roofline. That blue-black edge of night retreated, giving way to a thin wash of gold along the horizon. Early sun caught the windows across the street and turned them briefly into something warm.

And then you heard them.

Birds.

Small and ordinary and alive, somewhere in the trees beyond the parking structure. Not the desert birds you had learned to tune out at Salerno, picking at scraps near the base perimeter and scattering at the first sound of machinery. Not distant wings and nothing more. Just birds in a city morning, uninterrupted.

You tipped your face up toward the light.

You had loved the sun across every deployment, every base, every theatre. At Salerno it had been ruthless at its peak, the kind of heat that pressed down until it felt personal, that turned the dirt pale and made the air shimmer above the perimeter road. You had learned to work through it regardless. But in the early mornings, before the heat crested, and in the evenings when it finally relented, the light had been extraordinary. Burnt orange bleeding into the sky still vivid with that particular blue that only exists in the last moment before it surrenders to the sun. The air at that hour carried a dry, mineral quality that you had breathed in thousands of times until it had become part of how you understood the word evening.

You had never once missed a sunrise or a sunset you could get to. Even running on two hours of sleep and whatever you had managed to eat. Even when the day ahead, or the one just behind you, was too heavy to look at directly.

Adam had understood that without being told.

He would appear at your shoulder without announcement, drop down beside you on whatever stretch of wall or ledge or step you had claimed, and say nothing for a while. Just watch it with you. The silence with him had always been the comfortable kind.

Here in Pittsburgh the morning sun was gentler. Softer through the urban haze, less demanding. You closed your eyes and turned your face toward it, thousands of kilometres of travel ending right there, warm against your skin, and for one small second it felt exactly the same.

You could almost smell the dry heat of the desert, the particular gritty quality of air with no moisture in it. Almost feel the fine grain of it against your skin. And somewhere behind your closed eyes, so vivid it stopped your breathing for a full second, you could almost hear his voice. Low and near, coming over your shoulder the way it always had.

"Hey, you."

Your phone buzzed against your thigh. 

Your Uber had arrived.

You opened your eyes. You stood carefully and walked to the car.

The ride was quiet. The driver offered a brief greeting and you returned it and then leaned your head against the window, watching Pittsburgh pass in soft early fragments. Brick buildings. A traffic light cycling to yellow. A woman walking a dog with the purposefulness of someone who had been awake for hours already.

Your building came up faster than you expected. You thanked the driver and got out carefully.

The lobby was empty. The elevator was empty. The hallway on your floor stretched ahead of you, long and overhead-lit and silent.

You stopped outside Kalista's door.

"Hi, my name is Kalista Reid. I'm 28. I live in the apartment across the hall. Unit 601."

For a moment, you just looked at it.

She had helped you carry a trunk upstairs less than two weeks ago. She had called herself your first friend in Pittsburgh and meant it. She had made you buy throw pillows. She had sent seventeen opinions about the silver top before you even left the apartment. She had dragged you out because she thought you needed to feel like a person for one night.

And she had been hit hard enough to need surgery because you had not been paying close enough attention.

You looked away.

You went inside, the door clicked shut behind you. The silence was immediate. Too large. Too clean. Too much space for one person to fill at six in the morning after the kind of night that ended with discharge papers.

You pulled out your phone and opened Kalista's contact. You tried to keep it short. Something simple she could read when she woke up.

Hey. I'm home. I tried to stay but they wouldn't let me through. I am not family. I hated leaving.

I'm so sorry about tonight. I wasn't paying close enough attention and I should have been, and I don't really have anything better than that. I'm just sorry.

I'll be there the second you can have visitors.

Also! You were right about the silver top. For what it's worth, it was a very solid call on your part.

Then you crossed the living room toward the bedroom and stopped.

The photo albums sat in chronological order across two shelves of the bookshelf, the habit of a photographer's daughter. Sawyer's package was still only half unpacked. The loose four-by-sixes were sorted in careful piles across the lower shelf and the floor in front of it, no longer arranged by date, waiting for a permanent home you had not been ready to give them. The large tan envelope stamped:

CONFIDENTIAL SGT. A. HANDSCOMBE

sat where you had placed it the day the package arrived. Sawyer's letter, still sealed, beside it.

You had not opened either.

Not yet.

Your eyes found one stack with a photo on top, and before you had consciously made the decision your hands had already reached for it. The whole stack. Maybe fifty photos. The one sitting on top was a polaroid.

Adam. Standing dead centre, hands clasped in front of him. A professional smile, full of pride and entirely unable to contain it. That had always been his particular way of being proud of something. He did not perform. He simply held it, and it showed through anyway.

You remembered taking this photo. You remembered exactly where you were standing.

The day he made Corporal.

You turned the photo over.

On the back, in your own handwriting:

Corporal Handsome, 2016

Below the words, the outline of your lips. A shimmering pink print, barely-there lip gloss surviving years and deployments and oceans and a move across the country.

You flipped it back.

You walked a few steps toward the window where the morning light was stronger, held the photo flat and parallel to your eyes, and tilted it gently, maybe thirty degrees outward, scanning the surface slowly.

There.

The ghost of a print in the gloss of the image. His lips. Just the impression of them, oil residue on a surface that had held it quiet and patient all this time.

He had kissed this photo.

"Say cheese."

You had one eye closed and the camera pressed to the other, grinning already, trying to hold the shot steady through it.

"Cheeeeese." His smile was controlled, proud, just barely holding back something larger underneath.

Click. Flash. The camera whirred. The film began to slide out from the bottom.

He had just made Corporal, and it showed. Not in the way vanity showed, but in the way earned things showed. He had worked for it through deployments and rotations that never fully made it into official reports, worked for it the way his father had worked and his grandfather before that. Men who had gone to war and come back whole, who had passed something intact down the line. Adam had come from a stable home and a proud lineage, and the Army had seen something in him early that most people were still catching up to.

Half a second after the flash he had unclapsed his hands and pulled you in. Arms all the way around, the kind of hug that accounted for all of you at once, his chin resting easily on the top of your head. He exhaled against your hair. One hand shifted from your shoulder to the back of your neck, and then he pulled back just enough to look at you.

"I couldn't have done this without you."

He absolutely could have gotten here on his own. But it was still fun to take credit.

"I know," you told him, "because I was the one who talked you up to Sawyer."

He laughed. You laughed. Somewhere in the middle of it you looked down and realized the polaroid had finished printing.

You held it up between you, turning it toward him so he could watch it develop, your eyes still on his over the top of the photo. Absently, without thinking, you let it rest against your lips. The paper was cool against your mouth. Your own breath came back warm against your face from the surface of it.

Then he leaned in and kissed you through it.

You felt the pressure of his lips against yours through the thin film, and despite the photo between you, despite not being able to see exactly where your lips were, he found them perfectly. Like he could have done it without looking at all.

You had not been expecting it. You closed your eyes for the flutter of a second that it lasted.

Then it was over.

When he pulled back there was something in his eyes you had not seen before. Something quiet and full, like a sentence he had decided not to finish yet.

You turned the photo over in your hands. Then back again. The faint stain of your lip gloss on the paper. The ghost of his lips pressed into the gloss on the front.

"Now you can never throw that one away," he said.

"Was that the plan?" you asked.

He smiled.

"That was absolutely the plan."

That night, on your way to drop the photo at his bunk, you had written Corporal Handsome, 2016 on the back. Somewhere in the ten feet between your hand and his door, the photo slipped. Or perhaps you let it slip. It landed face-up on the ground directly in front of three members of his squad who had been sitting against the corridor wall.

A beat of silence.

Then someone said, very slowly, "Corporal Handsome?"

The name was in circulation within the hour. By the end of the week it had crossed two squads. A Staff Sergeant from Third Platoon clapped Adam on the back using it. He wore the name with the easy dignity of a man who was not particularly displeased with how events had unfolded.

He never called it an accident.

Neither did you.

You could not look at a photo of him without wanting him back. Not as a concept. Not as a comfort. You wanted him here, in this apartment, in this specific moment, taking up the space that was too large for one person. You wanted the weight of his arm across your shoulders. You wanted to hear him say something that made you laugh and watch him be quietly pleased about it for the next twenty minutes. You wanted to show him the throw pillows Kalista had made you buy and hear what he said.

You wanted proof that he had been real.

The photos were proof. That was what they were for. That was why your father had never put his camera down, and why you had kept the habit, and why Adam had kept a camera sewn into his vest against regulation and called it harmless.

So that proof existed.

So it could not be taken.

You gathered the stack and carried it into the bedroom, setting the photos carefully on the nightstand. The polaroid you set apart from the others, propped gently against the base of the lamp. Then you looked at the stack for one second too long and decided that the grime of the night was sitting on you in a way you could no longer ignore.

You went to shower.

A relief came when you took off the prosthetic.

The release of pressure was almost enough to make your vision swim. Your residual limb was aching in a way that was specific and deep, red at the socket line, the skin tender from hours of heat and impact and a fit that had been off since the fight. You stood at the bathroom counter and gripped the edge of it, breathing through the first hot pulse of returning circulation.

You hated that it felt good to take it off. You hated needing relief from something designed to help you.

The shower chair was folded in the hallway closet. Your physical therapist in Washington had used her careful, practical, firm voice when she told you to get one.

"It is not a failure. It is an adaptive tool."

You nodded at the time and bought one. You had put it in the closet the day you moved in and had not touched it since.

You were a grown woman. You had treated blast injuries in tents. You had cross-clamped bleeders by headlamp. You had held people together with your hands and gauze and pressure and sheer refusal to let go.

You could wash your own hair without sitting in a plastic chair like a patient.

You turned the shower on and waited for the water to heat, then approached the tub.

The problem with the shower chair being in the closet was that the tub edge was a fixed obstacle that required a fixed solution, and you were currently missing one leg below the knee.

You pressed your knee to the ledge of the tub and rolling your weight over it in a way you could not have replicated intentionally, catching the wall as you went, and ultimately surrendering to the shower floor rather than any version of standing.

The water was hot. That was something.

You sat with your back against the tub, right knee bent into your chest, left knee stretched straight because bending it to your chest still pulled in a way that felt like a protest, and you washed slowly. Everything you needed was on the lower shelf of the tub ledge, which you had worked out early was the only arrangement that actually functioned.

Reach. Shift. Brace. Rinse. Don't slip. Don't think about how none of this used to require thinking.

That was the part no one had prepared you for. Not the pain. Pain made sense and could be managed. It was the logistics. The constant, humiliating logistics of being alive in a body that no longer moved the way your brain expected it to. A towel out of reach. A crutch in the wrong room. The mental accounting of every single movement before you made it.

By the time you shut off the water and managed your way back over the tub edge and onto the bathmat, you were shaking, and you could not have said with any certainty whether it was exhaustion or anger or some precise combination of both that had no name.

You reached for the towel on the bar and dried off as best you could while still on the floor.

Then you looked toward the bathroom door. The crutches were not there. You had left them in the bedroom. Something in your chest shifted, moved, and snapped.

"Fuck."

You gripped the counter edge and tried to pull yourself up. Your palm slid on the wet surface. Pain cracked through your hip, sharp and immediate, and you dropped back down hard enough that the impact moved through your spine.

"Fuck."

Louder.

You looked down at your leg. At the scar tissue. At the shape of something that had been repaired and healed and was supposedly functional.

Your hand found the nearest thing on the lower shelf and threw it.

The bottle of lotion hit the wall hard enough to crack and burst open across the tile.

Still on the floor, you reached up and swept your arm across the counter. Toothbrush. Hairbrush. A small glass jar. Moisturiser. A folded washcloth. Everything went off the edge. The glass jar hit the floor and shattered.

"FUCK!" Your fist found the cabinet door.

Once. Twice. You didn't count after that. You just kept going, kept hitting, the pain in your knuckles building past the point where it registered as pain and becoming something else entirely, something that had been compressing for months and had finally run out of room and needed somewhere to go.

When you finally stopped you pulled your hands back and looked at them.

Blood across your knuckles. A smear on the cabinet door, and below the smear, a dent that had gone almost all the way through. You had done that. With your hand. On the floor of your bathroom at six in the morning in an apartment in a city where nobody was coming.

The sob came from somewhere so deep it didn't sound like you.

The towel slipped and fell and you let it. It didn't matter. There was no one here. It made you furious. Furious at the wet tile cold against your skin. Furious at the glass on the floor. Furious at the crutches in the other room. Furious at your body for surviving the unsurvivable and still managing to make every single ordinary thing impossible.

Because you had survived. That was the thing no one tells you about survival. It was not a conclusion. It did not hand you something livable in exchange. You had survived Adam's death and everything that had happened in the weeks before that you still could not think about directly. You had survived the infection. The surgery. The amputation. Discharge. Rehabilitation. Washington. The flight to Pittsburgh. The apartment. A bar on a Friday night.

But you could not get off the bathroom floor.

That was what broke you.

Not the war. Not the loss.

The bathroom floor.

The sobs were violent, the kind that forced your shoulders inward and curled your whole body toward itself. You pressed both hands over your mouth curled like a child on the floor--but it made no difference. The sound came through anyway, broken and beyond your control.

And the silence of the apartment around it, the absolute zero-reaction of being alone in a room you had just destroyed with no one to hear it and no one coming, made it worse.

It was not just Adam you had lost. That grief was enormous and specific and lived in a separate room from this one. The friends overseas who had tried to visit the hospital and been turned away because you could not stand to be seen that way. You had lost them too. Lost the life that existed only in those places, that did not translate, that you had left behind without being given the chance to say goodbye to it properly. The belonging that had no equivalent here.

The only "visitor" allowed in your hospital room was Sawyer, because she outranked everyone in it and walked through the door without asking permission. You had pushed everyone else away and called it healing, and now the healing was a city of one and an apartment that was too large and walls that did not react when you fell apart inside them.

You pressed your forehead to the cold tile and stayed there.

After a while the crying stopped because your body simply ran out of whatever it had been using to sustain it. You lay on the floor for a long time after. Long enough that the tile no longer felt cold against your cheek. Long enough that what had been wet on your face had dried.

The shower was still dripping. The glass was still on the floor.

Move.

Not standing. Not yet. You cleaned the glass first, because some part of you was still a doctor, still practical, still aware that bare skin and broken glass had one predictable outcome. You used a dry section of the towel, folded carefully over on itself, and cleared what you could reach. Then you set it aside.

After that, you moved to the door.

On the floor. Backwards. Because that was what was available.

It was humiliating--but there were no eyes to see. You catalogued it and kept moving.

You pulled open the bottom dresser drawer from the floor, you grabbed underwear, shorts and a T-shirt. Getting dressed took longer than it should have. You did not look at your leg. If you caught a glimpse in your peripheral vision you redirected your gaze just enough to miss it. You had done it enough times by now that it was nearly automatic.

When you reached the bed, you gripped the mattress edge and hauled yourself up.

You sat there for a moment. Just breathing.

There. Done.

The photos were still on the nightstand. Adam's face looked up at you from the bottom of the lamp. You reached for the photos before you had consciously decided to, and lay back, and began to go through them slowly.

Your squad, arms around each other, squinting into the same familiar sun. Photos from Adam's perspective, his squad arranged in the loose, easy formation of people who had learned to trust each other completely.

Then the photos that had not existed for you until Sawyer's package arrived.

Amber's photos.

Amber was your closest frien over there, the one who had seen everything and said nothing until she was given permission. She had known you loved Adam long before you said it out loud, and she had known about your habit of documenting everything, and she had quietly taken it upon herself to document you back, mostly without your knowledge. She had that kind of love for the people close to her. Generous and steady.

There were photos here you had never seen.

You and Amber of you sitting side by side on a supply crate, not touching but close enough that your shoulders were nearly brushing, both looking at something off-frame. A photo of you laughing at something Adam had said, your head tipped back, his face in three-quarter profile already pleased with himself. A photo of you asleep against the wall of the medical centre corridor waiting for a shift to start, and beside you, not asleep, watching you with an expression on his face you could not look at directly for too long.

Then, near the bottom of the stack, a photo that made you go still.

The camera was angled upward, catching yours and Adams faces against the sky. The perimeter wall below you. Early morning, the two of you half-asleep, shoulders touching, watching the sunrise from the spot that had been yours almost from the beginning. The burnt orange you admire cut across the retreating dark above the base. His mouth was slightly open in a way he would have absolutely hated if he had known about it.

You laughed. Just once. It broke halfway through.

Then you were crying again, but quietly this time. Not the bathroom kind. That had been rage and exhaustion and walls that didn't answer. This was different. This was longing, patient and enormous and without anywhere to go.

You missed him in a way that made your whole body feel hollow. The weight of him beside you. The sound of his voice saying your name. The warmth of someone who had known the difference between the silence that meant you were fine and the silence that meant you were not, and who had never once required you to explain which one you were in.

You missed being someone who had him.

You lay back without meaning to, photos spread across the sheets, one still held loosely between your fingers.

The sun had come fully up while you were on the bathroom floor, and it was filling the room now in long, slow lines. Gold across the floorboards. Gold over the edge of the bed. Gold over his face in the photograph beside your hand.

The polaroid sat propped against the base of the nightstand lamp, his lip print barely visible on the gloss.

Waiting to be framed.

You did not notice when you fell asleep.

Jack's POV

I pulled into the driveway at 9:33 a.m.

The number sat on the dashboard with the quiet authority of a fact I had not asked for.

The shift had run long enough to start losing its edges. Faces, charts, vital readings. One drunk with a fractured orbital floor. One broken nose. One woman with bloody knuckles and a precise, unblinking stare that had followed me through the rest of the night without my permission.

I sat in the car after shutting off the engine. I was not a man who needed to collect himself in his own driveway. But if I was honest about what I was doing, I would have had to be honest about what I was thinking about, and I had not yet decided to do that.

Abbott. Two T's.

I exhaled and got out.

The house held the quiet of a place that had learned to accommodate one person without comment. I dropped my bag near the door. It hit the floor with a dull, heavy sound.

Close enough.

In the kitchen I took the container of leftovers from the second shelf of the fridge and left it on the counter to reheat after I showered. No point running the microwave now. I was going to be in the bathroom longer than the food could stay warm.

The bathroom was ready. That was the right word for it. After enough years there was nothing worth performing about it. Grab-bar in the right place. Non-slip mat. Shower chair in position. Crutches leaning at the exact angle my hand would find them when I was ready to exit. Towel within reach.

I had learned, once, what happened when things were not where they needed to be. Everyone who needed to learn it did, eventually. The ones who adjusted fastest were the ones who stopped calling it compromise and started calling it a system.

I sat on the tub edge and released the prosthetic. The familiar shift happened immediately, pressure giving way, the limb settling back into itself. I ran a hand along the socket line out of habit. Redness where it had pressed too long. Nothing open. Nothing that required more than time.

Maintenance. Not the word anyone preferred. People liked recovery, or adjustment, or adaptation. Clean, forward-moving words. Maintenance was less flattering. Maintenance was what actually kept you walking.

I moved through the rest of the routine without needing to think about it, which was the entire point of having a routine.

The shower ran hot. I sat under it longer than necessary, elbows on my knees, head forward, and let the water do what water did after a long shift. Work through the tension in my shoulders, loosen the muscles along the back of my neck, take the smell of the hospital off my skin. Eventually the night stopped feeling like it was still happening to me.

Then I got back up.

Not dramatically. Not slowly. Hand on the grab bar, weight checked and redistributed, one careful movement at a time. There was nothing inspiring about it. It was just how it worked.

I dried off, dressed in a T-shirt and sweatpants, and balanced in front of the mirror.

Grey at the temples, more than last year. Dark circles under my eyes which were not new. A crease between my brows that had decided somewhere around 40 that it was permanent and had never thought to ask permission.

I looked at myself for a moment. Not critically. Just looked.

There were other versions of this face that could have formed over the last twenty-five years, other directions the whole thing could have gone, and I had been aware of that for a long time. Somewhere along the way the awareness had shifted from something unsettling into something closer to gratitude. I recognized the man in the mirror. I had not always been able to say that. It had taken years of work.

That counted for more than I ever said out loud.

"Not bad," I told the mirror. "For an old man."

I fit my prosthetic back on, because navigating the kitchen without it would be a harder task I did not have the energy for.

I reheated the leftovers, ate at the counter, rinsed the container and put it in the dishwasher.

By the time I reached the bedroom my lower back and right hip were making their case. The deep muscle above the knee that contracted after too many hours on my feet had been pulling for the last hour, and the socket had been on long enough that what was left of my leg wanted out. I sat on the edge of the bed, released the prosthetic, and set it beside me at the angle my hand would find in the morning. Then I got under the covers and let everything go quiet.

Routine. Maintenance. Survival, if I wanted to be dramatic about it, which I generally tried not to be.

I closed my eyes.

The world began to soften, thought starting to lose its edges.

Then my phone buzzed.

Once.

Ignore it.

Twice.

I reached for it. I looked at the name on the screen:

SAWYER

"Well," I said to no one. "There's a ghost."

I picked up.

"Holy shit," I said. "Is this Frances Sawyer, or have I finally started hallucinating from sleep deprivation?"

The laugh that came back was immediate and enormous, the kind that filled more space than the person producing it.

"Jack Abbot," she said. "Still charming. Still dramatic."

"Only with people who call me after a night shift."

"Night shift got you soft."

"Night shift got me old."

"You were old at twenty-four."

"And were unbearable."

"Yet you adored me."

"I tolerated you because you outranked me."

"You tolerated me because I saved your ass."

I closed my eyes that one landed somewhere old and familiar.

White. Then dirt against my face before I understood what had happened. Then the ringing, flat and total, the kind that pressed in from every direction at once and made everything else sound like it was happening underwater.

Sawyer's voice somewhere above me, miles away and right there at the same time. "Stay awake, Abbot. Stay awake."

I tried.

I opened my eyes.

"Did you ever get that peg leg I sent for Christmas?" she asked.

"It must have gotten lost in transit. I've been limping around on my own like an idiot."

"Well shit. I paid extra for the pirate finish."

"I knew I felt underdressed."

She laughed again, but the laugh shifted. A pause, half a beat too long for nostalgia. Sawyer had never called out of nothing. She called with a purpose, and the purpose was always something she had already settled on before she dialled.

"What do you need?" I asked.

"That obvious?"

"We haven't spoken in half a decade. Either someone's dead, someone's dying, or you want something."

She exhaled.

"Yeah," she said. "I want something."

I waited.

"About 11 months ago," she started, "there was an incident tied to one of our forward surgical units. Salerno initially. The situation developed across multiple locations over the following weeks. Eight people were captured."

I sat up slightly.

Weeks?

"Three made it back," she said.

The line went quiet for a moment.

"Only one of them survived."

I did the arithmetic the way you did automatically when someone gave you numbers like that. Eight. Three. One.

"She made it back. She developed a severe soft tissue infection. Septic, moving fast. We couldn't save the limb." Another pause, deliberate in a way that meant she had chosen the next words carefully. "Left leg. Below-knee amputation."

My hand, which had been loose on the sheet, went still.

Left. Below the knee.

Sawyer would not have said it the way she said it if she didn't know what it would do.

"Close enough to be a mirror," she said, quieter.

The silence between us had weight to it. The kind built from knowing someone across too many years and too many specific things to need much explaining.

I broke it first.

"How long had she been serving?"

"Enlisted at eighteen on an HPSP scholarship. Medical school through the Army. Combat track, trauma surgery. She was most of the way through her residency when everything happened. I was the one who pushed her toward medicine. I saw it in her from the start." A brief pause. "She's twenty-eight now."

"How far does that put her into residency?"

"Functionally R3. The paperwork is complicated by the deployment structure."

"Paperwork is always complicated."

"Her situation is uglier than the paperwork."

"What else?"

"She spent several months in Washington. Rehabilitation unit. Prosthetic fitting. Physical therapy." A pause. "She hated every second of it."

"That's not unusual."

"In a way I recognize," Sawyer said. "In a way you would recognize."

I looked toward the window. Something was forming in the back of my mind, quiet and unhurried, not yet a complete thought.

"She's not adjusting," Sawyer continued. "She's functioning. She's managing. She performs and keeps everything else in a very small, locked room and calls it control." A brief silence. "There's a difference."

"I know the difference."

"I know you do."

I ran a hand over my face.

"Where is she now?"

"Pittsburgh... I sent her there," Sawyer said, with the particular tone of someone fully aware of what they are doing and entirely comfortable with it. "I directed her to housing near PTMC. I've spoken with Gloria."

"Sawyer."

"She's signed off. Limited duties, supervised. It's not a full position yet but the door is open. The girl needs somewhere her training is not wasted."

"She needs a trauma therapist."

"She has one."

"She needs time."

"She won't take it."

"Then she needs someone to make her take it."

"That worked beautifully on you, if I recall."

I almost smiled. Almost.

"She wants the work back," Sawyer said. "Not deployment. Medicine. She thinks if she can just get back to being useful, everything else will settle around it."

"It won't."

"I know that. You know that... She doesn't know it yet."

Yes she does. She just won't stop moving long enough to face it.

"You want me to take her on," I said.

"I want you to consider it."

"No. You want me to take her on."

"I want someone on the ground who understands the medicine, the military background, the leg, and the specific brand of productive self-destruction that looks impressive on a resume until it isn't." She let the silence sit for a moment. "That's you, Jack."

"That's a very specific description."

"It's an accurate one."

I stared at the ceiling.

"When did I become the designated landing place for traumatised doctors?"

"Probably around the same time you stopped pretending you weren't one yourself."

"I'm an attending physician."

"You're an attending physician who spent almost two decades in the Army and still stands like it." A pause. "Don't be modest. It's unbecoming."

I almost laughed.

"How long has she been in Pittsburgh?"

"About a week and a half. She doesn't know anyone. No family." Sawyer's voice roughened slightly, just at the edges. "She made a friend, a neighbour, from what I can gather. But that's very new. She's alone, Jack. She's probably sitting in that apartment right now with more grief than she knows what to do with and no one to interrupt it."

My jaw tightened.

"What aren't you telling me?"

Sawyer was quiet for a moment. A different quality of quiet.

"The rest is hers," she said finally. "It's not mine to give."

"Is she safe to be around?"

"She says she is."

"That's not what I asked."

"No," Sawyer said. "It's not." A measured pause. "She wouldn't hurt anyone without reason. But she will run herself into the ground if no one interrupts the pattern."

"What's her name?" I asked.

A silence. Just long enough to be deliberate. Then Sawyer made a small, contained sound, clearly working to hold something back.

"Here's the thing," she said. "It's kind of funny, actually."

My eyes opened fully.

No. Fucking. Way.

"Y/N Abbott."

I stared at the ceiling.

"Spells it with two T's," I said.

Sawyer went quiet for half a second too long.

"Wait," she said, and it was the first time all night she sounded genuinely caught off guard. "You know her?"

That unformed thought in the back of my mind had resolved itself, detailed and specific. Bloody knuckles tucked carefully behind a back in the trauma bay. A woman sitting on the edge of a hospital bed with the stillness of someone deciding whether the room deserved her full attention. "Is she dead?" Delivered with the calm of a person who had already made their peace with whatever came next.

I shifted upward and leaned against the headboard.

"Unfortunately," I said, "I met her tonight."

There was a beat of silence.

Then Sawyer laughed so hard I had to pull the phone away from my ear.

"This is outstanding."

"No."

"This is divine intervention."

"It is not."

"This is the funniest thing that has happened to me in months."

"She performed an unsanctioned procedure in the back of an ambulance."

"Was it clinically necessary?" The laughter was still in her voice, barely contained.

"She drained a septal hematoma with an eighteen-gauge in a moving rig."

"So yes." I could hear the grin. "That is my girl."

"She also put a man in my ED looking like he had lost an argument with a wall. Repeatedly."

"Was he asking for it?"

I paused.

"Does it matter? She lost control of herself. Whatever happened in that parking lot, she was not entirely in Pittsburgh when it was happening."

She didn't say anything. She couldn't say anything.

"She said things got away from her."

"They will again," Sawyer said. "That's what I'm telling you. She is brilliant and she is broken and she will keep going until something stops her, and I need the thing that stops her to be structure and not a catastrophe."

I rubbed at my eyes.

"You sent me a liability."

"I sent you a doctor."

"You sent me a doctor with combat trauma, a recent amputation, no support system, and an apparent willingness to practice emergency medicine in moving vehicles without privileges or anaesthesia."

"She needs guidance," Sawyer said. "She needs someone who will not give her a pass simply because of what she's been through, and who understands what she's been through well enough to know exactly what a pass would cost her." Another pause. "That is not a long list of people."

She is not wrong.

"Gloria has already signed off," Sawyer said. "Credentialing still needs to clear but the position is there when it does. Observation first, limited duties, supervised. No independent procedures until the paperwork is clean and you're satisfied she's ready."

"She'll hate that."

"Yes."

"She may make my life difficult."

"Almost certainly."

"She told me I wasn't paying attention in medical school."

Nothing came back for a second.

"Jack," Sawyer said, very carefully, "I am trying so hard not to laugh."

"In my trauma bay."

"In your trauma bay," she repeated, and I could hear her losing the battle with it.

I waited.

"She's had a hard year. Go easy on her Jack," she said, once she had pulled herself together. Quieter now. The joke gone out of her voice.

I looked at the ceiling. Thought about the woman standing in my trauma bay with her hands hidden behind her back and her chin up like defiance was the last clean thing she owned.

"Yeah," I said. "I know."

The line held.

"If you have to... go medium," Sawyer said finally. Almost to herself.

Something in my chest had gone tight in a way I was not going to examine right now.

"Sure," I said. "Medium."

I could hear her smile through the phone, then she was gone. The text came through a few seconds after I hung up. An address.

She had been at home alone for hours with no one to check on her. She had lied about it, and I had suspected it at the time and let it go, and I was not particularly interested in examining the reason I had done that.

I reached for the prosthetic.

I had removed it twenty minutes ago and had not planned on putting it back on for several hours, and my body registered this change of plan in its own specific and unhurried way as I fitted the socket. I found my jacket.

This is a professional follow-up. A concussed patient who lied on discharge. That is all this is.

"Go medium," I said to the empty bedroom.

I grabbed my keys and went.

Your POV

Your hip hit the ground first. Then your shoulder. Then your cheek pressed into the asphalt hard enough that grit worked its way between your teeth and you tasted blood.

Your ears were ringing.

You could not hear anything clearly. Dull yelling somewhere above and around you, voices layered over each other in a language you recognised but could not process through the noise. Through the panic.

Something was pulled over your head, shrouding you in darkness. Rough fabric dragged against your face every time you moved. It smelled like gasoline, dust, wood smoke, and sweat. The air underneath it was hot and already used.

Was that an explosion? Where is Adam? Which way is up?

You were being pulled in more than one direction. Before you could form a complete thought, before you could get any kind of bearing, your wrists were yanked behind your back and someone forced you onto your knees.

You tried to pull away and they shoved you forward. With your hands tied there was nothing to catch yourself with. Your chest hit the ground then your face, the impact bright and immediate through the bag.

A sound left you. Not a word. Not even a scream. Just a low groan, involuntary, your body making room for pain that had not had time to locate itself yet. Your teeth had chipped. You were almost certain of it.

The bag came off.

Light hit you all at once.

You blinked, blinded. For half a second everything was only shapes. Sky. Dust. A figure crouching low in front of you, their outline a black silhouette against the glare, face invisible against the light.

They did not speak.

A cloth was forced into your mouth.

You tried to jerk back. A second set of hands held your head in place. Rope between your teeth, pulled tight, tied at the back of your skull. Your jaw screamed around it.

You tried to breathe but you couldn't get enough air.

Then the bag went back over your head.

The world shifted. Not all at once. In stages, like something folding over on itself slowly. The dirt became concrete. The sun became a weak yellow bulb. The air stayed hot.

You were in a room.

Dark. Damp. Humid enough that every breath came thick. Something dripping in the corner, steady and slow.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Your arms were tied behind the back of a chair. The gag still in your mouth. The bag gone. Cement walls. Cement floor. Cement ceiling. No windows. Weak yellow light bleeding around a doorframe somewhere, throwing pale shapes across the wet patches on the walls.

You turned your head as far as it would go. There was another chair behind you. Another body. You could not see who.

"Mmmhpk!"

Nothing.

"MMMHPK!"

Nothing.

Your pulse slammed against the rope at your wrists.

Then a sound from outside the room.

Clunk.

You went completely still.

Clunk.

Metal against metal. Getting closer.

Clunk.

Your chest tightened so hard there was no room left in it. The room felt smaller than it had a second ago. The dripping continued, indifferent.

No.

Clunk.

No. No. No.

Clunk.

The sound came again, louder, and every molecule of oxygen seemed to leave the room at once. You were gasping, fighting the gag, the sounds coming from your throat barely qualifying as human.

What is happening? What the fuck is happening?

A door you hadn't seen swung opened.

Your eyes snapped open.

You gasped. Air hit your lungs real and immediate and there, and before you could finish your first breath a shriek had escaped.

You jolted upright. Sweat everywhere. The sheet twisted around your waist. Photos slid off the bed in a cascade of glossy paper. Your chest heaved.

For several seconds you did not know where you were.

You were in the room. In the chair. You were at the perimeter wall and the light was wrong and you were on your knees in the dirt.

Then the crack in the blinds. Daylight through it, sharp and gold.

Pittsburgh.

Your apartment.

Your bed.

You dragged in one breath. Then another. Your heart was still running too fast.

Bang. Bang.

You froze.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

Someone was at the door.

Kalista.

You threw the blanket back. Photos scattered. You had forgotten they were there. You had forgotten falling asleep.

Where was your prosthetic? There, rolled just out of reach while you were sleeping.

"Shit."

Bang. Bang. Bang.

"I'm coming!" Your voice came out rough, half-strangled. "One second!"

You slid to the floor and reached for it, dragging it back with one hand while gripping the bed frame with the other. Adrenaline already moving through your system before you had time to process being awake. You got the liner wrong on the first attempt and swore again as you corrected it.

Another knock. Harder.

"Okaaaay!"

You forced the prosthetic on quickly. Too quickly. The socket did not seat right. You knew immediately. The pinch returned high on your inner thigh, sharp enough that your vision briefly flared at the edges.

You powered through it. You stood, took one step, and nearly went down.

"Fuck."

You caught yourself on the bedpost and pushed off it. Walking hurt. Hopping was faster. You crossed the bedroom in an undignified half-lurch on your right leg when the left became too unreliable to trust.

By the time you reached the front door you were breathing hard.

You grabbed the handle, leaned your weight into it, and pulled it open.

"Kalista, I was so—"

The words stopped.

Dr. Jack Abbot looked back at you.

For a moment, neither of you said anything.

He was not in scrubs. Sweats, a plain T-shirt and a jacket over it like he had not planned to be out long. His hair was slightly damp at the edges, silver threaded through it at the temples. He looked tired in a way that made him seem more human and, somehow, more irritating for it.

The T-shirt did not leave much to the imagination. The fabric pulled across his shoulders and chest in the way that happened when someone had built that breadth through actual use rather than habit, and he was broader than you had registered in the trauma bay. Broader, and stiller, and looking at you with an expression that was working very hard to stay neutral and landing just slightly to the left of it.

His eyes moved over your face once.

Not lingering. Assessing.

You became immediately and violently aware that you were standing behind a half-open door in sleep shorts and a T-shirt, hair damp with sweat. Your saving grace was that the door was covering the prosthetic completely.

"What are you doing here?"

Your voice came out sharper than you intended.

His gaze did not drop below your face.

"Before you think I'm a creep," he said, "I got a call from an old friend. Frances Sawyer."

You stared at him.

Then, before you could stop it: "How do you know Sawyer?"

His mouth shifted slightly. "Served alongside her. Late nineties. Same rotation for a long time." Then his eyes came back to yours, direct. "She called me last night. Said there was a physician in Pittsburgh, recently separated from the Army, who might need a professional hand." He let the air between us hang. "The description sounded familiar."

Something inside you tightened.

"What did she tell you?"

"Enough."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one you're getting from me at your front door." He held your gaze, steady, making no move toward you and no move to leave. Then his eyes dropped, briefly and deliberately, from your face to the hand you had wrapped around the doorframe.

Your knuckles. Split open again, stitches torn, dried blood along the breaks.

"Your stitches are gone," he said.

"I noticed."

"When."

You did not answer.

"You need those closed again."

"I'll manage."

"With which hand?"

Your eyes met his, neither of you moved.

"I have a suture kit," he said. "It's in my car."

"You don't have to—"

"You have a concussion, you're alone, and only one of those hands is your dominant one." His voice was not unkind. It was simply direct, in the way that did not leave much room for argument. "Accept the help."

You looked at your knuckles. The dried blood and the scabs were cracking along the gaps where the stitches had been. You knew, from both professional and very recent personal experience, that stitching your non-dominant hand would be a miserable exercise in stubbornness that your body would fight you through from start to finish.

"Fine," you said. "The door will be unlocked."

He nodded once and turned for the stairwell. That must have been how he got up here. You had not buzzed him in.

The second his back was to you, you moved.

Not rushing. Rushing led to falling, and you were not falling in front of him. But you moved with purpose, down the hall, into the bedroom. You let the sleep shorts drop and stepped into the baggiest pair of track pants you owned, working them up and settling them at your waist, the leg of the left side sitting loose and full over the socket. Socks, pulled high. Back out into the hallway.

The apartment was clean. Military clean, the habit too deep to shake regardless of what else was falling apart. The photo albums on the bookshelf. The stacked loose prints. Sawyer's two envelopes, still sealed, sitting where you had placed them. Your room was another matter entirely, but the door was closed and it was staying that way.

The bathroom door was also closed.

Do not think about the bathroom.

The prosthetic was pinching with every step, the blister along the socket line that had almost certainly torn somewhere on the bathroom floor burned. You settled onto the couch and adjusted your position until the pressure dropped from sharp to merely present.

The front door opened.

He came in quietly, the way attentive people moved through spaces that were not theirs. The suture kit was a small sealed case, the kind that lived in emergency bags and car compartments and suggested a person who did not go far without being prepared for contingencies.

He sat in the armchair across from you and opened the kit on the coffee table between you.

His eyes moved around the room the way they had in the trauma bay. Not intrusively. Just taking things in a beat longer than most people did. They moved across the bookshelf, across the stacked albums and loose prints on the lower shelf, across the two sealed envelopes. They slowed there for just a second.

He did not say anything. He opened a packet of saline and began cleaning your right hand.

"Any vomiting?"

"No."

"Vision changes since discharge?"

"No."

"Headache worse?"

"Not really."

He glanced up. Something in his expression noted the answer and filed it.

"Dizziness?"

When you were on the bathroom floor, yes.

"No."

He looked at you. Not at your words, exactly. Past them, at the space around them. Then he looked back down at your hand and kept working.

"Did you lose consciousness at any point?"

"I was sleeping."

"That's not what I asked." He waited with the patience of a man who had nowhere else to be and was not going to fill the silence for you.

"No," you said. "I did not lose consciousness."

"Good." He worked for a moment in quiet. You watched his hands. Precise. Practiced. Nothing needed adjusting.

Then, without looking up, he said, "Sawyer tells me you're starting at PTMC."

The words did not arrange themselves into meaning immediately.

"What?"

That got a reaction. His eyes came up, and you could see, very briefly, the recalibration of a man who had just realised he was the first person to deliver news he had not been given permission to deliver.

"She didn't tell you."

"No."

"When did you last check your email?"

You thought about it genuinely.

"I'm not sure," you admitted. "Months, maybe. It slipped my mind."

The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite amusement. Something adjacent to it. He looked back down at your hand.

"Admin has signed off on preliminary discussions," he said, working through the suture. "Observation period first. Limited duties, supervised. Credentialing will take time because your training history was complicated by the deployment structure, but it's workable." He clipped the thread on the last stitch of the first hand and moved to the second.

You were still processing.

Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Centre. The Pitt. It was not the field. Not deployment. Not Salerno. Not the thing you had lost and had been trying to claw your way back to for months through sheer wanting. But it was medicine. Real medicine, in a real facility, with real equipment and a full staff and all the particular aliveness of a trauma centre running at capacity.

Something was trying to open in your chest. You recognised the shape of it and pressed it carefully back down before it could get any larger. It was not a job yet. It was preliminary discussions and limited duties and credentialing paperwork. You had been disappointed before by things that sounded like they were finally going right.

But Sawyer had told you to trust her, and you had, and here it was.

He finished the second hand and clipped the thread.

"I owe you an apology," you said.

He looked up, "for what?" His voice had a quality that suggested he already knew but wanted to hear it.

"For implying you weren't paying attention in medical school."

"You more than implied."

"You were being condescending."

"I was asking standard triage questions."

You looked at him. He looked at you. Something in the space between you was trying to become amusement and not quite getting there yet.

"We were apparently trained under some of the same conditions," he said.

"Apparently." You considered him for a moment. "Though I imagine your charts were done by candlelight with an ink and quill."

His mouth shifted. "Charts. On a good night I had a headlamp and a prayer."

"Bosnia?" The question came out before you had decided whether or not to ask.

He looked at you steadily, "Kosovo," he said, "mostly."

"The war nobody talked about."

"No ticker tape parades," he agreed, quietly.

It sat there between you for a moment. That particular acknowledgement. The kind that did not require elaboration.

Then he set the kit aside and looked at you directly.

"I know," you said.

"I know you know."

"Knowing versus doing," you said it flat like it was going in one ear and out the other. "Separate skill sets. You've mentioned that."

"I'll keep mentioning it."

"I assumed," you scoffed.

He stood, suture kit in hand, and moved toward the kitchen. You meant to follow him immediately, but your first attempt at rising from the couch met a moment of resistance you had not accounted for, your weight shifting onto the left leg before the prosthetic had confirmed it was ready for that, and you dropped back down before you caught yourself.

His back was turned. He had not seen it.

Your second attempt was clean. You stood, rolled your shoulders back by habit, and followed him into the kitchen.

Like he had been here before, he went straight to the trash bin and disposed of the kit without comment.

It was as he was turning toward the hallway that you noticed it.

A slight shift in how he held himself when he changed direction. A barely-there compensation through the hip, a specific and practised redistribution of weight that most people would read as nothing more than a confident stride.

You did not read it as nothing. You had seen it, and you could not unsee it. Something in your chest had shifted in a way you did not yet have words for.

She opened the door and he stepped out into the hallway. Then he stopped and turned back to look at her.

"Thank you," you said. "Genuinely."

Something in his face settled, easier than it had been at any point since he had appeared in your doorway.

"For the stitches. And for coming." It was harder to say than it should have been, but you said it. "I know you didn't have to."

"Don't tear them again."

"I'll do my best."

"Check your email."

"I will."

"Today."

"Today."

At the corner of his mouth, a twitch. A small, contained smile that arrived like it had somewhere specific to be. Not the controlled expression from the trauma bay. Something else. It did not soften him exactly. He did not seem like a man who softened by accident. But it settled the tired set of his eyes into something warmer, and it changed the whole geography of his face in a way that was, against your will, quite something to look at.

He has a good smile. Do not. He is your future attending physician and he is obviously much older than you and you need to stop thinking about that.

You shelved the thought so fast it barely had time to breathe.

"I'll see you in The Pitt," he said. Simply, like a thing already decided. "Goodbye, Dr. Abbott," he added. "Two T's."

You rolled your eyes. He turned and started down the hallway. You held onto the doorframe.

"Dr. Abbot." It felt weird calling your own name but for someone else.

He stopped and turned just enough to look back at you.

"What exactly did Sawyer tell you about me?"

He was quiet for a moment, considering.

"She told me you were worth the trouble," he shrugged. "Past that, she said the rest was yours to give."

You held his gaze and nodded once. He nodded back, then turned away.

He walked to the elevator. You stood in your doorway with one hand on the frame, your prosthetic pinching, your knuckles neatly stitched, something cautious and unfamiliar sitting just below your sternum that you were not going to look at too directly.

The elevator doors closed.

You stepped back from the door and closed it, resting your back against it.

Quiet. Odd, almost--not just the apartment but your own head. You were not used to that.

You stood in it and let the last hour move through you. The strange, clarifying quality of someone who had looked straight at you without looking away. Who had not offered you a pass or a consolation. Who had walked the same terrain and come out the other side and somehow, without saying any of it directly, made you feel like that was something you were also allowed to do. Who had sat across from you and stitched your hands and spoken to you like a colleague rather than a casualty.

Then:

Oh, fuck. My car.

You let your head fall back against the door with a soft thud, eyes closing, a long slow breath leaving your chest.

And just like that, the quiet was gone.

AN: Thank you again! This is so surreal to me. Having people read my work and like it enough to come back genuinely means so much. I really do appreciate it more than I can say.

I've also attempted to make a taglist for those who asked! If you'd like to be added just let me know and I'll do my best. Comments, reblogs, and thoughts are always welcome <3

It was almost comical, you had to admit. Nine large boxes covered in dust with god knows what inside. Three duffels and two backpacks full of clothes and miscellaneous hygiene products. A disassembled bed frame with no mattress. An L-shaped olive green velvet couch that came with the apartment. The massive trunk Kalista had just helped you drag upstairs. And a few other odds and ends sitting static in a living space that was, by any measure, far too large for what you'd brought to fill it.

The apartment was nice, genuinely nice. A long hallway from the entrance opened through a wide arch into the living room. The kitchen and eating area sat beyond that, and covering the entire back wall was a gigantic semi-circle of windows that caught the afternoon light in a way that had sold you on this place before you'd even finished the tour.

You loved the sun. It gave you a kind of peace you couldn't fully articulate, just a steadiness, like being reminded the world was still turning. Large windows had been your only non-negotiable when you were searching. The balcony was through the sliding glass doors, and on a clear day you imagined you could stand out there and feel almost normal.

There were two bedrooms. The master had an ensuite. The second sat on the opposite end of the apartment with its own bathroom and a standing shower. Both had decent closets. Laundry was in-suite. You could walk a straight line from the front door all the way through to the balcony without turning.

You liked it. You did. But it felt strange, all this space, just for you. You weren't used to that. You weren't sure you'd ever been used to that.

"I just got back," you say, setting your keys on the kitchen counter. "I've been away for a while. Couldn't carry much with me on the road."

You look at the girl still standing in your doorway. Light brown hair, blue eyes, olive skin. A few dainty floral tattoos running up her forearms, nothing heavy, just delicate lines and small blooms. She was dressed in blue denim and a fitted white top with ARMY printed across the chest in block letters.

Ironic.

Something stirred in you that you didn't want to name. A small, irrational heat moving up through your chest. You recognized it before it could get any further. Your therapist had a word for it, something about intrusive emotional responses, about how the brain codes certain stimuli as threats long after the actual threat is gone. You knew the theory. That didn't always make it easier.

Unjustified. She doesn't know. You have no right to be upset with her for wearing a shirt.

Before it can build, you breathe in through your nose and let it go slowly. You scan the room the way Dr. Osei had taught you. One, boxes. Two, duffels. Three, the grey walls. Four, the balcony door. Five, the kitchen counter. You feel your pulse settle.

"You said you just got back?" Kalista interrupted your thoughts, tilting her head. "From where?"

Your mouth moved a half-second before your brain caught up. "Afghanistan. Iraq. Kuwait for a stretch. South Sudan. Most recently Syria." You paused. "I spent the last three years doing my residency embedded with a forward surgical team. It's like a Forward Operating Base. Salerno was my primary, but we moved around a lot. Combat medicine, mostly trauma." You glanced down. A breath snagged somewhere in your chest. "I got sent home."

"Sent home?" She said it carefully, like she wasn't sure she was allowed to ask.

"I was a medical intern when I deployed… made it through two and a half years of my physician residency." You kept your voice even. "Then I was involved in an incident and I lost it a little." A short, humourless sound escaped you that wasn't quite a laugh. "Honourably discharged. Sent home three-quarters of the person I used to be." You felt the tears threaten the back of your eyes and looked deliberately past her until the feeling passed. "My sergeant major, she's the one who convinced me to come to Pittsburgh. Said she had connections here, that she'd find me something. So here I am."

"So you're a doctor," she said slowly, "and a soldier." Her eyes had gone wide, the way people's eyes went when they were recalibrating everything they thought they knew about a conversation. "What happened to you?"

And then, before you could even form a beginning, she pulled it back.

"I'm so sorry, I didn't mean, I--" She was already backtracking, hands up, eyes apologetic. She'd clearly clocked something in your face you'd been trying to hide.

"It's okay," you said, and meant it, more or less. "You're the first person I've actually talked to in this city. Aside from the airport clerk at baggage claim and a taxi driver."

True. Completely true.

You didn't have anyone in Pittsburgh. You didn't have anyone anywhere, not anymore. Not after--

"Are you okay?" she asked. "Now, I mean." A beat. "You don't have to answer that either."

You considered it honestly. Were you okay? Right now, at this moment, you were distracted by the moving, by the boxes, by the task of standing in a new city in a new apartment and figuring out what came next. That counted for something.

"I think so?" It came out more like a question than a statement. "I'm still adjusting." You reached down and lifted the hem of your left pant leg, just enough. The prosthetic caught the light, cool gunmetal, carbon fibre casing below the knee, a replacement for what had been amputated eight months ago on the second worst day of your life.

"Woah--" Her eyes went wide. "Sorry, I didn't mean to--"

"It's okay," you cut her off, not unkindly. "That's the look I give it too."

She was quiet for a moment. Then something shifted in her face, not pity exactly. Something more like recognition of the weight of it, without pretending to understand the specifics. You appreciated that more than you could explain.

Kalista was the first person, outside of medical staff and your commanding officer, who knew about the leg. And that small honesty, those two sentences and a lifted hem, was probably the most vulnerable you'd allowed yourself to be in months. You weren't sure why you'd done it. Maybe because she'd helped carry your trunk without being asked. Maybe because the city felt enormous and you had no one in it.

You didn't notice the tears until you felt her arms around you. Quick and warm and a little fierce, like she'd decided and acted before she could second-guess herself.

"Sorry if that was weird," she said, already pulling back. "I just thought you might need a hug." She looked at you then, direct and unhesitating. "Okay, listen. You're new to the city. You're clearly an incredibly cool human being. You're a doctor and a soldier and--" she gestured at you in a way that managed to be both sincere and ridiculous, "honestly you're a little intimidating to look at. And I know what it's like to show up somewhere alone and not know a single person." She held her phone out. "Give me your number. Text me. Let's be friends."

You let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "I don't need a pity friend."

"Not a pity friend. Your first friend in Pittsburgh." She smiled, wide and bright and genuinely warm.

"I don't even know your last name."

"Okay, fine." A dramatic sigh. "Hi. My name is Kalista Reid. I'm 28, I live in unit 601 across the hall, and I am currently offering you my very limited and highly sought-after friendship." She looked at you expectantly.

The wall you'd been quietly reinforcing for months, the one you'd rebuilt piece by piece since the field hospital, since the flight home, since all of it, gave a single, audible crack.

"Hi," you said. "My name is Y/N. I'm 28. I live in unit 600." The corner of your mouth moved against your will.

"So you don't have a last name?" Her eyebrow lifted.

"Y/N Abbott."

"Y/N Abbott." She grinned. "It's very nice to meet you."

Four Days Later

Over the next few days, you and Kalista got to know each other with the particular intensity of two people who had stumbled into each other's orbit at exactly the right moment. She told you about working her way up through Pittsburgh's restaurant kitchens over the last decade, starting at the bottom, learning every station, building the kind of skill that only repetition and stubbornness could produce. She was a sous chef now at a place downtown that she described as "fancy but not pretentious, there's a difference." She told you about her family, her exes, her running roster of hobbies, and the exhaustive, occasionally unhinged details of her most recent love affair, which had ended with her walking out of a restaurant mid-entree and not looking back.

"So I couldn't take it anymore and I left him," she finished, landing the story with the satisfaction of someone who had told it several times and still enjoyed it.

"I would have left too," you said, still laughing.

The more you learned about her, the more it became clear that you could not have been more different. Her life was spontaneous and colourful and moved fast, with a particular kind of warmth that filled whatever room she was in. Yours had been structured and precise and governed by protocol for so long that you'd nearly forgotten what the alternative felt like. Maybe that was what made it easy. She was unlike anyone you'd spent real time with in years.

Four days in, you'd unpacked almost everything. A mattress had arrived. Kalista had strong opinions about throw pillows and had escorted you, somewhat against your will, to a home goods store where she'd made several executive decisions on your behalf.

The apartment was starting to look inhabited.

She stood up from the couch and wandered toward the last unpacked box, sitting near the far wall.

"You still haven't touched this one?"

"It's just books," you said, a little too quickly. You gestured for her to leave it.

"I like to read." She picked it up. It was heavier than it looked, and you knew that. She set it down closer to you, just out of arm's reach, and opened the flaps.

Everything in you went still.

Your heart rate spiked before your brain had time to explain why. The room began to contract slightly at the edges. You could hear your pulse in your ears, low and fast and rhythmic. The urge to reach over and close the box, to put your body between Kalista and whatever was inside it, rose up so sharply it took real effort to stay seated.

"These are so cute," she said, already lifting one of the photo books. "Is this baby Y/N?"

Breathe.

"Yeah," you said. "Baby Y/N." You reached out and pulled the cardboard gently toward yourself. Inside were at least fifteen photo albums, stacked in neat rows. A careful, chronological documentation of a life. "Oh, look at this one, you're naked!" She turned the book around, and there was a two-year-old version of you sitting in a bathtub with a rubber duck, completely unabashed.

The laugh that came out of you was real. "My dad never put his camera down. He was a photographer." You dug through the box, dug was generous, you knew exactly where it was, and found a photo of him taking a picture of himself in a mirror, grinning at his own reflection.

"Aw, that's your dad?" Kalista's face softened. "He looks nice. Where does he live?"

The smile left your face before you could catch it.

You stood up, shifted your weight, you still caught yourself compensating with the prosthetic when you moved too quickly, and walked to your room. You came back with a small box, the size of something you could hold in both hands. Solid dark oak, hinged at the back, with ABBOTT engraved across the lid in clean block letters surrounded by delicate filigree work. You set it on the cushion between you and unclasped the lid.

Red velvet lining. Three small urns, each a different size, sitting in fitted recesses. Nestled beside them, a small photo book, normal paperback size, worn at the corners, filled with pictures from before. Before everything. And beside that, a small chocolate brown leather box.

"Kalista," you said quietly, "this is my family. My mom, my dad, and my brother."

"Y/N--"

"My parents died when I was nine. Car accident." You said it the way you'd learned to say it, evenly, without pausing, because pausing let other people's grief into the room and you didn't always have space for it. You opened the small photo book and began turning pages slowly as you talked, not really seeing the images, just needing something to do with your hands. "A drunk driver ran a red light and hit us hard." You could close your eyes and still be there, upside down in the back seat, the airbags deflating around you, the smell of gasoline and something metallic, glass covering what should have been the ceiling. "My mother died on impact. My dad survived the crash itself but a steel rod had come through the windshield. It tore through his diaphragm, the left lobe of his liver, his stomach, his pancreas." A pause. "The abdominal aorta. I know now that he could never have survived that kind of injury. Nobody could."

Kalista had gone very still.

"My brother Hunter was fourteen. He woke up before I did. I don't know how long he was conscious in that car before anyone came." You turned a page. Hunter at seven, squinting into the sun. "He was never quite the same after. There were good stretches, real ones, where he felt like himself again. But he got into drugs." A slow exhale. "When I was sixteen, his girlfriend called me. She said he wasn't moving. I didn't have a car so I got on my bike and rode as fast as I could. I don't know why she didn't call 911, maybe she panicked, maybe she was scared because of the drugs, but he was gone by the time I got there." You reached the last page. The four of you, smiling, in a photo taken by a stranger outside some restaurant you couldn't remember the name of. You closed the cover. "I'd seen him come back from an overdose before. Not this time."

"Fuck," Kalista said softly. A tear ran down her chin.

"Yeah." You looked at the small wooden box. "But I've got them all here." You pressed your hand flat against the centre of your chest.

She hugged you again, tighter this time, like she was trying to hold something together. This time, you let yourself lean into it. Just slightly. Just enough.

She sniffed, swiped at her face, and looked deliberately at the stack of photo books with the energy of someone actively choosing to change the temperature of the room. "Okay. What about all of these? Are these all from the military?"

"Some." You pulled a few toward you and passed her one. "Military, university, med school, residency. A lot of years."

You flipped through pages slowly, giving her the shorthand version of each face. Your first squad, the five of you in a circle shoulder to shoulder like you're a football team huddling in between downs. The commanding officer, Sergeant Major Sawyer, who'd cornered you after a particularly gruelling week in your second year and told you flatly that you were too smart to be doing what you were doing and that if you didn't apply for the HPSP scholarship she would personally make your life difficult until you did. Pages and pages filled with years of memories with friends who'd become family across three deployments.

Then you turned a page and stopped.

The photo was taken outside in harsh midday sun, both of you in full kit. Operational camouflage pattern. Modular Scalable Vest loaded with ballistic plates, MOLLE-mounted magazine pouches, a radio pouch, an IFAK strapped along his side. His combat helmet was on the ground at your feet, discarded, technically against protocol, and absolutely characteristic. Your med kit sat next to it, enormous and overstuffed. Both of you had M4 carbines hanging on two-point slings across your chests. He was bent toward you and you were on your toes. Most of his face was turned away from the camera, but what was visible was enough, a jaw, the line of a neck, the particular way his whole posture changed when he was looking at you.

"Who," Kalista said slowly, "is THAT."

"It's a sensitive subject," you said, the words coming out before you'd made any conscious decision to speak.

"Oh, I'm sorry, you don't have to--" She was already pivoting, alarmed that she'd pulled on something load-bearing.

The doorbell rang.

You both looked up.

"Be right back." You got up carefully and crossed to the door.

A delivery driver stood in the hallway, scanner in hand. "Package for Abbott?"

"That's me."

"First name?"

"Y/N."

"Sign here." He handed over the clipboard. You scrawled your name and took the box from him. The size of a briefcase, heavier than it looked. You turned it over in your hands, searching for a return address, and found the sender's name printed in the top left corner in black block letters.

F. SAWYER.

Your sergeant major.

You stood in the hallway for a moment, just holding it.

You passed back through the living room and went to the kitchen, looking for scissors. Your hands were steady. That was something.

"Who is it?"

"A package from... an old friend."

"Ooooh, is it the old friend in that picture?" Kalista's voice carried around the corner, and you could hear the raised eyebrow in it.

"No, he was..." you trailed off, finding the scissors and cutting the tape. "Not the same person." You carried the box to the couch and sat down.

You folded back the cardboard.

A breath you hadn't known you were holding left your body all at once.

The tears came before anything else. Not the slow, manageable kind, the kind that blur everything immediately, that make the walls feel closer and the air feel thinner. Your pulse was in your ears again. A high thin ringing started up somewhere behind your eyes.

And then, just as fast, you shut it down.

Not here. Not right now.

You pulled each feeling back as it surfaced and pushed it down into the place you kept things like this, deep in the pit of your stomach, that quiet abyss where you could put the things that would break you if you gave them room. You sealed it. Breathed. Wiped your face with the back of your hand.

When you exhaled, you were steadier. You looked at Kalista, who was watching you with the careful expression of someone who understood she was witnessing something she hadn't been given the full context for yet.

"Holy shit," she said quietly, leaning in.

The box was packed with photographs. Hundreds of them, four-by-six glossy prints, stacked in loose rows, sorted into stacks. In the centre on top of all the photos sat two envelopes. One large tan envelope, stamped:

CONFIDENTIAL SGT. A. HANDSCOMBE

The other a letter-sized white envelope with your name written on the front by hand. Sawyer's handwriting, tight and slanted and unmistakable.

You picked both envelopes up and held them together. Something slid loose from between them and landed on top of the photographs.

A small clear plastic bag. Inside it, a ring. White gold, plain textured band, solid and unadorned.

"Oh my god--" Kalista stopped herself.

You reached up and found the chain around your neck, thin white gold, and pulled it out from beneath your shirt. Hanging from the end of it, a marquise-cut diamond in a white gold setting, delicate, distinctive, completely itself.

A perfect match for the ring sitting in the bag.

Kalista didn't say anything. She didn't need to.

"I'll give you the short version," you said, before she could ask.

And so you told her about him.

Adam Handscombe. Everyone who'd served with him for more than a week called him Corporal Handsome, a nickname that had attached itself to him when he was promoted to E-4 and refused to leave even after he'd made Sergeant. He'd introduced himself by the wrong name, or so you'd thought, the very first week you enlisted.

You met him at eighteen. He was twenty, two years in, already PFC and moving fast. He was assigned to show new arrivals around the FOB.

"Private Handsome?" You'd stared at him.

"Hands-combe." He'd said it the way you said things to someone who'd asked you to repeat themselves three times, efficient, not unkind, with the particular cadence of a man who had corrected this exact misunderstanding many times before. "But it doesn't hurt the ego either way."

You'd laughed. You weren't sure why, except that something in his delivery had been so entirely, disarmingly certain of itself.

You were flipping through photographs with Kalista as you talked. Sawyer had organized them, of course, dated on the back, sorted chronologically.

You'd always documented your life the way your father had, snapping pictures and getting them printed, building a physical record the way other people kept journals. You hadn't met anyone who understood that impulse until Adam. He'd kept a small digital camera in a pocket he'd sewn into the inside of his vest, completely against regulation, a rule he'd made peace with on the grounds that he wasn't photographing anything "classified". He'd photograph the sun going down over the base perimeter, the way the light turned everything amber at a certain angle. He'd photograph you looking at that same sunset, unaware, and you wouldn't find out until later.

You hadn't looked at most of these pictures in a very long time.

Then you turned to a spread and there the two of you were, surrounded by soldiers, white confetti paper thrown in the air, both of you laughing in the middle of all of it. Married. You looked at the place on your hand where the rings used to sit, the engagement ring now on the chain at your throat, the wedding band in the small chocolate brown leather box inside the oak box with your family.

"How did he..." Kalista started, and couldn't finish it.

"We didn't work together directly," you said carefully. "The Army discourages married couples from serving in close proximity, but in practice it didn't mean much. He was a Ranger with the 75th, I was attached to the forward surgical unit, our days rarely crossed." You paused. "He came by the medical centre at the end of his shift. We'd been married for seven days." You stopped. Swallowed. "He'd gotten hold of a small bouquet of flowers somewhere. I still don't know how, out there. Maybe a dozen, wrapped in brown paper. He called it a seven-day anniversary. We left through a back exit and walked toward a section of the perimeter wall that wasn't heavily monitored, hard to approach from the road, off to the side. We used to go there in the evenings sometimes. Just to talk." Another pause. "It was the perfect spot for an ambush."

"So, Mrs. Handscombe," he'd said, pulling himself up onto the wide ledge at the top of the gate, laughing as he said it.

"I haven't changed it yet," you told him, taking the hand he offered. "I love Abbott. I don't want to lose it."

"Then don't change it." He said it simply, like it was the easiest decision in the world. "We can be Sergeant Handscombe and Resident Physician Abbott, the perfect team that everyone is jealous of."

Then he kissed you. His hand came up to your jaw, tilting your face to his, and his lips met yours with the kind of certainty that never got old, soft at first, then fuller, like a sentence that started quietly and meant everything by the end. You felt it the way you always felt it with him: the particular warmth that moved through your chest, the way the rest of the world went a little quieter. You'd been in love with this man for years and it still felt like the first time someone had decided to choose you, completely, without reservation.

You loved him.

The thought moved through you clean and simple and enormous.

And he loved you back. You had never doubted that, not for a single day. He knew you the way very few people ever get to know another person: the way you thought before you spoke, the thing you needed before you asked for it, the difference between the silence that meant you were okay and the silence that meant you weren't. You knew him just the same. You were the same shape, the two of you, just made differently.

"I love you," you said, into the space between you.

"I love you too." He pressed his forehead to yours, that wide ridiculous smile breaking across his face. "Okay, I have to tell you what happened with Rosenberg today. We were out in the--"

BANG.

One tear fell from your face and landed on the photograph in front of you. Adam on one knee, brown leather ring box in his right hand, digital camera angled upward in his left, documenting the moment from both sides at once, because of course he was. The next photo was his, taken from below, looking up at your face. Ring box in the lower frame. Your expression: a smile so wide it had taken over everything else, tears already streaming, clearly mid-yes.

That had been one of the best days of your life.

You and Kalista sat together for a long time after that. You told her stories about Adam, about the life that had existed before FOB Salerno and everything that happened there. At some point food was ordered and wine was opened, and somehow, without either of you quite deciding it, you had found yourself in a real friendship.

You didn't mind.

Three Days Later

Kalista had, through what you could only describe as a sustained campaign of low-grade social pressure, convinced you to go out.

You had agreed reluctantly, conditionally, with the caveat that you weren't going to wear anything that made you feel like a different person.

She took one look at your wardrobe and vetoed the entire premise. "We're going to my place first," she said, already walking across the hall.

She found you a pair of low-rise flared black leather jeans that sat just right, no chance of the prosthetic showing unless you lifted the pant leg, and a shimmering silver top that fell a couple of inches above the waistband and caught the light when you moved. Black leather jacket over the top. Your Docs already on your feet, needing no intervention.

"Okay," she said, stepping back to look at you, "I need you to know that you are genuinely unfair to look at."

You laughed and grabbed your keys before leaving the apartment complex.

You drove. You weren't planning on drinking much.

The bar was loud and close and warm in the way bars got when they were packed, bodies everywhere, music you could feel in the floor more than hear through your ears, the particular energy of a Friday night in a city that took its Fridays seriously. You'd been to a bar maybe four times in medical school, most leaving before midnight. This was different. Kalista moved through it like she'd been coming here for years, which she probably had.

For a while, it was good. Better than you'd expected. You had a drink in your hand and your mind was occupied in the way it only got when there was enough sensory noise to crowd out the other things. You stood at the edge of the dance floor for a while, watching. A couple grinding against each other like they'd already decided where the night was ending. A group of women taking photos. A very large man being walked out by a bouncer with the resigned expression of someone who had done this many times tonight.

Kalista reappeared through the crowd with two drinks.

"I don't know if I should," you said, leaning in to be heard. "I drove."

"A couple of drinks won't kill you," she said, touching the bottom of your glass and tilting it upward. "Chug."

You didn't question it. You chugged. Cold and sweet, ice hitting your teeth at the end.

Somehow you ended up on the dance floor. Your body moved to the beat and for a while your brain was mercifully, completely quiet. A fine layer of sweat started at the back of your neck. You didn't know how much time had passed. You danced, you drank, you let go--just for a second. Eventually, Kalista tilted her head toward the exit and you followed her out through the front doors into the night air.

It hit you all at once, cold and clean, and you both stood there for a second, breathing it in.

"Oh my god you're so fun," Kalista said, arms spread wide, face tipped to the sky. She turned to you. "I am so happy you moved into my building."

"Me too," you said. And meant it.

To the left, a designated smoking area. A small cluster of people. You hadn't smoked since... you caught yourself. In a long time. The craving arrived the way it always did: specific and patient and completely uninterested in being reasoned with.

Kalista had already spotted someone. "Any chance we could bum a couple?" she asked, and a guy produced two without hesitation.

You thanked him quietly, lit yours, took a slow drag.

The nicotine moved through you in one clean wave.

Fuuuck. You'd missed that.

You weren't listening to the conversation next to you. You were just standing in it, watching the ember at the end of the cigarette, letting your mind go silent for the first time in days. That was the thing about cigarettes, the thing nobody liked to admit: they forced you to stop. To stand still. To breathe on a count.

"Shut the fuck up."

The words ripped you back instantly.

You turned just in time to hear the crack, the hard flat sound of a fist connecting with a face, and see Kalista go down.

You didn't think. That was the truth of it, and you would examine that truth later in the quiet of your apartment with a certain amount of unease. You didn't think. You just moved.

Kalista was on the ground, hands to her face. The man was enormous, well over six feet, broad through the shoulders, clearly drunk, which meant slower but also less predictable. You'd had a a few drinks, you'd been dancing for you don't know how long, and the adrenaline flooding your system was now at a concentration that made the alcohol irrelevant.

"Hey -- what the FUCK."

You hit him centre mass with your shoulder, driving your weight into his ribs. He staggered, more than you expected. His arms came up to push you back but you followed his arms and ripped them down before he could get the leverage, a defensive manoeuvre as automatic as breathing. He was stronger than you and you couldn't stay in a stationary grapple with someone this size. He recovered faster than you wanted. His fist came back and connected across the side of your face. You turned your head with it, an old reflex that saved you from the worst of it, but it still landed hard.

You saw red.

You hit his face. You drove a short jab to his midsection targeting the liver, then a sharp cross to his kidney. You couldn't feel the skin on your knuckles tearing apart as you hit him, blow after blow. He was drunk, which was the only reason this "plan" worked even slightly in your favour. You took him to the ground. You were on top of him, and somewhere between the first hit and the last you stopped counting, stopped thinking, stopped being in Pittsburgh entirely.

Someone grabbed you from behind, both arms around your torso, hauling you upright. You kicked and swung on pure reflex and they let go immediately. You could hear sirens under the ringing in your ears.

Kalista.

You ran to where she was sitting on the pavement, knees pulled to her chest.

"Let me look," you said, crouching beside her, two fingers tilting her chin upward. Doctor's hands now, steady, efficient, separated from everything else. Her nose had taken the full force of it. Deviated, visibly swollen, already darkening at the bridge. The shape was wrong. "We're going to need to go to the hospital," you told her, as gently as you could manage.

Behind you: "The one in the leather pants?"

A female officer. Calm, professional, expression giving nothing away. She had the particular stillness of someone who'd seen a lot of nights like this one.

"Ma'am. Can you come with me, please."

You stood and followed. Before she could start, you asked for the paramedics to go to Kalista first and gave them your initial assessment in a dozen words. Then you turned back to the officer.

"I can explain what happened."

"I'd appreciate that."

"We were in the smoking area. He started talking to her. I wasn't paying close enough attention." You kept your hands loose at your sides, your weight centred, your voice level. Your split and bloodied knuckles turned discreetly away. "I turned around when I heard him scream and she was already on the ground. I'm a combat physician. I reacted before I thought it through and I'm aware of that. But he broke her nose."

The officer looked at you, not at your face, but at the way you were standing. The way your weight was distributed. The way your hands were positioned. She'd seen this posture before, you could tell.

"Walk me through the part where you took down a man twice your weight and beat him bloody."

"He hit her. I reacted. I lost track of where I was for a moment." A pause. "That's not an excuse. It's what happened."

She studied you for a long beat. Then she glanced at your face, the bruising already darkening around your eye where his fist had landed, and something in her stern expression shifted. Not softness. Recognition.

"You took a hit too," she said, less like an observation and more like she was making a decision. "You should get that looked at."

"I'll be fine."

"You'll get it looked at," she said, and it wasn't a suggestion. She looked at the ground for a moment, working something through. "Multiple witnesses all put him as the one who threw first and her as the one who went down." She chose her next words carefully. "My read is he won't want to complicate this for himself. Not with that many people watching."

"That's not fair to her."

"No," the officer agreed, quietly. "It's not."

A pause.

"Am I being arrested?"

"Not tonight." She held your gaze for a moment. "Thank you for your service."

You nodded once and turned away.

Your feet didn't move immediately. You stood there, shoulders square, feet at shoulder width, hands loose at your sides. Alert. Waiting for a command that wasn't coming.

At ease.

You weren't sure if she'd said it or if you'd just needed to hear it. Either way, it was enough.

You made yourself walk to where the ambulance had pulled up. Kalista was on a gurney, pressing gauze to her face, looking simultaneously miserable and deeply unimpressed with how the evening had gone.

"Hey," you said, resting your hand on the edge of the stretcher. "How are you doing?"

"I'b been beder," she said, nasally, through the gauze.

You turned to the paramedic to her left. "Can I ride with her?"

He nodded. You climbed in.

The ambulance moved through downtown Pittsburgh, lights going, and you watched the paramedics work without interfering. You checked Kalista's vitals on the monitor, heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, all within acceptable range, and let yourself exhale slowly.

Then you looked at her again.

Something was slightly wrong.

Not wrong in the way that showed up on a monitor. Wrong in the way you had learned to read in places where the monitors weren't always available, where you had trained yourself to look at a person and take the information directly. The subtle asymmetry in her chest rise. The way she kept tilting her chin fractionally forward without seeming to notice.

Compensation.

Her airway was narrowing.

"Can you breathe okay?" you asked.

"Ib fine," she said.

"Kalista. Is your nose blocked on one side or both?"

A pause. "Both."

There it is.

"I need a penlight," you said to the paramedic on your right.

He looked at you properly for the first time. "Sorry, who are you exactly?"

"I'm her friend, who also happens to be a doctor. Something is wrong. I need a light."

He crossed his arms. "We're eight minutes out. Whatever you're thinking, it can wait until we're at the ED."

"It actually cannot wait." You kept your voice flat, clinical. "She's compensating. Her airway is narrowing. I can see it. Penlight. Please."

He looked to his partner looking for an answer, and you took action.

Fine. 

You reached past him, pulled a pair of gloves from the dispenser on the wall, and snapped them on. "I'm going to need an 18-gauge needle and an angiocath when you're ready to be helpful." You didn't wait. You used your own phone light, leaning in to check the inside of Kalista's nose, pressing gently along the septum.

There.

A dark, taut, blood-filled swelling just inside the nasal passage on both sides. A septal hematoma, and a growing one. Another couple minutes and she'd have no airway left before they reached the ED.

"She has a septal hematoma," you said, turning to him. "A blood clot forming inside the nose that's pressing on her airway. I need an 18-gauge needle. Now."

"That is not a procedure we perform in the rig--"

"Now!" You held his gaze. "I'm asking you to hand me a needle. I've drained these in a tent in the desert with a headlamp and no backup. I will take every ounce of responsibility. Hand me the needle or stand there and watch this get worse when it doesn’t have to. Your call."

He looked at you, at the blood stains peaking through the blue latex of the glove, at the bruise forming around your eye, at the expression on your face that had nothing uncertain in it.

He handed you the needle.

You worked quickly and gently, the kind of efficiency that doesn't look like speed but gets everything done. A clean puncture, the pressure releasing in seconds. Kalista made a small involuntary sound and then exhaled through both sides of her nose for the first time since she'd been hit.

"Oh," she said, blinking. "Oh, that's so much better."

"I know." You pressed a small piece of gauze into place. "Don't touch it."

The paramedic on your right was quiet for a moment. Then: "We're supposed to wait for the ED on something like that."

"Sometimes you have to think about the life in front of you and not the rules," you said. "That's how we did it over there. Quick and dirty, whatever keeps the patient breathing."

He nodded slowly, like something had been filed away.

The ambulance pulled into the bay. As the doors opened and the gurney came out, he turned back to you.

"This is going to be a lot of paperwork."

"Yeah," you said. "It usually is."

The paramedics handed Kalista off to the ED staff, rattling off vitals and status, and she disappeared through the doors on the gurney. You trailed behind, knowing you couldn't follow her into the trauma bay. You stopped at the threshold and watched her go.

The paramedic who was driving appeared at your shoulder. "You good?" He was looking at your face, specifically at the bruising around your eye and the cut at your temple, which you hadn't thought much about until right now. You lifted your hand to it and your fingers came back wet.

Oh. He'd hit you hard enough to break skin. 

You genuinely hadn't noticed. You looked down at your knuckles, split and still faintly seeping. You tried to remember what the guy looked like by the end and found you mostly couldn't.

That is not good.

"Yeah, I'm fine," you said, unconvincingly even to yourself. "I'll get a bandage or something."

"You should check in at the front desk." He gestured toward the waiting room doors.

"Yeah." You peeled away and turned left, and then your knee buckled.

Not all the way. You caught yourself on the way down, one hand out, taking a knee like you'd stumbled on uneven ground. And you were already pushing back up before you'd fully registered what had happened, both hands pressing off your right leg, forcing yourself upright through sheer stubbornness.

You'd be damned.

The prosthetic had slipped slightly in the socket, too much impact, too much movement, and somewhere in all of it you'd forgotten for a second that it was there. The paramedic was already at your elbow.

"Hey, are you sure you're alright?"

"Yeah." You locked your knee, felt the fit settle. "Just, yeah. I'm--."

"Who? Where is she."

The voice cut through the ED like something thrown hard at a wall. Sharp, loud, carrying the particular authority of someone who didn't raise their voice often and meant it when they did.

Both your head and the paramedic's snapped toward it.

Across the bay, near the nurses' station, a small crowd had formed. You could see the other paramedic from the ambulance talking rapidly to an older man, late forties maybe, with salt and pepper hair that curled slightly at the ends. His face was stoic. His jaw was set, his brow sharp, his posture absolutely squared. He was built like someone who had earned it over a long time and then kept it. Handsome in a way that caught you slightly off guard given the grey at his temples, the kind of face that had lived in it.

Wait. Did you just--

The thought dissolved because he was already moving toward you, and the paramedic beside you was making the face of a man who had just remembered somewhere else he urgently needed to be.

"Good luck," he said, and walked away before you could respond.

The man crossed the bay in firm, deliberate strides, not storming exactly, but with the kind of momentum that made people step aside without being asked. Something about the way he moved reminded you of Sawyer. The authority of it. The way his presence arrived just before he did.

Without thinking, you rolled your shoulders back. Feet--

Foot. 

Shoulder width apart. Hands behind you, right clasped over left.

He stopped in front of you. He looked you over in one full pass, head to toe and back up--assessing, cataloguing, and landing finally on your eyes.

"You were the one who drained a septal hematoma in a moving ambulance?" His words were measured. He was sizing you up, you could feel it, the same way you were sizing him up.

"Yes," you said. "And I would do it again."

Direct. No qualifier, no apology. He'd expected defensive and gotten something else entirely.

"And who gave you the authority to do that?"

You have to be kidding me.

"I did," you said, "when I saw her compensating while we were still eight minutes out from the ED with a narrowing airway." You held his gaze.

Something shifted in his face. Barely. You'd have missed it if you weren't watching.

"You saw her compensating," he repeated, flat. Testing whether you'd move.

You didn't. "She's my friend. What was I supposed to do, sit there and watch her struggle to breathe?"

He was angry, you could see it contained behind his eyes, carefully managed, the anger of someone who ran a tight ship and didn't appreciate unplanned variables. But he didn't blow.

"And you think," he said, "in this state—" he gestured, briefly, at your face, at the clear bruising forming around your eye— "you were making sound medical decisions?

You almost laughed. "Is she dead?"

He didn't answer right away.

You didn't let the silence sit. "No. She's not. Because I performed a clean field drainage of a septal hematoma." You held his gaze. "In a moving ambulance." You took one step toward him, ignoring the dull ache at your residual limb that you'd deal with later. "I knew exactly what I was doing and I can walk you through every decision I made. Or maybe," a beat, short and deliberate, "you weren't paying attention in medical school."

That landed. You could see it in the fraction of a second where his expression went from controlled to genuinely caught off guard.

He is attractive thou-- Stop. Absolutely not. Move on.

You held your ground. He held his. The two of you stood close enough that you could feel the air between you shift slightly. Neither of you looked away.

"Do not leave this hospital." He said it quietly, which was somehow worse than loud. He turned his head slightly without breaking eye contact. "Ellis."

A woman appeared just behind his left shoulder, a small smile already on her face like she'd been watching this unfold with great personal enjoyment.

"What's up."

"Take her to South 7. Check her out." Still not looking away from you. "Don't let her leave. Come get me when you're done." A brief pause. "And don't forget the knuckles."

How did he?

Your hands were behind your back. He couldn't have seen them. You kept your face perfectly still.

"Yeah, no problem." Ellis looked at you. You clocked her in your peripheral vision but didn't break eye contact. "Wanna follow me?"

You inhaled through your nose, slow and deliberate, and let it out the same way. One more second. Then you let it go, turned, and followed her.

The ED at night was its own world. As you followed Ellis through the bay you took it in without meaning to, gurneys lined against the walls, monitors beeping in overlapping rhythms, the low constant murmur of medical shorthand passing between staff. A full trauma centre, stocked and staffed and humming. You passed a medication cart that alone probably held more than your entire FOB pharmacy at Salerno. Supply closets with closed doors that you knew, without opening them, were full.

People here would not believe what we were working with over there.

You tucked it away.

Ellis held a door open and gestured to the bed inside. You sat, your feet dangling off the edge.

One foot. One... fucking atrocity.

"So," she said, turning to you with an expression that was openly, cheerfully curious. "You want to tell me what happened?"

"I got hit," you said. "And things got away from me."

She moved closer, tilting your face toward the light, probing carefully around your temple and cheekbone with two fingers. "That hurt?"

"Yeah."

She pressed gently at the back of your skull. "That?"

"Less."

"Follow my finger." She held up her index finger and moved it slowly left, then right. You tracked it. "Any nausea? Ringing in the ears?"

"Some ringing earlier. It's mostly gone."

"Blurry vision at any point?"

"No."

She made a small sound and reached for a dressing from the cabinet, pressing it carefully over the cut at your temple. "Looks like a mild concussion. Nothing alarming but nothing to dismiss. Someone should be checking on you every couple of hours tonight. Is there someone?"

"Yes," you said, a lie. You know concussion protocol and you know what happens if you say no, and you were in no mood to sit in a hospital hallway all night. 

She turned to her supplies. "I'd hate to see the other guy."

That made you laugh, a real one, small but genuine. "I think he actually beat me here."

You looked down at your hands, made two loose fists, watched the split skin across your knuckles where scabs were trying and failing to form. "Big white guy. Over six feet. Dragon tattoo on his neck. Drunk."

Ellis went very still. Then she turned around slowly, gauze in hand, and stared at you. "No. No way." She shook her head with the delighted disbelief of someone whose night had just become considerably more interesting. "I think I know exactly who you're talking about. He came in maybe five minutes before you, looked like he'd been through a car wash face-first."

That sat in your chest in a way that wasn't entirely comfortable. Even if he deserved it. Even if some part of you, somewhere dark and unfamiliar, had wanted to. You weren't someone who hurt people.

"Like I said," you said quietly. "It got away from me."

She worked while you talked, cleaning the cut at your temple, assessing your knuckles, asking questions in the easy unhurried way of someone skilled at making people forget they're being examined. You told her about Kalista. About the bar. About the ambulance.

"Okay, I have to ask," she said, not looking up from your hand. "How did you drain a septal hematoma in a moving ambulance?"

"I've done scarier procedures with less," you said. "It needed to be done. So I did it."

"Now I am hoping... you're a doctor?"

"Technically an R3." You looked at the ceiling for a second. 

She glanced up. "Technically?"

"I was completing my residency overseas. Afghanistan, Syria, a few others. I was on track to specialize in surgical trauma, combat medicine." You watched her close a small stitch across your knuckle. "Plans change."

"So you're back here now." She was quiet for a moment, reading what you didn't say. "Does that mean you were discharged?"

You let the silence answer for her. She got the message.

"Okay." She didn't push. "So what's next? Big plans for Pittsburgh?"

"No. I landed about a week ago. I've been setting up my apartment. Before that I was in Washington for a few months." The VA hospital in DC, the rehabilitation unit, the physical therapy ward where you'd learned to walk again, twice. You didn't say any of that. "My sergeant major told me to come here. Said she had connections. I'm hoping that turns into something."

"Something… meaning work?"

"Something meaning work."

Ellis looked out through the room's interior window into the bay for a moment, something turning over behind her eyes. "Because," she said, with the careful casualness of someone floating an idea they're pretending is a joke, "these jokers out there are getting predictable, and I have about fourteen follow-up questions about what happened to that guy in North 17." She turned back to you. "If you're an R3 and you know the right people, you might be able to get a position here. Theoretically."

You looked at her. She looked at you. Neither of you said anything for a second.

"What is this place called?" you asked.

She stood, set down her supplies, and performed a small formal bow. "Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Centre." She said it with ceremony. "But everyone calls it The Pitt."

You let out a breath that was close to a real laugh. "I like that."

She moved toward the door, then paused with her hand on the frame. "Seriously though, I was told to not let you leave. Can I trust you to stay put?"

"Yes." You looked at her, and she raised an eyebrow, and you raised your right hand. "Scout's honour."

She laughed. 

"I am waiting for the doctor I upset earlier, right?" 

"He's a good guy," she said, and she meant it. "You just caught him on a bad night. And whatever you said to him out there, definitely hit a nerve." She shook her head, still smiling. "Okay. I need to start you a chart. What's your name?"

"Y/N," you said.

"Last name?"

"Abbott." You spelled it out of habit. "A-B-B-O-T-T."

She didn't move right away. A smile was forming on her face, slow, like she was trying to hold something back.

"A-B-B-O-T-T?" she repeated.

"Yeah."

"Your… Dr. Abbott?"

"...Yeah? Why?"

"No reason," she said, too fast. Then she walked out the door, and you watched through the window as she made it approximately six steps before she started laughing.

You stared after her.

What on earth was that about?

Jack Abbot's POV

It had been a bad night before the ambulance pulled in.

It had been a bad day before that, if I was being honest, which I generally tried not to be when the alternative was getting through a shift. The ED was running at capacity, one of my attendings was out sick, and somewhere around hour nine I'd made a call I wasn't entirely sure about and had been quietly replaying it ever since, the way you did when you knew the outcome was fine but couldn't stop examining the path that got you there.

I was at the nurses' station when Kowalski came in off the rig.

I watched him approach and clocked immediately that he had something on his face. Not urgency. Something closer to preemptive apology.

"What," I said.

"So the patient we're bringing in has a broken nose, possible fracture… and a drained septal hematoma."

"Drained?" I said, turning to the chart.

"We drained it in the rig."

I looked up.

"Eighteen-gauge," Kowalski said. "Clean drainage, gauze in place, patient's airway is clear."

"And tell me why you would drain a septal hematoma in the rig."

"It wasn't me."

I put the chart down. "What do you mean it wasn't you."

"There was a woman with the patient. Friend of hers. She saw the compensation pattern before I did, before Jackson did, and she asked for the needle."

"You gave a civilian--"

"She said she was a doctor."

"You gave someone who said she was a doctor--"

"She knew what a septal hematoma was, she saw the compensation, she asked for specific equipment by gauge size, and she drained it clean in under thirty seconds in a moving vehicle." Kowalski paused. "I didn't exactly let it happen. She grabbed the gloves before I'd finished deciding. She saw it first. If she hadn't done anything--"

"Who." I cut him off. "Where is she."

Kowalski pointed.

I looked.

There was a woman standing with her back to me, talking to the other paramedic off the rig. Young, mid-to-late twenties. Dressed up, which meant she hadn't been working, which meant she was exactly the civilian I'd feared. She was bleeding on my floor, I noticed, a slow drip from her hands pooling faintly on the tile. I tracked it up: her knuckles.

Alright, Rocky.

Then my eyes went back to her posture. The way she was standing. Something registered that I didn't have words for immediately, just a small internal flag, the kind you made when a detail in a chart didn't fit the pattern and you didn't yet know why it mattered.

She had the posture of someone who'd been trained to have it.

My feet were moving before I'd consciously decided to move. She turned as I got close, and when she squared up to face me I saw the rest of it. Black eye, already darkening. A cut at the temple. Someone had hit her tonight, and by the look of those knuckles she'd returned the favour.

I also noticed, the way I noticed things I didn't mean to, that she was--

Stop.

"You were the one who drained the septal hematoma in a moving ambulance?" I kept my voice measured and looked her over once, head to toe, clinical, logging.