wild geese - jack abbot x reader
summary - Taking a leaf from Robby's book, you have a breakdown after a tough case, and it becomes apparent that even the brightest of attendings are held together by strings finer than you realised.
warnings/themes - hurt/comfort, attending!reader, established relationship, competent!reader, married couple with married couple vibes, burnt out!reader, I think of reader being in their mid-late thirties, so age gap but not a concerning one teehee, sprinkle of self-loathing, self-doubt, medical gore, child death, panic attack, a lot of grief/crying, many photos as story telling devices...medical inaccuracies left and right baby
note - Its been many, many moons since I wrote anything, let alone threw it up on the internet. This one was very self-serving and a bit cathartic. I personally think Abbot would have a massive competency kink...and I'm a sucker for a power couple. I hope you enjoy. Title inspired by the poem of the same name. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
“Stop all measures. Time of death, 4.14am.”
Three bleary-eyed residents, an intern and a pair of nurses took a collective breath as you stepped back from the table. A nurse silently turned off the heart monitor, bathing the room in silence.
“You all did well today.” You heard yourself say through your own heartbeat. “Crus, please close the body. I’ll begin treatment notes in a moment.”
The senior resident gave a single nod.
“Everyone else, take a breather and do any rounds you need to. We’ll meet back here for a moment of respect after the parents have been notified.”
Murmurs of acknowledgement went past as the trail of healthcare workers left the room. You followed, heartbeat roaring in your ears as you slipped into an empty consult bay.
The moment your previously blue, now bloodstained gloves were peeled from your fingers, you pressed the back of your hand against your chapped lips in a silent cry, sinking to the floor. The room you had disappeared into was dark, the silence marred only by the rhythmic sound of beeping medical equipment just outside the door bleeding in. That soft rhythm wasn’t the panicked blast of someone coding; that sound instead meant whoever was attached to it was still in the land of the living, likely with an overtired loved one tearfully gripping their hand as they rested, their vitals steadily ticking along. They still had time.
You wrapped your other arm around your centre, collapsing in on yourself, surgical gown crinkling as you did so. Your safety glasses sat next to you, abandoned when your gloves were. A spatter of congealing blood clung to the frame, the continuation of which sat on the skin of your cheek like a smear of copper lipstick. Your lungs shuddered as you smothered your own cry, coming out as a choked, confused sob. You could still feel the little girl’s heart in your hand. It had been a last ditch attempt to bring her back for long enough to insert a LVAD. Not that it worked.
You allowed yourself a few more seconds to release your misery, nails biting crescent moons into the soft palm of your hand. Judging by the raw, broken scream which sliced through your moment of solitude, the parents had been notified. The mother, a mousy-haired woman in her late thirties in a well-worn pair of red sweatpants had anxiously followed the paramedics out of the ambulance her daughter arrived in, her husband - sporting dark circles rivalling even those of your fellow night shift staff - following moments after. They had gripped each other, fear raw on their faces as their world was rolled into a trauma bay for emergency surgery.
Shuddering once more, you pulled yourself to your feet, finally stripping off the bloodied gown and reclaiming the glasses. Your watch gazed up at you, creamy white face softly reminding you that you had used up your moment alone, and that someone would be looking for you just minutes from now. The papery garment went to rest with the blue nitrile gloves, the glasses were hung onto the neck of your scrubs. Silently, you slid the glass door open, slipping out into the, thankfully, empty hallway, and into the bathroom opposite your now-abandoned hiding place.
You looked at the figure in the mirror as you ran your hands under the freezing tap. Your eyes were bright with tears under the harsh LEDs, but you hadn’t let yourself mourn long enough for your eyelids to swell and become red. Shake it off. Shake off for the rest of the shift. Long enough to debrief with the residents who had worked alongside you. Long enough to comfort them that they had done everything right, and that some cases were just unsolvable, even for a team like them. Long enough to look into the eyes of the patient’s parents and-. You sucked in a sharp breath once more, snapping the thought off. Leaning over the chipped sink you scrubbed your face with cold, shaking hands, the gold bands on the thin chain around your neck dancing with the movement. You watched for a heartbeat as the blood from your cheek slithered down the drain, before tightening your fraying ponytail and pushing the door open once more.
Lena was on you the moment you stepped out
“Pet, you’re needed in OR1 to speak with the parents. Priest is already with them but they want to speak with the attending on the case.” She walked alongside you toward your destination, tablet tucked under one arm. “I already…” She cleared her throat. “Already delivered the news. You just need to give them brief technicals.” The older woman softly squeezed your elbow. “You’ve done this before, just do what you can.”
Done this before. Done this before. Her words - said with nothing but intent to reassure and comfort - bounced around your skull. You put them back in their box behind your eyes as you stepped into the hub, seeing the parents huddled together outside OR1, tearfully nodding at the figure standing before them, his back to you. Those scruffy silver curls were recognisable to you anywhere.
“Thank you Lena.” You found your voice once more, patting her on the shoulder and straightening your spine as best you could.
The journey across the ER floor felt like it lasted an eternity, the smell of antiseptic and hand sanitiser as strong as ever. Stepping beside Doctor Jack Abbot, you reintroduced yourself to the trembling pair, pulling the group into the room. You did your best to ignore the tiny motionless figure - now shrouded in a crisp white cloth - laying at the centre of the room. The woman’s eyes drifted to where the blood-spattered glasses hung off your scrubs. You silently removed them and placed them into the tray by the door.
“You don’t have to see her. Not if you don’t want to.” Your voice was soft as you watched the now-family-of-two take in the sight before them. Your husband’s gaze was equally quiet as he watched from the corner of the room, hands folded behind his back just a step behind you.
“I want to see her.” The mother choked out, her husband nodding through his own wet eyes. “We have to see her. One more time.”
Wordlessly you pulled on a fresh pair of gloves, Jack moving to do the same. You caught his eye, shaking your head for the briefest of moments. This was your case to bear. He silently acquiesced, stepping back once more.
The shroud was folded back by your quivering hands. You softly recounted what had occurred. Her heart just hadn’t been strong enough to continue doing what it needed. She was gone for too long. The team had done all they could. The mother loudly sobbed through the news, clinging to her husband as bitter, fat tears rolled down his own cheeks. When the girl’s face was finally revealed, you stepped back, once more quietly giving your condolences and asking them to let someone know when they were ready to leave. The blue gloves went into the bin, you left the couple, the girl and the OR to their misery.
Stepping toward the hub desk, muscle memory swiping your card to begin your notes, a figure entered your peripheral vision, logging into the system on his own favoured PC.
“You still with us, doc’?” Jack murmured, eyes still locked on his own screen as he filtered through his patients.
“Mmhm.” The sound you made was soft, non-committal. You accepted a clipboard from an equally tired nurse, glancing down at it. The shuddering of your next breath said a lot more, causing the man to look up and over to you. You continued to type, focusing half on the movement of your lungs and half on the words on your screen.
“You okay?” His voice was soft, a flicker of concern in his eyes. You didn’t look over. This wasn’t like you. This…weakness. “You can have Crus lead the debrief. Put it on Crus control for a bit.”
Your lips twitched wryly, hand gripping the mouse a tad too hard.
“I’m an attending, Doctor Abbot. Let me be an attending.” The whisper came out sharper than you intended, causing you to wince internally.
He reached over wordlessly, hand gently finding your wrist as he went back to reading whatever was on the screen in front of him. The brush of the pad of his thumb against your skin was familiar, the small act of affection warming something which had gone cold in your chest in the early hours of that morning.
“Then go be the damn good attending you are, sweetheart.” His voice was as soft as his dark eyes as he looked over at you again, the PDA an unusual but welcome break from your normal work personas.
An attending you continued to be for the rest of the shift, though you weren’t sure if you were a damn good one. The debrief came and went, the residents peeling back the layers of the procedures and what could or couldn’t have been done under the circumstances. You praised their efforts before taking a moment to quietly reflect. You patted each member of the team on the back as they finally left to retrieve their belongings and head home.
Sign over was relatively painless, though you could feel Robby looking a tad too intently at you as you explained the cases being passed to him. Like he had recognised something in your face that he had seen in his own reflection. He didn’t say anything about it, but as you vanished to grab your bag you missed him muttering something to Jack with a furrowed brow, glancing over to where you had disappeared to your locker.
The drive home was silent, something mindless on the radio competing with the sound of the engine for what could fill the space better. Jack’s hand rested on your knee, a warm, constant pressure. He didn’t try to say anything, not until you pushed open the door to your shared townhouse.
“I’m going to go wash the shift off, there’s fresh towels in your bathroom.” The sentence was again acknowledged by your non-committal hum. Two attendings’ salaries could buy you luxuries like a bathroom each, the hot water after a long night usually a pleasure you couldn’t resist.
But tonight you found yourself stuck in the low light of the hallway, a single sliver of early morning sun fighting its way through the gap in the black out blinds covering every window and door in the space.
The sound of pipes coming to life and the blast of the upstairs shower faded into the back of your brain as you stopped short of reaching your own bathroom. Through bleary eyes you took in the display of framed photos which lined the shelves of a hallway cabinet, none of them quite matching, but none of them quite clashing either. They sat there in their mixed sizes and varying stages of dust coverage, returning your gaze.
Individual portraits of both you and Jack - far more youthful than either of you felt now - in your slightly askew undergraduate caps and gowns sat next to each other in companionable silence. Behind them a larger framed landscape stood watch, rolling green hills broken up only by the dusting of snow upon far off peaks.
Images of your post graduate achievements lingered next to your original graduation portraits. A photo of you on stage with a huge white smile plastered across your face, receiving your equally white coat, your medical doctorate hanging just above it. A small half-faded film photo sat propped up against the larger frame, your training hospital looming in the background as you gazed into the camera, eyes bright and sharp even after surviving the last long day of your residency. Beside that, a photo of you outside PTMC in the wintery sunshine, Robby standing beside you, hands shoved in his pockets and eyes crinkling into his smile, looking significantly less tired than he did these days. Dr Adamson stood behind the pair of you. Just days after that photo was taken, you had first met Jack. Your brain fluttered at the thought. You looked practical and alert, keen eyed behind your grin, arms folded across your chest and plastic tag sitting at your hip emblazoned with ATTENDING.
A slightly newer image, its frame not harbouring as much dust as its neighbours, captured you with a gargantuan bouquet of pink lilies, Jack's scruffy-jawed side profile clear as he pressed a proud kiss to your cheek. You looked tired but relieved, finally having completed your fellowship.
Your gaze followed the familiar path upward over the dark wooden shelves, tracing through photobooth strips of tipsy kisses and polaroids of friends’ weddings. A crumpled photo of a group of men in dusty uniforms scorched by the sun's rays flitted past before your eyes came to a stop.
A photo of a brightly laughing couple, slightly out of focus and poorly centred, perched just above you. In spite of the weight in your chest, you couldn't stop your lips from turning upward at the sight. The thumb in the right hand corner belonged to Robby, who, for all his medical prowess, wasn't cut out for photography. Through the soft blur you could make out what had garnered laughter from the couple; a pair of matching stethoscopes, a joint gift from PTMCs charge nurses. You knew those stethoscopes well, a small heart and date engraved on the back of them. You had run your hands up and down that equipment a million times, hearing thousands of strangers’ hearts and lungs through them. In spite of this familiarity, you found yourself reaching out to trace your fingers across the image. The glass of the frame was cool beneath your finger tips.
“Not having second thoughts now, are you?”
Jack stood at the end of the hallway, hair damp and sticking up at strange angles as he leaned against his crutch. He had swapped his dark scrubs for a pair of charcoal sweatpants, one leg tied off, and a soft grey t-shirt.
You huffed out a wry breath, returning your attention back to the photo.
“You know that the receipt is only valid for 90 days.” The soft padding of his foot and click of his crutch approached. “You could still try returning me, but you might only get store credit. Not sure if they’d even allow you to return a defective model...” He gestured to his leg, leaning his weight on the crutch. “So you might just be stuck with me.”
He leaned into you, pressing a kiss to the side of your head. You rolled your eyes, chuckling softly.
“Trip down memory lane, huh?”
You looked at the photos looking back at you. The sharp, carefully honed look in your eyes in each of them. A look of knowledge, hope, determination. A look of hours and hours of study and practice and hours and hours more of teaching. The look Jack had fallen for. On your third date together, between a few whiskeys and glasses of wine, he had murmured into your ear that you looked ‘ferocious’ when he first laid eyes on you, even with both of you clad in blood-soaked gowns and masks. You had giggled - a giggle too girlish and tipsy for a newly appointed ER attending - and kissed him.
Catching your current appearance in the glass of the frame, your reminiscing was cut short. Your face was pale, features sitting sallowly on your skin. Your hand, which you realised was clutching the chain around your neck, trembled. You looked tired. So, so tired. There was no life in your eyes, something dark and fearful lurking behind your irises instead. A thought stumbled through your skull; when was the last time you had seen that sharp, bright awareness in your eyes? A memory came tumbling after, the swirl of the little girl’s blood in the ER bathroom sink cutting clean through your mind. The feeling of her flesh, her organs, against your hands.
It crashed over you. All of it. Acid tears bubbled up to the surface, streaming down your cheeks.
“What am I, Jack?” You choked through the words. His arms found their way around you. “I-I am supposed to be this fearless, resilient doctor.”
“You are, sweetheart. You are the best of us all.” His voice was soft as his thumb brushed against the nape of your neck. You pushed back, pulling yourself from his grip to look up at him.
“I haven’t been that in such a long time. I don’t know if I ever was or if this was just me pulling on some sick disguise that is finally wearing off.” You gripped the front of your scrub top with a quivering hand, heaving in another breath and pulling your gaze away from his. “There is this…endless, infinite ball of grief in my chest. I can feel all this death.” A sob ripped through your throat as you closed your eyes, tears spilling down your face. “I am never not mourning, Jack. I mourn through our shifts. I mourn after our shifts. I mourn in my sleep. I think about their faces. I think about their bodies just…failing in my palms.”
Strong arms claimed you once again, your tears pressed into soft cotton as your husband rested his chin atop your head. You surrendered, pressing into his neck.
You sobbed, shoulders heaving like a baby taking its first breath. You cried. Not the soft watery tears that found their way out in the shower after long shifts. Not even the hot tears in the consult room just hours earlier could compare. You cried for the little girl who died with your hands around her heart. You cried for her tired father and heartbroken mother. You cried for every body which had taken its last laboured breath on the table before you. You cried like you finally acknowledged the gnawing pit in the bottom of your heart.
“I- I am so fucked up.” You choked out between sobs. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
Jack didn’t say anything. Not for several long moments as he held you, crutch abandoned against the wall. He let you cry, arms holding the little pieces of you together, a hand stroking the back of your head, buried in your limp post-shift hair.
After many pale early morning minutes, the heaving of your shoulders slowed as your sobs did.
“You are fucked up.” Jack muttered softly against the top of your head. “How could you not be? You give a pound of flesh every single day.”
“But you manage it.” Your voice was quiet against his shirt.
“I’ve dealt with my demons. It’s a process.” He murmured, rubbing small, slow circles along your back. “A process I go through every week, every day. I’m more fucked up than you, baby, believe me. You’ve woken up to my nightmares. You’ve driven Robby to his therapist appointments when his bike was in the shop.” He gently pulled back to look down at you, the calloused pads of his thumbs ghosting across your cheeks.
“We are so fucked up. But we show up. The guy who had the stroke in North 6 last night would be in the morgue instead of his wife's arms this morning if you hadn't been there.” He wiped away a tear trickling down your face. “Thousands of people wouldn't be here if you weren't who you are. And you are brilliant.” His lips brushed your forehead. “Fucked up, but so, so brilliant.”
“I’m not brilliant. Not anymore.”
“What you need - what we need,” his fingers dipped from your cheek to the chain around your neck, gently turning the gold band over to see the large glittering stone at the top of it, “is some time off. When was the last time we got to see this band on your pretty finger instead of around your neck?” He waited for the beat of protest that always came whenever he suggested you take more than a few days of vacation time. The who’s taking our shifts or the half-teasing we’ll be bored. But no protest came. You instead dipped your head in a watery nod.
“And sweetheart,” he gently hooked a finger under your chin, nudging you to look up at him. “You need to talk to someone. It will swallow you if you let it.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “I can’t watch that happen to you.”
You buried yourself in his now tear-soaked shirt. He was warm, smelling of soap and fabric softener. He had you.
A pair stood there under the soft lights of the hall, wrapped in each other. And for the first time in a very, very long time, the air in your lungs felt lighter.
