⋆｡˚ rory ˚｡⋆

“The new intern claims Barbie’s been doodling your name with little hearts all over her forms. Somebody’s got it bad.”

Mateo’s statement floats over the nurses’ station diver.

It manages to slam straight into your self-image. Delicate tissue at the best of times, wedged between your left ventricle and the tiny circuit that compels you to adopt every sad house-plant at Trader Joe’s.

Yes it’s true, you do, for the record, employ thematic embellishments. A heart here. A flourish there. (Morale matters; medicine is bleak). That is not the same thing as ‘having it bad’. 

But the problem is apparently people can’t make that distinction, and now you can see it too clearly, a pack of first-years huddled together, snickering over your smittenness, spider-webbing a hairline crack right through the high-gloss competence you spent seventy-eight paychecks shellacking.

It’s that eighth-grade deja vu: the day Jack Harrison caught you tracing Mrs. Jack Harrison in bubble letters on your planner and passed the page down the row like contraband. 

The heat that bursts behind your ears now is the exact temperature of that day, when the whole cafeteria seemed to sync with your cardiac rhythm — thump, she likes him, thump. 

You straighten behind the med cart, ready to emerge and correct the narrative before it mutates any further, when Frank speaks first. “Ignore it. It’s just noise — I’m sure she’ll lose interest soon enough.”

Oh.

Something clamps shut inside you so abruptly it almost audibly clicks.

Like you’ve been fizzing under pressure all shift and someone, somewhere, has just screwed the cap on tight. The carbonation tears around blind, frantic for an exit.

Noise. The word expands until it feels the whole corridor. Noise, as in background nuisance, as in easily tuned out, as in the thin electrical whine of a dying bulb that nobody bothers fixing until someone from maintenance finally rips it out and tosses it. 

So that’s what he hears when you talk? A squeaky hindrance he tolerates out of courtesy? 

The lively back-and-forth you stored under maybe someday morphs, in one breath, into you pawing at a deadbolt while he waits for the scratching to stop. 

You pivot on silent flats, slip down the side corridor before Mateo or Frank registers movement. 

Three steps in, a shoulder clips yours — McKay, clutching a stack of imaging requests. Clipboards explode across linoleum. 

“Whoa, road-runner much?” she laughs, stooping. Her grin falters when she meets your deer-in-the-headlights stare. “Hey, you good? You’re kind of… vibrating.”

There’s no better word for it. Your fingers keep sparking against each other, your chin keeps twitching toward the main hall, and every nerve ending chants the same directive: bolt, wounded-fawn style, into the nearest underbrush before the hunter looks up. 

You drop to your knees, paper edges nicking your skin as you herd the spill into something vaguely stack-shaped.

Out of the corner of your eye, Frank and Mateo both turn at the clatter. Frank’s brows notch, mouth already forming the silent You okay?

You slap the stack into McKay’s hands.

“Peachy!” you babble, already sidestepping to block Frank’s sight-line. “Totally good. Very busy. High-priority sticker emergency. Life or death if you’re, like, six and waiting for discharge.”

Your shoes squeak as you bolt. 

There are several indicators, in Frank’s opinion, that suggest you’ve come down with something terminal, and the first arrives in the form of his inbox. 

Or rather, the absence of its usual infestation. 

When he finally gets ten uninterrupted minutes to wade through his overnight emails, there is only one from you.

A curt administrative note about revised intake-labeling protocol, plus an attached spreadsheet for the week’s front-desk coverage.

It is concise. Properly punctuated. Horrifyingly lucid. 

Frank stares at it a full second longer than necessary, as if more of you might reveal itself under scrutiny.

Because, usually, by this point, there are at least twelve.

They arrive in glitter-bomb bursts throughout the day. A few carry actionable intel. Most are digital magpies’ nests: random URLs, blurry memes, rogue exclamation points, and the kind of half-formed shower-thought nonsense you apparently consider too important to trust to your own mind.

He spends longer than he’s willing to admit at the computer waiting for more emails to come in.

They never do.

The second indicator presents itself when he swipes into radiology and, for the first time in recent memory, does so alone. 

No sudden apparition at his elbow, no imploring eyes, no breathless little “oops, forgot mine again,” delivered as though this is an unforeseeable act of the gods rather than a behavior pattern.

He tends to just hand the badge over without questions. 

There is no point doing otherwise. If not him, you’ll simply latch onto the next available soft touch with security clearance, and Frank would rather it be him. 

He frowns when the reader spits its green light at an empty hallway.

The third, and by far the most worrying, indicator arrives in the break room.

Frank boxes himself into a stolen minute, pours a cup, looks up too late, and finds you standing at the same counter. 

Usually this is your opening. Your preferred habitat. 

You’d reach across his body for sugar you absolutely do not need (you’re sweet enough as it is), clip his front with your ass, crowd his elbow while stirring, then look up like none of it was intentional, like he’s just a piece of furniture placed unfortunately in your path. 

He braces for impact. Nothing happens.

Instead you give a brisk nod, measure out a generous amount of creamer into your cup, and keep your radius fanatically intact. 

You leave before he can tally the damage.

The space beside him turns freezer-aisle cold. Frank’s fingers blanch on the mug handle. He blames the overzealous hospital ventilation for about half a second, then hears the excuse rattle around his own head and die there. 

He has half a mind to go after you. Catch you by the wrist before you get too far, steer you into a vacant bay, and do the whole thing properly since apparently no one else is treating this personality drop as emergent. 

History, exam, differential. What’s been siphoned out of you, and can he replace it?

In a better universe, that line of inquiry earns him one of your usual responses, “Should I unbutton for the stethoscope, Doctor?” 

But he can’t do that. Can’t go stalking after you like some lovesick asshole with a savior complex and a death wish. 

Especially not now when he is, at best, one bad headline away from vaporizing the fellowship he’s been clawing toward for years. He needs HR to stop looking at him like one more incident will finish the job rehab failed to. 

And beyond that, he’s been trying to starve the gossip before it gets any bigger. Partly for himself, sure. Mostly for you. 

This place has a long memory when it comes to his mistakes and a short one when it comes to anything decent he’s ever done. 

He’s not about to hand the hospital a fresh excuse to staple your name to his and let people act like you’re just another piece of collateral from the mess he made of himself. 

But shit he misses you. He wants your attention back on him. And the flirting and the smart mouth and the little collisions of your body with his like you’ve forgotten where one of you ends and the other begins. 

So if he can’t be obvious, he’ll be strategic. He’ll do what he does best. Lay the bait and wait for you to come to him. 

At two he messes with the thermostat. 

There’s a woman in Facilities who’ll adjust it for him without putting in a work order, no questions, an ongoing favor from the time she showed up in the ER with split knuckles and a story about slipping while replacing a vent cover. 

Frank stitched the cut closed in under six minutes, declined the point out that the wound looked a lot more like she’d punched through something than brushed against it, and earned himself a useful little pocket of goodwill in the process.

And, more often than not, Frank squanders that usefulness on you. 

A degree warmer in the mornings, sometimes two if the night crew has left the department with all the ambient warmth of a crypt, timed just before you blow in the front doors, already looking faintly wounded by the concept of central air.

It’s at sixty-six now. 

Low enough to summon you, high enough that no one can accuse him of weaponizing infrastructure for attention.

Although that is precisely what he’s doing. 

But it takes longer than expected for you to appear in his line of sight. And when you finally do, you pay him no mind.

You putter through the department in several layers: cardigan, coat, fleece, thermal tights, hands tucked into your sleeves.

You look pissed. You look adorable. Frank resents learning those two things can coexist so easily.

He tries to catch your eye but you just keep moving through the pit like an overdressed cumulonimbus radiating indignation at every ceiling vent, refusing to seek him out.

It makes no sense. You should have filed a verbal complaint with him by minute eight.

And at minute forty-five he watches (sourly) as Garcia slides up beside you, a still-steaming warmer blanket perfectly folded over her arm. 

“You look frostbitten,” she murmurs, settling the plush square around your shoulders. 

You exhale a blissed little thank-you and lean into her, soaking up the heat Frank had planned to supply by proxy.

Garcia lifts her gaze, finds him across the pit, and winks. Problem solved, ER Ken, she mouths, fluffing the blanket with exaggerated care just to make sure he clocks her fingerprints all over his failed experiment. 

Problem not solved. In fact, freshly enlarged. 

Frank later lumbers down the hallway toward your office like a kicked senior dog chasing the last scrap of affection from its owner. He clutches the print-outs in his hand so tight they rasp with every step. 

He finds you at your desk, hair fallen in stray ribbons across your face, mouth pulled down at the corners while the monitor paints you blue. Concentration or maybe displeasure. Hard to tell from this angle.

He hovers, suddenly unsure whether to knock on the actual door or just the wall of silence you’ve erected. 

He opts for the literal door, two knuckles, two quick knocks.

Your head lifts. Something bright like excitement sparks across your face then the expression collapses, shutters down to business. Like you remembered all at once the circumstances surrounding him and whatever stupid hope had leapt up before you could stop it. 

He hates that expression immediately. Hates that it exists. Hates even more that he can’t quite sort out why seeing it on your face feels like a personal failure. 

“Need this form revised,” he says, lifting the mangled stack. “Thought maybe you could escort me to radiology? Could use the company, and you terrify the techs less than I do.”

It’s needy and transparent and he knows. He doesn’t care how it sounds as long as you say yes.

“I’m, uh, really busy at the moment, Dr. Langdon. Pending labs, two admits… might be a while.” You rattle it off too fast, like reading a grocery list you just wrote in your head. He knows every item is invented on the spot. 

“Humor me, okay? I’ve had seven hours of people telling me to wait my turn. I need one cooperative face before I implode.”

You worry the inside of your lips, eyes flicking to the doorway.

Finally you nod. “Fine.”

One syllable, and it hits like epinephrine. He can’t stop the microscopic lift of his chin, lungs taking in a fuller breath as if permission itself has oxygenated the air. 

He angles toward the hallway, offering the smallest tilt of his shoulder so you can merge. 

“Thanks,” he says, voice pitched towards casual.

“Sure.”

He glances at you to his left. Goosebumps litter the expanse of your arms. He eases his stride so you’re shoulder-to-shoulder instead of half a step behind. “You cold?”

“Nope. Perfectly comfortable.” You answer while simultaneously yanking your sleeves down to your knuckles.

He snorts. “Yeah and I’m the post child for impulse control.”

You stop mid-stride, eyes narrowing. “That’s not funny, Frank.”

His first name. That’s progress, he thinks. Even laced with contempt, hearing it from you feels like an exhale after hours underwater.

He knew you wouldn’t like the joke. Made it anyway, cheap currency to buy a spark out of you. If spark equals fury, so be it. Fury beats indifference every time. 

“Yeah, poor taste. Reflex, I guess.” He winces, thumb rubbing the knot at his collar. 

You huff through your nose and pivot forward again, pace clipped. Frank falls in step a half-pace behind, then edges closer.

“Cardigan looks new,” he ventures. “Color suits you.”

“It’s old,” you say, eyes still on the hallway ahead. 

Frank smothers another wince. Stupid. By this point the day has offered him more than enough evidence that the usual methods are dead on arrival.

Compliments, bait, orchestrated coincidence, all of it useless now that you’ve apparently decided to treat him like a mildly inconvenient coworker.

That’s the part he likes least. The sudden sense that he can’t locate himself in relation to you anymore. 

The part he likes least changes when he finds you twenty minutes later, stationed beside some orthopedic meathead, looking luminously alive.

No longer wan or withdrawn or visibly dying of whatever new strain of virus you’ve contracted. But smiling. A laugh bubbling out, fingers corkscrewing a curl the way they do when you’re charmed.

Apparently you can still flirt. You can still sparkle. You just can’t seem to do it anywhere near him. 

Before his cortex can veto, he’s crossing the floor, stopping dead at your shoulder. 

“Just need a status update on Mrs. Carlson’s tib-fib before radiology locks the board.” 

Mrs. Carlson, insofar as he knows, is fictional, but her imaginary fracture buys him two startled glances and three precious seconds inhaling the vanilla-and-alcohol warmth of your laugh. 

Meathead flips through pages. “Um… we don’t have a Carlson today.”

Frank fakes a thoughtful frown. “Huh. Alias, then. Happens every weekend — patients think we’re the witness-protection program.” 

Ortho squints. “I can pull the day-sheet again —”

“Good idea,” Frank says, nodding like a supervising attending. “Check PACU and the boarding queue; wouldn’t want to miss an imaging window.” 

The guy mutters agreement and slinks off, shoulders hunched in duty. Frank turns to you, expression suddenly softer. 

Crossing your arms, you cock a hip where Ortho had been. “Impressive diversion tactic. Did Mrs. Carlson spring fully formed from your imagination, or is she a previous imaginary friend?” 

The fury’s back again. 

Frank scratches at his jaw. “Didn’t think it through.” 

“You think plenty. Maybe just tell me what you want instead of throwing Jason under a bus.” 

Jason. Stupid name for a stupid guy, he thinks.

What he wants is one honest conversation and maybe your ass back where it belongs — in his personal space. He can’t say that last part though, so he settles for the first in the only terms he knows how.

“What I want is a five-minute consult with you. Somewhere quieter.” He flicks a glance at the empty bay down the hall, then back to your crossed arms. “Please.” 

You study him for a moment, then nod once.

“Bay twelve’s open. Five minutes, then I’m due back at my desk.”

Frank files the claim under Questionable. You treat workstations like bar stools — occupied only until something shinier beckons. It’s not the desk ticking in your head; it’s the idea of being walled in with him past the half-life of your composure.

He watches tension climb your scapulae as you march ahead, timing yourself like a patient on a stress test. 

Bay 12 yawns open and swallows you both.

The instant the noise of the corridor seals off, Frank feels his pulse redeploy to places it has no business patrolling. Temples, wrists, the hollow just above his sternum.

For one beat you stand opposite like combatants in a children’s-duel-turned-board-meeting: arms folded, backs straight, pretending neither of you can feel the static in the air. 

“Right.” He claps once (why did he clap?) and immediately regrets it. “Consult.” 

Your brows tip up, perfectly polite, perfectly guarded. “On our imaginary tib-fib?” 

Frank’s ears go hot. 

“Yeah, about that. I might have — misallocated resources.” He forces a laugh that sounds like a cough that sounds like a car refusing to start. “Look, I just —” A breath, steady, like he tells interns before a lumbar puncture. “I’ve noticed you’ve been… different. Quieter. Less —” he gestures vaguely, like there’s a medical term for starlight. “I thought maybe I’d done something.” 

“Frank, I’ve been at this hospital for three years. You’ve existed in approximately one and a half of them. If I’m different and you assume it’s about you, that’s either breathtaking narcissism or —” a small, lethal smile “— maybe something else.” 

Something else. He recognizes your own bait and still lunges. 

“Yeah. Maybe.” Quiet. Direct. No place to hide in it. “Maybe I did assume it had something to do with me because I wanted it to.” His knuckles sweep his jaw. He never looks away from you. “Because if it’s not that, then I’m standing here making an ass out of myself for no reason, and I’d actually prefer the narcissism.” 

You hesitate. “I’m just… giving you a little breathing room, okay?”

“Breathing room?” He moves toward you impulsively before catching himself, eyes wide, almost pleading. “I don’t — fuck, I don’t want breathing room. What are you doing that for?”

“What do you think?” You laugh, but it’s hollowed out completely. He doesn’t like the sound. “I spend half my shift practically trailing after you. Everyone sees it. I just —,” you purse your lips. “I don’t want to embarrass myself any more than I already have.”

He frowns at that. You’ve never once moved through this place like someone worried about looking foolish. 

You flirt when you want to flirt, laugh when you want to laugh, and say things most people would bury alive before letting them leave their mouths. You leave little traces of yourself everywhere. Lip gloss prints on coffee lids. Heart-dotted notes. Sweaters draped over chairs that aren’t yours. There is nothing cautious about you, nothing particularly governed by social survival.

Even your embarrassment tends to be theatrical, temporary, burned through fast and replaced with another bad idea. He has never known you to care this much about the audience. 

“What are you talking about?”

He watches as your eyes break off and land somewhere past his shoulders, as if the answer might be stapled to the wall.

“I heard what you said earlier.”

Frank’s brow furrows harder, causing a headache. “What?”

“With Mateo.” Your arms tighten across your middle. “About me being ‘just noise.’ About how I’d lose interest soon enough.” Your eyes flick up to his for a second. “So I thought maybe I should help you out with that.” 

Blood sluices out of his skull, then surges back so hard his vision pulses.

For a beat, Frank just stands there, knocked completely sideways by the realization that you heard that, heard those exact words with none of the context that had made them make sense in his head. Christ. 

No wonder you pulled back. No wonder you’ve been different. He’d been cornered by Mateo outside the med-supply cage, half-listening to him gleefully recycle some intern gossip thread like it was harmless entertainment, and all Frank had been trying to do was kill it fast.

Shut it down. Mateo was fishing for a reaction, for confirmation, for anything he could carry back into the staff room and let breed. 

Robby’s got a disciplinary file half built with his name on the tab. One more thing and he’ll be back in that carpeted purgatory explaining how “post-rehab Frank” was just a limited-time offer.

The only thought had been do not feed this. Do not let you become a bigger target than you already are. 

“No, that’s — fuck.” He breaks off, already hating how badly he’s said everything. “That’s not what I meant. I called the intern noise. The gossip. The whole stupid conversation. I meant she’d get bored and move on if I didn’t exacerbate it. I did not mean you.”

If anything, the entire point had been to avoid throwing you under the bus by acting like there was nothing there to poke at. And somehow that attempt has landed here, in front of him now, having done exactly the opposite. 

You look at him for a second like you’re trying to decide whether to believe him and coming up short. 

“I can handle it, you know. I’m a big girl. If I’m too much, or if I’ve been making you uncomfortable, you can just tell me.” The flat seam of your lips is more withering than any shout. “I’d rather hear it straight than keep walking around here feeling like some joke everybody else is already in on.” 

“I know you could,” he says, too fast, like he needs to get there before you decide otherwise. “I know you could handle it. And if that was what this was, I would’ve said it, yeah?” His chest keeps punching at the scrub top, lungs over-ventilating around the terror of being misunderstood.  “I don’t want you to stop flirting with me. I don’t want you to stop hovering or talking or… any of it. I — I fucking need it — You.” 

“Frank…”

His eyes flick down to your mouth, then up again, like he hates that you can see him thinking it.

“If I do something stupid right now,” he says, voice low, “are you gonna slap me?” 

He’s half begging for the hit, half begging on the green light. 

Your exhale stutters into a breathy laugh. “Depends how stupid.” 

Stupid wins. 

Frank closes the last inch and touches his mouth to yours.

Soft at first, like he’s half-afraid you’ll vanish. You don’t. You stay… then soften… then melt, and everything inside him rushes forward. The second your lips part, the kiss deepens. Hunger and apology braided tight.

His hand rises to the back of your neck, thumb stroking the hair there, and the kiss tips from cautious to greedy in a single heartbeat. 

He’s been starving himself on purpose, convincing the ache it was dietary. You don’t feed a craving that noble, he’d told himself in a dozen graveyard-shift pep talks. Now the craving is kissing back, and his resolve crumbles like a sugar packet. 

You curve forward, spine bowing until his shoulders hit the curtain and the metal rings screech on the rail, but the world past the vinyl may as well be orbiting another sun. You both break into breathless laughter, but neither of you stops.

They warned you about selfish addicts, a voice needles.

This is exactly what they meant: taking the one thing that makes the ward bearable and unintentionally hurting its feelings to keep it safe — then stealing it anyway.

He swallows the guilt, chases it with another taste of peppermint. 

Frank pulls back just far enough to speak, foreheads still touching. “No more breathing room, okay?” 

You pretend to ponder, then glance at the inch (maybe) separating your bodies. “Pretty sure you just repossessed every cubic inch of it.” 

“Good,” he says, thumb stroking the tendon at your nape like he’s checking his own pulse there. “I’m keeping it.” 

Selfish, a reprimand flickers, but he can’t imagine surrendering the warmth that’s finally tugged his chest open. 

Then the hallway pager shrieks, reminding you that the world still exists and someone probably needs a doctor who isn’t currently making out behind a curtain. 

You both straighten, slower than necessary, Smooth hair, reset badges. 

As you step through the divider he catches your hand, gives it a quick, secret squeeze.

You squeeze back, and the grin you trade in that split-second says everything the rumor mill never could: whatever this is, it’s no longer background noise.

MARIA NOTE hi hi hi thank you for reading and witnessing er barbie and franks FIRST KISS!!!!!!!!!! behind a questionably sanitary curtain, no less. may their pager batteries die forever so we get more smooch time. ₊ ⊹🪻 ✧˚. ᵎᵎ 🪴