#((master))

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.

"Yes," she said. "And I would do it again."

Direct. No qualifier, no apology in it.

"And who gave you the authority to do that?"

"I did," she said, "when I saw her compensating while we were still eight minutes out with a narrowing airway."

She saw her compensating. 

I let that sit for exactly one second. Specific phrase, used correctly, by someone who knew what it meant.

"You saw her compensating," I repeated, testing the edge of it.

"She's my friend," the woman said, and there was no apology in that either. "What was I supposed to do, sit there and watch her struggle to breathe?"

I was angry. I was aware of being angry and aware that some percentage of that anger was not entirely about this specific situation. I kept it behind my teeth.

"And you think," I said, gesturing briefly at her face, "in this state, you were making sound medical decisions?"

She looked at me with an expression I had not anticipated.

"Is she dead?"

The question hit the air and sat there.

Who the hell does this girl think she is talking to me like that.

I knew the answer, obviously I knew the answer, but she wasn't waiting for me to give it.

"No. She's not. Because I performed a clean field drainage of a septal hematoma." Behind her gaze was a burning she was trying to hard to hide. "In a moving ambulance." She took a step toward me. I don’t step back. "I knew exactly what I was doing and I can explain every decision I made if you'd like. Or maybe," a beat, short and deliberate, "you weren't paying attention in medical school."

I stared at her.

She did not just say that to me.

I had been a lead attending physician in this ED for several years. I had been told difficult things, wrong things, offensive things, things designed to rattle me and things not designed to rattle me that did anyway. I could count on one hand the number of times someone had genuinely caught me off guard.

She was looking at me with the absolute stillness of someone who had nothing left to lose and had made a kind of peace with that. It was not performance. I'd seen performance. This was something else, a particular quality of calm that lived in the eyes and didn't waver.

She stands the way I stand.

The thought arrived before I could stop it. Not a memory. Not a comparison to anyone else. Just the plain, clear observation: the squared shoulders, the weight distributed exactly right, the hands, the particular stillness that wasn't passivity but its opposite, something coiled and learned and earned.

She holds herself like I do. Did she-- Wh--

I shut down my thoughts before it could go any further.

I was still angry. I was also, beneath that and more quietly, something close to impressed, which I had absolutely no intention of showing her.

"Do not leave this hospital." I said it once, quietly, which was how I said things I meant. I turned my head slightly without breaking eye contact. "Ellis."

Ellis materialised at my shoulder with the expression of someone who had watched this whole exchange with barely concealed enjoyment and was going to be insufferable about it later.

"What's up."

"Take her to South 7. Check her out. Don't let her leave. Come get me when you're done." I pause. "And don't forget the knuckles."

I could see that the woman's face registered something at that, a fractional shift, there and gone. She walked away before she could comment on it.

I was forty minutes further into the night when Ellis reappeared.

I was standing at the board when I heard her laughing across the bay near the admit desk, where Mateo was saying something with his hands and the wide grin he wore when he'd found something he couldn't keep to himself. Ellis covered her mouth. Mateo was shaking his head like he couldn't believe it either.

I watched with the patience of a man who had learned his staff generally arrived at the point if you waited long enough.

Ellis clocked me watching and peeled off from Mateo, crossing toward me still holding down a smile that was losing the fight.

"She's fine," Ellis said, leading with business. "Temple cut is dressed, mild concussion, knuckles cleaned and closed. Nice bruise forming around the eye but nothing structural."

"Good."

"She's a doctor," Ellis said. "R3. Residency overseas, Afghanistan and Syria, combat trauma surgery. Army. Discharged, from the sounds of it."

I looked up from the board. "Army?"

"Army," Ellis confirmed.

There it is. She holds herself like a soldier--like me. 

I held her gaze for a moment, then looked back at the board.

"Also," Ellis said, with the careful timing of someone who has been waiting to deliver the main event, "she's the one who put the guy in North 17 in the condition he's currently in."

I set the marker down. "She did that."

"Apparently he was the one who broke her friends nose, and then things, quote, got away from her." Ellis's expression was doing something complicated. "She’s got some crazy strength that guy outweighs her by at least what, like, eighty pounds?"

Eighty, maybe ninety pounds. He was a big guy--she wasn’t that big.

"And," Ellis continued, pressing her lips together briefly, "her name is Abbott."

I took the chart from her. I looked at the name for a moment longer than was strictly necessary.

"Abbott." Ellis pointed at her name. There it was in clean block letters: ABBOTT, Y/N. "She spelled it out for me. A-B-B-O-T-T. Two T's."

Abbott.

Not a common name. Not a coincidence I could file away and ignore.

I handed the chart back.

"She has no idea," Ellis said, watching me carefully. “She does not know your name yet." I pause for just a second too long. "You should go talk to her. And I don't mean for documentation purposes."

"I intend to talk to her," I said. "It is for documentation purposes. She performed an unsanctioned field procedure on a civilian patient."

"Absolutely," Ellis said pleasantly.

"I need the incident on record."

"Of course you do." She tilted her head. "Go on then, Dr. Abbot, one T. Go introduce yourself to Dr. Abbott, two T's.” Her eyes widen and she releases a laugh, “Abbot squared." She was already turning away, raising her voice just enough for Mateo to catch it. "I'm telling everyone, by the way."

"You're not telling anyone."

"I'm telling everyone," she said cheerfully, and was gone.

I stood at the board.

Abbott. Two T's. Army. I would put my money on combat physician. Eight minutes out and she saw the compensation pattern before a trained paramedic did. And she beat the shit out of a man nearly twice her size.

I set the marker down. I looked at the chart I was supposed to be reviewing, and set that down too.

Then I turned and walked toward South 7.

The door to the room was open. I knocked on the frame anyway.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her feet dangling off the side. She turned when she heard me. Something moved across her face, not quite the wariness from earlier, not quite a smile. Something in between. She was reassessing, same as me.

"I owe you an apology," I said, which was not what I'd planned to open with, but it was true so it came out first. "I came at you hard out there without the full picture."

She watched me for a moment. "You had enough of the picture."

"I had Kowalski's version."

"Which was…"

"Which was accurate," I let that settle. "Your friend is going to be fine. They've got her in imaging now, precautionary, but the nose is straightforward. She was asking about you."

Something moved through her face at that, soft and fast and gone as soon as it appeared.

I pulled the chair from the corner of the room and sat, which I could tell surprised her. I'd intended to stay standing. I wasn't entirely sure why I'd sat down, except that this felt like a conversation that deserved it.

"I'm Jack Abbot," I said. "Attending physician. I run the ED."

She looked at me. Then she looked at the name badge clipped to my coat, which she clearly hadn't clocked until this moment.

A-B-B-O-T.

One T.

"You're kidding me," she said.

"I'm not."

The corner of her mouth moved. Not a smile exactly, but the beginning of one. "Y/N Abbott," she said. "Two T's."

"I noticed."

"Of course you did." A quiet exhale through her nose that might, in another life, have been a laugh. "Of course the man who yelled at me in the middle of a trauma bay is named Abbot."

"I didn't yell."

"You raised your voice."

"It's a loud room."

She looked at me with an expression that was both tired and faintly, reluctantly amused. I found that I didn't entirely mind being on the receiving end of it.

"It's been a long night," I said, which was the closest I was going to get to explaining myself.

"Yeah," she said. "It really has."

We sat with that for a moment, the particular quiet of two people deciding whether a bad first impression was going to be the whole story.

“You know you’ve set off a domino effect of paperwork for me to complete tonight between your friend's broken nose, your impromptu procedure in the ambulance and the sad sap in North 17.”

“Are you looking for my official statement?” There is a slight smile on her face, amused.

I look at the forms in front of me on her chart and click my pen in an exaggerated way ready to report the events of tonight, “I’m ready when you are.”