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The Difference Between Us: Chapter 6

Pairing: Dr. Jack Abbot x Reader Fandom: The Pitt

Summary: After being honourably discharged from the Army, you arrive in Pittsburgh with a half-finished residency, a body you are still learning how to live in, and a past you have no intention of unpacking. Dr. Jack Abbot is supposed to be a professional contact, nothing more. But he notices too much, understands things he should not understand, and carries himself with a familiarity you cannot quite place. What begins as professional tension slowly becomes something harder to ignore.

Word Count: 18.2-ish K

Masterlist

Warning: age gap (49/28), mentor/mentee dynamic, power imbalance, explicit solo sexual content (M), sexual tension, grief, widowhood, spouse death, discussion of a fatal shooting, death of family members, captivity & torture flashback, PTSD, dissociation, hallucination, survivor's guilt, self-sacrifice discussion, amputation, prosthetic fitting and limb care, depiction of depression (self-neglect, disordered living space), shouting/argument, blood & minor injury, medical procedures, cremated remains, loss of faith, smoking, swearing.

Author’s Note: Hey! Oh my god. So sorry for the long wait guys. I went into a final draft and it turned into a partial re-write. I got very busy with work, then I had a vacation and then I got sick so a lot happened but I finally got some time to finish this chapter. Then I didn't realize that Tumblr has a 1,000 block posting limit so I actually wrote a ton more and had to cut a bunch to fit this in that way that is is (trying not to give spoilers). There is a little treat in this one near the end ;)

***Reminder: small bold italic text = auditory/visual senses.

***New: this chapter contains a flashback where internal thoughts are marked in bold italic underline to keep the two separate.

August 6, 2026

Calum called at 3:26 PM.

"Hello, this is Dr. Y/N Abbott."

"Wow. You're like a girl version of him," he laughed at his own joke before you could decide whether to, "I just finished with your new prosthetic. I can only stick around the clinic till about 4:15, I've got a flight at 9:00 tonight and I won't be back for two weeks. Can you come in now? Test her out?"

"Yes," a smile broke across your face, wide and genuine and entirely without your permission, "I'll come right now. Oh my gosh. I'm kind of excited."

It was your day off and you'd already gotten ready to head to the store when he called. You quickly finished grabbing what you needed, wallet, keys, cellphone, chapstick, the spare ply socks and backup liner that lived in the bag whether you were going to a clinic or a coffee shop and tossed it all in.

"You should be. I have high hopes. This one will be leaps and bounds better than the last. Pun, very much, intended," you could hear the smile on his face. You'd only met him once, but he was the kind of friendly that made once feel like enough, "I'll see you soon."

"Yeah. See you soon, bye," you hung up as you reached the parking lot.

There she was.

Lime gold gone chalky, lifting at the seams, chrome dulled to the color of old nickels, rust creeping up the wheel wells like something patient. Long-bodied, flat-tailed, built in an era when steel was cheap and nobody apologized for size. The wagon your grandfather had bought new that had outlived every hand that ever loved her but yours.

Looking like an absolute hunk of junk to anyone who didn't know the model.

You reached the door pausing before getting in, taking a moment to twist your limb square inside the temporary prosthetic. It sat snug against what was left of your calf, but it was surely not a perfect fit.

Still. Better than the one Abbot had driven a scalpel through while you screamed for a man who wasn't there.

Good riddance to that thing.

You'd spent the better part of the week thinking of ways to properly put it in the ground.

A pyre, maybe. Set it on a log to watch the foam curl and blacken.

You opened the door and sat down, sliding the key into the ignition, same as always.

But this time the low growl you'd learned to expect never came. Instead the engine caught for half a breath and dropped into a thin, even ticking.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

You stopped.

Rolled the key back to start without pulling it, then twisted forward again.

A low hum. Then nothing but the tick, faster now, stubborn.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

You let go of the key.

Fuck.

You tried once more. The ticking ran on.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Indifferent.

The dry mechanical stutter that meant something you didn't have time to fix.

You released it and slumped back into the seat with a long breath through your nose. No use pretending. Not this time.

She isn't going to start.

For a moment you just sat.

The quiet filled with echoes of people who weren't there, who hadn't been there in years.

You could hear an old fight surface up out of the upholstery. You and Hunter in the back seat, gone feral over the last handful of chips in the bag before some drive you couldn't place anymore. Him holding the bag above his head. You, elbowing him in the ribs. Your mother's voice from the front telling you both to knock it off before she made your dad turn this car around.

A small smile found your mouth.

"You could never just let me have them, huh," you said to the empty seat beside you.

A question for Hunter. You spoke to him, to them, sometimes.

Not because you thought they were listening. It was a habit you'd picked up at 16, after Hunter, when the number of people who could answer you dropped to zero and everything you would have said to them still needed somewhere to go. So it went into the air. The air took it. That turned out to be enough.

You weren't optimistic about the afterlife. You had your reasons. Everything your life had handed you said to fear it, or to expect nothing from it at all.

You didn't believe in a god.

You couldn't.

No one who loved you unconditionally would let people suffer the way you'd watched people suffer.

Even if some part of you wanted to believe, it had been so long that whatever Hunter was, whatever your mother and father had been, was surely gone by now.

Moved on.

Recycled into something else. A tree. A stranger's newborn.

Nothing you'd ever recognize.

The thought pulled toward Adam, the way every thought eventually did.

But you didn't let it.

Not now.

You straightened in the seat and tried the key one final time.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Ti--

"Come on!" Both hands came down on the wheel, again, again, the horn giving a strangled bleat under your palm. "I don't have time for this! I don't have time."

You shoved the door open and got out, phone already in your hand, Kalista already ringing.

Ring. Ring. Ri--

"Hey!"

"Kalista, oh my god, okay. I need to borrow your car. It's an emergency."

"What's going on? I've got my car with me, I'm not home right now."

"Fuck," you pressed your forehead to the cool roof of the Pontiac, "okay. Thanks anyway. Wait. Where are you?"

Silence on the line. The guilty kind.

"No," you said, "stop it. You are not."

"He's just so fi—"

"Oh my god, tell Jeremy I said use protection. Seriously."

"Oh my god, Y/N!"

"Haaave fuuun!"

"Thank you, bye."

You hung up, smiling despite yourself. You were happy for her.

The date had turned into dates and the dates were clearly going somewhere.

Good. She deserves a good guy.

You checked your watch.

3:37 PM.

Just over thirty minutes to get across town to a door that would lock at 4:15.

You had one other person to call.

You had no choice, really, because your schedules were exactly the same. You couldn't work without his countersignature on everything you touched and because of that the two of you moved through the week on the same clock.

You stayed leaning against the closed door and opened your phone. Into the messages. His number still wasn't saved, yet he sat second from the top, right under Kalista.

You didn't text many people.

Apparently you'd texted exactly two people this week. And one of them was the man whose contact you refused to name.

No time to wait on a reply that might sit unread for twenty minutes.

You steadied yourself, thumb over the call button, pressing it before you could think yourself out of it.

Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring.

"Hello, this is Dr. Jack Abbot. You know the drill. Leave it at the tone."

You didn't leave anything.

You ended the call, let your arm drop and your head roll back on your shoulders in a silent groan. You turned to face the car, set both hands on the roof, dropped your forehead to the metal between them.

Another sigh emptied out of you.

What am I going to d--

Bzzzz.

Your head came up. You looked at the screen.

(412) 345-6789

"Hey! I ne--"

"This is Dr. Abbot. Go ahead."

What?

"Uh. It's Y/N. I--"

"I've got you. What's the story?"

Voices behind him, low and social. The muffled scrape of a chair pushing back. He wasn't talking to you the way he talked to you. He was talking to you the way he talked to a phone at three in the morning with his boots already half on.

"I don't-- what story? I just called to ask i--"

"Vitals first."

"Dr. Abbot, there's no--"

"Okay. Talk me through the mechanism."

You opened your mouth to tell him there was no mechanism, there was no patient, there was a dead car and a fitting appointment. Then you heard the softer voice in the room with him, female.

The shape of the whole thing dropped into place.

He was on a date and he was using you to leave it.

Oh my god.

You leaned back against the vehicle and gave the man exactly what he'd called you for.

"Fifty-year-old male," you said, flat, clinical, the on-call cadence coming back like it had never left, "acute onset."

"That's what I'm looking at," you could hear the smile he wasn't letting into his voice, "go on."

"Situational Extraction Syndrome. Textbook. Rapidly progressive," you examined your nails, "I'd want him out the door inside sixty seconds or you risk permanent scheduling of a second date."

"God. That fast."

"That fast."

"I'm on my way," then, away from the phone, the stiffness arriving right on cue, "hey, I'm so sorry, I've got to go. This is an emergency."

The softer voice, muffled, gracious. "Oh, no, that's okay. Go be a life-saving doctor."

"Right. Yeah. My apologies," laying the regret on a little thick.

"Let's, uh. Let's do this another—"

"WHAT!?" His voice rose to full volume, aimed nowhere, aimed at the crisis. "No. No, I'm coming now."

You pressed your lips together and said nothing, because if you said anything you'd laugh.

A few seconds of movement. A chair, a jacket, the particular sounds of a man leaving a place fast. The clunk of a door, the shift of outside air against the speaker.

Then he was back and his voice dropped the whole performance like a coat he'd been waiting all night to take off.

"You called right on time," he said," thank you, truly," a car chirped unlocked on his end, "now, what did you actually need?"

"Calum called and my new prosthetic is ready but my car is dead," you groaned, "and I have 25 minutes before he locks the door."

You could hear, a turn signal ticking somewhere.

"I'm ten minutes from you. Sit tight. Don't do anything heroic to that starter."

"Thank you," you hung up.

You walked a few meters to the mouth of the parking lot and lowered yourself onto the stoop by the entrance, extending your legs in front of you. The temporary prosthetic was better than the one it replaced but better wasn't the same as good. It still sat wrong, so you flexed what muscle was left inside it and felt the small give of tension letting go.

Today was cloudy. A flat white ceiling with only a few thin blades of sun cutting through where the cover thinned.

You took what you could get.

What you really wanted was another thing.

The deep, deliberate work of a thumb pressing the knot out of the top of your leg, the way Dr. Abbot had done it in the call room nobody was supposed to know existed.

You thought about his hands without meaning to.

Rough and careful at the same time, firm where they needed to be, gentle where they didn't. The first real relief the limb had felt in months.

Then your mind went wandering somewhere else entirely.

Those hands ran up into wrists, into forearms you'd catalogued without deciding to. Corded and scarred and built in a way that could only have come from the years he didn't talk about.

Old habits.

You could read a body the way you read a chart. His story was harder to read than most.

The forearms led to shoulders, broad. You could see the fabric of his scrubs pulled taut across a frame that held its shape well past the age it had any right to. The scatter of freckles that rose out of his collar, climbing the side of his throat toward his jaw.

Stubble, white and grey. Some shifts he came in and you could tell he'd shaved the night before, but he never took it down to the skin. There was always something left.

For a second you let yourself wonder what it would feel like agains--

Oh my god. He's your boss. Cool it.

You caught the thought and cut it.

But another came before the first finished fading--which was worse.

His face. The jaw, the cheekbones set high enough to talk to the gods, sharp enough to keep your eyes from moving on when they should have. The lines at his eyes and his mouth didn't read as age. They read as the things that made the rest of it work, the parts that made him look like a man who'd earned every year and wore them like they suited him.

For a moment you wondered what a younger Dr. Abbot had looked like. Before Kosovo, before the leg, before whatever had put the grey in.

You held the picture a second.

Then let it go.

Because the grey was the part you kept snagging on.

The salt taking over the pepper at his temples, threaded through the stubble. Like the decades signed their name on him.

And his mouth... again.

The way his lips would pull tight into a near-smile when he caught sight of you across the floor. The way the top row of his teeth would come down, just barely, over his bottom lip when he was bent over a chart working something hard.

That bite.

That one small, maddening bite you'd been trying to unsee for a week straight.

You were so far down inside it that you didn't see the truck pull in front of you, too busy with the shape of him, his mouth, his hands, hi--

Honk.

You jumped where you sat, eyes snapping up and locking onto the vehicle idling a few feet away.

"Come on, I texted Calum to hold the door, but I don't know if he saw it," he'd rolled the passenger window down and was leaning to call across the cab, "get in."

You pushed up off the stoop, grabbed your bag, and hauled yourself into the truck.

He was pulling off the curb before you'd finished settling.

You glanced at the dash.

3:58 PM.

"Thank you," you said, turning toward him, "for rushing... just for this."

"Just for this?" His eyes stayed on the road, "This is your leg. Of all the people you could've called today, I'm the one who actually knows what this is worth," he looked at you, and there it was, the tight-lipped smile you'd just been picturing.

You gave it back to him, "I just want you to know I'm thankful," holding the smile that long felt strange in your face, unpracticed, but it didn't feel wrong.

"Not a problem." He checked his mirror and merged. "My pleasure, honestly. You got me out of a miserable date."

"Oh," you weren't sure what to do with it, "I'm so sorry I interrupted your date."

"It's okay. You did me a favor."

"Yeah, I picked up on that," you watched the side of his face, "somewhere around the part where you made me call time on your evening."

"You did that beautifully, by the way."

"You conscripted me. I answered the phone a bystander and hung up an accomplice."

"You were a natural. 'Sixty seconds or you risk a second date,'" he almost smiled, "couldn't have scripted it."

"You didn't script it, you ambushed me with it. I called about a car and you had me running a code on you."

"And you rose to the occasion. That's the mark of a good clinician."

"The mark of a good clinician is not helping their attending fake a medical emergency to skip out on a woman."

"Agree to disagree."

He huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh, eyes forward, and you decided to let him keep his dignity. Mostly.

"Why was it miserable?" Something in his face went flat with the look of a man remembering an hour he wanted back, "you don't have to tell me," you added, quick, so it wouldn't land as pressure.

"It's not that," he shrugged one shoulder, "she just wasn't what I thought."

"And what did you think?"

"I thought she'd be more interesting to talk to."

"So she's boring?"

"No. She's not boring. She's just--" he hunted for a word, "I had other things on my mind."

"What things?"

Jack's POV

"What things?"

You. And that goddamn black thong.

"Just work things," I said. I tried to read her out of the corner of my eye without turning my head, "nothing, really."

"Oh," she didn't sound put out by it, "work's not the worst thing to have on your mind."

"Yeah?" I looked at her fully this time, "so what were you so deep in that you didn't hear or see a truck pull up two feet in front of you?"

The light ahead went red and I kept my eyes on her as we slowed.

She didn't look back at me.

But I'd have put money on the colour climbing into her cheeks.

"Just work things," she mocked.

Your POV

"Just work things."

Lie.

"Nothing, really," you added, mocking his own words back at him, a smirk pulling at the side of your mouth.

He laughed. A real one, low in his chest. It filled the cab better than the radio he'd left off.

You reached the clinic at 4:11.

ABBOT(T) in blocky print scrawled across the whiteboard outside Calum's office.

When you opened the door you saw him waiting there in a jacket with a duffle bag on the floor.

"Hey! Oh my god, thank you, thank you," you crossed to him.

"No problem," he said, easy as ever, though he tapped his wrist, "for the record, my flight's the only reason I'm rushing you. Let's get moving before I have to actually run to make it."

Your eyes were wide as you tried to bank the excitement down to something dignified. You couldn't quite manage it.

A small part of you had been looking forward to this all week.

"Come sit, get it on, take it for a spin. I'll watch your gait, we'll see what needs dialling in," he gestured to the fitting bench along the wall.

You nodded and settled onto it.

You wore a pair of flared Lululemons, soft and stretchy, the kind you could roll up over the knee without having to strip down in case you needed a hand.

You bent and drew the fabric up past your knee.

You worked the temp socket off, rolled the liner down and reached for the new setup waiting beside you.

Looking at the clean unmarked socket, the fresh liner, none of it worn soft or stained yet by a single day of your weight, you stopped.

Your eyes dropped to the leg.

What was left of it.

The shape below your knee that ended too soon, the taper of it, the surgical seam gone silvery and smooth.

You hadn't really looked, not since the last time you'd forced yourself to look at it.

You didn't care about the two sets of eyes on you.

You just sat with it for a moment.

Your fingertips moved over the end of the limb, tracing the line of the scar without any purpose but to feel it there.

A breath you hadn't known you were holding leaked out of your lungs.

"I don't think I'll ever get used to this," you said, to the room more than to anyone in it, "sometimes I forget, for just a second. Then I look, and it's..."

You stopped moving.

Your eyes lost their focus, going soft and far.

You could feel the floor start to tilt.

You couldn't catch it. No fight in you, no flight.

"I--"

The room thinned at its edges.

White light where there'd been fluorescent.

The clean smell of the clinic turning, underneath, to something wet and mineral and cold, the smell of a cement floor that never warmed.

Somewhere far off, water.

A drop.

Strangers' voices reshaping into a language you only had six words of.

Another drop.

"It--"

The taper of your own leg under your hand became the thing they took while you burned, the call made for you, by Sawyer, because you were too far gone to make it yourself.

"Ther--"

"Hey," a hand landed warm and flat on your right thigh, "it's okay," his voice.

You knew the gravel of it.

"Stay here with us," your eyes were still ticking back and forth between what was in the room and what wasn't as they fought their way toward his.

"Stay here with me," his other hand came to rest against your leg, careful, unafraid of it, "I'm right here."

He worked a slow, soft circle into the end of the limb with the pad of his thumb. No flinch in him at all, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world to touch the part of you Adam never got to know.

"It's gonna be okay. Come back to me."

Jack.

His voice was the thread. You followed it.

The drip went first. It thinned, lost its rhythm, stopped being water and went back to being nothing, the ordinary nothing of a room where no one was counting seconds.

Then the cold. It pulled back off the floor a degree at a time, and the floor under you was a bench again, padded, warm from your own weight.

The light was the last to let go. The white bleached down out of the air and left the fluorescents, humming, yellow-edged, and the wall in front of you was pale and clean and just a wall, and had been the whole time.

"Come back to me," he said again, pressing once more into your leg, an anchor you could feel through the fog.

Your eyes were slowing. Settling. No longer hunting the room for a threat that wasn't there.

You found his eyes and held them.

"There you are," the near-smile, "you've got this."

And just like that, you were back.

Both feet, real and phantom, in the room. You turned to the socket and set the limb inside it.

Calum moved in beside him. You hadn't noticed that Abbot had crouched to your level, patient as furniture.

Calum talked you through the placement then checked the fit with two fingers along the socket line and gave a small nod.

"Alright. Stand up for me. Take your time, let it come to you."

You pushed up off the bench. The difference hit you in the first half-second of weight.

Better. Immediately, unmistakably better.

You wobbled once, the smallest sway as your body recalibrated to a foundation that fit. Abbot's hands were presented in front of you, firm and sure, always sure, closing around your own to help steady you.

He let you find your own balance. Making it clear that he was only there to catch the difference, not to hold you up.

You looked at his forearms. This close, with your hands in his, you couldn't not.

The flex of them as they took the weight of you, the tendons standing, the old scars pale against the tan.

Steady.

He was giving you exactly as much as you needed, not one ounce more.

You steadied. His grip eased slightly without letting go.

"Good," Calum said, "now walk it out for me. Down to the wall and back. I want to see how the socket loads when your weight moves through it."

You let go of Abbot's hands and took your first steps.

You'd braced for wrongness. Friction high on the inner thigh where the old sleeve had rolled and burned you raw. The hitch in your hip from months of loading a leg that fit like a borrowed shoe. The low ache that lived in your back and your other knee.

The tax you paid for walking on a flinch.

It didn't come.

The socket moved with you instead of against you. Your weight ran down through the limb and into the floor along a line that felt, for the first time in longer than you could name, like it belonged to your body.

You walked to the wall.

Turned.

Walked back, watching your own gait in the long mirror without the usual urge to look away from it.

"Huh," you said, quiet.

"Different, yeah?" Calum was watching your hips, your knee, the whole chain of you. "This one's built to do more than stand there and hurt. Go on. Push it a little. It'll hold."

So you "pushed it."

You walked faster, cut a tight turn, felt the socket stay locked to you through the pivot instead of dragging a half-step behind. You dropped into a shallow squat and came back up, testing how it took the bend. You rose onto the ball of the sound foot and let the prosthetic bear the shift.

Each new demand, you braced for the pain out of pure habit and each time the pain that used to answer simply didn't.

It was strange.

That was the honest word for it. Strange the way clean sheets are strange after a long time without. You'd carried the discomfort so long it had become the baseline, become just what a leg was and here was a leg that argued the point.

Somewhere under the strangeness a much larger thing was rising. You knew it for what it was even as you tried to keep your face even about it.

Gratitude.

The uncomplicated, overwhelming kind.

"Calum," you started.

"I know," he said. "You don't have to."

Across the room, Abbot had gone still, watching you, arms loosely crossed, propped against the edge of a treatment table. He wasn't saying anything and you didn't get a clean look at his face before you turned back.

But you'd have bet on what was there.

A man watching you move like your body was yours again, holding down something that looked a great deal like pride, because he didn't think it was his to show.

"Try the bag," Calum said, nodding toward the heavy bag hanging in the corner where the clinic gave way to the gym half of the room. "Remember, it's a different foot than your last one. It'll plant differently when you throw from it. Better you feel that here."

You crossed to the bag. Set your stance, sound foot back, prosthetic forward. You felt the small negotiation of a body relearning where its base was.

You threw a jab, then a cross. On the cross you drove off the back foot the way you'd been taught a lifetime ago in a different country.

The new leg planted.

It caught the ground and gave the force somewhere to go. The bag swung and nothing in the socket screamed.

You threw a few more. Finding the rhythm: the plant, the pivot, the weight rolling clean through a foot you couldn't feel but could, for once, trust.

"Okay," you breathed, half a laugh in it, "okay, yeah."

"There she is," Calum started gathering his things in earnest, he clapped your right shoulder, "I'll want you back in a couple weeks so I can chase the fit as the swelling keeps settling. That's normal, that's the job now. But that'll carry you through long days on the floor, a jog to start, getting back under a bar, and," he tipped his head at the bag, "clearly, that."

"Thank you," you said, smiling wide but not nearly big enough for what you meant.

"Go enjoy your vacation," Abbot cut into the conversation, pushing off the table. He took Calum's forearm, the grip turning into a hard clap on the back that held a moment past the handshake, "try not to think about any of us."

"Not a chance I'm thinking about you two," Calum shrugged into his jacket the rest of the way, "Y/N. Take care of that. And take care of him, he won't ask you to," a small look passed between the two men, some old shorthand you weren't inside of, "now get out so I can lock up and go be a normal person for a while."

You wished him a good trip. He waved you both off, already killing the lights at the back of the clinic.

You walked out into the flat grey afternoon on a leg that felt like your own.

"So," Abbot said, unlocking the truck, "now that you've got a leg that can actually take it. We should hit the gym together."

You stopped with your hand on the door.

"Together?" You looked at him, unconvinced, "you don't strike me as a workout-buddy guy."

"You'll want a spotter," he said, like it was obvious. Then, conceding the point, "and you're right, I'm not. I go alone, I keep to myself, I like it that way," he pulled the driver's door open, "but getting back under a bar after this long, you don't do that solo. And you might want something to punch that hits back."

"Please." You climbed into the truck, shut the door and buckled. "Dr. Abbot. Seriously. What, you don't think I could take you?"

The corner of his mouth went up as he started the engine, "First, its Jack. Second, I know you couldn't, but it's cute that you think you could."

"Right... Jack. You've got to be joking. You're pushing what, 75?" You settled back into the seat, recalibrating, "I guess for a man knocking on a century, you're in decent shape."

"I'll take that." His eyes moved over you once, brief and appraising and gone. "You're not walking in there with anything to prove. Trust me."

Heat crawled up the back of your neck.

You kept your eyes forward.

"I could use the company," the banter dropped out of his voice, leaving the plainness underneath, "I know what I said. Alone's fine. Alone's been fine for a long time," he kept his eyes on the road, "doesn't mean it wouldn't be better with someone there. And I'd guess you know something about that."

Something in the way he said it told you he already knew the answer.

"Yeah," you agreed, "okay, fine. Gym partners," you let out sigh as you said it.

"Good," he pulled out of the lot.

A few blocks passed.

Then, casually, eyes on the road, "Have you gone grocery shopping yet?"

"Uhh. No."

"Didn't think so," he flicked the blinker, "we'll go before I drop you. Our days are synced and it just so happens I needed to go. And you've got, what, a jar of pickles and a freezer a quarter full of pizza pops?"

"That's not--" you stopped as you caught the flat deadpan he was aiming at you, the just-admit-it stare, patient as a wall, "okay, let's go," you huffed down into your seat.

You pushed the cart.

He read the shelves.

He'd drop something in and tell you what went with it. The not-cooking had never been the problem. The knowing-what-to-buy was, you'd told him as much the time he stocked your fridge without asking.

"Yogurt keeps," he said, setting it in," eat it with the granola and the berries, that's a whole breakfast, takes ninety seconds."

"Hummus, because it makes vegetables edible without effort."

"Bread, butter, jam."

"A carton of orange juice."

Eggs, "because eggs were the answer to half the times a person didn't know what to eat."

When you reached past him and dropped three 1L of Pepsi Zero Sugar into the cart, he raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

Being around him was surprisingly easy. That was something you kept noticing. You'd expected his presence to feel like being managed, but it didn't.

It felt like company.

Back at your place you were both unpacking it all, nothing elaborate, just the things he'd called "basics."

"There," he shut the fridge on the last of it, "now you've got some colour in there."

Yogurt, hummus, butter and jam, a carton of raspberries, the juice, the group of defiant Pepsi.

Simple things.

In the cupboard, a few boxes of pasta, a jar of sauce, rice, oats, a can or two of soup.

The bones of a kitchen that fed a person.

You smiled and thanked him.

He nodded.

"Not a problem, really," he looked around the place, taking it in properly for the first time, "so how long have you been here? It's nice."

"Yeah. I like it," your eyes drifted to the back wall, the one that was almost entirely window, the semi-circle of glass that had sold you the apartment before you'd seen another thing about it, "I've been here just about as long as I've known you. I moved in a few days before that first night in the ED with Kalista," you lifted a hand, turned the knuckles toward him, tipped them so the light caught the thin white scars there, "right before I met you like this."

"Those healed alright," he looked closer, "scaring came in more than I'd have guessed, for the depth of them."

"Wasn't the first time I'd split them."

That gave him pause.

"Care to elaborate."

"I told you. I was held for twenty-seven days," your voice stayed level, the flat clinical register you used to keep the thing at arm's length, "at some point in there I split them. Split them again in the hospital in Washington. Again at Adam's funeral. Again the night I met you. Then the next morning, on my bathroom cabinet."

You heard it building in your own voice, the level tone starting to crack along a seam.

"Adam," he said.

Quiet. Careful with it.

You stopped.

You hadn't heard him say it. You'd heard it spoken aloud exactly once since the his funeral, formally, by Amber in dress blues who had to get through the whole sentence without her voice breaking, a name read like a rite.

But no one had ever just said it conversationally, like a name instead of a wound.

"Stop," you said, low.

Not loud.

"You just listed five places you split those knuckles. Funerals, hospitals, cells," he kept his voice level, "I'm not asking you to relive any of it. I just don't think a person should have to carry a list like that and never once say it out loud."

"God, that's a good line," it came out mean and you meant it to,"'Never once say it out loud.' Did Sawyer give you that one? You've got a whole toolkit, don't you. Secret rooms and grief metaphors and the exact right thing at the exact right time," you stepped back from him, "you don't know me, you know the assignment."

"That's the whole reason I'm standing in your kitchen," the edge came up in him too, meeting yours, "somebody I trust asked me to make sure you land on your feet. I'm not going to apologize for taking it seriously."

"Why do you even care?" You didn't care how it sounded.

You couldn't have said how it got here this fast, what turned a conversation into this, only that he'd said Adam's name and something in you had gone up like a struck match.

"Who are you? You've known me a few weeks. Sawyer points you at me like a project and you just, what, sign up? Why would I trust you with any of this?"

"Because I know what it is," his voice climbed to meet the room, "I know exactly what this is, so don't--"

"No! YOU! Don't!" You were up out of yourself now, the grief turning to something hotter and harder to hold, "you couldn't begin to imagine the kind of--"

"HER NAME WAS CLAIRE!"

You'd never heard him like that. The steadiness you'd been throwing rocks at all night cracked straight down the middle and out of it came that.

The room, and you, went dead silent.

The heat went out of you all at once, your whole body caught flat-footed and stunned.

"I lost my wife," he said, lower, the volume gone back out of it.

Tears that had begun as pools in the corners of your eyes flooded over, streaming down your cheeks. Sorrow, full throttle, hollow and aching in your chest rattled through your frame while he spoke.

Barely audible sobs fell from your lips.

"You two wear the same face and bear the same marks. Maybe you should ask him sometime."

You hadn't understood it then. You understood it now.

He turned the ring on his finger. The one you'd seen a hundred times and never asked about.

"It was sudden. No warning, nothing. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. A convenience store robbery that went bad."

You looked at him through the blur.

You could see it now, the shine in his eyes too proud to let a tear fall.

"They took her to Westbridge," he paused, "not us... and the shooter… they brought the shooter to the Pitt," his jaw worked, "I didn't know. Mid-20s John Doe came in with a gunshot wound and I did my job. I put him back together. Clean work. I was proud of it, even," he drew a breath, "I found out after. What he'd done. Where she'd been taken. That I'd spent that hour saving the hands that--"

His breath hitched, one sharp inhale that he caught and held and set back down, the recovery so practiced it almost passed for composure.

He stopped.

It didn't need finishing.

You'd sat down at some point during it, sunk onto the arm of the olive couch without deciding to.

Your tears weren't only yours now, they were for him.

You wiped your face with the heel of your hand.

"How long?"

"Thirteen years, nine months and twenty-six days," he said the count without hesitating, the way you'd recite something you'd worn smooth turning it over. Then, quieter, like setting down a thing he'd made peace with carrying, "October 11, 2012."

Nine days.

The math did itself before you could stop it. Nine days before Adam's date--thirteen years earlier.

He'd been carrying all of that, down to the day, and he still stood there steady enough to hand out "wisdom and secret rooms," and you'd spat that steadiness back at him like it meant he'd never once been on the floor.

"I'm sorry," you meant it, "I shouldn't have--"

"You didn't know," he lowered himself onto the other end of the couch, leaving a careful gap between you, "how would you?"

You sat in it together, the quiet broken here and there by a sniff, by the wet catch of your breath leveling out.

Then you asked the thing you'd been circling since you accepted the reality of your new life.

"Does it go away?" Your voice was steadier now, worn smooth, "the pain? Does it ever... does it get better? Did you ever move on?"

He was quiet for a moment, giving it the honesty it asked for instead of the comfort it didn't.

"It took time," he looked at you, "a lot of it, but yes. It stops being the first thing you touch when you wake up and starts being something you carry. Then one day you realize you've been carrying it a while without setting it down, and it didn't kill you," he turned the ring again, "I dated. Eventually. I was with people. A few women for a while, one almost a year, another almost two. And they were good. I couldn't get all the way to wanting to stay. But that wasn't their fault."

He looked at his hands.

"The first time you're with someone new… after," he said, plainly, no weight on it beyond the truth of it, "it's strange. Not bad. Just strange, the whole time, like your body's somewhere your head hasn't agreed to go yet," his eyes stayed on his hands, "then it isn't strange anymore. That's the part nobody warns you about, that it stops being strange. Feels like a betrayal for about a second. Then it's just life again."

You took that in.

You didn't have that yet. Maybe you never would. But it was something, sitting next to a man who'd made it to the other side and wasn't pretending the crossing was clean.

A silence settled, easier than the one before it. Then his head turned, his attention caught by something across the room.

The bookshelf.

He got up, walking towards it slowly. You rose and trailed him without quite deciding to. You saw where his eyes had gone and your chest tightened.

The evening light, had climbed the shelves the way it always did and gone gold across the top of them.

The trailing plants at the bottom. The medical texts in an order only you could account for. The photo albums, family first, then the whole life in prints.

And above them, arranged with a care you'd spent two days getting right, the three frames. The burial flag folded upright behind them. The dark ceramic urn. The little grey mountain that ran incense down its face like a slow waterfall. Adam's dog tags draped over the corner of the squad-photo frame, hanging against the glass.

You watched his eyes land on the middle frame.

The two of you in your dress uniforms, foreheads nearly touching, confetti mid-air, caught laughing and not posed.

"He's handsome," he said, eyes turning to you.

Jack's POV

I said it and then I waited. I want her to walk through the door herself instead of me hauling her through it.

She'd spent the whole night defending the present. But this. This she'd already grieved. This was the seam.

Give me anything. Any piece of him. It doesn't have to be the hard part. Just let me stand next to one true thing.

I kept my face open and my mouth shut and I let the picture do the asking.

Your POV

A sound came out of you that was half a laugh and half the tail end of the crying.

"His last name is Handscombe," a smile pulled across your face as you spoke, looking at the photo of the man you married, "maybe… ten years ago somebody started calling him 'Corporal Handsome,'" you laughed, "and it stuck! Even after he made sergeant. No matter how hard he tried to shut it down," you reached out and touched the edge of the frame, "he hated it and he loved it," tears welled in your eyes, not the sad kind, the kind that come with a good memory arriving whole, "he'd roll his eyes every single time, but I could tell he'd have been heartbroken if they ever quit."

You looked at the picture and the whole of him came back at once, the way he did.

"He could barely grow a moustache," you said, another laugh breaking through, the memory of it so vivid it ached, "tried for a solid six months once. It looked ridiculous and I told him so every single day and he kept it anyway," your voice cracked around the smile," god, I loved him. I loved him so much I didn't have room for anything else," asoft sob rattled through you, "I got seven days of being married to him before--"

You couldn't finish it. Another sob, deeper this time, wracked through your frame.

The two of you were leaving a lot of sentences unfinished on the floor tonight.

"Claire used to leave cabinets open," he said, making eye contact.

Offering a piece of her the way you'd offered a piece of Adam.

"Every cabinet in the house. It drove me out of my mind. I'd walk through and close them behind her like a man following a toddler," the near-smile grazed his mouth but didn't quite make it, "I'd give a great deal to walk into a kitchen with every door hanging open right now."

You understood that ache better than he could have known.

He looked over the whole shelf again, the light on it, the order of it, the obvious hours in it.

"This is beautiful," he paused, "what you've made here. It's a beautiful place to put him," his eyes moved over the clean lines of it, the deliberate arrangement, nothing out of place, "and it's meticulous. This whole room is. It's immaculate."

"Thank you," you swiped at your face, the compliment sitting warm and strange in your chest.

You looked at him a moment.

Then it struck you, plain and sideways, the way useful thoughts always came. He had the same leg. Had it longer than you'd had yours. Somewhere in all those years he'd have figured out the thing you hadn't, how to get in and out of that damn tub without the hobbling, one-knee production you'd been calling a method for months.

The question was moving up your throat before you'd cleared it for takeoff.

"Can I ask you something?" You said it to a point just left of his face. "There's a thing I've been dealing with. It's stupid."

"Sure," no weight to it, like you'd asked him the time, "what."

"The shower. Getting in and out of the tub," you kept it flat, "I've got a way I do it, but the way I do it is... bad."

"I'd have to see the setup and what you're doing now," he said it the way he said things on the floor, like it was already a plan and not a favour he was doing you.

It's a mess back there.

"It's messy," you said, "fair warning."

"I can handle a mess."

Jack's POV

As she led me to her bedroom I let myself feel it for exactly one second, the small unlikely fact of it.

She'd asked me for help.

Not much, just a shower, a tub, nothing. But I'd watched this woman white-knuckle a phantom limb across a shift rather than say a word, watched her strip her own gloves off and walk out of my department before she'd let me see her flinch.

"She'll defend and deny the present to death. If you want a seam, it's the past." So I'd given her mine. Claire, laid out next to Adam, the two of them side by side like a thing we'd agreed to trade.

I hadn't done it as a tactic. But I'd have be lying if I said I didn't know what I was doing. You show a person the wound first. You go in bleeding so they don't have to go in alone.

And somewhere between her kitchen and this hallway, it had worked. The door had come open a crack and she'd been the one to open it.

I understood something else the second I stepped through. Something an hour of talking hadn't told me.

I'm a strong believer that you can read a person by the rooms they keep.

And she read like a chart.

Chief complaint out front. History buried in the back rooms.

The parts of her home that face outward, the parts that get seen, those get the performance. Her living room was a held breath. Not a book out of line, not a cushion wrong, the shelf for her dead built like an altar and kept like one. That was the space she'd decided to let the world into, and she'd made it flawless.

Her bedroom was the deeper truth. The version of her she didn't want to share. Clothes everywhere. On the floor, the chair, hung over the footboard, a pile at the end of the bed that had clearly been sat on and shoved aside more than once. Nothing dirty. That was the thing to understand. Not filthy, not neglected in the way that grows mold and smells. Just a room where the effort had run out. Clean laundry and worn laundry giving up the distinction, folded once and never put away.

The bed half-made in the way that means never made.

Photos on every surface. Loose 4x6 gloss and a scatter of white-bordered polaroids, some face-up, some face-down, spread across the nightstand and the dresser and the floor by the bed like she went through them and didn't have it in her to gather them back. A photo album open on the mattress. Another on the floor beside it, splayed on its spine.

And on the floor, that was the part that told me the most. The carpet by the bed and the path to the bathroom, worn different. Scuffed. The specific ground-in track of someone who takes the leg off and gets where she's going on the floor, on her hands, on the parts of her that still worked, when there was no one around to keep the performance up for.

And in the corner, untouched, a trunk. Military. I knew what a footlocker like that held, and I knew, from the dust on the lid, that she hadn't opened it.

I didn't ask. Not now.

She crossed the bedroom and pushed the bathroom door open ahead of me. It was worse.

Not dirty. I want to be fair about that, because there's a difference and the difference is the whole diagnosis. Nothing growing, nothing rotting, no smell. Just a room where the upkeep had quietly stopped being possible. The counter crowded edge to edge, a contact case, three different face lotions, a toothbrush lying on the porcelain instead of in the cup two inches from it, a box of tampons pushed back against the mirror, hair things, a razor, all of it closed and capped and none of it put anywhere. Two towels, one hanging crooked off the rod, one on the floor by the tub where it had been stepped out of and left.

And in the corner, half in a plastic bag, the things I'd been hoping to see and didn't like the look of. A shrinker. A spare liner still in its packaging. A sleeve of ply socks. All of it shoved down beside the vanity like a chore she'd carried into the room and set down and never come back for. Then the cabinet. I'd known about the hole. She'd told me herself an hour ago, standing in her kitchen, listing off the places she'd split her knuckles like a flight manifest. What she hadn't told me was that she'd left it. The lower door punched clean through, splinters still standing out of the wood where the panel had given, never sanded, never swapped.

And along the broken edge, gone brown and flat with age, her blood.

Six weeks of it. Still there.

"You never cleaned this," I said.

She looked at where I was looking.

"It's structural now," she said, "load-bearing. Whole vanity comes down if I touch it."

She's fine... fine the way a man walking on a broken foot is fine, right up until the X-ray.

I stood in a woman's bathroom and read it like a chart. I took the counter and the towels and the bag in the corner and the blood on the wood and put them together into a picture she has never once agreed to show anybody, and I did it in about nine seconds.

I couldn't have stopped if I'd wanted to. I didn't want to.

Because the picture told me what she'd never say out loud, which is that she is not managing. She's performing managing, out front, where the light is good, and paying for the performance back here where nobody sees the bill.

So do something useful with it, Abbot.

I turned to the tub.

"Okay," I clapped my hands together, "first problem. You've got nothing to hold onto."

Your POV

He said it like a fact, not a failing, which was the only reason you didn't get defensive about it.

"Nothing on this wall, nothing at the entry," he put his hand flat on the tile beside the tub, testing it, "you're doing a wet transfer, on one leg, with nothing to grab. That's not a technique problem. That's a physics problem."

"I've been fine."

"You've been lucky," he said it without heat, "bars go here and here. Vertical at the entry for the transfer, horizontal along the long wall for everything after. That's the real fix. It's twenty minutes and four screws if your studs are where they should be."

"Studs?"

"I'll find them," he said it like the matter was closed, "hardware store's ten minutes from here. We can grab a set on a day we're both off and I'll put them in for you."

"And until then? Because that's not tonight."

"Until then," he looked at you, "you've got a shower chair."

You said nothing.

"I know you've got one," he said, "they give everybody one. Go get it."

Go get it.

Not "do you have one?" not "would you consider?" He'd skipped the entire argument you'd been ready to have, and standing there with your mouth open and nothing loaded in it, you found you didn't especially want to have it anymore.

You went and got it out of the hall closet, still in the plastic.

He took it from you, pulled the wrap off, set it in the tub, back corner, and adjusted the legs by feel without measuring anything.

"Taps are here, so the chair faces this way. You want everything you need inside your reach before you ever get in. You already keep your supplies low, which is good, that part you've got right," he stepped up onto the lip of the tub, then sat down on the edge of it, fully dressed, like a man settling onto a bench, "watch this once, then you're doing it."

Then he reached down, rolled his pant leg, popped the sleeve, and took his leg off. No ceremony. No warning. The way you'd take off a watch.

He set it on the floor outside the tub, on the dry towel, well back from the water.

"Leg never comes in with you. Wet fiberglass on a wet surface is how you end up in my department, and I'll be honest, I'd take it personally," he shifted his weight back onto his hands, "sit on the edge first, always. Never step in. Sound leg over."

He swung it over.

"Then the other."

He brought the residual limb across, unhurried.

"Then you move back onto the chair, hands taking the weight the whole way down. You control the descent. You don't drop into anything."

He transferred onto the chair, one clean motion and sat there in his clothes in your bathtub, looking entirely unbothered about it.

"That's the whole thing," he said, "coming out is the same in reverse, and coming out is when people fall, so slow down for it. Dry the limb all the way before the liner goes anywhere near it," he shrugged, "personally, if I'm going straight to bed after, I don't bother putting it back on. Crutch from here to the bedroom and that's it. Some nights the leg's just one more thing to do."

"That's it."

"That's it," he held a hand out, "your turn."

You'd like to say you didn't hesitate.

He came out the way he'd gone in, put his leg back on with the same total absence of drama, and stood clear of the tub while you took the edge of it and sat.

Your hands went white on the porcelain.

"Sound leg first," he said, low, "take your time. Nobody's timing you."

You got the leg off. Set it out where he'd set his.

You swung the sound leg over and the balance went out from under you for half a second, a lurch.

His hand was at your shoulder blade before you'd finished tipping, steady and impersonal, gone again the moment you were level.

"Good. That's the part the bar fixes," his voice hadn't changed at all, "other one."

You brought it across.

"Now back onto the chair. Hands take it. Slow."

You lowered yourself down and the chair took your weight. You were sitting in your own bathtub with both hands free and the floor of you nowhere near the actual floor.

Eight months.

Eight months of a knee-down, one-armed, wall-scraping production you'd built out of nothing and stubbornness. And it turned out the whole time there had been a way to just sit down.

"There it is," he said, "that's all it was."

You stared at your own hands.

"I feel like a child," you said.

"No." Immediate. Flat. "You're learning to do something new in a body you've had for less than a year."

"Uh huh."

"Okay... you're right, you are a kid. I've got scrubs older than you."

The laugh got out before you could stop it, wet and surprised, and it broke the whole thing open.

He put out a hand and you took it and got yourself out, and it was fine, it was ordinary, it was a person getting out of a bathtub.

He nodded at the cabinet on his way past.

"I can fix that, while I'm at it. Swap the door, or knock the panel back and you'd never know it happened. Fifteen minutes."

"Nah," the smirk arrived before you could stop it, "don't worry about it."

He looked at you.

"I mean it. It stays."

August 11, 2026

11:09 PM

"2.0! Settle this for me," you turned away from the chart you were detailing to look at Dr. Shen, "you would rather eat a nice greasy slice of pizza from across the street over one of these..." He held up a protein bar and gave it a look that would have killed it, had that been possible. "NASTY! Protein bars. Right?" He looked into your eyes like the fate of nations hung on it.

Without hesitation you responded, "one hundred percent."

"See! Even someone who's eaten MREs would choose taste over convenience!" He was speaking passionately at Mateo now.

Who, after listening to the argument, preferred the protein bar.

They were bickering to your left, you couldn't be bothered. Your mind was preoccupied with the clock.

One hour until Adam's birthday, officially.

He wasn't born at midnight, but to you the birthday started as soon as the clock hit 12:00. That was exactly how it had been between you and Adam. On each other's birthdays, as soon as the clock turned, you'd be together, each racing to be the first to say "Happy Birthday."

Simple and stupid and probably what everyone does. But this time was the first time you'd spend his birthday without him.

You stared at the chart in front of you, typing out the details of your most recent case:

Puncture wound, volar aspect left palm. Mechanism: impalement on metal receipt spindle, removed at scene by patient. Sensation intact all digits, capillary refill under two seconds, flexor function preserved.

XR left hand: no retained foreign body, no fracture. High-pressure irrigation performed, wound left open to heal by secondary intention. Tetanus updated. Strict return precautions reviewed for signs of deep space infection.

The server had gone to slap a receipt onto the spike and put her palm through it instead, clean through. Then she pulled it out herself before the ambulance got there, which you had opinions about but kept to yourself.

"I do not want to be that girl. Woof." Abbot spoke over your shoulder. Something he'd been doing a lot of lately.

"Right? I was just thinking that."

"I've got some good news," his voice lifted.

Some genuine good news would be nice right about now.

"Oh really. Well, please," you turned on the stool to face him, the smallest smile on your face.

It felt forced. You were doing your best to act like nothing was sitting on the far side of that clock.

"When that clock," he pointed to the giant clock hanging above the nurses' station, "reads midnight, your Pennsylvania license verification clears. Credentialing pushed it through this afternoon. Provisional privileges. You assess, you order, you chart as physician of record. My countersignature stays on treatment plans. But… you still don't touch a procedure without an attending in the room," a smirk started to form, "figured you'd want to know that come midnight, you stop being the world's most overqualified intern," smirk now evolved into a full smile. Growing in unison with your own.

You stood from the stool and lifted both hands toward the ceiling. Then in an extremely controlled fashion executed something between a stretch and a victory dance, face scrunched with joy.

"Fuck yeeeeaaahhhh," you whispered to yourself.

You brought your arms down and turned back to Dr. Abbot.

"No shit? That's awesome. I told you I was a real physician. Ha! You just couldn't take my word for it, huh?" You patted his shoulder as you moved to pass him.

He stopped you.

"Hold on. Was that… a happy dance? Just now?"

"It was an act of excitement."

"That was the stiffest happy dance I have ever witnessed. I've seen rigor mortis with more rhythm," he laughed, "relaaaax sometime."

"Oh yeah?" You turned back to him, "and did you see yourself when Huckleberry said there were leftover blueberry muffins in the break room last week? I swear it was like watching the Tin Man try to do the dougie."

"That was different. Those muffins were exceptional."

"Your elbows didn't bend once. Not once."

"They bent."

"They creaked."

He was fighting the smile and losing.

Something about watching him lose was better than winning. You raised your right hand into the air, palm out.

He looked at you. Then at the hand.

"Are you serious?"

"Come on, old man. Just do it."

He smiled and clapped your hand with his. The crisp sound of a perfectly lined up high-five echoed through the ED, distinct over all the chaos. You smiled at each other and turned away.

You could finish the chart later. You wanted a case, a fresh one, one where the forms would come back with your own name printed in the consulting line.

You thought about it. In a way, your name was already on every report, just short one T, which was exactly enough reason to want to add it in.

You went to the board, scanning up and down.

"No cherry-picking. South 3 is ready," Lena said, not even looking up from her station, "labs are back, ECG's on the chart."

"Alright, sure. South 3 it is," you didn't mind, honestly. You just wanted something.

South 3 was a 62 year-old man named Reggie Stephens with abdominal pain since that morning.

He was ready for you.

He had a phone in one hand, open to a page he'd clearly been building for hours. He laid out his own history before you'd finished reading the chart.

Sharp pain, lower left, worse after eating. He'd cross-referenced it against, by his own count, four sources.

"I think it's diverticulitis," he said, "possibly early. But I want to rule out an abdominal aortic aneurysm, because I read that presents similarly, and at my age--"

"You're not tender where an AAA would make you tender," you said, palpating, "and you'd feel it quite differently. This is soft. Pulsatile masses aren't subtle," you watched his face, "you a doctor, Mr. Stephens?"

"Engineer. Retired. Thirty-one years," he said it the way some men say a rank, "I read. A lot."

"I can tell."

This is going to be a long conversation.

You ordered more labs. He asked which markers and why.

You explained white count and CRP, then he asked what number would change your plan.

You ordered a CT. He needed to know the radiation dose, then negotiated it, until finally accepting it on the condition that you'd walk him through the read yourself instead of, in his words, "having it relayed like a game of telephone by somebody who trained on a computer."

You'd have found it insufferable in almost anyone.

In him, somehow, it was the most fun you'd had on shift.

Because he wasn't wrong to ask.

He was wrong about the aneurysm, wrong about a hernia, wrong, gently, about most of it. But every question was a real question. And answering them made you feel the shape of your own competence in a way you hadn't in months.

He fought you on the boring answer with the stamina of a man who'd spent three decades finding the flaw in other people's math and you fought back.

The CT came back diverticulitis. Uncomplicated. Exactly what he'd led with, minus every exotic thing he'd tried to upgrade it into.

"Ha," he looked almost disappointed, "so I was right."

"You were right the first time. Then you spent 45 minutes trying to talk yourself into something worse."

"I like to be thorough."

You couldn't help but smile as you handed him the discharge paperwork: oral antibiotics, diet modification, the return precautions he would absolutely read twice.

"Diverticulitis is boring. Boring is the best thing you can be in my department. Take the win."

He took the paperwork and the pen, then squinted at you.

"You argue like somebody who's been argued at," he said, "military?"

You didn't answer that. You just smiled, a real one, and told him to follow up with his doctor in a week.

"They're not going to be as much fun as you," he called after you.

"No," you agreed, over your shoulder. "They're not."

You turned, chart in hand, ready to for the first time file it under your own name.

Both T's.

It felt right.

You stepped out of the room, closing the door softly behind you. You couldn't help but look back through the glass.

You checked your watch.

11:59 PM. What?

As the thought hit you, the clock turned.

12:00 AM.

The pride you'd carried out of South 3 dissolved immediately. Something colder poured into the space it left.

How did time move so fast?

You turned, searching through the moving faces and bodies. The floor was mid-rush, everyone weaving, efficient, purposeful.

Where is he?

Your eyes swept the tarmac.

No. Not the tarmac. The hospital.

Where is he?

You didn't notice your focus starting to slide, the edges of the room going thin the way they'd gone thin at the clinic. Someone bumped your side. You brushed it off and started walking, because ahead of you, past the nurses' station, a crowd was forming.

Backs turned. Shoulders squared. The particular stillness of soldiers around something on the ground.

Soldiers? No. Nurses. Those are scrubs.

Except the shoulders were wrong for scrubs. Too square, too still, the stance of people standing over a body and waiting to be told what to do with it.

What is it? What happened? Who--

You stepped closer. Another bump at your left, your knee buckled, you caught it, kept moving. The huddle ahead of you resolved and blurred and resolved.

The man closest to you was in scrubs. The one beside him was in OCPs, sand-coloured, sleeves down. A woman turned half a profile toward you and she had a stethoscope around her neck and a rifle slung across her back, and you were close enough now to see both and neither.

Then you stopped trusting your eyes entirely, because underneath everything, low and rhythmic and impossible, you could hear rotors.

Move. You're a doctor. Move.

You reached the place where the crowd was.

There was no crowd.

There was a hallway. An empty stretch of floor outside South 8, a supply cart parked against the wall, Kim walking past with an armful of saline.

Not a single person gathered anywhere. Nothing. No one.

You stood very still and let your heart hammer itself back down.

It wasn't real. There was nothing there.

You breathed in for four, held it, let it go. Scanned the room, counted five things, the way Dr. Osei had built into you.

Cart. Clock. Kim. Monitor. The scuff on the baseboard shaped like a boot heel.

You knew what you were supposed to do with an episode like that. You were a physician--you knew exactly what the responsible version looked like, the reporting, the conversation, the concerned faces.

But your privileges were four minutes old.

You shrugged your shoulders back into place and decided, with a calm that was itself probably worth reporting, that it was fine. It had passed. It was handled.

It's fine.

Something grabbed your shoulder. You turned fast.

Terrified.

For a fraction of a second his face was Adam's.

Then the grey at the temples shuttered the face back into its own. Firm jaw, strong brow, pride sitting in it.

The way Adam's pride used to sit, but older.

"Congratulations, Dr. Abbott," his hands landed on your shoulders, warm and heavy. The weight of them pressed something loose in your chest you hadn't known was clenched. "Two T's. Provisional privileges, effective five minutes ago. First chart that's all yours."

You let out a breath and with it went a tightness you hadn't noticed pulled across your chest.

He lifted one hand off your shoulder, palm up.

You smiled with recognition and returned the high five.

Then he reached into his scrub pocket and held something out to you, flat on his palm. A pin. Two capital T's, side by side, small and brass and heavier than it looked.

"Group effort," he said, "Mateo found it, Lena put the order in, half the floor signed off on the idea. I asked if I could be the one to give it to you."

You took it and fixed it to the cloth above your badge. When you looked up he was digging through his pocket again.

He pulled out a second pin. A single capital T, same brass, same weight.

"Lena had this one made for me," he turned it over between his fingers, deadpan, "figured it might help people tell us apart. We look so alike, it's been a real problem."

The laugh that came out of you was real, and loud enough to turn heads at the station.

And the heads that turned didn't turn back. Mateo threw both arms up. Lena gave you a nod over the top of her glasses without breaking from the phone at her ear. Ellis said something to Shen that made him laugh, Shen started clapping, Cruz joined in. Kim came out of South 4 with an armful of linens tucked them under one elbow still managing to clap with her free hand.

You smiled and thanked them, all of them. It was a small thing that meant a lot.

You stepped away toward the break room while the floor folded back into motion behind you.

The break room was empty. You looked at the pin for a moment. This ridiculous, thoughtful thing.

Then your smile faded into something quieter.

You reached for the chain at your throat, drawing it out from under your scrub top. The marquise and the thin band beside it, warm from your skin. You pressed them both to your lips and closed your eyes.

Happy birthday, my love. I miss you. Every day. Every second. I miss you.

You stood there, rings pressed into your lips, eyes shut, allowing this minute to be his.

Behind you, softly, the door clicked closed.

Your eyes snapped open and you turned. But the room was empty, the door back in its frame.

You wondered who it was that had felt the need to flee.

Jack's POV

I'd followed her to the break room because I wanted to talk to her. Nothing important. An excuse, mostly, to keep the good mood going another five minutes.

I got the door open a foot and stopped.

She had her back to me, standing at the table, and I only got one look before I understood I shouldn't have any.

Her head was bowed. Both hands up at her mouth, holding something small I couldn't see and didn't need to. Shoulders down out of the line she carries them in, all the way down, the whole rigging of her let go at once. She wasn't moving. Not the stillness of somebody waiting on something. The stillness of somebody who had come in here specifically so she could stop.

She didn't know I was there. That was plain from the shoulders alone. Nobody stands like that with an audience.

Whatever this was, it wasn't mine.

I stepped back and let the door close as softly as it would go.

The rest of the shift ran itself. She worked clean, charted under her own name. Somewhere around 6:00 AM I needed to take a breather.

I told Lena to page me if anything urgent came in. Then I made for the freight elevator and rode it up to nine.

The doors opened. Two flights of stairs and a push-bar door, same as it always was. When I shouldered it open I was met with gold. Sunrise, full and low, flooding the rooftop from the far side, the kind of light that makes even a hospital roof look like it's forgiven you for something.

My first instinct was to put a hand up against it, which I did. Then I looked toward the ledge, toward the spot where I expected, out of years of habit, to find Robby.

Instead, I found (Y/n).

I slowed. She was on the other side of the safety bar, out on the ledge. Before anything else in me could react to that, I registered that she was steady. Sitting, not standing.

Settled.

Nothing I hadn't done a hundred times in that exact spot.

I turned and caught the door before it could slam shut.

I wasn't trying to sneak up on her. I just wanted to know what she was doing up here, alone, at the end of one of her best shift in her short Pittsburgh career.

That curiosity was not, strictly speaking, any of my business. But I proceeded with it anyway.

She was talking. Low, half-swallowed by the wind off the rivers.

I stood where I was and listened.

"...sometimes the days feel so long, but the nights go quick. I dream of you. And them. And there," her voice caught, then kept going, "what they did to you and me. To all of us," a sob escaped her, it sounded like she stopped fighting them, "and you saved us. You gave your life for us."

I went still.

"Eight taken. Three out. One survived."

Sawyer's arithmetic, the numbers I'd known for a month. Here was the missing detail.

He'd been there. Her husband had been taken with her, had been in it with her. 27 days.

And he'd died getting her out.

She hadn't told me. She'd told a rooftop at sunrise.

I was stealing it. I should have left.

"I miss you every day. Every second," the crying was undeniable now, open, unguarded in a way I had never once seen her.

"It was supposed to be me."

She said it the way people say a thing they've said a thousand times, worn smooth, no shape left to it.

"I'd already decided. I had the whole thing worked out and I was ready, and you knew. You knew what I was going to do."

I went very still.

"And you didn't argue with me. You didn't say a word. You just got there first so I couldn't," her breath came apart somewhere in the middle and she hauled it back, "you didn't ask me. Not once. And I would have said no, and you knew that too, and that's why you didn't ask."

That was the shape of it. Somewhere in whatever happened out there she had decided the arithmetic: it was going to be him walking out. Adam had looked at the same arithmetic and moved first.

The wind took the next part. Then it brought her back.

"That's not saving me. That's deciding you're the one who gets to do the saving."

And there it was.

Every hand I have put on her. Every single one.

The leg I carried. The scalpel. The groceries in her fridge that she never asked for. Every decision I have made about that woman I made because I could see it clearly and she couldn't, and I did not once stop to ask.

I have been doing to her, in miniature, the exact thing she is up here crying about at six in the morning.

So stop deciding for her.

That was the whole correction, it took me about two seconds to find it. I suspect it will take considerably longer to actually do: offer the thin, say the reason, then leave the decision on the table where she can reach it, and let her pick it up or not, and live with either.

She'd asked me for help the other night. Actually asked, out loud, for the first time since I've known her.

That's what that was. That's what it costs her.

Up on the ledge her voice changed. The crying got a laugh folded into it, wet and small, and she kept going.

"But I think... I think I'm building a new home here. I've met people. Good people. Nice. Supportive."

All true. That floor had taken to her.

"Kind of annoying."

And there's me.

"He reminds me of you sometimes."

The ground went out from under the morning. I know what that is, I've been the other side of it. Grief reaches out in the dark and takes the shape standing closest, and it has nothing to do with the man himself.

She's not seeing me. She's seeing the outline he left.

"His name's Dr. Abbot. Small world, huh? It's not even spelled the same. Jack Abbot, A-B-B-O-T. "

She was introducing me. That got me, spelling my name out for a dead man like he'd want to be able to place me later.

"He lost his leg too. Overseas, too. Sometimes I think it's strange how much we have in common."

Everybody's said it. Robby, Calum, Dana, all of them. I let it go past me like weather.

"I found out he lost his wife," the smile left of her voice, "I thought he was divorced and just kept the ring. But I never asked. And I said such ugly things to him before I knew."

No. You didn't know.

I didn't say it. It wasn't my conversation. I was just standing in it.

She was quiet a long time. The wind moved. The light climbed.

"But I'm here for you."

She lifted something small and her hand opened over the drop.

Your POV

The sun cleared the rivers gold, the exact color it used to come up over the wire, back when the two of you would steal the quiet hour before the war woke up and watch it arrive together. His favorite light. Your favorite light. The only clock that never lied to either of you.

You'd carried the vial in your bag since the start of shift. A tablespoon, less. The agreed-upon terms of your deal.

You opened it into the sunrise and let the wind take him out over a city he'd never seen.

Salerno had a piece of him. So did Washington. And his hometown, by his mother's hand. Now Pittsburgh.

You were showing him the world the way you'd promised, one city at a time, one tablespoon at a time. And this one, this one you were giving him on his birthday, in his light.

"Happy birthday," you whispered.

The wind moved through the space where the ashes had been. Behind you, close, a boot scuffed concrete.

You went rigid. Turned.

Dr. Abbot stood a few feet back from the safety bar, hands loose at his sides, making no attempt to pretend he'd just arrived.

Heat flooded up your neck, it wasn't the good kind, "how long have you been standing there?"

"A while."

"How much did you hear?"

"Enough to know you think I'm 'kind of annoying.'"

You stared at him.

"'Supportive' was also in there," he went on, ducking under the safety bar like it was his, "and 'nice.' So on balance I'm choosing to take the whole thing as a positive performance review."

The laugh ambushed you, wet and involuntary. You hated him for it a little, but you were more grateful for it, because you understood exactly what he was doing.

He'd heard everything. He was holding all of it and handing you back only the part that was light enough to carry in front of another person.

He settled onto the ledge beside you, a careful arm's length between. Looking out at the light the way you'd been looking at it.

For a while, neither of you said anything.

Then he straightened slightly, squared his shoulders toward the sunrise, and addressed the open air in the flat normal cadence you'd know anywhere--the voice of a man delivering a report.

"Sergeant. Figured you'd want a sitrep," Abbot spoke to the sky, entirely serious, "as of 00:00 this morning, provisional privileges, effective immediately. First chart filed under her own name. Both T's, which she will not let anyone forget, I'm sure. Performance on the floor, outstanding. Morale, improving," his mouth twitched, "still refuses to call me Jack, which I'm electing to note in the record as insubordination."

The sound you made was half a sob and half a laugh. It came from somewhere so deep you didn't recognize the exit route.

He let the wind have the quiet for a moment.

"Happy birthday, Sergeant," he said, softer.

You looked at the side of his face, gold-lit, steady, his eyes on the place where the ashes had gone.

"Thank you for getting her out."

Everything in you went still.

You couldn't have spoken if the building were on fire.

So you did the only thing you had. Your arms wrapped around him and pulled tight. A silent tear fell from your eye. He returned your hug without looking away from the light.

You both let go, and the two of you sat on the ledge of the Pitt while the sun finished climbing.

A doctor and a doctor. A widow and a widower.

Then his watch chirped, ugly and ordinary.

"Alright," he rose, offering you a hand under the bar, "we've got 40 minutes left on the clock and if Mateo finds out we were both up here, the story will be unrecognizable by Thursday."

"By Tuesday."

"By Tuesday," he agreed.

You took his hand and went back to work.

September 7, 2026

You were running the river path, a light jog, easing the new leg up through the gears the way Calum had told you to. In black, low-rise flared lulu pants and a matching bra top, athletic enough to mean business but cute enough that you'd checked the mirror twice.

You glanced over your shoulder.

Nothing. You are good. You are ahead.

You glanced over the other shoulder.

Nothing. Yeah. You are great. You are ah--

A hand touched the middle of your back.

"AH!" You jumped half out of your skin and spun, now jogging backwards, pulse slamming, "oh my god, I didn't even see you. What the hell," you were out of breath and pointing at him like an accusation, "you're fast for an old guy, Dr. Abbot."

"How many times do I have to tell you to call me Jack?" He was breathing hard too, hands going to his hips as you both slowed to a stop.

"Ha," you dragged in a breath, "you're my superior. It's built into the training. You of all people should get that."

"Uh huh," he straightened out of the hands-on-hips thing, still breathing hard, a thin sheen of sweat across a chest that had no business looking like that after four kilometers, "how many weeks have we been doing this?"

You new the answer, "four?"

"Four weeks. Three, four mornings a week, straight off a twelve," he started walking it out, you fell in beside him, "I have driven you to Calum's twice. I have watched that man take a heat gun to your socket while you complained about the temperature," he tipped his head, "point out the part of that where I'm your superior."

"The part where you countersign my charts."

"That's paperwork. That's not a relationship."

You didn't answer that right away, because he'd said it lightly and it had landed heavier than he meant it to, or exactly as heavy as he meant it to. You were getting worse at telling the difference.

"Superior at work," he went on, easier, "out here I'm just a guy who's faster than you."

"You are not faster than me."

"I came up behind you and you didn't hear me."

"I was in a zone."

"You were dying."

You stopped for a second, honestly considering it. Not the running. The other thing.

Because he was right. The shape of the last four weeks was sitting there in plain view and neither of you had looked directly at it. Four mornings a week. The clinic trips. A grab bar he'd put in your bathroom with his own drill and had not shut up about since. He'd been in your kitchen, your bedroom, your bathtub.

"Wow," you said in a tone of pure disbelief as you put your hand up, palm open, high, the way you'd started doing without discussing it," my only friend in Pittsburgh is an old man."

He brought his up and met it, both hands flat. Neither of you pulled away as fast as you used to.

"Hey."

You let yourself look at him for exactly one second longer than you had any business looking. Sweat at the collar, shoulders still working through the tail end of his breathing, forearms you'd catalogued more than once and would be cataloguing again, apparently, this morning, on a public path, in the sun.

Then you took off.

"You can't just--"

You could hear him swear and go after you, and it took him less time to close the gap than you'd have liked.

October 3, 2026

Jack's POV

I'd like the record to show that teaching her to fight was her idea.

Fine. It was my idea.

But she agreed with unsettling enthusiasm. By the second session it was clear the Army had already handled the introduction and what she actually wanted out of me was a live body "because a bag doesn't hit back." I should have seen it coming. The first time I ever saw her face there was somebody else's blood on her knuckles.

So I held mitts and assessed her, which is what you do. Hands were never the problem. Hands were, frankly, better than mine at that age. She moved better every week too, as the leg and her trust in it caught up to each other.

When Calum got back from his trip the two of us went in together and he shaved a hair off the socket, chased the swelling down the way he said he would. We'd been in a couple times now for adjustments--because that's the job now. Each time she walked out of that clinic moving a little more like the leg had always been hers.

And that's what it had been. Mitts, footwork, conditioning, a leg getting better underneath her. Then this morning, in the parking lot, before I'd even shut the truck door.

"I want to get on the mat."

No.

That was the first thing that arrived, fully formed, before I'd assembled a single reason for it.

I coached her the way I'd coach anyone. Hands-on, adjusting a stance here, squaring a hip there, the way I've done for a hundred medics and soldiers over the years without a single complication.

Now... there were complications.

Three weeks back, of our shared off day. Early session, before either of us had to be anywhere, the gym half empty and the sun coming through the high windows in long dusty bars across the floor.

She was drilling a hook off the back foot and not getting it, because she was throwing it with her arm instead of her hips. I told her twice. Told her a third time. Then I did what I have done ten thousand times in twenty five years of teaching people to hit things, which is step in behind and put my hands on the points that need to move.

"It comes from here," I said, and set my hands on her hips, "not from the shoulder. Turn the whole thing."

She turned the whole thing. And misjudged, badly, where I was standing. She stepped back into me.

I want to be exact about this, because I have been exact about it privately more times than is defensible. Her back came flush to my chest, the top of her head just under my chin and for the length of two seconds my hands were still on her hips and her body was against mine from shoulder to thigh, all of it. She was warm through the shirt and she smelled like clean sweat, and vanilla, which surprised me every single time. Under the vanilla theres something sharper, alcohol or antiseptic, a hospital note that never fully comes off any of us.

And low, right at the front of my hips, where I am not built to be philosophical about anything, the softness of her.

Two seconds. Maybe less.

Then she moved off, reset her stance, said something under her breath about the mitt being too high and threw the hook again. Correctly this time, off the hip like I'd been telling her.

She did not register it. Not one flicker. Nothing crossed her face, because there was nothing there to cross it.

A person bumped into another person in a gym.

"There it is. That's the one," I sent it back to her flat, the way I'd say it to anybody, "again."

And I held mitts for another forty minutes like a professional. As I drove her home we talked about a patient with a retained fishhook.

Then I went to my own house.

I ate something standing at the counter. Rinsed the plate, put it in the dishwasher, wiped down the sink, because I am a tidy man and tidiness is a thing to do with your hands. I sat down on my own couch at four in the afternoon with the radio low, like a grown adult with a settled life.

And I thought about it.

Just once, at first. Just the two seconds, the way you'd rewind a play to see the foot land in bounds. Clinical.

Then again.

Then again, slower, and somewhere in the third pass it stopped being a memory and became something I was doing.

I felt it change. I knew exactly what it was. I did not stop.

Don't.

I put my head back against the cushion and let it run.

Her spine along my sternum. The give of her hips under my hands, which had been on her, which I had put there myself. How small she is against me and how completely that registers when there is no space left between two people. The heat of her coming through two layers of cotton like there weren't any. The idea, which arrived uninvited and stayed, that she had only stepped back six inches and that if I had shifted my weight forward instead of holding still she would have felt exactly what she was doing to me, right there, in a public gym, at eight in the morning.

That was the one. That was the thought that took the legs out.

My hand was already moving.

I'd like to report that it was brief. That it was mechanical, an itch scratched, a man of fourty-nine dealing efficiently with a biological event and getting on with his afternoon........

It was not brief.

It was slow and it was specific and I let myself have all of it, her breath going, the sound she'd make, my hands going up under that shirt instead of staying politely on the outside of it, her turning around in my arms in a room with nobody in it, the whole architecture of a thing that has not happened and cannot happen, built out in detail, at four in the afternoon, on my own couch, with the radio on.

At the end I said something. Not a word exactly. A syllable with the shape of the front of her name in it.

And then it was over, and the room was just a room.

The radio was still going. Somebody was doing traffic.

I sat there for a while with my head back and my eyes open and a ceiling I have looked at ten thousand times and I took a full and honest inventory of the man on that couch.

Forty-nine years old. A career in uniform and a longer one after it. Thousands of people alive because of decisions I made under pressure. A man other men come to when it's bad, because I am the steady one, that is the entire and only thing I have ever been.

And a woman half my age had stepped backwards into me by accident, and I had taken those two seconds home and made a whole afternoon out of them.

She's twenty-eight. You countersign her charts. She buried her husband nearly a year ago and she still wears his ring around her neck. Sawyer put her in your hands. Get up.

I got up. I cleaned myself off. I washed my hands twice at the kitchen sink, like that was the part that needed addressing.

Then I put my shoes on and went for a five-mile run I did not want, in the heat, at the ugliest hour of the day. It did not help either.

"You ready, old man?"

She came out of the locker room snapping me from my thoughts.

She's in shorts, the loose olive ones over a tighter sand-coloured pair underneath. Sports bra, black, functional, no interest in being anything else. Everything she owns for this is chosen to move and nothing is chosen to be looked at, which does not, I have found, make the slightest difference.

Bare shoulders. Bare stomach. The socket line sitting where it sits, out in the open, in a room full of people, which is not nothing for a woman who spent six months buying pants specifically to hide it. The first time she walked out like that I had a genuinely difficult afternoon locating places to look. I'm better at it now.

Mostly.

What I couldn't help noticing and I did try, is what eight weeks had done. In July she'd had the body of a soldier who had stopped being one. Thin in the way that isn't health, muscle gone quiet under a layer of months spent surviving instead of living. Now there was definition back across her shoulders, down her arms, the long muscles of her back standing up under the strap. She'd been eating. She'd been sleeping some. She'd been putting the work in and the work had answered.

She looked like somebody's soldier again.

"Warm up first," I said.

"I am warm."

"You're vertical. That's different."

We went through it. Shrimping, bridging, the ugly unglamorous floor work that nobody films. She was fluent in it in a way that told me she'd done a lot of it, once, somewhere with worse mats than these.

"Okay," she sat up, "the mat."

Here is where I made my mistake.

"Nobody's going to fight with you."

Her face changed, "why?"

"Because of the leg. There's too much liability. A carbon prosthetic is a wea--"

"People fight with you."

"That's different."

"How?"

Because I don't want to watch you get hurt.

And I heard it. Sitting in my own mouth, unsaid, wearing a costume.

Because that is not a liability concern, that's not a policy, that is a man looking at a woman and deciding on her behalf which risks she is permitted to accept. I have stood on a roof at sunrise and listened to her tell her dead husband exactly what she thinks of men who do that. "That's not saving me. That's deciding you're the one who gets to do the saving."

For weeks I've been carrying that. And here I was, in a gym, at 9:00 AM doing it in a smaller size.

"It isn't different," I said, "you're right. Get on the mat and I'll fight you."

She blinked at me, "okay."

"Rules first. You tap, I stop. I tap, you stop. Nobody's proving anything."

"Sure."

"Say it back."

"I tap, you stop," she grinned at me, "I heard you."

We started standing, leg on, which she would have fought me over if I'd suggested anything else.

She came at me straight away. Got a decent tie-up, hands where they should be and tried to work an underhook. I stuffed it, because I have sixty pounds on her and I have been doing this since before she was born.

She reset and came again. Better the second time. Changed levels properly, got in on a leg, and had to abandon it because finishing a takedown means driving through with your hips and her hips have a carbon post underneath one of them that doesn't bend.

I felt her clock it. The exact half-second where the body said no.

Then I got lazy.

I tapped her twice on the side of the head. Light, open hand, the way you do with somebody you're not actually fighting.

She stopped dead.

"Don't."

"Don't what."

"Don't do that," flat, "if you're going to fight me, fight me."

"I'm not trying to hurt you."

"Then you're not doing me a favor. You're doing yourself one."

She stepped in and hit me in the mouth.

Clean. Short. Came off the back foot exactly the way I'd taught her, and I felt my lip go between my teeth and split. The taste of it arrived a half second later.

The gym went very quiet in my particular corner of it.

I touched my mouth. Looked at the red on my fingers.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay?"

"Okay. Nobody's patronizing anybody," I nodded at the mat, "leg off. We're going down."

Something moved across her face, there and gone.

"Pylon's a lever," I said, before she could decide it was about her, "carbon fiber, doesn't feel a thing and it'll crack a rib without either of us meaning it to. It's also a handle. There's no version of somebody getting a handle on your body that ends well," I sat down on the edge of the mat, "mine's coming off too."

I rolled the pant leg, broke the seal, took it off and set it down, and did not make a production of it. Then she sat and did the same, and I watched her do it without appearing to. The first time she did that in front of me, in a call room in July, it cost her something I could see from across a room. In the clinic it cost less. In her own bathroom, less again. This morning she rolled the sleeve, broke the seal, set the leg down beside the mat and pulled her shorts back over the end of the limb, and it took about eleven seconds, and she didn't look at me once to see how I was taking it.

Down to eleven seconds.

I don't say things like that to her. She'd hate it. But I keep a running number, and the number keeps going down

So we started from the knees and about forty seconds in I put her on her back. Not roughly. But I stopped subtracting and there's a difference between the two. She felt it immediately. She's better trained than I am. That's the truth of it. Her system is the current one, drilled properly, positional and patient. Mine is the old Field Manual business from the 90s, which was mostly about ending things fast with whatever was nearest. It has aged about as well as I have. She out-techniqued me three separate times in the first four minutes. It didn't matter, because I'm sixty pounds heavier and my base is a foot wider and eventually every exchange resolved into physics. But somewhere in the middle of it I started noticing something else.

Her game was somebody else's.

That's a real thing you can read on a person. Everybody's grappling has a dialect, and hers wasn't hers. There were things in there that didn't belong to a doctor who trained twice a week between rotations. There was a grip she kept coming back to. An ugly little wrist tie nobody teaches in a class, the kind of thing that only ever gets handed person to person on a mat by somebody who loves it.

Who taught you this?

I already knew. Because whoever put that grip in her hands had been close enough to put it there. Repeatedly. Patiently. And I was, at that particular moment, standing in his spot. She hunted a leg. I circled, took her back, and got the body triangle. Which was correct. It's the highest-percentage thing available and I've been finishing rolls from there for thirty years. My chest to her spine, my legs locked across her waist, my forearm coming across.

I got it to about forty percent.

"Tap."

Nothing.

"Y/N. Tap."

She got a hand on my wrist and started working it and she was not going to get it. She knew she was not going to get it. She kept working it.

I could feel her heart going against my forearm. I could feel every breath she took and how few of them there were.

She's not tapping.

And then, with the timing of a man who has never in his life been rewarded for restraint, my body picked that exact second to remind me it had opinions. Loudly. Immediately. Pressed directly against the small of her back with a body triangle locked around her waist and absolutely nowhere for it to hide.

I let go.

Not fast. Fast would have told her something. I unhooked the triangle, slid the arm out, rolled off her and sat back on my heels and put a good foot of air between us. She came up on her elbow, chest going, hair everywhere, absolutely furious.

"I wasn't done."

"You were done four seconds in."

"I had it."

"You didn't have it. You were never going to have it, and you knew that. You didn't tap," I pulled the glove off with my teeth because my hands were shaking slightly and I didn't want her to see it, "why didn't you tap?"

"I didn't need to."

"You had a forearm across your throat."

"I've had worse."

"That is not the flex you think it is."

"I didn't need to, Adam."

The gym kept running. Somebody dropped a plate over by the racks.

Her face did something I have seen on people in my department maybe four times in twenty years. Not embarrassment. Something further down than that. The look of a person who has just heard their own voice from outside their own head and cannot get back in.

"Abbot," she said, "I meant Abbot."

Let it go.

That was the correction. That was the whole rule I'd written for myself on a rooftop. It said: let her have it, don't decide what she can carry, leave the thing on the table where she can reach it.

I looked at her sitting on a mat with her leg off, seven weeks after I heard her scream at him from a ledge. I broke my own rule about eleven seconds after making it.

"He taught you," I said.

She went so still.

"The wrist tie. The grip you keep going back to," I sat down properly, out of her space, hands on my knees, "It's not from basics."

For a while she just breathed.

"He was 75th," she said finally, "it's their program, they wrote the thing," her hand went flat on the mat and stayed there, "I used to watch him run it for his guys. And I stood there one day and thought, 'that's not special, I could do that.'"

Something moved at the corner of her mouth that was trying very hard to be a smile.

"So he taught me. On worse mats than this."

"How long?"

"Years," she looked at her hands. "Every base. Every rotation. Any floor that would hold us."

And this is the first time you've been on a mat since.

I didn't say it. She'd only just found out herself. I watched her find it out, actually, watched it land on her face about a second before I got there, which is why she'd said his name, because she hadn't come here to fight anybody.

She'd come here to be held like that again.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay?"

"Okay," I got up, put a hand down, she took it, "same time on our next off day."

In the truck she was quiet for about six blocks, which is not a thing she does and I was busy being grateful for it.

Then, entirely conversational, eyes out the window, "you know you can just tap out too, right."

"Mm."

"Instead of, you know. Bailing on a finish you had locked."

"I had it locked."

"You did. You definitely did," she turned her head and looked at me with an expression of profound medical concern, "so what happened?"

She knows.

"Cramp," I said.

"A cramp."

"In the hip."

"In the hip," she nodded slowly, thoughtfully, like a colleague receiving a differential she intended to be generous about, "sure, hip."

I made a turn I did not need to make. She let me have about a block of silence, which was worse than if she hadn't.

"For the record," she said, hand on the door, "if you were trying to make me tap, that was a hell of a strategy."

Do not respond to that.

"Get out of my truck."

"Mm," she got out, then leaned back into the cab with her hand up, palm open, high, the way we do now.

I brought mine up and met it. She closed her fingers down over mine, briefly, once, and gave it a small shake before she let go, which is not a thing she'd done before and not a thing either of us said anything about.

"Ice that lip," she smiled, "you look like you lost a fight."

"I won the fight."

"Tell that to your mouth," the door shut and she was gone up the walk. She was moving like her body belonged to her.

I gave myself a stern talking-to on the drive back.

Forty-nine years old. Decorated combat veteran. Senior attending physician. Her supervising attending, which is the part that mattered and the part I kept circling back to. Conducting himself like a man who has never once stood near a woman.

And it's more than a bad look. Sawyer put this in my hands. Called me and asked me to help this girl land on her feet. There is a sick and specific kind of man who takes a grieving twenty-eight-year-old that a friend entrusted to him and turns it into something for himself. I have spent an entire career refusing to stand within a mile of that man.

Today I got on a mat with a woman who was trying to feel her husband's hands again, and I let my body make it about mine.

The talking-to was airtight.

The talking-to did not take.

I filed it where I have absolutely no business keeping a file, and told myself I'd delete it later. I knew with the calm certainty of a man who has met himself that I would not.

What I chose to focus on instead is this.

She smiled more in that one hour than in her first two months of shifts combined.

And she said his name out loud, in a room, to a living person, for the first time since I've known her.

Those are not the same kind of good. But I'll take both.

A/N: Holy shit right. Okay. So as a heads up, this chapter was originally way longer, and I did not know Tumblr had a 1,000 block limit until Tumblr told me, at which point I had to shuffle a lot of things around. So if the pacing feels a little different from usual, that's why. Thank you so much for reading this far. Truly. I hope you're all still loving this series as much as I love writing it.

Good news though: because I wrote so much, Chapter 7 is already almost finished, so it should be out fairly soon. Thank you all! I appreciate every single one of you!! <3<3

Taglist: @seulbeomie @generation-zero @peariesque @amerryraven @tinka490 @hazydespair @itwasneverdvt @trustmeima-doctor-blog @defronix @mrskreizler-zemo @graciiiaciii @dedicateeverythingtomilkshake @kneelforloki @stardustworlds @imaginecrushes @wiltedpetalzz @sydney-m @oddin4ry @fightmeyoushits2 @romancebookreader4life @secretcloudpepperonipizza @vicky066 @rufles2 @bgharison @callmefatherr @mongoosemagazine @dvbkie099 @mayawainfleet @thehockeynerd30 @trustmeima-doctor @crispy-coke @koreyswrld @onlyheretowastetime

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