#dr jack

“They're really crawling tonight,” said Jack, somewhere around two am, falling to your side and stretching out his neck.

You stood there, a hand scratching at your neck as you hummed, looking up to the board. Names were highlighted, symptoms and concerns whittled down to a one word hypothesis.

“Anything good?” he asked, eyeing you and eyeing the board. “Anything catching your eye?”

“Only you.”

“Glad to hear it.”

Somewhere between following him into battlefields and trauma rooms which were covered in just as much blood as war fields, there came a flirting tease shared between the two of you. Whereas Jack could flirt with anyone; flattering words tumbling out before he could think of them, your words of endearment were only ever aimed at him.

It made him feel special. He didn't want to feel special, not under your gaze or hand.

“We have four hours left of our shift,” Jack sighed.

You smirked. “Tired already, old man?”

He smirked back at you. “Just thinking of our attack plan.”

“I'll take south,” you said.

Jack nodded. “I'll go north, swap every hour for general.”

“I get first dibs on trauma,” you said, turning to him, a small rock in your heels.

“Since when?”

“Since you loved me.”

It was said in such a teasing uplift of your voice that Jack chuckled on instinct, without thinking of what the words really meant, without letting himself believe the words you said. It was only when you'd slipped away, a pat to his shoulder or a warming squeeze as a parting gift that he was allowed to think about it.

If he admitted that somewhere between the fighting, the dragging of limp bodies to safety and patching them up, between the cold and dark nights with only the stench of blood as company, turned to the same smell protected inside snow white walls that he'd grown to love you, would you laugh at him?

The thought had him feeling like a teenager, like a small boy discovering it wasn't destiny that he'd marry his first crush. It had him wanting to curl up and wincing just at the idea of your dismissal.

Jack had spent so long savouring the love he felt for you, like cupping hands over a dying flame, he didn't know how to let it burn brighter.

“If you keep staring like that and the wind comes, you'll freeze,” said Lena, peering at him through the chaos of the nurses station, the beating heart of the Pitt.

It must have been a charge nurse thing, to see and know all.

“Staring like what?” he asked, making his way over and leaning on the counter.

“Like a dog with a bone,” she said, smirking and making a panting motion.

“You're a cruel woman,” said Jack.

“I'm a woman with hope,” Lena shrugged. “I still have fifty dollars that something will happen between the two of you by the end of the year.”

It was probably one of the Pitt's best and definitely longest on-going bet. The whole will they, won't they thing between you and Jack. If nothing was pursued between the two of you, at least Jack could act as if it was to claim the title of the longest on going bet.

“Honey.” Lena walked over, reaching for Jack's hand. His eyeline drifted from where you'd disappeared to, back to Lena. “What keeps you from saying anything?”

“The weight of keeping my mysterious persona,” he said with a huff of a smile. He hoped it sounded like a joke and not some joke on him.

Lena ducked her head, peering over her glasses and raised brows. “We see a lot of people come and go in this place, some for better, most for worse. Something it teaches us: life isn't certain.”

Jack sighed. He knew that. Knew that better than most.

He felt like part of his life had been over when he lost his leg, then another part when he lost his wife. Once, Robby had said it felt like every passing they witnessed leeched something from his soul every time. Jack didn't think he was necessarily wrong.

Nothing in life was certain, he knew that. It didn't fill him with the sort of courage to tell you how he felt. It only reminded him that he was scared of what losing you looked like.

“Jack!” your voice called out, desperation twinging it. “Trauma here!”

He rushed over, landing at your side next to a teenage boy on the gurney and helping you push him in. “Don't hold back, gimme what you got.”

“David Harris, seventeen, driving down when a lorry hit him. Main complaints are back pain and he can't feel his legs. BP is one-thirty over eighty-five, pulse ninety,” you rattled off, taking what the paramedics had given you moments ago and spitting them out effortlessly.

“My- my dad's gonna kill me,” spluttered David.

“Not before we fix you up,” Jack promised. “Trauma one!”

A team of you formed and together you all shifted David over to the trauma bed, beginning to hook him up, stick him with IV, get his pulse ox and everything else.

“David, can you lift your leg for me?” you asked, tapping the left.

Jack watched as there was no lift. The other leg was broken, that much he could tell from just a look. It wasn't sitting right and the long gash spread down the boys calf supported that theory.

You ran the back of your knuckle along the boys foot, waiting for a reaction. There was a small wiggle in his toes.

“Good bowel sounds,” Parker called. “Doesn't seem to be anything in the stomach!”

“My- my leg,” David whined in pain.

“We'll get you something for that,” you said, looking to Jack who hovered around, stepping aside when he got in the way. “Get an MG of ketamine on drip!”

“My-my girlfriend,” said David. His eyes jumped from one un-familiar face to the next, head restrained in a neck brace. “She was with me. Is she okay? I- I didn't see her?”

“What's her name buddy, we'll do what we can to find out,” said Jack, standing safely at his head.

“Lucy.”

Jack nodded. “Pretty?” He asked, eyes flickering up to you, catching the focused set of your brows and eyes keen at work.

David gave the smallest and throatiest smile. “Bea-beautiful.”

“Well, we'll find out what we can-” But Jack caught sight of a paramedic, Johnson, he thought his name was pulling you aside and uttering something for your ears only. He caught the shake of the paramedics head, the fall of your expression and knew, David's beautiful Lucy was only going to be coming to PTMC for the morgue.

“For now, let's get you fixed up, yeah?” Jack added. “You're in the best hands here!”

You returned to David's side, taking charge of the examinations and orders but Jack knew you'd shaken off the death of a young girl like a dog coming out of the river and shaking off the water. Like pulling out an autumn jacket in summer and brushing off the dust before getting on with it.

“Femur's completely split,” said Parker from the other side of the bed.

“Call Welch, get surgery down here!” you ordered.

Parker didn't even have to glance at Jack to know he'd be backing up your say, nodding for her to do so.

A sudden beeping ripped through everyone's concentration.

“Stats are falling!”

“Shit- what's going on?” you cursed, rushing around to identify the problem you'd all glanced over as David's eyes fluttered shut, his neck brace the only thing from keeping his head lulling to the side.

“Heart rate's down to fifty,” said Jack, teetering on his toes and watching over you.

“Atropine?” asked Matteo.

You nodded. “Push a milligram. Get an ET eight tube, I need to intubate.”

“BP'S ninety over sixty,” Matteo told you.

Jack wanted nothing more than to brush his hand against yours, to push his shoulder into you and have you know he was there. Instead, he kept his distance, watching you intubate with practised ease, bagging him and discarding the tools at your side.

“Call for a vent, and get me crichoid pressure-”

It was all a blur, the sort Jack honed in on you. He watched you go. He watched you work, making sure your hands were kept steady and mind kept in the field.

As always it was. It was his own mind that betrayed him in taking him out the trauma and to anywhere else, with you.

The nurses desk was a well-deserved rest bite. Where tired doctors slumped on stools and chairs, dragging their fingers over computer keys to type in words they'd typed a hundred times before. It was the island in the middle of a stormy sea.

It was where you went, to hide in plain sight.

“I've got results on our trauma,” said Doctor Ellis, handing you the tablet smudged with frantic finger prints. “CAT scans show there's no signs of haemorrhages or bleeding in the brain. He's up and recovering in post-op.”

“Awake?”

She shook her head. “Coma.”

Your heart plummeted. “Poor kid. His girlfriend didn't make it.”

“I heard. Police called, said they want to talk to the kid when he wakes up. They say he ran a red lights.”

The tablet dropped in your hand as you took to soothing the headache growing in your head, rubbing small circles at your temple.

“Damn.”

“Yeah,” tutted Ellis, but already straightening up and glancing around at the rooms. “Who next?”

“Hey-” you said, taking a stand and walking to her side. “Does Jack seem different, recently?”

You hadn't meant to ask. It seemed to just slip out when the chance presented itself.

At the start of the shift everything seemed fine. There was that familiar teasing that passed between the two of you, the winks and the nudges like you were sharing some inside joke you didn't even know. With every tick of the clock and every shift of patients you saw Jack's distance manifest.

He was backing up, taking your side less, frowning at himself when nobody said anything to him. He was stuck inside his own mind, but you couldn't tell why.

“No,” said Ellis with a teasing grin. “Why? Trouble in paradise?”

You wondered where Jack was now, what other tasks had him so occupied in the mind and was dragging him from your side. Of course it wasn't like he had to be at your side constantly, you were just so used to it.

“Hey,” said Ellis with a nudge at your arm. “I said trouble in paradise?”

“No,” you said with a pssh sort of sound. “If there was a paradise it wouldn't be here.”

She grinned. “Amen to that.” She left you at that, to do more of her actual job.

You still sat there, chin rested in your hands as you thought about Jack. Often you did. You'd never admit it out loud but to yourself you could say the words you couldn't speak in words. The quiet I love you's that existed only in your heart and soul.

Most of the time you were fine with that fact, that the words were only yours yet more recently it had been harder to conceal. You worried that in every look there lingered that love impossible to ignore. That you reached for him in moments you shouldn't only because you needed to, damn the consequences of working in the ED.

It had been like that on the field, when relaying on each other became necessary for survival. When the shoulders touching and arms bumping was the only thing to keep you going.

Now, his absence distracted you.

Lena waddled over to you, practically throwing herself on the counter.

“Brutal one?” you asked.

“Tough,” she said. “We've got a nine year old boy dragonised with B-Cell Lymphoma.”

“Shit.”

Lena nodded. It was, indeed, shit. “The diagnosis came through a while ago now, kids been through treatment after treatment, chemo after chemo. Says he doesn't want to do it anymore.”

“Oh...”

Kids were supposed to not want to do any more homework. They were supposed to put up a fight against going to school or about coming in early from playing outside with friends. They weren't supposed to be ill, fighting treatments that kept failing. Fighting hope.

“His parents want a second opinion, from a doctor,” said Lena.

“Who- who's spoke to them so far?”

“Jack,” she said. “I think... I dunno, I think this one's took a toll on him.”

So that's what had made him vanish. Your clinical cap slid on but behind all the words you rehearsed to help the boy and the parents there sat a burning worry for Jack. A need to find him that almost took over everything else. But Jack would need someone to be him, to cover, to help. It had always been you in war and the Pitt wasn't so far off from being that.

With steady hands you took the tablet Lena held out to you.

“Which room?”

“Six.”

“Okay. Thanks. If you see Jack before I do, can you tell him I'm looking for him?”

Lena smiled like she already had plans to do that without you having to tell her. “Of course, hun.”

Jack was found on the roof. Not an un-common occurrence but one that no less concerned you. Often times he'd tell you. Jack would come to you, wherever you were (even if it meant waiting outside a patient's room) to tell you where he'd be. You always knew something was wrong then. He'd lost a patient- every loss hit Jack hard, like a truck. So you'd offer as much time as you could to sit with him in the break room or if he was adamant, to follow him up to the roof.

You'd let him stand alone, but just knowing you were there always seemed to make his trips up quick. Always stopped him from doing something stupid like slipping over the other side of the rail.

He hadn't come to find you. That's what was worrying.

You took the elevator and stairs up, arming yourself with Lena's words.

“I think he needs to hear something good,” she'd said, shoving a pen up into her ponytail.

“What? Like we only have two and a half hours left on shift?”

She'd laughed with crinkles at her eyes. “No. Something that'll last.”

Something that'll last.

“Hey!” you called out to him. Your arms crossed over your chest as you tilted your neck back to check the night sky and its stars. It was a ritual for you, to count the stars you could see when you were up there, giving them each a name of every patient you lost.

Jack was still on the safe side of the rail. Unlike every other time, it didn't make you any less nervous. “Hi.”

His back was too you, taunt and shoulders high, hands in his pockets.

You stopped yourself just behind him, not close enough to see the freckles. “I didn't know you were up here.”

“But you found me.”

You smiled to yourself, proud. “Yeah. Yeah, I did.”

Jack's head tilted down in something that could have been a nod.

“You should go back down,” he said. “They probably need you.”

“You wanna talk about it?” you asked.

There was a pregnant silence between the two of you, where nothing but the honks of four am travellers and call of sirens interrupted.

“Talk about what?”

“Whatever's bothering you.”

There was that silence again. It had you taking slow steps closer, close enough you could smell the sharp scent of alcohol-based hand sanitiser and the last dregs of his cologne. Something woodsy that took you away from the walls of the Pitt.

“No,” said Jack. Muscles pulled in his neck.

You and Jack spoke about almost everything. There was hardly a line that wasn't crossed between the two of you. Between him losing his leg, his wife and the therapy; his problems were yours.

“See that worries me, Jack,” you said, landing yourself next to him at the railing.

His head turned away from you, a pained expression on his face as if it hurt him to do so.

“Is it the kid?”

Jack waited for a reason not to talk about it. For your pagers to buzz in your pockets, for a hoard of ambulances to flood the gates. For the floor to swallow him up. Anything would've done probably. “Nine years old. More than three treatment plans, spending most of his life in hospital. And now he doesn't want to carry on.”

You'd spoken to the boy and the parents. As a family then alone. The parents were heart-broke, years of tear-stains down their cheeks and exhausted. The kid was heart-broken, years of tear-stains down his cheek and exhausted. His illness had become one of the only things they had to talk about. Without a proper school routine or hobbies that didn't exist outside of a hospital, what made the kid a kid?

“There's options we can try,” you said. “We can talk to the kid and give him a lay out of the treatments. We can get someone from upstairs to talk to him and the parents. Get a specialist in.”

“There's a boy in ICU, stuck in a coma, seventeen,” Jack tutted. “Has school. Collage. The bag found in his car was some sort of hockey team. A whole fucking life that flashes by in an instant.”

Existential crisis was as common as the cold at PTMC. It didn't make it any less startling when the symptoms showed in him.

Something that'll last.

“Neither of them are lost causes,” you reminded him.

“C'mon,” he scoffed, backing away from the rail without looking at you or turning around. “We can try to save as many lives as possible but what difference does it make? People still die. Heck, that seventeen year old boy thought his girlfriend was the most beautiful girl in the world and he still ran a red light and she still died!”

“Accident's happen.”

“What's the point of it all,” he mumbled. His hands were at his hips, head hanging low between his shoulder blades as he shook it at the ground.

Jack looked like he was seconds away from shaking his fists at the sky or falling to his knees.

“Yes, life is fleeting,” you told him. “People will always die. People will always get hurt. And when they do the people they've loved throughout their life turn up. They stand at their bedside and hold their hand. They-they hold them and tell them everything's going to be okay. That they love them.”

You watched Jack frown at your words, brows pulled tightly, his entire face moving with the need to not hear you. To preserve his bubble of pain and misery.

“That's more important than anything,” you said, standing in front of him, wanting nothing more than to reach for him.

“What, love?”

Your heart twinged at how flippantly he said the word, as if the idea of love was revolting.

Suddenly you were a kid watching every Disney princess and prince fall in love and live happily ever after, staring longingly at the rays of the screen and wishing for one day your own happy ending. To one day have a person that felt like home.

Except then you didn't except to find your home in the middle of the torn apart Middle-East, in a man that was a good few years older than you and already complaining about back pain by the time you met him.

Nor did you expect to be on a roof with him, hearing him shun the idea.

“Yes, love. That's- that's what lasts.”

Jack's face, that was pulled in age and flecked in greys, twisted into a mocking smirk. “You can't seriously think that love is what all of this means? Is what all of this is for?”

At once you became very aware of the burning in your chest and the twist in your stomach.

“I do.”

“That love solves everything?”

“Well it certainly helps!” you argued.

“It doesn't!” he snapped. “If that boy wakes up- if- he still has to deal with the pain of losing his girlfriend, who he loved. That love doesn't go anywhere it just turns into pain. And those parents, that's all they'll feel if that boy choses to die. Pain. For the rest of their life!”

“Jack-” you tried to interject.

“I lost my wife, do you think I still feel her love? No, I feel pain!”

“What about us?” you asked out before you could stop yourself.

Jack paused, chest heaving in un-controlled anger.

“Isn't there love there?”

You truly had no doubt about it. That the love that preserved between bullet shells and chest tube trays was there, beating like its own heart.

“No.”

He said it definitely. He said it finally. He said it with no room for arguments.

Your scrubs may as well have been painted in bright colours. There may as well have been a stupid little hat with a bell attached. Your shoes should have a flick up and your cheeks should have been painted a rosy red. You were up on the roof making a fool out of yourself in front of Jack, after all.

“No?” you asked.

This time Jack had the decency to glance at his feet. “No.”

“There's not been a single moment where you-”

He shook his head and cut you off.

It took you a further embarrassing amount of time to find your feet and move them from him, from the roof, from the religion you'd built your life around.

You left him on that roof, and the part of you that loved him too.

Two days of leave, a busy weekend and Jack's own time off meant you'd successfully avoided him for a week, going on a second one.

It messed everything up.

It was like the tide needing the moon to go in and out. Without you and Jack, nothing seemed to run smoothly.

Cases were jumbled almost every night shift. Patients were more erratic and nurses were rushed off their feet more than usual. Shen was getting through more coffee than you thought was humanly possible and even Lena seemed to come in ready for the shift to be over before it began.

Without the workings of you and Jack, nothing went right.

Blood bags split all over the floors than just got cleaned. The OR was constantly booked up and radiology decided to start taking their sweet time with cases. Even worse, it was flu season and in spite of everyone being reminded with sharp texts from Robby to get their shots, they were still dropping like flies.

“Mercury's in retrograde,” said Santos one morning where she and Mel and Javadi tried to figure out what had disturbed everyone's funk. You were loitering, helping them get caught up. “Can cause travel disruptions, tech complications, miscommunication-”

You scoffed out a chuckle. Miscommunication.

Could you even call it that if you failed to communicate how you felt about Jack. But how said no like he wasn't shocked to hear you say it. He'd said it so quick it seemed he already had his answer prepared and ready.

Had he known how you felt all this time and was waiting to exploit that Achilles heal in you?

“Can I talk to you?” Robby wondered past you, tapping you with one finger on the arm. It dragged as he walked off, expecting you to follow.

With a great sigh you swung yourself from your charting, following him down to a secluded corner.

Robby pursed his lips and checked around the area. His hoodie was still zipped high, sleeves rolled, hair still nice and not dishevelled from the day that had barely begun. He was yet to be effected from whatever shit had everything else going wrong. Probably because to him things were always going wrong. “What is going on with you and Abbot?”

Your arms crossed over you chest, defensively. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

His eyes dropped down, pointedly. “Yes. Yes you do.”

You shook your head and lifted one shoulder.

Robby’s hands clasped in front of him. “You’re not talking. Shen says you can’t be in the same room with him for more than five seconds. It’s affecting staff, it’s affecting patients,” he said, pausing to try to find the right words. He pursed his lips. “It’s affecting you, what is it?”

For a moment, you contemplated telling him. You wondered if a third party had also thought there was clear love between every small action as insignificant as they seemed. But you feared the answer more than you desired to know it.

“It's nothing,” you said. “It's just been busy and we haven't spoken in a while. But it's fine, it's nothing.”

His shoulders moved in a shuddering breath. A telling sign he didn't believe you. “Okay. Fine. Whatever. Sort it out in your own time but keep it out of work, okay?”

“I will.”

“Jack too.”

“Well for that you'd have to talk to him.”

Robby gave you another look. There may have been something akin to anger at your voice. Or because Robby had never known you and Jack to not be talking. “Well, I'll have to talk to him anyway. Guess I'll add it to the list.”

“Talking to him about what?” you asked, following him down the corridor.

“Day shifts getting over run, I really need an extra pair of hands,” he said, shaking his head at how annoyed he was over that fact and you knew it must have been bad if Robby was admitting he needed help.

Here, presented a choice.

“I can help,” you offered.

Robby looked at you. “What?”

“If you need help on day, I can do it,” you said, your chest filling with hope. What better way to avoid Jack and tend to your wounded pride.

He paused in step and looked back down at you. His brows pinched together.

“What?” you asked again.

Robby looked around once more before checking the closest exam room next to you was empty before dragging you in. He closed the door and pulled the curtain. “Okay, now you gotta tell me what's going on.”

You chuckled. “There is nothing.”

“You wanna swap working with Jack, who you've worked with for years, to work with me?” he asked.

“To work on day shift. With you. If you need the help I can move to day.”

Robby folded his arms over his chest. “And Jack and you aren't avoiding each other?”

You gulped. “No.”

Robby-evidently- did not believe you. “Just sort it out, I've got Shen down one ear, Lena down the other so please, please, put me out of my misery.”

It had only been a week. You were sure in times things would soothe over. That everyone would forget how well you and Jack worked together and focus their eyes on another great working team. They'd get over it. You were sure, in time, you would too.

Robby eventually held his hands up in surrender. “Okay, fine, I'll talk to who I need to talk to but as far as I'm concerned, you're on day. You can pull a double.”

Double was usually a curse word for you but it had never been more welcomed.

“Thank you,” you said, body visibly relaxing.

Robby glanced once more at you, amused and shaking his head before leaving. It took you one more second before you did too.

Jack was lingering on the other side, trying to listen to something Doctor King was saying to him but his eyes found yours at once. They were dark and watching. They'd probably watched Robby come out first.

Not that it was anything. Not that even if it was it would be any of his business. He'd made that clear.

So why did your heart beat harder in your chest in the catching's of Jack's eyes.

Jack thought he could do it. He really, really did. He overestimated himself.

When Robby told him you were moving to day he’d nodded, took it on the chin and not looked at his old friend that was waiting for something. To throw a fit, to deny the request, to make a punch. Anything, probably.

Robby left disappointed when he did none of that.

He couldn’t say anything, could he? He’s broken your heart, hasn’t he? On that roof, where he lingered when you left feeling the stars judge him. Where he almost threw up realising what he'd said and done.

“Will he wake up?”

Jack looked to the woman sitting at her husband’s side, taking in a shuddering breath. “It’s too early to tell. He suffered a hemorrhage in the left lobe of his brain. Though we managed to find it and stop the bleeding the effects we won’t know till he wakes.”

She chocked on a sob. “So I’m just supposed to wait?”

“We have a room prepped for him upstairs where you’ll be made more comfortable. The both of you.” Jack fiddled with his wedding ring.

He remembers sitting at bed sides, the hundred questions to ask even if he already knew the answers as a doctor. He just needed somebody else to explain to him why his love for his wife wasn’t saving her?

He looked at the woman, holding the man’s hand and wondered if she was asking him the same thing. They'd argued she said, he'd only gone for a walk to clear is mind. Now, the words in fleeting moments of anger could define the end.

Had you asked yourself the same thing? Why your love for Jack was only dragging you down? The thought alone made him feel sick.

He remembered his face when he said no. It had given heartbreak a new meaning, to see it on you.

What was worse was watching your heartache be taped over by his best friend.

As suspected when Jack followed his patient being wheeled out and tried comforting words to his wife, he was greeted with the sight of you and Robby. The two of you stood outside your own exam room, talking- teasing perhaps with the smile on both your faces.

He watched as Robby added salt to injury and gave you his signature double fist pump that you returned like it wasn’t the first time. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe you and Robby had your own handshake by now.

Jack didn’t know what your life was like any more, for the first time in years.

The elevator doors slid close on his patient, his wife and the scores of people holding his monitors as he went up. The clean grey reflected Jack, half of who he used to be.

He looks back to you, standing under the tv screen of patients to pick up. He was supposed to be leaving soon, his shift was over and the hand offs were going slow. If he was careful, he might be able to steal a moment with you.

Jack moved slowly to stand next to you. “Can we talk?”

“I have patients.”

“A minute,” he begged.

You looked at him, dead in the eyes. There was no light in there. Nothing that could have said the years you’d known each other, been at each other’s side. “No.”

“So this is how it’s gonna be, forever?” He asked. He wasn’t above pleading.

“Leave it, Jack,” you warned before leaving him, walking away and again, he let you.

Jack caught Robby watching the two of you, his arms crossed over his chest as he watched you walk away before he found Jack through the frames of his glasses. Whoever was speaking to him was going practically ignored as Robby looked to Jack, a small tilt of a shake of his head.

He walked away, went home without saying anything to his best friend. He went home and chased sleep running away from him. In his dreams you were back on the rooftop but things went differently. He didn’t linger at the edge or didn’t turn to you. In some of the fitful dreams your arms just wrapped around him and that was enough. Jack thought he could feel the weight of your head resting on his chest when he woke but it was only reality crushing down his heart.

In a collection of hours later he was back walking through chairs to begin his shift, bag heavier than usual with the baggage he carried.

Some of his night shift had already made it in in drips and drabs, day shifters looking dead walking on their feet.

All but Robby who was supporting a pep in his step.

“Hey, you’re in early,” he noted as Jack dumped his bag next to his.

“Woke up before my alarm for a change,” he shrugged.

Robby watched him, reading the lie. “Don’t do this, brother.”

Jack frowned. “Do what?”

“You know what.”

“Brother, it is too early in my shift to be doing this-”

“-and it’s late in mine, listen,” he said, voice dropping low. “I don’t know what’s happened between you. A part of me doesn’t want to know. Heck, I almost don’t want you to kiss and make up cause I need them on shift.”

Jack levelled his gaze onto Robby but he was looking at him honestly.

“Whatever happened, whatever was done or said, it effected their performance and it's effecting yours. Either sort it out or give it some more time.”

Jack didn't think Robby was trying to hold you to himself. He didn't think Robby was selfish or manipulative enough for that. Then again, Jack would do worse to get you back.

His heart lurched as he realised you hadn't told Robby what was said up on the roof, otherwise he was sure he'd be getting chewed out by now.

“Where are they?” asked Jack.

Robby sighed, rubbing the back of his neck and shrugged. An obvious lie.

Jack moved by Robby, desperate to see you, to be given a chance to explain. He looked into every exam room, checked your name on the board, looked for any signs of you before he headed out to the ambulance bay.

You were there, sat hunched on the wall that held a tiny garden within itself. Your hands rested on your knees, leaving you hunched over, shoulders moving as you caught your breath.

“Hey,” said Jack, standing in front of you.

You didn't bristle or flinch at his voice. A good response, but Jack sensed you just weren't hearing him, in the middle of the throws of panic.

“Hey, you're okay,” Jack crouched as best he was able to, ignoring the irritation it gave his leg. “You're okay.”

Your brows scrunched, your eyes were closed. “Leave me alone, Jack.”

“No, c'mon, I-I just-”

“Just what?” you asked, breath catching.

Jack didn't know what. He could tell you he didn't mean what he said on the roof and he didn't, of course he loved you, felt more than just love for you. But it had been proven time and time again that love wasn't going to save him, or anyone. He'd seen miracles, where lovers spoke to their partners going through hell and had been rewarded with speedy recoveries. But he'd also been the one holding the hand, the one doing the talking with the reward only being the catalogue of caskets at a raging cost.

Loving you was beautiful. Losing you was a pain he couldn't go through, not again.

“I just wanna help,” he said, a hand lying on your shoulder. “Was it a patient? Was it- was it a bad shift?”

“I don't wanna talk about it,” you said, pushing yourself up to your feet and starting the process of walking away. A process he'd made you skilled at.

“How long are we gonna carry on like this?” he asked, following you up and trying to remain as level-headed as possible.

You didn't even grace him with an answer. You were only heading further and further away and Jack saw it all again. Your head tucked low when you left him on the roof, the times you'd been first to leave when you were catching up over drinks and Jack watched you go, insisting you could make it back home alone. He thought about working with you in SWAT, with guns blazing, and watching you be recruited on another field and hoping- all but praying- he'd see you again.

You were leaving once more and with every step you got further and further-

“Okay, I'm sorry- I'm sorry!” he called out.

You paused in step, under the golden glow of the overhead lights. “You have nothing to apologise for, Jack. It was my own fault.”

“No, no it wasn't, it was mine, all mine,” he said, desperate to say anything to keep you to stay.

“If you don't have feelings for me it's nobody's fault but-”

“I do!” he called. “I do.”

You turned and it felt like Jack was seeing you all over again. The rounds of your face. The heat in your eyes. “Don't do that, Jack. Just don't.”

“You know I have feelings for you,” he said.

“No, I don't!” you snapped.

Some techs lingering on the wall opposite the two of you glanced over, eyes wide before looking back down to their phones in attempts to distract themselves but Jack figured they were keeping their ears open.

You cleared your throat and stepped closer. “You cannot tell me you have feelings for me when I all but told you I love you on that roof top and you said no.”

Jack lowered his head from your hard gaze. He was ashamed, hateful of himself and another third thing he couldn't label. “I did.”

“You made me feel small-”

“I did.”

“I thought you loved me!”

“I do,” he insisted, looking back up to you.

Your head was shaking. Your eyes were tired, half circles of dark purple under your eyes. “You said you didn't.”

Jack winced at the break in your voice. “I... I said a lot of things. I know I laughed off your idea of love, I know, and I said I didn't feel anything for you and that's a lie, such a lie. How-” Jack's hands clasped themselves. “How could I not feel anything for you?”

Your head lowered, hands resting at your hips as your weight shifted. “I dunno. You said you didn't.”

The lights overhead flickered.

Jack's hands came to pray in front of him. “I said a lot of things I didn't mean. Like how love isn't worth it, of course it is.”

But something hard had grown in you the last week or so, something that had changed that little glint in your eyes you learned to look at Jack with. It had morphed into something un-forgiving.

“Robby he once said to me that watching people die, whether you knew them or not, was like something being taken from you. Usually I'm better than that, we have to be. It got to me that day on the roof and I... I took it out on the one person I never should have,” he explained, looking through his lashes at you.

You shrugged, indifferent. “That's supposed to make it all okay?”

He shook his head. “No, no it doesn't.”

“You laughed away my idea of love and it's the only thing that's kept me going,” you admitted.

“And you're the bravest person I know for that. To- to face what we face and keep that love. I think it's... remarkable.”

You looked down, scuffing your trainers. “It was easy when it was for you,” you admit, chuckling like it was a daft notion in hindsight. “It's like I've had to learn to love all over again.”

Jack gulped. He didn't want to have to think what that meant. He knew he had no right to ask if you'd learnt to love Robby like you'd once loved Jack. If the years of carefully crafted trust and deep knowing was easily replaced in the week you'd been on day with Robby. “I-I don't want you to love again.”

When your eyes met there was something definite in them.

Jack took a step forward and you didn't take one in retreat. “I'm terrified to love, okay, I'll put it out there, full heart on my sleeve. It's fucking terrifying to me that I'm gonna fall in love again and be so deeply into that person that I might feel everything I did when I lost my wife. I don't- I don't know how to face that all again.”

“But life isn't all about losing, Jack,” you said to him. Your words were practised and he had no doubt you'd thought of what you'd say to him a hundred times over.

“I know that, I know that. Being faced with losing you this last week it's... it's been hell,” he said with a huff of a pathetic smile. “C'mon you must know I am not the top of my game right now.”

“Sorry if I don't feel sympathetic for you,” you said, full of that sardonic humour he loved.

“I'm feeling plenty sorry for myself,” he said. “But isn't the right love falling in spite of the fear?”

“So you're saying you love me?” you questioned.

Jack's lips pursed but he nodded, stomach churning.

You frowned, a small shake to your head. “You can't even say the words.”

He tried, his lips parted, tongue wetting but as soon as he tried they chocked up in his mouth and froze. “I can try.”

There was a battle deep inside of you. He recognised it in the way you looked around you, in the way you weren't sure how to stand or where to look.

“I thought we were in love for a long time,” you admitted. “I know it was never said, not with so many words, and I know you lost your wife and I can't imagine how painful that must have felt. But I still thought that there'd be something for us. It's what's kept me going, kept me strong, cause that's love, I'm pretty sure. When you said no...”

“I didn't mean it,” the three weighted words turned to a dry sob wedged in his throat.

“It felt like you did.”

Jack had always struggled to see love or believe in it as a god. He'd never been able to think of it as the thing driving all of life when pain combatted it at every step in his own life.

He'd never believed in it more at that moment, when he felt it breaking between the two of you.

“I want to learn how to do it.” Jack took wide steps in front of you, taking your cheeks in his hands and gaining your attention. “I want to love again, please-please-”

How odd that he could feel it inside of him, believe it to be the only thing that had meant anything to him, yet the idea of living inside of himself and saying the words was too much. It was self-sabotage at its finest.

Your lips parted to speak and Jack knew it was going to be some form of goodbye before you'd spoke.

So he kissed you. He slotted his lips over yours and felt the desire and despair mixed in one, served on the warmth of your lips. He chased them, he craved them when he felt your own hands slow up his back, holding onto his shoulders.

There was no pulling or pushing just the depths of love un-spoken.

You pulled away first with a sharp intake of breath. You stepped back and Jack's eyes watched you lick the taste of him from your lips.

“I don't know, Jack,” you admitted.

He'd thought I love you were some of the most painful three words. But I don't know was coming in at a close second.

Robby stepped out of the ambulance bay doors, his bag and your familiar one slung over his shoulders. He said nothing, only took in a deep breath and waited for someone to give.

Jack let you go that night, watching you go to Robby's side as he handed you your hoodie without even helping you put it on like Jack had so many times.

If he knew then what he did now he might have took his time, took a slow drag of an inhale to get a smell of you.

You looked back once at Jack as Robby led you over to his bike. “I'll see you tomorrow.”

Jack gave a nod and Robby lifted a hand in passing.

Jack would practise every day, every night, every waking second then, to learn to love again.