#emdfc

Grey

It's the suit, Will thinks, that makes him look so dangerous. There is comfort and familiarity in his normal clothes, and yet, people are more afraid of him dressed to the nines with blood under his fingernails and Hannibal's mark on his charcoal grey suit. He studies himself in the mirror.

"You look stunning, my dear," Hannibal murmurs, kissing Will's neck and wrapping his arms around him from behind. "Like the blade of an expertly crafted knife, you are exquisite and deadly. And mine."

"Possessive?"

"Of all my things," Hannibal replies casually.

He doesn't exaggerate or hide his perception of Will as an attack dog he happens to find ravishing. Will knows he's being manipulated and taken advantage of. He knows he'll take the fall for everything Hannibal makes him do. But that doesn't mean he can do anything about it when Hannibal is his anchor in the vast sea.

"I think you like that I can't resist your ownership."

"You like being owned."

Hannibal's hands reach to the back of Will's head and unbuckle the clear plastic muzzle leftover from Will's days under Chilton's thumb. He brushes his hand against Will's mouth as he removes it.

"I have a treat for you tonight, Will, and I hope it satiates your needs."

Sun

Crockett passes Ava the joint and stretches lazily under the gentle beams of the sun. It’s not the time of year that allows the sun to scorch, but simply to provide a splash of warmth on the cold wintry days. The asphalt beneath Crockett’s car is icy, but there is none on the hood they lounge upon, a blanket spread between their bodies and the frigid metal. The puff of smoke from her lips is partially steam from the way her lungs expel air so much warmer than that of the environment. 

“It helps, doesn’t it?” he asks halfway through the joint. His speech is slower, less panicked and frantic than it often sounds. “You don’t feel the urges.”

She shrugs. There are episodes where it’s easier to deal with, but that doesn’t mean anything. This could just be a good day. Still, she can enjoy the soft buzz flooding her veins and the lack of a picture over Crockett’s scrubs. That can’t be up to regulation at work, she thinks, but if Lanik hasn’t made him remove it, she supposes it’s alright. 

“What’s up with the flowers?” she finds herself asking. 

“If they see my name, they can kill me,” he says.

He doesn’t clarify who, or why they’d need his name to kill him, but she understands. It’s about the delusion. She has her own, though she thinks them less bizarre than his (the nature of the disease is as such). From there, she doesn’t push, and he doesn’t offer more information, so they settle back into a sort of silence while they finish the joint. Crockett has a tin of others should they need to drag out the high. 

Crockett doesn’t ask her about her issues, or why she was forced into the support group. He seems to understand that she isn’t ready to bare that part of herself to the rest of the world, even someone who would get it much better than Connor. That’s something beautiful about him; he cares about people and seems to always know what they need, sometimes better than the individual themself. He knows when Maggie needs a coffee and when April needs a break. He knows when Noah needs reassurance and Ethan needs to be told no. He just understands in a way that suggests he’s spent a large portion of his life learning to please people to get by. 

“I nearly killed a patient,” Ava confesses to him. 

He lights a new joint and offers her the first drag of its sweet, deep smoke into her lungs, but he does not react with anger or disgust or anything along those lines. No, he waits patiently for her to continue if she so chooses. 

“I couldn’t go into the OR unless I washed my hands the right amount of times and put on my gloves just right. The patient coded while I was scrubbing in. We were able to save them, of course, but it- it was a wakeup call, I think.”

“I’ve had experiences like that.”

He takes his turn on the smoke and then presses a loving, platonic kiss to her forehead, promising that he will not judge her for the things she has done. 

Accident

It doesn’t make sense.

Not to Ethan, anyways. Accidents happen, and this is no exception. It isn’t like Crockett woke up this morning intending to just throw a plate on the floor to shatter it, or anything of the sort, and there’s no way he intentionally bumped the lip of it with his arm to send it careening onto the hardwood. He’s barefoot too, meaning he has to stay put while Ethan cleans. He stands there, silent, and stares at the broken glass as Ethan sweeps it up, seemingly just surprised, until Ethan stands up to empty the dustpan and sees the shiny tears rolling down his cheeks.

“Crockett?”

He reaches for him, but the moment his hand touches Crockett’s arm, Crockett stumbles back and raises his forearm in front of his face defensively, trying to protect himself from a nonexistent threat, crying out in fear as he loses his footing and winds up on the floor. 

“Please, no! I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, baby, I didn’t! I’m sorry, I swear!”

Ethan’s a little lost. He’s familiar with PTSD from his own experiences, but that says nothing of the reaction Crockett’s having to something else entirely. This is a different kind of trauma than the military. This is a kind of trauma that worms its way into someone’s very bones, that makes Crockett’s eyes so wide with fear even staring up at Ethan and seeing him. 

He’s not so much buried in a memory of someone else, but applying a muscle memory to Ethan out of a fear of retaliation for something so clearly unintentional. Ethan desperately tries to placate him, assuring him he’s safe, but it seems to have no effect on Crockett’s panic. 

“Crockett, seriously, please,” he says. “I’m not gonna hurt you, I promise. Just- just take a deep breath? Copy my breathing.”

Ethan exaggerates his breathing to try and get Crockett to follow it with little success. It only gets worse when Crockett starts trying to pick up the shards with his bare hands, littering them in cuts nearly instantly. Ethan cries out for him to stop and Crockett’s stricken eyes return to his. He’s so afraid. 

“Breathe in,” he coaxes gently. “It’s okay. I’m here. Breathe out.”

He crouches, afraid to kneel because of the glass, and reaches out once more- slowly this time- to tilt Crockett’s face up away from the mess on the floor. 

“It’s okay.”

If only Ethan knew how to fix this.

Nature

The light grows slowly outside of her window. It’s early, but not so much so that she can’t drag herself out of bed and into the protection of her slippers and robe. This late in the year, there is not so much work to be done, but they still keep to the habit of rising with the lazy sun and checking on the crops and the animals. The old cow, Angie, is still going, but she has fallen into a bit of a wheezy breath lately, against Ava’s best efforts. They’ve patched the barn thrice and leave a blanket draped over her massive back now to keep her warm. 

Robin is still asleep beside her, and Ava allows her to stay that way. She doesn’t doubt the woman will be up soon, but she deserves even the thinnest sliver of extra rest when she works so hard throughout the day. As she nudges past the cats to get to the stairs, intent on starting breakfast, she realizes that she never cared to do this for Connor. If she was up, so was he. The same was true of him. But she loves Robin enough to let her sleep in those precious extra minutes. This is also, she suddenly notes, the first time she’s thought of Connor in nearly two weeks. A new record! And this was no idolization either, but simply a recognition that what they had probably wasn’t the best.

No matter what, she feels the closest to content she’s come in a long time as she cuts up fresh vegetables for an omelette. Connor’s photo no longer lives in her bedroom, instead keeping a calm residence on the counter next to a picture of Isaac as a calf (he’s moved onto the ranch, now, too far to visit) and Robin’s mother. There’s even a frame around his young face now. She doesn’t reach out to touch the photo, like she once might have, but she feels the urge when she looks at his smile for too long before turning back to the cutting board. 

Once she actually gets working on the stove, she loses herself in the rhythm of it, easily focusing on something that exists here and now. Breakfast is real. Robin is real, when she presses up against Ava from behind and kisses her neck. 

“Good morning, beautiful.”

Robin kisses her again before pulling away. “Good morning to you too. The rascals fed yet?”

“Not yet.”

As Ava finishes breakfast, Robin puts out food for the dogs and cats, both of them finished at the perfect time to sit down for food within minutes of each other. Ava means to be rational and calm about the whole thing. Unfortunately, her mind has far less charitable ideas about it. She thinks of Connor. Last night gave her another dream of his body on the floor. So cold. So bloody. Messy. She thinks of it when she bites into a strawberry, and Robin must see the look in her eyes because she goes all soft around the edges of her smile and reaches out to hold her hand. 

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Like always, Ava says no. She hasn’t reached the point where she can acknowledge the pain she’s been through, or her own role in what happened. Not to someone else, anyhow. She’s fairly certain that Robin knows the story, though, since it was on national news. 

Robin doesn’t push her, but she does love her, and strokes a thumb over Ava’s knuckles to remind her of this fact. 

Gloves

It’s April who convinces him to walk into the ED, cupping his still swollen, still unbearably painful face despite the weeks it’s been since his injury. The doctor in Crockett knows that it means infection, but a less rational part of him thinks that this is just his life now, and the pain will never go away. Either way, he’s here, with Natalie pushing an IV into his arm for a morphine drip, concerned when he held up nine fingers for her pain scale. 

He’s grateful they didn’t cut off any of those. 

They put an ultrasound to his warm, puffy cheeks and jaw, look inside his mouth, and prod at him for a while before declaring it a severe infection and noting that Crockett is dehydrated and has low blood sugar. He’s admitted- hardly surprising, and is gifted with an IV of fluids, morphine, and antibiotics while a nurse tries to convince him to sip some juice through a straw. She tries for about twenty minutes before giving up, and shortly thereafter, his ICU doctor comes and gives him an all-too familiar NG tube. 

“If you can’t eat on your own, you’ll need it permanently,” the doctor warns him. He just gives her a little smile and a thumbs up. She doesn’t seem to know how to respond, so she doesn’t, choosing instead to raise his bed a bit to make him comfortable and inform him that a nurse will bring some ice packs for his face. 

It reminds him a bit of getting his wisdom teeth out when he was fourteen. But then, it was temporary, and his mother held bags of frozen vegetables against his jaw, spoke to him in soft French and kissed his temple to reassure him while he cried about the pain. 

Will comes to check on him, as his ED doc, and probes the tender inside of his mouth with gloved fingers. He pokes at an abscess that needs to be drained, and hums at the sound of pain Crockett makes. “I’ll let gen surg know.”

Throughout the day, he is grateful he cannot taste the latex against his flesh, while they do this or that without any sedation lest it lead to him closing his mouth or slipping beyond safety’s reach. Then they leave him be with his feeding tube and his trauma, like he was never anything more than a patient in the first place. 

Parenting

Crockett turns the page for Harper, even though she likes to do it. She needs to keep her arm still for the IV, for the chemo, that’s made her just as sick as the cancer has. She’s too young for it all, he thinks, and too precious to be subjected to the agony of chemotherapy before she’s walked into an elementary school classroom. The little downy coating of hair on her head has vanished. Her cheeks don’t flush pink when she smiles anymore. She sleeps more than she doesn’t. There are bags under her eyes, contrasting her chubby cheeks, making the saddest picture of a child. More than anything, Crockett wishes he could make it better. 

He does what he can, though, and sits in the hospital bed with her in his lap, reading “Goodnight Sweet Butterflies” on a brisk winter day. Harper doesn’t like the winter much, and he’d be doing this even at home, but there is a special sadness in his own heart for the family they won’t get to see and the friends she won’t make. Other kids her age have at least a couple from daycare or the like. Harper has nurses, and she has Noah. 

Normally, Noah makes a point to come by when Harper has chemo, his presence soothing to her, but he’s busy having his own medical crisis this morning. His sats dropped too low again, meaning he’s back on a proper oxygen mask rather than the cannula and too exhausted and unoxygenated to come visit the pediatric oncology ward where Harper has spent so much time, the nurses have taped her drawings up around the room.

They’ll visit him when her chemo bag is empty, to cheer him up and help wash away his guilt for not being here, misplaced as it is. Noah isn’t Harper’s father. He’s just a friend Crockett made, the only one he has since coming to Chicago. Yet, he’s always here, dependable even when his lips tinge a little purple or he has a coughing fit behind his blue medical mask. 

Harper had asked for him when the nurse brought her chemo, citing the fact that it doesn’t ache as much when Noah is here. She calls him Noah in her small voice, but Crockett can nearly imagine a fatherly substitution. It’s silly, he thinks. He’s just lonely. He just misses having another person who loves Harper as much as him and can help him stay upright when the grief tugs him down. 

Together

They know what they look like ahead of time, of course. They’ve exchanged photos like crazy, just as commonplace as their texts and calls. But still, Elsa is nervous Sarah won’t recognize her, or even think she’s ugly enough in person to simply leave behind rather than meet (even if she knows Sarah isn’t like that). What started as an outreach to find out how to cope with Dr. Charles is now so much more. 

She sees Sarah first, stepping off the Greyhound and holding her backpack straps with a familiar nervousness. Elsa does that too. She calls Sarah’s name, perhaps too loud, and is rewarded with an absolutely stunning smile that lights up the whole world. God, she’s beautiful. She’s so beautiful. She’s the most stunning woman to ever walk the earth, and suddenly her arms are wrapped around Elsa in the world’s safest embrace.

“I hope this is okay,” she says, her lips moving against Elsa’s temple. “I just really needed to hug you.”

Elsa nods and loses herself in the hug. It’s so warm. So safe. So perfect. She never could have imagined before that someone as beautiful and lovely as Sarah would ever want her, but here they are at the bus station, with Elsa going up on her toes to reach for a kiss, one freely given and tasting of those red hot candies she eats by the bucketfull. She must have been snacking on them on the ride. In truth, Elsa doesn’t mind the taste, not with everything else this moment brings.

“This is literally a dream come true.”

Sarah’s laugh is the sun that brings the dawn, the moon that washes over the city streets, the stars that children wish upon. She is everything. Elsa kisses her again, and again and again, until her lips are tingling and she has no choice but to feel so completely and irrevocably in love that she’s drowning in it.

Beginning

It is the first proper day of the summer opening, which will span the course of several to make time for every room to be christened. Every building must be appreciated by and introduced to those who believe in Crockett’s treatments. The chemical wing, the bio research center, the operating building, everything. They need to know that he’s doing things right and doing them well, and that includes his patient who will be the first to experience the brand new operating rooms, state of the art and ripe with new surgical equipment to be tested. It is Dr. Halstead who lies on the table, Dr. Sexton who performs, Nurse Lockwood who assists.

“This is an experimental procedure,” Crockett says into the microphone. He has also scrubbed in to assist and observe, and can see through the theatre window at everyone who has come to see. These rooms will allow teaching in a way that isn’t usually possible. A round operating room makes it perfect for people to find the vantage point that teaches them from beyond the glass. “Dr. Halstead has something called an Atrial Septal Defect. For those who don’t have medical degrees, that means there is a hole in his heart that disrupts blood flow. Today, we will be repairing this hole with a minimally invasive ‘closed’ heart surgery.”

He does not explain too much in depth, knowing it will go over most of their heads, but people watch as it all happens. Dr. Sexton operates the thin, newly patented tools with ease, following the image on a screen brought up by the endoscope, occasionally directing Nurse Lockwood in a soft voice to adjust. People can see the feed from the observation area as well; there are screens every few feet. Some look at that. Some look at the blood leaking around Dr. Sexton’s tools. Some look at Crockett. 

“Dr. Marcel, scalpel?”

Crockett reaches for it, hesitating for a moment as his hand curls around the instrument. “This is a closed surgery.”

“I’m seeing another defect.”

He gestures at the screen with his free hand, the flesh pulsing with Dr. Halstead’s heartbeat, showing off the place where he’s stitched together the hole with dissolvable thread and then directing Nurse Lockwood to turn the endoscope.

“That’s an atrioventricular defect,” Dr. Sexton says. “It’s complete. I can’t get out of his chest and do nothing, it’ll kill him.”

“Is it new?”

“Torn edges.”

“Bleeding?”

“Crockett.”

He looks at their observers, who are now whispering amongst themselves, theorizing. This is bad. Especially if it seems that the procedure caused it, which it very well may have. Dr. Sexton can’t proceed without the scalpel. Crockett sets it down and leans toward the microphone once more.

“Okay, folks, so we found another defect in Dr. Halstead’s heart. We’ll be repairing that as well via the same method.”

Dr. Sexton stares at him. “Dr. Marcel,” he says sharply. “He is going to die on this table-”

“If we don’t repair the defect, I’m aware. Go ahead and do so.”