#greys abc

Three years.

You’d spent three years of your life at Seattle Grace — you never had gotten used to the addition of Mercy West to the name — where residents screwed their attendings and each other like it was a board requirement, and managed to never come even close to crossing that line. 

You weren’t a surgical resident by trade, they worshipped the order and stability of the Operating Room, whereas you lived and breathed for the noise and chaos of the Emergency Room. You’d first met Meredith when she posted on the hospital’s notice boards looking for roommates. 

You were the first person she agreed to let move in. She knew you in passing well enough to be sure you weren’t completely nuts, you wouldn’t be bothered by the odd hours she kept because you kept them yourself and, most importantly, she didn’t spend a full hundred plus hours a week with you already. Of course, she eventually caved and let George and Izzie move in too. 

George was easy to get along with in those early days, he was kindhearted and compassionate, loyal to his friends and a favourite with his patients. Sometimes it took him a few tries to get going, to trust his usually excellent instincts, but in the end he always fought for what he thought was right. 

Izzie was perpetually perky in a way that was sometimes impressive and sometimes made you want to throw something at her, but she stress baked and you stress cleaned so you often made quite the team in the kitchen in the stupid hours of the morning.

Somehow, you became the only emergency medicine resident in an inner circle of surgeons.

The surgical residents of Seattle Grace Hospital were driven, almost to the point of ridiculousness, and so when they weren’t in surgery, they were hunting for it.

They all spent their fair share of time poking about in your periphery while you were trying to treat your patients, desperately seeking something that might become surgical that they could poach before their fellow residents could. It would have been helpful always having a surgical consult on hand if they weren’t the single most competitive bunch you’d ever met. None of them more so than Cristina.

She didn’t care in the slightest how much the others liked you. She was slower to accept you, she steadfastly stood by the notion that surgery was superior to all other forms of medicine and she never let you forget it. But you didn’t go the distance in emergency medicine if you were shy and retiring so you gave as good as you got, letting her unshakeable arrogance roll off you with quick wit and dry humour. 

“She’s an ER intern,” Cristina had snarked the first time she hung out at Meredith’s house and you were there. “You heard what Bailey said, they don’t know their ass from their esophagus.”

“I guess that explains why I keep sitting on my breakfast instead of eating it,” you shot back without missing a beat. “Thank God for all you surgeons to set me straight or I’d starve to death.”

You didn’t let her walk all over you, but she spent more time trolling for surgeries than anyone else and you did respect the hustle so you gave her the occasional heads up when something particularly interesting rolled in and she in turn respected that. Eventually, the jabs traded about surgeons and their God complexes and how emergency medicine was nothing but quick and dirty fixes were more habit than heat. 

Alex wasn’t brought into the group voluntarily so much as he hung around until he became part of the fabric of life that you couldn’t imagine not being there. Like a stray tomcat who tried to hump anything that moved and hissed constantly like he hated everyone around him but still didn’t make any attempt to leave. 

The more time you spent with them, the more you realised that you’d ended up here because the eye of the storm was your natural habitat and, much as you came to love them all, these people were nothing if not tornadoes of bad personal decisions. 

The frankly insane percentage of your friends who had screwed, married or otherwise romanced their attendings became a running joke to you. 

You had watched in morbid amusement as Meredith made some choices over Derek Shepherd that would have cost anyone else their career, as Cristina got involved with not one, but two different attendings. Lexi, the surprise Grey nobody was expecting to show up, was doing some kind of back and forth dance with Mark Sloan that was borderline painful to watch. Hell, even Alex had slept with Addison. Without fail, it came with blurred lines both at work and at home and messy drama that should have been more at home on a TV screen than a hospital. You often wondered how they even found time to practice medicine at all.

Three years of a four year residency, and you’d never so much as looked sideways at any attending, in your department or otherwise. You couldn’t believe that leaving Seattle Grace was the thing that threatened to undo all that.

————————————————————————————

The first blow to your ability to be at home in Seattle came with the loss of George. He rounded your little dysfunctional family out, softened the rough edges that so many of you brought to the table. He’d lost his way there for a while after his dad passed, but he was getting himself together again. Losing him was sudden and senseless. You knew life was often that way, but you’d been so unprepared for it and it tipped your entire world sideways. 

Then Izzie leaving so suddenly had shaken those already unstable foundations. Getting on with Izzie had been hit or miss with you the longer you knew her. At least with the others, even Alex who could be the most infuriating person you’d ever known, you knew where you stood. Izzie had a habit of changing her mind on a dime and you often seriously disagreed with the choices she made when she let her heart rule her head. She was a huge part of all of your lives for so long, though, that her suddenly not being there felt like being cut off from a part of yourself. 

It was someone who was no one to you that put the final nail in the coffin that was your time in Seattle. Gary Clark — a man whose name you hadn't even known at the time — was the one who changed everything. 

The aftermath of the carnage he wrought on the hospital was clear in the turmoil it caused in every single one of you. You tried, you really did. For months, you did the therapy and all the things you were supposed to do. You got up every morning when you wanted nothing more than to disappear, you ate, slept, bathed when you were meant to, you dragged yourself into the hospital despite the dread in your stomach, but it started to feel like Seattle was haunting you. Or you were haunting it. 

So you condensed your entire life down into moving boxes and hauled them across the country to a place where there wasn’t a ghost around every corner.

————————————————————————————

The first time you saw Dr. Jack Abbot, you immediately noticed how good looking he was.

PTMC’s ER wasn’t all that different from Seattle Grace’s, in the way that all ERs felt alike.

Fluorescent bulbs glared down from the ceiling in uniform rows, brightening every shadowed corner so there was nowhere to hide. The clamour of the waiting room bubbled in over the underlying hum of machines every now and then when the main door swung open, a reminder that this place slept even less than its doctors did. Underneath it all, the whisper of sneakered feet across the floor as everyone who moved through the hallways did so with purpose, only ever a heartbeat away from a flat out run to the next critical event. 

Dr. Robinavitch, Robby he’d told you to call him, had been giving you the tour. It was wide and open, spiralling out in all directions from what they called the Hub, where patient boards hung, insistent and demanding, above a bank of desks topped with computers, clipboards and tablets for tracking the many patients you’d see over many hours spent inside. Each direction was named for the points on a compass, boasting a total of about two dozen rooms. 

He’d walked you through them all and you tried to construct a mental map to guide you until you got your feet under you in this new place. You’d so far pressed yourself flat against the wall to avoid two gurneys being wheeled around, three laser focused nurses and a couple of med students on their way back to the locker room locked in a furious debate about something or other. It felt like coming home in a way Seattle hadn’t since well over a year ago. 

Robby circled back to the Hub, introducing you to the charge nurse, Dana. She was a slim blonde woman with a look that screamed she’d never missed a trick in her life and she oozed the kind of gentle authority that told you she ran this ER far more than Robby ever had. She gave you a welcoming smile. 

“And this is Dr. Abbot,” Robby said, gesturing to the man beside Dana. “He’s our night shift attending but he just loves it so much he’s here almost as much as me in the day too. Abbot, this is our new R4.”

The man in question was broad and muscled, with gentle curls speckled with silver and an intense hazel stare. As he straightened from the computer he had been leaning over, he raked those sharp eyes over you from head to toe. “It’s not often we get new blood around here at your level. You running from something or to something?”

You might not have been hooking up in on-call rooms at every convenient moment — and some seriously inconvenient ones — but you knew an attractive man when you saw one. You processed that fact silently, with a distant thought wondering if there was some factory somewhere producing all these hot attendings as some kind of cosmic test for tired, pent up residents all over the country. 

“You can’t seriously be expecting me to give up all my secrets in the first thirty seconds?” You asked, meeting his assessing gaze and holding it with just a hint of mischief.

His eyes narrowed for several long moments before a slow smirk spread across his lips and Robby and Dana both laughed. “I like her,” Abbot told Robby. “She’ll hold her own just fine, I think.”

The rush of satisfaction that filled you was just the relief at having made a good impression on three of the most important people in an ER’s hierarchy. Wasn’t it?

————————————————————————————

The ease with which you settled into life in the Pitt, as it was affectionately known, was like coming up for air when you’d been seconds away from drowning. Every moment you spent there made you feel more like yourself than you had in a long time. 

Confident, efficient and knowledgeable, you proved yourself a worthy addition to the team. Your new colleagues responded by making you feel incredibly welcome.

If you looked closely enough, you could find echoes of all the things you missed most about your chosen family back in Seattle right here and it was more comforting than you’d have readily admitted. 

Samira Mohan’s bright and positive attitude and Mel King’s impressive recall reminded you so much of Lexi. Trinity Santos was as cutthroat, sarcastic and dedicated as Cristina. Dennis Whitaker sometimes said or did something you could so easily picture George doing that it hurt to look at him. 

As much as you appreciated the reminders of where you’d come from, you were also glad for the contrast provided by the people here who didn’t remind you of anything you’d lost or left behind.

All the nursing staff, but especially Princess and Perlah, lifted the atmosphere inside the Pitt like no one else could. They missed absolutely nothing that was worth gossiping about and you’d learned it was best not to wonder too hard what they were talking about when they stood chatting to one another in rapid Tagalog. 

You seemed to get on well enough with everyone.

One thing you didn’t do, though, was give a straight answer to the question of why you moved the length of the country half way through your final year of residency. It made you something of a mystery to the rest of the Pitt staff. Cassie McKay was the only person who’d stopped asking after the first time you gave her a vague non-answer. Sure and collected, she carried herself with the air of someone who knew what it was like to fear looking too far backwards.

Robby, having been the one to review your transfer application and interview you, was the one person who knew the finer details of your reason for fleeing Seattle and he pretended he didn’t know a damn thing. By the end of your first month, there was a pool going to discover the reason. 

It was the worst kept secret you’d ever seen, and that was saying something. So far, guesses had included that you’d been left at the altar, that you’d been the one doing the leaving, that you’d moved to take care of a family member, that you were secretly married or secretly divorced or had a secret child.

None of them came even close to being right, and you were pretty sure they never would. So sure, in fact, that you’d eventually told them all that you knew what they were up to and you wanted in. If none of them could figure it out in the six months before you completed your residency, then you got to keep the money for yourself. Maybe by then, the thought of talking about it with people who weren’t there wouldn’t be so overwhelming.

You didn't mind, really, being the subject of all their guessing. It took your mind off the real reason. It was also pretty funny to watch them all analyse anything you said about your life before Pittsburgh for clues. 

The time difference with Seattle and the fact you were all now fourth year residents made it hard to keep up with your friends there, but there was a group chat and you managed the occasional phone call. One evening, you walked out of the locker room in your street clothes and felt the attention of everyone standing by the Hub narrow onto you as you said, “Meredith, I moved to Pittsburgh, Cristina quit to bartend at Joe’s. Those are two very different things. I promise you, I’m fine.”

You had laughed as you walked out the door, watching Princess add ‘flamed out of previous program’ to the betting board and then spent your walk home regaling Meredith with the chosen pastime of your new colleagues.

It was also around the end of your first month that you’d been complaining to Samira about how hard it was to apartment hunt between shifts and that living in a hotel, especially the kind you could afford on a resident’s salary, was beginning to drive you mad. She immediately offered you her second bedroom, and you didn’t hesitate for a second before taking her up on it. 

“Sold!” You’d laughed, tucking an arm through hers as you left the ER several hours later than you should have been. “But I’m still not helping you win that pool.”

It was nice to share a living space again with someone you’d come to think of as a friend. You’d missed the noise, the feeling of having someone else just exist around you. Staying in that rundown hotel had had the noise, sure, but it wasn’t the same. Dana had told you privately that she thought it was good for Samira, too. 

“That girl spends entirely too much time at this hospital,” Dana had said. At your bemused look, the one that said we all do, she’d given a fond shake of the head. “You know what I mean, she never seems to have much going on outside here even when she can get away. I was worried she was gonna end up like Robby and Abbot.”

With the living situation solved, there was only one real problem remaining in your life. That problem was Jack Abbot. He was a problem because he wasn’t just attractive, he was also charming and in your experience, attendings who were both handsome and charming unraveled the lives of residents like kittens batting around balls of thread. 

Your paths crossed more than you thought they would because Robby wasn’t kidding, the two of them overlapped for far more than just handover each day. Whenever you did cross, he seemed to gravitate towards you. You had to admit he was an impressive physician and a good teacher. The problem was that you found yourself luxuriating in his attention, heating up under his stare instead of shrinking away from it, enjoying when he’d step in close behind you to quietly offer corrections or worse, praise, in that low, gravelly voice of his. You’d catch yourself leaning into it before you realised what you were doing and then overcorrecting with polite distance and quick exits.

Jack, meanwhile, was utterly confused by you. He enjoyed working with you, impressed by the way you looked and moved like you were never more at home than when you were in the middle of a crisis, the way you bent the mayhem to your will. Sometimes, he thought that you enjoyed working with him too. Those times when you were right there, handing him what he needed without him having to ask, making the calls he was thinking of making a split second before he made them, standing just a little taller and looking just a little more pleased with yourself when he gave you a nod or a compliment on your work. Then there were the times he worried you might actually hate him. The times when shutters came down behind your eyes, when you seemed to look through him rather than at him, when you called him ‘Dr. Abbot’ in the kind of polite, detached tone he associated with bank tellers and car salesmen and then kept as far away from him as you could until he finally left the Pitt entirely.

You didn’t create that distance with anyone else. He knew, because he watched carefully for it. You joked with the nursing staff, not once holding their gossiping against them. You’d moved in with Mohan. When you gave advice to Santos, Whitaker or Javadi, more often than not it was with good natured ribbing for the younger residents. You didn’t draw those lines with the other more senior members of staff either, Dana treated you the same motherly way she did everyone else and you let her and you clapped back at Robby as frequently as the next person.

He could have let it frustrate him, the fact that he was a grown man, a man who’d lived through combat and trauma more times than he could count, who was so very bothered that the pretty resident he felt a connection to seemed to dislike him. Instead, he decided to double down, determined to undo whatever had made you feel so uncomfortable around him.

————————————————————————————

When Jack came in for his next shift, he found you exactly where he’d expected to; sitting in front of one of the computers at the Hub, locked in on your charting. His hand slid into your peripheral vision, pushing a cardboard coffee cup — the kind from the good local coffee shop and not the hospital cafeteria — onto the desk. Your fingers slowed across the keyboard until they stilled completely and you looked at it like it had personally offended you. 

“What’s that?” 

“…Coffee?” Jack’s answer came out more like a question then he meant it to, because he hadn’t been expecting to have to explain a coffee cup to you. Your eyes flicked up to meet his for the briefest of seconds.

“I don’t drink coffee,” you said, nudging the cup to the side with one finger, as if it might be toxic, so you could continue your charting.

Jack didn’t call you a liar, as such, but he did say, “You’re an ER resident, you drink coffee. I’ve seen you drink coffee. It’s good coffee, it’s not poison.”

You hesitated, still watching the coffee cup like it might strike out and bite you. “At least I’d have the mercy of a quick death if it was,” you muttered. A quick death would be preferable to the slow, torturous demise that came with the inability to smother your overwhelming attraction to one of your bosses. At Jack’s furrowed brows, you pushed on. “We’re not doing this.”

“Doing what?”

“Coffee. Small talk. That’s how it starts.”

“How what starts?” Jack felt like he was losing his mind, he’d thought he couldn’t go wrong with coffee and yet he hadn’t understood half of this conversation.

“Nothing,” you snapped. “Never mind. I’m done. Bye, Dr. Abbot.” You logged out of the computer faster than you ever had before, swivelled yourself up out of the chair and were halfway down the hall before Jack knew what was happening.

He turned to Dana and Robby, both of whom had been watching the conversation unfold with confused amusement. “Did any of that make sense to either of you?”

They both shook their heads at him.

————————————————————————————

Samira was the only person outside the state of Washington who knew about your attraction to Jack, and that was only because of your bad habit of putting your phone on speaker so you could carry on with whatever you were doing when you got a chance to speak to anyone back in Seattle.

Meredith, Cristina and Lexi had all taken time out of their busy schedules to tease you mercilessly about your fall from grace and into the pits of the same inconvenient and inappropriate feelings you’d once laughed at them for. Samira, once she heard a few of the stories that made so adamantly against this nonsense, was absolutely beside herself with hilarity.

It quickly became clear that you would get exactly no moral support or useful advice, but instead plenty of mockery and requests for a picture so they could decide if you at least had good taste in attendings.

After she stopped laughing, Samira had convinced you to ease up just a little, pointing out that if you kept basically fleeing the man, someone would definitely figure out that something was amiss. So, for a good few weeks, a bit of the tension bled out of you when you crossed paths with Jack. You’d apologised for being snappy about the coffee, citing tiredness after a long shift and breathing a huge sigh of relief when he’d accepted without question. 

You still caught yourself focusing on him in ways that were not helpful. Like noticing his broad shoulders, toned biceps, strong hands (he seemed to be the only person to ever make scrubs look good, what was that all about?), the way your entire body warmed when he stepped in a little closer than he needed to or how his voice occasionally raked down your spine in a way that made you shiver, but you were determined to ignore it. 

You shoved it down as much as you could, and managed to work with him as effectively, if not more, as with everyone else at the Pitt. The rhythm started to make you relax around him a bit.

In the next few weeks, Lexi, in particular, had clicked with Samira over the course of a few disjointed phone calls. It wasn’t really surprising when you stopped to think about how similar they were as people and as doctors. They shared a generally sunny disposition, often seeking out a silver lining where the rest of you might approach with jaded cynicism, and their empathy and compassion seemed to have no limits. Until, apparently, it came to you. 

You’d walked to work with Samira today under the bright blue skies and gently warming sunlight, and you’d actually had a pretty good feeling about the day. That was, until you were dressed in your scrubs in the locker room, putting your phone in your locker and you happened to take one last glance at your notifications. Weird, you thought, seeing a lot of hits from your group chat. As you opened them, you read on with dawning horror at what you saw. 

Slamming your locker shut, phone still unlocked and gripped in your hand, you stormed onto the floor in search of Samira. When you found her checking the board, waiting for Robby to show up for rounds, you shoved the phone in her face. 

“Did you do this?” You hissed the question, but you both knew you didn’t need an answer. After recently being added to your chat, she’d decided to indulge the constant requests for a picture of who the others had dubbed McHottie. Not original, but they’d been having too much fun relishing in your downfall to care about coming up with anything wittier. Except, Samira hadn’t just sent a photo, she’d sent a link to one of Javadi’s many TikToks, one where Jack had accidentally featured in the background.

She’d already seen most of the replies on her own phone before she made it to the floor, but she read them again with a grin she couldn’t suppress. 

Cristina: I’m sorry, you’re working in a hospital where baby doctors make TikToks? That’s unacceptable, come home immediately.

Cristina: But bring McHottie with you, there’s always room for a silver fox.

Lexi: Damn, paging Dr. Biceps. You are so screwed.

Meredith: Stay away from elevators.

Meredith: Or don’t, the sex will probably be great.

You: You’re all enjoying this way too much.

Alex: Please, please stop adding me back into this chat or I’m gonna throw myself in front of the next ambulance I see.

“Do what?” You were still waving your phone in Samira’s grinning face when Santos sidled up beside the two of you, yanking your phone out of your grip before you could lock it. Her eyes scanned the messages, and when she was done she wore a grin to match Samira’s.

“You’re kidding me?” She asked, doing nothing to hide the mirth in her voice or eyes.

“This is a nightmare,” you declared, snatching your phone back and shoving it deep inside the pocket of your scrubs. “I’m having a nightmare and any second now I’ll wake up and never have met either of you.”

“What’s this about a nightmare?” Robby asked from behind you and any retort you might have had died on a slightly choked breath as you saw Jack right beside him. 

“Doesn’t matter,” you said, shooting a glare at Santos when she tried to cover a laugh with a cough. Badly. 

The morning passed as all mornings in the Pitt did; in a swirl of patient exams, ECGs, blood tests, x-rays and CT scans. You and Jack — seriously, didn’t this man ever go home? — had been treating a patient who’d been hit by a car and had just about gotten him stabilised when his spleen ruptured. You’d rushed him upstairs and had just finished handing him off for surgery.

“That was good work, quick and steady.” Such simple praise shouldn’t make you feel so pleased with yourself. You knew you were good at your job, because you worked hard to be that way. “You thinking of staying here after your residency?” He asked as you were waiting for the elevator.

“Yeah, possibly,” you shrugged, not wanting to sound like you were putting too much hope on that one option. “I kind of like it here.” 

“Good. You just say the word if you want a recommendation letter.”

It wasn’t until he was inside the elevator, looking at you expectantly, that you remembered Meredith’s wise words. Stay away from elevators. You knew you had to follow them. If Seattle Grace had taught you anything, it was that you should never get onto elevators alone with attendings you’d pictured naked. 

“You coming?”

“Uhh, I’m gonna take the stairs,” you said, taking a step back. Jack watched you go with a confused nod.

A couple of minutes and four flights of stairs later, you slid through the doors back into the Pitt. Whitaker and Santos watched you from in front of one of the trauma bays. 

“Why didn’t you just get the elevator with Abbot?”

“Rule number one Whitaker, elevators are where self control goes to die,” you said as you passed them, never breaking stride.

“I don’t— That doesn’t even make sense!” He called after you, accompanied by Santos’ laughter. 

Inside the trauma bay, snapping on gloves to begin another examination, Jack Abbot felt like every time he thought he was starting to know you, he ended up understanding less. 

————————————————————————————

As time went on, Jack was starting to think he’d got it all wrong.

He’d puzzled over your words to Whitaker about self control until he’d convinced himself that your reluctance to be around him wasn’t to do with hate at all but quite the opposite. He’d started noticing the way you responded to him and forming another theory entirely. 

When you were working, things were mostly normal. It was when the two of you started to stray away from the medicine where you changed. There were still a few odd moments where there was a glint in your eye like you had something to bat back at him in the midst of sarcastic banter that flowed back and forth and you still refused to get in an elevator if there wasn’t a patient between you. He was starting to wonder if you were as affected by him as he was by you and it was going to his head in ways that were borderline unhealthy.

As if the world was offering him an answer, proof that he was right, you started showing up on the night shifts. The first time he’d seen you behind the central desk at the Hub at 1 a.m., wearing your street clothes and tucked away in a corner where you wouldn’t be in Lena’s way, he’d been concerned. The current of the Pitt towed him from one patient to the next, but his eyes drifted over to you every time he crossed within sight of the Hub. You didn’t seem to be in any distress but he couldn’t fathom why you’d be there. A couple of hours passed before there was a lull and as he’d come over to check why, his worry had thawed into an emotion he knew well when it came to you; confusion. His eyes bounced across the books splayed out across the desk, the scattered pens and the scribbled notes on brightly coloured post-its.

“Are you… studying? In the Pitt, in the middle of the night?”

“Hm?” You glanced up at him. “Oh yeah,” you muttered, reading your most recent set of notes again. “I can’t focus at home, I need the noise.”

“That’s one of the weirdest things I’ve ever heard.” 

You smiled a little, and Jack thought it was kind of pathetic how much it felt like victory to him. “Back in Seattle, the house I lived in was kind of like the open house where people just showed up at all hours. Now, silence kills my brain and I will not fail my boards when there’s all this chaos just going begging right here.”

“Speaking of Seattle,” he said, sliding into the stool next to you and trying to focus on anything besides the way you were absentmindedly chewing on your pen, “are you ever gonna clue us in and end the mystery behind the pool?”

When you laughed, Jack felt it all the way down to his bones. “No way,” you said, abandoning your books for now and giving him your full attention, “those guesses are way too funny. Besides, another ten weeks and that money’s all mine.”

He spent a couple of minutes with you, quizzing you on your notes as you chatted idly about hospital gossip and you told him little bits and pieces of your life in Seattle. Nothing he could use to win the pool, but more than you’d given to most other people. 

Despite what everyone thought, he very much liked getting out of here after a shift, but Jack thought he could have happily spent the night there. Even with the uncomfortable chairs, the lights that were giving him a headache, and the way this place made him relive every failure he’d ever had within its walls, he thought he’d have stayed in this very spot for the rest of his life as long as you kept looking at him. Inevitably, he got pulled into a trauma call, but you were still there when he came back, armed with another coffee — hospital sourced, sadly — and a snack from the vending machine. 

“I noticed you haven’t eaten anything since you’ve been sitting here,” he said by way of explanation.

“Don’t do that, don’t notice things about me.”

“Oh, it’s too late for that. You fascinate me,” Jack’s voice pitched low and he leaned his elbows on the counter above you.

“No, I don’t,” you scoffed, sliding your stool back to create some space. “You don’t even know me.”

“I know some things. I know you chew on your pen when you’re studying in a way that’s completely maddening, I know you like it when I tell you how talented you are, I know you have weird rules about elevators that I cannot begin to understand.” He laughed a little, but you could feel the slightest hint of panic sparking inside you. “I know you’re a great mentor to the med students and your patients love you.  I know you love the chaos and can’t focus in the silence, I know you miss your friends in Seattle but I also know you’d never move back there. I’ve been noticing you since you got here, sweetheart.”

The panic had started to unfurl along your limbs, because it wasn’t funny any more. You might have bitched about it, but you could see why it was funny that you found him so attractive when you’d drawn so much amusement from the sexual escapades of Seattle Grace but this wasn’t that any more. This was too much like potential, too much like it could be the start of something real that would inevitably implode and drag your hard-earned career down with it before it even really began. 

“Why do you do that?” Jack asked, cutting through the loaded silence. He could see it happening, the way you were forcing yourself to back away from the easy, relaxed aura that had settled between you. “Why do you shut me out when you don’t with everyone else?”

“Did you ever think maybe it’s not about you?”

————————————————————————————

A month later found medical professionals from all over the country descending on Pittsburgh for a conference. You knew that Derek and Mark were flying in as speakers and you’d made plans to catch up with them before they flew back.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time, to arrange for them to meet you at the Pitt at the end of your shift but as you approached the last hour of your shift, the hour that overlapped with Jack’s, you began to doubt. You realised there was a decent chance that would mean Jack crossing paths with them and if they behaved the part of the annoying brothers you never asked for, as they so often did, you would be just absolutely mortified. 

The thought plagued you through your last case, and it was what tipped you over the edge when you felt just a little too pleased at Jack’s whispered, “Atta girl.” 

As you exited the patient’s room, you turned to him with the air of someone teetering on the edge.

“Okay, this…” you gestured between the two of you, “this is not happening. Because if we do this, then yeah, it’ll be good to start with. There will be laughing and flirting and lots of great sex but then, something bad will happen. Because you’re the hot attending and I’m the resident and something bad always happens. Then the next thing you know I’m a cliché on the bathroom floor with all these feelings and a tequila hangover and my life is spiralling out of control. I refuse to become that girl over a man, any man, no matter how great he is. So I need you to stop with the hair and the voice and the noticing me and the biceps because it’s incredibly distracting!”

It was the only time you’d ever heard dead silence in the Pitt and it distantly occurred to you that you didn’t need Derek and Mark to humiliate you because you’d just done a bang up job of it all on your own. 

“I’m the hot attending?” Jack asked, smirking. He looked so good when he did it that it made you a little furious.

“Seriously, that’s what you took from that? Seriously?”

“They call you McHottie,” Santos called helpfully from somewhere off to your left and you thought you might actually throttle her. Later, though, because you remained locked still under the self-satisfied gaze of Jack Abbot.

Robby called your name, and God bless him he tried so hard not to sound like he was laughing at you. “Shift’s over.” Still, you didn’t move your eyes from Jack’s. “And you’ve got visitors.”

With a sinking feeling you turned to see Derek and Mark watching with keen interest, not trying at all to seem like they weren’t laughing at you. As you stalked past them to the locker room to change, Mark called after you. “Spectacular meltdown.”

“Screw you, McSteamy.”

————————————————————————————

Derek and Mark had laughed at you all the way back to your apartment and, as you showered and changed, you seriously considered throwing them both out and ordering takeout instead of going to dinner. Eventually, you decided you’d punish them by making them take you somewhere nice and foot the bill. Goddamn surgeons. Goddamn McAssholes, it’s their bad examples that got me in this mess in the first place.

You were glad you’d gone in the end, even if the teasing hadn’t stopped entirely all evening, because it felt so good to actually see some of the people who knew you best, who’d been around for some of your lowest moments. They updated you on all the gossip from Seattle – you all agreed how relieved you were that Cristina saw sense and gave up bartending – and you told them about how much you were enjoying being in a new place and how free it made you feel. You also confided in them, between their jokes and wisecracks, that Jack was actually a good man, which made everything so much harder because you could actually see yourself being with him but not at the expense of your residency. They, in turn, reminded you that you were not Meredith or Lexi or anyone else, Jack was not them and this was not Seattle, so maybe you were overreacting just a little. You weren’t convinced, but promised to take it under advisement. If you could ever get over your embarrassment enough to speak to him again. 

You made it all the way to dessert before your phone summoned you back to the hospital. A massive pile up a few miles away meant the night shift was likely about to be overwhelmed and they were calling in back up. Derek paid for your cab and you were thankful you kept a spare pair of scrubs in your locker because it meant you wouldn’t have to stop off home first. 

The Pitt was full to bursting when you arrived, but everyone in it had become experts at slipping their little social interactions between their procedures, it was how they kept sane, so arriving in a nice dress and makeup didn’t go unnoticed. 

Donnie wolf whistled when you passed by the Hub, followed by Mateo saying, “I feel bad for the guy who had to watch you leave, or is that for a certain night shift attending? I’ve been hearing the tension might have reached a breaking point.”

Self-consciousness prickled its way all the way up from your toes, but the laugh you gave was genuine because Mateo was too nice to be taken maliciously.

You nearly bumped into Jack leaving a trauma room as you walked by, ducking your head and hoping he hadn’t heard Mateo because one nightmarish encounter with him was enough for one day. His eyes trailed you as you dodged around him and into the locker room. His feet followed without conscious thought. 

He leaned in the doorway as you dug your scrubs out of your locker. “You look…. are you trying to kill me, sweetheart?”

Your hands paused on the zipper of your dress, and you cast a look at him over your shoulder. “I already told you we’re not doing this. Do you not listen?”

“I do, when people mean what they say.” Jack moved behind you close enough that you could feel his breath falling hot against the back of your neck. “What I heard wasn’t that you don’t want to, but that you’re scared of what happens if you do.” His hands brushed your hair over your shoulder so he could reach the zip of your dress himself. “You’re worried about your residency? Fine. It’s what, six weeks to your boards?” He dragged the zipper down slowly, the back of his knuckles scorching against the line of your spine as he spoke, voice rough and full of promise. “I haven’t wanted to date anyone in a long while, I can wait six weeks.”

As soon as your dress was unzipped, Jack turned on his heel and returned to the Pitt, as if he hadn’t left you there with your heart racing, back thrumming where his bare skin had touched yours and desire glittering in your veins. 

—

When he got to the ER, time blurred.

You were barely conscious, blood staining your clothes, your face pale against the chaos. April was applying pressure to your abdomen, shouting orders. Owen and Bailey hovered nearby. Arizona was already assessing the fetal heart rate. Everything was moving too fast — and not fast enough.

“Her BP’s dropping!”

“She’s crashing, we need to move now—”

“Where’s Derek?” you whispered, dazed, as the gurney wheeled down the hallway.

“I’m here,” he choked out, rushing beside you, gripping your hand. “I’m here, baby, I’m right here.”

You tried to smile. “I’m scared, Derek.”

“No. No, you don’t get to be scared. You’re okay. You and the baby — you’re both gonna be okay.”

You let out a broken breath. “Promise?”

He leaned in and kissed your forehead, hard. “I promise. You hold on, you hear me? You hold on.”

—

Hours passed.

Derek paced, blood still on his scrubs, refusing to sit. His mind looped through every possible worst-case scenario, every scan he hadn’t seen, every second he wasn’t by your side in that car.

Meredith stood beside him quietly.

“She’s strong,” she said.

He replied numbly. “So was every patient I ever lost.”

Arizona came out first. “The baby’s stable. We delivered early — NICU has her. They’re tiny but fighting.”

Derek’s knees almost gave out.

Bailey followed. “We stopped the bleeding. She has a long road ahead, but she made it through surgery. She’s in recovery now.”

He didn’t wait for permission. He ran.

—

You looked so fragile, hooked up to machines, IVs in both arms, monitors beeping steadily.

But you were alive.

He sat beside you and gently took your hand, pressing it to his lips, his voice breaking as he whispered, “I thought I lost you.”

You stirred slightly, eyes fluttering open. “Hey…”

“You scared the hell out of me,” he said, brushing your hair back. “You and the little one.”

“The baby…?”

“Is safe. You both are.” He kissed your hand again, fiercely. “Don’t ever do that again. You don’t get to leave me. Not you.”

You gave him a tired smile. “Wasn’t planning on it.”

He exhaled shakily and pressed his forehead to yours. “Good. Because I need you. More than anything.”

----