✨Still writing✨

Wandanat x reader

Can you write a fic in which Reader is really focused on studying and doesn't care about herself and her body collapses?

[Part 2]

- You’re not alone

Wandanat x reader

Reader is depressed and relapsing

TW: suicidal thoughts, suicide attempt, self-harm

- Old Habits

Wandanat x reader

Reader makes a mistake on a mission that puts a teammate in danger; her feelings of guilt will lead her to fall into old habits

TW: self-harm

- Paris, oh Paris

WandaNat x reader

Prompt: Hi sweetie, can I make you a wandanat x reader request where Wanda, Natasha and the reader go on vacation somewhere (like Paris) and the reader is afraid of the plane for some mission gone wrong and also is self-harming so bring a sweatshirt even though it is so hot outside and therefore the reader faints (either from the heat or from some problem she had on the last mission, such as a cardiac arrest) or something like that? Thanks 😊

TW: self-harm, panic attack

-You’re destiny has already been written

Wandanat x reader

Prompt: Hi, I have a request idea if you are still making those ^^’ so it’s a wandanat x reader. Reader goes with Nat and Clint to vormir and she stops Natasha from jumping. And when everyone come back Natasha’s like extremely mad at her because for reader’s decision Laura has to take care of the kids alone and reader doesn’t know what to do, and wanda’s like trying to sort everything out but nat ends up breaking with reader and yeah… probably with a happy ending but whatever you would want xD

TW: death of the minor character, mention of suicidal thoughts

-Better than before

Wandanat x reader

Prompt: Love your Marvel stuff! Could you do one that is Wanda x Nat x reader. Reader doesn’t know what going on with herself. She feels different than normal. Unknowingly depression is setting in. In a room full of people she feels so alone. She hides her self harm from Wanda and nat for as long as as she can. She slowly pulls away from everything and everyone. Wanda bad Nat try to reach her, but reader pushes them away too. Reader is in denial anything is wrong bc nothing really triggered these feelings of isolation. Wanda and Nat are desperate to save reader from herself. Nat or Wanda walk in in reader self harming and reader fights with all her strength, so desperate to cling to the one thing that gives her control, while Nat or Wanda calls for the other lover to help.

TW: depression, self-harm

- Let me sleep

WandaNat x reader

Prompt: the reader can’t take it anymore

TW: suicide

- Cuddles and fever

WandaNat x reader

Prompt: when the reader has a fever, her girls take care of her

- Stress Kills

Prompt: Hello!! I really love your work and I was wondering if you can write something -WandaNat- so reader is very stressed and barely have time to rest because it’s just been really messy lately but reader tried to get everything under control again but it never worked so one day reader just stops doing everything and just being unresponsive-because of the stress- I don’t know if this makes any sense but I’ve been stressed lately and your stories are the only thing that keeps me sane.. also this is my first request I really hope you get this.. thank you!!😌

TW: stress, depression (?), panic attack.

- We deserve a happy ending

WandaNat x reader

Prompt: reader isn’t in a good mood but she has two beautiful and cuddly girlfriends

TW: panic attack

- Just like the others

WandaNat x reader

Prompt: Hi!! How are you?? I hope you’re feeling better!! This is probably annoying but can I request another one?? So Y/n and WandaNat are having a fight because wandanat is stressed from work and when they came home it was messy because Y/n just had a mental breakdown -but they didn’t know- so they yell at her and Y/n started having panic attacks because of the yelling but it took them quite a long time to notice. Fluff in the end tehe!! Also I just wanna tell you that your stories get me through a lot, you’re amazing!!❤️ (feel free to skip this request if you’re busy or tired and needs rest! I hope you’re doing fine!!). Thank you so much!! Sorry for requesting again tehe 🙃

TW: mention of suicidal thoughts, panic attacks, mention of depression

- Love Crimes

WandaNat x reader

Prompt: justice can be tasty with the right women (vampire!reader, vampire!Natasha, witch!Wanda)

TW: blood

- Difficult choises

WandaNat x reader

Prompt: Fear leads the reader to bullshit ... maybe her girlfriends, Natasha and Wanda, will be able to fix it.

[ PART 2 ]

- Secret Plan

WandaNat x reader

Prompt: The reader does her own thing after a fight with Steve. It wasn't her best idea

- Time to Celebrate

Wandanat x reader

Prompt: how about a wandanat x reader where it’s y/n’s birthday and suppose to have the day off but fury decided to send us on a mission and then we got hurt and wandanat almost killed fury (: OOH! And they’re just babying reader and stuff like that because reader is hurt?? Tehe!! (And lots of cuddles and hugs yeay!)

- Christmas

Wandanat x reader

Prompt: Christmas in Italy can be...challenging.

- Only one

Wandanat x reader

Request: Hey! ♥️ hope you’re doing good. I was wondering if you would write something, where reader is in self harm recovery and is about to relapse one night, but decides to call Nat and Wanda instead? Maybe they come over and distracts them like maybe they brought food? Idk thanks anyways. I really like your writing.

TW: self-harm

- Hidden Past

Wandanat x reader

Prompt: The reader has hidden something .. but you know, everything comes to the surface sooner or later

TW: past suicide attempt, eating disorder

- It's all Peter Parker's fault

Wandanat x reader

Prompt: the reader pranks their girlfriends, Peter is her accomplice but things don't end well for her and her girlfriends don't like the joke.

TW: injuries, blood.

- Something went wrong

Wandanat x reader

Prompt: A mission goes wrong and the reader is seriously injured ... the consequences change her life and the only thing that comes to her mind is to drive away any person. Including her girls.

TW: heart attack, blindness

- At every step

Wandanat x reader

Prompt: Would you do something where wandanat x reader have just started dating and Wanda and Nat don't know about readers issues. they walk in on them self harming and then yeah I'll let you decide from there

TW: self-harm

- Everything is too much

Wandanat x reader

Request: Could you do an introverted Reader that is trying to find time to be alone to recharge their batteries, but being at the compound around a bunch of extroverted heroes it’s hard to find that quiet time. R is at their breaking point when Wanda or Natasha recognizes something is wrong. She doesn’t know how to help R but tries her best.

- Amor Vincit Omnia

Wandanat x reader

Request:  6 and 71 from the prompt list perhaps?   6. “ Why didn’t you say anything?”  71. “I took Nyquil instead of Dayquil and now I’m about to pass out”

- Magic always has a price

Wandanat x reader

Prompt: As she tries to get Natasha back, Wanda discovers that magic always has a price. Too bad that the only one who remembers everything is you.

WANDANAT X DAUGHTER!READER

- Together

Wandanat x daughter!reader

Prompt: Hi, so I have a request idea the reader is Wandanats child and and has an ED, and Wanda and Nat decided to take her to a mental health camp, but when they visit her they see that r started cutting again, and when they take r home they are afraid that r will take their life so they become overprotective especially when they see r with sharp things, because reader is still not self harm free, the rest can be up to you 🙃

TW: eating disorder, self-harm

Part I

Part II

WANDANAT X BIOQUAKE X READER ~

WANDA X NATASHA X JEMMA X DAISY X READER [series]

- Road Trip

Wanda x Natasha x Jemma x Daisy x reader

Prompt: I love your works so much! Can we please have one where my girls Wanda, Nat, Jemma and Skye and fem!reader are on their way to a girls trip when they get into an accident. Besides a few scratches the girls are alright except the reader. They try keep her conscious but its getting harder and all of them are getting insanely emotional and worried

Part I

Part II

Part III Road Trip Masterlist

- If it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger

Daisy x Jemma x platonicsister!reader

Prompt: I love your works so so much wow. Can I please request one where Jemma and Daisy have come to love fem!reader as their little sister. Instead of Daisy getting shot its R and Jemma and Daisy are the first one to find her barely lifeless body and they try to keep her awake and stop the bleeding. Please make jt as angsty and long as you want

- Baby's crying

Wandanat x reader x Bioquake

Request: If possible, you should write another wanda x natasha x reader x jemma x daisy. Maybe pregnant reader with a happy ending. If not its alright! I hope you have a great day, also btw I love your stories!

- Breaking Point

Wandanat x reader (platonic bioquake x bobbi x reader)

Prompt: The reader comes to a breaking point… and can only see one solution.

TW: suicidal thoughts, suicide attempt.

MCU CAST X READER

- Not your fault

Elizabeth Olsen x Scarlett Johansson x reader

Prompt: Hi, I have a request idea where the reader gets hurt during filming, for example a concussion, (she works on the MCU set) and she is engaged to Elizabeth and Scarlett, they become very worried and take care of her. Thanks :)

- Misunderstandings

Scarlett Johansson x reader

Prompt: hii! are your requests open? if so could you make a scarlett johansson x reader fic where the reader is also an mcu cast and they both have a crush on each other but they're both oblivious and scar usually goes to chris evans for advice but that makes the reader think they're dating so she distances herself to scar and then scar gets hurt and sad as to why she's not talking to her and then they both confess their feelings to each other and its all cute? you don't have to if you don't wanna!! but thank you sm if you do i need sum scar 😫😫

NATASHA X READER

-The right time

Natasha x reader

Prompt: Heyy bestie can i pls request a natasha x reader where R finds out she's pregnant? like maybe they did sperm donation or something and she tells nat and nat starts crying and its all really fluffy :)) thank you sm!!

- This world sucks without you

Natasha x reader

Prompt: after Vormir, after Thanos’ defeat…the reader can’t live without Natasha

TW: death, suicide

- The punishment you deserve

Dom!Natasha x sub!reader

Prompt: Saying "fuck you" to your girlfriend, in front of all the Avengers was not your brightest idea and when your punishment comes, you realize it.

TW: smut

- Mommy

Alpha!Natasha x omega!reader

Prompt: RPGs can be really interesting 

TW: not real non-con

- Last Step

Natasha x reader

Prompt:  Could you write something where the reader has reached her last straw and has everything in place to kill herself but Nat walks in last minute and has to fight to stop her?

TW: suicidal thoughts, suicidal attempt.

- Submission

Sub!Natasha x dom!reader

Prompt: SUB NAT LASHING OUT ON FEM READER BUT THEN READER GETS MAD AND PUNISHES NAT, MAYBE HAVING ANOTHER ONE OF THE AVENGERS WATCH OR SMTH SO HUMILIATE NAT

- Prompts 1 and 9

Natasha x reader

Request: Heyy Hope you’re doing alright- For the prompts I would love to read 1. “[…], you’re bleeding.” And 9. “Hey, why are you walking like that?” With nat and reader you can decide who’s hurt.

TW: bleeding, injuries

PEGGY CARTER X READER

- Love is not always easy

Peggy Carter x reader

Request: hi sorry i don’t really know how to use tumblr so I hope im making this request in the right way. But anyway can you make a fic where instead of Peggy getting impaled by the rebar in 2x05 it’s the reader and they drive to violets house and she takes care of her, but here’s the thing the reader and Peggy are in love but because of the time they have to keep it a secret. p.s. I love your fics sm keep it up - a fellow italian <3 (I saw that in your bio and I loved it).

TW: bleeding, injuries.

THE 100

CLARKE X LEXA X OCTAVIA X RAVEN

- Cold from Snow

Clexa x Octaven

Prompt: Clarke Griffin believes she is a burden to everyone, even her girlfriends.  Better to freeze to death than to be a burden, right?

NANCY DREW

NANCY DREW X READER

- Truth Spell

Nancy Drew x reader

Request:  if that's fine with you, i was thinking of an imagine based on 3x10 in which the reader confesses her feelings for nancy under the truth spell? maybe nancy noticed how tensed she has been lately (due to seeing nancy and park getting closer) and asks her what's wrong at the party and she blurs out she has feelings for her

THE WITCHER

TISSAIA X YENNEFER X READER

- Sometimes a Flower is not just a Flower

Tissaia x Yennefer x reader (platonic!sabrina x reader)

Prompt: Thanedd with a third person around

TW: bleeding, past suicide attempt.

SUPERGIRL

SUPERCORP X READER

- But it worth

Kara x Lena x reader

Request: Would you be willing to do supercorp x reader (if not supercorp then wandanat) where reader feels alone and upset, they become reckless on missions and it is noticed by the two others. They confront reader and they break down, fluff ending or really any ending you want. (I don't know if you do supercorp, so wandanat is also good)

STATION 19

MAYA X CARINA X READER

- Heat Kills

Maya x Carina x reader

Prompt: Reader has an heatstroke caused by an intensive workout.

- Endgame

Maya x Carina x reader

Request: How about one, where the two come back home from a hard day and just want to cuddle with R and watch some movies etc., but they can't find R anywhere. One of them enters the bedroom and sees a letter, which turns out to be a suicide note, which, obviously, scares them a lot.So they (frantically) continue looking for R and notice that the bathroom door is closed, so they get a spear key to open it (or just kick it open lol) and see R in the bathtub, wrists c*t open and the water having turned red.

TW: suicide attempt

- Heart Problems

Maya x Carina x reader

[PART 1]

[PART 2]

Prompt: Reader knows that hiding something to her girlfriends it’s not a good idea but chest pain it’s not something that they will just ignore, right?

TW: heart problems, heart attack.

- Hard Choices, hard life

Maya x Carina x reader

Prompt: Reader comes to a point of no return.

TW: depression, suicide attempt, ocd, pills

I accept requests

You realize Baran is already home from the pleasant smell of chicken and pomegranate that floods your nostrils the moment you step into your apartment. How much you can love that woman, you truly don’t know. Fesenjan is one of the traditional dishes from her home country, and also the one you and Trinity fell hopelessly in love with the first time you tried it. Baran always makes it for special occasions, and your heart skips a beat at the thought that you’ve forgotten some anniversary of yours that you weren’t aware of.

As you mentally run through every important date in your relationship, your gaze falls on the shoe rack beneath the entryway mirror, and another smile tugs at your lips, pushing away the worry from a moment ago.

Trinity is home too; her sneakers are tossed carelessly in the rack, right next to the ones you just set down. Maybe Baran is right — you really are two teenagers.

“We Fell in Love in October” plays in your ears as you walk toward the kitchen. You cross the entryway in a few steps and trail your fingers along the back of the couch as you pass through the living room.

The moment you slide open the kitchen door, you have absolutely no doubt about what your oldest girlfriend has been cooking.

Baran is at the stove; Trinity, meanwhile, is pretending to help, scrolling through her phone — probably a Spotify playlist — while she follows Baran around with the same devotion of a duckling trailing its mother. Although you doubt a duckling slaps its mother’s butt every chance it gets.

They haven’t noticed you yet, so you take the opportunity to watch them. You lean your shoulder against the door frame in a precarious position that Baran would call dangerous. Boomer.

If someone had told you that after ten years of grinding through textbooks you’d find not one, but two incredible women — both doctors, no less — well, you would have asked them to share whatever they’d been smoking. Altruism is fundamental in a doctor, after all.

They’re stunning.

It’s a stupid thought — you’ve known them for years, loved them for years — and yet every time you watch them without them knowing, you’re overtaken by the same feeling as when you kissed for the first time, and then, on days like the one you’ve just gotten through, you look at what you have with the same delicacy you’d handle something made of glass. As if it could break.

Baran stirs something in the pan with that absolute focus she brings to everything she does, from medical reports to the embroidered edges of the throw pillows she sewed herself — the ones you and Trinity regularly flatten by throwing yourselves onto the couch with the enthusiasm of two wrestlers. Her dark hair is pulled up in a soft updo that’s loosened over the course of the day, a few strands falling against her neck, and she’s wearing that burgundy sweatshirt that Trinity constantly steals from her, three sizes too big, yet she wears it with a dignity that borders on unjust. The marks from her protective goggles are still pressed around her nose — you can see them from here — two thin reddish lines on her olive skin, which tells you today wasn’t a walk in the park for her either.

Trinity is completely different — in posture, in energy, in everything. She stands next to the stovetop with that distracted grace she always carries, her chin tilted up slightly as she looks at her phone screen, one foot tapping rhythmically on the floor in time with the playlist playing through the kitchen. She’s wearing her university sweatsuit, her hair up in a messy bun with a few rebellious strands that have broken free and settled against her face. On her neck, just below her left ear, you can see the small purple mark Baran left there a week ago — the one Trinity covers every morning with a flesh-colored bandage when she goes to work, with the air of someone who is absolutely not doing anything suspicious.

You love them in an embarrassing way. It’s a fact. You stopped fighting it the day Trinity showed up at your night shift with two coffees and a ham sandwich at three in the morning, saying “Baran told me you don’t eat when you’re stressed, so—” as if it were the most normal thing in the world. As if bringing food to the girl your girlfriend won’t stop talking about, at three in the morning, wasn’t already a declaration of love in and of itself.

You’re lost in this thought when Trinity looks up from her phone and sees you.

“Well, look who finally made it home… hey, baby.”

The way she says it warms your heart like a hot drink. She moves toward you with that energy that seems inexhaustible even after twelve hours in the ER — only when she’s around you two, for the record — and stops halfway to set her phone down on the counter, then closes the distance in three steps and hugs you with the strength of someone who’s needed to do this for hours.

She wraps around you completely. Her chin rests on your shoulder, her arms circle your waist, and for a moment you let yourself go entirely — the weight of your body against hers, your breathing slowing, your eyes closing.

“Jesus, are you okay? You look like shit,” she murmurs against your neck. It’s not a rhetorical question; she needs to make sure you won’t become one of the people she treats every day in the ER for a physical breakdown from work.

“I’m just tired,” you answer. Your voice comes out rougher than expected. “Really tired.”

“Me too,” she says, and then she pulls back just enough to look at your face, her hands sliding down to your elbows as if to hold you still, to study you better. It’s a professional habit she can’t turn off even outside the hospital — that clinical gaze, the quick assessment that is really just concern dressed up as medicine. “Did you eat today?”

You’re about to answer when Baran speaks up, without even turning from the stove.

“She had half a sandwich at one and probably nothing else.”

You turn toward her. “How do you know that?”

Baran turns around. The wooden spoon is still in her hand, her expression that of someone who has answered this question too many times to find a way to make it interesting anymore.

“Because I know you,” she says simply, and then adds, with a half-smile that manages to be simultaneously affectionate and slightly accusatory: “And maybe also because I saw your tray in the cafeteria when I stopped in for a coffee around two. Half a tuna sandwich and an empty cracker wrapper.”

Trinity looks at you like this confirms something.

“Babe.”

“It was a rough day,” you defend yourself, your voice carrying the exact tone of someone who knows they’re wrong but has no intention of fully admitting it. “I couldn’t stop for more than five minutes.”

Baran sets down the spoon, steps closer, and takes your face in her hands with a gentleness that is almost surgical. She turns your head slightly, studies you — pupils, color, the tension around your eyes — and then kisses you, brief, on the lips. You don’t know how you manage it, but you hold back the groan you feel rising in your throat.

“Sit down,” she says. “Dinner’s ready in ten minutes.”

It’s not a request.

You sit at three sides of the round table you chose together at a flea market a year ago; Trinity had called it “perfect” and it became the table in your apartment without further discussion.

Baran serves the Fesenjan with that quiet care she puts into every domestic gesture — the basmati rice on one side, the pomegranate and walnut sauce on the other — and for a few minutes, you eat in silence.

It’s not an uncomfortable silence. It’s the silence of three people who know each other well enough to know when someone needs quiet.

It’s Trinity who speaks first, and she does so with her mouth still half-full, in exactly the way that horrifies Baran every single time.

“Okay, I have to tell you guys something or I’m going to explode.”

“Please finish chewing. I don’t want to perform emergency procedures at home too. At least at work they pay me for it,” says Baran, with total resignation.

Trinity swallows theatrically. “Done. Okay. This morning, nine-seventeen, a guy comes into the trauma bay — twenty-three years old, traumatic brain injury from a scooter fall, no helmet, obviously —”

“Obviously,” you and Baran say in unison.

”— and while me and Whitaker are working on him, the mother, who had been walked out by Dana, decides the wait is unacceptable and so —” dramatic pause — “she lets herself into the trauma bay. And not only does she come in, she starts directing things. She literally tells me to move out of the way so she can get a better look at what we’re doing to her son.”

“No,” you say.

“Yes. And then she also told me I was stitching wrong! The stitches, the ones I’ve been doing since we started first-year residency, and —”

Baran sets her fork on the edge of her plate. “What did you do? I’m not sure I want to know, Trin. You know we need to improve our patient satisfaction scores and you, babe, are really not —”

“I just dropped a few pointed remarks, telling her she should have worried about raising her son properly instead of telling me and Dennis how to do our jobs.”

Baran shakes her head theatrically, swallowing the lecture she’d technically be obligated to give, and shoots you a glance hoping for backup. She doesn’t find it — in fact, you’re barely holding back a laugh.

“Did she leave?” asks Baran.

“She left.” Trinity goes back to eating. “Whitaker looked at me like I was some kind of supernatural phenomenon.”

“Dennis still has a pretty low threshold for awe,” you say, snickering. “He hasn’t fully grasped your immunity to human nonsense yet.”

“Does the immunity develop?” asks Trinity.

“In some cases it becomes cynicism,” says Baran, smiling. “Try not to get there.”

You laugh — the first real laugh of the day — and feel something loosen in your chest. This. This is what you needed: sitting here, eating food Baran cooked, listening to Trinity tell her stories, watching Baran try to be serious and failing because one corner of her mouth always gives away a smile she hasn’t authorized, when it comes to the two of you.

“So I,” you begin, planting your elbows on the table in the way that makes Baran despair but that she’s long since accepted as part of the package, “had an organizational breakdown of biblical proportions this morning because someone — I’m not naming names, but they work in this ER — had restocked the supply room following a logic that was neither alphabetical, nor by category, nor by frequency of use, but apparently by” — you pause — “aesthetics.”

“Aesthetics,” repeats Baran, flat.

“Aesthetics. The tourniquets were next to the colorful band-aids because, and I quote, ‘they went well together.’”

Trinity bursts out laughing. Another thing you love about her: she laughs with her whole body, leaning slightly forward, eyes falling half-closed, and the sound is genuine and a little unruly and absolutely irresistible.

“Who was it? Javadi? Please tell me it was Crash.”

“One of the new residents. Samira already handled it, though. With that principal energy she has — understands everything, judges everything, never raises her voice.”

“Samira is terrifying,” says Trinity, admiringly.

“Mohan is efficient,” corrects Baran. “There’s a difference.”

“She can be both.”

Baran considers this. “Yes,” she concedes. “She can.”

You spend the rest of dinner talking about your afternoon — four coded patients in three hours, an ambulance arrival with missing paperwork that required twenty minutes of phone calls, an elderly woman who kept you for half an hour talking about her grandchildren while she waited for her test results and who was, somehow, the best part of your day — and you listen to Baran describe hers, her voice dropping toward the end the way it always does when she’s talking about something that stressed her, a pediatric case that hadn’t gone the way she’d hoped but that had ultimately resolved well — ultimately, ultimately — but that interval between “not how she’d hoped” and “well” you hear in the way she pronounces the words.

Under the table, you reach for her foot with yours. She doesn’t say anything, but the pressure that answers back is unmistakable.

After dinner you wash the dishes the only way that works in this kitchen: Trinity washes, you dry, and Baran puts everything away, because neither you nor Trinity have ever learned exactly where each thing goes, and she stopped trying to teach you after the seventeenth attempt.

“It’s pointless,” she’d said six months ago, with the serenity of someone who has reached acceptance. “I’ll do it myself. It’s faster.”

“You’re depriving us of the opportunity to learn,” Trinity had said.

“I’m depriving you of the opportunity to put the glasses in the wrong spot for the eighteenth time.”

No response had seemed adequate.

You’re drying the last dish when you feel Baran’s arms wrap around you from behind. She’s a few inches taller than you, enough to rest her chin on top of your head, and she does. Her breath is warm against your hair.

“How are you, really?” she says, softly.

It’s not the same question as before. Before it was an assessment. This is something else.

“Tired,” you answer, honestly. You set the dish on the counter. “But better. This helped.” A pause. “You two helped.”

You feel her smile against your head even though you can’t see it.

“Good,” she says.

Trinity, who had been draining the sink, looks at the two of you with that expression of pure love you’ve learned to recognize over the years, and then says:

“Bath?”

There’s a story behind the tub.

Two years ago you came home after your shift and found the bathroom transformed. Not literally — but almost. Baran had arranged, during those ten hours while you and Trinity were at work on her day off, for a tub to be installed. Not the small, slightly sad one that had been there before — the one you only used in emergencies because it looked like a relic from the eighties — but an enormous tub, deep, with antique-white claw feet, taking up nearly a third of the bathroom, and clearly chosen with the same care Baran brings to everything.

You’d looked at the tub. You’d looked at Baran. And “I love you” had left your lips before you could stop it.

“As an anniversary gift,” Trinity had added, standing beside you, who seemed far less surprised and was therefore clearly in on it.

“You knew?! You didn’t say anything?”

“Trinity is hard to surprise,” Baran had said, with what was unmistakably affection disguised as criticism. “I needed someone to keep an eye on the bathroom dimensions while I was at my appointment with the tile guy.”

It had taken you a few seconds. Then you’d hugged Baran, your face against her neck, and she’d held you back with that quiet naturalness that is her mother tongue for things that matter.

Two teenagers, she still calls you. But she’d picked that tub with claw feet because she knew Trinity had always loved claw feet. And she’d made it big enough for all three.

The bathroom fills slowly with steam.

Trinity has connected her phone to the small speaker on the shelf beside the sink — Mitski, “My Love Mine All Mine,” begins playing through the bathroom — and she’s adding something to the water, one of the bath salts Baran buys from a perfumery near the hospital, the kind that fill the bathroom with a scent that’s halfway between lavender and something warmer, spicier, hard to define but immediately recognizable as home.

Baran stands by the tub, checks the water temperature with her wrist, then straightens, satisfied.

You undress slowly, with that ease that only comes with people around whom you feel completely safe. You don’t think about it anymore — you never thought about taking your clothes off in front of them, or rather, you did think about it the first few times, that first summer together when everything was still new and beautiful and slightly terrifying, but now it’s simply part of this, of you all. As a teenager you were embarrassed by even the thought of undressing, but with them you weren’t afraid. You didn’t feel judged.

Baran pulls off the burgundy sweatshirt and Trinity, who has already dropped everything on the floor, watches you as you pull off your shirt.

“You’ve got a bruise on your side.”

You already know. You got it this morning against the corner of the supply cart during a dash down the hallway. It’s nothing.

“I know.”

“How’d you get it?”

“Cart.”

Trinity makes that face she makes when she wants to say you’re a disaster but chooses not to say it out loud, because she knows she’d hear the same thing back and the conversation would never end.

“In you go,” says Baran instead, with that voice that is always both an invitation and a directive.

The water is perfect.

You get in first; Baran holds your hand as you step over the edge — an automatic gesture, unrequested — one that makes you feel simultaneously cared for and, briefly, like you’re eighty-two years old, but then you sit down in the warm water and every objection dissolves immediately.

The heat wraps around you like something physical, real — a gentle pressure on every muscle you’ve kept tensed for the last twelve hours. You feel your shoulders drop. Your back surrenders. Your breathing expands.

“Oh,” you say, in the voice of someone who is reconsidering their life’s priorities.

“Right,” says Trinity, climbing in after you with the ease of someone who’s done this enough times not to care how it looks, settling on the other side of the tub, her knees bent, her feet brushing yours. “Every time I forget how good this tub is and every time I remember.”

“It’s a bathtub, not a spiritual experience,” says Baran, who gets in last with that quiet composure she brings to everything.

“With you two it becomes one,” Trinity answers, whispering. You stroke her knee with one hand, sending a not-insignificant wave through the water, while Baran leaves a kiss on her forehead before settling in beside you.

For a few minutes you simply stay in the water. Mitski sings something sweet and slightly melancholy, the steam makes everything at the edges softly indistinct, and you have your head resting on Baran’s shoulder with your eyes half-closed, and you feel Trinity find your foot with hers beneath the water and stay there.

This, you think again. This is everything.

You’re not sure exactly who moves first.

Maybe it’s you, turning your head toward Baran and finding her already looking at you — those dark, attentive eyes that never stop studying everything but that, when they land on you, on Trinity, finally stop being on guard. Maybe it’s Trinity, who somewhere in the warm water finds your ankle and slowly moves upward. Maybe it’s the music, or the exhaustion loosening every pointless resistance, or simply the fact that you’re all here, all three of you, alive and whole after a day that could have been worse than it turned out to be.

The kiss with Baran starts slow; she never rushes things, she has a patience that is almost an art form and a form of torture, in those moments when you just want her to — well. Her fingers come up to tuck a strand of hair behind your ear before she even leans in, as if she needs to clear away every distraction first. Her mouth is warm and tastes like tea — she had tea after dinner, she always does — and she kisses you with that absolute focus she puts into everything, as if you’re the only thing that exists right now, as if everything else can wait.

Trinity reaches you from the other side, her hands in the water, then on your shoulders, then in your hair, and the way the three of you move together has become as familiar as choreography learned by heart. You’ve figured out how to share this space without elbowing each other in the face.

The water stirs slightly. The steam grows thicker. The music plays on. You lose yourself in this — in the warmth, in the contact, in the absolute familiarity of the two of them: Baran’s hands, always precise even when they’re not precise at all; Trinity’s short laugh that breaks off against your shoulder; the way you hear your name sometimes, in one of their voices.

The bathroom is warm. Too warm, maybe, but you don’t feel it yet, not really — you’ll feel it later, when your body decides to present the bill.

Trinity pulls Baran into a hungry kiss that makes desire pulse through you and the heat in the room feels suffocating. Your hands caress the oldest woman’s breasts, drawing a moan from her. Trinity’s lips quickly find your neck, biting and sucking while you gasp for more, desperate for more than what they’re giving you.

Baran’s fingers slide down your body and dip beneath the water, reaching your clit with a confidence that only comes from years of experience.

You lose the thread of every coherent thought.

There is only the heat — of the water, of them, of the steam thickening in the air — and between your legs those fingers of Baran’s, those goddamn magic fingers that always know exactly what they’re doing, with that quiet precision that has never needed to be guided. Trinity holds you still, her mouth still at your neck, her arm around your waist like an anchor as you writhe trying to get more, and you let your head fall back against her shoulder because you have no other choice, because your body has already decided for you.

“Please… baby —” you manage; more, more, faster.

You feel Baran smile against your skin and murmur something — you can’t make out the words, the steam and the pulse of blood in your ears drown everything out — a “patience, azizam, good girl,” and Trinity laughs against your neck, that small, warm laugh she has when she’s pleased about something.

The water churns. The steam rises.

Baran’s fingers don’t stop — they increase in speed and pressure — and you stop trying to keep your eyes open. Trinity’s lips find your breast, her mouth closing around your right nipple, and the peak of pleasure finds you.

It happens without warning.

Or rather, there had been a warning — you’ll understand this afterward, retrospectively, with the frustrating clarity that hindsight provides: the accumulated exhaustion, twelve hours on your feet, not having eaten enough, the warmth of the tub that had dilated the peripheral blood vessels, the blood pressure dropping silently and progressively while you weren’t paying attention, and the orgasm.

The warning had been that faint ringing in your ears, a few minutes earlier. You’d attributed it to the hot water. You’d noticed your vision make a microscopic shift, as if someone had slightly adjusted the brightness on a screen, dimming it, and you’d thought I’m just tired.

Then the orgasm takes you — warm and long and already different from the others in a way you can’t quite identify in the moment it’s happening — and right after that, the world does something strange.

It tilts.

Not metaphorically. And your body decides, unilaterally and without consulting you, to stop being a problem you have to manage.

You feel Baran’s arms before you even understand what’s happening.

“Y/N.”

Baran’s voice is close, too close, and it has a tone you’ve never heard before, or that you’ve heard very few times.

“Babe, answer me.”

You blink. The bathroom ceiling is above you. You’re still in the water, but your head is out — someone is holding it out — and your back is against something warm and solid that takes you a few seconds to identify as Baran’s chest. Her arms are under yours, holding you up.

“I’m here,” you say. Your voice comes out strange — hoarse and slightly distant, as if it’s coming from a few inches further away than usual, as if it isn’t yours but an echo.

You sense Trinity before you see her. Her fingers find your wrist beneath the water — three fingers on the radial side — and then you notice the small concentrated silence that falls when someone is counting.

You look up. Trinity is kneeling on the edge of the tub, the top half of her body leaning forward, her hair falling to one side, looking at you with those eyes that at work are the most reassuring thing you know, and that now carry that same shadow but multiplied by something that isn’t professional — it’s pure, simple fear.

“You passed out,” she says. It’s not a question.

“I…” You swallow. “Yeah, I think so.”

“No ‘you think,’” says Baran, from behind you, her voice firm against your hair. “You passed out. How long, Trin?”

“Twenty seconds, maybe twenty-five.” Trinity doesn’t stop holding your wrist. “Mild tachycardia. Regular rhythm.” A pause. “Eighty-nine, ninety.”

“Blood pressure.”

“I can’t measure it here, but peripheral perfusion —” Trinity studies your hands, your lips, your eyelids — “is acceptable. Lips aren’t blue. She’s responsive.”

“I’m responsive,” you say, attempting a normal tone but coming out somewhere between defensive and mortified. “I just felt a little off, it was probably just —”

“Y/N.”

Baran’s tone is the same one she uses with patients who are about to do something counterproductive to their own health. You know it well. You use it too, sometimes.

“I’m fine,” you try.

“You lost consciousness for twenty-five seconds in a tub full of water,” says Baran, and her voice is absolutely flat — the kind of flat that isn’t an absence of emotion but the precise containment of one she can’t afford to let out right now. “You’re not fine.”

You consider this. You have all the tools to argue; you’re a doctor too, you know the pathophysiology, you know exactly what happened and why, you know it was probably a vasovagal episode from a combination of factors and that you feel better now — but you’re having this conversation with your bare back against Baran’s chest while she holds you up in warm water and Trinity is counting your heart rate, and there’s something about this image that makes it difficult to carry the argument with the conviction it requires.

“Orthostatic hypotension,” you say finally, as a compromise. “Probably. Accumulated fatigue, poor hydration, vasodilation from the heat, the —”

“I know what it is,” says Trinity, and her voice carries that sharp gentleness she knows how to use when someone is trying to rationalize their way out of confronting a problem. “We all know what it is. That doesn’t change what happened.”

You pause.

“I’m sorry,” you say, and you’re not entirely sure what you’re sorry for — certainly for scaring them, for not listening to your body, for not eating enough, for all of these things together.

Baran’s hold shifts; her arms no longer hold you like something to be kept from falling, but like something precious she wants to keep close.

“Now we get out of the water, and then we can talk about apologies.”

It’s Trinity who sees what’s about to happen.

Baran helps you up; her hands are on your forearms, her grip firm, the movement slow and controlled, and for a second you’re fine — or you think you’re fine — or rather, your brain is telling you you’re fine and your circulatory system hasn’t finished sharing its opinion yet.

You straighten up. The blood follows gravity at a slightly faster rate than desired. Your vision does that thing again and your left knee decides, without consulting you, to bend.

You don’t fall — or rather, you’re falling, you’re falling forward, the edge of the tub is right there beneath your eyes at a distance your brain calculates as too close and this is going to hurt a lot when Trinity’s hands catch you.

She doesn’t catch you gracefully. Her arms close around you with a snap, her body absorbs your weight by shifting sideways, a dull impact against the tiled wall that sounds like a shoulder sacrificing itself for someone’s head. The edge of the tub passes five centimeters from your forehead.

Five centimeters.

You both stay still for a full five seconds, and then Trinity says, “Okay.” Her voice is completely steady. Only someone who knows her can hear that it isn’t steady at all. “Okay, I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

“Christ,” says Baran from behind you — under her breath, in Persian — and that alone is enough to convey the level of alarm she’s reached.

“Trin, are you okay?”

You’d like to joke that you don’t weigh that much, but you’re not in a condition for that yet.

“Yeah.” Trinity doesn’t let go. Her arms are around your shoulders, your forehead is against her neck, and you can feel her heart beating faster than her tone of voice would suggest. “Let’s get out.”

You dry off in the hallway; Trinity keeps a towel around your shoulders while Baran gets the rest, and then you make it to the bedroom.

“Sit,” says Baran, and the moment you do, she disappears into the hallway.

You sit on the edge of the bed. Your head is still slightly foggy, sounds too. Your blood pressure is still coming back up.

Trinity is beside you in a second, her right hand resting on your cheek.

“How do you feel?” she asks.

“Better,” you say. And it’s true — you can feel your cardiovascular system returning to something resembling normal. “Really, I feel better.”

“Mm.” Trinity doesn’t seem entirely convinced, but she lets it go for now.

Baran comes back with two glasses of water — she brings them both to you, naturally — and then goes to get a third and fourth for herself and Trinity. But you notice she has a strange expression, an expression that is… angry. Not at you, or not only at you — she’s angry at the situation, at the fact that this happened, at the fact that you’re smiling awkwardly instead of — what, she doesn’t even know.

“Baran,” you say.

She looks at you.

“I’m okay.” A pause. “Really. The water was too hot, it was a rough day, and I didn’t eat enough. I don’t need to be admitted.”

“I didn’t say you need to be admitted.”

“But you were thinking it.”

A moment. Then: “I was thinking that out of all the ways this evening could have gone, this wasn’t high on my list of favorites.”

You want to laugh. Not because it’s funny — or maybe it’s a little funny, in the way that frightening things sometimes become laugh-or-cry situations.

“I’m sorry,” you say. And this time you say it for her, not for the situation in the abstract.

She sighs and comes to sit beside you on the bed, on the opposite side from Trinity. She takes your hand and, for a few seconds, says nothing.

“You didn’t eat enough,” she says finally. “You were already running low before you got in the water. The heat did the rest.” A pause. “That’s what you said, and you’re right.”

“So I’m a competent doctor.”

“You’re a competent doctor who passed out in the bathtub, so —”

“Technically I passed out after the orgasm, I was —”

“Y/N.”

“Okay.”

Trinity makes a sound halfway between a laugh and a sigh. “Can you two please get under the covers, or this night is going to be longer than it already has been.”

It takes a few minutes to settle in; you in the middle, as always — it had been one of the first things that emerged naturally in those months when you were all figuring out how to be physically together, how to occupy the same space, and you in the middle had become the arrangement, the one that worked; Baran on your right with the book she opens and then won’t actually read; Trinity on your left with her phone, scrolling Instagram for a full ten minutes before leaning her head on your shoulder.

The lamp on Baran’s nightstand is on; the bed is big and soft and the blanket is the heavy one you pulled out in October and that Baran folds every morning.

You lie back. Your muscles surrender into the mattress with the total resignation of someone who has nothing left to defend.

“Okay,” you say, to the ceiling. “This is definitely better.”

“This is where you should have been an hour ago,” says Baran, turning a page of* The Handmaid’s Tale.* Though you doubt she’s really reading about June’s struggle against Gilead right now.

“Baran.”

“I’m reading.”

Trinity looks at you, and you share that mischievous glance the two of you exchange like kids speaking in code in front of a parent. “How much she loves being right.”

“So much,” you agree.

“I can hear you. I’m older than both of you but I haven’t reached the age where I can’t hear what you’re saying,” says Baran, without lifting her eyes from the book.

A solid twenty minutes pass in which the situation seems to have settled in the most pleasant way possible; you’re in the process of deciding whether to fall asleep immediately or stay up a little longer, Trinity has put her phone down and turned on her side toward you, her hand resting on your stomach, while Baran is actually reading now, her shoulder against yours, her breathing steady.

It’s in this fragile equilibrium that your brain — always optimally timed — produces a thought.

You turn toward Trinity.

She feels the movement and opens one eye.

“What?”

“Nothing,” you say. Then: “I was just thinking that I slept for twenty-seven years without you two and I don’t understand how I did it.”

Trinity looks at you for a moment, with that half-asleep expression, and then smiles — the kind of smile you give when you’re looking at the person you love.

“I don’t know either,” she says.

Baran lowers her book an inch. Doesn’t turn. But says, softly: “Neither do I.”

And as you watch them, the warmth of the love you feel filling your chest, another idea comes to mind and you decide to act on it. After all, everyone deserves to feel relaxed in this house. Not just you. Besides — they’re goddesses. You couldn’t keep your hands to yourself even if you tried.

It’s Trinity who notices what you’re trying to do.

You’re not being particularly subtle about it, or maybe you are trying to be, but Trinity Santos has a capacity to read people’s movements — something she developed in her own adolescence — that is simply off the charts.

You’ve turned toward her. Your hands have shifted. Your intention is pretty clear.

“Babe,” says Trinity.

“I’m just —”

“No.”

On the other side, Baran sets her book on the nightstand.

“I was trying to —” you begin.

“I know what you were trying to do,” says Trinity, and she sits up slightly, her shoulders squaring. She is very serious right now. “And the answer is no.”

“It doesn’t make sense for you two to just —”

“It makes perfect sense,” says Baran, to your right, her voice soft — firm but not angry. “You passed out an hour ago.”

“I’m not —”

“Out,” she repeats, calmly. “For twenty-five seconds. In a tub full of water.”

“You’re better right now,” says Trinity, her voice gentler, her hand returning to your stomach but differently now — not that earlier distracted contact but something that sounds like a kind of boundary. “But you’re okay right now because we got out of the water and you lay down. Not because the problem disappeared.”

“The problem was the water being too hot.”

“The problem was that you hadn’t eaten enough and you’d been on your feet for twelve hours and your body had already hit its limit,” says Baran, “and we weren’t paying close enough attention.”

This stops you.

You turn toward her. Her expression is hard to read right now, but there’s something underneath — something you recognize as guilt that she’s carrying quietly.

“It’s not your fault,” you say.

“I didn’t say it was our fault.” She looks away briefly and pauses. “I said we weren’t paying close enough attention. It’s not the same thing.” She looks at you. “I should have noticed the water was too hot. I should have pushed you to eat more at dinner. I should have —”

“Babe.” You sit up slightly — Trinity doesn’t stop you but keeps her hand on your back as you do, a discreet monitoring effort that’s slightly below her usual standards. You move close enough to Baran to take her hand. “Are you okay?”

She looks at you. There’s a moment of silence and then her eyes go glassy and your stomach drops.

“Baran.”

Baran’s eyes stay open. Fixed. Pointed at a spot slightly to the left of your shoulder that doesn’t exist, that has nothing interesting about it, that is nothing. Her mouth has stayed slightly parted. Her hand is in yours but it’s no longer squeezing — it’s just there, still, like an object left on a table.

The silence lasts maybe two seconds.

You only realize you’ve been holding your breath when Trinity, from the other side of the bed, says softly: “Y/N.”

She doesn’t need to say more.

You already know. You both already know, because you’ve seen this before, because Baran explained it to you: I have epilepsy, absence seizures, they’re short, they pass on their own, they’re very rare, I get them when I’m particularly stressed or worried about something — and because since that day you’ve both learned to recognize that interruption. You don’t move.

This is the first point in the unwritten protocol you’ve built together over the years: you don’t move abruptly, you don’t shake her, you don’t put anything in her mouth, you don’t call her name out loud as if you could pull her out before it’s over on its own. You wait. You watch. You count.

Trinity is already on her knees on the bed, her hand moving toward Baran’s wrist. Count.

One. Two. Three.

Baran’s eyes don’t move. Her mouth is still slightly open.

Eight. Nine. Ten.

Then Baran blinks.

Once. Twice. The third blink lets you breathe again slightly. Her hand in yours squeezes lightly. It’s not a conscious gesture — it’s the reflex of return — and then her eyes find yours.

It takes her a second.

Just a second, but it’s a second in which you see the exact moment she understands where she is, who she’s with, and what just happened.

Her expression doesn’t change dramatically. It never does. But there’s a subtle thing — a millimeter adjustment of her jaw, a breath that comes in just a little faster than usual — that says everything she won’t say out loud.

“Baran,” you say, quietly.

“Yeah,” she answers. Her voice is normal. Almost perfectly normal. Only someone who knows her hears that there is something underneath, reassembling in real time, like a house of cards that tilted and that she’s straightening piece by piece without anyone seeing the hands at work. “I’m here.”

Trinity says nothing. But the hand on her wrist stays.

“How long?” says Baran, after a moment.

It’s the question she always asks. Not what happened — she already knows that; the duration, however, is the information she can never collect on her own.

“Eleven, twelve seconds,” you say.

She nods.

“Are you okay, babe?” says Trinity, softly. Her fingers, which moments ago were measuring the older woman’s pulse, rise to her cheek. Baran lets herself be soothed by her touch, and then nods, just slightly.

“Are you okay?” you whisper, your heart still racing from the fear that, every time — no matter how many times you’ll see her like this — grips your chest and your soul.

Baran holds your gaze for a moment and then nods again.

“Yes, azizam. I was stressed, and stress lowers the threshold. You both know that —”

“We know,” you say.

“There’s no point in you worrying every time.”

“And yet…” says Trinity, with a smile.

Baran opens her mouth. She closes it.

It’s the reaction of someone who had a ready argument and walked straight into a response that leaves no room for arguments.

“We’ll worry every time anyway.” You smile, just barely. The adrenaline is crashing hard after the seizure, and your body isn’t making it easy on you.

Baran looks at you. Trinity still has her hand on her cheek and you still have her hand in yours.

“Azizam,” she murmurs, and it’s not clear who she’s saying it to.

Then her eyes shift to your face and change.

You know that look.

“Y/N.”

“I’m —”

The world turns.

Not like in the tub — not that abrupt and definitive tilt that precedes the dark — this is gentler. The lamp on the nightstand multiplies for a second and your hands find the sheets, gripping them as if that single hold could anchor you.

“Oh,” you say, in the voice of someone who is updating their assessment of the situation.

Baran is already moving before you finish saying it.

“Sit up, sit up, wait — no —” Her hands are on your shoulders, guiding you back. “Lie down. Right now.”

“It’s just a little dizziness —”

“Lie down, Y/N.”

It’s not a request. It’s a tone that doesn’t allow negotiations, so you lie down.

The ceiling stops spinning almost immediately — or at least it slows down, which isn’t the same thing but is enough to let you fix your gaze on the patch of plaster in the corner and use it as an anchor point.

Trinity already has the decorative pillow in hand. The one Baran bought — the one you two use as a projectile at the wrong moments and that is now being slid under your ankles.

“Legs up,” says Trinity, unnecessarily, given that she’s already lifting them.

“I got it.”

“Good.”

Baran is sitting on the edge of the bed at your side. Her fingers find your wrist.

Outside the window, Pittsburgh makes its nighttime sounds. Inside there’s only your breathing, still a little too shallow, and the weight of Baran’s fingers on your wrist, and Trinity who has knelt on the mattress beside you and is watching you with that sixty-percent-calm expression you can now read all the way down to its depths.

“Ninety-one,” says Baran, after a few seconds. Her voice is flat and precise. “It’s coming down.”

“I told you it was coming down,” you say, to the ceiling.

“It was going in the wrong direction,” she says.

You don’t have an adequate response to that.

“Breathe,” says Baran.

“I am breath —”

“Consciously.”

You breathe consciously. Four seconds in, six seconds out — and the ceiling stops spinning for good. The calcium deposit in the corner stays right where it should be.

“Better?” says Trinity.

“Yeah.” A pause. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” says Trinity.

“For —” You make a vague gesture that encompasses more or less everything: the tub, the dizziness, the legs propped up on the decorative pillow, the fact that it’s eleven at night and none of the three of you can manage to stay still even when your bodies stop doing you the courtesy of functioning correctly. “This.”

Baran doesn’t answer right away. Her fingers are still on your wrist — no longer counting at this point, but not going anywhere either.

“You could eat lunch,” says Trinity.

“You could,” Baran agrees.

You’re about to respond when the ringing in your ears drops another notch and you realize you’ve had your eyes slightly half-closed for the last few minutes without having made that decision.

“How long do I have to stay like this?” you say.

Baran checks your pulse one more time. “Until I’m satisfied,” she says.

“Parameters?”

“When you stop asking me about parameters.”

Trinity laughs, and you close your eyes completely.

It takes a few minutes.

Baran doesn’t move from the edge of the bed, her fingers staying on your wrist. Trinity has settled in beside you, her head on the pillow next to your shoulder, and every once in a while you feel her breathing shift slightly.

“Eighty-four,” says Baran, at some point.

“Better.”

“Better.”

You open your eyes; the ceiling is still and the nightstand lamp is just one.

“Can I —”

“No,” they both say, simultaneously.

A moment.

“I didn’t even say what I wanted to do.”

“No,” they repeat, with the same implacable synchrony.

You spent ten years studying medicine and you have a specialization in emergency medicine and you cannot convince two doctors that you’re well enough to sit up. There is something deeply, specifically humiliating about this, and also something you can’t call by any other name but love — even if you would not say that out loud right now.

Baran slowly lowers your legs and then holds her hands on your ankles for a few seconds, as if she’s waiting for a response your body needs to give.

“Sit up slowly,” she says.

You do.

Baran looks at you for a long moment, then smiles, nodding just slightly, and lets her fingers trail over your ankles.

“Good.”

Trinity wraps an arm around your shoulders and leaves a kiss on your temple.

“The day was rough,” you say.

“Yeah.”

“Yours was too.”

“I know.”

“And we’re all three of us in bed at eleven at night with low blood pressure and absence seizures and we didn’t eat enough.” You pause. “We’re a disaster.”

A moment of silence.

Then Trinity, from the other side of the bed, says: “We’re three doctors who don’t know how to take care of themselves.”

“Doctors are the worst patients,” says Baran.

“You tell us that at least once a week.”

“Because it’s true at least once a week.”

You want to laugh and you hear Trinity laugh against the pillow; Baran smiles and make that sound she makes: the half-sigh that contains a laugh she didn’t authorize but that came out anyway.

Baran picks her book back up but holds it lower than before, at an angle that lets her look up soundlessly. Trinity resettles with her head on your chest, in the exact spot she nestled into the first time you all slept together and which has been hers ever since — without negotiations, by right of discovery. You feel her breathing slow against your shoulder within a few minutes.

Baran’s hand finds yours in the dark, beneath the covers.

You stroke Trinity’s hair absently, whispering an “I love you” into her strands as you hold her close. Her ability to fall asleep will always be the envy of you.

“Tomorrow you stay home if your blood pressure is still low,” Baran whispers, with a glance that says “I’m your attending and I have no intention of watching you pass out again.”

“My pressure won’t be —”

“Y/N.”

A pause.

“Okay,” you say.

“I love you,” Baran murmurs, and you lean toward her — without shifting Trinity on top of you — to leave a kiss on her lips.

“I love you too, so much,” you whisper, letting your noses touch before finally laying your head on the pillow and closing your eyes.

You’re grateful every single day for these two.

Heyyy, thanks for reading! I know, I know — I’m terrible at the spicy parts, I know. Let’s not talk about it, okay? Anyway, it took me two weeks to write this so I hope you appreciate it (lol), I have more ideas in mind and I love the dynamic between these three in my head way too much so… there will be more. Thanks again for reading, you all know requests are very welcome, and have a great day! Ko-fi link if you want to and can support me. Otherwise a like and a comment are more than enough!

P.s: I’m sorry for the medical inaccuracies :)

You glance at the clock and a frustrated groan escapes your lips. It’s only two in the afternoon, and you seriously doubt you’ll be able to leave the ER before another four hours, given the holiday crowd. People tend to be exponentially more stupid around the holidays and, above all, more irritable.

The second sigh you let out is loud enough to make three of the six people at the nurses’ station in the center of the ER turn around. Including Dana.

“Everything okay, kid?” Dana slides her glasses down her nose, lifting her gaze from the chart she’s reviewing for just a moment. Oh, that’s not a good sign. Everyone at the Pitt knows that move — the subtle shift between the kind head nurse and the one who doesn’t take a no for an answer.

You nod; a tight smile pulls at your lips as you look at the board in front of you. “I’d be fine if I had five minutes of peace, not—”

You sway. A sudden dizziness forces you to grab the first thing you can reach as vertigo hits. The nurses’ station tilts to the left - no, you’re tilting, the station is exactly where it’s always been - and your fingers curl around the edge of the counter with so much force your knuckles go white.

“Woah, sit down, kid. I don’t want a doctor on the floor of my ER.”

“I–I’m fine, I’m just tired,” you murmur, but your voice comes out thin, unsteady, and your legs are doing a terrible job of backing up your words. The world keeps swaying - back and forth, back and forth - as if someone had picked up the ER and set it on a boat in the middle of the ocean.

Dana doesn’t give you time to lie again. Her hand is on your shoulder before you can react - firm, warm, heavy as an anchor - and she pushes you down with a gentleness that leaves no room for argument. You sit. Not in a chair, there isn’t one within reach, but on the stool behind the nurses’ station - the one with the broken wheel that only turns one way, the one Dana sits on during night shifts when she thinks nobody’s watching.

“Head down,” she says, and her hand slides from your shoulder to the back of your neck, pressing your head toward your knees. “Easy. Breathe.”

The blood flows back. Your brain protests - a dull buzzing behind your eyes, a tingling that runs down your spine - and then, slowly, the world stops swaying. Not completely. But enough to tell the floor from the walls.

“When did you last eat?”

It’s not a question. It’s the tone Dana uses when she already knows the answer and just wants to hear you say it out loud, because things said out loud become real, and real things can’t be ignored.

You think about it. The alarm at four-thirty, the shower, the coffee drunk standing in the kitchen while Trinity was still asleep and Yolanda had already left for her surgery shift. Before the coffee, there’s nothing.

“We’ve been going nonstop, you know how holiday weekends are and—” you protest weakly, the excuse already on the tip of your tongue before any accusation is even made.

Dana moves and disappears from your sight for a second, then a plastic cup appears in your field of vision, held by a hand with short nails and a bandage on the thumb.

“Drink. All of it. And don’t move until I say so.”

You drink. The water is lukewarm, tastes like hospital, and your body receives it with a gratitude that has nothing to do with taste and everything to do with survival. Your stomach clenches at the first sip - a brief, dull cramp, the complaint of an organ that forgot it was an organ - and then relaxes, surrenders, accepts.

You lift your head. Slowly. The world stays still. More or less still. Still enough.

Dana has gone back to her chart. She’s watching you - you can tell, the way she glances at you sideways over the top of her glasses without turning her head - but she says nothing. She gives you time. She gives you her stool with the broken wheel and a cup of water and her silent surveillance.

And it’s in that moment, with the plastic cup still tight in your fingers and your heart beating just a little too fast for someone who’s sitting down, that you see them.

Yolanda and Trinity.

They’re moving quickly through the ER, side by side but not together. There’s something about the distance between their bodies that feels wrong to you, something in the rigidity of their shoulders that shouldn’t be there. They don’t normally walk like this. Normally Trinity is right next to Yolanda, or a step ahead - never behind, never behind, because your relationship is one of absolute equals - and their rhythms sync effortlessly, like two instruments playing in the same key. Now Yolanda walks like she’s going somewhere with a specific purpose, and Trinity follows a step behind, jaw clenched, hands balled into fists at her sides and an expression on her face that you recognize - oh, you recognize it - that expression which is the brick wall behind which Trinity hides everything she doesn’t want the world to see: the pain, the anger, the frustration, the fear. All of it compressed, crushed down, held inside with a brutal force that one day, you know, won’t be enough anymore.

They turn left. Toward the stairwell.

Your body moves before your brain does. You get up from the stool. Your legs protest, your knees make a sound that shouldn’t come from someone your age, and the world sways for a tenth of a second - a ghost of the earlier swaying, a warning you ignore completely.

“Hey! Kid, where do you think you’re-”

Dana’s voice reaches you halfway down the corridor but you don’t stop. You can’t stop. Not with that image in your head. The stairwell door has closed behind them and their expressions were definitely not those of people about to sneak off for a quickie at work.

The door is heavy. You push it open with a shove that costs you more energy than it should, and the sound of metal hitting the concrete wall echoes through the empty space but it’s immediately swallowed by something else.

Yolanda’s voice.

“I don’t care how you frame it, Trinity. Langdon has been rehired. The decision has been made, administration approved it, and the fact that you keep acting like it’s a personal affront is creating an unsustainable environment for everyone. Especially in front of patients.”

The sound reaches you before the sight. The stairwell is gray - concrete, metal, the yellowish light of a fluorescent tube that’s needed replacing for months - and their voices bounce off the walls and multiply, growing larger than they are, filling the space with a tension you can almost touch.

They’re one floor below. They haven’t heard you come in. From your position at the top of the first landing, you can see them: Yolanda standing in the middle of the landing in her green surgical scrubs, arms crossed over her chest, back straight as a steel rod. Trinity across from her, leaning against the railing with her arms at her sides, chin lifted, and the look of someone bracing to take a hit without showing it hurts.

“A personal affront?” Trinity. Her voice is low, controlled, too controlled. The voice of someone speaking through a clenched jaw. “Yolanda, that man was using drugs. He was stealing medication. He was stealing medication from the ER where we work, where people I trust work, and now he’s back like nothing happened. It’s not a personal affront. It’s a matter of safety. Of principle. If it had been anyone else - God forbid, a woman, an R2 or anybody that’s not the “golden boy”- they would never have been rehired. Never.”

“And that gives you the right to treat him like a criminal every time you pass him in the hallway? The right to stare him down until he looks away? To answer in monosyllables when he asks for a consult? To create an atmosphere so hostile that half the department walks on eggshells whenever you’re in the same room?”

The words land on the landing like grenades. Precise, calibrated, devastating. Yolanda never yells, she never needs to, but her voice carries a weight that presses down on your chest even from a flight of stairs away. Every syllable is an incision. Every pause is the moment the surgeon checks how deep the cut is before going in again.

Trinity doesn’t move. Her body is still, anchored to the railing as if it’s the only thing holding her upright, and her eyes — her eyes that normally burn with life, with energy, with everything that makes Trinity Santos who she is, her eyes are flat. Dead. The brick wall is up, solid, impenetrable.

But you see it. You always see it. You see the tremor in her jaw, the way her knuckles go white on the railing, the nearly imperceptible movement of her throat when she swallows something that isn’t saliva. You see everything Trinity is desperately trying to hide, and the fact that Yolanda can’t see it — or worse, that she sees it and chooses to keep going anyway — lights something in your chest. Something hot and dangerous that goes beyond the protectiveness you feel toward your youngest girl.

“Langdon had a problem,” Yolanda continues, her voice not giving an inch. “He had a problem, he faced it, he went through a rehabilitation program, and the medical board deemed him fit to return. It’s not your decision, Trinity. It’s not your tribunal. And the way you’re treating him isn’t just unfair and immature-”

The word immature bounces off the concrete walls and hits you like a slap. And something inside you, something primitive, visceral, irrational, catches fire.

Your feet move down the stairs. One, two, three, four. The sound of your footsteps echoes off the concrete, and both their heads turn toward you at the same instant, like two deer hearing a branch snap in the woods.

“Y/N?” Yolanda speaks. Eyebrow raised, posture stiffening further. In her eyes, the flash of someone caught doing something they didn’t want seen.

“Immature, Yolo, really?” you say, and your voice is harder than you expected. Flat. Sharp. Without the filter you normally keep between your brain and your mouth, the filter that lets you be diplomatic, conciliatory, the one who mediates between the two. That filter is gone right now. The exhaustion has dissolved it. The weariness has eaten it. “You just called Trinity immature because she can’t accept that a colleague who was stealing medication has been rehired like nothing happened?”

“This doesn’t concern you,” Yolanda says. The tone is the one she uses when someone walks into the OR uninvited: cold, territorial.

“Doesn’t concern me?” A sound escapes your throat, something halfway between a laugh and a growl. The disbelief is more than evident in your voice. “Yolanda, they’re my partners. Everything that concerns them concerns me. And what you’re doing right now isn’t a confrontation. It’s an execution.”

The silence that follows is nuclear. Yolanda stares at you with something that looks like shock, she wasn’t expecting those words, not from you. You, who are always the calm one, the reasonable one, the one who stands in the middle and holds everything together.

“Trinity has every right to be pissed,” you continue, and every word costs you something because the world has started swaying again, faintly, at the edges of your vision, but you ignore it because you can’t stop now, not with Trinity’s face trembling on the other side of the landing. “She found out a colleague was using drugs and stealing from the place where she works, where we all work, and now she has to pretend everything’s fine? She has to smile and hand him charts and act like nothing happened?”

“Nobody is asking her to pretend-”

“Yes, you are! That is exactly what you’re asking her to do! You’re asking her to swallow the anger and the betrayal and the fear and just sit there quietly like nothing happened because the board decided so, and who is Trinity Santos to question a board?”

Your voice echoes through the stairwell. It comes out of your chest with a force that surprises you, that frightens you, a force you didn’t know you still had after ten hours on your feet and one glass of water and nothing else in your stomach.

Trinity hasn’t said a word. She’s stayed leaning on the railing, motionless, her eyes moving from you to Yolanda and back again. And in her eyes there’s something that twists your stomach: gratitude. Wounded, painful gratitude, the gratitude of someone who isn’t used to being defended and doesn’t know how to react when it happens.

Yolanda takes a step forward. Her arms drop from her chest and fall to her sides. Her face has changed; the surgical armor has cracked, and through those cracks something raw seeps through, something less controlled.

“And so what do you propose?” she says, and her voice has lost the cutting edge from moments ago. It’s lower, rougher, the voice of a woman who’s bleeding underneath the armor. “That Trinity keeps treating Langdon like a pariah until he leaves again? That she poisons the atmosphere of the department because she can’t-”

“Can’t what? Trust? Yes, Yolanda. She can’t trust. And you know better than anyone how hard that is for her. You know what’s behind that wall. You know, and you’re using it against her.”

The words come out before you can stop them. When Trinity has that look, a part of you has always been afraid she might fall back into old, unhealthy habits, and you can’t let that happen. But the moment those words hit the air, the moment they bounce off the concrete walls and fill the stairwell with their weight, you know you’ve crossed a line. You see it in the way Yolanda stiffens. You see the flash in her eyes, not anger. Pain. The raw, naked pain of someone who has just been accused of the thing they fear most. Of hurting the person they love.

And in that same instant, with the same speed that the anger had flooded in, the realization hits you like a freight train.

Yolanda isn’t using anything against Trinity. She’s trying to protect Trinity from herself, from her temper, from the consequences that temper could have on her career, her reputation, her life. She’s doing it the wrong way - with a scalpel instead of open hands, with surgical precision instead of tenderness - but she’s doing it out of love. The exact same love that drove you down those stairs. And you just told her she was using it as a weapon.

Your mouth opens. The words are there - “I’m sorry,” “I didn’t mean it,” “Yolo, wait” - they’re there, on the tip of your tongue, ready to come out, ready to repair what you just broke.

But your body decides otherwise.

The floor moves. Or rather, you move. You sway, lose your vertical axis, feel your legs turn to cotton and the world tilt thirty, forty, fifty degrees to the left. It’s not the gentle swaying from before, the kind you could hide behind a tight smile. This is a violent tilt. The gray concrete of the floor rushes up toward the ceiling and the ceiling drops toward the floor and everything in between - Yolanda, Trinity, the stairs, the yellowish light - blends into a vortex of shapes and colors that your brain can no longer organize.

Your hands reach for something. Anything. A handhold, a railing, a wall. Your fingers find fabric. They close, instinctively, desperately, with the blind force of a body that is falling and refuses to fall, around the fabric, and the fabric is Trinity’s scrubs.

You grab her with both hands. Your fingers contract around the fabric with a strength you didn’t know you had, and your weight pulls Trinity downward. You feel her body thrown off balance by your sudden dead weight, hear her shoes scrape against the concrete of the landing as she tries to plant her feet and not go down with you, hear her voice explode somewhere above your head.

“Y/N!”

But Trinity can’t hold you. Your weight is dead, inert - the weight of a body that has stopped cooperating - and her legs buckle under the effort for one terrifying instant; you feel her lose her balance, feel her body tilt downward, toward you, toward the floor before she catches herself with a brutal jerk, planting one foot behind her and dropping her right knee to the ground.

But your fingers lose their grip. The fabric of her scrubs slides between your sweaty, trembling fingers. And the floor arrives.

Your knees hit the concrete first. The pain shoots up your thighs like an electric current, then your palms, open, scraping against the rough surface. Then the rest of your body following forward, and your head dropping, and your hair falling over your face like a curtain, and through that curtain you see nothing but the gray of the floor and the dark patches of worn paint and your shadow on the concrete.

The silence is total. The argument is dead. The words are dead. The accusations, the anger, the scalpel, the brick wall, Langdon, the medication, the cruelty, the trust, all of it, dead the moment your body hit the concrete. As if someone had muted the world, and the only things left are the sound of your short, ragged breathing and the beating of your heart in your ears.

Yolanda moves first.

Her medical brain switches on before her emotional one , it always does, it’s how Yolanda Garcia functions when the world collapses: she becomes machine, becomes protocol, becomes the sequence of actions she’s repeated thousands of times until they’ve become reflex. Her knees hit the concrete beside you and her hands are on your body before you can register her presence: one on your wrist, fingers seeking the radial artery with the precision of a heat-seeking missile, the other on your sternum, between your collarbones, feeling your breath through the fabric of your scrubs.

“Sweetheart… Y/N, look at me. Open your eyes.”

Her voice is completely, radically different from thirty seconds ago. The scalpel is gone. The surgeon dissecting Trinity’s behavior with autopsy precision is gone. It’s Yolanda. Just Yolanda. Your Yolanda. With her knees on the cold concrete and the woman she loves beneath her fingers and that woman’s pulse beating too fast, too weak, too irregular.

Trinity is on the other side. She threw herself down - she didn’t kneel with Yolanda’s caution, she threw herself, her knees hitting the concrete with a force that will leave bruises tomorrow - and her hands are on your shoulders and her face is fifteen centimeters from yours and her eyes are wide, and the wall has collapsed and behind the wall there is everything: the fear, the love, the terror, the helplessness.

“Don’t you dare pass out,” says Trinity, and her voice is an order and a prayer at the same time. “Love, look at me. Stay with me.”

You’re not passing out. Or maybe you are. The boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness has become a dotted line that your utterly exhausted brain can no longer follow. You know you’re on the floor. You know the concrete is cold under your palms. You know Yolanda has her fingers on your wrist and Trinity has her hands on your shoulders and the fluorescent light is yellow and the world is still here, even as your vision narrows at the edges like someone is drawing the theater curtain closed.

“I’m here,” you murmur. Your voice is a thread. “I’m here. I’m not passing out. I’m just-”

“If you say ‘tired’-” Trinity starts, and her voice cracks in the middle of the sentence like glass under too much pressure, and she doesn’t finish, because her hands on your shoulders are shaking and her eyes are bright and Trinity Santos does not cry - does not cry in front of people, does not cry when she’s on her knees on a floor, does not cry, period - but she’s close. Very, very close. Because of the shitty day she’s had, and because you are paler than a white sheet.

“Thready pulse. Tachycardia,” says Yolanda, and she’s talking to Trinity, not to you. She’s talking about you as though you weren’t there, and normally it would drive you insane, but right now your pride is somewhere on the floor alongside your knees and you don’t have the strength to pick up either one.

“Dana gave me water before, I think I’m just tired and dehydrated, that’s all,” you say, and your voice sounds distant even to your own ears. “At the nurses’ station. I had a dizzy spell and she made me sit down.”

“A dizzy spell,” Trinity repeats. Her hands leave your shoulders and take your face. She turns you toward her with the delicacy of someone handling a trauma patient. “You had a dizzy spell and you decided to come down a flight of stairs?”

“I saw you heading toward the stairwell and I-”

“And you came down the stairs,” she repeats, and it’s not a question. The blade in her voice is aimed at herself. She hates herself right now. You can see it in her eyes as clear as an X-ray: she hates herself because she was fighting with Yolanda while you were collapsing, because her pride and her anger at Langdon had taken up so much space in her head there was none left for you.

And Yolanda, who is still on her knees beside you with her fingers on your wrist and her mind racing ; she looks at you and in her eyes you see exactly the same thing. The same guilt. The same horror. She had been dissecting Trinity with the scalpel of her logic while you hadn’t eaten in a day and a half and were swaying at the nurses’ station, and neither of them had noticed because they were too busy waging war on each other.

“I need to get up,” you say.

“Wait a second,” says Yolanda. “Slow. Trinity, hold her left arm. I’ve got the right. On three.”

Their hands are on you. Four hands. The warmth of their palms passes through the fabric and reaches your skin, and for a second the only thing you feel is this: them. Their hands on your biceps. Their strength compensating for your weakness. The way their bodies coordinate without speaking, without looking at each other, as if they were programmed to function together whenever you stop functioning on your own.

“One. Two. Three.”

They lift you. Centimeter by centimeter. Your knees protest, throbbing where they hit the concrete, and the world sways again - that goddamn swaying - but their hands hold you. They hold you and they don’t let go, and the world can sway all it wants because between your body and the floor there are Yolanda Garcia and Trinity Santos, and no force on earth is strong enough to make you fall when they’re both holding on.

You’re standing. More or less. Leaning on Trinity from one side and Yolanda from the other, legs trembling, dignity somewhere on the concrete beside the patches of worn paint.

Nobody speaks. The stairwell is quiet. The fluorescent hums. The noise of the ER filters through like a distant memory of a world that still exists, somewhere, on the other side of the concrete and metal.

It’s Yolanda who breaks the silence. As always.

“You were right,” she says. She says it looking straight ahead, not at you, not at Trinity. She looks at the gray wall as if it were a simpler conversation partner than the two women flanking her. “About the way. The way I talk to Trinity when I’m angry. The way I use… the precision.” She swallows. “To hurt. You’re right. And I don’t realize I’m doing it while it’s happening, which is probably the worst part.”

Trinity says nothing. But her arm around you tightens, just slightly, and her gaze slides toward Yolanda for an instant. A very brief instant, almost furtive, as if looking at her in this moment of fracture were an act too intimate even for someone who shares her bed every night.

“And you were right about Langdon,” you say to Yolanda. The words come out before you can censor them. “About Trinity’s behavior. About the way she’s treating Langdon. The fact that he stole medication and was using drugs doesn’t give her the right to make his life impossible. Not in a hospital. Not when he’s trying to rebuild himself. And not in front of patients, sweetheart.”

Trinity stiffens at your side. You feel it - the tension that runs through her arm like a current - and for a second you’re afraid you’ve cut the wrong wire at the wrong moment.

But Trinity Santos doesn’t run from the truth. She hates it, sometimes. She screams at it. But she doesn’t run.

“I know,” she says. Two words. The hardest she’s ever said. She says them looking at the floor, jaw set, the arm around you trembling. “I know she’s right. But I couldn’t hear it the way you were saying it, Yolanda, because the way you were saying it made me feel like I was a problem to be solved, not a person who made a mistake.”

The hum of the fluorescent. Your breathing. Three different rhythms: yours, short and shallow, Yolanda’s slow and controlled, Trinity’s uneven, jagged, filling the stairwell like an out-of-tune symphony.

Yolanda raises her free hand and rests it on the back of Trinity’s neck. A small gesture. Silent. Nothing surgical. Her fingers press gently into Trinity’s hair and stay there.

Trinity closes her eyes. Just for a second. The brick wall collapses completely, and what’s left is only her - no armor, no defenses - just Trinity, exhausted, wounded, with the woman she loves touching the back of her neck in a stairwell and the other woman she loves hanging from her arm like a weight she wouldn’t let go of for anything in the world.

“You’re not a problem to be solved,” says Yolanda, softly. “You never have been. I’m sorry if I made you feel that way.”

Those two words - I’m sorry - she doesn’t say them often. Almost never. And when she does, they land like stones.

Trinity nods. Doesn’t speak. Her hand finds Yolanda’s and their fingers intertwine behind her head, an awkward, uncomfortable, beautiful gesture.

Then both their eyes come back to you. Simultaneously. As if they remembered in the same instant that the woman they love is barely standing between them, with scraped knees and a stomach that’s been empty for twenty-four hours.

“And now,” says Yolanda, and her voice has changed completely, the voice of the woman who only exists in your apartment, the Yolanda who tucks your hair behind your ear and brings you tea when you can’t sleep: “now we go upstairs. We get you somewhere to sit, you eat something, and your shift is over.”

“I can’t leave the-”

“Yes, you can,” says Trinity. “Because the alternative is you collapsing again, and next time there might not be my scrub to grab onto.”

You don’t argue. You don’t have the strength. You move. One step at a time. Slowly. With a slowness that is the opposite of everything you are - three women who run, who save, who never stop - and which is now the only speed possible.

You reach the locker room with great effort. Your forehead is damp with sweat when you finally manage to sink onto one of the benches you use to change your shoes. The locker room is empty, thankfully. You’re really not in the mood to explain why you’re being escorted around the hospital by an R2 and a surgeon while looking like you’re about to pass out.

You take two slow breaths, recognizing in the air the familiar smell of alcohol and stale sweat that belongs to this place. Yolanda is digging through her locker looking for her water bottle while Trinity is rummaging through her bag for a protein bar to give you. You sigh, quietly. Your head still feels light, and yet there’s only one worry occupying a deep corner of your subconscious right now, eating you alive. You watch Trinity; her shoulders are rigid and she looks like she’s carrying the weight of this entire shitty day on them. It’s in this moment that you decide you need to know, hoping she’ll tell you the truth.

“Trin…love.”

Yolanda turns briefly, pausing her search for a moment. She’s recognized the tone in your voice, and her gaze examines you with surgical precision while you watch the awareness slowly dawn in her eyes. Of course she understands.

“Mm?” Trinity responds, still in her desperate search for a source of nutrition for you — she hasn’t noticed how the room has suddenly gone quiet. You feel your heart beating in your ears and have to clear your throat before speaking again.

“Honey, did you hurt yourself today?”

The question drops into the locker room like a glass hitting a marble floor.

Trinity stops. She doesn’t turn around, not right away, but her hands stop moving inside the bag. You see them freeze mid-motion, her fingers tight around something that is not a protein bar ; it’s just a reason not to look at you, not to look at Yolanda. Her shoulders, already rigid and weighed down, bowed under the burden of a day that should never have been this long and this cruel, drop just a little further. Only a few inches, but you notice. You always notice everything about Trinity, even when you wish you didn’t, even when noticing means seeing what you don’t want to see.

Yolanda is motionless. The water bottle is in her right hand, suspended in midair, and her eyes are fixed on Trinity with an expression you have only ever seen on her face in the operating room, when the monitor makes a sound it shouldn’t make and the body under her hands does something that wasn’t supposed to happen. The expression of someone who has understood before the words have made the thought real.

The silence lasts three seconds. It feels like three hundred.

“Trin… sweetheart. Did you hurt yourself today?”

You repeat the question. You repeat it because silence is not an answer, and because the way Trinity’s shoulders have gone stiff is, in fact, an answer you refuse to accept.

Trinity turns around. Slowly. With the slowness of someone dragging their body through something dense, like water, like freshly poured concrete… or fear. And when her face comes into your field of vision, the wall isn’t there. There’s no mask, not the impenetrable mask that Trinity builds between herself and the world every time the world asks her a question she doesn’t want to answer.

The question came too fast, and it came from the one person Trinity cannot lie to, even when lying would be easier and less painful. Her eyes are bright. Her lips are trembling. And her voice, when it comes out, is not the voice of Trinity Santos. It’s the voice of a tired, frightened girl, caught doing something she had promised herself she would never do again.

“Yes.”

One syllable. The most insignificant phonetic unit in the language and the most devastating, right now.

The world doesn’t stop. Not like in the movies, not like in stories — not with a dramatic silence and the lights dimming. The world keeps going - the locker room fluorescent hums, the faucet in the bathroom next door drips, outside the door the ER buzzes and patients wait and monitors beep their steady beeps - the world keeps going because the world doesn’t care, the world has never cared, the world moves forward with the same indifference with which it moves forward when you lose a patient or when a father jumps off a bridge or when the woman you love says “yes” in the voice of a child, in a locker room that smells of pure alcohol and stale sweat.

But your world - the small one, the one that exists between these three walls and your three bodies - your world splits. It splits in two like a bone under too much pressure, with a sound that isn’t a sound but that you feel nonetheless, in your bones, in your chest, in your empty stomach contracting around nothing.

Yolanda sets the water bottle on the bench with a motion that is the opposite of everything Yolanda Garcia is: uncontrolled, imprecise, almost clumsy. The bottle bounces on the wooden surface and rolls a few inches before stopping, and the metallic sound it makes is the only noise in the locker room for one full minute.

Then Yolanda moves.

Not the way she normally moves; not with grace, not with intention, not with that calculated fluidity that is the hallmark of the surgeon. She moves the way she moves when a patient is going into arrest on the operating table: fast. Direct. With a trajectory that tolerates no obstacles. Two steps, two strides that swallow the distance between her and Trinity as if that distance were a personal insult, and then she’s in front of her.

“Let me see.” Yolanda. Her voice is flat. Flat as a monitor when the heart stops beating. Flat as the voice of a woman using every single fiber of her being not to shake. “Trin, let me see.”

Trinity looks at her. Her eyes find Yolanda’s, and what you see there is shame. Pure, naked, total shame. The shame of someone who has done something they promised never to do again and cannot hide it and cannot justify it and cannot do anything other than stand there, in front of the woman they love, and show what they have done.

Trinity’s hands find the hem of her scrubs. Her fingers are trembling — you can see the fabric shift under the unsteady grip of her fingers — and then, with a slow, hesitant gesture full of a fear that makes you clench your teeth hard enough to feel them creak, Trinity lowers her waistband.

The left side. The pale skin of her thigh -that strip of skin you know by heart, that you’ve kissed, that you’ve caressed, that you’ve pressed against yours in the darkness of your shared bed - that skin now tells a different story.

Three lines. Thin. Red. Horizontal. Parallel to each other with a precision that is a stab to the chest, because it is the signature of someone who has done this before. Of someone who knows where to cut so it won’t be seen, how hard to press so it hurts but not too much, how to clean so it won’t get infected. Of someone who knows the map of their own body the way a surgeon knows the map of a patient, and has used that knowledge against themselves.

They’re not deep. That is the first thought your medical brain produces; they’re not deep, they don’t need sutures, the bleeding has stopped, the edges are clean, precise, made with something sharp and sterile. And the second thought, the one that arrives a tenth of a second later and wipes out the first like a wave wiping out a sandcastle; the second thought is: her hands were steady. When she did this, her hands were steady.

Yolanda looks. She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t move. She looks at the three red lines on Trinity’s skin with the surgeon’s eye, and for five seconds that is all she is: a doctor looking at a wound. A doctor breathing through her nose at a controlled rhythm; the same she uses in the operating room when things go wrong and panic is not an option.

Then the doctor ends. And the woman begins.

Yolanda’s hands rise, slowly. You watch them descend in slow motion; fingers open, palms up, the universal gesture of someone who doesn’t want to frighten, who approaches something fragile with the care reserved for things that cannot be broken twice. Her fingers stop one centimeter from Trinity’s skin. One centimeter. They don’t touch. They stay suspended in the air, trembling; the hands of Yolanda Garcia are trembling, the hands that never tremble, that have never trembled, are trembling over three clean red lines on the skin of the woman she loves. Who wouldn’t tremble.

“Can I?” Yolanda whispers. And the word comes out broken, snapped in two as if her voice had buckled under the weight of it.

Trinity gives the smallest nod of her head. Her eyes are closed and her lips are pressed into a line that quivers.

Yolanda touches.

Her fingers rest on Trinity’s skin, beside the lines, and the reaction is immediate. Trinity’s body flinches. A small, involuntary flinch - the reflex of a body that has been touched in the exact place it didn’t want to be touched, the exact place where the shame lives - and her hands close into fists at her sides and her eyes squeeze tighter shut as if she could erase this moment simply by refusing to see it.

Yolanda’s fingers move. Professional. Precise. They trace the edge of the first line, assessing the depth, the consistency of the borders, the stage of coagulation. They move to the second. Then the third.

Her face is a perfect mask, but beneath the mask - where you can see because you love this woman and knowing someone deeply means seeing their fractures even when they hide them - Yolanda Garcia is breaking apart.

You can see it in her breathing, in the way her chest moves: too fast, too shallow. You can see it in her jaw, in the way the muscles tighten and release and tighten again. You can see it in her eyes, which don’t leave Trinity’s skin, which trace the lines with fierce concentration, and which shine. They shine with a light that is not professional and not surgical and has nothing to do with medicine. They shine with tears that Yolanda is refusing to shed with the same force she would use to refuse to let a patient die on the table.

“They’re not deep,” says Yolanda. Her voice is steady as a rope pulled to the breaking point. “They don’t need stitches, but I have to dress them. Now.”

She doesn’t wait for an answer. She turns, goes to the small medicine cabinet in the locker room - the one with the faded red cross on the door, the one everyone uses for bandages and ibuprofen and the small emergencies of everyday life - and opens it. Gauze. Disinfectant. Butterfly closures. She takes them out with precise, automatic movements , the movements of a body running on muscle memory because her mind is somewhere else, somewhere dark where three red lines on the skin of the woman she loves overlap with all the old scars she has touched in the darkness of their bed, whispering “these don’t define you” and meaning it. Really meaning it.

You’re on the bench. You haven’t moved. You haven’t moved because your legs won’t move - not by choice but by incapacity, by the total and complete exhaustion of every physical and emotional reserve your body possessed - and your hands are in your lap, with your scraped palms turned upward. Tears run down your face and you do nothing to stop them. You can’t do anything other than watch Yolanda returning with the gauze and the disinfectant, watch Trinity standing with her waistband lowered and her eyes closed and her face wrecked, watch Yolanda’s hands trembling - trembling, goddamn it, Yolanda Garcia’s hands are trembling - as she opens the disinfectant and pours a little onto the gauze.

“It’s going to sting,” says Yolanda. She says it in the doctor’s voice. She says it because it’s what she says to patients, every time, before disinfecting a wound. A warning. A professional courtesy. But that touc, healing, gentle, necessar, is also a touch that hurts, that hurts all three of them.

Trinity inhales when the gauze touches her skin. A short, sharp breath, the hiss of air through clenched teeth. Her body goes rigid but doesn’t pull away. She stays still. She lets Yolanda do what needs to be done, because she knows that resistance would only make things worse.

Yolanda cleans. First line. Second. Third. Her fingers work with her characteristic precision, small, circular, exact movements, and her face doesn’t change expression. Not a muscle. Not a crease. The mask holds.

When she’s finished cleaning, she takes the butterfly closures. She applies them one by one, closing the edges of each line with the same care she’d give a surgical wound. Three closures. Three small white wings on Trinity’s skin, covering what was done without erasing it. Because nothing erases it. Not bandages, not time, not love. However much of it you can give to your youngest girl.

Yolanda’s fingers take hold of the waistband of Trinity’s scrub pants and gently pull it back up. The fabric hides the lines from your sight but not from your minds.

And then Yolanda’s hands fall to her sides. As if someone has cut the strings holding them up. They fall, lifeless, her fingers still stained with disinfectant, and her entire body changes posture: her shoulders drop, her back curves, her head tilts forward just slightly, just a few degrees, enough to cast a shadow across her face. And her breath breaks, with a long, thin tremor that starts in her chest and passes through her shoulders.

“Yolo—” Trinity begins, and her voice is pure terror, because one of the two women she loves is on the verge of shattering and it’s her fault.

“Don’t,” says Yolanda. And her voice… is destroyed. Wounded. “Don’t talk for a second. Give me a second.”

The second lasts twenty. Then thirty. You count them in your head - not by choice, but because counting is the only thing your brain is capable of right now - and in those thirty seconds Yolanda breathes. Inhales. Exhales. Inhales. Exhales. With her eyes closed and her hands at her sides and her body trembling and her face fighting something that wants to come out, that she doesn’t want to let out, not here, not now, not yet.

Then she opens her eyes, and her eyes are red. When she speaks, her voice is unlike any voice you have ever heard from her; it is the voice of someone who has just been wounded in the deepest way possible and who is trying, with every gram of strength they possess, not to wound in return.

“I had my hands on your skin last night,” says Yolanda. She looks at Trinity. As if you weren’t in the room. “My hands were on your skin. We were in our bed. I touched you exactly where those— those—” She can’t say it. The word cuts lodges in her throat like a piece of glass. “And they weren’t there. Last night they weren’t there. Which means you did this this morning. You did it today, in this hospital, while I was three floors above you in surgery and you were in the bathroom of the ER with something sharp and I didn’t know. I didn’t know, Trinity.”

Her voice breaks. Trinity’s hands are at her sides, her fingers stiff and tense — the fingers of someone who wants to reach for the person in front of her and doesn’t know if she has the right. Tears run down her face and her mouth opens and closes, searching for words that don’t exist.

“I didn’t… I don’t know how to explain—” says Trinity, and her voice is unrecognizable. Thick. Wet. The voice of someone speaking through the rubble of a collapsed wall. “When Langdon… this morning, I— I was fine. I was fine, I swear. And then I looked at him and I thought about what he did and about how he’s back here now like nothing happened and then Al-Hashimi practically told me I’d have to repeat my residency year if I didn’t get through those charts and then it was just… it’s like a noise. A noise that keeps getting louder, and the only way to make it stop is—”

She stops. Swallows.

“It’s the only way I know to make it stop,” she whispers. “I know it’s wrong. I know. I’m a doctor, I take care of people. But then I go into the bathroom and— I know it’s wrong.”

You get up.

You don’t know how. You don’t know where the strength comes from - your body hasn’t eaten, hasn’t slept, nearly collapsed on a concrete floor less than ten minutes ago - but you get up. Your legs are shaking, the world sways for a second, but you get up and take the two steps that separate you from Trinity and you take her face in your hands. You place them on her wet cheeks and turn her toward you and you look at her.

“Listen to me,” you say. And your voice isn’t strong. It’s not the voice from the stairwell. It’s the voice of someone who loves another person so much they feel their pain in their own body, like an echo. “Listen to me, sweetheart. The fact that it’s the only way you know doesn’t mean it’s the only way that exists. It just means nobody ever taught you another one. And that is something that can change. Not in a hospital bathroom with the door closed and steady hands. With us. With someone.”

Her tears wet your fingers. Her lips tremble beneath your palms. And her eyes - those eyes you’ve loved since the very first day, those eyes full of fire - those eyes look at you with something that is bigger than shame and stronger than fear. They look at you with the desperate, hungry, wild hope of someone who wants to believe you, who needs to believe you.

Yolanda steps closer. She stops behind Trinity and her hands rise and settle on Trinity’s shoulders.

“I’m not judging you,” says Yolanda. And the way she says it, with a low voice stripped of all its armor, breaks something in your chest that you didn’t know could break any further. “I don’t judge you, Trinity. But I need — I need you, the next time you feel that noise, instead of going into the bathroom, to come to me. Or to Y/N. Or to both of us. I don’t care where we are, I don’t care what we’re doing. Just come. And if you can’t come, send us a message. One word. Any word. And we’ll be there. This cannot happen again, sweetheart.”

Yolanda’s hands on Trinity’s shoulders tighten. Hard. So hard you can see her knuckles whiten and her fingers press into flesh through the fabric of the scrubs. It’s the touch of a woman trying to hold something together by sheer force of will.

“Can you do that?” Yolanda asks. “Can you promise me that?”

Trinity closes her eyes. The tears keep falling and her body trembles between your hands and Yolanda’s, between your palms on her cheeks and Yolanda’s fingers on her shoulders, between two bodies holding her from the front and the back like the walls of a safe place.

“I’ll try,” she says. “I can’t… I can’t promise you it will never happen again. That wouldn’t be honest. But I can promise you that I’ll try. To come to you. Not to close the door. Not to- not to use my hands for this.”

It’s not enough. All three of you know that. It’s not enough because “I’ll try” is not “yes” and “it will never happen again” is a sentence no honest human being can make. But it’s all Trinity has. It’s all she can give, right now, on this floor, in this locker room, after this day. And you accept it. You accept it because the alternative - demanding a promise she can’t keep - would be another form of violence, and your girl has suffered far too much already.

“And you talk to someone,” you say. “A professional. Not us. Someone who knows how to help you with that noise.”

Trinity opens her eyes. She looks at you. Then turns her head, just slightly, and looks at Yolanda. And in her gaze there is something that resembles surrender.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

Your hands leave her face and Yolanda’s hands drop from Trinity’s shoulders and she wraps you both in her arms from behind, her long arms around both your shoulders, her chest pressed against Trinity’s back.

You stay like that. Under the fluorescent light of the locker room, with the smell of alcohol and disinfectant and stale sweat, with your three shadows overlapping on the wall of lockers like a single misshapen and beautiful silhouette. You don’t speak. There’s nothing to say that hasn’t already been said or that can’t wait. The silence is full of your hands, your breathing, the beating of your hearts that slowly, beat by beat, begin to synchronize.

Then the locker room door opens.

Dana.

Of course it’s Dana. With her crooked glasses, her dangling badge, a sandwich in her left hand and a juice box in her right and an expression on her face that is an entire encyclopedia of unspoken things. Her eyes sweep the room in under a second: you, pale, with wet cheeks; Trinity, with red eyes; Yolanda, with her arm around both of you. And in that second Dana catalogues, files, understands, and decides. Everything. Without any of you having said a single word.

She doesn’t ask what happened. She doesn’t ask if you’re okay. She doesn’t ask anything that requires an answer, because Dana knows - Dana always knows everything - that there are moments when questions are a luxury and answers are a burden.

She sets the sandwich and the juice box on the bench beside you. She looks at you, then at Trinity, then at Yolanda.

“Mohan has your patients,” she says, addressing you. “Javadi has yours,” to Trinity. “Walsh is covering your surgery,” to Yolanda. “Don’t look at me like that, Garcia. Walsh is perfectly capable.”

Yolanda doesn’t protest. Not this time. She doesn’t have the strength or the will to protest, and honestly maybe she doesn’t even want to. She nods. Once. A small movement that says thank you without saying the word.

Dana looks at all of you for another moment, then her gaze settles on Trinity and something in her face changes. It softens. The lines around her eyes smooth out. Her jaw relaxes. And for a moment Dana is the woman with kids at home. The woman who climbs onto rooftops and opens locker room doors and sees the things nobody wants seen, and guards them with the same ferocity with which she guards her ER.

“Go home,” she says. Quietly, without threat, without irony, in the voice she uses at three in the morning with young colleagues who have just lost their first patient and don’t know how to get up from their chair. “All three of you. Go home.”

She leaves. The door closes. Her footsteps recede down the corridor and then her voice - “Javadi, 4 north, let’s go. Break time’s over” - and then nothing. Just the hum of the fluorescent and the drip of the faucet and your breathing.

Trinity is the first to pull away. She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand and her gaze falls on the sandwich Dana left on the bench.

She picks it up, unwraps it, and holds it out to you.

“Eat,” she says.

You eat. Yolanda takes a sip from her water bottle and passes it to Trinity, who drinks and then passes it to you. The juice box you open afterward, in the car, sitting in the back seat with your legs touching and your hands intertwined, Yolanda at the wheel with her eyes checking on you both in the rearview mirror every thirty seconds.

The city flows past the window. Fireworks. Flags. Barbecues. Everyone else’s Fourth of July.

Your Fourth of July is here, a jungle of emotions in a car that smells of a day that went on too long and of dried tears. With three red lines beneath a butterfly closure, a fragile pact, and a juice box passed from hand to hand like a quiet prayer.

It’s not enough. It’s not a cure.

But it’s a start. And it’s yours.

Thanks for reading! Here we are with another Trinity x Yolanda x reader. I’ll be honest — the last episode made me genuinely furious. At who? I’m not even sure. I’m angry at Yolanda because she treated Trin like dirt, but at the same time, I know Trinity may have taken things too far, so this is how I let it out. (I know, I need to bring the word count down — we’re getting a little out of hand here.) Anyway, thanks again for reading, requests are always welcome, and I’m leaving the Ko-fi link below. Leave likes and comments; for a writer, it really does mean everything. Have a great day!!

P.S.: I’m currently working on something with JFK Jr., Carolyn, and reader — I just haven’t decided whether to post it yet.

Support me on kofi ☕️

You hear the phone ring and then the voicemail kick in; you don’t need to pull it out to know who’s calling you. The only real doubt that could arise is which of the two of them has actually worried enough to call you. Well, maybe you know that answer too. You finish the cigarette and stub it out on the cement beneath you; as you do, your fingertip barely scrapes against the cement and that faint pain numbs you completely, along with the cold air and the sound of the traffic below. You glare with resentment at the empty pack of cigarettes in your pocket and a small huff leaves your lips. You settle yourself more comfortably on the ledge, not paying much attention — as if you weren’t literally one step away from death.

A small, melancholic smile curls your lips and a jolt of pain strikes your right cheek; by now a bruise has surely formed, no doubt about it. You don’t need to have studied medicine for ten years to figure that out, and you don’t need a mirror either. You feel it in every facial movement you make; every single crease of the skin reminds you coldly of what happened today and the reason you find yourself on this rooftop.

It’s not the first time a patient has thrown a punch at you, but it is the first time that the father of a child — John, six years old, with a cardiac malformation for which you could do nothing except fifteen desperate minutes of cardiac massage on your part — screams at you that it’s your fault his child is dead, punches you in the face, and then, according to the evening news, throws himself off the nearest bridge to the hospital. Dead on impact. Only Dana had recognized the man on the news, and her gaze had settled on you with a sweetness and a concern that only that woman was capable of. But, as was your habit, you had downplayed it and reassured her and, above all, you had begged her not to tell anyone.

Not that anyone knew about your relationship. A relationship involving three people is never an easy confession, and in a workplace? A nightmare.

Everyone in the ER knew about THEIR relationship, but you stayed in the shadows, with fleeting quickies, stolen kisses, and a shared apartment twelve minutes by car from your workplace.

You had started working at the Pitt alongside Trinity, and gradually she had grown close to a certain surgeon, and then, well, the duo had become a trio. With Yolanda’s hands roaming over your body while your mouth found warm shelter between Trinity’s legs. Before long, your casual relationship had grown more serious until you decided to move in together, and you fit together so well that it seemed a shame not to have met them sooner; a sacrilege, almost. Trinity had opened up about her scars, you about the depression that had consumed you for most of your life, and Yolanda about her battle with — and eventual victory over — the obsessive-compulsive disorder that, over the years, had transformed into the control she so often displayed in the operating room. You were imperfect, but you loved and accepted one another completely in a way you had only ever dreamed of.

You slide your fingertip over the wheel that strikes the lighter’s flame; it takes three tries for the fire to rise and for the empty cigarette box, resting on the cement of the ledge, to catch fire.

You’ve been up here for hours by now; you don’t know what you want to do, you don’t know if you want to take a step forward and end all of this forever or take a step back and return to the arms of your partners, at home. John isn’t the first child you’ve lost, but you had grown attached to him like you never had to anyone else. In one month, you had seen that little human being more than most of your own family; he had made you laugh, cry, have fun; he had drawn you a beautiful picture: three figures holding hands in front of a building with an asterisk drawn on top, at the center of which was a serpent coiled around a staff. One night, while you were checking his vitals, you had told the little one that you loved two people and not just one, like other people. You had told him that everyone says you can only love one person at a time, and that they said it because they had never met two extraordinary people at the same time.

The next day, when you had entered his room for the routine checkup, you had found him sitting on the bed — surrounded by machines that a child shouldn’t even have to see, at his age — clutching triumphantly, in his tiny little hands, that piece of paper. He had handed it to you with the biggest smile you had ever seen him make, and in a proud voice he had said that he too loved many people: his father, his cousin, his teacher… and he understood what it meant to love more than one person. You had cried that day, because a child had explained and understood what many people couldn’t even conceive of.

The world had lost a beautiful person today.

It wasn’t your fault, you know that; rationally, you know that you did — that all of you did — everything you were capable of doing. But grief… grief is never rational.

What remains of the pack is a little pile of ash; you brush it away with the back of your hand, letting the wind carry it off with a gust. The way you too would like to fly away, without the weight of everything you feel on your shoulders right now.

“To jump or not to jump, that is what I wonder”… you chuckle bitterly at the thought; after all, the great Shakespeare would not be very pleased with this butchered quotation.

The phone rings again, three, four, five times. And then, the rooftop door opens with a creak.

You don’t even turn around, you don’t feel the need and even less the desire. Whether it’s one of your colleagues or one of your partners doesn’t matter; you don’t owe explanations to anyone, everyone comes up here, whether for the view or for other reprehensible reasons is beside the point.

“Hey kiddo, I haven’t seen you come down in a while. The night shift has arrived and Lena too, finally. I can’t wait to get home to my boys. Maybe it’s time for you to do the same.”

The unmistakable voice of the head nurse rings through the noisy silence of the roof, drowning out the hum of car horns dozens of meters below. You hear the click of a lighter, and without turning around, you understand she has just lit a cigarette.

You don’t answer. You don’t turn. The sound of her steps approaches slowly, unhurriedly, as if she had all the time in the world — and perhaps, in a way, she does. Dana isn’t the type of person who rushes you; she’s the type of person who sits down next to you, on the cold cement, a meter from the edge, and smokes in silence as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“I lied for you today, you know? Santos called me, about an hour ago,” she says, after a long drag. Her voice is flat, free of judgment. “I told her you were still at the hospital, that you were finishing some charts. She pretended to believe me.”

Your stomach drops. Not because of the lie itself, but because Dana had had to construct it, think it through, make it believable. For you. Because you hadn’t had the courage to answer the phone.

“You didn’t have to,” you murmur.

“I didn’t have to, but the alternative was telling her the truth, and I don’t know if I was ready for that conversation.”

You don’t ask what the truth is according to Dana. You don’t need to. You saw her watching you walk out of the family room with the bruise already forming on your cheek and your eyes hollow.

“I’m not going to jump, Dana,” you sigh, but not even you believe your own words because, as a matter of fact, a very large part of you would just like to have the guts to take that last step.

“I didn’t suggest that, kid, but I’m definitely not going down from this roof without seeing you get off that ledge first. You’ve been up here for hours and I doubt it’s just to admire the view.”

You hear a long breath and then a little cloud of smoke rises to your right. The woman has probably moved closer, without you noticing.

You swallow. The metallic taste of smoke scratches your throat and the inhaler in your pocket weighs like an accusation.

“It was a bad day, Dana. Nothing more.”

“A bad day…” Dana chuckles bitterly, weighing every single word and shaking her head a couple of times before tossing the cigarette on the ground and crushing it with the toe of her shoe.

For a few seconds, the only sound surrounding you is your breathing, the wheeze in your bronchi that you are trying with all your might to silence. Your abs ache from how hard you’re straining not to cough, but from the gaze you feel burning against your back, you understand it’s futile.

“How much,” she says. A single word, dry as a slap.

“Dana—”

“How much did you smoke, y/n.”

“A pack.”

Dana drags a hand over her face. From bottom to top, slowly, pressing her fingers against her closed eyes as if she were trying to erase something from her own sight. You’ve seen her make that gesture only after the worst shifts — the ones after which you find yourself in the parking lot staring at the steering wheel for twenty minutes before you can turn the key.

“A whole pack,” she repeats, and her voice trembles now. Not with anger. With something deeper, rawer. “You’re asthmatic. You’re asthmatic, for fuck’s sake, y/n, and you’re a doctor, you know what it does to your lungs, and the wheeze I can hear in your breathing is proof of it. Where’s your inhaler? Christ…”

Out of the corner of your eye, you see her turn toward the city for a second, toward the lights flickering on one after another in the growing darkness. You see her hesitate, open her mouth and then close it again as if she were afraid of what she’s about to say might cause. You’ve never seen her doubt anything.

“Santos and Garcia won’t be happy about this, you know that, right?”

An icy chill runs down your spine, and it’s not from the cold.

“W-what?”

“I’ve worked in the ER for twenty years and I notice everything that happens inside it. You’re the only person Santos doesn’t vent to during a shitty shift, and the other day I saw Garcia adjusting the stethoscope around your neck with a smile I’d only ever seen her direct at Santos. It didn’t take me long to figure it out… and it’s fine, I’m not judging you, kid. I’m not judging any of you three, and actually, I’m glad you’ve found someone to talk to. You don’t need a medical degree to see that you love each other.”

Dana smiles and, slowly, takes a step toward you, and only when she’s sure you won’t make any sudden moves does she rest her hand on your arm.

You can’t speak. Your throat has closed and it’s not the asthma, this time. You had guarded that secret so jealously that now, hearing someone else say it out loud is like being stabbed right in the chest. You had been so careful; you had told everyone that you and Trinity had moved in together — for financial convenience, obviously — and the relationship between her and Yolanda was common knowledge by now. You never would have thought that your glances would give you away.

“I don’t care, Y/n. I’ve never cared. Who you love, how many people you love, how you love them… that’s your business. What I care about is that two people who love you are a few minutes’ drive from here and they’ve been looking for you for hours. They’re looking for you and you’re up here, alone, in the cold, with a pack of cigarettes in your veins and a bruise on your face and a deafening wheeze in your lungs. Punishing yourself.” Her voice cracks, barely, on the last word. “Punishing yourself for something that isn’t your fault.”

“I know you know it but knowing it and believing it are two different things, kid,” the knot in your throat tightens, “and until you believe it, you can’t be up here alone. I don’t trust your choices right now.”

“Well… I don’t trust myself right now either.”

Dana squeezes your arm as another coughing fit strikes you.

“That child was special,” she says, and her voice has changed again, lower, softer. “Every time I walked past his room and saw you in there telling him things, making him laugh, checking the machines pretending everything was normal… every time I thought that boy was incredibly lucky to have you as his doctor.” Pause. “And today the world lost something irreplaceable. But not because of you, Y/n. Not because of you.”

You don’t answer. You can’t. Your eyes burn and your throat is a tight knot and if you open your mouth now you know what will come out is a strangled sound, a cry of pain that you don’t want Dana to hear — not here, not now.

“It’s time to get off that ledge, y/n. Go home to your girls.”

A long silence settles between you. The traffic below continues as always — indifferent, constant, stupidly normal — and the sky has gone completely black now, without that orange strip on the horizon left to hide behind. Dana is standing, less than two meters from you. She hasn’t moved closer but she hasn’t moved away either. She guards that space the way one guards a border.

“You know what he told me, once?” you say, and you don’t know why you’re saying it, you don’t know where it comes from, but the words come out before you can stop them. “John. One evening, while I was checking his vitals and he couldn’t sleep, he asked me why I became a doctor.”

Dana doesn’t move, doesn’t speak. She listens.

“I told him I became a doctor because I wanted to help people and make them feel better. And he looked at me with those big eyes that were impossible to say no to, Dana, and he said: ‘But then why do you cry when you leave my room?’” Your voice breaks, you can’t help it, as the memory of that sweet child invades your mind with force.

You bite your lower lip so hard you taste blood.

“A six-year-old child… and he noticed I was crying. He noticed that every time I left his room I leaned against the corridor wall and cried because I knew — I knew, Dana, from the very first day — that he wasn’t going to make it. That every probability I had studied in my medical textbooks testified to how his story would end. And he knew I was crying and he never said anything until that evening when he asked me and I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t know how to explain to a child that I was crying because—”

You stop. The sob takes your throat like a hand and squeezes. You lean forward, your hands on the cold cement, and for one horrible second the world tilts — the edge is right there, less than a few centimeters away, and your body weighs too much and the void pulls —

Dana’s hand grabs your arm with force. So hard that you feel every single finger through the fabric of your jacket. She pulls you back and for a moment you find yourself with your back against her chest, her arm around your shoulders and her heart pounding against your back.

Not the calm heartbeat of a woman who has everything under control, but the terrified heartbeat of someone who has just seen what could have happened.

“Don’t move,” she says, and her voice is unrecognizable. Hoarse, broken, stripped of all professionalism, of all distance, of every role. “Don’t move, y/n. Stay here, stay still.”

Her arms tremble around you.

Yours tremble against her body.

And you stay like that for a time you can’t measure — seconds, maybe, or minutes, or hours compressed into a heartbeat — until Dana drags you off the ledge, setting you with your back against the cement you were sitting on just moments ago.

“He answered me himself, you know,” you whisper, and your voice is a whisper, the thinnest thread barely audible, the ghost of a sound. “I apologized for not knowing how to answer him and he said: ‘Maybe you cry because you care about me. My dad cries too and I know he loves me.’”

Dana doesn’t answer, but her arm tightens around you and her breathing becomes irregular, short, broken — like the breathing of someone fighting not to cry and succeeding by the thinnest margin.

“And he was right,” you say. “I was crying because I cared about him. And now I’m crying because he’s gone and his father is gone and I’m on this fucking roof wondering if—”

“Enough.”

Dana lets you go. She shifts, moves in front of you; kneeling on the cement, her hands on your shoulders, her face thirty centimeters from yours, and in her eyes you see something you’ve never seen in twenty years of emergency room condensed in that woman: fear. Pure, naked, total fear.

“Enough,” she repeats, and her voice trembles but holds. “Listen to me. That child loved you. His father was destroyed by grief and did the things that grief makes people do. And you’re here, alive, with a bruise and a heart that hurts too much, but you’re here. You’re here, Y/n. And I need you to stay here.”

She takes your face in her hands. Her fingers are cold and rough against your skin.

“I need you to use that inhaler. I need you to get up from this cement and come down from this roof and let me drive you home and let those two women hold you tight tonight. I need these things, Y/n. I need them. Can you do them for me, if you can’t do them for yourself?”

You don’t answer. Not with words. But your fingers find the jacket pocket — the one without the phone — and pull out the inhaler. The metal is ice-cold. You bring it to your mouth. Press. Inhale. Hold for a few seconds.

The bronchi open. Air flows in and the wheeze, finally, fades.

Dana nods. She releases your face. She sits next to you, shoulder to shoulder, and for a full minute you stay in silence, seated on the cement with your backs against the ledge you were sitting on just moments ago.

“That child is the reason you get up from this roof,” Dana says. “Not for me. Not for your job. Because that child — you are not allowed, y/n, do you hear me? — you are not allowed to turn that child into a memory of something that was lost.”

You stand up.

Your legs tremble, your knees protest, and for a second the world spins, darkness closing in at the edges of your vision, but Dana quickly grabs you by the elbow to keep you from falling.

“Easy, kid,” she says. “Easy.”

She holds your elbow a few seconds longer than necessary, until she’s sure your legs can hold on their own, and then lets go — but doesn’t move away. She walks at your side toward the roof door, half a step behind, close enough to catch you if you fall and far enough not to make you feel like an invalid.

“My keys are in the locker,” you say, your voice hoarse. “I need to—”

“Oh, you don’t actually think I’m going to let you drive, do you?” She turns to you as if you had just told her you’d removed a lung from a healthy patient, arching her right eyebrow.

“Dana—”

“I’m driving you home. End of discussion. Your car will get some rest.”

You don’t have the strength to argue. You don’t have the strength to do anything, really. The adrenaline left a long time ago and what remains is an exhaustion so total that it feels like you’re moving underwater. You follow Dana through the ER — emptied out at this hour, thanks to some divine miracle — until you reach outside, the parking lot, where the cold night air makes you shiver.

The drive home is blurred, the warmth of the car lulls you and the devastating emotions of the day drain you so much that you think you closed your eyes at some point. You don’t even remember telling Dana where you live, actually; and yet, when you open your eyes you recognize the façade of your apartment building.

You turn toward her. In the darkness of the car, her face is lit in flashes by the orange streetlight and her dark circles seem deeper, her gaze more tired. She spent her evening on a roof, in the cold, for you. She should be home with her boys by now, and instead she’s here.

“Dana.”

“Tell me.”

“Why did you come up?”

She looks at you for a few seconds and then, with a tired smile, answers, “Because I don’t only have two children to look after, but also many other doctors just like you, kid — Santos and Mohan and Javadi and Whitaker. You’re all my godchildren, and I have to make sure my godchildren are safe.”

“Thank you,” you say, and the word is so inadequate, so small compared to what it contains, that you’re almost ashamed to say it.

Dana huffs a half-laugh — dry, tired, real — and then hugs you.

“This pain will pass, y/n, but until then, turn to the people who love you.”

She gives you one last squeeze and then gets out of the car to open your door for you, walks you to the entrance and waits patiently while you find the keys inside your jacket. The head nurse waits until you’re inside the building and then, with one final nod, walks away.

“I expect not to see you at work tomorrow, and when you come back, we’ll have a talk about what happened tonight. It’s not optional.”

Dana closes the front door, with you inside, and heads toward the car. You hear her start the engine only after you step into the elevator and the doors close behind you.

You arrive in front of your door without realizing it; you slip your hand into your jacket pocket to pull out the keys again and open the door.

The smell hits you first. Lavender — Trinity’s detergent. Coffee — Yolanda. Something burnt — the toaster, probably, forgotten somewhere in the chaos of the day by Trinity; Yolanda keeps everything under control, after all. Home. The sound of that word in your head hurts in a way you didn’t expect.

“Finally.”

Yolanda’s voice comes from the living room. The tone is the exasperated one she uses when you come home late; irritated, a bit annoyed, but fundamentally calm. The tone of someone who thinks they already know what happened: long shift, charts, the usual delay. You hear the sound of the couch deforming under the weight of someone getting up and then her footsteps — barefoot, quick — in the hallway.

Yolanda appears from the doorframe; she’s wearing your gray sweatshirt, sweatpants, and her hair is tied up. She’s gripping the phone in her hand and slipping it into her pocket with the automatic gesture of someone who has just stopped checking the screen.

“I know you were finishing charts, but you could have at least—”

She stops.

The words die in her mouth. You see it happen in real time: the sentence fading, the lips remaining half-open, the eyes moving from your eyes to your right cheek. And staying there, pinned.

Her face changes and the irritation vanishes, the relief vanishes. What remains is something bare, sharp, surgical.

“Y/n.”

Your name sounds different from how you’ve heard her say it a thousand times. It sounds like an alarm sounds.

“What the hell happened.”

It’s not a question. You know her well enough to know that when Yolanda phrases things like that — flat, dry, without a question mark — she’s not asking. She’s demanding an answer.

“Trinity.”

She says it without turning around, without taking her eyes off yours, raising her voice just enough for it to reach the living room. Trinity’s name spoken in that sharp, urgent, clinical tone is the same one she uses in the operating room when something goes wrong and she needs another pair of hands.

You hear Trinity get up from the couch, her hurried steps in the hallway, and then you see her appear behind Yolanda, with the blanket still clutched in one hand and the expression of someone expecting a complaint about the lateness who finds something else entirely.

She looks at you, her gaze quickly finds the bruise on your face and stops there. The hand gripping the blanket opens and the fabric falls to the floor without a sound.

“Who,” she says. A single syllable. Low, hoarse, charged.

“Can we sit down? I’ll explain everything, but—”

“Who the fuck did that to your face, y/n.” Trinity has taken a step forward. She’s in the hallway now, less than a meter from you, and her eyes haven’t left the bruise for a single second. Her hand rises toward your cheek — slow, controlled, with the gentleness of someone handling something broken — and her fingers stop a centimeter from the skin. She doesn’t touch. She feels the heat of the inflammation through the air.

“Close the door,” says Yolanda, behind you. You hadn’t realized it, but the front door is still open, flung wide onto the landing. You push it. It closes. The sound of the lock clicking shut is final. For one single instant you had the temptation to run away, but it wouldn’t solve anything now. If anything, it would only make things worse.

Trinity takes your chin between her fingers and turns your face toward the hallway light. Her lips tighten. You see her clench her jaw once, twice; a gesture she makes when examining victims of violence.

“It’s not a fall,” she says. “It’s not a locker. It’s not a cabinet door. It’s a punch, y/n. Someone punched you.”

Silence. That she was good, you already knew, but this…

“Why didn’t you answer the phone?” Yolanda speaks. She has come closer now, and you feel her to your left. Her tone is low, careful, controlled with a visible effort, like someone walking on a glass floor. “We called. Messages. Dana said charts. But you weren’t answering. Why?”

“Because I couldn’t.”

“Couldn’t or wouldn’t?”

The difference, right now, seems irrelevant to you.

Trinity releases your chin. She takes your hand — the right one, the one with the fingertip scraped by the cement, which fortunately she doesn’t notice — and guides you to the living room. She sits you on the couch and then sits beside you, so close that her thigh touches yours, and she doesn’t let go of your hand. Her fingers are warm. Yours, on the contrary, are ice-cold.

Yolanda stays standing. Arms crossed, leaning against the TV cabinet, facing you. The news is still on — the volume low, images scrolling across the screen — and for a second your eyes fall there, on the screen, and you pray they’re not replaying the bridge story because if they see it now, before you—

“Turn that thing off,” Trinity says to Yolanda, and from the tone you can tell it’s not because of the noise. She noticed your gaze. She saw where you were looking. She doesn’t know why yet, but she saw it.

Yolanda picks up the remote and turns it off. Silence. Only the refrigerator humming, the bathroom faucet dripping, your breathing.

“Talk,” says Yolanda.

You look at them. Both of them. Trinity is at your side, with your hand in hers and her eyes fixed on you — those eyes you’ve learned to read like an open book and that are now full of something that oscillates between fear, fury, and anguish. Yolanda stands before you, arms crossed, with the expression of someone performing an emotional triage.

“John died this morning.”

A shadow passes over Trinity’s face. She knew — they both probably knew, departments talk — but hearing it from your mouth, in your broken voice, is different. Her hand squeezes yours.

“Cardiac malformation. Fifteen minutes of cpr. He didn’t make it.” The clinical chart tone; the wall every doctor hides behind, with great effort and very often without great results. “His father was in the family room. I went to notify him of the death. He… let’s say he didn’t take it well.”

“The bruise,” says Yolanda. Hers is not a question.

“He screamed at me that it was my fault, that I had killed his son, and then he punched me.” You gesture toward your cheek with a nod. “Outside the room. No one was around.”

Trinity’s hand contracts in yours. A reflex, a jolt; the body reacting before the mind. Her breathing has changed — it’s shorter, quicker, her chest rising and falling in jerks.

“And you didn’t tell us,” says Trinity.

“That’s not all.”

Yolanda pushes off the cabinet, takes a step toward you. Her arms have uncrossed and her hands are at her sides, open, and there’s something in her posture that reminds you of the way she approaches the operating table when she already knows the surgery is going to be long and complicated and isn’t going to go the way it should.

“He… left the hospital after hitting me. He jumped from the bridge on Eighth. Died on impact.” You swallow. “They reported it on the evening news, in the afternoon. Dana recognized him… she’s the one who brought me home.”

The silence that follows is not silence. It’s the sound of two people processing information too large, too heavy, too full of implications to be absorbed in a single breath. Yolanda has stopped moving; she stands in the middle of the living room, two steps from the couch, with an expression you’ve seen only once — in the operating room, when she lost a patient on the table and took off her gloves and set them in the bin with a calm that had frightened everyone. Trinity, beside you, has closed her eyes.

“The charts,” says Yolanda. And the word falls into the living room like something heavy, something dirty. “Dana told us you were finishing charts.”

“Dana lied for me. I had asked her not to say anything.”

“And where were you.” Yolanda whispers, her gaze concealing the need for a denial that, however, doesn’t come.

“On the roof.”

One second.

“On the roof,” Trinity repeats, and opens her eyes. “For how long.”

“Since four. Maybe earlier. I don’t know.”

“Four hours,” says Yolanda, and her voice trembles. “Four hours on the hospital roof without answering the phone, after a man punched you in the face and jumped off a bridge.” She inhales. “Were you on the ledge?”

You don’t answer. But the way you avoid her gaze is answer enough.

“God.” The word leaves her like an exhalation. She brings her hands to her face, presses them against her eyes, drags them down slowly, and when her eyes reappear they’re glistening. Glistening in a way you’ve never seen. Glistening in a way that frightens you more than anything that has happened today, because Yolanda doesn’t cry — she never cries. “Y/n… You were on the ledge.”

“I wasn’t going to—”

“You weren’t going to?” Trinity stands up, and her voice rises with her. “You don’t know if you were going to or not. You don’t sit on a ledge for four hours when you know what you want to do, y/n!”

She’s right. She’s right and you know it and she knows it and the silence that follows is the proof.

“The charts,” says Trinity, and her voice has changed. It’s fragile, wounded. She takes her hands from her face and her eyes are red and wet and full of a desperation that devastates you. “We believed it. I believed it, Y/n. Dana said you were finishing charts and I said ‘ok, she’s doing charts’ and I stopped calling because I thought you were working and you were on the ledge. For half an hour longer I didn’t look for you because someone told me a lie and I believed it and you were—”

Her voice breaks. She turns her back on you and takes three steps toward the kitchen before stopping with her hands pressed on the tabletop, arms straight, head bowed. Her breathing is loud, ragged — the breathing of someone trying to hold the pieces together by sheer force of will. It’s the breathing you’ve heard her do many times before… just before a panic attack.

“Trinity, sweetheart—” you stand up.

“Sit down.” Yolanda. She isn’t looking at you. She’s looking at Trinity and then, with three quick steps, reaches her. She places a hand on her sternum and presses gently, to make her feel her presence. She presses softly, with an open palm, a gesture that both of you use to help your girlfriend — to give her something physical to focus on when her breath escapes her.

Trinity inhales, once, twice. Slowly, fighting against the panic rising in her chest. Her hands are still on the table, knuckles white with the effort and arms trembling under the weight of a body that wants to give in.

You stay on the couch, motionless, while guilt devours you. Not only for everything that happened today but also for this. For the fact that Trinity, one of the two women you love with all your heart, is having a panic attack in your living room, and the cause is you.

“Breathe, love,” Yolanda murmurs; her voice is calm, low, steady… completely different from the one she just used with you. It’s the voice she reserves for Trinity in the worst moments. “Look at me. Breathe in with me. That’s it. Good.”

Trinity raises her head. Her eyes find Yolanda’s and cling there, like an anchor. She inhales when Yolanda inhales. She exhales when Yolanda exhales. They do it three times, four, five, until the rhythm stabilizes and Trinity’s hands on the table finally stop trembling.

“I’m sorry.”

You say it from the couch, with your hands on your knees and your voice trembling like a child’s. You say it looking at them and the inadequacy of those two words crushes you.

Trinity pulls away from the table. She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, with a rough, almost angry gesture, as if the tears were a personal offense. She inhales once, deeply, and then crosses the living room and comes back to you.

She kneels on the floor in front of the couch, and her hands take your knees. She looks up at you from below and her face is devastated and furious and full of love, and all these things together shouldn’t be able to coexist on the same face, yet on Trinity’s they do — they always have.

“I’m not done,” she says. Her voice is still hoarse, still unsteady. “I’m not done being angry with you. I’m not done being afraid. I’m not done—” She stops. Swallows. “But first I need to know one thing. And I need you to tell me the truth, love — not the version you think is less painful. The truth.”

You nod.

“On the ledge. For four hours.” Her fingers tighten on your knees. “At any point during those four hours, did you think about jumping? I’m asking you if the thought crossed your mind, even for one second.”

The living room is so silent you can hear your own heartbeat in your ears. Yolanda stands at the kitchen entrance, motionless, arms at her sides and eyes fixed on you. She waits. They both wait.

And you could lie, you could say “no, never” with the same ease you said “I’m fine” to Dana this morning. You could protect — again, still, always — and add another layer of lies between yourself and the people you love.

But you stopped lying tonight. You’re tired, and you can’t do it with their eyes on you.

“Yes.”

A single syllable, so brief and yet the heaviest you have ever spoken.

Trinity closes her eyes. She doesn’t move, doesn’t pull away, doesn’t remove her hands from your knees, but her face does something that destroys you: it contracts, for a second, as if she had received a physical blow — a real, bodily pain — and then recomposes itself. When she opens her eyes there are tears, but beneath the tears there is something else — something hard, determined, unshakable.

“Ok,” she says. “Ok.” She’s shaken, visibly shaken, but she’s trying to process somehow the bomb you’ve just dropped.

Yolanda has moved. You didn’t hear her, but now she’s behind you, on the couch, and her hands are on your shoulders. The weight of her hands on your tense muscles is warm and steady and says: I’m here, I’m not going anywhere.

“And Dana?” asks Yolanda, from behind you. Her voice is controlled, but her fingers on your shoulders tremble, just barely, betraying everything else. “Dana knew? That you were on the ledge?”

“She came up. She found me there and — she pulled me down.”

A sound escapes Yolanda’s throat. It’s not a word; it’s a strangled sob. Her fingers tighten on your shoulders, once, hard, and then relax. She leans down, leaves a kiss in your hair, and you feel her hands stiffen slightly.

“You smoked.”

“I—”

“Goddammit, y/n,” Yolanda whispers, her voice still trembling, but with anger now.

Trinity doesn’t react — not immediately, at least. Her face stays motionless, perfectly still, for three whole seconds, and then something breaks. You see her rise from her knees, sit next to you on the couch, and rest her head against the backrest, eyes on the ceiling. She inhales. Exhales. Inhales again.

“You’re asthmatic,” she says, to the ceiling. As if she were telling the universe and not you.

“I know.”

“You know.” A pause. “You know, and you smoked.”

There’s no anger in her voice. There’s something worse: there’s weariness. The exhaustion of someone who spent hours fighting against imaginary scenarios and now discovers that reality was worse than all of them.

Yolanda has moved. She’s no longer behind you; she’s gone to the bathroom to get something. When she returns, she has the stethoscope gripped in her hands, along with your backup inhaler — the emergency one, with the corticosteroid and not just the bronchodilator.

“Yolo—” you sigh.

“Don’t piss me off more than I already am right now, please.”

She sits to your right and makes you turn toward her; she slides the bell first across your chest and then your back, ordering you to breathe in and out when she tells you to.

“I can still hear the wheeze. Take a puff.”

You grab the inhaler; her look brooks no argument, and you’re not sure how much further you can push the rope before it snaps, so you follow her orders to perfection, and when, a few minutes later, she checks again, she’s satisfied enough to put the stethoscope away.

She lets herself fall onto the couch, at your side, and her arms wrap around you, together with Trinity’s; the surgeon rests her forehead against your shoulder, and her body trembles. You feel something warm and wet soaking through the fabric of your shirt where her cheek is pressed, and you realize she’s crying. Yolanda is crying. In silence, without a sound, with tears falling without permission, and you’ve never seen her cry in your life, and the fact that she’s doing it now, here, against your shoulder, tells you everything there is to know about what you’ve done to her tonight.

You stay like that.

You don’t know for how long. Time stopped mattering the moment you stopped lying, and now all that exists is this: three bodies on a couch, three broken breaths trying to find each other again, the living room that smells of lavender and cold coffee, and the world outside the window going on without you.

It’s Trinity who moves first.

She stands — eyes swollen, red, but her gaze steady, present — and removes your jacket. She does it slowly, sliding it off your arms one side at a time, and the smell of stale smoke rises from the fabric like an animal waking up. She folds it with care — too much care for a jacket that should just be tossed in the corner — and takes it to the hallway. When she comes back, her hands return quickly to you, to your face; she touches you as if that could anchor you, in her mind.

Trinity sits next to you again. She takes your chin between her fingers and turns your face toward the lamp. She examines the bruise, with light, professional fingers — the touch of a doctor assessing a trauma. As if she weren’t assessing the battered face of the woman she loves.

“Ice won’t do much good at this point,” she says, softly. “Tomorrow it’ll be worse. But nothing’s broken.”

“I know.”

“I know you know.” A shadow of something crosses her lips. “But you don’t get to decide, today.”

Yolanda’s eyes are still glistening but she’s no longer crying; her breathing has stabilized — not as controlled as usual, but certainly better than before.

“Tomorrow we talk,” she says. “About everything. The cigarettes. The asthma. Dana. The roof. The ledge. The phone. About how we make sure this never happens again.” Pause. “I can’t go through another evening like this, y/n. I can’t do it. Not a second time.”

“Neither can I,” says Trinity, from the other side, quietly.

“Tomorrow,” you say. It’s all you have. Your voice emptied out, your body exhausted, and their bodies at your sides, and the blanket — picked up from the floor by one of them, at some moment you didn’t register — around your shoulders.

You don’t promise anything. You don’t say “it won’t happen again” because you don’t know if that’s true and you’ve stopped lying tonight. You rest your head against the backrest, close your eyes, and let the weight of your body give in toward them. Toward Trinity, on your left, who takes your hand under the blanket and laces her fingers with yours. Toward Yolanda, on your right, who squeezes your arm and presses her cheek against your bicep.

You surrender. To them. To this. To the fact that you are alive and you are here and it hurts and tomorrow it will hurt again, but at least you won’t be alone.

Three figures holding hands.

All three of them standing.

Just like in John’s drawing.

Heyy, sooo… It’s been a while uh? At least, I was really inspired for this one. I hope u liked it and yes, I fell in love with Santos and Garcia (what I have to say, toxic yuri is my kryptonite). Anyway, requests are open (as always) and have a great day!