“Stop that…”

The warning leaves her mouth without her even having to look up.

Y/N felt exhausted, and she could feel the sweat dripping down her body as she pushed the discarded stretcher elsewhere.

She definitely wasn’t in an appealing state, yet Jack Abbot stared at her with pure adoration clear as day in his eyes.

“Stop what?” He asks quietly, watching her work with the same affectionate expression he’d have anytime he watched her before.

Before it all happened..

“We are friends, Dr. Abbot…” She playfully reminds as she goes to walk past him.

“We are friends.” He agrees. “What? Friends can’t look at friends?” He asks, humor in his eyes as he follows her down the hallway.

The feel of the ED was… Sore still. Raw. They had just finished treating a WAVE of incoming patients, all because of some tainted chili that had been served at a local street fair happening a few blocks over.

Let’s just say, Y/N was perfectly fine going vegan for the time being..

“Not like that..” Y/N comments back as she works to strip off her gear, discarding it in the hazard bin at the end of the hallway.

“So let me get this straight. I can’t.. Call you at a certain time of night, can’t take you out for a meal or a drink, and now.. I can’t look at you.” Jack lists, humor in his eyes.

Y/N turns to face him fully now, hair getting in her face as she looks up at him.

And how close he’s standing..

“Exactly. To all of that.” She states simply. She was happy to have Jack back in her life. After years apart, after all the complications of love, she realized before Jack Abbot was her boyfriend.. He was her friend. Her best friend.

The dorky guy who she met her first week of med school because he had fallen on her blanket while playing football in the courtyard of the campus.

She realized she missed the moments where they were just friends, hanging out and studying together. Quizzing each other with the reward for getting the answers correct being gummy worms from the library vending machine.

And she had him back.

But she knew how easy it had been to fall in love with him the first time around. And how it ended. She couldn’t handle that again..

“Well what if I have to look at you for a certain reason?” Jack challenges, humor in his eyes as he fixes her hair for her, tucking it behind her ear. She eyes him before backing away, turning to continue down the hallway.

“Like what?” She asks finally, heading to her desk with him following close behind. Jack had gotten used to yet again walking somewhat behind Y/N.

He always did love being led by her..

“Like… I have an illness and if I ever stop looking at you, I could die. I still can’t look at you?” Jack asks as Y/N turns to face him when she gets to her desk.

“Like the minute you look away from me, you’ll die?” Y/N asks to clarify as he looks her right in the eyes, hands behind his back.

“The minute I look away..” He says softly with a certain nod, voice tender for only them to hear. Y/N looks away to stop the flutter in her heart.

“Well, it was nice knowing you.” Y/N states sarcastically and Jack grabs for his chest.

“That hurt. That really hurt.” He says deadpan as Y/N bites back a laugh.

“I think I’m owed an apology.” He continues. “So.. I’ll pick you up at 7pm tomorrow. Okay? Okay.” He nods as he quickly tries to turn and walk away so she could feel bond to the agreement. Y/N swats lightly at his arm though.

“Fat chance.” She states as he smirks.

“That’s what you said last time..” He teases quietly without thinking. Y/N watches him softly. She can’t help it most times.

“Don’t you have work to do?” She finally asks just as Robby walks over.

“Yup. He’s gotta head to the roof. Incoming patient. 12 minutes out. I need you with Whitaker..” Robby announces. Jack sighs at that, but then turns back to Y/N.

“This isn’t the end of our conversation.” He states softly as she rolls her eyes playfully at him. He walks off, leaving Robby alone with her.

“You’re welcome.” Robby says simply, thinking they’re alone now.

“I can handle Jack..” She snorts softly as she sits in her chair with a heavy sigh.

“Oh, I know. That’s what I’m trying to avoid..” Robby jokes. Y/N raises an eyebrow at Robby. “Look. You and Jack.. You’re like.. The stars and the moon, fire and wood, Johnny and June Cash.” Robby lists.

“Way to show your age with that one..” Y/N jokes.

“You two will always make sense..” Robby continues, ignoring her comment obviously. “But.. I can’t lose my best doctor if this fails.” He states.

“Robby…” Y/N shakes her head. “I’ve had a long day. Jack is the last thing on my mind..” She says, lying through her teeth like its second nature. Robby eyes her closely, nodding politely.

“How about a drink then. Tomorrow night? You’ve got off, right?” He offers. Y/N sighs deeply at that.

Neither realize Jack is still watching from his spot at the nurse’s station, completely ignoring Dana as she tries telling him more about the incoming patient..

“Free drinks sound like a dream. But I think I’m better off at home. Plus, it’s gonna rain tomorrow..” She scrunches her nose. Robby laughs softly. Joy walks over at that moment to get signatures from both doctors on an infected nose piercing case.

“Come on. I’ll throw in free food too..” Robby jokes as he watches Y/N sign.

“Mm… Free drinks and free food? You drive a hard bargain..” Y/N giggles a bit. Joy eyes both before walking away.

“The answer’s still no though.” Y/N says simply. Robby nods at that, backing off.

“Ay! Black cat!” Jack whispers as he follows after Joy. She smirks over at him.

“What’s up, toy solider? I’m a busy woman..” Joy taunts casually as the two begin walking in pace with each other.

“What’s happening with Y/N and Robby?” He asks.

“Oh no. My spying days for you are over. Last time I gave you the scoop on a brewing romance, Garcia almost jumped down my throat..” She snorts.

“How was I supposed to know they were hiding it? Plus! Not my fault Emma blabbed to Princess..” Jack begins defending himself yet again before pausing. “Wait. Brewing romance?” He asks, stopping in his tracks. Joy notices almost instantly, turning to face the older man.

“Oh yeah. Robby asked her out for drinks. Tomorrow night. I think she agreed..” Joy shrugs. “Guess your little ‘long-game’ plan didn’t work. Should’ve listened to me when you had the chance..” She reminds softly as Jack stays quiet.

No. Robby cared for Y/N, sure, but.. He wouldn’t try and take a shot at her. Not with all the history he knew of. That he had a front row seat at witnessing…

Jack feels the panic flash through his body, making his fingers tingle.

He was losing Y/N all over again…

*

*

*

Y/N was about to spend her Saturday night doing the three big ‘B’s.

Bath. Book. Bed.

And she couldn’t wait.

It had been in the 90s all week, but tonight, there’d be a thunderstorm as a reward, and Y/N had timed it perfectly to be soaking in the bath as it started.

It was now 7pm, and Y/N was in the midst of mixing ingredients into a bowl for a facial care mask she’d seen online when her doorbell rings. Blinking in confusion, she walks over to the door and opens it, freezing as she sees Jack standing there, outside her townhouse door, in the pouring rain..

“Oh my god. Jack, what are you-“ He cuts her off.

“Don’t go out with him, Snoop..” He says bluntly, talking over the rain. Y/N blinks a bit, stunned by all of this.

“What are you.. What are you talking about? You’re gonna get sick! Come inside!” She fusses.

“If I come inside.. I’m gonna kiss you.” Jack says simply. Y/N pauses at that.

“Wha-“ He cuts her off again.

“Y/N. If I come inside… I’m gonna grab you, and I’m gonna kiss you. And I’m gonna take you to your room… And I’m going to show you.. How badly I’ve missed you all these years.” He says in the same calm and matter of fact tone that makes her shiver slightly. She tells herself it from the chilly air hitting her..

“And I will never let you go again. Ever.” He continues quietly.

“We…” Her voice breaks slightly. What the hell is she supposed to say to that?! “Jack. We’re just friends-“ Jack shakes his head at that.

“We’re not. I’m not..” Jack states as she looks up at him, biting her bottom lip. “I’ll tell you what I’ve been.” He says. “I’ve been a kid in love. I’ve been an idiot in denial. I’ve been half a man to you. And I’ll tell you what I am now. I’m ready. I’m worthy. I’m the man you fucking deserve, Y/N. And I want you. Bad.” He states as she watches him, unable to look away.

“Don’t.. Fucking please don’t go out with him..” He whispers.

“Who?!” She squeaks, still reeling from all of this.

“Robby!” Jack says.

“I’m not going out with Robby! H-How… Who even told you that?!” She asks.

Jack takes a deep breath as he watches her in awe. “You aren’t? You said no?” He asks.

“No?! To.. Drinks?! Yeah, I-I did, but it wasn’t a date! It was… He wanted to take me out as a friend!” Y/N fusses.

“Robby?!” She continues before he can speak. “Out of all the people you think I’d try and be with, you’re scared of Robby taking his chances with me?!” She asks in disbelief.

“I’m scared of any man taking a chance with you, Y/N!” Jack says bluntly. “And I wanted to play things safe, and I wanted to wait, and.. Play the ‘long-game’, but fuck the long game if it means losing you.” He states.

“So I’m here. Now. And I’m telling you that if you have me come inside… I’m not leaving till tomorrow morning when I walk down the street to get you a cup of coffee at your favorite deli..” He promises shamelessly.

“Jack, we.. We aren’t young anymore to be doing this. We.. Work together. If this fails-“ He cuts her off.

“I’ll leave the Pitt.” He says simply, mind already made up. Y/N stammers for a good second before shaking off the shock.

“Don’t… Don’t say that..” She mutters.

“This is how I should’ve acted the day you left, Y/N. 24 years ago, I pushed you until you gave up on me. On us. And I didn’t.. I didn’t stop you. I let you walk out. I let you down.” He says quietly.

“And I’m here now, and.. I don’t think it’s too late…” He confesses. “I-I think I can still be the man you need, Snoop.” He whispers desperately, and it makes her eyes well a bit at how eager he sounds to prove himself.

“Just.. Just tell me to come in, baby..” He finally whispers. “Let me show you..” He breathes out.

Y/N is silent for a moment, still in disbelief. She slowly shakes her head. “I can’t, Jack. I can’t risk.. Losing you again..” She mutters. Jack presses his lips together as he looks down for a moment, racking his brain.

This couldn’t be how it all ends…

Without a second thought, he gets on his knees right in front of her door. “What.. What are you doing?” Y/N asks in confusion as she watches.

“I’m not leaving..” He says softly. “You’re not losing me..” He mutters, determined.

“Jack. Get up.” Y/N tries softly, shaking her head. She didn’t want him hurting himself like this..

He stays on his knees though.

Head down and hands folded behind his back.

He shakes his head. “You go, you come back, it won’t matter. Because I’ll still be here.” He says certainly. “Until you tell me I can come in…” He states, rolling his shoulders to prepare fully.

Y/N shakes her head slightly. “You’ve officially lost your mind, Jack…” She notes quietly.

“Lost it the day I let you go. I’m not getting up..” His voice is soft and slightly gruff. “You tell me..” He looks up at her. “You tell me when it’s time to come in..” He whispers.

Y/N blinks a bit, still astonished. She doesn’t know if it’s towards Jack for this big gesture that’s only ever been in the books she reads, or the fact that she could feel an excited flutter in her stomach from how he looked up at her.

With those dark brown eyes that never aged…

“Good night, Jack..” She settles on finally before slowly shutting the front door. She backs away and listens. She waits. Waits with held breath to hear him get up. To hear him leave.

He doesn’t.

She does.

Walking back to the kitchen, she tries to focus on the mask, but even as she mixes it, she wonders.. Is he still there? Did he give up?

With the mask mixture complete, Y/N checks the clock hanging in her kitchen. 15 minutes have passed. She shakes off the feeling and decides to focus on the mask, applying it and then grabbing a drink for herself.

When the timer goes off, she wipes her face and checks the clock again. She can’t help it. She feels a jolt of nervousness hit the pit of her stomach when she sees another 15 minutes had passed..

Biting her bottom lip hard, she slowly approaches the door, not knowing what she wanted more. Because if he was still there… She’d feel guilty. But if he had left.. She’d feel.. Disappointed? Either way, she didn’t have a clue what she truly wanted to see on the other side of that peephole.

Stretching up a bit, she peeks through and gasps softly.

Still there. Same position. Jack Abbot…

She can feel her heart pounding in her ears as she backs away from the door, gripping at her long sleeves in order to keep them at her side. “He’s still there…” She breathes out to herself as she stares at the door for only a second longer before she finally opens it.

Jack is soaked to the bone now.

The rain had drenched him, and yet he looks up at Y/N with a small smile that held no regret. “Can I come inside..?” He breathes out after a moment of them just staring each other.

“I won’t lose you?” Y/N finally asks over the rain as she watches him with some hesitation in her eyes, but it’s a small blotch compared to the oasis of adoration he could see from his spot on the ground.

“Never again.” He whispers. “Y/N I am so sorry. I’m so sorry I couldn’t love you like this back then. But… Baby, I’m gonna love you with everything in me now..” He states as he shakes his head to show he’s more than ready.

“Swear to god?” Y/N mutters.

“Snoop. I swear to you…” Jack whispers, emphasizing that one word. As if she was way more important. It makes her heart skip a beat.

“Jack. You can come inside…” She finally whispers and she has never seen a man move so fast.

Jack gets up quickly, hands already going for her waist as he picks her up. She yelps in surprise at how cold and wet he is, but his lips catch hers before she can bring herself to comment on it. Arms go around his neck as she melts against him instantly. His leg kicks the front door closed as they make out passionately.

Her lungs burned, but her heart raced with an excitement that could only be described as a euphoric high at finally feeling his lips again for the first time in.. So, so long..

Pulling away, Jack speaks between heavy pants. “Now…” He swallows a bit. “Where the hell is that bedroom?” He mumbles as she giggles against his lips that were already going in for round two…

💞Tags/Warnings💞: brief mentions of 9/11, war, PTSD, recovery from war, hurt/comfort, (pls read at your own risk!), exes back to friends to…. Maybe lovers? 🤭, slight fluff, no major age-gap, angst (you’ve been warned lol)

💞Plot💞: In Jack Abbot’s past life, he had it all. Y/N, a future in medicine, and a set of long-term goals. But life had other plans…

💞Characters💞: Jack Abbot x Fem!Reader

💞Title💞: Years

💞A/N💞: I’ve got, babes! I really really hope you enjoy!! 🤭 because I enjoyed writing this..

((Requests are ALWAYS open))

Masterlist

~ September 11th, 2001 ~

“Severe clear skies await us today, Pittsburgh. Just truly some unlimited visibility. The day will feature bright, deep blue skies and virtually no cloud cover with highs reaching the Mid-70s, so if there were any summer plans you thought you couldn’t squeeze in, now’s your chance…”

Y/N smiles to herself as she brushes her teeth, listening in on the loud tv in the living room of this studio apartment that belonged to the man now engrossed in said news broadcast. Rinsing her mouth and then setting her toothbrush in the plastic cup being used as a holder, she decides it’s only right to grab her boyfriend of one year’s attention.

Placing her hands together firmly, she brings her thumbs towards her lips and mimics a loon whistle, making Jack smile as he gets the hint, muting the tv so he can do the bird call back. It’s their thing. Has been since their first ever date. A picnic in the park by their campus that consisted of bird watching.

She giggles as she does the call again. He looks at her lovingly from his spot on the couch. “Come over here!” She jokingly calls out finally, playfully giving up. She’s still in his t-shirt from last night.

“Too lazy..” Jack jokingly complains as he throws himself back on the couch, always a goofball. It makes Y/N roll her eyes as she walks over to the couch.

She was always the one to give in.

Jack smiles proudly at winning this lighthearted game of tug of war for attention, his eyes bright, his brown curls a mess from just waking up about ten or so minutes ago.

“I have to go to the library today.” Y/N notes as he reaches up and grasps her hips to yank her down on top of him.

“Do you really?” He jokingly asks as if that can be debated. Y/N snorts at that, shaking her head at him as her arms wrap around his neck.

“I have to study.” She points out as he hums, nuzzling into the cork of her neck and arms wrapping around her waist.

“You can study here…” He mumbles against her skin.

“You’ll distract me!” She giggles, not falling for that offer again. Last time, she was lucky to have gotten a 90 on her test with how little she got to study.

“Those glasses distract me!” Jack defends as he looks up at her. “I’ll behave this time.” He promises as she playfully covers his puppy dog eyes with her hand.

“No!” She fusses lightheartedly, not wanting to give in. He laughs and moves them effortlessly so he’s now on top of her.

“No! No!” Y/N playfully cries out through laughter as Jack grabs her wrists to pin. “Not the eyes!” She giggles, knowing she’ll give in if she looks at him.

“Look at me! Look at my eyes!” Jack jokingly orders dramatically as they play fight on the couch. “Come on, Snoop!” He laughs as she turns her face away. There it was. Her dear nickname.

Snoop.

As in Snoopy.

God he was a dork, but she had to stay strong!

The laughter is cut short though with a sharp gasp as Y/N catches the scene playing on the tv screen. Jack stops his tickling and play fighting when he sees the look of horror on her face. He opens his mouth to speak but instinctively follows her eyes, freezing up too as he sees the chaos unfolding right now.

“Oh my god..” Y/N whispers as Jack sits up more, unmuting the tv now. She sits up too and the news reports everything that’s known so far. She shakes her head.

“Those people..” She breathes out in horror before a new thought sinks into her heart like a red hot dagger. She slowly looks at her military boyfriend.

“Jack. What does this mean?” She breathes out as he stays quiet, the question also sitting hard on his shoulders. His jaw clenches.

“Jack, what does this mean?!” She repeats, louder.

* * *

~ December 13th, 2001 ~

Ring.

Ring.

Ring.

Y/N stirs awake, confused and annoyed by the home phone. Sitting up in bed, she grabs the telephone without checking caller ID. Hell, she doesn’t even check what time it is. She knows it can be anything from Jack calling her on base to a friend who drunkenly needs a ride home from the bar. It’s Saturday night after all, and all Y/N knows now is life indoors. She didn’t wanna miss a phone call from Jack. Or a letter either. If it wasn’t class, she wasn’t going.

“Hello?” She mumbles, voice coming out gruffer than she intended.

“Ms. Y/L/N?” A man asks on the other end to clarify. Y/N pauses at the formal tone. A lump begins to form in her throat.

No.

“Yes..” She whispers.

“This is Liaison Officer Johnson-“ Y/N’s heart sinks.

“No.” She says fast as she throws the phone on the bed like it burned her palm. If she didn’t pick it back up… If she didn’t listen to what this man had to say… Maybe it wouldn’t be real. Maybe it wouldn’t be true. She shakes as she gets out of bed, pacing. She could hear the muffled sounds of a deep voice on the phone laid on the bed she’d shared with Jack just two months ago before he had to ship out.

It was like a demon taunting her.

She slowly moves closer to the phone, heart pounding in her chest as she can make out only a few words. ‘Hospital’ and ‘alive’ are the ones that make her swallow her fear and snatch the phone back up.

“What happened?” She whispers, voice squeezing out of her tight throat as tears spill over.

*

*

*

That night is a blur.

One filled with talking to military officers and case managers alike, but all she can stare at is the love of her life, lying in a hospital bed, tubes and wires everywhere.

The murmurs of a nurse pulls her back to her reality. It’s 4am, and she’s in a hospital room. It’s December 13th, 2001 at 4am… And she’s in a hospital room. Watching machines beep and wheeze as snow falls beyond the bed and pass the fifth floor window.

It’s like she’s in some sick snow globe.

“What?” She whispers, voice thick with exhaustion. She could’ve sworn she’d already answered any and all questions hours ago.

She’d heard the story from officials. A landmine. It had been a landmine. And the sound of a low, breathy, loon whistle is what drew attention to him as he laid there.

Using his last moments of consciousness to make their noise.

“I said your partner is a hero.” The nurse repeats quietly, and Y/N just stares at her. An icy anger spreads through her veins as she lets the words cut into her skin. The nurse notices the twinge in her jaw, quietly apologizing before walking out.

Y/N wasn’t mad at the fact that Jack was seen as a hero. He is a hero. But he’s a hero in a fight that has nothing to do with him..

* * *

~ December 20th, 2001 ~

“I can do it.”

The phrase has left Y/N’s mouth more times than she can count. It’s been her go to phrase for seven whole days now.

Feedings? Y/N can do it.

Sponge baths? Y/N can do it.

Mental stimulations? Y/N can do it.

The staff had given up on trying to fight her on it. Those four words weren’t an offer. A suggestion.

No, they were a warning.

‘Back away, I’ll do it.’

With the speed and efficiency of a woman who has done this before, Y/N slowly stands from the chair that’s been her new home since December 13th..

Sponge bath time.

She’s done this every day. Usually around the same time. She had it all down to a tee now. She could do this on autopilot. And she has. She can recite what’s needed forward and backwards and she’s sure that even drunk off her ass, she won’t ever forget it.

To wash your love one, you’ll need 2 wash basins, mild soap, several washcloths, and at least 2 to 3 towels. Don’t forget the waterproof bed pads either, or the moisturizer. Y/N used a personal favorite. It smells of cinnamon and reminds her of all those times she’d fall asleep with her head on his chest.

Y/N tests the water without soap to make sure it’s warm enough before she begins with his face first. She’d given him a shave just yesterday, always favoring his smooth skin rather than the stubble. She recalls the playful arguments about it where Jack would complain about wanting to see how much he could grow. But he always shaved for her anyways.

As the rag rubs tenderly across his upper cheek, avoiding his eyes, she sees it. It makes her freeze. Had she finally lost it? Slowly, she wipes his other cheek. There! There it was again. A twitch. A twitch of his nose. Ever so slight but still a sign that he could feel the wet rag on his face.

His eyes move a bit from behind his eyelids, slowly squeezing as he begins to cough, the tubes down his throat choking him. Y/N gets up so fast from the edge of the bed that she nearly falls to the floor.

She’s quick to run out into the hallway, finding the nurses station and waving them over as jumbled words leave her mouth. The machines beeping faster helped prove her point. This wasn’t a drill. This was her boyfriend.

Back and alert..

The nightmare was over…

* * *

~ December 31st, 2001 ~

The celebration is somber, sure, but it is still had.

Live footage of New York City is played on the hospital room tv that’s in the corner of the private room. Sat on the edge of the hospital bed, Y/N’s tender kisses find any space they can make their presence known as Jack sits there, eyes shut in a moment of silent peace.

Cheeks, forehead, nose, chin. Repeat. Cheeks, forehead, nose, chin. Repeat.

Her hand stays on the back of his neck as she focuses solely on how every part of his face felt against her lips. She wanted it now burned into her frontal lobe. His hand twitches as he places it on her hip to keep her close. He’d be let out tomorrow morning, yet he was still quiet over how he felt about that.

Jack had grown up in the foster care system. No family was around to really help them with all that needed to be prepped for his return home. So Y/N used any time he was in therapy, physical or mental, to work with the case managers in the military and the hospital to make sure the apartment was up to standard. Sure, friends had come by too. The occasional family member on Y/N’s side called to check in.

But Jack and Y/N were entering the new year alone…

The tv had been muted. No point in hearing strangers countdown when all she wanted was to focus on Jack’s breathing. With a soft sigh, she rests her head on his shoulder, fingers playing with the curls at the nape of his neck. Outside in the hallway, celebration erupts and Y/N pretends to not notice how Jack’s shoulders jolt slightly when the nurses pop their tiny streamers..

Jack and Y/N were entering the near year alone. But this wasn’t.. Her Jack…

* * *

~ March 20th, 2002 ~

“I got called while I was in class…”

Y/N tries to keep her voice light as Jack focuses solely on using his crutches to walk himself to the couch. He grunts softly as a sign for her to continue as she focuses on cooking.

“You missed your therapy session.” She says.

“I didn’t have physical therapy this Monday.” He mumbles, deciding on playing dumb instead of facing the truth. He didn’t wanna go back to that damn office. He didn’t wanna think about his time overseas, and every time he sat down with Dr. Marcus, that’s all he wanted to discuss.

“Your psychologist appointment, Jack. You missed the session. Again.” Y/N says, voice a bit firmer now. Jack plops himself on the couch, wincing. The phantom pains were the hardest part of all of this.

Actually, the hardest part was whenever he’d wake up soaked in a cold sweat believing he was still lying on that forest floor, thinking he’d never get to see Y/N again.

“I couldn’t make it. I don’t know why they call you anyways..” Jack states finally.

“Because I’m on all your paperwork, and Dr. Marcus is worried about you..” Y/N begins.

“Oh come on…” Jack shakes his head.

“He’s concerned! He has every right to be!” Y/N defends over Jack’s growing voice.

“It’s bullshit!” Jack argues bluntly.

“He thinks you’re not getting better, Jack. And.. He’s got me thinking that too-“

“He gets paid either way, Y/N! Me being on his couch or not makes no damn difference! Now he’s got you all paranoid!”

“It’s not just him!”

“It is. He’s bothering you, and you’re letting him. It’s all a load of crap!”

“Where are your sleeping pills?”

She didn’t mean to blurt out the question, but.. it’s now heavy in the air. Refusing to be ignored, and for a split second, Y/N wants to go back on it. Against her better judgment, she stares Jack down as he sits on the couch of their studio apartment.

“What?” He asks, eyes averting and face growing guilty in a way to show he had, in fact, heard her. He just didn’t want to answer the question.

“Your sleeping pills. Where are they, Jack?” Y/N asks again, quieter now.

“I don’t need em.” Jack mutters with a shrug that tries to come off as casual but is clearly forced. He looks away and instead focuses on his crutches, trying to balance them by the arm of the couch so they were next to him.

“So where did you put them?” Y/N asks, not letting this go.

“I don’t know.”

“Jack.”

“I don’t know, Y/N!” He snaps a bit. “They just… I didn’t need em.” He lands on the same excuse.

Y/N watches him for a moment. The shell of the man she loves. So close to being her Jack. But so far gone.

Maybe her Jack was still in that forest…

“You flushed them.” She finally says, showing she knows the truth. Jack stays staring at his crutches, nervously picking at the top of his prosthetic as a little habit he’d picked up on in the hospital.

“I heard you last night.” She confesses. She’d heard the splash of the pills hitting the water. The toilet flushing them down. “Those are to help you sleep.” She says.

“I don’t need sleep..” Jack finally speaks, tone stiff.

“You don’t need sleep…” Y/N mutters it back as if testing that line on her tongue.

Tastes bitter.

“You don’t need sleep, you don’t need Dr. Marcus..” Y/N sighs as she turns back to her chopping board.

“What do you need, Jack?” She finally whispers as she turns to look at him from over her shoulder, her hair in her face. Jack can’t bring himself to look back at her.

Not right now.

Not like this.

Not when he can see the exhaustion clear on her face every single day. Juggling both med school and his needs without letting it ever spill over. And that was the problem. Because Jack Abbot couldn’t look at the love of his life… Without feeling like she was looking through him..

“I’ll tell you what I don’t need.” He mutters, voice rough. “A live-in nurse instead of a girlfriend. A therapist to bother me to go see a therapist.” He complains as she watches him, unshed tears clear in her eyes. That’s the one thing about Y/N that first stunned Jack. She could get misty eyed, sure. But she’d never let the tears fall. Her head would always be held high.

“I don’t need to wake up to a thousand questions everyday.” He continues, letting it all out now.

“‘How are you feeling?’, ‘what are you thinking?’..” He lists. “‘How’s your leg?’.”

That was the worst of the questions.

“Every fucking day it’s about the leg! How’s the leg, rest the leg, stretch the leg..” He argues as Y/N watches it all come crashing in on him.

“Can you stop asking about the fucking leg?! It’s a leg!” Jack snaps without meaning to. He freezes as he hears the echo of his voice ring throughout the modest studio apartment.

A cruel reminder of what he’d just done. Like his words repeated back to him.

He stares at Y/N now, feeling ashamed as he puts his hands on his mouth as if at a loss of words. He blinks a bit and shakes his head, but Y/N has already moved from the kitchen and over to the living room.

“I’m sor…” Jack gasps in a bit, voice choked up as he feels his chest tighten with mortification. Y/N stands in front of him as he rests his head against her stomach. “Sorry…” He pants out. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry..” He manages to wheeze out as she runs her fingers through his hair while his arms wrap tightly around her hips to hold her body in place in front of him.

As Y/N focuses entirely on tangling her fingers through Jack’s curls, she realizes bitterly.. That he was right. He didn’t need a nurse or a therapist. He needed his girlfriend.

And he needed time.

* * *

~ April 7th, 2005 ~

When Y/N had first heard the name ‘Adeline Parks’, it was seven months after she’d packed a bag and left Jack’s apartment to stay with her sister.

Mutual friends had tried hiding it at first, but during a hang out with a friend of a friend, it had slipped out due to no one warning that friend how major this news was.

Maybe Y/N had been childish to think Jack would reach out when he was ready. Maybe she shouldn’t have written him a letter without specifying that she still wanted him only. That she still wore the promise ring on a silver chain around her neck that he’d given to her on their six month anniversary. He’d won it in a claw machine.

Against their better judgement, and persistent warnings, Y/N made their mutual friends always share any and all big news between Jack and his new paramour.

And when Robby told her about the impromptu wedding… She knew she had to see Jack.

She just didn’t know why…

She didn’t know what she was doing here.

The house was decorated nicely. The wedding intended to be small and intimate. Being done in the backyard of Adeline’s parents’ home in upstate Pennsylvania. It had been about a three hour drive, but Y/N had been buzzing with anxiety and hit the road before the sun was even out over the horizon.

She had followed the caterers in through the back door through the kitchen and had now snuck upstairs. She didn’t know where Jack could be, but she knew he had to be in one of these five bedrooms. Hesitantly, she put her hands together tightly, put her thumbs close to her lips and blew. A low loon bird whistle travels through the hallway. With bated breath, she waited. Hoped. And then…

From the last door at the very end of the hallway came a low bird call back.

Jack.

Quickly, she rushed towards the door, pushing it open and freezing in the doorway as she took him in.

Jack Abbot.

In a very classy suit. His tie was still hanging loosely over his shoulders as he fully faced her, paling at the sight. That made two of them.

“Y/N…” Jack breathes out, stunned that she was in fact standing in front of him. She doesn’t move for a moment before finally realizing where she is and who she’s with. She swallows a bit, stepping into the room to close the door behind them.

Trying to shut out reality.

“I didn’t even get to say goodbye…” Y/N mutters finally, voice trying to remain playful, but the tears are already building as Jack’s shoulders slump at the truth.

They didn’t get a goodbye…

“What are you doing here, Snoop?” He finally asks, voice quiet as he watches her shift from one leg to the other. Something she does when she’s at a loss for words.

“I just…” The tears begin to seep down her cheeks without her consent. “I wanted to see if it was real.” She admits quietly. Jack looks down, guilt crossing his face as he listens to her try to hold back a sob, her voice quivering.

“A-And…” She takes a quick deep breath to regain some composure. “I think I wanted to… Talk you out of it?” She mumbles, as if even she doesn’t know for sure.

Jack opens his mouth to speak, but she’s quick to talk over him. “W-Which I can see now is… selfish.” She assures despite her quivering bottom lip.

Y/N eyes him up and down as she continues speaking after another deep breath in. “You’re here, and you’re ready, and you’re… You’re in a suit-“ Y/N’s voice gets caught in her throat as she realizes that minor detail.

Jack Abbot. A man who used to joke he’d rather die than wear a suit, who she’d fuss and fight with just to wear a button down.. That man was now in a suit.

“You’re in a suit.” She breathes out. Jack watches her with soft eyes, realizing too how that fact is heavy on both.

“How do I look?” He tries quietly, his eyes also tearing up a bit. Y/N hums softly. Tenderly, as she holds herself.

“You look good, Jack. I knew you’d always look good..” She admits quietly as she puts on a proud smile through the tears, nodding fast. Jack’s lip twitches into a sad smile before he steps closer..

“Snoop…” He whispers. There’s that nickname again.

“I just wanted to see you.” Y/N says quickly and simply as she steps back. “But I.. But, Jack, I don’t.. I don’t wanna ruin today. For you, so..” She pauses to take another deep breath to try and calm herself down. “So I should go.” She tries as she motions towards the bedroom door from over her shoulder.

“Y/N.” Jack tries again, but he doesn’t say much after that. He can’t say much after that. He doesn’t know what to say.

“I won’t ruin today for you, Jack. Not if you’re happy..” She whispers before feeling her heart ache. “Are you?” She asks quietly. Morbid curiosity getting the better of her.

Jack is silent as he watches her with soft eyes. He was different. His stance was different, his body was different. He had a beard growing now. She guessed Adeline liked his stubble…

“Are you happy, Jack..?” She repeats, voice barely audible. She doesn’t know why. Maybe it was a last ditch attempt at seeing if this was actually over. But he just stares at her.

She slowly nods, taking that as answer enough. She rubs her hands on her jeans and awkwardly turns towards the door before pausing yet again, turning her head to face him over her shoulder.

“Is she better?”

The silence that follows that question is sickening for Y/N. It’s too loud for her liking. She nods slowly and turns back to the door, turning the knob to leave.

“She doesn’t ask.” Jack finally answers, voice gruff with emotion. “About the leg.”

Y/N stops her movements for only a second before she leaves the room, shutting the door behind her. She leans against it for a moment, just to stop her head from spinning. She straightens up and then starts to walk back towards the stairs when she hears it.

“Psst.”

She slows her movements and turns her head, freezing as she sees her.

Adeline Parks.

The bride herself.

Adeline smiles brightly, peeking out from the crack of her old bedroom door that’s still painted the kind of pink a teenage girl would love. “How’s Jack?” She asks, blue eyes twinkling with excitement.

Y/N stares at her for a moment, mouth dry before she nods. “He’s good. Ready.” She whispers.

Adeline squeals excitedly at the news, sighing in relief with a giggle, hand resting on her chest over her heart. She then blushes as if remembering Y/N is still standing in front of her. “Oh. I’m sorry.” She chuckles as she fixes her hair a bit.

“Adeline.” She introduces herself, holding out her hand after opening the door a bit wider to officially greet her. She’s in a strapless, mermaid style wedding dress.

Y/N moves without thought, her hand slipping into Adeline’s, shaking hands formally. “Are you.. One of Jack’s friends?” The blushing bride asks curiously as they slowly release each other. Y/N nods a bit.

“Yeah. Something like that..” She mutters before taking a deep breath to suck down any emotion. “I’m not staying. I just.. I wanted to wish him luck..” She continues quietly. Adeline frowns softly at that.

“Did we forget to invite you? I’m so sorry. We can make room.” She tries politely, and Y/N shakes her head quickly.

Dear god, no.

“No, no. Really. I… Can’t stay.” Y/N says again, voice slightly tense as Adeline nods slowly, deciding not to push it. Y/N steps towards the stairs to leave, and then pauses yet again.

“Can I… Can you promise me something?” She asks Adeline. The blue eyed woman corks her head curiously before slowly nodding for her to continue.

“Can you just… Can you promise to just love him?” Y/N finally asks quietly. “Love him with just.. With just your whole heart?” She whispers.

Adeline smiles softly, humor and confusion clear on her face, but she still nods. “That’s the plan.” She states gently.

Y/N watches her with a mix of pain and gratitude, nodding slowly as she mouths a ‘thank you’.

Without another word, she leaves down the stairs…

* * *

~ August 7th, 2026 ~

“Holy crap..” Robby whispers as Y/N steps into the Pitt, fanning herself with a random flyer she’d taken from the front lobby of the hospital. “Either I need new glasses, or… Dr. Y/N has finally made her way back home…” He jokes as she smiles softly, moving over to hug her old friend.

“You two know each other?” Dana asks from the nurses station, genuinely curious.

“Oh yeah, before he was driving you all nuts, he was my reliable study partner..” Y/N teases a bit as she pulls back.

“One of her reliable study partners..” Robby corrects without a second thought. Y/N doesn’t have to question who the other one could be. She knew. The other reliable study partner had basically run her out of Pittsburgh..

Well, to be fair, she’d done that herself.

She needed Jack to stay in the past though, and it had seemed to work just fine. Fine enough for her to heal while out there and then take up a position here for night shift.

PTMC wasn’t the best hospital out there. In fact, Y/N had chosen this position over a New York City job offer strictly because she felt like it was time to just go home.

“I know you’re running this ship short staffed..” Y/N says gently as Robby sighs heavily as if that’s an understatement.

“I’m glad you got the position. Dr. Parker Ellis had to move off of night shift and on to day shift just to help..” Robby mutters as Y/N nods slowly. She’d only been briefed about the hospital being short staffed. How Gloria was desperate for a new hire and relieved for Y/N’s application.

“Are you.. Sure you’re gonna be okay working here though?” Robby finally asks, voice softer as the two walk off towards the lockers so he could show her where her things go before every shift.

“Hey, this hospital may be low on funding and short-staffed, but I’m a big girl, Robby. I can handle it.” She chuckles as they get to an empty locker. She begins opening it.

“Oh, I know you are..” He chuckles before continuing. “I meant can you handle working with Jack.” He clarifies softly.

Her hand twitches on the handle of the locker. When moving back to Pittsburgh, Y/N had let the thought cross her mind. What if she bumped into him again. At a store or coffee shop. What would she say, how world she carry herself. But the universe was very funny for making him her coworker!

She’d lost tabs on Jack a year into moving away from Pittsburgh and away from any mutual friends. She couldn’t hear about him anymore. She focused on finishing school and her residency instead.

“I… Did not know that..” Y/N finally says slowly, keeping a mature composure about her. Robby watches her closely as she slowly opens her locker.

“It’s been 21 years, Robby..” She notes gently as she realizes the look he’s giving her. “I think enough time has passed.” She assures jokingly, but a small part of her wants to laugh out loud.

How much time can truly wash away a lover?

Robby nods, not seeing through her act as he squeezes her shoulder. “I’m glad you’re here. That you’re back for good. Pittsburgh was barely standing without you..” He jokes quietly as she focuses on the reunion with her old friend.

She’d deal with Jack when she got to that point…

In other words… She’d avoid being anywhere near him for as long as possible..

*

*

*

When Jack Abbot had first heard the words ‘Doctor’ and ‘Y/N’, he’d thought for sure he’d misheard Shen somehow. But then it sunk into the pit of his stomach.

Was she back?

He’d spent a good few hours of his night shift trying to find her for himself, just barely missing her most moments. It was like she was haunting this damn ED. Which was a step up from how she usually just haunted him.

He had watched a ghost documentary once that said the more you think about a person, the more power you feed their spirit to stay tethered to you. To haunt you. He’d found it interesting enough. Maybe he could think of Adeline at least once everyday. It’d keep her around longer. But then he truly thought about it. Because whereas he thought of Adeline once a day for the past ten years…

He thought about Y/N Y/L/N at least three times a day.. For the past 24 years..

So which ghost had more strength to haunt him? Maybe the woman he was now trying to find in every corner of this damn ED..

It’s 11pm when he finally takes a breather in a random hospital room. He needs it, honestly. Jack feeling so out of sorts was something he hasn’t felt in years. He had come to accept life, and death, and any trails and tribulations as apart of being alive. And had found balance. Between the ugly and the beautiful.

Sure, most days were harder than others. But Jack’s therapist had taught him a cooping technic that he used a lot. Name one ugly thing that happened today, then one beautiful thing. Because the universe will usually send you both.

So… Ugly thing. Okay. His ex was now his coworker.

Beautiful thing. Okay.

Jack pauses as only one thought comes to mind.

‘Y/N is back..’

He sighs softly, sitting on the edge of the hospital bed when the door opens. “There’s a free room right here…” Her voice stops along with her movements. She stares at Jack like a deer in headlights for only a moment. Then she blinks away the look, wanting to come off more.. Poised.

“Jack..” She whispers as if accepting this face to face. His eyes soften without any intention to do so.

“Snoop.” He says back.

“It’s been awhile…” She tries to chuckle as he stands from the bed. He nods back, solemnly.

“That it has..” He agrees. “You look good, Snoop. Real good.” He compliments gently as he debates on hugging her or staying these three feet apart.

Y/N smiles sheepishly. “Been staying active. Guess you can say the same?” She asks, nodding to the very obvious muscles under his uniform. Jack looks down at his body, smirking a bit.

“These old things?” He jokes, making her chuckle a bit. It takes the edge off.

A little bit.

“How um… How’s life been? How’s.. Adeline?” Y/N asks, just wanting to keep the conversation going mostly. Even if it turned into one consisting of his marriage and if he had kids.

“Life’s been… Life.” Jack nods certainly at that overview on it. “And Adeline is… She passed.” He continues gently. Y/N stiffens at that.

“Jack, I’m so sorry.” She whispers. It’s the first thing to leave her mouth before she’s even fully processed it. Jack smiles a bit at the genuine sadness of her tone.

She still had that big heart.

“Don’t be. Happened.. In 2010. We saw it coming, got to prepare for it. Not everybody has that.” He nods like a man who’s accepted this part of his life. Y/N smiles a bit at his newfound wisdom.

“What about you?” Jack asks after a beat of silence, eyes examining her hands himself as they rest folded in front of her. He can’t see a ring. It’s relieving in probably the most confusing way possible.

“Oh, uh-“ Y/N is cut off by the hospital room door opening behind her.

“We could use all hands on this one. Car accident. Got five people coming in at once.” Lena says before running back out. That jolts both of them back into work mode. With one more glance, Y/N is first to leave the room…

* * *

~ August 8th, 2026 ~

Jack paces the ambulance bay with breathing exercises coming in handy. It’s 1am and he was debating just calling it a night. Five patients came in, five were saved. Yet one would need a prosthetic, and those cases were still sore for Jack.

The automated doors sound from behind him, making him glance over his shoulder. Y/N sighs a bit as she leans against a pillar, clearly also needing air. Jack nods at her. “You did good in there..” He says, gruffly. The tension between them was back. Maybe because they were watching their past play out in front of them, their roles given to a young college couple.

Y/N nods slowly. “Finished speaking to Patient three’s girlfriend. She’s staying with him upstairs. Gonna speak with the prosthetist in the morning…” She mumbles gently as Jack nods, rubbing his chin a bit.

“Think they’ll be okay?” Jack asks after a moment of just listening to the city’s noises and the soft wind blowing. Y/N lets the question sit in the air for so long, Jack wonders if she even heard him.

“Is it possible?” She finally answers quietly. Maybe it’s the case, the exhaustion, the history. But those words leave her mouth and stab through Jack’s somberness like an hot iron rod.

Jack nods slowly, a part of him wanting to just accept that as a statement and move past it, but he shakes his head instead, turning to face her.

“Could we have?” He asks, voice more curious than anything. It was just one of life’s biggest mysteries to him..

Y/N straightens up her stance as he crosses his arms. “If you hadn’t… If you hadn’t left.” He continues with a sheepish shrug.

Y/N pauses at that. “Left?” She asks quietly. As if he hadn’t pushed her to that point.

“Yeah. Left.” Jack says softly, as if not understanding the heaviness of that word. “Because you couldn’t handle me. Because you were scared..-“ Y/N laughs humorlessly at that.

“I could handle you, Jack.” She says shortly, calmly. “I could.” She repeats with a resiliently nod. Jack frowns softly as he watches her.

“And I wanted to. And you took that from me.” She states as it spills out now. “You did.” She says as she shakes her head.

Jack looks down, realizing this is always going to be a sensitive topic for them. He feels ashamed. For even bringing it up. He opens his mouth, but she continues on.

“You don’t know half the things I could’ve handled.” She states quietly. “For you…” She adds, emphasizing that one word. ‘You’.

For You.

As if every pain and tear and ugly moment would’ve been worth it. Because she’d have him.

Jack stares at her with soft eyes as she shakes her head in astonishment. Not at him. But the fact that she still means that with her whole chest.

Still.

After 24 years.

“You have no idea… The things I could’ve handled, Jack…” She finally ends on before turning to leave.

“Maybe I didn’t want to find out...” He finally admits out loud. It stops her movements, but she doesn’t face him. “Maybe I knew you deserved better.” He says as she stands with her back to him, still silent.

“I’m so sorry.” He finally says. Those words have been in his chest since he had turned around to find her standing in his room on his wedding day.

He was just finally man enough to say them.

Without another word, Y/N heads back inside, leaving Jack to be comforted by the sounds of the city life happening around them…

*

*

*

The sun is welcoming on Jack’s face.

He takes a moment to breathe in the scent of the freshly cut grass as he stands out front of the hospital. A new beautiful thing to add to his list. He’d survived the night at the expense of not being alone with Y/N again. The long stares though showed there was more that needed to be said. But the confrontation in the ambulance bay had let some of the pressure out.

He had handed over his patients and promised to text Robby later about his first shift with the woman who knew him before he’d shed his old skin. Now, it was just a matter of walking back to his apartment and calling it a day until 7pm again.

With one more deep breath, he fixes the strap over his shoulder and takes one step forward when a sound cuts through the cars and early morning chatter of the city.

A bird whistle.

A loon bird whistle.

Soft and precise. A request for attention. A request to wait.

It stops him in his tracks instantly, a small smile playing faintly on his lips as he positions his hands to do the whistle back..

!!The End!!

And thank you for 510

followers!!

Bucky appeared in your field of vision, standing over you. He was yelling something at you in between each shot he fired at the agents encroaching. You couldn’t make it out over the ringing in your ears.

He looked panicked.

Bucky never looked panicked.

You struggled to sit up, wanting to help, to be back fighting at his side.

A violent wash of pain finally ripped through your stomach. You doubled over, fighting the urge to vomit as your vision blurred.

But it didn’t need to be in focus to see the large pool of blood spreading from a circular puncture in your suit just below your ribs. Oh.

Bucky’s voice was muddied, but it finally broke through the cacophony in your head. “Baby, it’s okay, it’s–” He grimaced at his empty clip and drew a knife from his belt. “You’re gonna be fine,” he yelled over the chaos surrounding the two of you. “I’m gonna get you…” He trailed off as he turned back to face the crowd, realizing he was suddenly yelling over near silence. “...out of here,” he finished hesitantly.

You stifled a groan as you forced yourself into a sitting position, eyes flicking nervously around the room at the clusters of Hydra agents who stood stoically, having ceased fire without warning.

“The wolf has found himself a sheep to guard,” a voice drawled from the other side of the room.

You shivered as footsteps clicked slowly, evenly, across the cool floor, echoing off the concrete walls. “Not very impressive is she, Soldat? Taken down with one shot,” the voice continued.

Bucky crouched in front of you, left arm extended behind him to shield as much of you as possible.

You put a shaking hand on the back of his jacket, the barest bit of reassurance you could manage.

“Nobody fucking touches her!” Bucky snarled.

“Oh, they won’t,” the voice answered coolly, and finally you were able to zero in on its source as a tall, blonde woman stepped out from behind one of the Hydra soldiers. “They’re curious, too.”

“Who the fuck are you?” you asked weakly. Bucky winced, but you couldn’t tell if it was at the boldness of your question or the strain in your voice.

“No one of consequence,” she said with a smile, stepping closer, apparently unconcerned by the blade in Bucky’s hand or the whirring of his metal arm as his fist clenched. “Just another in the long line of handlers for your boyfriend here.”

It was your turn to snarl, and it was only another wave of stabbing pain that washed over you and beaded sweat across your forehead that stopped you from charging her.

You turned your head to the side, coughing up bile that burned along your throat and the back of your tongue. Bucky risked a glance back at you, and the feral anger in his eyes softened immediately when they fell on yours.

“Quite the warrior, isn’t she?” the woman mocked. “Won’t be much of a fight for you. Such a shame.” She clicked her tongue, fixing her stare on you. “Not to worry, dear,” she crooned. “This won’t take long.”

“If you think I’m going to–” Bucky started, his voice low and even, but she cut him off.

“Oh, yes, I know all about your work with the princess,” she said dismissively, scratching at a fleck of blood on the back of her hand.

“Then what do you want?”

She laughed coldly, her eyes still on her hands. “It doesn’t matter what I want. As I said, I’m no one of consequence. ‘Cut off one head’ and all that. But Hydra… Hydra wants its asset back, and well…” She looked up, a sickening smile on her face. “It’s a shame Princess Shuri didn’t quite finish her project on you, isn’t it?”

Your blood ran cold, and Bucky stiffened in front of you.

“God knows why you’d be out in the field with that little chink in your armor. Did you think the little PR ‘leaks’ your team put out were enough to convince us?”

Your heart sank clear into your stomach, and you fought another wave of nausea building. Bucky was only on this mission because of you.

It was your first mission back after a civilian hostage situation that had ended badly. It’d taken several months for you to be ready to be back in the field again.

You’d held each other through your respective nightmares. Sparred into the early hours of the morning until you ended up tangled together on the mats.

And somehow he’d talked his way onto this mission, despite your assurances that you’d be fine and protests that this was a terrible idea.

You’d never so regretted being right.

“You know what happens next, don’t you?” the blonde woman purred. “Do you want to say your goodbyes?”

Bucky charged towards her with a roar, but stopped cold in his tracks as every soldier set their aim on you. You flinched at the clicking of dozens of guns cocking with you in their scopes.

“I gave you a chance,” she shrugged. “Желание.”

Bucky turned to face you, panic clouding his eyes. “Baby, I–”

“Ржавый.”

He doubled over in front of you, covering his ears in an effort you knew was futile. Tears streamed down your cheeks. You didn’t know when you’d started crying, but you swiped furiously at them before reaching towards him.

“Семнадцать.”

“Bucky,” you pleaded, cupping his face between your hands. “Bucky, listen to me.”

“Рассвет.”

His eyes were screwed shut. You ran shaking fingertips along his jaw, coaxing him to open them. “Honey, please listen to me. Whatever happens, its–”

“Печь.”

“It’s okay,” you choked, blood painting the edges of your lips. “It’s not you. I know it’s not you,” you promised.

“Девять.”

His eyes flew open, and you stifled a cry. He looked petrified. Not even the terror of his nightmares had elicited a look like that.

“Bucky, it’s–”

“I can’t hurt you,” he sobbed, his hands gripping your wrists.

“Добросердечный.”

“You’re not,” you soothed, your breaths growing shallow in an effort to control the waver in your voice. “It’s not you.”

You pulled him gently until he laid his head in your lap, his knees to his chest, his hands still clamped tightly over his ears. A groan sat low in your chest at the pressure on your wound, but you couldn’t have cared less. You laid your head on his shoulder and wrapped your arms tightly around him.

You almost wished you would bleed out before she finished reciting.

“Возвращение на Родину.”

His body trembled against you. You ran your fingers gently through his hair, silent tears dampening his vest.

“Один.”

You pressed a kiss to the back of his head. “I love you, James Barnes,” you whispered.

“Товарный вагон.”

The trembling stopped instantly. He was so still you weren’t sure if he was breathing.

“Bucky?” you breathed. No answer.

The blonde woman took a step back. “Soldat?” she called, and you thought you could hear a trace of nervousness in her voice.

Bucky sat up so sharply it knocked you back, and the woman flinched. He remained kneeling next to you, his head down.

“Я готов отвечить,” he said, his eyes finally meeting yours. They were cold, unlike you’d ever seen them, and you weren’t sure if it was his stare or the blood seeping out of you that chilled you to the bone.

The woman grinned. “Come here.”

Bucky rose without hesitation and walked slowly towards his new captor. His boots tracked your blood across the concrete, a trail of crimson footprints that matched the emblems stamped on the uniforms of the soldiers surrounding you.

Your stomach lurched with every silent step he took. He stopped in front of her, hands behind his back.

“Look at you,” the woman breathed. She brushed her fingertips under his chin, inclining his head. He stared past her, seemingly unphased.

You spat more bile onto the concrete next to you. Your fingers were starting to lose feeling.

“Welcome back, Soldat.” She looked over at you. “You’ve done Hydra a great service by drawing him out into the open, little sheep. We were thrilled to hear of your lowkey little trial run to ‘get back out there.’ Much longer with the princess and he would’ve been lost to us.”

A weak “Fuck you” was all you could manage as you slumped fully to the ground. Tears streamed down your temples, choking your shallow breaths. How could you have let this happen to him?

Bucky, whose screams from Hydra’s haunting torments had drawn you to his room often enough that one night you’d just stayed. Bucky, who took every mission combatting Hydra that he could get cleared for to help bury the guilt in his chest. Bucky, your love, who’s greatest fear was being realized before him.

Part of you knew there would have been no stopping him from coming with you. He was such a stubborn ass, especially when it came to you.

But that was easy to forget as you watched him stand meekly at her side, unflinching as she poked and prodded at him, a shell of the man you loved. And it was your fault.

“Let’s clean up some loose ends, shall we?” she grinned.

You squeezed your eyes shut. You didn’t want to see his eyes when he obeyed.

“Kill her.”

Silence followed the echoes of her command. You braced yourself, knowing the Winter Soldier stalked his prey silently.

“Soldat, I said–”

There was a high-pitched yelp, and your eyes shot open. Bucky’s metal hand was around the woman’s throat, pure malice in his eyes.

“Никто, блять, ее не трогает,” he hissed, snapping her neck without a second thought.

She crumpled to the ground, and there was a moment’s pause as he assessed the room and the weapons aimed at you, hatred in his eyes.

A panicked Hydra agent swung his gun wildly towards Bucky, but he was on the ground before you could scream.

The rest of the soldiers began to open fire on him, and you scrambled back towards the wall as quickly as you could, soft cries leaving you as you jostled your abdomen.

It took mere seconds for Bucky to clear a path to you, but the closer he got, the more you were certain it wasn’t Bucky. You weren’t sure why he was protecting you–maybe some development from Shuri’s work–but this was the Soldier. There was no trace of the man you loved in those cold, blue eyes.

You sat helplessly, fighting to keep conscious, as the Soldier tore through the assailants with ease, bullets deflecting off his metal arm or lodging harmlessly in his Kevlar. Bones snapped, skin sliced and stabbed, bodies felled. The footprints he’d left moments ago were now indistinguishable in his bloody wake.

When the last agent dropped to the ground, you waited silently. You had no idea if he considered you to be a threat.

The Soldier turned to face you, reassuming the position he’d initially taken next to the blonde woman.

“Bucky?” you asked quietly. He didn’t respond.

You winced. “Soldat?” He inclined his head towards you, an indication of attention. “C’mere please,” you said weakly before a cough overtook you. Blood dripped from your lips.

The Soldier approached and knelt at your side. There was a flicker of concern in his eyes as he took in the blood on your face. He started to reach for you before flinching violently and planting his hands on his thighs.

“Bucky,” you pleaded. “I need you.” You reached hesitantly for his face, and when he didn’t respond, you rested your hand gently on his cheek. Confusion clouded his eyes, and you weren’t sure whether that was progress.

“You’re James Buchanan Barnes,” you said, fingers running along his jaw. “You’re not the Winter Soldier anymore.” His brow furrowed, but he scanned your body, eyes landing on the bullet wound.

“We were on a mission together, because you’re too stubborn,” you coughed, a weak smile on your lips. “But you saved me. We get to go home.”

“Домой,” he said roughly, uncertainty in his voice.

“Home,” you repeated, hoping you were remembering the little bits of Russian he had taught you in what felt like another life.

“Какова моя следующая миссия?”

You shook your head helplessly, pressing a hand firmly to your stomach. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

The Soldier nodded as if you’d given a clear answer, then tore a strip of fabric off his sleeve. He lifted your hand gently and pressed the fabric to the wound.

Before he could pull his hand away, you caught it in yours and drew it close to your chest, pressing a kiss to his bloodied knuckles. He froze, and you almost didn’t catch it as your consciousness began to wane in and out.

“I–”

You jumped as he spoke, and looked up to find unbridled conflict on his face. The man and the soldier at war. His hand tensed in yours like he wasn’t sure what was expected of him.

“Bucky,” you said gently. “You know me. And I know you’re in there.” You pushed his hair back from his face, your arm falling heavily to the floor next to you.

Without pause, he eased your arm into your lap, then shook his head violently, as though he had disobeyed orders. His head dropped like he was awaiting retaliation.

“No, no,” you said softly, your voice breaking. “That’s right. It’s okay.”

He looked up and reached slowly towards your face, eyes not leaving yours as he swiped at the blood coating your lips. You sighed, leaning into his touch. “I love you, James Barnes,” you said as evenly as you could, your eyes falling heavy before closing completely.

His thumb slid shakily across your lip again.

“Baby?” he said weakly.

When you looked at him this time, you burst into tears. The ice was gone, replaced with gentle blue. “Bucky,” you sobbed.

“I’m here,” he breathed, pressing his forehead to yours. “I’m here.” He tilted up, pressing a kiss to your forehead. “Thank you.”

“You fought it,” you whispered. “Baby, you–”

“Part of that’s gotta be Shuri,” he said as he ripped more of his sleeve to hold on your wound. “We gotta get you back to the jet. You need the Cradle and–”

“But you disobeyed her orders.” You stifled a groan as he scooped you up off the ground.

“Well,” he said softly, “I had you to fight for.”

You snorted. “You sap.”

He smiled, but it was slightly pained. You leaned against his chest as his even gait carried you out towards the jet.

“Are you okay?” you asked quietly.

“I will be.” He paused. “I think we’re gonna have some new nightmares to contend with.”

“We can always go spar instead,” you offered.

He chuckled. “That’s just an excuse for me to fuck you.”

“Do you need an excuse?”

He chewed on his lip as he stopped outside the entry ramp, shifting you slightly in his arms so he could scan his thumbprint. The ramp began to descend. “I didn’t scare you?”

“I was scared for them,” you said honestly. “And I was scared for you. Because nothing you could have done would have been your fault, but I know you would never believe that.”

He nodded.

“And even then,” you said tiredly as he strode up the ramp, “you were still protecting me.”

“Always, baby,” he promised. “If I do nothin’ else, it’ll be good enough for me.”

Your brow furrowed. “Well ‘s not good enough for me,” you slurred as he laid you in the Cradle and slid the top closed.

“What–”

“I gotta protect you too.”

He smiled as he fiddled with the control panel, and you sighed in relief as pain relievers began to course through you.

“‘Course you will, baby.” He knelt next to you. “Let’s go home.”

There’s blood under your head, just a small streak, but it’s too much. Your face is pale, eyes closed, lashes still. Dean presses his hand to your neck — nothing. No pulse.

His stomach drops out.

“C’mon, don’t—don’t you do this to me.” He presses harder, like he can will your heart back. “(Y/N), open your eyes.”

Nothing.

The sound he makes next isn’t human — something between a curse and a prayer, cracked wide open. He tilts your chin up, starts CPR even though his hands are trembling so bad he can barely line them up. “Breathe, dammit, breathe—”

He’s counting under his breath, voice breaking on every number. “One, two, three, four…”

He keeps going, keeps pressing, keeps begging, until — there. A flutter.

It’s faint, like a whisper against his fingers, but it’s there.

Dean chokes out a laugh — half-sob, half-relief — pressing his forehead to yours. “That’s it, baby. That’s it. You hang on, you hear me? You don’t check out on me now.”

You don’t answer. You just breathe — barely — but it’s enough to make him see again.

Sam’s at his side now, voice tight. “We gotta move. She needs a hospital.”

Dean shakes his head, already scooping you up in his arms, blood smearing across his jacket. “No hospitals. I got her.”

He carries you out of that place like he’s holding something sacred. Every step is a prayer. Every heartbeat feels like it’s borrowed.

He doesn’t talk on the drive. Doesn’t blink. One hand on the wheel, the other gripping yours in his lap, checking every few seconds to make sure you’re still warm.

Hours later, you wake.

The room’s dim. Lamp flickering. Smells like whiskey and antiseptic — Dean’s version of first aid. Your head throbs like it’s splitting in two. You groan, shifting just a little.

“Easy, easy—hey.”

His voice comes from beside you, low and rough. You turn your head, see him sitting in the chair by the bed, elbows on his knees, face hidden behind his hands. When he looks up, his eyes are red. Wet. He doesn’t even try to hide it.

“Dean?”

He exhales shakily, like he’s been holding his breath for hours. “You scared the hell outta me, sweetheart.”

“What… happened?”

He rubs a hand down his face, jaw flexing. “You hit the floor. Hard. You weren’t breathing.” His voice cracks right through the middle. “I thought I lost you.”

Your chest tightens. “But I’m okay.”

He laughs — sharp, broken. “You stopped breathing, and you’re telling me you’re okay?” He shakes his head. “You don’t get to say that.”

You reach out, fingers brushing his wrist. “Dean…”

He catches your hand, presses it to his mouth, eyes closing. “I couldn’t find your pulse. I kept thinking—” He cuts himself off, breath hitching. “If you hadn’t—if you didn’t…”

“I’m here.”

His eyes snap open, wet and wild. “Yeah, for now.” He stands, pacing, running a hand through his hair. “You can’t do that to me. You hear me? You can’t just—” His voice breaks. “You can’t die on me.”

“Dean—”

He turns back, expression crumbling. “I can handle monsters, demons, all of it — but not that. Not you.”

You sit up a little, even though the room tilts. “I didn’t plan it, y’know.”

“Yeah, well,” he mutters, wiping his face with the back of his hand, “maybe start planning to not die next time.”

That earns him a weak smile. “Bossy.”

He huffs out a laugh, the sound shaking. Then he’s next to you, sitting on the edge of the bed, face softening. “You sure you’re really here?”

You nod. “Pretty sure.”

He studies you for a long moment, eyes tracing your face like he’s memorizing it. Then he leans in, presses his forehead to yours, breathing you in. “Don’t do that again,” he whispers. “I mean it. I can’t—” His voice catches, small. “I can’t lose you.”

“You won’t.”

He lets out a long, shuddering breath, arms coming around you. You melt into him, your head against his shoulder, listening to his heartbeat pounding hard under your ear.

After a while, he murmurs, “You need water? Painkillers?”

You shake your head. “Just you.”

He laughs — quiet, almost disbelieving. “You’re gonna kill me, sweetheart.”

“Already tried,” you mumble, half-smiling.

“Don’t joke about that.” His arms tighten around you. “Not tonight.”

You close your eyes, sinking against him. “Then don’t let go.”

“I’m not.” His lips brush the top of your head, soft and trembling. “I’m not letting go of you ever again.”

You drift off like that — wrapped in him, heartbeat steady beneath your cheek, his breath ghosting over your hair like a promise.

And for the first time all night, Dean Winchester lets himself believe you’re really going to be okay.

your gun shakes in your hands.

“sweetheart,” the one on the left says, breathless. “look at me.”

the one on the right flinches. “don’t call her that,” he snaps.

same voice. same rough edge. same wounded anger tucked under the words. your stomach turns. “stop,” you say, and it comes out smaller than you want. “both of you. stop talking.”

they do and it almost makes it worse.

the shapeshifter has dean’s memories. sam warned you, voice tight over the phone while you were still running through wet alleyways and trying not to throw up. it can know things. private things. motel rooms and bad jokes and the way dean hums under his breath when he thinks you’re asleep. the first time he kissed you. the first time he said i love you and then immediately panicked and pretended to check the car’s oil. all of it. stolen.

“ask me something,” left-dean says, stepping half an inch forward.

you lift the gun higher. “don’t.”

he stops.

right-dean’s jaw tightens. “ask me.”

your eyes burn. “you both know.”

“not everything,” right-dean says.

left-dean scoffs, and god, it sounds so much like him you feel sick. “that’s what i’d say too.”

your finger rests near the trigger. not on it. near.

you think of dean’s hands on your hips in the bunker kitchen, warm and grease-stained from fixing something that didn’t need fixing. you think of him stealing your fries, then pretending he didn’t. you think of the night he crawled into bed beside you without a word after a hunt went bad, pressing his forehead between your shoulder blades, silent until he finally whispered “don’t make me talk yet”.

you know him. you do. so why can’t you breathe? “what did you tell me,” you start, voice cracking despite the effort, “after jolene’s case? when i wanted to quit?”

both of them go still. left-dean answers first. “i told you that you could. that i’d drive you anywhere you wanted. no guilt trip.”

your chest caves a little. right answer. perfect answer.

right-dean swallows hard. “and then i said i was selfish.”

left-dean turns sharply. you freeze.

right-dean looks at you. “i said i was selfish because i wanted you to stay,” he says. “and then i got scared you’d hear that as pressure, so i made a joke about your terrible motel coffee and you threw a pillow at my head.”

left-dean’s mouth twists. “cute. doesn’t prove anything.”

no. it doesn’t. that’s the awful thing. it still doesn’t.

then left-dean softens his face, careful and familiar, and takes one slow step toward you. “baby, come on. you know me.”

baby. too easy. too clean. your dean almost never uses that when he’s scared. he gets rougher. quieter. meaner to himself.

right-dean’s eyes flick to your gun. then to you. “shoot me,” he says.

your heart drops. left-dean goes silent.

“what?”

right-dean’s voice is hoarse. “if you can’t tell, shoot me. leg, shoulder, whatever. silver’ll show you. don’t let him near you.”

“dean—”

“don’t argue with me.” his face breaks, just for a second. “please.”

there. not in the memory. not in the words. in the way he makes himself the sacrifice before he lets you become one.

your hand steadies.

left-dean sees the shift before you move. his expression hardens, dean’s face turning strange with something that is not dean at all. “you sure about that?” he says.

you aim at him. “yeah,” you whisper. “i am.”

the shot splits the rain. silver hits shoulder, not heart, because even now—stupid, stupid—you can’t shoot dean’s face without mercy. the thing screams with his mouth, skin rippling wrong under the streetlight, and then sam is there from nowhere, finishing it before your knees can give out.

after, dean catches you before you fall. the real dean. solid. shaking. warm. you grab his jacket with both fists and shove your face into his chest, furious at him, furious at yourself, furious that you ever had to learn him this way.

“you told me to shoot you,” you choke.

his arms tighten around you. “yeah,” he says, voice breaking at the edges. “i know.”

“i hate you.”

“yeah,” he whispers into your hair. “i know that too.”

you hold him harder anyway, because his heartbeat is under your ear and it is his. it is his. it is his.

“Just tired. Was a tough one.” His tone was short, that familiar fake smirk barely touching his lips before disappearing.

“That’s not it.” Dean exhaled sharply through his nose, like he was already done with this.

“Drop it, then.” He turned again, starting toward the room, boots hitting the pavement harder this time. You followed, forcing yourself to keep up even as your side throbbed with every step.

“Dean, please—” You reached for his hand, just barely catching his fingers. He yanked it away, the sudden movement made you stumble half a step back.

“You ran after that thing alone.” Your brows pulled together.

“What?"

“You left Sam exposed.” You shook your head immediately.

“That’s not what happened.”

“You don’t get to make calls like that.”

“I was trying to stop it from—”

“You put him at risk.” Something inside you snapped tighter.

“Do you actually think I would risk Sam?” Dean didn’t answer. And that silence hit harder than anything he’d said. “That’s…” you shook your head slowly, disbelief settling in. “You really think that little of me?”

“I think you made a reckless decision.”

Your voice wavered just slightly. “I was protecting him.”

“By running off alone?”

“You weren’t there—”

“And you could’ve gotten him killed!” His voice echoed across the empty lot, bouncing off the motel walls and dying in the silence.

You went completely still. The pain in your side, the sting in your chest, everything froze for a second.

Then you nodded. “Fine.”

Dean frowned, the anger still there but flickering now with something else.

“It’s not—” But you were already stepping back.

“If that’s what you think.” You turned before he could say anything else and walked toward the small diner next to the motel, neon lights buzzing softly in the distance.

Dean watched you go. Still angry and still convinced he was right.

·𖥸·

Dean pushed the motel door open harder than necessary.

Inside, the room smelled like antiseptic and old carpet. Sam was sitting on the edge of the bed, sleeves rolled up, a first aid kit spread open beside him.

He looked up. “Where’s she?”

Dean tossed the keys onto the table with a dull clatter.

“Out. You hurt?” he asked, nodding toward the kit. Sam frowned, shaking his head.

“No. You know… it’s a good thing she was there tonight.” Dean glanced at him.

“What?” Sam leaned back slightly, thoughtful.

“Just saying. Could’ve gone pretty bad otherwise.” Dean didn’t respond right away, his jaw tightening again. “Anyway,” Sam added, “where’d she go?” Dean rubbed the back of his neck.

“The diner, I think.”

“You let her go alone?” Sam’s tone shifted. Dean frowned.

“What’s wrong with that? She’s old enough.” Sam stared at him for a second.

“You knew she got hit pretty hard when she jumped in, right?” Dean’s stomach dropped.

“What do you mean?” Sam frowned, confused now.

“Her side. Looked like a decent cut.” Dean just stared at him clueless.

“…You’re kidding.” Sam shook his head slowly. “Dammit.”

·𖥸·

You were sitting on the closed toilet lid, the harsh yellow light making everything look worse than it felt.

Your hand pressed hard against your ribs, fingers slick with blood. A wad of napkins was already soaked through, dark and useless.

Your breathing was shallow.

“Okay… okay…” you murmured to yourself, more to stay grounded than anything else.

The bathroom door suddenly slammed open. Dean stopped cold when he saw everything at once—the blood, the mess, your pale face, the way your shoulders were tense like you were barely holding yourself.

When you looked up, your expression hardened instantly.

“What now?” Dean stepped forward, slower this time.

“Let me see that.” You pressed the napkins tighter against your side.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re bleeding.”

“You think I don’t know?” He crouched in front of you, reaching carefully.

“Let me see.” You pulled back immediately.

“No.” Dean blinked, thrown off.

“Sweetheart—”

“You were just yelling at me five minutes ago.” That stopped him.

“I didn’t know you were hurt.” You let out a short, humorless laugh.

“Yeah. How could you notice?” He shifted closer again, more cautious this time.

“Let me help.” You shook your head.

“I’ve got it.”

“Babe—”

“I said I’ve got it.” The edge in your voice made him pause. For a second, neither of you moved.

“Sam told me,” he said finally. You stilled, eyes dropping to your hands.

“Of course he did.” Dean dragged a hand down his face.

“I thought you—”

“You thought I put him in danger.” Your voice wasn’t sharp anymore. Just tired. Dean shook his head.

“I was wrong.” You didn’t answer. “You saved him,” he added, quieter this time. Your gaze stayed on the blood staining your fingers.

“I wasn’t going to let anything happen to him.”

“I know.” Carefully, he reached for a fresh stack of paper towels and set them beside you. Close, but not touching.

“I’m sorry,” he said, softer now. Your shoulders loosened just a fraction. Not much. But enough. A long breath left you.

“Fine.” Dean looked up immediately. “You can help.”

Relief flashed across his face before he moved in, slowly and careful. He replaced the soaked napkins with clean ones, his hands steady now.

“Does it hurt bad?”

“A little.” He shook his head under his breath.

“I’m such an idiot.”

“Yeah,” you muttered. That earned the smallest ghost of a smile from him. He pressed the clean towels gently against the wound, his touch careful, focused.

“Still mad at me?” he asked, playfully this time.

“A little bit.” His hand came up, brushing a strand of hair away from your face, softer than before.

“I’m really sorry.” You studied him for a moment, searching, then looked away.

“It’s fine now.” He leaned in, pressing a soft kiss to your forehead.

╭──────────.★..─╮

You could feel your pulse in your ears as you bit your tongue. Jack was going out again for another SWAT shift. Every time he picked up, an argument ensued. He always came up with excuses. The team needed him. He had years of combat medic experience. He was rarely in the thick of it. The job wasn’t even that dangerous.

You always rebutted. The team did just fine without him every other day. His previous experience didn’t mean he was required to continue working in that environment now. If he wasn’t in danger, why did he have to have full combat protective gear on? And of course, the job was dangerous—that’s what drew him in!

You thought after your engagement that maybe Jack could be convinced. Not to settle down necessarily, just to re-evaluate the undue stress he caused every time he locked the door behind him and walked into the flames of chaos.

“Whatever, I’m going to be late. Don’t bother staying up for me, I have a shift tonight, so I won’t be coming back home.” He snaps.

“Jack! You can’t keep doing this! What are you avoiding by just jumping headfirst into a pit of lions every week? Why can’t you just spend the holiday with your fiancée before working tonight?” You counter.

You hate it when you and Jack fight. You hate that he has the ability to get you so riled up. And you hate even more that he seems to be so obtuse to the fact that watching him leave eats you alive. Every. Single. Time.

“I’m done having this conversation! We argue every single time! I’m going!” He yells.

You stiffen and swallow, refusing to let yourself cry in front of him. You stay quiet, knowing that your voice will betray you.

Jack huffs and shakes his head, grabbing his backpack and closing the door with careful precision. Even in moments of anger, you’re always amazed at how immense his restraint can be.

You immediately head for the shower, needing a physical reset from the fight. And like always, you end up feeling better. There’s something like a remedy hidden in the tendrils of steam that encase you. And along with feeling better, you start to feel guilty. You understand where Jack is coming from, and that’s almost worse than full-heartedly being blinded by your own thoughts and opinions. Understanding him means there’s always an opportunity for forgiveness and compromise, despite wanting absolutely no compromise in this situation.

You change into your pajamas and decide to take a nap. You picked up a call shift this evening, even though it wasn’t your holiday to work. Nothing beats call, holiday, and shift differential all lining up like the perfect eclipse. Your sleep is restless; however, you can’t stop worrying about Jack. Wondering if he’s alright, worrying that if something bad did happen, the last memory you would have of each other is a stupid fight about stupid anxieties.

At first, you aren’t sure of how long you’ve slept, but your pager starts to alarm. You sit up and grab the small device from the bedside table, and look at it with bleary eyes.

INCOMING TRAUMA: LEVEL 1, UNIDENTIFIED 48Y/O MALE, MVC HEAD ON COLLISION, GCS 7, HYPOTENSIVE, TACHYCARDIC, INTUBATED ON SCENE, ARRIVAL BY AMBULANCE, ETA 15 MINUTES

Immediately, you’re rolling out of bed to pull scrubs on and rush to the hospital. It’s already 10 PM, which means Jack should be at work and done with his SWAT shift. But with your luck, there will be no time to see him before prepping the OR and starting to work on the incoming trauma patient. You sigh and grab your keys, making your way toward the chaos.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

You are currently trying to work with the doctor on call tonight to repair the trauma patient’s liver. The laceration is substantial, but you know it’s treatable. You’ve assisted on cases like these a hundred times before since you graduated from PA school, and you know you’ll get to do a hundred more like it in years to come.

“So, how’s wedding planning coming along?” Dr. Murphy asks as she works.

You hum with a small smile, “You know, things get pushed to the back burner when you both work the strangest shifts. I feel like Jack and I have barely any time together, and usually he ends up picking up a shift to help with the SWAT unit when he’s free anyway.”

Dr. Murphy laughs. You’ve always loved to witness just how much she loves her job; it reminds you of yourself, it reminds you of Jack. The sheer passion to excel at saving people.

“Oh, trust me, everything will settle into place. You both need to take each other’s advice sometimes. Slow down. Breathe.”

A chuckle escapes your lips as the door to the OR opens. Maybe it’s because the skeleton crew are the only staff here at this hour. Or perhaps it’s because everyone on this side of the wing wears the light blue surgical scrubs. Or maybe it’s just instinct that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand, but you turn around and see him.

He’s middle-aged, handsome, with green eyes that are bloodshot, and dark hair that curls at the nape of his neck. For a moment, all he does is stare at your patient. The nurse anesthetist looks up with confusion. She stands up and starts walking toward him.

“Sir, this is a sterile-“

A shot rings out and silences everyone. The only noise is from the monitors that are keeping track of the patient’s vitals, and the ventilator that is helping him breathe. You falter for a moment, but you know that stopping the procedure now would result in your patient dying, so you continue operating.

You can’t see the nurse, Janie. The equipment she uses typically blocks her from view anyway, but you start to see the pool of blood on the floor near the suction cart. There’s a lump in your throat that can’t seem to be swallowed.

You glance up at the scrub tech. She’s new, it’s her first week. You think her name is Lorelei, but you’re having trouble remembering right now. She looks terrified. You see her hands shake as she preps the table with all of the tools needed for the procedure, stealing glances at the man with the gun. You try to do a head count of everyone who would’ve been in the OR. All you can come up with are you, Dr. Murphy, Janie, and Lorelei. Everyone else helped to get the patient stable and left to help elsewhere. Just the four of you.

“This is him?” The man grunts, “The drunk driver?”

Dr. Murphy is cool as she responds, “Sir, what do you want?”

The man lets out a guttural wail, “I want my daughter! He killed my daughter!”

Your heart skips a beat, and despite the rules and codes of ethics you’ve spent years studying and following, you understand and empathize with the father. You see the hopelessness in his face and hear the grief in his voice. And you know that you disagree entirely with his actions, but you still understand how he got here.

“Sir, my name is Dr. Abigail Murphy. I am a trauma surgeon at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center. My patient is currently being operated on. Hurting our staff or our patients will do nothing to bring your daughter back. We can call for someone who can come in and help you; you just have to drop the gun.”

His quiet sobs are silenced, and he looks straight at Dr. Murphy, “You just want them to take me? You want them to take me as I die while that…that monster lives?”

You don’t realize what’s happening even after Dr. Murphy disappears from your line of sight. The tinnitus swells, and all you can hear aside from the ringing in your ears is the blood that’s rushing through your veins. And finally, your hands begin to shake when you notice you’re the only one keeping your patient above ground.

Lorelei crouches on the ground, covering her head with her hands, and guiltily, you wish you didn’t have the responsibility, so you could do the same.

“Hey!” The father yells, and his voice finally breaks through your stupor, “I said stop saving him!”

You look up with tears in your eyes and hope it doesn’t show on your face when you see the campus police looking in the window of the door behind the father, assessing the situation, and wondering when they’ll enter.

“What’s your name?” You blurt out, not knowing what to say that will stall him.

He falters, “W-what?”

“Your name, I want to know your name.” You say before telling him your own.

“Jacob Haas,” He says.

“Hi Jacob,” You whimper, “I went to school for six years to get here. Got my master’s and everything. And one of the first things you learn is the Hippocratic Oath. It’s about like…confidentiality and non-maleficence and shit. Basically just: do no harm. So I understand where you’re coming from, and I am really, really sorry about your daughter. I’m sure she was…I’m sure she was amazing. But how is hurting hospital staff going to help her? We can’t judge our patients by their acts or their morals. We’re not God. But we do have a code, and I promised to do no harm, but you’re asking me to go against that, and I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

You know you’ve lost his attention before you feel the pain. You can see the moment he decides as you glance up from your patient to look at him. It’s something you learned in a de-escalation class once; humanize them, empathy is your friend. It always seemed silly in books or movies when a traumatic moment would happen in slow motion. You realize now just how silly it is because the pain is instantaneous. Everything is loud and overwhelming, and you may not know what is happening, but you know the police are involved now because there’s yelling. There’s so much yelling.

For a moment, you think you can close your eyes to escape from this frame of time, but that is rudely interrupted when someone puts pressure on your shoulder, where you now realize you’ve been shot. You don’t know if it’s you who screams or someone else.

Lots of people come into view, most of them look like they’re saying something. You know you should recognize them. These are your coworkers, but nothing seems to stick. You see someone draw medication in a syringe, is there a prick when it enters? All of the pain you’ve ever felt has been bottled up just so you could relive it in this moment. And then, just as suddenly as the chaos began, it fades away as you fall asleep.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

Jack had just finished stabilizing a patient with an anastomotic leak and sent him up to the OR when he heard it. He knew immediately that it wasn’t just something that had fallen or crashed. He remembered the sound of gunfire like a song you always know the words to, even years after not hearing it. Then there were three more shots.

It was an agonizing six minutes until the intercom confirmed what he already knew, “Code Silver OR 4, Code Silver OR 4, Code Silver OR 4.”

He felt the flood of hormones rush through his system like a tsunami. It’s the same feeling he gets whenever someone on his SWAT team gets critically injured, or any time there’s a code blue in the Pitt. The same feeling he gets every time he leaves you after a fight, he always ends up starting before he realizes it.

His shoulders drop once he realizes the threat isn’t anywhere in the vicinity of the ER. Instinctively, he turns to see where you are and realizes you’re not supposed to be at work tonight. Then, Jack stiffens when he remembers the conversation you had a week ago. You told him you were going to pick up a call shift for the OR since he was already on schedule.

His hands move before he has the time to tell them what to do. Jack pulls out his phone and opens the app to see the locations you shared. For a moment, his brain tries to convince itself that you’re at home. Home, where you should be, fast asleep, or at least relaxing with a book or a movie. But his vision tunnels when he sees the icon with the photo of you, you’re at the hospital.

Jack’s mind goes into overdrive. He recalls the MVC that came in earlier, how the trauma team had called in OR staff to prep for surgery. He curses himself for not immediately remembering that you were on call tonight.

It’s procedural the way he begins moving. Telling Shen to hold down the fort while he checks in with the campus police to see if they need help. His steps up the stairs are calculated. They’ve always had to be since he lost his leg. He sees a sheet draped over someone in the hallway near the entrance to the operating wing. There’s commotion happening deeper in the hallway as he makes his way toward OR 4.

Campus PD has a man in custody. He is sitting on the floor with his head in his hands. Someone yells for supplies deeper in the room, something about needing to stop the bleeding. He hears a monitor start to flatline.

Jack doesn’t care. He runs.

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Your shoulder doesn’t feel right. The pain you felt earlier lingers. And there’s an incessant beeping noise that threatens to drive you crazy. But then you feel it, the weight. The warmth. Someone’s hand tethered to your own.

You whimper and try to shift in the bed to get comfortable, and the hand is suddenly gone. Replaced by the sound of someone calling your name. The voice is familiar, and through the sedation, it takes a minute to catch up with what your heart has already discovered. Jack.

“Jack?” You whisper, squinting.

You watch him sigh. His shoulders drop, and with it, the tightness in your chest eases. Even if you’re still dazed and confused, your body knows that if Jack feels safe, so do you.

“Oh, baby,” He whispers, bringing a hand to your jaw.

You cough, suddenly acutely aware of the dryness in your throat. Instantly, straw is at your lips, ready to deliver the remedy of water. You take a few small sips and lick your lips, head falling back on the pillow. Exhausted.

“Is he okay?” You ask, each moment feels more aware than the one before it.

The room is silent, aside from the monitors keeping track of your vitals. Jack glances down at the floor and gently takes your hand again.

“There was a code silver.” He starts, clearing his throat.

You interrupt, “I know there was. I was there. Did my patient die?”

You see him swallow and look at you. Jack was never one to shy away from the truth. He was always there to tell families the worst news they had to receive, with empathy and a deeper understanding. But for some reason, when it comes to you, he’s stuck. It’s different seeing you in pain. It was his job to try to mitigate that every single time. And here, there was no avoiding it. The damage has already been done.

“Yes,” He says hoarsely, “He died. But you were- “

“What about Janie? Dr. Murphy? Lorelei?” You urge.

A pained look takes over. You’ve seen Jack cry before. Despite everything he’s been through and all of the things he might need to work on, overall, he’s more emotionally regulated than one might expect. He runs a hand down his face, “Janie didn’t make it, Dr. Murphy…has a long road of recovery ahead of her, Lorelei’s just shaken up, but- “

“Fuck.” You whisper, pulling your hand away. You look down at both of them and are acutely aware of the brace that your right arm is in. It completely immobilizes your entire upper arm, but doesn’t stop the throbbing that threatens to overstimulate you.

“You had to have surgery,” Jack starts, “The bullet completely shattered your humeral head, they couldn’t save it. They decided to do a reverse arthroplasty. There was a lot of vascular and nerve damage. It’ll take a lot of rehab...”

You look away from him and bite your lip, trying to will yourself not to cry. Jack’s hand reaches out again, and as much as you want to pull away, you let him.

“Honey, you’re gonna get through this. We’re gonna get through this.” He whispers. And you almost believe it.

A knock at the door draws your attention. You see a doctor at the door. He’s not in scrubs, though, which tells you he must not be so clinical that he deals with patients who are physically ill. It finally clicks that he must be a psychologist or psychiatrist.

Jack sits a little straighter in his chair, but his hand doesn’t leave yours, and you don’t try to pull away again. The doctor introduces himself, and sure enough, he is from the psychiatric department and came to offer support and condolences.

“The hospital is going to require that you complete six weeks of therapy before returning to work. I know your rehab will take longer than that, and I urge you to continue after the minimum, but I wanted to introduce myself so you could start. Whenever you’re ready.” He says kindly.

You agree, hesitantly, and Jack helps you set up an initial appointment. The rest of the day goes similarly. Jack helps you try to piece together everything that happened. Different people from your care team come in to introduce themselves and set up a plan of care for you once you’re discharged. By lunch, you’re practically unwilling to talk to anyone else but Jack.

“I want to go home,” You say finally.

Jack’s brow furrows in concern and quiet recognition, “Baby, they just wanna stay on top of your pain and make sure everything is healing properly.”

“I know that,” You whine, “Can’t they make an exception? I’m a PA. I know how to take care of myself. I even have my own doctor to check in on me at home.”

He chuckles and brushes a strand of hair away from your face, “Get through tonight, and we’ll see about going home in the morning? Okay?”

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Jack was right. You do get to go home in the morning, and it was good to stay overnight to keep on top of your pain. You hate that he’s right.

The drive back to your house is filled with jazz music and soft morning light. It’s the playlist Jack likes to put on whenever you’re stressed or overstimulated. You can tell he’s nervous because he keeps trying to subtly steal glances at you the entire fifteen minutes.

“Can I take a shower? Please?” You ask once you get parked.

He gives you a knowing smile, “That’s why I made them put on the waterproof bandage before we left.”

You make your way in and go straight to the bathroom. Jack helps you undress and remove your brace. You’re always shocked when you visit the ER and hear the way people talk about him. They rarely say anything bad, but it’s always about the cold, clinical precision he carries. You never feel that at home. It’s all warm and tender.

The water feels like relief as it rolls down your back. You gently try to wash yourself, and Jack lets you. He understands how important reclaiming your independence is after such a traumatic experience. But he’s never far, always ready to step in when you need it.

And you hate to admit that you do. But he sees it, the small huff of frustration as you try to open the bottle of shampoo you’re holding between your knees with your left hand. The accessible shower is something you’re grateful for now. You silently thank the accessibility it provides you to do more than you otherwise could right now. But when Jack sees the look of helplessness on your face as you try to process how to wash your hair single-handedly, he quietly steps in.

“What do you want me to do, baby?” He asks, still leaving the ball in your court.

You huff, “I can’t open this stupid bottle, and even if I could, I don’t know how I am supposed to wash my hair like this.”

“Okay,” He says, thinking, “I could open the bottle and put the shampoo on your hair, if you still want to try to wash it yourself, or I can do it all for you, baby. You did so good with everything else.”

You let out a restrained sob, “Can you please do it?”

He had gotten prepared as you were washing the rest of your body, removing his prosthetic, and getting his crutches nearby. He got towels ready for both of you, made sure the no-slip mat was secure, and grabbed a change of clothes for when you were done. He opens the shower door more than it had been and turns the showerhead so the water is spraying away from you both.

Once he steps in, leaving his crutches at the door, and taking a seat next to you on the bench, he grabs the showerhead and hands it to you.

“Here, hold on to this,” He mumbles, grabbing the shampoo, balancing between your knees. His hands work the shampoo into your scalp like they have hundreds of times before in moments of a different sort of intimacy. You sigh in relief. The feeling is almost better than the pain medication they discharged you with. Medication can’t bring the closeness you feel with Jack.

Once you are both clean, Jack turns the water off and grabs a towel for you. You start to pat yourself dry as he dries himself off and starts getting your clothes. You see his exhaustion too, the way he leans into his crutches more than usual.

“Jack, baby,” You interrupt.

He pauses, looking at you with worry, “Everything okay? What’s wrong?”

“Sit down.” You say.

He looks confused, “You’re in pain, and tired. Sit down. I can hand you your clothes. I’ll need help with my shirt and brace, but we can do that sitting.”

There’s something unreadable in his expression, but he gives in, sitting back down on the bench with his towel around his waist. You stand up, slowly, still feeling a little weak. You fully open the shower doors and grab Jack’s boxers and shorts and hand them to him. You see, he’s laid out a pair of underwear and one of his sweats for you with a button-up pajama top. Always thoughtful, like he knew a regular shirt would be more trouble than it’s worth, trying to manipulate your arm through a sleeve.

Once Jack has his pants on, he turns to you, helping you get each foot through your underwear, and then the pants’ legs. You’re happy to forget about the option to wear a bra right now. You whimper when Jack helps you extend your arm through the sleeve of your shirt, but he quietly shushes you and places a kiss on your temple when you’re finished. You both sit and breathe for a moment. Taking in the feeling of being clean. The exhaustion it cost to get there.

He takes in a deep breath and blows it out through his mouth, grounding, “Ready for your brace?” He asks.

You nod your head and grab it from the toilet seat, turning your torso so he can help you put it back on. It feels unnatural, the position your arm has to be in, but you know wearing the brace will help you recover with the best possible outcome, so you tolerate it.

When you’re both finished, you get set up in the living room. Jack told HR he needed to take FMLA while you were home recovering. Gloria tried to put up a fight, arguing that leaving Shen to fend for himself would leave the night shift in shambles. He told her to find another attending to cover for him.

Even though PT won’t start for another week or so, you were given instructions for small movements that would help to preserve your range of motion. Jack talks you through them, even when you yell at him to shut up or leave you alone. He stays. He knows how important it was to have someone push him after his amputation. So, even though his heart breaks every time he sees you so hopeless, he pushes you farther.

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Recovery is far from linear. There are weeks you are proud of your improvements, and others where everything seems insurmountable. Jack is there every step of the way. A steady assurance that you’re here. You’re trying.

“Ugh! I can’t keep fucking doing this!” You yell after your sixth time trying to hold a spoon.

Jack looks up from across the room. He sees you stand up from your chair by the occupational therapist and start to walk out the door as they call after you. He’s immediately up and following you outside.

“Hey, hey, hey,” He says, carefully placing a hand on your waist to stop you, “Where are you at? What do you need?”

You can feel the tears in your eyes, and you wipe them away as they fall, but it’s no use.

“I can’t do this, Jack! This is impossible! I’m never going to be able to do my job again, that’s like the one thing that matters to me.” You cry.

Jack stays calm. And you hate it. After months of healing and crying and helplessness, he still stays supportive and understanding, and part of you just wishes he could show an ounce of anger because maybe that would give you a wake up call to just move forward.

But if there’s one thing Jack is, it’s honest. Not once throughout this process has he pitied you or lied to you. He’s never given you false promises about your recovery or the future.

“You might not be able to go to surgery.” He admits, “But that doesn’t mean you’re worthless or not competent! At least you’re alive!” He finally raises his voice.

You inhale sharply and purse your lips to keep them from wobbling. And you let yourself grieve. You grieve the person you were before all of this, and the person you’ll never become because of it. You grieve your career, and a life without pain, and a life without anxiety at every sudden sound.

You sob and hide into Jacks chest. He wraps his arms around you as you hang onto him like a lifeline.

“I’m so tired of feeling like I can’t do anything, and like I’m burdening you, Jack I don’t know how you learned to adapt; this is so hard.” You cry.

He puts hand at the nape of your neck and shushes you. You stay like that until you feel like air is something real again. It’s not until Jack feels you physically calm down that he speaks again.

With both hands on either side of your face he makes sure you’re looking at him fully before continuing, “Baby, you have never been a burden. Ever.”

He wipes a few tears from your cheek, “I have been trying so hard to be the person I wish I had in my life after I lost my leg. And I know even that will never be enough to make things better. You’re allowed to be angry because you’re right. You might never get enough strength or dexterity back to work in the OR again. You deserve to grieve that.”

Jack swallows hard like he’s bargaining with someone, and he’s not confident they’ll agree with him, “But that doesn’t mean you can’t transition into a different position. We could use another PA in the ER, you could go into any specialty. Hell, you could start teaching if you wanted. None of this makes you less competent or brilliant.”

He rests his forehead against yours, “I am so sorry you are experiencing this. I love you so much.”

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Recovery wasn’t just something you went through. Everything that happened changed Jack too. After an argument one night he decided to quit volunteering for the SWAT team.

You never realized how much guilt Jack carried over the past eight months about the argument that day. But he admitted it to you one night while you both laid in bed after a long day.

“I feel like it’s my fault,” He whispered, “You getting hurt.”

Your heart skipped a beat, “What? Why would any of that be your fault?”

“You picked up that call shift because you knew I was working with the SWAT team that day. There was no reason for you to be there. If I had just listened to you and pulled my head out of my ass….”

He exhaled shakily, “Maybe you’d still be in the OR and not cardiology.”

You turned to look at him, like what he’s said was so absurd that you couldn’t understand why he would say such a thing, “Jack. None of this was your fault. I never blamed you.”

A pause, “And I actually really like cardiology.”

Jack doesn’t smile, you see the maelstrom of emotion behind his eyes. A tear falls down the side of his face.

His resolve cracks, “I couldn’t protect you.”

You frown and curl into his side, wincing as your shoulder catches and tingles with pain, “Baby,” you start, softer this time, “You can’t keep replaying that night in your head trying to search for a different outcome.”

He clenches his jaw and stares at the ceiling, but you feel the trail of his thumb at your waistband.

“I was supposed to protect you.”

“You did,” you say instantly, “You stayed.”

He lets out a choked sound.

“I love you,” he says, voice wrecked.

Your hand twirls one of the curls at the nape of his neck and you press a kiss to his collarbone. And for the first time since that night, Jack closes his eyes. And lets himself grieve instead of feeling guilty.

You hated how long everything took now. Something as simple as sitting upright in bed became a carefully planned event involving medication timing, strategically placed pillows, and enough determination to make your physical therapist visibly concerned. Showering exhausted you. Walking exhausted you. Sometimes even holding a conversation for too long left you needing a nap afterward because the concussion still lingered stubbornly in the background, stealing pieces of your energy whenever you weren't paying attention.

You hated needing help more than anything else.

More than the pain. More than the restrictions. More than the endless parade of specialists, surgeons, therapists, and follow-up appointments that seemed determined to remind you how badly injured you had been.

You hated reaching for a glass of water and realizing your shoulder couldn't manage the movement. Hated waking up in the middle of the night and having to ask for assistance instead of simply getting up yourself. Hated the way people watched you now, always a little too carefully, as if they expected you to break apart in front of them.

For the first week after surgery, getting out of bed required someone nearby.

The realization humiliated you more than it should have.

You were used to being the person helping. The person lifting stretchers and running trauma activations and staying three hours past the end of a shift because somebody else's emergency mattered more than your own exhaustion. You were the person people called when things got difficult, the one who always figured out a solution, always kept moving, always managed to carry a little more than everyone thought possible.

Now people looked at you the way you usually looked at patients.

With concern.

With patience.

With that careful gentleness reserved for people who were hurt badly enough that nobody wanted to make things worse.

It made your skin crawl.

The bruising around your throat lingered for weeks afterward.

Dark fingerprints faded slowly enough that every accidental glance in a mirror felt like being punched directly in the chest. Sometimes you would catch sight of them while brushing your teeth or washing your face and suddenly find yourself back inside Trauma Two again. Back beneath fluorescent lights. Back on the floor.

Hands around your throat.

Air disappearing.

The cabinet slamming into the back of your skull.

The overwhelming certainty that your body was beginning to fail you.

You never stayed in front of mirrors very long anymore.

Mostly, though, you hated being a patient.

You spent nearly three weeks in the hospital altogether, long enough to memorize the overnight ICU staff by voice alone. Long enough for nurses to start sneaking you extra pudding cups because apparently near-strangulation combined with jaw fractures meant surviving almost entirely on soft foods for a while. Long enough to become familiar with the strange rhythm of hospitalization.

The four a.m. lab draws.

The endless vital sign checks.

The quiet conversations nurses thought patients couldn't hear from the hallway.

The way sunlight crawled slowly across the floor every afternoon before disappearing again.

Long enough to watch Pittsburgh weather change endlessly through narrow hospital windows while your own department continued functioning without you somewhere several floors below.

That part bothered you more than expected.

The emergency department was still open. Traumas still arrived. Residents still complained. Patients still needed help. Life continued moving forward whether you were there or not, and for the first time in years you were stuck watching from the outside.

Rationally, you knew the department would survive without you.

Emotionally, it felt different.

You had spent so much of your life inside those walls that part of you had started believing your place there was permanent. Necessary. The thought of everyone continuing without you left a strange hollow feeling in your chest that you couldn't quite explain.

Sometimes you found yourself staring at the tracking board app on your phone just to feel connected to something familiar.

Sometimes you missed it so badly your chest physically hurt.

Jack practically moved into your hospital room by the third day.

Not officially, but everyone knew.

His hoodie stayed permanently draped across the back of the chair beside your bed. Empty coffee cups accumulated along the windowsill no matter how many times nurses threw them away. Half the overnight staff stopped questioning why Dr. Abbot somehow appeared in your room at two in the morning every single night.

Sometimes you woke up to find him asleep beside your bed, neck bent at an angle guaranteed to cause problems later, one hand still wrapped loosely around yours like he needed physical proof you were breathing. Other nights he didn't sleep at all.

You would wake sometime around three in the morning and find him sitting quietly in the darkness, laptop forgotten beside him, staring out the window with an expression that always made something uncomfortable twist inside your chest.

Whenever he noticed you awake, he smiled immediately.

Every single time.

The smile never quite reached his eyes.

That scared you more than you wanted to admit.

Because Jack had always been good at hiding things. Better than most people. Years of emergency medicine had taught him how to compartmentalize fear and grief and exhaustion until nobody could tell what was happening beneath the surface.

The fact that he wasn't hiding this meant it was bigger than either of you wanted to acknowledge.

You tried returning to work conversations by day six.

Jack shut that down immediately.

"I'm serious," you argued from the hospital bed while attempting to maneuver yourself upright one-handed. "I can do consults at least."

Jack looked up from the chair beside your bed with an expression so deeply unimpressed it almost offended you.

"You got strangled, fractured your jaw, dislocated your shoulder, cracked two ribs, and had a concussion severe enough to put you in the ICU for three days."

You frowned.

"When you say it like that, it sounds dramatic."

"It was dramatic."

"I’m just saying that it sounds worse when you list everything."

"Because the list is bad."

You opened your mouth to argue and immediately regretted it when pain shot sharply through your jaw.

Jack noticed, of course he noticed. He always noticed.

Without another word, he stood and crossed the room. By the time you managed to formulate a protest, he was already adjusting the pillows behind your back, carefully supporting your injured shoulder before helping you settle into a more comfortable position.

The movement was practiced now, almost natural.

Weeks ago you would have hated needing the help. Now you hated how grateful it made you feel.

"You are not stepping foot back into the ER until you're fully cleared," he said firmly. "And before you argue with me, Robby agrees."

"That's because Robby enjoys ruining my life."

"No," Jack answered flatly. "That's because Robby watched you almost die."

The words landed heavily between both of you.

"I did too, by the way."

Silence settled over the room immediately.

Jack's hands slowed against the blanket before becoming still altogether.

You felt your chest tighten.

Because there it was again. The thing neither of you had figured out how to talk about yet.

The attack wasn't over. Not really.

Neither of you talked about the nightmares much either, even though they started almost immediately after the ICU. Yours usually involved hands around your throat and the horrible realization that Leon did not recognize you anymore. Jack’s were quieter. You noticed them mostly because he stopped sleeping deeply afterward. Some nights you woke up and found him sitting awake at the edge of the bed staring at absolutely nothing while his prosthetic rested beside him on the floor.

Neither of you knew how to fix the other.

So instead you stayed close.

After discharge, recovery became its own strange routine. Orthopedic follow-ups. Neurology appointments. Speech therapy for the lingering jaw pain and throat damage. Physical therapy twice a week where a woman named Denise slowly taught your shoulder how to function properly again while you swore creatively enough to make her laugh almost every session.

And therapy.

Real therapy.

Therapy turned out to be harder than physical therapy.

At least with physical therapy there was a clear objective. Denise bent your shoulder until it hurt, assigned exercises you hated, and measured progress in degrees of motion and strength. There was a finish line somewhere. A point where the joint would function again, where the muscles would remember what they were supposed to do, where the pain would eventually become manageable.

Therapy with Dr. Feldman didn't work like that.

There were no measurements. No imaging results. No charts proving you were improving. Just a quiet office with soft lighting, a bookshelf full of psychology texts, and a woman who somehow managed to see directly through every defense mechanism you had spent years perfecting.

You hated her almost immediately.

Not because she was unkind. The problem was that she was patient.

The first appointment consisted mostly of you sitting rigidly in your chair with your arms crossed while answering questions with as few words as possible. You approached the entire thing the same way you approached difficult conversations with patients' family members in the emergency department: polite, cooperative, and emotionally unavailable.

Dr. Feldman noticed within fifteen minutes.

"How have you been sleeping?" she asked.

"Fine."

She looked down at her notes briefly before looking back up.

"You were hospitalized for nearly three weeks after a violent assault. Most people aren't sleeping fine."

You shrugged.

"I've had worse schedules during residency."

A small smile tugged at her mouth.

"That's not what I asked."

You hated that answer.

The second session wasn't much better. Every time she asked about your emotions, you redirected toward medicine. Every time she asked how something felt, you explained the physiology behind it instead. You could discuss post-traumatic stress responses, hypervigilance, sleep disruption, conditioned fear responses, and trauma recovery pathways in meticulous detail. You could explain exactly what was happening inside your brain.

What you couldn't do was admit how any of it actually affected you.

Halfway through the appointment, Dr. Feldman finally set her notebook aside.

"You keep describing trauma," she said.

"Because we're discussing trauma."

"No," she replied gently. "You're describing symptoms. You're explaining mechanisms. You're talking about yourself the same way you'd talk about a patient."

The observation irritated you immediately because it was true.

"I'm a doctor."

"I know."

"It's how I think."

Dr. Feldman smiled slightly. "I know that too."

For a moment, neither of you spoke. The room settled into a comfortable silence that immediately made you uncomfortable. Years in emergency medicine had trained you to fill silence quickly. Silence usually meant somebody was waiting for an answer, waiting for bad news, waiting for a conversation to become more painful than either person wanted it to be. Dr. Feldman, however, seemed perfectly content to sit inside it.

Eventually she leaned forward slightly in her chair.

"But you're not my doctor."

The words landed harder than they should have. You looked away immediately.

"You don't have to explain this to me clinically," she continued gently. "You don't have to convince me that you understand trauma. I already know you do."

A humorless laugh escaped you.

"That's easier."

Of course it was easier. Explaining symptoms was safer than feeling them. Discussing hypervigilance was safer than admitting you were afraid. Turning yourself into a case study allowed you to keep a comfortable distance between yourself and what had actually happened. If you could reduce the attack to diagnoses and recovery statistics and neurological responses, then maybe it felt less personal.

Dr. Feldman's expression softened.

"Of course it is."

Something about the kindness in her voice made your chest ache unexpectedly.

The sessions continued after that. Week after week, you showed up and slowly learned that recovery was a lot harder when someone refused to let you hide behind medical terminology. Sometimes you left feeling angry. Sometimes exhausted. Occasionally embarrassed by how much energy it took simply to sit in that office and answer questions honestly. There were appointments where you spent nearly the entire session arguing with her, and others where you spent the drive home replaying a single observation because it had landed uncomfortably close to something you weren't ready to examine.

The breakthrough happened during your fourth appointment, though neither of you recognized it immediately.

The conversation had shifted toward work, which should have felt safe. Work was familiar. Work was predictable. Work was the one area of your life where you still understood exactly who you were.

"Have you thought about going back?" Dr. Feldman asked.

"Obviously."

"You miss it."

The answer came instantly.

"Every day."

She nodded thoughtfully.

"What do you miss?"

You didn't even have to think about it.

"The pace. The people. The chaos. Being useful."

As soon as the words left your mouth, you realized how much truth was hiding inside them. You missed the noise of trauma activations. You missed residents interrupting each other during presentations. You missed arguing with consultants and complaining about impossible patient loads. You missed the organized insanity of the emergency department. You even missed things you used to hate.

Most of all, you missed feeling like yourself.

Dr. Feldman watched you quietly for a moment before asking, "And what worries you about going back?"

The question should have been simple.

Instead, something tightened immediately in your chest.

You looked down at your hands.

"I don't know."

Dr. Feldman didn't respond.

The silence stretched.

You hated that she knew exactly how effective silence was.

Eventually you sighed heavily and rubbed a hand across your face.

"I know what you're trying to ask."

"Then answer it."

The response almost made you laugh.

Almost.

Instead, you stared at the floor and tried not to think too hard about why your pulse had suddenly picked up. Images surfaced anyway. Hospital curtains closing. Empty treatment rooms. The sharp beep of a monitor. A patient moving unexpectedly. A hand reaching toward you.

Your stomach twisted.

And suddenly you understood exactly why you had spent weeks avoiding this conversation.

"Sometimes I think about being alone with a patient," you admitted quietly. "Sometimes I think about walking into an exam room and closing the curtain behind me, and immediately I start planning exits. I start calculating how quickly I could get out if something happened."

The confession felt awful. Humiliating, even.

You couldn't bring yourself to look at her.

Because suddenly this wasn't about trauma responses or coping mechanisms or anything clinical at all. It was about fear. Real fear. The kind you had spent years helping other people survive.

Your fingers tightened together in your lap.

"I'm afraid of being alone with patients."

The words hung heavily between you.

For years, you had been the person other people relied on when they were afraid. You were the doctor walking into emergencies, not the person avoiding them. The calm one. The capable one. The person who always seemed to know what to do when everyone else was panicking. Building a career in emergency medicine had required a certain level of confidence in your ability to function under pressure, and somewhere along the way that confidence had quietly become part of your identity.

Now the thought of being alone with a patient made your heart race.

The contradiction sat heavily inside your chest. It wasn't just fear that bothered you. It was what the fear seemed to say about you. Every time your pulse spiked walking into an exam room, every time you found yourself unconsciously identifying exits, some stubborn part of your brain interpreted it as weakness. You knew that wasn't fair. You would never judge a patient that harshly. You would never expect someone who had survived what you survived to simply get over it.

For some reason, you expected it from yourself anyway.

Dr. Feldman seemed to recognize that immediately.

"Why does that feel embarrassing?" she asked.

The question caught you off guard. You frowned slightly, searching for an answer that made sense.

"Because I know better."

"Know better than what?"

You gestured vaguely, frustration already building.

"Than this. Than being afraid all the time. Than having panic responses I can literally explain from a neurological perspective."

Dr. Feldman remained quiet for a moment before responding.

"You were strangled. You suffered a traumatic brain injury. You genuinely believed you might die."

The words settled heavily between you.

Hearing the facts presented that plainly made something uncomfortable twist inside your chest. You spent so much time viewing the attack through a clinical lens that it was easy to forget how terrifying it had actually been. In your own mind, the event had gradually become a collection of injuries and recovery milestones. Fractured jaw. Concussion. Shoulder dislocation. ICU admission. Physical therapy. Follow-up appointments.

Medical facts.

Medical facts were easier to live with than memories.

"And now you're judging yourself for being afraid," Dr. Feldman continued gently.

You looked away.

The worst part was that she was right.

When she phrased it that way, the cruelty of it became obvious. Not cruelty from anyone else. Not from your coworkers or Jack or your friends. Nobody in your life expected you to recover faster than you already were.

The pressure was entirely your own.

"I know the psychology behind trauma," you said quietly.

"I know."

"I know why my brain is reacting this way."

"I know."

The frustration finally surfaced.

"Then why does it still feel like this?" You rubbed a hand across your face, suddenly exhausted. "Why do I understand exactly what's happening and still feel like I'm losing my mind sometimes?"

For the first time since sitting down in her office, your voice wavered.

Not dramatically.

Just enough.

Enough that you heard it. Enough that she heard it.

Dr. Feldman didn't answer immediately. She let the question exist for a moment before speaking.

"Because understanding pain isn't the same thing as healing from it."

You stared down at your hands.

The answer should have been obvious, instead it felt devastating.

For months you had approached recovery the same way you approached every problem in medicine. Gather information. Understand the mechanism. Create a treatment plan. Follow the evidence. Somewhere deep down, part of you had believed that if you understood trauma well enough, you could control it.

As if knowledge could somehow exempt you from being human.

"You've spent years helping other people survive terrible things," Dr. Feldman said softly. "You've sat with grieving families. You've treated victims of violence. You've helped patients through experiences most people can't even imagine. But throughout all of those situations, you were standing beside the trauma."

Your throat tightened.

"This time, you were the one living through it."

The words landed harder than anything else she had said.

Suddenly you weren't sitting in a quiet office anymore.

You were back in Trauma Two, staring up at fluorescent lights while your lungs desperately searched for air. You remembered the growing certainty that something was terribly wrong. The helplessness. The fear. The horrifying realization that all of your training, all of your experience, and all of your medical knowledge couldn't change what was happening.

For the first time, you remembered the attack not as a physician but as the person who had survived it.

The memory hit hard enough that tears blurred your vision before you could stop them.

At first you felt embarrassed. Then tired. Then overwhelmingly sad.

Not only because of the attack itself, but because of everything that followed. The surgeries. The nightmares. The panic attacks. The months spent measuring your recovery against impossible expectations. The constant belief that you should somehow be handling all of this better because you were a doctor and doctors were supposed to understand these things.

Dr. Feldman didn't interrupt. She didn't hand you a tissue or rush to make you feel better. She simply sat there with you while the reality finally settled into place.

For months, you had been describing the attack the same way you described everything else in medicine—clinically, objectively, through symptoms and recovery timelines. You had translated the most frightening experience of your life into a language that felt safer, convincing yourself that understanding it might somehow make it easier to carry.

But trauma wasn't a chart.

It wasn't a diagnosis.

And it wasn't something you could analyze until it stopped hurting.

For the first time since waking up in the ICU, you stopped trying to explain it away. You stopped trying to justify your reactions or convince yourself that understanding the psychology behind trauma should somehow make you immune to it.

The truth was much simpler than that.

It hurt.

Doctors made terrible patients because knowing the science behind something did not magically stop it from hurting. Understanding trauma responses did not prevent nightmares. Being able to explain hypervigilance did not stop your pulse from spiking whenever somebody approached too quickly from behind. Knowing exactly which parts of your brain were responsible for fear and survival instincts did absolutely nothing when those same instincts decided a harmless moment was dangerous.

Some days were easier than others after that. Some mornings almost felt normal until a mirror, a monitor alarm, or an unexpected reminder dragged the memory back to the surface. The bad nights were harder, especially when nightmares left you gasping awake before reality had a chance to catch up.

On those nights, Jack would reach for you almost immediately, often before either of you fully opened your eyes. Somewhere along the way, he had learned the difference between you shifting in your sleep and you waking from a nightmare. He would pull you closer without a word, one hand settling against your back while both of you waited for your breathing to slow again.

Slowly, though almost painfully slowly, life began stitching itself back together around the damage. The nightmares became less frequent. The panic lasted minutes instead of hours. Physical therapy hurt a little less each week. Recovery never arrived all at once; it came in tiny pieces that were easy to miss until you looked back and realized how far you had come.

By the time nearly three months had passed, most of the visible evidence of the attack had finally faded. The bruising around your throat disappeared first, though sometimes you still caught yourself staring too long at your reflection, expecting to see fingerprints there anyway. Your jaw had mostly healed, leaving behind only occasional pain when you talked too much or forgot yourself and laughed too hard. Physical therapy slowly returned strength to your shoulder until Denise finally cleared you to stop glaring at resistance bands like they had personally offended you.

Physically, you were doing well.

Emotionally was harder to measure.

Because no amount of therapy fully prepared you for walking back into the emergency department for the first time.

The second the automatic hospital doors opened that morning, your body betrayed you instantly.

Your heartbeat spiked so suddenly it almost made you stop walking. Your chest tightened. Every sound felt too loud all at once. Ambulance radios crackled overhead somewhere down the hallway. Stretchers rattled across tile floors. Somebody laughed in the distance. A monitor alarm sounded briefly before being silenced.

The familiar chaos of the emergency department wrapped around you immediately.

For years, these sounds had meant comfort. Work. Purpose. Routine. The constant noise of ambulance radios, ringing phones, overhead pages, and monitor alarms had become so familiar that your brain barely registered them anymore. They were part of the rhythm of the place. Part of home.

Now, your body reacted differently.

Before your brain could catch up, every muscle had already tightened. Your chest felt too small. It was as though some deeply buried part of you had mistaken familiarity for danger.

You slowed without meaning to.

Jack noticed immediately.

His hand tightened around yours before you had even fully stopped walking.

"Hey."

The word was quiet and gentle. When you looked up, you found him watching you carefully. Not because he thought you were about to fall apart, and not because he was panicking. He was simply paying attention. Somewhere over the past few months, Jack had become remarkably good at noticing the things you tried not to show anyone else.

"You okay?"

The question wasn't casual.

You could hear the concern beneath it immediately. The concern had softened over the months, but it had never fully disappeared. Even now, Jack seemed capable of noticing the things you tried not to show anyone else long before you admitted them yourself.

You took a slow breath.

"Yeah."

Jack's eyebrow lifted immediately.

The look alone told you he didn't believe that answer for a second.

Despite yourself, a small laugh escaped.

"Okay," you admitted, exhaling heavily. "Maybe not completely."

"That's a more believable answer."

The corner of his mouth twitched slightly.

What struck you wasn't the teasing so much as the absence of everything else. There was no judgment in his voice, no frustration, and no expectation that you should somehow be over this by now. Months had passed since the attack, but Jack had never once acted as though recovery came with a deadline.

His fingers tightened around yours.

"You don't have to be okay immediately."

The words settled somewhere deep inside your chest because they felt less like reassurance and more like permission.

For months, you had been quietly frustrated with yourself for not recovering faster.

Jack never seemed to share that frustration.

Not once.

You looked at him for a moment before nodding.

This time, when you took a breath, it came a little easier.

And when the two of you started walking again, you realized you weren't quite as afraid as you had been thirty seconds earlier.

Jack stood beside you in black scrubs, one hand still wrapped around yours while the other adjusted the strap of his bag. He looked calmer than he had in weeks, but not entirely relaxed. Some part of him still carried the memory of what happened here, even if neither of you talked about it very often.

Without saying anything else, he squeezed your hand once more before guiding you further inside.

The emergency department looked exactly the same.

Monitors still beeped overhead. Residents still rushed through presentations too quickly. Dana was already arguing with somebody in radiology over the phone near the nurses' station. Santos appeared to be stealing crackers from somewhere while simultaneously talking over three different people.

Life had continued here without you.

Standing there again, that realization hit harder than you expected. After everything that had happened, some irrational part of you had expected the place to feel different. Instead, the department had done what it always did.

It kept going.

Then somebody noticed you.

The shift moved through the department almost immediately. Conversations slowed. Heads turned. Even Santos stopped talking for a full second, which honestly felt medically concerning on its own.

"There she is."

Dana's voice carried across the nurses' station before you could fully prepare yourself. Something about hearing it made your stomach tighten unexpectedly.

You smiled awkwardly.

"Hi."

The word came out far more nervous than you intended.

God.

You had handled mass casualty incidents with steadier composure than this.

Santos recovered first.

Before you could react, she was already crossing the department toward you. A second later, she wrapped you in a careful hug, avoiding your shoulder with surprising precision while somehow still managing to squeeze hard enough to make your eyes sting unexpectedly.

"You look significantly less dead."

A surprised laugh escaped you.

"Thank you."

"No, seriously."

She stepped back and looked you over carefully, her eyes moving across your face as if she were unconsciously searching for evidence that you were actually okay.

"I'm glad you're back," she said quietly. "It sucked here without you."

The words landed harder than you expected.

Because you knew Santos.

You knew how much effort it took for her to say something sincere without immediately burying it beneath sarcasm.

The department seemed quieter after that.

Not because anyone felt awkward.

Because everyone remembered.

Nobody talked about it anymore, but the memory still existed beneath the surface of the room. They remembered the safe word over the intercom. They remembered Jack sprinting toward Trauma Two. They remembered the shouting, the blood, the uncertainty afterward.

Standing there surrounded by familiar faces, you suddenly realized that while you had been recovering, they had been carrying pieces of that experience too.

Whitaker approached next looking deeply uncomfortable.

"We missed you."

The words came out almost too quickly.

Your throat tightened immediately.

Not because the statement was dramatic.

Because it was honest.

The emergency department had always been dysfunctional and chaotic and emotionally repressed in exactly the way trauma departments usually were. Nobody openly talked about how much they cared about each other. Instead, they brought extra coffee. Covered shifts. Saved each other the last decent muffin in the break room and made fun of one another relentlessly.

That was how affection worked here.

But they had missed you.

And standing there looking at people you had worked beside for years, a realization settled heavily into your chest.

For weeks after the attack, these people hadn't known whether you were going to survive.

While you were unconscious in the ICU, they had still shown up for work. They had still walked past Trauma Two. They had still waited.

Somehow, understanding that hurt more than you expected.

Your eyes burned suddenly.

Immediately, Jack's hand settled against the small of your back.

Grounding.

Steady.

A reminder that you weren't standing here alone.

"You okay?" he asked quietly.

Only you could hear him.

You nodded a little too quickly.

Jack's expression made it abundantly clear he wasn't fooled for a second.

Before he could say anything else, Robby appeared.

"Alright. Enough vulnerability before somebody bursts into flames."

A few people laughed immediately.

The tension eased.

Robby pointed directly at you.

"Half shifts for the next two weeks. No trauma rooms alone. No heroics. No staying late. No pretending you're invincible."

You blinked.

"Robby—"

"That wasn't a suggestion."

"It sounded vaguely suggestive."

"It wasn't."

You crossed your arms as much as your shoulder currently allowed.

"I'm sensing hostility."

"I'm sensing paperwork if you reinjure yourself."

Several nurses immediately nodded in agreement.

Traitors.

"And if I catch you overworking yourself, I'm personally calling your physical therapist."

You gasped dramatically.

"That feels threatening."

"It is threatening."

Despite yourself, you laughed.

A real laugh this time.

The sound felt rusty after months away, but hearing it surprised you almost as much as feeling it. For a second, the knot that had been sitting in your chest all morning loosened.

And when you glanced toward Jack, you caught the expression that crossed his face before he could hide it.

Relief.

The realization hit you then with surprising force.

This morning hadn't only terrified you.

It had terrified him too.

Because returning to the emergency department meant more than walking back into work. For you, it meant facing the place where your life had nearly ended. For Jack, it meant returning to the place where he had found you bleeding on the floor and thought, for one horrifying moment, that he was already too late.

Your eyes drifted instinctively down the hallway toward Trauma Two before you could stop yourself.

The curtain was open now. The room sat empty beneath fluorescent lights, looking exactly like every other trauma bay in the department.

But your body remembered anyway.

The back of your neck tightened. Your breathing faltered.

Jack noticed immediately.

Without saying anything, his hand found yours again. His fingers threaded through your own with quiet certainty, grounding you before the panic had a chance to grow into something larger.

This time when he squeezed your hand, you squeezed back.

Life slowly started feeling like yours again after that.

Not all at once. Healing never happened dramatically the way movies liked pretending it did. There was no singular moment where everything stopped hurting and the fear disappeared. Recovery arrived quietly instead, through ordinary moments that barely seemed important at the time.

The first time you walked through the hospital parking garage alone without your pulse skyrocketing. The first night you slept six uninterrupted hours. The first time Jack touched your throat absentmindedly while kissing you and your body didn't flinch before your brain caught up.

Those moments mattered more than any clean CT scan ever could.

The victories that mattered most were often the ones you barely noticed at first. One day you realized an ordinary hallway no longer made your shoulders tense. Another day you found yourself laughing without pain or hesitation. Eventually, you stopped thinking about every breath, every movement, every reminder of what had happened and simply existed again.

Your body slowly began feeling like home.

The bruises faded completely after a while. Physical therapy eventually became frustrating instead of humiliating, which Denise informed you was actually progress.

A few weeks later, she watched you complete an exercise without compensating for pain for the first time since surgery.

"There she is," Denise said immediately.

For the first time in a very long time, you believed her.

The nightmares faded too.

Not entirely at first.

Some nights still dragged you backward into Trauma Two with terrifying clarity. You would wake with your heart hammering against your ribs while panic clawed briefly through your chest before reality slowly settled back into place around you.

Those moments used to feel endless.

Eventually they became manageable.

Partly because Jack was always there.

Sometimes he woke before you did, reaching for you automatically the second your breathing changed beside him. Other nights he simply pulled you closer without either of you speaking, one hand moving slowly along your spine while your heartbeat gradually returned to normal.

Neither of you talked much during those moments because you didn't need to. There was something strangely intimate about surviving trauma beside somebody who understood exactly what silence meant.

No explanations.

No reassurances.

Just the quiet certainty that neither of you had to carry it alone.

The attack had changed both of you.

There was no pretending otherwise.

Then one afternoon, almost five months after the attack, Leon reached out.

You had been sitting on the couch answering work emails when the notification appeared. At first, you barely paid attention to it. Over the past few months your inbox had filled with department updates, physical therapy reminders, scheduling changes, and occasional messages from coworkers checking in on you. It looked no different than any of the others until your eyes landed on the sender's name.

Leon Carter.

The reaction was immediate.

Your stomach dropped hard enough that you physically sat back against the couch, staring at the screen while your brain struggled to process what you were seeing. The name itself looked strangely ordinary sitting there in your inbox, which somehow made it worse. Nothing about it suggested surgeries or ICU stays or months of recovery. Nothing about it suggested panic attacks or nightmares or the long process of learning how to feel safe again.

It was just a name.

But it was attached to one of the worst days of your life.

You didn't open the email right away. Instead, you found yourself staring at it while memories surfaced faster than you could organize them. You remembered the rain and the interstate. You remembered climbing into the ambulance and finding a frightened man who talked about his daughter and thanked you for helping him. You remembered the trust he had placed in you simply because you were a doctor and doctors were supposed to know what to do.

Then the memories shifted.

You remembered Trauma Two. The confusion in his eyes. The moment recognition disappeared and something went terribly wrong. You remembered fear. You remembered pain. You remembered waking up in the ICU days later with only fragments of the attack and everybody else's horror to fill in the gaps.

The problem was that none of those memories existed separately anymore.

When you thought about Leon, you thought about all of it at once.

The patient.

The victim.

The man who nearly died in a car accident.

The man who nearly killed you afterward.

For several long seconds, you simply sat there looking at the email while your pulse climbed higher and higher.

Across the apartment, Jack looked up from where he was working on his laptop at the dining table. He noticed the change in your expression immediately.

Five months later, he still seemed capable of reading your mood before you spoke a single word.

"What happened?"

The question sounded casual, but you could already hear the concern underneath it.

You swallowed, glanced back at the screen, and slowly turned the laptop toward him.

Jack's eyes moved across the screen, and the change in him was immediate.

His entire body stiffened before he'd even finished reading.

"No."

The answer came so quickly it startled you.

"Jack—"

"No."

His voice wasn't loud. If anything, that made it worse. Every muscle in his jaw tightened, and something flashed across his face so quickly it was difficult to identify. Anger, certainly. But fear too. Fear disguised as anger. The kind that had become familiar over the past few months whenever conversations drifted too close to what happened in Trauma Two.

"You do not owe him anything."

The words settled heavily between you.

You knew that.

Nobody expected you to answer. Nobody expected forgiveness. Nobody expected anything from you at all. The problem wasn't obligation. The problem was that part of you already wanted to know what Leon had said.

That night, long after dinner and after the apartment had settled into its usual quiet rhythm, you finally opened the email. Jack didn't try to stop you. He simply sat beside you on the couch while you read.

The message wasn't long.

What struck you first was what it didn't contain. There were no excuses. No attempts to justify what happened. No requests for forgiveness. Leon explained that pieces of the attack had only recently been explained to him fully after months of neurology appointments and psychological rehabilitation. He remembered the accident. He remembered the rain and the ambulance ride. He remembered talking to you and trusting you to help him.

After that, there was nothing.

The seizure had fractured his memory completely.

The next thing he remembered was waking up days later and learning that he had violently assaulted the doctor who stopped on the interstate to save his life.

You felt your throat tighten as you continued reading.

Leon wrote that he was horrified by what happened. He wrote that he understood if you never wanted to hear from him again. He wrote that he thought about you every day and hoped you were healing. He explained that he was finally receiving treatment for both the neurological aftermath of the seizure and the psychological trauma surrounding the accident itself.

At the very end, there was a simple apology.

And somehow that made it harder.

By the time you reached the last line, several minutes had passed. The apartment felt unusually quiet around you. When you finally looked up, Jack was watching carefully from the other end of the couch. He wasn't pushing for an answer or trying to influence your reaction. He was simply waiting.

"What are you thinking?"

You looked back down at the screen.

For a moment, you weren't entirely sure yourself.

"I think he's telling the truth."

Jack's gaze dropped immediately. You could practically see the conflict moving across his face.

"He almost killed you."

The words came out rougher than he intended.

You shifted closer until your knee brushed his.

"I know."

Jack looked toward the apartment windows instead. The city lights reflected faintly against the glass while silence settled between both of you.

Eventually, Jack let out a quiet laugh and rubbed a hand across his face. There wasn't any humor in the sound. If anything, he looked exhausted. The kind of exhausted that had nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with carrying something for too long.

"You know what the worst part is?"

Your chest tightened immediately.

"What?"

For a moment, he didn't answer. He just stared out toward the apartment windows.

"I know it wasn't his fault," he said finally. "I know what postictal aggression is. I know what brain injuries do to people. I know he wasn't himself."

His jaw tightened as he spoke, and you could see the conflict written all over his face. Jack understood the medicine. He understood the neurology. He understood all the reasons why what happened wasn't really Leon's fault.

But understanding something and making peace with it were two very different things.

"I know all of that," he continued quietly. "But every time I hear his name, I still see you on that floor."

The honesty of it hit harder than you expected because there was no anger behind it. No blame. No attempt to argue with the facts. It was simply the truth.

You reached for his hand immediately.

His fingers closed around yours before you had fully touched him, as though some part of him still needed the reassurance. As though, despite the months that had passed, there were moments when his body still remembered the terror of almost losing you.

"He didn't remember hurting me," you said softly.

Jack nodded.

"I know."

"He wasn't trying to hurt me."

"I know."

His thumb moved slowly across your knuckles before his gaze dropped toward your joined hands.

"That doesn't make it hurt less."

Your eyes burned unexpectedly.

"No," you admitted. "It doesn't."

Silence settled between the two of you after that, not uncomfortable but heavy with the kind of truth neither of you could argue with. Leon had been a victim. You had been a victim too. One reality didn't erase the other, and accepting that was probably the hardest part of all.

Eventually, you answered the email.

Not because you were completely healed, and not because you had somehow stopped being afraid. There were still days when memories surfaced unexpectedly and moments when certain sounds made your pulse spike before your brain could catch up. There were still shifts where you caught yourself avoiding Trauma Two without consciously realizing it. Healing had never been linear, no matter how badly you wanted it to be.

But you also understood neurological trauma. You understood how quickly a person could stop being themselves inside catastrophic moments. More importantly, you understood what it felt like to wake up after trauma wishing desperately that something terrible had never happened.

So you accepted his apology.

Much to Jack's absolute dismay.

"You're too forgiving," he complained several days later while the two of you carried groceries up three flights of stairs.

You snorted.

"Says the emergency physician."

"That's different."

"It literally isn't."

"It is when it's you."

The answer arrived so quickly that it stole the rest of your argument.

Jack stopped halfway up the stairs, grocery bags hanging forgotten at his sides. For a moment he simply looked at you, and suddenly you could see all of it again: the fear, the exhaustion, the months he had spent pretending he was coping better than he actually was.

"You almost died."

His voice wasn't loud. It didn't need to be.

The quiet certainty in it somehow made the words hit even harder.

"I don't think you understand what that did to me."

Emotion caught painfully in your throat before you could answer.

Because maybe, for the first time, you finally did understand.

Five months ago, you probably wouldn't have. A year ago, you might have called his fear irrational. Doctors saw trauma every day. People got hurt. People healed. Life moved on. That was the unspoken agreement everyone in emergency medicine made with themselves in order to keep functioning. If you stopped to consider how fragile everything really was, if you allowed yourself to think too hard about all the ways an ordinary day could become a catastrophe, you would never be able to walk back into work.

So you learned to accept uncertainty without dwelling on it. You learned to tell yourself that terrible things happened to other people.

Then it happened to you.

The attack forced you to confront something years of emergency medicine had never fully taught you. None of it was guaranteed. Not the next shift. Not next year. Not even the next ordinary Tuesday that began like every other day and ended with your entire life divided into a before and after.

Standing there on the staircase, looking at Jack, you finally understood what he had been carrying all those months. It wasn't just the memory of the attack. It was the memory of almost losing you. The memory of walking into Trauma Two and finding the person he loved lying on the floor. The memory of not knowing whether you were going to survive.

You stepped closer until the grocery bags bumped awkwardly against both of your legs and wrapped your arms around him.

Jack held on immediately.

Not desperately. Just instinctively.

Like he always did now. Like some small part of him still needed the reassurance that you were really there, standing in front of him, alive and breathing and stubborn enough to argue with him about everything.

For the first time since the attack, you didn't just recognize that instinct.

You understood it.

And somehow that realization hurt almost as much as it healed.

After a while, life settled again anyway.

Not because everything was suddenly fixed. Not because the memories disappeared or because the attack stopped being part of your story. Life simply did what it always did. It kept moving forward. Shifts accumulated. Seasons changed. New patients arrived. New crises demanded attention. The world refused to remain frozen around a single terrible day, no matter how much that day had changed the people who survived it.

Eventually, you returned to full shifts.

The first one felt impossible.

You remembered standing in the locker room beforehand staring at your reflection for longer than necessary, scrubs folded over one arm while anxiety twisted quietly beneath your ribs. Part of you had been convinced something would go wrong the moment you stepped back into the rhythm of a normal day. That you would panic. Freeze. Forget how to be yourself.

Instead, the shift began.

Then another patient arrived.

Then another.

Hours passed.

You assessed injuries. Ordered imaging. Argued with consultants. Drank coffee that had been sitting out too long. Somewhere around the middle of the afternoon, you realized you had gone nearly three hours without thinking about the attack at all.

The realization almost made you stop walking.

Because for the first time, the emergency department felt like work again instead of a place haunted by memory.

It wasn't immediate after that. There were still difficult moments. Days where entering certain rooms made your stomach tighten unexpectedly. Cases that lingered a little too long beneath your skin. But gradually, almost invisibly, the fear loosened its grip.

You stopped hesitating before entering trauma bays. Your hands stopped shaking after violent cases. The emergency department slowly became home again instead of the place where something terrible happened to you.

And through all of it, Jack remained exactly where he had always been.

Beside you.

Some nights after difficult shifts, the two of you still sat together in the parking garage for a few extra minutes before driving home. Neither of you usually spoke much during those moments. You simply sat in comfortable silence while the adrenaline of the shift slowly drained away.

Sometimes Jack still reached for your hand automatically in crowded hallways. Sometimes you caught him scanning rooms without realizing he was doing it. Occasionally you would glance across a trauma bay and find him already looking at you.

The expression never changed.

It wasn't worry anymore.

Not entirely.

It was something softer.

Something that looked suspiciously like gratitude.

Like some part of him remained quietly amazed every single day that you were still alive to look back at him at all.

One night, after an especially exhausting shift, the two of you found yourselves briefly alone at the nurses' station while the rest of the department dealt with varying levels of chaos farther down the hallway.

Jack was finishing a chart.

You were pretending to finish one.

Neither of you had enough remaining brain cells to be particularly successful.

Without looking up from the computer screen, Jack reached over and laced his fingers through yours beneath the desk. The movement was so absentminded that he probably didn't even realize he'd done it. You looked down at your joined hands and felt something settle quietly in your chest.

There was nothing remarkable about the gesture anymore. That was what made it matter.

Over the past year, that hand had reached for yours so many times that you had stopped noticing most of them. It had found yours in hospital rooms when you woke up disoriented and hurting. It had found yours in therapy office parking lots when neither of you really wanted to talk about what had been discussed inside. It had found yours in the middle of nightmares, in crowded hallways, during difficult shifts, and in countless ordinary moments that would never make it into any dramatic retelling of your recovery.

When you thought back to everything that had happened—the surgeries, the panic attacks, the nightmares, the endless appointments, and the exhausting process of slowly rebuilding yourself from the inside out—one truth remained painfully clear.

You would not have survived any of it without Jack.

Not because he fixed it. Nobody could have done that. He hadn't magically erased the pain or made the recovery easier than it was. The nightmares still happened. The fear still existed. The damage had still been real.

What Jack had done was stay.

Every time recovery became ugly or frustrating or unbearably difficult, he stayed. Every time you pushed people away, convinced yourself you were fine, or became angry at your own limitations, he stayed. He sat beside hospital beds and physical therapy offices and bad days without ever demanding that you become easier to love.

Sometimes, during the quietest parts of overnight shifts, you still found yourself thinking about the version of yourself that had existed before all of this happened. The woman standing beside a wrecked car on an interstate in the pouring rain. The woman who ran toward emergencies without hesitation. The woman who believed understanding trauma and surviving trauma were basically the same thing.

You missed her sometimes.

More than you usually admitted.

There were days when you missed how uncomplicated she had been. How certain. How convinced of her own resilience.

But not as much as you expected to.

Because surviving had changed you. Not dramatically. The changes had happened quietly instead, carving themselves into habits and instincts before you ever noticed them. They lived in the way your body still stiffened slightly at raised voices, in the way Jack checked your breathing in his sleep without realizing he was doing it, and in the way both of you had learned that silence could mean comfort instead of distance.

There were still difficult moments. Violent patients occasionally made your pulse spike before your brain could remind you that you were safe. Cold Pittsburgh mornings sometimes left your shoulder aching where scar tissue still lingered. There were nights when Jack woke from dreams he never fully explained and reached for you before he was even awake enough to realize what he was doing.

But there were good days now too.

Real ones.

Days where laughter came easily again and the emergency department felt like home instead of a crime scene. Days where you caught yourself standing inside Trauma Two without remembering to be afraid first. Days where entire hours passed without thinking about the attack at all.

Healing had happened quietly. Not through dramatic breakthroughs or grand victories, but through ordinary moments accumulating so gradually that one day you looked back and realized your life belonged to you again.

And maybe that was why you loved Jack so much in the end.

It wasn't because he had saved you, although in a lot of ways he probably had. It wasn't even because he stayed when things became painful and complicated, though that mattered too. You loved him because he never once asked you to heal faster for his comfort. He never treated your recovery like an inconvenience or your fear like something that needed to be fixed. He simply sat beside you through every ugly part of it with the same stubborn steadiness, loving you exactly as you were while you figured out how to become yourself again.

One night near the end of your shift, long after life had started feeling normal again, the two of you found yourselves standing outside the hospital watching snow drift softly across the parking lot.

Jack stood close enough that his shoulder brushed yours through both of your jackets.

For a while, neither of you said anything.

The air smelled like snow and cold pavement, and you simply stood together watching flakes drift through the glow of the parking lot lights. It was an ordinary moment. So ordinary, in fact, that a year ago you probably wouldn't have remembered it.

Now it felt important.

Without looking away from the snowfall, Jack reached for your hand automatically. The gesture was so familiar that neither of you really thought about it anymore. You simply threaded your fingers through his and felt his grip tighten instinctively around yours.

Somewhere along the way, that had become home.

Standing there beneath fluorescent lights with your hand wrapped safely inside his, you found yourself thinking about everything that had happened over the past year. The attack had changed your life. It had left scars, taken things from you, and forced both of you to rebuild parts of yourselves you never expected to lose.

But it hadn't taken everything.

Because when the fear finally stopped feeling so sharp and the dust settled enough for you to see clearly again, one truth remained.

The worst thing that had ever happened to you had also shown you exactly who would stay when everything else fell apart.

And somehow, standing beside Jack in the falling snow, that knowledge felt stronger than the fear ever had.

Six months later.

The cabin is so remote that supply drops only come once a month.

You chose Norway because the cold helps. Something about extreme temperatures stabilizes the radiation — makes the constant hum under your skin almost bearable.

The cabin is small. One room, actually. A bed you rarely sleep in, a kitchenette you barely use, and a desk completely buried under research materials. Quantum physics textbooks in three languages, compound's database you stole before disappearing, including Bruce's notes.

Your hands hover over an equation, and they're glowing again. Faint purple light seeping through your skin like bioluminescence. You've learned to control it somewhat— channel it into small bursts of energy manipulation. You can move objects now without touching them, create shields, sense energy fields within a hundred-meter radius.

But it doesn't matter. None of it matters, because you're alone.

The dog tags hang heavy around your neck, you haven't taken them off once in six months. Sometimes you hold them when you sleep and pretend there's still a heartbeat behind them.

You wonder if he's given up looking yet. You wonder if Steve finally convinced him to let you go, if he started healing, started living, started forgetting—

Your hands flare bright purple and the coffee mug on the desk shatters.

"Shit." Your voice sounds strange. You haven't spoken out loud in three days, maybe four.

You clean up the ceramic shards with your bare hands, not bothering with the broom. The cuts heal almost instantly now, another side effect you discovered in the past weeks: accelerated healing, enhanced strength, and a bone-deep exhaustion that no amount of sleep can touch.

The latest book you've read is about quantum entanglement. The theory that particles can remain connected across any distance, that what affects one affects the other instantaneously. You'd laughed when you first read it, because of course that's what you are now. Quantumly entangled with Bucky across whatever distance you've put between you, feeling the ache of separation like a physical wound.

Your notes are getting more desperate, the handwriting sloppier. Margins filled with half-formed theories and crossed out equations. What if you could reverse the cellular integration? What if you could extract the energy signature? What if, what if, what if—

You slam the book shut and stand up too fast, the chair scrapes against the wooden floor, loud in the oppressive silence.

Outside, it's snowing again. You pull on your jacket—his jacket, actually, one of the things you took when you came here— and step out into the blizzard. The cold hits like a slap, but you welcome it. The wind screams, and you scream back, your voice low in the howl of the storm.

"TAKE IT BACK!"

Your hands are blazing now, purple energy crackling between your fingers like lightning. The snow around you melts in a perfect circle, steam rising as radiation meets ice.

"YOU GAVE THIS TO ME, SO TAKE IT BACK!" You're on your knees now, hands pressed into the snow, and where your palms touch the ground, the energy pulses outward in waves. "I DON'T WANT IT ANYMORE! I DON'T WANT ANY OF IT!"

The universe doesn't answer. It never does.

You collapse forward, forehead pressed against the frozen ground, and the sobs come like they always do: violent, wrenching and endless. Your fingers dig into the snow until they hit permafrost, and the dog tags swing forward, cold metal against your neck.

"Please," you whisper to no one, to nothing. "Please just let me go, let me fade… let me disappear. I can't do this anymore."

The wind howls.

You stay there until hypothermia starts to set in—which takes longer than it should, because apparently, cosmic radiation makes you resistant to temperature extremes too. When you finally drag yourself back inside, there's a perfect circle of dead earth where you'd been kneeling. Nothing will grow there for years.

You don't bother changing out of your wet clothes, you just curl up on the bed, still wearing his jacket, clutching his dog tags and stare at the wall. You probably should sleep, but instead, you reach for your phone.

You know you shouldn't do this, you've promised yourself every night you won't do this again, but you do it anyway.

The folder is called DO NOT OPEN and you've opened it 180 times, once for every night since you've been gone. Your finger hovers over one video for just one moment—one last chance for saving yourself— before you press play.

The screen fills with Bucky's face, and your heart immediately shatters. He's in bed, hair messy from sleep, early morning light streaming through the window behind him. This was recorded four months before everything went wrong. Before you knew that touching him could kill him.

"Stop recording me," video-Bucky mumbles, but he's smiling. That real, genuine smile he only ever gave you. The one that made his eyes crinkle at the corners.

"Never," your own voice responds from behind the camera, playful and so fucking happy it hurts to hear. "You're too pretty in the morning, it's unfair."

"I'm not pretty, I'm rugged."

"You're pretty and rugged, that's a dangerous combination."

He reaches for the camera—for you— and the frame shakes as you dodge away, laughing. God, your laugh sounds so carefree, like you didn't know that in four months, you'd be alone in a frozen cabin listening to this laugh and wanting to die.

"Come back to bed," video-Bucky says, and his voice is rough with sleep and affection and want. "It's too early for this."

"It's 10 AM."

"Exactly, too early." He props himself up on one elbow, and the sheet slips down to his waist. You remember this moment, remember thinking he looked like something out of a dream. "Put the phone down and come here."

"Make me."

His grin turns wicked. "Is that a challenge?"

"Maybe."

What happens next is blur—he's suddenly lunging forward, the camera spins wildly, and then you're both laughing, breathless and so in love it radiates from every frame. The video stabilizes eventually. Now you're both in frame, squeezed together in a selfie angle. His arm is around your shoulders and your head is tucked against his chest.

"Say hi to future us," you say to the camera.

"Hi future us," Bucky obliges, then he looks down at you, and his expression goes soft. "Hope you're having a good day."

"Hope we're still this happy," you add quietly.

He kisses the top of your head. "We will be, I promise."

The video ends.

You're sobbing before the screen even goes dark. It comes out in ragged, gasping waves—the kind of crying that feels like it's tearing you apart from the inside out. You curl tighter round the phone, pressing it against your chest like you can somehow press yourself back into that moment. Back when you were warm and safe.

"I'm sorry," you choke out to the empty room. To the ghost of him in the video. "I'm so sorry. I couldn't keep us that happy, I couldn't—"

Your voice breaks completely.

You replay the video again.

And again.

And again.

Then you close your eyes and try to sleep, knowing you'll dream of him. Knowing you'll wake up reaching for someone who isn't there. Knowing tomorrow night you'll watch the video again. Because it hurts, but it's all you have.

AVENGERS COMPOUND, month 2 since you left.

Bucky hasn't slept in thirty-six hours.

Steve finds him in the lab at 3 AM surrounded by data pads and holographic displays, Carol Danvers' contact information pulled up on the main screen.

"Buck—"

"She's out there somewhere, completely alone, probably thinking she saved me." Bucky doesn't look up from the screen, his metal fingers tap against the desk in an arrhythmic pattern that betrays his agitation. "She's got cosmic radiation tearing her apart from the inside and she's alone, Steve."

"You don't know that she's—"

"Yes, I do." Now Bucky looks up, and Steve flinches at what he sees in his eyes. "I know her, she took every piece of research she could carry. She's trying to fix herself, trying to find a cure so she can come back."

Steve sits down heavily. "Or she's trying to accept that there isn't one."

"No," the word comes out flat. "I don't accept that. Carol Danvers survived direct exposure to an Infinity Stone, so did Peter Quill and his entire team. Wanda got his powers from the mind stone. There are precedents, Steve, there are options."

"Bruce already—"

"Bruce doesn't know everything." Bucky pulls up a new file—Carol's SHIELD profile, her encounter with the tesseract. "Carol Danvers absorbs energy, that's her entire power set. What if she could absorb the radiation from—"

"Bucky, you're grasping at straws."

"I'm following leads," Bucky's jaw tightens. "There's a difference."

Steve watches his best friend for a long moment. The shadows under Bucky's eyes, the tension in his shoulder, the way his flesh hand keeps reaching for something that isn't there—your hand, probably. The habit is so ingrained that he doesn't even notice he's doing it anymore.

"If you find her," Steve says quietly, "and there's no cure… what then?"

Bucky's smile is sharp and humorless. "Then I'll find one anyway, I'll search every corner of this universe and the next if I have to."

"Buck—"

"She gave everything to save me, Steve. She walked away from me—the person she loved the most— because she thought it was the only way to keep me alive." Bucky stands, gathering his research into a neat stack. "So yeah, I'm gonna find a cure, and then I'm gonna find her. And then we're gonna have the forever she didn't think we could have."

"You sound pretty certain."

"I am certain," Bucky's smile heads for the door, pausing a the threshold. "I didn't survive seventy years of HYDRA just to lose her to bad luck and cosmic radiation. I'm getting her back, Steve. That's not a question. The only question is how long it will take."

He's gone before he can respond.

Month 3: Carol Danvers.

Turns out finding Carol Danvers is harder than expected. She's off-world more than she's on it, handling emergencies across multiple galaxies. Bucky makes a bunch of favors to Nick Fury so he can let him borrow his pager.

He waits patiently for one week until Carol materializes in a flash of gold light, landing in the empty field where Bucky's been waiting.

"You're Bucky."

He stands his ground. "Yeah, thanks for meeting me."

"Fury said you needed help with an Infinity Stone problem." Carol crosses her arms. "I'm listening."

So Bucky tells her everything. The mission to Morag, the power stone, the way you grabbed it to save everyone and the radiation poisoning that followed. Carol listens without interrupting, when he's done, she's quiet for a long moment.

"She grabbed the Power Stone with her bare hands," Carol says finally, "and survived."

"Barely."

"No, you don't get it." Carol shakes her head. "She should be dead. The fact that she's alive at all means her body did something right, it adapted somehow."

"But she's still emitting radiation—"

"Because her body doesn't know what to do with the energy it absorbed. It's trying to expel something it should be integrating." Carol starts pacing thinking out loud. "When I absorbed the Tesseract energy, my cells restructured at a molecular level, the energy became part of me. Your girlfriend's body is stuck in limbo—it absorbed the energy but can't process it."

Bucky's heart rate picks up. "Do you think… you can help her?"

"Maybe." Carol turns to face him. "I can absorb energy, it's literally what I do. If she's emitting Infinity Stone radiation, I might be able to pull it out of her system."

"Might?"

"I've never tried to absorb Infinity Stone energy from another person before," Carol's expression is serious. "But I'm willing to try. Where is she?"

And there it is… the question Bucky's been dreading.

"I don't know," he admits. "She disappeared three months ago, I've been trying to find her, but—"

"But she doesn't want to be found." Carol's expression softens slightly. "Smart girl."

"I need to find her first," Bucky says. "But when I do, will you help?"

Carol studies him for a moment and sees the desperation he's trying to hide, the determination, the love.

"Yeah," she says finally. "I'll help. But Barnes— even if I can absorb some of the radiation, it might not be enough. Infinity Stone exposure on this scale… there might not be a complete cure."

"Then I'll find one anyway."

Carol almost smiles. "Stubborn."

"You have no idea."

"Actually, I think I do." She pulls out a pager that looks exactly like Fury's. "Here. If you find her, call me and I'll come as soon as I can."

Bucky takes it carefully. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet," Carol's eyes glow faint gold. "Just find her, and when you do tell her Carol Danvers said she's a bad ass for surviving this long."

She's gone in a flash of light.

Month 4: Peter Quill.

The Guardians are harder to track down than Carol was. They don't exactly have an Earth address, they don't check in with any planetary authorities. They're mercenaries, pirates, heroes—depending on who you ask—and they move through the galaxy like ghosts.

Bucky has to call in a favor from Thor's old contacts. Has to promise things to people he'd rather shoot and has to follow a trail of bar fights and unpaid tabs halfway across the galaxy in a borrowed ship.

He finds them on Knowhere, of all places, in a dive bar that smells like engine fuel. Peter Quill is drunk… not falling-down drunk, but close.

Bucky slides into the seat across from him without asking. Quill looks up, squinting

"Do I know you?"

"I'm Bucky Barnes, I'm—"

"Yeah, yeah, I know, Steve Rogers' boyfriend or whatever." Quill waves a hand vaguely. "What do you want? We're not taking any jobs right now."

"I'm not here to hire you," Bucky pushes a data pad across the table. "I'm here because you survived direct exposure to the Power Stone."

That gets Quill's attention. He straightens up, suddenly more sober. "Why do you want to know about that?"

"Because someone I love is sort of dying from the same thing."

The words hang in the air between them.

Quill's expression changes. "Tell me," he says quietly.

So Bucky does, again. The whole story. By the time he's finished, Quill has ordered another drink.

"She grabbed it to save you," Quill says.

"To save everyone on the mission."

"But mostly you."

Bucky doesn't deny it.

Quill stares into his glass. "Gamora died because of a Soul Stone, because Thanos—" He cuts himself off, jaw tight. "I know what it's like, losing someone like that. Having to keep going when the only person you want is gone."

"I'm sorry," Bucky says, and means it.

"Yeah, me too." Quill drains his drink. "The only reason I survived the Power Stone was because my team shared the load—and because of my celestial DNA, without that, I'd be dead. Your girl doesn't have either of those things."

"But she survived."

"She did," Quill leans forward. "Which means her body did something extraordinary. The human body shouldn't be able to process Infinity Stone energy, but if she's alive, if she's still walking around, that means she's adapted somehow."

"Carol said the same thing."

"Carol's right. Your girlfriend is basically a living Infinity Stone battery at this point." Quill pauses. "The question is whether that's killing her or making her stronger."

"It's killing me," Bucky says flatly. "The radiation makes me sick, my body reads it as a threat."

"Because of that knockoff serum running through your veins, it's trying to protect you from what it thinks is a toxin." Quill drums his fingers on the table. "But what if it's not a toxin? What if it's just… power? Raw, uncontrolled, cosmic power that her body doesn't know how to use yet?"

Bucky's mind is racing. "You think she needs to integrate it, not expel it."

"I think she needs to stop fighting it, yeah." Quill meets his eyes. "When I held the Power Stone, I could feel it trying to tear me apart, but the moment I stopped resisting that's when it clicked. I could hold it and channel it. You need to find her and tell her to stop fighting it."

There's a long silence.

"I lost the person I loved most," Quill says finally. "I didn't get a choice, she was just… gone. But you've got a chance. Your girl is out there somewhere, alive. Don't waste it, don't let her think she has to do this alone."

"She left because being near me was killing me."

"So find a way to fix that part," Quill pulls up a holographic display. "I'll give you my genetic profile, the medical scans, all of it. Maybe it'll help."

"Why?" Bucky asks. "You don't know me."

Quill's smile is sad. "Because if I could go back, if I could save Gamora… I'd do anything, absolutely anything." He slides the data chip across the table. "So go save yours."

Bucky takes the chip carefully. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me, just—" Quill's voice cracks slightly. "Just get her back. And when you do, don't let go. Not for anything."

"I won't," Bucky promises.

Three hours later, Rocket corners Bucky in the cargo bay.

"So," Rocket says, eyeing Bucky's metal arm with barely concealed interest. "That arm of yours, if you happen to not need it anymore—"

"No."

"I'm just saying—"

"Rocket, I swear—"

"That thing is wasted on you! Do you even know what I could do with tech like that? The upgrades I could—"

"I am Groot," Groot interrupts gently.

"Fine! Fine, I'll stop asking." Rocket huffs. "But when you get yourself killed doing something stupid for your girlfriend, I call dibs."

Despite everything, Bucky almost laughed.

"If I die," he says, "you can have it."

Rocket's eyes light up. "Really?"

"No, not really. Stop asking."

"You're no fun."

But when Bucky lies down that night in the spare quarters they've given him, staring at the ceiling of an alien ship somewhere in deep space, he pulls out the locket and opens it. Stares at your face in the small photograph.

"I'm getting closer," he whispers to the image. "I'm gonna solve this and then I'm gonna find you."

The photo doesn't answer, but he keeps talking anyway.

"I know you think you saved me by leaving, and maybe you did—maybe I would've killed myself trying to get more time with you. But you gotta know, I'm not surviving without you, I'm just existing."

His thumb traces the edge of the locket.

"So I'm coming for you, and I'm bringing a cure. And then you're never leaving my side again."

He closes the locket and presses it against his chest. "Hold on a little longer."

Month 5: Wakanda.

Shuri doesn't look up when Bucky enters her lab. She's surrounded by holographic displays—genetic sequences spinning in mid-air, cellular structures rotating slowly, data streams flowing faster than he can follow.

"Sergeant Barnes," she says, still focused on her work. "I've been expecting you."

"You have?"

"Oh please, quit the innocent act. Captain Danvers contacted me three weeks ago, Peter Quill's genetic data arrived last Tuesday. I've been running simulations since then."

Bucky's heart jumps. "And?"

"It's fascinating," Shuri waves her hand and the displays reorganize themselves. "Your girlfriend grabbed the Power Stone with her bare hands and survived, do you understand how extraordinary that is?"

"I know she should be dead—"

"No, you don't understand." Shuri pulls up an image—a cellular structure that seems half-familiar. "These are her cells, or at least, what I'm projecting they look like based on the radiation signature Bruce detected. See these markers here?" She points to glowing purple threads woven through the DNA. "That's Infinity Stone radiation, not just touching her cells, but integrated into them. Part of her genetic code now."

Bucky stares at the image. "How is that possible?"

"The same way Carol Danvers survived Tesseract exposure, the same way Wanda Maximoff gained powers from the Mind Stone. The same way Vision was created." Shuri's expression turns serious. "When I was trying to remove the Mind Stone from Vision, I was working with approximately three million neurons, trying separate the Stone's influence from his neural pathways without destroying what made him… him."

"You didn't have time to finish."

"No," pain flickers across Shuri's face. "But I learned something important: you can't just rip Infinity Stone energy out of living tissue, it's woven too deeply. The only way forward is reintegration."

"I don't understand."

Shuri pulls up another display—this time showing Quill's genetic structure next to your projected one. "Peter Quill's Celestial DNA allowed him to hold the Power Stone temporarily because his cells could process that level of energy. Carol Danvers' cells restructured to absorb and metabolize cosmic energy. Your girlfriend's cells are trying to do the same thing—but they're stuck halfway."

"Bruce said her body was rejecting it."

"Because it doesn't know how to accept it." Shuri starts pulling up more data—complex equations, cellular models, energy flow diagrams. "Think of it like an organ transplant. Her body absorbed this foreign energy, but her immune system is treating it as an invader. It's trying to expel something that's already part of her."

Bucky's mind is racing. "So what do we do?"

"We teach her cells to stop fighting." Shuri's smile is sharp. "We program her DNA to recognize the energy as native rather than foreign. Molecular reintegration."

"Is that possible?"

"I did it with Vision's neurons. This is the same principle, just… broader scope." Shuri pulls up a simulation—cells reorganizing, energy pathways forming, the purple glow gradually fading from threat to integration. " If I can map her complete structure, I can design a recoding sequence. Nanobots that rewrite her cellular programming one cell at a time, teaching her body to metabolize the radiation."

"How long would that take?"

"The procedure itself? Six to eight hours. Full integration? Three to four weeks as the nanobots work through her system." Shuri meets his eyes. "But there's a complication."

Of course there is.

"The radiation levels are too high right now," Shuri continues. "If I try to recode her cells while she's emitting that much energy, the nanobots will burn out before they can complete the process. We need to reduce her baseline radiation first."

"Carol can absorb it."

"Exactly," Shuri nods. "Captain Danvers reduces the radiation to manageable levels—say, twenty to thirty percent of current output, then I perform the molecular reintegration. Her cells learn to process the remaining energy naturally."

"And then?"

"And then she stops being a walking radiation source. She'll still have powers—the energy is part of her now, that's not changing. But her body will know how to control it, contain it, use it… she won't be toxic to you anymore."

Bucky can barely breathe. "And you think it'll work?"

"I ran the simulation eight hundred and forty-seven times," Shuri pulls up the success rate. "Ninety-two percent success rate. The eight percent failure scenarios all involve variables I can control for with proper preparation."

"Ninety-two percent."

"Better odds than we usually get." Shuri closes the displays with a gesture. "There's one more thing. The reintegration works best when the subject is willing. When they stop fighting the energy and accept it as part of themselves."

Bucky remembers Quill's words: The moment I stopped resisting, that's when it clicked.

"We were trying to fight it the whole time," he says quietly. "She's probably out there trying to do the same thing."

"Then you'll need to convince her to stop." Shuri's gaze is steady. "This won't work if she's still trying to expel the energy. She needs to embrace it, accept that this is who she is now."

"She will," Bucky says with certainty. "Once she knows there's a way back she'll do whatever it takes."

"Good," Shuri starts compiling the data. "I'll need her here in Wakanda for the procedure. The lab has shielding that can protect you during the process. And Barnes—" She pauses. "I'll need a complete genetic sample. Blood work, cellular scans, the full profile. Which means you'll need to find her first."

"I'm working on it."

"Well, work faster. I've seen psychological profiles on prolonged isolation. Five months alone with that kind of power… it changes people. Find her soon."

"I will."

Finding you takes another four weeks.

Steve and Bruce work the digital angle—reading financial footprints, energy signatures, satellite anomalies. Tony's AI runs pattern recognition on global power fluctuations. But it's Sam who finds the real lead.

"Supply drops," he says, dropping a folder on the table in front of Bucky. "Remote locations, extreme climates. Someone's been ordering very specific brand of snacks to a location in Northern Norway, among other interesting things…"

Bucky's hands are shaking as he opens the folder. Shipping manifests. Your favorite brand of cookies, quantum physics textbooks. The deliveries stop at a drop point fifty kilometers from the nearest settlement.

"It's her," he breathes.

"Probably," Sam agrees. "But Buck—you can't be the one to approach her."

"Like hell I can't—"

"Think about it." Steve's voice is quiet. "She left to protect you. If you show up before we can implement the cure, she'll run. She'll think you're being reckless, that you're going to hurt yourself trying to be near her."

Bucky knows he's right. Hates it, but he knows it.

"I'll go," Bruce offers. "With Steve. We'll explain about Carol, about Shuri's procedure. We'll convince her to come back."

"She won't believe it's real," Bucky says roughly. "She'll think it's a trap, or false hope, or—"

"Then we'll show her the data." Bruce is already pulling up Shuri's simulations on his tablet. "The success rate, the genetic models, everything. She's a scientist, Bucky, she'll understand the evidence."

"And what if she doesn't want to come back?"

Steve's hand lands on his shoulder. "Then we'll keep trying until she does. But Buck—we need to move fast. Every day she's out there alone…"

He doesn't finish, doesn't have to.

"Okay," Bucky's voice is hoarse. "Okay, you go. But I'm coming with you. I'll stay in the jet, I won't approach her, but I need to be there."

"Bucky—"

"I need to see her, Steve. Even if it's from a distance, even if she doesn't know I'm there." His hand clenches into a fist. "I haven't seen her face in six months. Please."

Steve and Bruce exchange a look.

"The jet has radiation shielding." Bruce says slowly. "If you stay inside, behind the barrier."

"I will, I promise."

"Alright," Steve nods. "We leave in an hour."

You're halfway through a complex equation when you feel it—two energy signatures getting closer.

Your hands flare purple instinctively, defensive. Your supplies came two days ago, so no one should be out here.

You're at the window when you see them: Steve and Bruce, hiking through the snow toward your cabin. They're not wearing tactical gear, no weapons visible. Just two men in winter coats, looking like they're out for a walk.

No.

They can't be here. You were so careful, you covered your tracks, you—

They're fifty meters away now, close enough that you can see Steve's concerned expression. Close enough that Bruce is checking some kind of device in his hand—probably measuring your radiation output.

You grab your go-bag. You can run. There's a back exit, you can be gone before they get here. But Steve holds up his hands, as a universal sign of 'we come in peace' and you hesitate.

Bruce pulls out a tablet, holds it up so you can see the screen from this distance. It's still too far away to see it clearly, but looks like genetic sequences, cellular models and something about Wakandan technology you remember from Shuri's lab.

Your hands are shaking now. Slowly, carefully, you open the door.

"Don't come any closer," you call out. Your voice sounds strange after weeks of disuse. "I mean it, Steve. You know what I can do."

"We're here to help you." Steve calls back.

"There is no help. I've been researching for six months, I've read everything—"

"To find a cure," Bruce interrupts. "But that's not the right approach… we found an alternative."

"What?"

"Can we come in?" Bruce asks. "I'll show you the data, all of it. The procedure, the success rate, everything."

You should say no. You should run. This is exactly what you were afraid of—them finding you, giving you false hope, convincing you to come back when nothing has changed.

But god, you're so tired of being alone.

"Stay on that side of the room," you say, stepping back. "Don't get closer than five feet."

They enter slowly, Bruce immediately starts setting up the tablet on your desk, pulling up files and simulations, Steve stays by the door, watching you with that expression you know too well—the one that says he's trying to figure out if you're okay.

You're not okay. You haven't been okay in six months.

"Carol Danvers can absorb energy," Bruce starts without preamble. "She's agreed to reduce your radiation output by sixty to seventy percent. Then Shuri performs a molecular reintegration procedure—essentially reprogramming your cells to metabolize the Infinity Stone energy instead of expelling it."

You stare at the data, there are some cellular models showing the integration process, and there's a timeline—six to eight hours for the procedure, three to four weeks for full integration, the success rate is 92%.

"This is real?" Your voice cracks.

"It's real," Steve says quietly. "Shuri's been working on it for weeks. She's ready whenever you are."

"And Bucky—" You can't finish the question.

"He's been searching for this since the day you left," Bruce says. "Carol, Peter Quill, Shuri—he tracked down everyone who's ever survived Infinity Stone exposure. This solution exists because he refused to give up."

Your eyes are burning at this point. "Is he…"

"He's alive. He's okay." Steve's voice is gentle. "He wants to see you."

"No." The word comes out panicked. "No, he can't—the radiation—"

"He's not here," Bruce says quickly. "He's in the jet, behind shielding. He promised not to approach until after the procedure."

The relief and disappointment war in your chest.

"Can I—" You swallow hard. "Can I see him? From a distance?"

Steve and Bruce exchange a glance.

"The jet has observation windows," Steve says. "You'd be separated, but—"

"I don't care." You're already moving toward the door. "Please."

They set it up in the cargo hold.

A wall of reinforced glass, the kind designed to contain gamma radiation. You on one side, Bucky on the other. Five feet of separation plus a barrier that could probably withstand a nuclear blast.

It's not enough, but it's the closest you've been to him in six months. Bruce and Steve step back, giving you privacy. You can barely breathe as you walk toward the glass, your hands trembling, your heart racing so fast you think it might burst.

And then you see him.

He's thinner. There are shadows under his eyes that weren't there before. His hair is longer, tied back in a knot. He's wearing the jacket you bought him for his birthday last year—the one he claimed he didn't like but wore constantly anyway.

He looks like he hasn't slept in weeks.

But he still looks beautiful.

"Hi," you whisper, even though he can't possibly hear you through the glass.

But his lips move, forming the same word: Hi.

Your hand comes up, pressing against the glass. His mirrors it on the other side, flesh palm to your purple-veined one, separated by three inches of reinforced barrier.

"You found me," you say.

He nods, his eyes are red.

"I'm sorry." The words tumble out. "I'm so sorry, I thought I was saving you, I thought—"

He shakes his head sharply and pulls out his phone, types something and then he holds it up to the glass:

Don't apologize, you did save me. Now it's my turn to save us.

Your breath hitches. "Is it real? Bruce showed me the data, but—"

He types again: 92% success rate. Shuri's ready, Carol's ready. We just need you there.

"What if I'm part of the 8%?"

Then we find another way, but you won't be. I know you won't be.

You're crying now, tears running down your face. "I missed you so much."

I know, me too.

"I still love you, I never stopped, I—"

He's typing again, but his other hand is pressed so hard against the glass you can see his knuckles turning white: I never stopped either, not even for a second.

"I wear your dog tags every day." You pull them out from under your shirt, hold them up so he can see.

His face crumbles, he touches the locket around his neck.

You both stand there, hands pressed to opposite sides of the glass, crying, trying to get closer to each other through sheer force of will.

"After the procedure," you whisper. "How long until we can—"

He understands immediately and types again: Three to four weeks for full integration. But Bruce thinks maybe partial contact earlier. An hour, maybe two. We build up slowly.

"I can do that. I can wait." Your voice is steadier now. "I waited six months, I can wait a few more weeks if it means forever after that. When do we start?"

He looks over his shoulder—probably at Steve or Bruce. Then he looks back at you and types: Whenever you're ready. We can go to Wakanda right now. Carol's on standby.

You take a shaky breath and look down at your hands—still glowing faintly purple, still dangerous. Then you look at him, the man who crossed the galaxy to find a solution and refused to give up even when you'd given up on yourself.

"I'm ready."

The medical bay is unlike anything you've ever seen. Shuri's designed it specifically for this—a surgical theater surrounded by energy dampening fields, radiation shielding, and enough monitoring equipment to track every cell in your body simultaneously. Carol Danvers stands to one side, warming up like an athlete before a marathon.

You're in the center, sitting on the examination table in a medical gown, trying not to think about the 8% failure rate.

"Okay," Shuri says, circling you with a scanner. "Here's how this works. First, Carol absorbs as much of the excess radiation as she can. This will hurt—I'm not going to lie to you. It's going to feel like she's pulling your insides out. But it's necessary to get your levels down to where the nanobots can work."

"How long?"

"Ten to fifteen minutes, depending on how much energy she can safely absorb." Shuri meets your eyes. "You need to say conscious through it. If you pass out, your body might instinctively fight back, and we can't risk that."

You nod, even though your hands are shaking.

"After Carol's done, I'll inject the nanobots. They'll start the recoding process immediately—you'll feel that too. Warmth, tingling, maybe some discomfort as your cells restructure. The initial programming takes six to eight hours. You'll be sedated for most of it."

"And then?"

"Then we wait. Three to four weeks for full integration. But if everything goes right, you should be able to tolerate brief contact within a week. We'll build up slowly."

Brief contact. A week. You can do this.

"Where's Bucky?"

Shuri gestures to the observation room—a wall of glass where you can see him pacing like a caged animal. Steve's there too, one hand on Bucky's shoulder, probably the only thing keeping him from breaking through the barrier.

Your eyes meet across the distance. He presses his hand to the glass. You mirror the gesture, even though he's too far away to really see.

"He'll be there the whole time," Shuri promises. "Every second. Ready?"

No. Not even a little bit.

"Yes," you say anyway.

Carol steps forward and her eyes are glowing now, fully gold, power radiating off her in waves. "I need you to lower your defenses," she says. "Stop fighting the energy, let it flow naturally. Can you do that?"

"I can do that."

"Good," Carol's hands hover over your shoulders, not quite touching. "On three. One—"

She doesn't get to three.

The pain is immediate and absolute. It feels like she's reached inside your chest and grabbed your heart, except is not your heart, it's the energy, the purple lightning that's been living in your veins for six months, and she's pulling it out thread by thread. Your back arches, your hands grip the table hard enough to dent the metal and you can't breathe, can't think, can't—

"Stay with me!" Carol's voice cuts through the agony. "I know it hurts, but you need to stay conscious. Focus on something!"

You focus on the observation window.

On Bucky, who's pressed against the glass now, both hands flat against it, his mouth moving in words you can't hear but can read on his lips: You can do this, stay with me.

The energy streams from your body to Carol's in visible waves—purple light flowing into gold. Your veins are still glowing but fainter now, the spiderweb patterns starting to fade. Carol's gritting her teeth, absorbing more and more, her whole body incandescent.

"Seventy percent," Shuri calls out. "Carol, that's enough."

"I can take more!"

"You're at your limit, any more and you'll destabilize."

Carol pulls back reluctantly, and the sudden absence of pressure makes you gasp. You collapse forward, would have fallen off the table if Shuri hadn't caught you.

"I've got you. Deep breaths, you did so well."

Your whole body is trembling. When you look down at your hands, the purple glow is still there, but it's so much fainter now. Almost translucent.

"Seventy-four percent reduction," Shuri reports, checking her scanners. "That's even better than projected. How do you feel?"

"Like I got hit by a truck," you manage.

Carol's leaning against the wall, breathing hard, her skin still glowing. "That was intense," she says. "The Power stone is no joke."

"Thank you," you whisper.

"Thank me when you get your happy ending," Carol straightens up with visible effort. "Shuri, she's all yours."

Shuri's already preparing the injection—a syringe full of silver liquid that seems to move on its own. Nanobots. Millions of them, ready to rewrite your genetic code.

"This is it," Shuri says. "Last chance to back out."

You look at the observation window again. Bucky hasn't moved. He's still there, watching, waiting, believing.

"Do it," you say.

The injection is almost anticlimactic—a small pinch in your arm. For a moment, nothing happens.

Then the warmth starts.

It begins at the injection site and spreads—through your arm, across your chest, down through your core. It's not painful exactly, more like your cells are waking up, reorganizing, learning a new language. You can feel the nanobots working, tiny machines rewriting your DNA one base pair at a time.

"Cellular restructuring has begun," Shuri announces. "Vitals are stable, neural activity normal. So far so good."

The warmth intensifies. Your hands start glowing brighter—not purple now, but silver-white as the nanobots flood your system. It's beautiful and terrifying at the same time.

"I'm going to sedate you now," Shuri says gently. "When you wake up, the primary recoding will be complete. Okay?"

You nod, already feeling drowsy as she administers the sedative.

The last thing you see before your eyes close is Bucky in the observation window, his hand still pressed to the glass.

Hold on, you think. Just a little longer.

Then darkness.

You wake up to Shuri's face hovering over you, concerned.

"Welcome back," she says. "How do you feel?"

You take inventory. Your body feels… different. Not wrong, just different. Like you've been taken apart and put back together in a slightly new configuration. The constant hum of energy under your skin is still there, but it's quieter now… more controlled.

"Weird," you say. "But okay?"

"Better than okay," Shuri helps you sit up slowly. "The primary recoding is complete. Ninety-seven percent of your cells have been successfully reprogrammed. The remaining three percent should finish integrating over the next few days."

"And the radiation?"

"Almost completely internalized. You're still emitting trace amounts, but we're talking background levels now—barely detectable." Shuri can't quite hide her smile. "We did it, it worked."

You look down at your hands. The purple veins are gone. Your skin looks normal… human. When you concentrate, you can feel the energy still there, coiled deep inside, but it's not fighting to get out anymore. It's part of you now.

"Bucky—"

"Right here."

Your head snaps toward the door. He's there, still on the other side of the glass barrier, but closer now. Close enough that you can see the tears on his face.

"The levels are low enough for brief contact," Shuri says carefully. "Emphasis on brief. We're taking five minutes, maybe ten. And I want you both in the shielded room so I can monitor his vitals."

"I'll take it," you say immediately.

"Me too," Bucky echoes.

Shuri looks between you both and shakes her head fondly. "You two are impossible. Give me ten minutes to set up the monitoring equipment."

She leaves to prepare. You and Bucky stay separated by the glass, just looking at each other. He looks exhausted, like he hasn't slept since you started the procedure.

"You were here the whole time," you say. He nods. "Eight hours standing there?"

A small smile. "I've done longer stakeouts."

"Bucky—"

"I wasn't leaving." His voice is rough. "Not when I just got you back."

Your chest tightens. "Five minutes isn't much."

"It's more than we had yesterday." His hand comes up to the glass again. "And tomorrow it'll be ten, then twenty, then an hour. We'll get there."

"You're really patient about this."

His laugh is sharp. "I'm really not. I'm dying to touch you, but I'm also not risking your health or mine by rushing. We do this right."

"When did you become so responsible?"

"When I almost lost you." His expression goes serious. "I'm not screwing this up. We're following Shuri's protocol exactly. Even if it kills me."

"Don't say that—"

"Figure of speech." He softens. "I'm okay, I promise. Just… eager."

"Me too."

Shuri returns with enough monitoring equipment to stock a small hospital. She sets it up in a side room—smaller, more intimate, with a chair for each of you and about six feet of space between them.

"Okay," she says, attaching heart rate monitors to both of you. "Five minutes. You can sit close, but no extended contact yet. If Bucky shows any symptoms—nausea, dizziness, elevated heart rate beyond normal excitement—we stop immediately. Understood?"

"Understood," you both say in unison.

Shuri gives you one more look, then steps out. "I'll be right outside. The system will alert me if anything goes wrong."

The door closes.

You're alone with Bucky for the first time in six months.

He's in the chair across from you, three feet away, close enough to touch, but not touching. His hands are gripping his knees so hard his knuckles are white.

"Hi," you whisper.

"Hey beautiful." His voice cracks.

"I don't know what to say."

"Me neither," he swallows hard. "I had a whole speech planned, had it memorized and everything. But now you're here, and I can't remember any of it."

"Try anyway."

He takes a shaky breath. "I missed you. Every second of every day. I missed the way you hum when you're concentrating, when you steal the covers in the middle of the night, the way you laugh at everyone's jokes even when they're terrible… I missed waking up next to you, I missed you so much it felt like dying."

Your eyes are burning. "I've missed you too. I missed everything about you. Even how you still pretend you don't like modern music but I've seen your Spotify wrapped—"

He huffs a laugh. "Busted."

"I'm sorry I left."

"Don't be." He leans forward, elbows on his knees. "You did what you had to do to save my life."

"I should've trusted that we could find another way—"

"Hey," his voice is gentle. "We found it. We're here now, that's what matters."

You nod, wiping your eyes. "Can I— can I move closer?"

"Please."

You shift your chair forward, then again, until you're right in front of him, knees almost touching. Close enough to see the flecks of gray in his blue eyes. Close enough to count his lashes. Close enough to reach out and—

"Two more minutes," FRIDAY announces.

You both freeze.

"That went fast," you say.

"Yeah." Bucky's staring at you like he's trying to memorize every detail. "Tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow," you agree. "And the day after, and the day after that."

"Every day until you're sick of me."

"So never."

He smiles—real and genuine. "Never sounds good."

"One minute," FRIDAY says.

"I love you," you blurt out. "I know I said it through the glass, but I need to say it again. I love you. I never stopped, not for one second."

"I love you too." His eyes are bright. "So fucking much. And when we get through this, when we don't have to count minutes anymore, I'm never letting you out of my sight again."

"Promise?"

"Promise."

"Time's up," FRIDAY announces.

Neither of you move.

"We should—" you start.

"Yeah," he agrees.

But you still don't move.

Finally, Shuri's voice comes through the intercom. "I will come in there and separate you myself if necessary."

That breaks the spell. You both laugh, standing up reluctantly.

"Tomorrow," Bucky says again.

"Tomorrow," you confirm.

As you leave the room, you look back one more time. He's watching you go, one hand raised in a small wave.

You wave back.

It's only five minutes, but it's a start.

Week one: Ten minutes a day.

Day 1: You talk about the mission that started everything. About Morag, and the temple and the moment the orb split open.

Day 2: He tells you about tracking down Carol, about Quill and the Gamora parallel. You cry.

Day 3: You share your research notes. He's impressed by how far you got on your own.

Day 4: You sit in comfortable silence, just existing in the same space.

Day 5: He brings you a book. You each read quiet, occasionally reading passages aloud to each other.

Day 6: You almost hold hands. Get within an inch. Pull back at the last second.

Day 7: Shuri increases your time to fifteen minutes. You both cheer.

Week two: thirty minutes a day.

Day 8: First accidental touch—his knee bumps yours. You both freeze, wait for symptoms. Nothing happens and you both cry from relief.

Day 9: Intentional touch—fingers brushing, just for a second. His skin is warm.

Day 10: You hold hands for sixty seconds. It's the longest minute of your life.

Day 11: He brings your favorite snacks. You eat together, knees touching the whole time.

Day 12: You fall asleep during your sessions. Wake up to find him watching you with the softest expression.

Day 13: First argument—he wants to push the limits, you want to follow the protocol. You barely win.

Day 14: Shuri increases your time to forty-five minutes. His vitals stay perfect the entire session.

Week three: two hours a day.

Day 15: You watch a movie, sit on the same couch. His arm around your shoulders for the last twenty minutes.

Day 16: You talk about the future. About what happens after you're cleared. Where you'll live. If you'll go back to the team.

Day 17: He braids your hair. You've forgotten how good his hands feel.

Day 18: You meet his lips for the first time—just a quick press, barely three seconds. You both shake afterwards.

Day 19: Longer kiss. Ten seconds. His hand cups your face and you lean into it.

Day 20: You make out like teenagers on Shuri's medical couch. She threatens to separate you, but neither of you care.

Day 21: Shuri runs final tests and declares you ninety-nine percent integrated. Clears you for normal contact with monitoring.

Week four.

Shuri gives you a room. Not a medical bay, not a shielded facility. Just a regular room in the residential wing of the Wakandan complex. A bed, a bathroom, a window overlooking the city.

"You're cleared for overnight contact," she says. "But I want you both wearing monitors, if anything feels off, even a little bit, you come find me immediately."

"We will," you promise.

"I mean it. No being heroes, no pushing through symptoms."

"We won't," Bucky adds.

Shuri looks between you both, then sighs. "You're going to push through symptoms, aren't you?"

"Absolutely not," you both lie in unison.

She shakes her head fondly. "At least try to be safe about it, and for the love of Bast, use protection. I don't need any radioactive super-babies running around my lab."

You turn bright red. Bucky coughs.

"I'm a scientist," Shuri says drily. "I know what you're planning to do the second I leave this room. Just be smart about it."

She leaves.

You and Bucky stand there, suddenly awkward.

"So," you say.

"So," he echoes.

"We have all night."

"Yeah."

"No timers."

"Nope."

You take step toward him. Then another. Close enough to touch.

"I don't know how to do this anymore," you admit quietly. "Without counting minutes. Without watching the clock."

"Me neither." His hand comes up slowly, carefully, and cups your face. His thumb strokes across your cheekbone. "Guess we'll figure it out together."

You lean into his touch, eyes closing. Just feeling his warmth, his calluses. The way his breath hitches when you turn your head and press a kiss to his palm.

"I'm nervous," you whisper.

"Me too."

"What if—" you stop. "What if something goes wrong?"

"Then we stop." He steps closer, forehead resting against yours. "But nothing's going to go wrong, we've been building up to this for weeks. Your levels are stable, my body's adjusted. We're okay."

"You sound pretty confident about that."

"I'm confident." His other hand finds your waist. "I'm confident that I love you, that I want you. I've waited six months and four weeks for this. And I'm confident that we're going to be just fine."

"When did you get so wise?"

"When I married you."

You huff a laugh against his mouth. "You didn't marry me. We're not—"

"Technicality." He kisses you softly. "We will be. Soon as we're home, I'm gonna marry you properly."

"Is that a proposal?"

"That's a promise." You kiss him again, deeper this time, and his arms tighten around you. "Now, can I take you to bed?"

You nod and both move together slowly, carefully. He sits on the edge of the bed, pulls you between his legs. His hands settle on your hips, toying with the hem of your shirt.

"I'm going to make love to you now."

Your breath catches. "Okay…"

"And it's probably going to be emotional and messy, and we're probably both going to cry."

"That's okay too."

"And we're going to check the monitors every five minutes like paranoid people."

That makes you laugh. "Probably every two minutes."

"FRIDAY's going to think we're ridiculous."

"It's an AI… but it probably already thinks we're ridiculous."

His smile is so soft and so full of love it makes your chest ache. "Come here."

You climb into his lap, straddling him, and for a moment you just stay like that, your foreheads touching, breathing each other's air. His hands slide under your shirt, warm skin and cool vibranium against your skin.

"You're shaking," he murmurs.

"I'm nervous."

"We don't have to—"

"I want to." You pull back enough to look at him. "I really, really want to. I just— it's been so long. And I'm scared it's going to feel different. That we're going to be different."

"We are different," he says gently. "We've been through hell, we've been apart. We've had to rebuild everything from scratch. But—" His hand comes up to cup your face. "But I still love you the exact same way. And I still want you the exact same way. And when I touch you—" His hand slides down your neck, across your collarbone, "—it still feels like coming home."

"Bucky—" Your voice breaks.

"Let me show you," he whispers. "Let me show you that we're still us. That nothing's changed where it matters."

You kiss him in answer. Deep and slow and full of six months of longing.

His hands slide under your shirt, fingertips tracing patterns on your ribs. You arch into the touch, and he makes this low sound in his chest that you've missed so much.

He pauses, a question in his eyes. You nod, and your shirt comes off slowly, carefully, like he's unwrapping something precious. It gets tossed somewhere neither of you care about. His hands immediately return to your skin, mapping territory he knows by heart.

You tug at his shirt in answer. It joins yours on the floor, and then it's skin against skin and you both go very still. His eyes find yours for a second, you check the monitors on both your wrists, heart rates elevated but stable.

He kisses you again, and this time there's more heat behind it. His hands slide down your thighs, and he lifts you easily turning to lay you back on the bed.

He hovers over you for a moment, just looking. Making sure you're real. You reach up, trace his bottom lip with your thumb. He catches your hand, presses a kiss to your palm, then your wrist, then the inside of your elbow, working his way up your arm with gentle, deliberate kisses.

He continues his exploration, kissing every inch of exposed skin. Your collarbone, the hollow of your throat, the space between your breasts. When he reaches your ribs—where the purple veins used to be, now faded to nothing—he pauses and looks at you with so much tenderness it hurts. Then he kisses every faded mark, tender kiss across your chest and your arms. Everywhere the purple light used to shimmer.

You're crying before he's halfway done.

He kisses the tears from your cheeks, settles his weight more fully against you.

"I love you," you whisper. "I love you so much."

"I love you too," his voice is rough. "So much. So fucking much."

You kiss him hard, desperately, and he responds in kind. The gentleness gives way to need, to six months of missing each other, to all the times you thought you'd never get to do this again. Clothes come off—the rest of yours, all of his— and then it's just skin and heat and hands trying to touch everywhere at once.

You reach for the monitors, checking. He does the same. Both elevated, but still stable.

He kisses down your body again, this time with clear intent. You thread your fingers through his hair as he works, building you up until you're shaking and desperate. When he kisses his way back up your body, you're both trembling. He reaches for the nightstand and pauses to look at you.

The first moment he slides into you, you both go completely still. Your breath catches. His forehead drops to your shoulder. For a long moment, neither of you move—just feeling. Being connected again.

He lifts his head to look at you, and his eyes are bright with unshed tears. You cup his face with both hands, and he leans into the touch. Then he starts to move, slow and careful, and you wrap your legs around his waist, pulling him deeper.

It's perfect.

Not in a perfect movie way—there are awkward position adjustments and a moment where the bed squeaks really loudly and you both pause, half-laughing. But it's perfect in your own way.

The pace gradually builds. He's hitting all the right spots, finding the rhythm you both remember. When you finally come apart, it's together—him buried deep inside you, your name on his lips, your hands clutched in his hair. The pleasure crashes through you like a wave and you feel him follow seconds later, his whole body shuddering.

After, he doesn't pull out immediately, just stays there, face buried in your neck, both of you breathing hard. You check the monitors one more time. All vitals stable. No warnings.

"We're okay," you whisper, and your voice cracks. "We're really okay."

He nods against your neck, and you feel wetness—tears. He's crying. You're both crying.

He finally pulls back enough to look at you, and you're both a mess—tears streaming, smiling through them.

"I love you," you say quietly. "I love you so much."

"I love you too," he carefully pulls out, disposes of the condom and immediately pulls you back into his arms. "God, I love you."

You curl into his chest, listening to his heartbeat, feeling his warmth. His hand runs through your hair in long, soothing strokes. There's a long, comfortable silence.

Then: "FRIDAY, are you monitoring us right now?"

FRIDAY's voice fills the room: "I am monitoring your vital signs, as requested by Princess Shuri. I am not, however, recording or observing. Your privacy is assured."

"Thank you, FRIDAY." Bucky says.

"You're welcome, sergeant Barnes. And congratulations. Your vital signs remained stable throughout your… activity."

You burst out laughing . "Oh my god."

"FRIDAY just congratulated us on sex," Bucky says, grinning.

"I congratulated you on maintaining stable vital signs during intimate contact," FRIDAY corrects primly. "The sex is your own business."

You're both laughing now, that slightly hysterical post-emotional-sex laughter.

His hand trails down your spine, a silent question. You shift closer in answer.

You make love twice more that night—once slow and lazy, once with a little more urgency. Each time, you check the monitors wordlessly, a quick glance and a nod before continuing.

You talk in between rounds. About everything and nothing. About the future. About where you'll live when you get officially cleared. About all the mundane, beautiful things you get to plan now that you have forever.

"I want to marry you," he says at some point. "For real, proper wedding, all of our friends. You in a white dress walking to me, making me cry."

"I'd really like that."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." You kiss his chest. "Let's get married. Let's have the life we were supposed to have before everything went wrong."

"Nothing went wrong," he says quietly. "It was just… a detour. We took the long way around, but we're here now."

"We're here now," you agree.

You fall asleep like that. Tangled together. No monitors alarming, no timers counting down. Just you and him and the whole future stretched out before you.

When you wake you in the morning, his arms are still around you. And when you check the monitors—because old habits die hard—they're still perfectly stable.

You really are free.

A few hours later, Shuri finds you both in the dining hall, looking thoroughly rumpled and impossibly happy.

"Good morning," she says with a knowing smirk. "I trust you slept well?"

"Very well," Bucky says innocently.

"Mmhmm." She pulls data on her tablet. "Your vitals were stable all night. Eight hours of contact with zero adverse reactions. I'd say we can officially declare you're safe to be around each other."

You and Bucky look at each other.

"We're really safe," you whisper.

"We really are"

Shuri's expression softens. "You're free. No more restrictions, no more monitoring. You can go and live your lives."

"Thank you," you say. "Shuri, thank you for everything. For saving us, for—"

"For giving us our lives back," Bucky finishes.

"You're welcome." She closes the tablet. "Now go home, get married, be disgustingly happy. And please, do not name your first child after me."

"No promises," you say grinning.

She shakes her head fondly. "Impossible, you're both impossible."

But she's smiling. And so are you.

Because you're free. You have your whole lives ahead of you. And you're going to spend every single second of it together.

You get married in a small ceremony two months after. It's just the team and a handful of close friends on the grounds of the compound, under an arch decorated with simple white flowers. Steve officiates it. Sam cries more than anyone expected. Maria Hill catches the bouquet and immediately tries to give it back.

The retirement conversation happens on your honeymoon. You're in Greece, watching the sunset paint the sea in shades of gold and pink, and Bucky says quietly "What if we didn't go back?" So you call Steve from a café in Santorini and he takes it exactly as you'd hoped. You promise to come help them if something Thanos-level happens again.

Finding a perfect house takes three months. You look at a dozen places before you find it—a modest two-story in a quiet town upstate, with a front porch and a backyard and a garage that makes Bucky's eyes light up. The neighborhood is the kind where people know their neighbors' names, where kids play in yards, where nothing exciting happens. It takes you two weeks to move in and you spend the first month turning the house into your home.

You find work teaching physics at the local university. Your students are bright and curious and have absolutely no idea their professor used to save the world. You love teaching, love the routine of it, the normalcy, the way your biggest challenge is explaining quantum mechanics to undergrads instead of fighting cosmic threats.

Bucky starts small, fixing the neighbor's lawn mower, then someone's car. Word spreads, and soon he's running a modest auto repair business out of the garage, specializing in vintage cars and motorcycles. On the weekends, he volunteers at the VA, running support groups for veterans. He doesn't talk much about those sessions, but you can see how much it means to him. How much it helps. He's found his purpose outside of being a soldier.

Your life becomes beautifully ordinary. Morning coffees and breakfast routines, coming home to each other every evening, grocery shopping on Saturdays, movie nights on Fridays, Sunday mornings in bed with nowhere to be and nothing to do but exist together.

Two years into retirement, you're on the back porch with coffee going cold in your hands. Bucky's next to you on the swing, his arm around your shoulders, both of you watch the neighborhood slowly wake up.

"I've been thinking about having a baby," you say quietly.

Bucky's thumb stills on your shoulder for just a moment, then continues its gentle movement. "Yeah?"

"Yeah."

He doesn't ask if you're sure. He just holds you a little closer and lets the words settle between you. His arm wrap around you fully, and you sit together in the golden morning light, thinking about what comes next. A family. The next chapter of this improbable, beautiful life.

It won't be simple. Nothing about you has ever been simple, there will be complications, uncertainties, moments of fear. You'll need to call Shuri, get answers, make plans… but you've survived worse than uncertainty.

You've survived impossible. And you'll survive this too, together.

"Should we call her?" Bucky asks quietly. "Shuri?"

You nod against his chest. "Soon. Let's just— let's sit here a little longer first."

"Okay."

So you do. You sit on your back porch on a Sunday morning, holding each other, remembering everything it took to get here, and choosing together what comes next.

The quantum tunnel spits you out on Morag in 2014, and the first thing you notice is how quiet it is. Dead quiet. Just wind and ruins and the distant sound of waves.

"We've got forty-five minutes before the window closes," you say, checking th GPS device on your wrist. "The temple's half a klick north."

Steve adjusts his shield. "Stay sharp, we don't know what we're walking into."

Bucky's already scanning the perimeter, rifle raised. "Looks abandoned."

"It is," you confirm. "Quill still unconscious down there. We're early."

The temple is exactly where it should be—a massive structure carved into the cliff face, a fascinating alien architecture. The power stone it's placed in its pedestal, sealed in the orb, pulsing with barely contained energy.

"Okay," Steve says. "Nice and easy. We secure the stone, get back to the platform and—"

The explosion cuts him off.

You're thrown sideways, slamming into one of the temple pillars. Your ears are ringing. Through the smoke, you see them: Sakaraans, maybe a dozen of them, firing indiscriminately. They must have followed you when they saw the quantum tunnel.

"Get the stone!" Steve shouts, shield already deflecting blaster fire.

Bucky's at your side, hauling you up. "You good?"

"Yeah, go—"

Another explosion, closer this time. The temple shudders and you watch in horror as the pedestal cracks, the orb rolls free splitting open on the ston floor.

The power stone tumbles out, raw, uncontained, pulsing with enough enrgy to level a planet.

Everything slows down.

Bucky's moving toward it—he's a super soldier, he might survive the exposure—but you're closer. You're already running. You can hear him screaming your name, but you're faster. Your hands close around the stone, and the universe explodes… at least for you.

Purple lightning crawls up your arms, through your veins, behind your eyes. It's not pain, it's way too big to be pain. It's everything, all at once. Every star being born and dying, every moment that ever was or ever will be, all of it flooding through you at once.

You can hear Bucky screaming but you can't let go. If you let go, the energy discharge will kill everyone. Will crack the planet open.

So you hold on.

Four seconds. Five. Six.

You slam the stone back into what's left of the pedestal and the world snaps back into focus. You're on your knees, your hands are still glowing, purple veins crawling under your skin like lightning scars. Bucky's hands are on your face, he's saying your name over and over, frantic.

"I'm okay," you manage. Your voice sounds wrong, distant. "I'm okay, I'm—"

You pass out in his arms.

You wake up three days later in the med bay. Bruce is there immediately, shining a light in your eyes, checking your vitals. "Welcome back, how do you feel?"

"Like I touched an infinity stone."

"Well, you're not dead, so, that's a good start." He's trying for levity, but you can see the concern in his eyes. "The glowing has mostly faded, you've still got some residual marks, but they should disappear completely in another few days."

You look down at your hands. The purple veins are still there, faint now, like a spiderweb under your skin.

"Where's Bucky?"

"He's been here the whole time, I finally convinced him to go shower about an hour ago." Bruce hesitates. "He was… he didn't handle seeing you like that very well."

You're about to respond, when the door crashes open and Bucky's thre, hair still wet, looking like he's been through hell.

"You're awake." He's across the room in three strides, hands hovering over you like he's afraid to touch. "You're okay, you're—"

"I'm okay," you assure him. "Buck, I'm fine."

He sits on the edge of the bed, and you can see his hands shaking. "You stopped breathing twice. Did Bruce tell you that? Your heart stopped once, I had to watch them—"

"But I'm here now." You catch his hand, lacing your fingers through his. "I'm right here."

He lifts your joined hands to his mouth, kissing your knuckles. "Don't ever do that again."

"No more infinity stones, I promise."

He manages a weak smile before leaning down to kiss you properly. You don't notice the way his hand tightens on yours or the way his breathing picks up.

Twenty minutes later, he's vomiting in the bathroom.

Bruce runs every test he can think of. Bucky insists it's just stress, just the comedown from the mission, but you all know better.

It happens again the next day. You're sitting together in the common room, your head on his shoulder, and after thirty minutes he has to excuse himself. You find him in the hallway, pale and shaking, leaning against the wall.

"This is connected to the stone," you say.

"We don't know that."

"Bucky—"

"We don't know that," he repeats, more firmly. "Could be a hundred things, could be—"

He doesn't get to finish. His knees buckle and you barely catch him.

Bruce's diagnosis is clinical and devastating: you're still emitting radiation from the power stone. Not enough to hurt a normal person, but enough that Bucky's enhanced metabolism reads it as a threat. The serum is trying to fight it, which is tearing him apart from the inside.

"It should fade," Bruce says, but he won't meet your eyes. "In theory."

"How long?" Bucky demands.

"I don't know. The levels are decreasing, but slowly. It could take weeks, maybe months." He pauses. "Maybe longer."

"So what do we do?"

Bruce looks between you both. "You stay apart, minimize exposure until radiation dissipates to safe levels."

The silence is deafining.

"How much exposure is safe?" You ask quietly.

"Based on today's readings?" Bruce checks his tablet. "Five minutes. Maybe ten if he's had time to recover."

Five minutes. You only get five minutes.

After a few weeks, the lab tests proof that you're safe for fifteen minutes.

You measure everything now.

Bucky sets a timer on his phone every time he enters your room. When it goes off, he leaves without arguments or exceptions.

Fifteen minutes isn't enough time for anything meaningful. It's enough for "how was your day" and "I miss you" and one kiss before the alarm sounds and he has to go.

You start writing things down. All the things you want to tell him, but don't have time for. You leave notes in his room, he leaves notes in yours.

Thought about you today when I saw a cat stuck in a tree. It reminded me of that mission in Prague. -B Sam made a joke about your hair, I defended your honor. You're welcome. -You I'm counting down the minutes until tomorrow, always counting. -B

By week four, your time increases to forty five minutes, and it fels like a miracle.

You can have a meal together now… well, most of one. You learn to eat fast, to tlk while chewing, to fit entire conversations into the space between bites.

"Bruce says the decline is steady," Bucky tells you over breakfast. "If it keeps dropping at this rate, we might have a few hours in another month."

"That's good," you say, but you're both thinking the same thing: What if it stops? What if this is as good as it gets?

The timer goes off and Bucky's only eaten half his food.

"I'll finish it tomorrow," he says, kissing your forehead on his way out.

His plate sits on your table for the rest of the day. You can't bring yourself to throw it away.

By the sixth week, you got two hours, and it feels like the cruelest gift.

It's enough time to watch a movie—if you start it the second he walks in and he leaves before the credits roll.

It's enough time to have sex—once, and only if you're efficient about it, and only if you're both okay with him leaving immediately after. You try it once, the alarm goes off while you're still catching your breath. He kisses you and walks out, and you lie there alone in the tangled sheets and cry.

When the eighth week comes, you notice the increase is slowing down. Bruce shows you the charts, the curve is flattening. The rate of decrease is dropping.

"What does that mean?" Bucky asks.

"It means we might be approaching a plateau," Bruce says carefully. "A baseline level that won't decrease further."

"But it's still going down," you argue. "It went up forty seven minutes this week."

"Forty-seven minutes in seven days. Last week it was an hour and twelve minutes. The week before that, ninety minutes." Bruce looks tired. "I'm not saying it's definitely plateaued, but we need to prepare for the possibility."

That night, Bucky comes to your room. You lie together in your narrow bed, fully clothed, his flesh arm wrapped around you.

"We have thirty more minutes," you whisper. "We should talk about something."

"I don't want to talk."

"Then what do you want?"

"This." His voice is rough. "Just this, just you."

You fall asleep like that. Wake up four hours later to Bucky convulsing beside you, blood streaming from his nose and ears.

"You could've died!" You're shouting, pacing, because if you stop moving you'll fall apart. "You could've— do you have any idea what it was like, waking up and seeing you like that?"

Bucky's sitting on the edge of the med bay bed, still pale but recovering. "I fell asleep, it was an accident."

"An accident? You stayed for four hours, Bucky! Four freaking hours! Your timer went off and you turned it off instead of leaving—"

"I didn't—"

"FRIDAY showed me the logs!" Your voice cracks. "You dismissed the alarm six times, six."

The silence stretches between you.

"I wanted more time," he says finly.

"You could've died."

"I wanted more time with you." He looks up, and his eyes are red. "Is that so fucking terrible? That I wanted to fall asleep next to you? That I wanted one night where I didn't have to watch the clock?"

"Yes!" The word tears out of you. "Yes, it's terrible, because you're killing yourself for a few extra hours—"

"Don't you get it? It's not about hours!" He's on his feet now. "It's about us. Us being together… that's the only thing keeping me—"

The nose bleed starts.

You've been here too long. Twenty minutes arguing, and he's already over the limit.

"I'm leaving," you whisper.

"We're not done—"

"I said I'm leaving!" You're crying now, shoving at his chest before walking out.

You sink to the floor of the next room and finish the fight alone, screaming at an empty room.

Bruce calls you both into the lab. You know it before he speaks, he has a terrible poker face.

"The levels have been stbale for two weeks," he says. "No decrease, no increase. I think… I think this is it."

"It could still drop," Bucky argues. "Could just be longer plateau before—"

"It could." Bruce agrees. "But it's been twelve weeks. The radiation signature should've decreased more by now if it was going to." He pulls up a graph. "I think we're looking at a permanent baseline, aproximately three hours of safe exposure per day."

Three hours for the rest of your life. Three fucking hours.

"There has to be something else," you say, but your voice sounds distant. "Another treatment, a way to extract it, something—"

"I've consulted with everyone I can think of. Shuri, Helen Cho, Strange… There's no precedent for this. Infinity stone exposure on this scale…." Bruce shakes his head. "I'm really sorry."

You're aware of Bucky's hand finding yours, holding it tight.

"Three hours," he says. "We can work with three hours."

You don't answer.

That night, you sit in your room and do the math.

Three hours a day is 1,095 hours a year. Divided by 24, that's 45.625 days. You get 45 days a year with him… the rest, you spend alone.

If you live by 80—optimistic, given your line of work— and Bucky lives to be 150 because of the serum, you'll get 58 years together: 2,668 days total out of 21,170.

12.6% of your life together. The other 87.4% alone.

You're still staring at the numbers when Bucky walks in.

"Three hours a day is 1,095 hours a year," he says, and his voice is so carefully controlled it hurts to hear. "That's 45 days, we get 45 days a year together. Some couples do long distance and see each other less than that. We could— we could make this work, right?"

He's standing in the doorway, hasn't crossed the threshold yet. Even now, he's trying to preserve your time.

"Buck—"

"I wake up at 5, come here until 8. Then lunch, 12 to 1. Dinner, 6 to 8. That's three hours, we just split it up throughout theday. It's structured but it's— it's something." He's talking faster now, desperate. "We could meal prep on Sundays so we don't waste time cooking. We could— I don't know, we could read books at the same time so we have something to talk about during—"

"Bucky, stop."

"No." He takes one step into the room, just one. "No, I won't stop. I've done the math every possible way and this— this is what we have, so we make it enough, we make it—"

"It's not a life."

The words land like a physical blow. You watch him flinch.

"It's our life." His voice cracks. "It is what he have, and people leave with worse. People— people do long distance, people have—"

"People don't get poisoned by the person they love."

"Don't—" The word comes out sharp, ragged. "Don't make this about—"

"What if it gets worse?" You're on your feet now, and you can see the exact moment the timer his head starts counting. He's been here for two minutes. You have 178 minutes left today. "What if the plateau is temporary? What if three hours become two, and then one—"

"Then we'll deal with it."

"What if it kills you?"

"Then it kills me!"

The shout echoes in the small room. Bucky's chest is heaving, his flesh hand clenched into a fist, and you can already see it— the slight tremor starting in his fingers, the way his pupils are dilating wrong.

Five minutes. He's been here for five minutes.

"Get out," you whisper.

"No."

"Bucky, please—"

"No." He crosses the room in three strides, and you can see what it costs him. There's already a slight drag to his left leg—the serum's propioception breaking down. "You don't get to decide this alone… you grabbed that stone to save the mission, to save Steve, to save the entire goddamn universe. You think I'm gonna let that sacrifice be for nothing? You think I'm gonna just walk away after—"

He stops and sways.

Seven minutes.

"Sit down." You grab his arm— his flesh arm, careful now— and try to guide him to the bed. His skin is already too warm. "Damn it, James, sit down before you—"

"No," he's shaking his head and the movement seems to cost him. "Not yet. I can't—I'm not ready yet."

"You're already past your limit—"

"I know." His voice drops. "God, I know. I can feel it. It's like fire in my blood, did you know that? It burns. Everything burns when I'm near you."

Your breath hitches. "You never told me—"

"Because I don't care." He cups your face with both hands, and the metal one is whirring wrong, plates shifting and clicking out of sync. "I don't care if it hurts. I don't care if it burns— the only thing I need is you."

His knees buckle. You catch him, barely, and you're both sinking to the floor. His back hits the edge of the bed and you're kneeling between his legs, holding him up.

"I need one more time," he breathes out. "I need to kiss you one more time without the fucking timer, without counting the seconds in my head, without wondering if this is the one that finally—"

He doesn't finish. Can't finish.

"This is cruel," you whisper as your hands frame his face, and you can feel the fever radiating off his skin. "This is so cruel, letting you stay when you—"

"Then be cruel." His eyes lock on yours, and even unfocused with pain, they're still looking at you with so much love it hurts. "Be cruel, let me have this, let me—"

"It's killing you—"

"You think leaving me won't?" His metal had comes up—jerky and malfunctioning— and catches your wrist. The grip is weak. How could it be? His metal arm is never weak. "You think walking away and leaving without you won't kill me just as dead? At least this way I got to…"

His nose starts bleeding.

It's been ten fucking minutes.

"Please, stop." You sob, reaching for something to stop the blood, but he catches your hand.

"No, please, just—" He's pulling you closer, even though every instinct you have is screaming to push him away, to save him. "Just stay, please. I know we're out of time, I know this is it, I know tomorrow you're gonna leave and never come back, so just— god, please just let me have this."

"How did you—"

"I know you." His thumb brushes your cheekbone. "I know that stubborn look in your face… you've already decided. You're planning on disappear and going somewhere I can't find you, because you think that way you'd be saving me. But baby, I'm not gonna survive without you, you understand that?"

He's crying now, and the tears are pink-tinged. There's blood on his tears. That's new.

"I can't lose you again," he chokes out. "I can't be the one left behind again. I can't wake up and find out the person I love the most is gone."

"Then you have to let me go." You're crying too, your forehead pressed against his. "You have to let me be the one that walks away, because I can live knowing you're out there, somewhere, safe and whole and alive. But I can't live watching this kill you. I can't, Bucky, I simply can't."

"One more time," he whispers against your mouth. "Let me have one more time where I'm not counting… where I can just pretend we have forever."

"We don't have forever…"

"I know. And I know I'm past it, I know I'm gonna pay for this, I don't care."

And he kisses you.

It's not gentle nor careful. It's desperate and drowning. His mouth is relentless against yours, like he's trying to memorize the taste, the feeling, the way you feel together. Your hands are on his hair, on his face, feeling the fever burning through him.

The kiss tastes like copper and salt. And somehow you feel it like the one last thing you'll ever have in your life.

His body is shaking violently now. You can feel every tremor, every muscle spasm. His metal arm is now hanging useless at his side, but his flesh hand is still cupped around the back of your neck, still holding you close as his strength fails.

You break the kiss against to breathe and he makes this desperate, broken sound that breaks your heart and chases your mouth. "Not yet, not yet, please—"

"Bucky, you're—"

"I know." He kisses you again, softer this time, gentler. "Just one more time."

Another kiss, this one starts to taste like blood. His hands are sliding down from your neck, he's losing motor control and his eyes are rolling back. You catch him as he slumps forward, his full weight collapsing into you.

"No, no, no…" You're holding him, lowering him down to the floor, cradling his head. "FRIDAY! Get Steve here! Get Bruce! Please someone—"

Bucky slurs something low, barely conscious. You look down at him with tears in your eyes. "Please, please, stay with me—"

But he's out.

You lay down, screaming until your throat hurts for what it feels like forever, even though it only has been two minutes.

You're still holding him when Steve and Sam crash through the door. Bruce arrives a bit later to the med bay. They try to pull him from your arms and you won't let go.

"How long?" Bruce asks quietly, already prepping an IV.

Your voice barely comes out and sounds distant. "Fifteen minutes, maybe more…"

Steve's face go white. "Jesus Christ."

"Get her out of here," Bruce orders and Sam pulls you away gently.

You watch from the doorway as they work in him. Watch as they load him onto a gurney and wheel him past you to medical.

His metal arm is hanging off the side of the gurney, completely loose. Blood is still trickling from his nose. But on his face, even unconscious, there's this ghost of a smile.

Like it was worth it.

You slide down the wall in the empty hallway and sob, praying in silence for him to be okay.

When Steve finds you an hour later, you're still there. Still staring at the same spot where they took him away.

"He's stable," Steve says quietly, sitting down beside you. "He's gonna be okay…"

You don't answer, looking down at your hands.

"Bruce says the exposure set him back weeks, maybe months. He will need time to recover before…" He trails off but you already know what he means.

Before you can see each other again.

"I'm leaving," you say. Your voice is flat, empty. "Tomorrow, somewhere he won't find me…"

"He'll look."

"I know." You finally look at Steve. "That is why I need you to stop him. You need to make him understand that this is— this is the only way I know how to save him."

Steve remains in silence for a long moment. Then: "He's not gonna forgive you for this."

You close your eyes, leaning your head on the wall. "…But at least he'll be alive."

The next morning, you're gone.

You leave a note on his bedside table in medical, anchored down by a small locket with your initials and a picture of you both inside. You took his dog tags in exchange. The paper is covered in your handwriting, and in some places the ink is smudged.

Bucky,

I'm writing this while you're still unconscious, and I'm trying not to look at you, because if I do, I won't be able to leave. So I'm staring at this paper instead, forcing my hand to move and trying to get all of it out before I lose my nerve.

By the time you read this, I'll be gone. And I need you to understand that this isn't me running away from you. This is me running forward the only future where you survive.

I love you. I love you so much it feels like it's burning me from the inside out. I love the way you still sleep on the left side of the bed just because I asked you once to do so because I felt more comfortable sleeping on the right. I love how you pretend you don't like when Sam calls you "Buckaroo" but I can see you trying not to smile. I love that you learned how to braid hair just so you could braid mine on the nights we actually had time together.

I love you for fighting so hard, for pushing your limits for wanting me badly enough to hurt yourself. But that's exactly why I can't stay.

Last night I watched you almost die in my arms just for some extra time with me. I felt your heartbeat falter under my hands, I saw the blood and I saw you smiling unconscious when they were taking you to the medbay. And that's how I know you're never going to stop. You'll never choose yourself over me. You'll push and push until there's nothing left, and I will have to watch you fade.

I can't do that, Buck. I can't let the person I love most in this world destroy himself for stolen moments and rationed hours. I can't live knowing that every kiss might be the one that finally kills you.

So I'm choosing for the both of us. I'm doing the thing you can't do.

I'm leaving. And I need you to let me go.

I know you're probably already planning how to find me. I know Steve is probably going to help you, and if they ever find me Sam is going to yell at me for breaking your heart, and you're going to pull every favor and every resource until you track me down.

Please don't. I'm begging you baby, please don't look for me.

I know it's not fair to ask, I know I don't have the right, but I'm asking anyway because I need you to live. I need you to have a full life without timers and blood and goodbye kisses that might be the last one.

You've spent so much time being a weapon, being used, being told you don't get to choose. So I'm giving you a choice now: you can spend the rest of your life chasing a ghost or you can let me be the one that got away. You can hold on the hurt or you can let it make you strong enough to move forward.

You probably already know which one I'm hoping you'll choose.

Be happy, James Buchanan Barnes. Be reckless and stupid and alive. Get a cat. Let Sam teach you how to use social media, let Steve drag you to those museums you always pretend to hate. Flirt with someone at a coffee shop, have a one night stand, fall in love again.

Live the life I can't give you.

I'm sorry I couldn't be strong enough to stay. I'm sorry for choosing this way. I'm sorry for every fight we won't have and every meal we don't share and every tomorrow we won't get.

But most of all I'm sorry that loving me turned into something that could kill you.

I'm serious, James, don't look for me. This is the only way I know how to save you.

Always yours, even from far away.

When Bucky wakes up, the first thing he see is the letter. The second thing he sees is that his dog tags are gone. The third thing he realizes is that you are gone too.

He reads the letter and the machine monitoring his heart rate starts screaming.

"No." He's already ripping off the IV from his arm, swaying his legs over the side of the bed. "No, no, no—"

Steve's hands land on his shoulders. "Buck, you need to calm down."

"Where is she?!"

The scream echoes through the medbay. Bucky shoves Steve back hard enough that he hits the wall.

"You need to lie back down," Bruce says, trying to use his calm voice. "Your system is still recovering, you can't—"

Bucky's on his feet now. The room spins but he doesn't care. He's moving toward the door and Steve's blocking it and Bucky can feel it rising in his chest—that cold, dark thing he's spent burying.

"Move."

"You're in no condition—"

"I said move!"

His metal fist goes through the wall next to Steve's head. Sam is there too now, both of them trying to corral him back towards the bed, but Bucky's fighting them… really fighting them. There's blood running down his arm from where he tore the IV out and he can feel his body failing, feel the weakness on his legs, but he doesn't care.

"She's gone!" He's shouting, or maybe sobbing, he can't tell anymore at this point. "She's gone, I have to find her, I have to—"

"Bucky, listen to me—" Steve tries.

"No!" Bucky slams his metal arm into a medical cart and sends it crashing across the room. "You don't understand, she thinks—the letter says—"

He can't get the words out, can't even breathe properly. His chest is too tight and the room is spinning. You're gone.

"We need to sedate him," Bruce intervenes.

"Don't you fucking dare!" Bucky spins toward him and Steve has to physically tackle him. They go down hard, Steve pinning him to the floor and Bucky's still fighting, thrashing, his metal arm whirring as he tries to throw Steve down.

"I'm sorry," Steve is saying and he means it, Bucky hears it in his voice. "I'm sorry, Bucky but you're gonna hurt yourself if we don't stop you."

"I don't care!" Bucky's voice cracks. "I don't care, let me go, let me find her—"

He feels the needle slide into his arm.

"No, please, I have to— she doesn't understand—I need to tell her." His vision is blurring, Steve's face above him, both of them looking wrecked. "Find her, please find her…"

The darkness takes him back.

When he wakes again, it's dark outside.

He's restrained now. Steve's asleep in the chair beside the bed, Sam is gone.

Bucky lies there for a long moment, staring at the ceiling, his body aches and his head pounds. Underneath it all, there's this hollow space where you used to be.

The letter is folded on the bedside table. They must've picked it up after… after whatever happened. He doesn't remember all of it, just the rage and the panic, the desperate need to move, to chase you and fix everything.

But he's not panicking now, he's thinking.

What if all of it wasn't permanent? What if there was a cure? Bruce said there was no precedent for infinity stone exposure like this. No treatment, no solution. But Bruce doesn't know everything. Bruce couldn't save Tony.

Bucky's mind was starting to work, clicking through possibilities: Carol Danvers got her powers when she was exposed to the space stone. Wanda's powers were the result of an experiment trial with the mind stone. Peter Quill was exposed to the power stone, along with his team, according to what Steve told him.

There were options. Leads. Possibilities.

And if none of them worked, he would find new ones. He'll search every corner of the universe if he has to. He'll make deals with gods and monsters and anyone else who might have answers.

The restraints are loose enough that he could break them. They're meant to slow him down, not stop him. But he doesn't move. He just lies there, breathing steadily, his mind cataloguing resources and contacts and next steps.

He reaches back for the letter and reads it one more time.

I'm serious, James, don't look for me. This is the only way I know how to save you.

He folds it carefully and picks up the locket you left there, a picture of the both of you staring back at him. He closes his hand around it and presses it against his chest.

"I'm going to solve this out," he murmurs quietly, low enough to prevent Steve from waking up. "And then I'm going to find you, and we're going to have forever. I promise."

At first you assumed construction or flooding because of the weather, but then smoke curled upward through the rain and your stomach dropped immediately.

Cars sat mangled across three lanes of traffic at impossible angles. One SUV had spun into the median while another sedan looked almost folded around the back of a delivery truck, its front end crushed so badly it barely resembled a vehicle anymore. Hazard lights blinked weakly through the storm while people stumbled across the interstate in shock.

Your body moved before your brain fully caught up.

“Oh my God.”

You were already unbuckling your seatbelt before the car completely stopped.

Adrenaline sliced straight through your exhaustion hard enough to make your hands shake as you reached for the trauma bag in the passenger seat. Rain hit you instantly the second you shoved the door open, cold water soaking through your clothes within seconds while distant screaming echoed somewhere through the storm.

Someone yelled that a driver was trapped.

Another voice screamed for a medic.

A woman near the shoulder sobbed hard enough she could barely breathe, blood running down the side of her forehead while a man beside her stood completely frozen, staring blankly at the wreckage like his brain had stopped processing reality altogether.

You were already running.

“I’m a doctor,” you shouted over the rain. “Move back and give me some room.”

People listened immediately.

The trapped driver looked somewhere in his forties, pinned awkwardly behind the wheel of the crushed sedan. Blood streamed from a scalp laceration down the side of his face while the airbags hung deflated around him. His breathing came too fast beneath the sound of rain hammering against twisted metal, panic beginning to sharpen around the edges of every inhale.

You crouched carefully beside the shattered driver’s side window, ignoring the glass biting through your scrub pants into your knees.

“Hey,” you said, forcing calmness into your voice despite the adrenaline roaring through your chest. “Can you hear me?”

The man blinked slowly toward you, dazed. “Think so.”

“Good. That’s good.” You adjusted the flashlight between your fingers while quickly checking his pupils. “What’s your name?”

“Leon.”

“Okay, Leon. I’m Dr. Y/L/N.” Your voice stayed steady automatically, years of emergency medicine taking over before panic had a chance to settle in. “Don’t move your neck for me, alright?”

A shaky breath of laughter escaped him. “Wasn’t planning on it.”

Despite everything, you smiled a little.

“You’re doing great,” you assured him quietly. “Stay with me.”

And he did.

His eyes kept finding yours every few seconds like you were the only stable thing left in the middle of the chaos.

Your hands moved automatically after that.

Pressure against the head wound. Monitoring responsiveness. Keeping him conscious and talking while you assessed what you could from outside the vehicle. Rainwater mixed with blood beneath your fingers while traffic backed up for what looked like miles behind you, headlights glowing dimly through the storm.

Leon kept looking at you every few seconds like you were the only stable thing left in the middle of the chaos.

“You work at the PTMC?” he asked weakly after spotting the hospital logo embroidered onto your soaked jacket.

“Unfortunately.”

That got a real laugh out of him, brief and pained but enough that relief loosened slightly in your chest.

“You always this calm when you see a car crash?”

You let out a tired breath through your nose. “No. I’m panicking beautifully internally.”

That made him laugh again.

Patients relaxed faster once they laughed. It was something you learned early in residency, fear loosened the second people felt human again instead of helpless.

So you stayed with him.

Even after the paramedics arrived.

Even after they started finishing the extrication, peeling back what remained of the driver’s side door while rain poured endlessly over the wreckage.

You stayed crouched beside him talking him through every step because shock was already creeping in around the edges of his expression, and every time panic threatened to overwhelm him again, his eyes found yours immediately.

“You’re okay,” you kept saying quietly. “Stay with me. You’re okay.”

The interstate blurred around you in streaks of red brake lights and flashing hazards. Rain soaked through your jacket and scrubs completely now, damp fabric clinging uncomfortably to your skin while your hair stuck to the back of your neck. The adrenaline that had carried you through the crash scene was already fading, leaving behind an exhaustion so heavy it felt physical.

An EMT looked up from the stretcher and did a double take.

“Dr. Y/L/N?”

You snapped back into focus automatically.

“Male, approximately forty-two. Restrained driver. Brief LOC reported by witnesses. GCS fifteen currently. Complaining of left-sided rib pain. Possible concussion. Neuro status intact for now, but keep an eye on him.”

The EMT nodded once while adjusting the cervical collar. “Got it.”

They moved quickly after that, securing straps, checking vitals, loading equipment through the rain while Leon tracked every movement with the wide-eyed focus of someone trying very hard not to think too much about what had almost happened.

Your knees ached from kneeling on broken glass. Your hands had started trembling slightly now that nobody urgently needed anything from you anymore.

But you stayed beside him anyway.

Leon caught your wrist weakly just before the paramedics closed the ambulance doors.

“Hey.”

You looked up immediately.

His face looked pale beneath the blood and rainwater, eyes glassy with pain and adrenaline, but there was something steadier there too.

Gratitude maybe.

“Thank you for taking care of me.”

The words landed somewhere deeper than they should have.

You swallowed hard before giving his hand one quick squeeze.

“Yeah,” you said softly. “Of course.”

For a second, you just stood there breathing.

The interstate still smelled like gasoline and smoke. Somewhere farther down the road another paramedic shouted instructions while tow trucks crawled through the rain toward the wreckage. Traffic in the opposite lanes slowed almost to a stop as people stared through fogged windows at what was left of the crash.

“You riding in with us?” one of the EMTs asked.

You glanced once toward your abandoned car still trapped in unmoving traffic nearly half a mile behind the accident scene. The thought of trying to get back to it right now felt impossible.

“Yeah,” you answered tiredly.

The ambulance doors shut behind you a second later, sealing you inside with the sharp smell of antiseptic, wet clothing, and adrenaline.

Leon talked for almost the entire ride to the hospital.

Nervous talking.

The kind trauma patients did when they were scared enough to fill every silence because silence meant thinking too hard about how close they came to dying. You’d seen it hundreds of times before. Some people cried. Some got angry. Some went terrifyingly quiet.

Leon talked.

So you let him.

He rambled about his job, about his daughter’s soccer game this weekend, about how his wife was going to kill him for wrecking the car because they still hadn’t finished paying it off. Every few sentences his voice shook slightly before he forced another joke out anyway.

You stayed beside him the whole ride, monitoring pupils and vitals while keeping him talking just enough to assess mental status without making it obvious you were doing it.

“You always pick up patients on the highway on your day off?” he asked weakly at one point.

You let out a tired breath of laughter. “Only the lucky ones.”

That earned another shaky smile from him.

The ambulance doors burst open, paramedics already rolling the stretcher down the bay entrance while rainwater dripped steadily from the wheels onto the floor.

By the time the ambulance rolled through the bay doors at The Pitt, you were freezing hard enough your teeth almost hurt. Your scrubs were soaked completely through, your shoes squelching against the floor while trauma staff moved around you in organized chaos.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Santos called across the ER the second she spotted you climbing out of the ambulance bay. “Always a pleasure seeing you this early, Iron Woman.”

You groaned immediately.

You earned the nickname after accidentally mistaking a patient for Robert Downey Jr. during a twenty-hour shift.

To be fair, the goatee had been identical.

“Dana,” you called immediately, falling into step beside the stretcher. “What’s open?”

Dana barely looked up from the nurses’ station. “Trauma Two’s clear.”

“Perfect.” You pushed damp hair back from your face before glancing toward the department. “Whitaker, Javadi, you’re with me. Perlah, can you help set up Two?”

Perlah nodded immediately and disappeared ahead of the group while Whitaker grabbed gloves from the wall dispenser on his way past.

“You look cold,” Whitaker informed you conversationally.

“Thank you,” you replied flatly.

Javadi appeared beside the stretcher while all of you pushed through the trauma bay doors together. “What happened?”

“Restrained driver, approximately forty-two,” you answered automatically. “High-speed MVA during the storm. Brief LOC reported by witnesses. GCS fifteen on arrival, complaining of left-sided rib pain and worsening headache. Possible concussion.”

“Vitals stable en route,” one of the paramedics added while helping transfer Leon onto the trauma bed.

Whitaker immediately started attaching monitors while Javadi pulled supplies from cabinets with the frantic efficiency of someone still trying very hard to look calmer than she actually felt.

Then Jack looked up from the computer station.

And somehow, in the middle of the packed emergency department, everything softened slightly around the edges.

You caught the exact moment recognition crossed his face. The exhaustion behind his eyes shifted immediately into concern as his gaze moved slowly over you. Soaked scrubs, blood smeared across your gloves, rainwater dripping steadily from your hair onto the floor beneath you.

Jack crossed the trauma bay almost immediately.

“You okay?” he asked quietly. “What happened? I thought you went home.”

His voice grounded you in a way almost nothing else could anymore.

Maybe it was because he always sounded calm even during chaos. Maybe it was because after years together your body recognized him before your brain consciously caught up. Or maybe it was simply that exhaustion hit harder the second somebody else arrived to help carry it.

“I’m fine,” you answered automatically while stripping off your soaked gloves and replacing them with clean ones. “Probably need a head CT.”

Jack’s expression tightened instantly.

“For you?”

You blinked at him before realizing what you’d said. “What? No. For the patient.”

Behind you, Perlah had already started cutting away Leon’s soaked shirt while Whitaker attached cardiac leads to his chest.

“BP’s holding,” Whitaker called.

“Sinus tach at one-ten,” Javadi added while checking another monitor. “Probably pain and adrenaline.”

“Good,” you answered automatically before stepping back beside the bed.

“Where’s Robby?”

“Overdose in Four,” Dana answered from the doorway.

You nodded once and reached for your penlight again, checking Leon’s pupils carefully while rain continued tapping faintly against the ambulance bay doors behind you.

Santos wandered into Trauma Two looking personally offended. “Why does huckleberry and crash get invited? I can help.”

“You can stand there and look pretty while actual doctors save lives,” you shot back immediately.

Santos gasped dramatically. “Dr. Abbot, your girlfriend is bullying me again.”

“She bullies everybody,” Jack muttered.

But there was no heat behind it.

His eyes lingered on you a second too long.

You knew that look by now.

Jack had spent years in emergency medicine learning how to bury concern beneath sarcasm and exhaustion, but you still caught it every time. He noticed the dark circles under your eyes. The slight tremor beginning in your hands now that the adrenaline was wearing off. The way your shoulders sagged whenever you thought nobody was looking.

“You’re freezing,” he said quietly.

“You are correct. I am freezing.”

Without another word, Jack pulled his hoodie off the back of the nurses’ station chair and draped it carefully around your shoulders before you could protest. It was still warm from him, smelling faintly like coffee, antiseptic, and the cologne he only remembered to wear maybe twice a month.

Something in your chest tightened stupidly at the gesture.

Behind him, Santos gagged theatrically. “Oh my God. Romance in the trauma bay. I’m going to throw up.”

“Go chart something,” Jack said flatly.

Whitaker looked up from the monitor leads. “Actually, I think it's very sweet."

“You’re all miserable,” you informed them while pulling the hoodie tighter around yourself.

“No,” Javadi corrected while checking Leon’s blood pressure. “You two are just aggressively in love in public.”

Jack looked genuinely offended. “Aggressively? I don't get it."

Despite yourself, you laughed softly while stepping back toward Leon’s bedside.

Leon noticed the interaction immediately.

“That your boyfriend?” he asked weakly from the trauma bed.

“Husband to the emergency department,” you corrected while snapping fresh gloves on. “Boyfriend in real life.”

Jack rolled his eyes while typing orders into the computer. “Don’t encourage her, Leon.”

Leon grinned despite the pain. “You guys are disgustingly cute.”

Under the brighter trauma lights, bruising had already started blooming dark purple across his ribs beneath the rain-soaked skin.

“Headache worse?” you asked while checking his pupils again.

“A little.”

“You nauseous?”

“Not yet.”

“Good,” you answered. “Let’s keep it that way.”

Javadi palpated carefully along his left side while Whitaker adjusted the blood pressure cuff.

“There’s something strangely comforting about you people,” Leon admitted weakly after a moment.

“You say that now,” Javadi muttered.

That earned another tired laugh from him before he winced sharply afterward.

“There it is,” you said softly. “Still joking. Good sign, buddy.”

There was something oddly comforting about patients who stayed conversational. After years in emergency medicine, you learned to appreciate moments where humanity still existed between procedures and bloodwork and trauma assessments.

Sometimes those tiny conversations mattered almost as much as the medicine itself.

Jack stepped beside you while reviewing Leon’s vitals, his shoulder brushing yours briefly in the cramped trauma bay. The room smelled faintly of antiseptic, damp fabric, and rainwater now that Leon’s soaked clothing had finally been cut away.

“You should change,” Jack murmured quietly while adjusting one of the monitor leads. “I got this, baby.”

You barely glanced at him, still focused on the chart. “Don’t worry. I’ll survive.”

A tired look crossed his face immediately.

“That’s usually what people say right before passing out.”

You shot him a look over your shoulder, though exhaustion dulled most of the energy behind it. “You’re dramatic.”

“You’ve been awake how long now?”

“Eighteen hours.”

Jack stared at you flatly. “That’s not comforting.”

“You stopped at a major accident scene after an eighteen-hour shift?” Javadi asked incredulously.

You shrugged slightly.

And that alone made Jack’s jaw tighten, because that was exactly the kind of thing you always did.

The adrenaline carrying you through the crash scene had almost completely faded now, leaving behind exhaustion so heavy it felt physical. Your wet clothes clung coldly to your skin beneath Jack’s hoodie while every muscle in your body ached now that the immediate crisis had passed.

Jack exhaled softly through his nose before lowering his voice.

“You don’t always have to run yourself into the ground trying to save everybody.”

The words landed harder than they should have.

You focused instead on adjusting Leon’s blanket over his chest, smoothing the fabric carefully just to give your hands something else to do.

Jack knew you too well by now to push after saying something like that.

That was part of what made loving him dangerous sometimes. He noticed things you worked very hard to hide from everybody else.

He noticed the way your hands trembled after bad trauma calls once the adrenaline wore off. How you skipped meals without realizing it during difficult shifts. How every patient death stayed with you longer than you ever admitted aloud.

Jack had spent years in emergency medicine learning how to compartmentalize just enough to survive it, which somehow only made him better at recognizing when you weren’t doing the same.

His hand brushed briefly against the small of your back as he moved toward the monitors again.

“Don’t worry, Leon,” Jack said easily while checking the cardiac tracing. “You’re in good hands.”

Leon looked toward him before his gaze drifted back to you.

“I figured that out already,” he said softly. “She stopped on the interstate for me.”

You glanced up from the chart, slightly surprised by how steady his voice sounded now despite everything.

“You didn’t have to do all that,” Leon continued quietly.

You shrugged lightly, pushing damp hair away from your face. “Part of the job.”

“Maybe,” he answered softly, still watching you carefully. “But most people would’ve kept driving.”

Something warm and uncomfortable settled low in your chest at that.

Most patients never saw the moments in between all of this. They saw calm voices and steady hands. They saw competence because that was what they needed from you in moments like these.

They never saw the aftermath.

The exhaustion. The panic doctors swallowed in real time just to keep functioning. The way people occasionally locked themselves in supply closets for thirty seconds after bad cases just to breathe before walking back out like nothing happened.

But Leon had seen you kneeling beside twisted metal in freezing rain with blood on your hands while traffic screamed past only feet away.

He’d seen the human part too.

And somehow that felt far more exposing than expected.

Before you could answer, something shifted.

Subtle.

Small enough most people in the room probably would have missed it entirely.

But after years in emergency medicine, your body noticed changes before your brain consciously caught up.

Leon’s breathing changed.

One second it was slow and uneven with postictal exhaustion.

The next it caught strangely in his chest.

His eyes lost focus somewhere over your shoulder while every muscle in his body tightened beneath the blankets all at once.

Your stomach dropped instantly.

“Leon?”

Jack looked up from the monitor station at the exact same moment Leon’s entire body stiffened violently against the mattress.

“He’s seizing!”

Everything exploded into motion.

The seizure hit hard and fast, violent enough that the entire trauma bed rattled beneath him. His back arched sharply while his arms convulsed uncontrollably, knocking equipment sideways as monitors erupted into sharp screaming alarms throughout the room.

“Clock started,” Perlah called immediately.

“Two minutes on the seizure pads,” Whitaker added while grabbing suction.

“Turn him,” you ordered.

You and Javadi moved together automatically, carefully rolling Leon onto his side while his body continued jerking violently beneath your hands. Blood appeared at the corner of his mouth where he’d bitten through his tongue while every breath came in horrible choking gasps between convulsions.

“Airway’s clear,” Javadi said quickly, though her voice still sounded tight with adrenaline.

Across the room Jack was already pulling medication from the crash cart while Dana called CT from the doorway ahead of transport.

Then finally, slowly, the seizure broke.

Leon’s body slumped heavily back against the mattress drenched in sweat while ragged breaths tore unevenly from his chest. The room fell briefly into that strange silence that always followed emergencies, where everybody still moved quickly even though the worst part had passed.

For now.

“Let’s get a CT stat,” Jack said immediately.

You nodded once, trying to ignore the tremor beginning in your hands now that the adrenaline spike was crashing again.

“I’ll stay with him until transport.”

Jack hesitated.

Only briefly, but long enough for you to notice.

Something unreadable crossed his expression while his eyes flicked from Leon back toward you.

Concern maybe.

The same quiet tension he always carried after particularly violent trauma cases.

“You sure?” he asked softly.

You frowned slightly. “Yeah.”

Whitaker glanced briefly between both of you like he noticed something too, but before he could say anything Dana appeared in the doorway again.

“Trauma Three needs help now.”

Jack’s jaw tightened.

His fingers brushed briefly against your wrist before he stepped away toward the hallway, disappearing almost immediately back into the noise and chaos outside the trauma bay.

The room quieted afterward.

Machines beeped steadily while rain tapped faintly against distant ER windows somewhere down the hall. Whitaker and Javadi had already been pulled into another room, leaving you alone beside Leon while he lay motionless in exhausted postictal confusion.

You dimmed the overhead light slightly before adjusting the blanket higher over his chest.

“Hey,” you said gently when you noticed him beginning to stir. “You’re okay. You had a seizure.”

No response.

His eyes stayed fixed upward, unfocused and confused.

Postictal.

You had seen it hundreds of times before. Disorientation. Confusion. Agitation sometimes. Patients waking terrified because their brains had not fully caught up to reality yet.

Your shoulder ached dully now that exhaustion was settling deeper into your body again. You reached absentmindedly for the chart at the foot of the bed, mentally running through differentials and imaging priorities while waiting for CT to call back.

You missed the shift in him by less than a second.

One moment Leon lay motionless against the mattress, the next his eyes sharpened violently.

Not recognition.

Fear.

Pure terrified instinct.

Your stomach dropped.

“Leon—”

He surged upright before you could finish the sentence.

His hand closed around your throat with terrifying force, slamming you backward into the cabinet hard enough to knock the air violently from your lungs. Pain exploded across the back of your skull as your head cracked sharply against metal.

“Leon!”

The sound came out broken and strangled.

But he wasn’t seeing you.

That was the horrifying part.

His eyes looked completely wild now—unfocused, terrified, empty all at once. Pure neurological panic stripped entirely of recognition.

For one terrible second, training overrode fear.

“Leon,” you gasped desperately, grabbing his wrists instinctively instead of striking him. “Listen to me. You’re in the hospital. You’re safe.”

Nothing reached him.

His grip tightened harder around your throat.

Air stopped.

Panic slammed through you instantly now, sharp and animal and overwhelming in a way you almost never allowed yourself to feel. Your vision flickered violently while you clawed uselessly at his hands, trying desperately to drag in even one full breath.

You needed help.

Safe word.

Your mouth opened automatically.

“H—”

Nothing came out except a rasp.

Leon shoved you backward harder, your skull slamming against the cabinet again hard enough that white exploded across your vision.

The hospital safe word.

You just needed to say it.

“Hula—”

The sound collapsed into another strangled gasp as his fingers crushed tighter against your airway.

Your lungs burned.

Tears blurred your vision from pain and lack of oxygen while movement echoed faintly somewhere outside the trauma bay. People were still moving through the ER completely unaware of what was happening behind the curtain.

Your body was weakening fast.

You forced one shredded breath into your lungs and screamed:

“HULA HOOP!”

The entire department reacted instantly.

The trauma bay doors burst open hard enough to slam against the wall while voices shouted over each other.

Hands grabbed Leon, trying to drag him backward while he fought wildly in blind confusion and terror.

But before anyone could fully pull him away, he shoved you violently across the room.

Your shoulder struck the edge of the cabinetry with a horrible crack before the rest of your body collapsed hard onto the tile floor.

Pain tore through your arm instantly, sharp and wrong enough it barely felt real.

You couldn’t breathe.

Couldn’t think.

The room blurred violently while alarms screamed overhead and people shouted your name somewhere nearby.

And through all of it, through the pain and chaos splitting apart around you, your brain found one thing instinctively.

Jack.

You thought about the way he always found you in crowded trauma bays without even trying. The way his hoodie still smelled faintly like coffee and antiseptic around your shoulders. The quiet brush of his hand against your back only minutes earlier.

You wondered irrationally if he was going to blame himself for leaving the room.

That thought hurt almost as badly as the pain itself.

Your eyes slipped closed just as the world dissolved completely into noise.

Jack was halfway through finishing a chart when he realized he had not seen you in several minutes.

He looked up automatically, scanning the department for you out of habit more than anything else. Usually he could spot you immediately no matter how crowded the ER became. You moved quickly when you worked, sharp and focused and impossible to miss once he knew what to look for.

But you were nowhere.

“Hey, Javadi,” he called while signing off medication orders. “Have you seen Dr. Y/L/N?”

Javadi looked up so quickly, like she was a deer caught in headlights. “Uh… no,” she answered quickly. Too quickly. “I haven’t seen her since I left Leon. Sorry.”

Then she disappeared almost immediately toward another patient before he could ask anything else.

He pushed himself upright from the workstation, the familiar ache radiating faintly through his prosthetic. Long shifts always made it worse. The socket rubbed raw after enough hours on his feet, especially during busy trauma nights when he barely sat down.

Normally he ignored it.

Right now he barely felt it at all.

“Dana,” he called, already moving toward the nurses’ station. “Have you seen Y/N?”

Dana barely looked up from the chart she was reviewing. “Pretty sure she’s still with Leon. Why?”

Jack turned the iPad slightly toward her. “They haven’t gone to CT.”

That got her attention.

Her eyes flicked quickly toward the tracking board before settling back on him. “They’re probably backed up upstairs.”

“Maybe.”

But something still felt wrong.

Dana sighed softly. “Jack, she’s a big girl. She can handle herself.”

He knew that.

God, he knew that better than anybody.

You were one of the strongest people he had ever met. Smarter than most attendings twice your age. Calm during trauma activations that made residents freeze completely. You handled combative patients, pediatric codes, catastrophic MVCs, and grieving families with a steadiness that still amazed him after all these years.

But that feeling in his chest would not go away.

Dana pointed down the hallway. “I actually need you in Central Fourteen. Chest pain rule-out and Dr. Garcia wants another set of eyes before she calls cards.”

Jack exhaled through his nose, still staring at the tracking board.

“Right,” he muttered distractedly. “Yeah. Okay.”

He turned reluctantly toward the direction of Central Fourteen, adjusting his pace automatically as the prosthetic clicked softly against tile beneath his scrub pants. Fatigue had settled deep into the joint hours ago, making his gait slightly uneven now that the adrenaline from earlier trauma activations had worn off.

Then he heard it.

“HULA HOOP!”

Everything in his body stopped instantly.

The voice was barely recognizable.

Raw. Ragged. Strangled around obvious pain and panic in a way that made every hair on the back of his neck stand upright immediately. For one horrible second his brain refused to process it properly because it did not make sense. Not your voice. Not like that.

And then recognition hit him all at once.

The hospital safe word.

Trauma Two.

Jack’s heart dropped so violently it almost hurt.

No.

The thought hit him before anything else.

No no no.

Adrenaline detonated through his bloodstream hard enough to make him dizzy.

Then instinct took over completely.

“No,” he breathed aloud, already moving before the word fully left his mouth.

He pivoted so sharply pain shot violently through his prosthetic, the sudden turn grinding pressure through the socket hard enough that under normal circumstances it would have staggered him. But right now he barely felt it beneath the sheer overwhelming panic flooding his system.

Fear swallowed everything else whole.

Not the controlled fear he knew from trauma medicine. Not the clinical kind that sharpened your focus during codes and mass casualty calls.

This was different.

This was personal.

Jack shoved past a stretcher hard enough that the wheels screeched across tile while people all around him started reacting at the exact same time. Nurses turned toward Trauma Two instantly at the sound of the safe word. Dana’s head snapped upward from the nurses’ station. Santos was already running before half the department fully understood what was happening.

But Jack got there first.

The curtain outside Trauma Two jerked violently as shouting erupted from inside the room. Monitors screamed overhead loud enough to echo through the entire department while equipment crashed hard against the floor somewhere beyond the drapes.

“Get him off her!”

The words barely registered through the roaring in Jack’s ears.

His pulse was so loud now it drowned everything else out.

He hit the doorway hard enough that the curtain ripped halfway off the track as he shoved inside.

And then he saw you.

Lying on the floor.

Motionless.

For one horrifying second his brain simply stopped functioning.

You were crumpled unnaturally against the tile beside the cabinets, one arm twisted wrong beneath you while blood streaked across the side of your face from where your head had struck something hard enough to split skin open. Jack noticed everything all at once in the brutal hyperclarity trauma doctors developed after years in emergency medicine.

The bruising already forming around your throat.

The abnormal angle of your shoulder.

The way your chest barely moved.

And somehow that was the part that terrified him most.

You were not moving enough.

Leon was still screaming somewhere nearby while Ahmed and two nurses fought to restrain him against the opposite wall, his face wild with postictal confusion and terror. Somebody was yelling for sedation meds. The entire trauma bay had dissolved into complete chaos.

But Jack barely registered any of it.

Because you were on the floor.

And you were not getting up.

Something inside his chest seemed to cave inward violently.

“Oh, honey.”

Then he said your name, and the sound that came out barely resembled the steady, composed voice Jack used during traumas and codes and every impossible shift the hospital threw at him.

This was different.

There was no clinical calm left in him now.

Only fear.

Pure terrified fear.

He dropped beside you so fast pain tore sharply through his prosthetic as his knee hit tile, but he ignored it instantly. His hands shook hard enough he almost missed your carotid pulse the first time he checked.

Then finally.

There. Weak, but there.

Relief hit so hard it almost made him nauseous.

“Oh my God,” he whispered shakily, one bloodstained hand cradling the side of your face carefully while the other pressed against your neck searching for injuries. “Hey. Hey, stay with me. Come on.”

You did not respond.

Jack’s stomach turned violently.

Training forced itself back online in fragmented pieces despite the panic threatening to choke him alive. Airway. Breathing. Circulation. Neuro. He assessed automatically even while his brain screamed at him that this was you beneath his hands.

Not a patient.

You.

Blood pressure crash from trauma? Concussion? Cervical injury? Shoulder dislocation? Fracture? Internal bleed?

His eyes flicked instantly toward your throat again and rage flooded him so suddenly it nearly stole his breath.

Finger-shaped bruises were already darkening against your skin.

He hurt you.

The realization nearly made Jack physically sick.

“Jack,” Dana’s voice cut sharply through the chaos as she dropped beside him. “We need to move.”

But Jack could barely hear her.

Your eyelashes fluttered faintly for half a second before falling closed again and something inside him broke completely at the sight.

“No no no,” he whispered frantically, brushing damp hair away from your face with shaking fingers. “Stay awake. Baby, stay awake for me.”

His voice cracked hard on the last word.

That terrified him almost as much as the sight of you bleeding on the floor.

Because Jack Abbot did not lose composure.

Not during traumas, not during mass casualties, not while pronouncing deaths.

But right now panic was tearing straight through him so violently he could barely breathe around it.

And for the first time in years, he had absolutely no idea how to separate being a doctor from being the man who loved you.

“What the hell happened?”

Robby’s voice cut sharply through the chaos as he pushed into Trauma Two with Mohan directly behind him, but for half a second, both of them stopped cold.

The room looked catastrophic. Leon was still fighting violently against security near the far wall, his movements frantic and disorganized while Santos shouted for more sedation. Equipment littered the floor around the trauma bay, overturned trays and scattered supplies crunching beneath people’s shoes as alarms screamed overhead loudly enough to make the entire room feel claustrophobic.

And in the middle of all of it, you were lying motionless on the floor with Jack kneeling beside you.

Blood streaked down the side of your face and disappeared beneath the collar of his hoodie still hanging around your shoulders. Bruising had already started darkening visibly around your throat, ugly fingerprints blooming beneath the fluorescent trauma lights, while your left arm rested at an angle that made Mohan’s stomach immediately drop.

“Jesus Christ,” Mohan breathed.

“Security’s got the patient,” Dana snapped, already dropping beside you with Santos. “Probably postictal aggression after the seizure. He went after her.”

Robby moved instantly after that, years of trauma medicine overriding shock the second he reached your side. “Get her on a gurney now. C-spine precautions. Santos, I need vitals. Dana, page CT and tell them we’re coming immediately. Mohan, get me neuro and ortho on standby.”

Everybody moved except Jack.

He stayed frozen beside you on the tile floor, one hand still cradling the side of your face like he physically could not force himself to let go.

“Jack,” Robby said.

No response.

Jack was staring at you with an expression Robby had never seen on him before. Not panic exactly. Worse than panic. Helplessness, maybe, like his brain had short-circuited somewhere between doctor and boyfriend and now could not figure out how to function as either.

“Jack,” Robby repeated more firmly.

That finally seemed to pull him back enough to blink.

“She isn’t breathing right,” he said hoarsely, voice rough enough it barely sounded like him anymore. “He had her by the throat. Her head hit the cabinet, probably. Possible LOC. Shoulder’s definitely dislocated, maybe fractured too.”

The words came out clipped and automatic, pure trauma assessment forced through panic, but his hands were still shaking.

Dana and Santos carefully slid a backboard beneath you while Mohan cut away the remains of the hoodie around your shoulder to assess the injury better. The second the fabric moved, Jack saw the full extent of the bruising spreading across your throat, dark purple already beneath your skin.

“He squeezed hard enough to leave petechiae,” Santos muttered quietly while examining your neck. “Shit.”

Robby’s jaw tightened immediately. “We need airway monitoring. Neck trauma protocol.”

You stirred weakly then, letting out a broken sound somewhere between a gasp and a whimper as Dana stabilized your shoulder. Jack moved instantly at the sound.

“Hey,” he said, voice softening so fast it almost hurt to hear. “Hey, don’t move. You’re okay.”

Your eyes fluttered halfway open for barely a second before unfocusing again.

“She’s awake,” Jack breathed.

“For now,” Robby answered grimly while checking your pupils with a penlight. “Possible concussion. We’re not ruling anything out yet.”

Jack knew that tone. It was the same one they all used when things might be much worse than they looked initially.

Around them, the room was finally beginning to settle into controlled chaos instead of outright panic. Security had Leon restrained now while Santos pushed sedatives through an IV line with tight, controlled movements. Leon’s terrified shouting dissolved into confused, exhausted mumbling as the medication began taking effect.

“He didn’t know what he was doing,” Mohan said quietly, mostly to fill the horrible silence hanging over the room.

Jack did not answer. Rationally, he already knew that. Postictal aggression, neurological confusion, severe agitation after seizure activity. They had all seen it before. But none of it mattered right now, because every time Jack blinked, he saw your body hitting the floor again.

“On my count,” Santos said firmly while positioning herself near your head. “One, two, three.”

They lifted you carefully onto the gurney, and the second they moved your shoulder, a sharp cry tore from your throat despite your barely conscious state.

Jack physically flinched.

Robby looked at him immediately. “Jack, I need you with me here.”

But Jack still looked frozen. His prosthetic locked slightly as he stood too quickly, pain shooting sharply through the joint while exhaustion and adrenaline crashed violently together inside his body. Normally, he compensated automatically for it. Years of physical therapy had taught him exactly how to move through pain without thinking.

Right now, he barely noticed it. All he could see was you strapped to a trauma gurney instead of standing beside one, and somehow that felt profoundly wrong in a way his brain could not fully process yet.

Dana squeezed his arm briefly as she passed him. “She’s alive,” she said quietly, firmly enough that it sounded almost like an order. “So stay with us.”

Jack swallowed hard, then finally nodded once.

The second the gurney locked into place beside the trauma bed, the room shifted fully into trauma mode. Controlled chaos. Fast hands. Sharply clipped orders. Monitor alarms blending into the constant noise of the ER outside while everybody moved around you with the kind of practiced coordination that only came from years of emergency medicine.

“BP dropping,” Santos called from the monitor station. “Ninety-two over fifty-six. Heart rate one-forty. Pulse ox ninety-four.”

Robby swore quietly under his breath before stepping beside the gurney. “Dana, I need another large bore IV. CBC, CMP, coags, type and screen, lactate. Full trauma panel.”

Dana was already moving before he finished speaking.

Mohan carefully stabilized your cervical spine while Perlah adjusted the collar more securely around your neck. Blood stained the side of your face now, dark against pale skin beneath the fluorescent trauma lights, while bruising continued spreading visibly across your throat.

“She’s tachycardic from pain and adrenaline,” Mohan said quickly while palpating carefully along your ribs and clavicle. “Left shoulder deformity obvious. Could be anterior dislocation, maybe proximal humerus fracture too.”

“She hit hard,” Dana added grimly while cutting away the sleeve of your scrub top completely. “Look at the swelling already, poor baby.”

Jack forced himself closer finally, though every instinct in his body screamed at him to stop looking entirely.

Your shoulder looked wrong. Not subtly wrong, catastrophically wrong. The joint sat visibly displaced beneath skin already darkening with bruising while your arm rested protectively against your torso in unconscious guarding. Even barely responsive, your body was trying to protect the injury.

“Y/N?” Robby called firmly while shining the penlight into your eyes again. “Hey, stay with me.”

Your eyelids fluttered weakly, and your lips parted slightly before a small broken sound escaped you, more pain than words.

“There you go,” Dana said softly. “That’s good, hey sweetie.”

“She’s responsive,” Mohan confirmed. “Pupils reactive bilaterally.”

“Any obvious neuro deficits?”

“Hard to assess until she’s more alert.”

Jack swallowed hard. Normally those words would have sounded clinical. Routine. Hearing them about you made him feel sick.

Robby’s fingers moved carefully along your scalp before stopping near the back of your head. “She’s got a laceration here. Probably where she hit the cabinet.”

“How bad?” Jack asked immediately.

Robby looked up briefly. “Needs staples. I’m more concerned about intracranial bleed.”

Jack felt the room narrow sharply around him as his brain supplied every possibility instantly. Subdural. Epidural. Contusion. Diffuse axonal injury. Years of trauma medicine suddenly felt less like a skill and more like torture because now he knew exactly how bad this could become.

“BP’s still dropping,” Santos called sharply.

“Hang another liter.”

Dana connected fluids immediately while Mohan checked your abdomen carefully for rigidity and tenderness.

“She guarding?”

“Little bit.”

“Could just be pain response.”

“Or internal injury,” Robby answered grimly.

Jack closed his eyes briefly. Only twenty minutes ago, he had been teasing you for refusing to change out of wet scrubs. Twenty minutes ago, you had been standing beside him alive and exhausted and rolling your eyes at him. Now you were strapped to a trauma gurney while your coworkers discussed possible brain bleeds.

The trauma bay doors pushed open again.

“What do we have?”

Garcia entered already pulling gloves on, clearly expecting another routine consult before her eyes landed on the gurney. Then she froze.

“Is that...?”

Nobody answered immediately because suddenly saying it aloud made everything feel horrifyingly real.

Garcia moved closer automatically, surgical instincts taking over even while shock still flickered visibly across her face. Her eyes swept quickly across your injuries, taking in the bruising around your throat, the unstable shoulder, and the blood matted into your hair.

“Oh my God.”

Jack looked away sharply at the sound in her voice. He could handle panic, trauma, blood, failed resuscitations, and catastrophic injuries. But he could not handle hearing pity directed at you.

“What happened?” Garcia asked quietly.

“Postictal assault,” Robby answered while reviewing your vitals. “Patient seized after MVC. Became combative during recovery.”

Garcia’s jaw tightened immediately. Her eyes flicked briefly toward Jack, and somehow that made everything worse. Everybody in the hospital knew about the two of you. Not because either of you talked about it much, but because some things became obvious after enough years working together. The way Jack unconsciously searched for you in crowded rooms. The way your voice softened around him even during impossible shifts. The way both of you somehow always ended up side by side during difficult traumas without discussing it first.

And now everybody was watching him try not to fall apart while you lay bleeding in front of him.

“Y/N,” Garcia said gently while stepping closer to assess your airway. “Can you hear me?”

Your brow twitched faintly at the sound of your name.

“Good,” she murmured softly. “Stay with us.”

Jack finally moved closer again until he stood directly beside the gurney. For a second, he just stared at you. Really stared. At the bruises darkening beneath your jaw, at the trembling rise and fall of your breathing, at the blood drying against your temple.

Then very carefully, he reached down and took your hand.

Your fingers twitched weakly against his palm almost immediately.

Tiny movement. Huge relief.

“Okay,” Robby said firmly, forcing the room back into focus. “Let’s move. I want CT angio head and neck immediately. We’re ruling out intracranial bleed and carotid injury.”

Garcia nodded once beside him, already assessing your airway with practiced hands. “Neck swelling’s getting worse.”

Jack saw it too now that she said it aloud. The bruising around your throat had spread darker beneath the fluorescent lights while swelling gathered visibly beneath your jawline. Every breath you took sounded wrong now. Wet. Shallow. Strained enough to make every survival instinct in his body start screaming.

“Pulse ox is dipping,” Santos called sharply. “Ninety-one.”

“Jaw thrust,” Garcia ordered immediately.

Dana repositioned carefully at your head while Garcia leaned closer, studying the bruising around your airway with growing concern. “She may need to be intubated before CT if the swelling progresses.”

The word hit Jack like a physical blow. Intubated. His brain immediately supplied images he did not want. Ventilator settings. Sedation drips. ICU monitors. Neurological checks every hour.

“No,” he said automatically before he could stop himself.

Everybody looked at him.

Jack swallowed hard immediately, realizing too late he had said it aloud.

Robby’s expression softened slightly. “Jack.”

He hated the way Robby said his name right now. Carefully. Like he was one bad second away from falling apart completely.

“I know,” Jack muttered quickly, dragging a shaky hand down his face. “I know.”

But he didn’t. Not really. Because his brain kept splitting violently between two impossible realities. One side of him catalogued injuries automatically. Airway trauma after strangulation. Possible cervical instability. Hypoxia. Concussion. Internal bleeding. Shoulder fracture-dislocation. The other side could barely process the fact that you were lying here at all.

Your breathing suddenly hitched sharply.

Jack’s head snapped toward you instantly.

Your eyes fluttered weakly before opening. Confusion crossed your face immediately while you tried weakly to move, but pain flashed across your expression so fast it made Jack physically tense.

“Don’t,” he said immediately, stepping closer. “Baby, don’t move.”

Your gaze drifted slowly around the trauma bay like you were trying to understand where you were. The bright lights. The people surrounding you. The monitors beeping overhead. Then finally, your eyes landed on Jack.

Relief flickered there instantly. Small. Barely there. Enough to nearly destroy him.

“Hey,” he said softly, gripping your hand tighter without realizing it. “Hey, I’m right here.”

Your lips parted slightly, but nothing came out at first except a weak breath.

Jack leaned closer immediately. “What?”

Your brow pinched faintly in confusion.

“...Leon?”

The room went quiet for half a second.

Even now, barely conscious and injured and terrified, your first instinct was still the patient. Something inside Jack cracked painfully at that.

“He’s restrained,” Robby answered gently before Jack could. “You’re safe.”

Your eyes shifted again, slower this time.

“Hurts,” you whispered faintly.

Jack looked immediately toward your shoulder. “I know,” he said quietly, voice finally cracking despite how hard he tried to control it. “I know, sweetheart.”

Garcia’s eyes flicked sharply toward him at the sound. Jack almost never lost composure at work. Not like this.

You tried to swallow and immediately winced.

Garcia noticed too. “Throat pain?”

A tiny nod.

“Difficulty breathing?”

Another weak nod.

Garcia looked immediately toward Robby. “Airway’s worsening.”

Robby swore quietly under his breath. “We tube here or risk losing it in CT.”

The room shifted instantly again. More movement. More urgency. Dana reached for airway equipment while Santos prepared sedation meds with visibly tighter movements now. Mohan adjusted oxygen flow quickly while Garcia moved toward the head of the bed.

Jack felt suddenly frozen all over again.

Your eyes moved back toward him weakly, panic beginning to flicker beneath the pain now that you were awake enough to understand pieces of the conversation around you.

“Jack,” you whispered hoarsely.

His chest tightened violently. “I’m here.”

Your fingers curled weakly against his hand.

“Don’t...” Your breathing hitched painfully. “Don’t leave.”

That finally broke him.

Because you sounded scared. You, the person who stayed calm during pediatric arrests and mass casualty incidents and catastrophic traumas that made residents physically sick afterward.

Jack leaned down immediately, pressing his forehead briefly against yours despite the blood and chaos surrounding both of you. “I’m not going anywhere,” he whispered shakily. “Okay? I’m right here.”

Then your heart rate spiked sharply.

“One-fifty,” Santos warned.

Your oxygen dipped again.

“Eighty-eight.”

Garcia looked up instantly. “That’s it. We’re securing the airway.”

Panic flashed visibly across your face, and Jack felt your hand tighten weakly around his.

“Hey,” he said immediately, brushing damp hair carefully away from your forehead. “Look at me, sweetheart.”

Your unfocused eyes found his again.

“You’re okay,” he whispered, even though his own heart was pounding hard enough to make him nauseous. “Just keep breathing for me.”

Garcia stepped beside him carefully. “Jack,” she said quietly. “I need room.”

And suddenly he realized there was nothing else he could do. No medication to order. No procedure capable of fixing this himself. No trauma protocol separating him from the overwhelming terror flooding his chest.

All he could do was let go of your hand and watch other people try to save you, and somehow that felt worse than anything he had seen in his entire career.

And somehow that felt infinitely worse than any injury he had seen in his entire career.

The intubation blurred together afterward in fragments Jack knew would probably stay with him for the rest of his life.

Garcia’s voice turned sharp and clinical the second she stepped fully into procedure mode. “Etomidate ready?”

“Ready.”

“Succinylcholine?”

“Ready.”

“Pulse ox?”

“Eighty-seven and dropping.”

The room moved quickly around you after that. Packaging tore open, monitors screamed softly overhead, and Santos pushed medications through your IV with controlled precision while Dana stabilized your cervical spine at the head of the bed.

Jack stood rooted beside the wall, feeling completely fucking useless.

He had watched hundreds of intubations in his career. He had performed them himself during impossible traumas, with blood filling airways and families screaming outside the room. Usually, the procedure grounded him. Medicine always grounded him because medicine made sense. Algorithms. Protocols. Airway, breathing, circulation. Find the problem and fix it.

But this was you, and suddenly none of it felt clinical anymore.

Your eyes found his one last time before the sedatives fully took effect. Fear still flickered there beneath the exhaustion and pain, but so did trust. Complete trust. The kind that made his chest ache violently because you were still looking at him like he could somehow fix this.

Then your body relaxed beneath the medication.

Garcia moved immediately. “Going in.”

The room fell quieter for a second except for the ventilator alarms and the sound of Jack’s own pulse hammering violently in his ears. He watched Garcia guide the laryngoscope carefully while Robby monitored your vitals from beside the bed.

“Visualized.”

“Tube.”

“Advancing.”

Jack swallowed hard enough that it hurt.

You looked so small suddenly. That was the thought that kept repeating in his head while he stared at your motionless body beneath trauma lights that suddenly felt much too bright. You had always seemed larger than life somehow. Loud when you wanted to be. Brilliant. Sharp-edged. Impossible to intimidate. The kind of doctor residents followed instinctively because even during disasters, you carried yourself like you could handle anything thrown at you.

Now you were lying completely still while somebody else breathed for you.

“Tube’s in,” Garcia confirmed.

Relief swept through the room instantly, subtle but collective.

“End tidal color change confirmed.”

“Breath sounds bilateral.”

“Secure it.”

Dana taped the ET tube carefully into place while the ventilator connected with a soft mechanical hiss. Your chest finally began rising in slow, controlled breaths afterward, steady and artificial and horrifyingly impersonal.

Jack hated the sound immediately.

The ventilator transformed you from injured into critical in a way his brain could no longer avoid.

Robby was already moving again. “Okay, we transport now. I want CTA head and neck, cervical spine imaging, chest CT, trauma series. Somebody call ortho and tell them she’s likely got a fracture-dislocation.”

“She’s still hypotensive,” Santos warned while adjusting fluids.

“Pressure?”

“Ninety systolic.”

“Hang another liter.”

Everything continued moving around him after that, but Jack could barely process any of it fully anymore. The room had narrowed into snapshots burned violently into his memory. Blood staining the collar of your scrub top. Finger-shaped bruises spreading darker around your throat. Your hand slipping weakly from his when they rolled the gurney toward the doors.

He followed automatically beside the bed while they rushed you toward imaging. His prosthetic protested immediately beneath the sudden pace, sharp pain radiating through the socket with every uneven step, but he barely registered it now. His entire body had narrowed itself into one singular instinct.

Stay close. Do not lose sight of her.

Hallway lights blurred overhead while the gurney rattled violently across tile. Nurses moved aside instantly when they recognized who was lying on the stretcher, and somehow that silence hurt worse than panic would have.

People stopped talking when they saw you.

A respiratory therapist physically froze near the elevators before whispering, “Oh my God.”

Jack looked away immediately. He could not handle watching other people realize how bad this was.

Then suddenly, he was left standing alone in the hallway.

The silence hit him all at once.

He stared numbly at the closed doors for several long seconds before finally turning back toward Trauma Two because he genuinely did not know what else to do with himself.

By the time he returned, the room was mostly empty again. The chaos was over. Only the aftermath remained.

One overturned tray still sat abandoned near the wall where it had been kicked over during the struggle. Wrappers and syringes littered the floor beside shattered plastic packaging while a monitor continued beeping pointlessly beside an empty bed.

And blood.

Your blood was still everywhere.

Jack stopped walking.

For a second he just stood there staring at it. Tiny streaks across the tile floor. Smears against the cabinets where your head had hit. Dark fingerprints dried against the bedrail.

His stomach twisted so violently he thought he might actually throw up.

Because the only thing left of you in this room now was blood.

Not your laugh echoing across the nurses’ station during overnight shifts. Not your sarcasm when Santos annoyed you on purpose. Not the warmth of your body curled against his after impossible shifts when both of you were too exhausted to even speak properly anymore.

Just blood.

Jack looked down slowly at his own hands. There was still dried blood caught beneath his fingernails from where he had held your face trying to keep you conscious. More stained the sleeves of his scrub top in dark rust-colored smears that made his chest tighten painfully every time he looked at them.

You were intubated upstairs while trauma surgeons searched your brain for bleeding.

The thought cracked something open inside him.

If he had stayed. If he had trusted his instincts. If he had checked sooner.

“Jack.”

Dana’s voice came softly from the doorway behind him.

He did not turn around immediately. For a second, neither of them spoke while she took in the scene around him. Dana had worked in emergency medicine long enough to understand what trauma aftermath looked like, not just physically, but emotionally too.

Jack looked wrecked. Not outwardly hysterical. That almost would have been easier. Instead, he looked hollowed out from the inside.

“You should sit down,” she said gently.

“I’m fine.”

The answer came automatically, immediate and empty.

Dana almost sighed because they both knew it was complete bullshit. She stepped further into the room slowly, careful with him now in the same way people approached trauma patients who had not realized how badly they were injured yet.

“You’re shaking.”

His hands were trembling badly now that the adrenaline had started wearing off, small uncontrollable tremors moving through his fingers no matter how tightly he clenched them into fists.

“I left her,” he said quietly.

Dana’s expression softened immediately. “Jack.”

“I left her alone with him.”

The guilt in his voice nearly hurt to hear.

Dana moved closer. “You could not have predicted postictal aggression escalating like that.”

“But I should’ve checked sooner.”

Jack laughed once under his breath, but there was absolutely no humor in it. Just panic and exhaustion and guilt twisting together so tightly he could barely breathe around it anymore.

“She sounded scared,” he whispered roughly. “Do you know how bad it has to be for her to sound scared?”

Dana’s chest tightened painfully because she did know. Everybody in that hospital knew how terrifyingly calm you usually were under pressure. You were the person comforting other people during disasters. The doctor residents looked for during bad traumas because your voice never shook.

But tonight it had.

Dana stepped directly in front of him then and reached up without hesitation, gripping the back of his neck firmly enough to ground him.

“Listen to me,” she said softly but seriously. “She is alive.”

Jack swallowed hard. “She squeezed my hand before CT.”

“Then hold onto that.”

His eyes burned immediately at the words.

For a second, he looked terrifyingly close to falling apart completely.

“She was looking at me like she thought she was dying.”

Dana’s face crumpled slightly at the crack in his voice because Jack Abbot almost never sounded fragile. Not after everything life had already put him through.

But this was different.

This was you.

“You know her,” Dana said quietly. “You know how hard she fights.”

Jack closed his eyes briefly because somehow that made this hurt even worse. He did know. He knew the exact stubborn determination living inside you, the way you worked through exhaustion and grief and pain because your body physically did not know how to stop caring about people.

And suddenly, the idea of losing you felt so catastrophic he genuinely could not imagine surviving it.

When you woke up, the first thing you felt was pain.

Not sharp at first. Not localized enough to understand. Just heavy.

A crushing ache spread through your entire body like every bone had shattered somewhere deep beneath your skin. Awareness dragged itself slowly upward through layers of medication and exhaustion while fluorescent hospital light glowed faintly red through your eyelids. For one blissfully empty second, your brain stayed blank enough that you did not remember anything at all.

Then your chest tightened violently around the ventilator tube lodged in your throat.

Panic hit instantly.

Your eyes snapped open as your body reacted on pure instinct, trying desperately to fight the foreign object forcing air into your lungs. The movement sent agony ripping through your throat and jaw so violently it nearly knocked you unconscious again. A horrible choking sound escaped around the tube while pain exploded across the side of your head hard enough to blur your vision immediately.

The monitors beside your bed erupted into sharp alarms.

Then suddenly Jack was there.

He moved so quickly the chair beside your ICU bed nearly tipped backward onto the floor. One second the room felt empty and terrifying and unfamiliar, and the next his hands were hovering carefully near your face like he wanted to touch you everywhere at once but was terrified of hurting you more.

“Hey, hey, don’t fight it,” he said immediately, voice low and urgent. “You’re okay. Breathe with it.”

You could see his mouth moving. Could see panic written all over his face.

But you could not hear him properly.

Everything sounded distorted beneath the ringing in your ears, voices muffled and warped together like you were trapped underwater. The ventilator hissed rhythmically beside you while your chest rose mechanically against your will, and the sensation was horrifying enough to send another wave of panic crashing violently through your body.

Jack kept talking anyway.

You recognized the cadence of his voice more than the words themselves. Calm. Steady. But underneath it there was something rawer now, something desperate he usually hid much better than this.

Your entire body hurt.

Your throat burned every time the ventilator pushed another breath into your lungs. Your jaw ached violently from the intubation while your left shoulder throbbed with deep nauseating pain that radiated all the way down your arm. Even breathing hurt despite the machine doing most of the work for you.

Then memory came back all at once.

The trauma bay. Leon seizing. Hands crushing around your throat. Your head slamming violently against the cabinet. The floor.

You started crying before you even realized it was happening.

Tears slipped silently sideways into your hair while panic clawed straight up your chest hard enough to blur your vision again. You could not stop shaking. Every instinct in your body still screamed danger even though logically you knew you were safe now.

Jack’s entire expression broke the second he realized you were crying.

“Oh, baby,” he whispered hoarsely.

At least you thought that was what he said.

He sat carefully on the edge of the chair beside your bed before reaching for your hand, avoiding IV lines and bruises with practiced gentleness. The second his fingers touched yours, you grabbed onto him desperately enough that pain shot violently through your injured shoulder again.

You did not care.

Jack was here.

And somehow that meant alive. Safe.

Your grip tightened harder around his hand while your breathing turned ragged around the tube again. Jack immediately leaned closer, his thumb brushing shakily across your knuckles while he tried to calm you before you exhausted yourself further.

“It’s okay,” he murmured softly. “You’re okay. I’ve got you.”

Only then did you really look at him.

And God.

He looked awful.

Dark bruising sat beneath his eyes like he had not slept once since this happened. His hair looked messy in a way that suggested he had spent hours dragging anxious hands through it, and there was something hollowed out in his expression now that made your chest tighten painfully.

You mouthed the question anyway despite the ventilator.

What happened to you?

Jack watched your lips carefully before understanding finally crossed his face. His throat worked once visibly while emotion flashed so openly across his expression it almost scared you more than the pain itself.

He still looked terrified.

Even now.

Instead of speaking, he carefully turned your hand over in his and began tracing slow letters against your palm with his thumb.

Patient attacked you.

The memory crashed back completely after that.

The pressure around your throat. Leon’s empty unfocused eyes. Your body hitting the wall. The terrifying realization that he genuinely did not recognize you anymore.

You jerked violently on instinct before you could stop yourself, panic surging through your bloodstream so fast your vision blurred instantly while the cardiac monitor erupted into another wave of alarms beside the bed.

Jack reacted immediately.

“Hey, hey, look at me.”

You could not fully hear the words, but you knew his voice. Knew the shape of it. The desperation underneath it.

Your breathing turned frantic around the ventilator while terror clawed violently through your chest again. You remembered thinking you were going to die. Not abstractly. Not distantly.

Really die.

And for one horrifying second, lying in this ICU bed unable to speak or breathe on your own, that feeling came rushing back all over again.

Jack kept one hand wrapped tightly around yours while the other hovered uncertainly near your face. He looked like he wanted to pull you against him and protect you from everything all at once but knew touching you too much would only hurt you further.

“You’re safe now,” he kept saying quietly. “He can’t hurt you. You’re safe.”

Safe.

Your eyes darted weakly around the ICU room instead. Machines. IV poles. Bandages. Your leg elevated and immobilized beneath blankets. Soft restraints loosely secured around your wrists so you would not accidentally pull the ventilator tube out while disoriented.

You felt trapped inside your own body.

The panic became unbearable.

Then your eyes landed on the PCA pump beside the bed.

Jack noticed immediately.

His entire face fell.

“Baby…”

You reached weakly toward the button anyway with trembling fingers.

Jack looked absolutely shattered watching you press it. Not angry. Not disappointed.

Heartbroken.

Because he understood immediately what you were doing.

You could not stop the fear. Could not stop the pain.

So you were choosing unconsciousness instead.

Medication flooded slowly through your bloodstream almost immediately afterward. Warmth spread outward in gradual waves, softening the sharp edges of panic first before the pain finally began loosening its grip around your body. The terror still lingered somewhere deep beneath everything else, but it no longer felt sharp enough to suffocate you alive.

Your grip weakened slightly around Jack’s hand as exhaustion dragged heavily at your eyelids again.

Jack stayed exactly where he was.

You could barely keep your eyes open anymore, but you still saw the way he looked at you while the medication slowly pulled you back under.

Completely devastated.

Like watching you choose sedation over consciousness hurt him almost as much as the attack itself.

Your fingers twitched weakly against his palm before your eyes finally slipped closed again.

The last thing you felt before unconsciousness dragged you under completely was Jack lifting your hand carefully toward his mouth and pressing one shaking kiss against your bruised knuckles.

The second time you woke up was somehow worse because this time you stayed conscious long enough to understand what had happened to you.

Pain existed everywhere now.

Not sharp anymore. Not even severe enough in one specific place to focus on. It had settled deeper than that, heavy and constant, wrapping itself around your entire body until even breathing felt exhausting. Every inhale pulled painfully against bruised ribs while your jaw throbbed in slow aching pulses that spread all the way into your skull. The medication dulled the edges enough to keep panic from swallowing you whole again, but not enough to make you forget.

Nothing let you forget for very long.

Garcia stood beside your ICU bed when your eyes finally opened again, flashlight moving carefully across your pupils while monitors hummed steadily around the room. The overhead lights had been dimmed sometime while you slept, leaving everything washed in pale blue-gray shadows that made the hospital feel strangely unreal.

“Hey,” Garcia said softly the second she noticed you were awake. “Welcome back.”

Your hearing still came and went in fractured bursts after the concussion. Some sounds arrived painfully sharp while others disappeared completely beneath the relentless ringing inside your ears. Voices felt warped and distant, like everybody speaking stood underwater somewhere far away from you.

You blinked slowly toward the doorway and spotted Santos hovering there awkwardly holding a bouquet of flowers that looked aggressively stolen from the hospital gift shop. Half the stems bent sideways beneath crinkled plastic wrap while one of the price tags still dangled visibly from the bouquet.

You stared at them for a second before a weak breath of laughter escaped you despite the pain immediately punishing the movement.

Santos looked so relieved at the sound she nearly seemed close to crying herself.

“You scared the absolute shit out of us,” she said quickly, like humor was the only thing keeping her from saying something genuinely emotional instead.

The ghost of a smile tugged weakly at your mouth.

Garcia stepped back after finishing the neuro assessment while Santos moved a little closer to the bed, still clutching the flowers awkwardly against her chest.

“Abbott threatened like six people,” she muttered after clearing her throat.

Your eyes shifted toward her slowly.

“He almost went through security trying to get back to Leon.”

Your stomach twisted instantly.

Leon.

For one horrible second you saw him again exactly as he looked before the attack happened. Pale and exhausted beneath ambulance lights while rain hammered against the windows around both of you. Laughing weakly through pain. Asking if you were always that calm. Looking at you like you were safe.

You swallowed hard against the sudden nausea crawling into your throat.

“What happened to him?” you asked quietly, each word dragging painfully through the ache in your fractured jaw.

Santos’ expression changed immediately. The sarcasm disappeared first. Then the humor.

“He’s okay,” she answered after a moment, voice softer now. “Physically, I mean.”

You closed your eyes briefly.

Santos hesitated before continuing more carefully. “He doesn’t remember anything after the seizure started. Robby thinks it’s the postictal state mixed with the head trauma.”

The room fell quiet after that.

Not awkward quiet.

Heavy quiet.

The kind that settled directly into your ribs and stayed there.

Because the worst part was that you believed her completely.

You knew exactly what postictal violence looked like. You understood the neurological confusion, the blind panic, the total loss of recognition that sometimes followed severe seizures. Rationally and medically, every part of your brain understood exactly what had happened inside Trauma Two.

But emotionally, it still hurt in ways you did not know how to untangle yet.

A strange grief wrapped itself around the fear sitting inside your chest because less than an hour before the attack, Leon had been sitting beside you in the back of an ambulance talking about his daughter and his wife and soccer games and stupid jokes while rain pounded against the windows. You remembered thinking he seemed kind, the sort of patient who apologized too much for being in pain.

You had liked him.

And then suddenly he became the person who nearly killed you.

Emergency medicine was cruel like that sometimes. One second somebody was human to you. The next they became trauma.

Santos stepped closer quietly before squeezing your foot gently through the blanket. “We’ll come back later, okay?”

You nodded weakly.

After they left, the ICU room felt unbearably quiet again. Machines hummed softly around you while rain tapped faintly against distant windows somewhere beyond the hallway. Pittsburgh looked gray outside the narrow ICU window, the city blurred beneath another storm rolling slowly across the skyline.

You drifted in and out for hours after that.

Sometimes nurses came in to check vitals and neuro responses. Sometimes transport arrived to wheel you toward imaging. Sometimes you only woke long enough to register pain before medication dragged you under again.

Then sometime deep into the night, consciousness returned slowly enough that you realized somebody was sitting beside your bed.

Jack.

At first you thought he was asleep.

His head rested bowed carefully against your hand where it lay on top of the blanket, broad shoulders slumped forward like exhaustion had physically crushed him downward into the chair. The dim ICU lighting softened the edges of him enough that for one brief second he looked strangely fragile.

Then you noticed he was shaking.

Your heart cracked instantly.

Jack was crying.

Quietly. Almost silently. But hard enough that his shoulders trembled every few seconds beneath the dim blue ICU lights.

The sight hurt worse than any fracture in your body.

You had seen Jack exhausted before. Angry. Burned out after impossible shifts and mass casualty nights and pediatric codes that left entire departments emotionally gutted afterward.

But you had never seen him like this.

Very slowly, ignoring the pain shooting through your ribs and shoulder, you lifted your fingers weakly toward his hair.

The movement alone was enough.

Jack lifted his head immediately.

His eyes were bloodshot and red-rimmed beneath exhaustion so deep it looked painful. There was stubble shadowing his jaw now like he had not even thought about himself since this happened, and the healing cut near his cheekbone stood out harshly beneath fluorescent light.

Destroyed.

That was the only word your exhausted brain could find for the way he looked.

Jack Abbott was always the steady one. The person everybody else leaned on during disasters because he never seemed to break no matter how catastrophic things became around him.

Until now.

“I should’ve stayed.”

The words came out rough enough they barely sounded like him at all. Raw. Torn open somewhere deep inside.

You frowned weakly despite the pain. “No.”

“I knew something was wrong.”

“You couldn’t know.”

“I did.”

Jack stood abruptly then, pacing once across the small ICU room before turning back toward you like he physically could not force himself to stay still anymore. His prosthetic clicked sharply against the tile beneath his scrub pants while one trembling hand dragged hard through his hair again.

“I left you alone in there.”

“Jack.”

His face crumpled so suddenly it stole what little breath your bruised ribs could manage.

“When they pulled him off you...” His voice broke completely for one horrible second before he forced himself to continue anyway. “You weren’t moving.”

Your own eyes filled instantly.

Jack pressed shaking fingers hard against his mouth, trying desperately to regain control of himself and failing anyway.

“There was so much blood,” he whispered finally.

The confession hollowed the entire room out around both of you.

You reached toward him carefully despite the pain.

Jack moved back to your bedside immediately this time, like he physically could not tolerate distance from you anymore, and leaned down slowly until his forehead rested carefully against yours.

For a long time neither of you spoke.

Machines hummed softly around the room while rain tapped gently against the windows again. Jack’s breathing still shook every few seconds no matter how hard he tried controlling it, and you realized with sudden aching clarity that he had been holding himself together by force ever since the attack happened.

Probably for everyone else.

For the department.

For you.

Until now.

Finally, through the ache in your jaw and throat, you whispered softly, “You saved me.”

Jack closed his eyes immediately like the words hurt almost as much as the memory itself.

For a long moment he did not say anything at all. His forehead stayed pressed carefully against yours while his breathing shook unevenly every few seconds, and you realized suddenly that he was trying very hard not to completely fall apart in front of you. The effort of it sat visibly in every tense line of his body, in the way his fingers curled tightly around yours like letting go might physically destroy him, in the way his shoulders remained rigid even now like some part of him still expected another disaster to happen the second he stopped bracing for it.

“You almost died.”

The words came out so quietly you nearly missed them beneath the hum of machines surrounding both of you.

Jack pulled back just enough to look at you again, and the expression on his face made something ache deep inside your chest because he looked terrified still.

Not panicked anymore. Not frantic.

Just deeply, genuinely terrified in a way you had never seen before.

“I couldn’t get to you fast enough,” he admitted roughly, eyes fixed on your face like he needed constant proof you were still here. “I heard the safe word and I ran, but by the time I got there...” His throat tightened visibly. “You were on the floor.”

You swallowed painfully.

Bits and pieces still came back in flashes more than complete memories. Leon’s hands around your throat. The cabinet slamming against the back of your skull. The overwhelming certainty that your body was beginning to give out beneath you.

Then Jack.

Your eyes drifted slowly across his face now, taking him in properly for the first time since waking up. The exhaustion. The fear. The sleepless hollowing beneath his eyes. He looked like somebody who had been surviving on adrenaline alone for far too long.

“You did get to me,” you whispered carefully.

Jack laughed once under his breath, but the sound cracked painfully in the middle. “Barely.”

“That’s not true.”

His jaw tightened immediately.

You knew that look. The same one he got after bad outcomes. After losses he carried around long after everybody else moved on. Jack had always been harder on himself than anyone else could ever be, especially when the people he loved were involved.

And God, he loved deeply.

Even when he pretended not to.

You shifted your hand weakly against his, ignoring the ache radiating through your shoulder and ribs.

“Jack.”

His eyes lifted back to yours instantly.

“I’m here.”

Something inside him seemed to break completely at those words.

Jack lowered his head again, pressing one trembling kiss carefully against your bruised knuckles before holding your hand against his chest. His heartbeat pounded hard and uneven beneath your fingers, fast enough that you could still feel the leftover adrenaline vibrating through him.

For a while neither of you spoke again.

The ICU remained dim and quiet around you while rain continued tapping softly against the windows outside. Nurses’ footsteps echoed faintly somewhere down the hallway, distant enough that it almost felt like the rest of the world existed somewhere very far away from this room.

Your eyelids had started growing heavy again by the time Jack finally spoke.

“You scared me,” he admitted quietly.

The confession sounded small somehow. Honest in a way that made your chest ache more than the injuries did.

You looked at him for a second before squeezing his hand as tightly as your exhausted body would allow.

“I know,” you whispered.

Jack nodded once, eyes never leaving your face.

Then very carefully, like he was handling something impossibly fragile, he leaned closer and pressed a kiss against your forehead while exhaustion slowly began pulling you back under again.

This time, when sleep finally took you, Jack’s hand never left yours.