good men die too (so i'd rather be with you)

Samira had tried to push those twelve months down, but she never could. Never really wanted to, if she’s honest with herself, because she felt more human that year than she ever had since. She had tried— in vain— to forget those quick brushes of a hand on her lower back, and the looks they’d traded, halfway between awed and adoring, even when she was weighed down by exhaustion and existentialism. They didn’t matter if Samira didn’t acknowledge them.

If she could ignore them, push them down and pray them away, then Samira still had a hope of crawling out of this deep, all-consuming hole that falling in love with Jack Abbot had put her in.

Notes:

precursors to this chapter: due to the nature of this fic’s plot i have had to lift canon dialogue from throughout s1, but changed it to fit within samira’s new context as an attending who trained under jack abbot, and is therefore confident in her abilities x (like she should be in show canon samira baby please stand up to robby we beg)
chapter specific trigger warning about a particularly sensitive/graphic moment
graphic depictions of injury involving a fetal crush injury, written in the capacity of abbot treating a patient. the description itself is not plot necessary to read if you’re not in the headspace! runs from “They lose the daughter in surgery” to “…when there’s so much worse around him.”

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

It’s a one bed apartment in the middle of Boston, with a fault line in the wall that threatens to bring it down on top of her as she sleeps. The walls are bare and unadorned. The heating doesn’t always work.

Samira refuses to call it home.

Jack doesn’t go home with half of his unit. They stagger the releases, and he’s left in the lurch, serving half a regiment with a half-staffed hospital and a half-empty adjoining apartment.

“Jack,” his retention NCO says, voice tinny and thin through the receiver. “We can get you transferred to the reserves, man. What do you want? A raise? Better benefits?”

No, he thinks. That’s not what he wants at all.

The man on the other side of the phone sighs, low and guttural, into the receiver. “Say it and it’s yours, Abbot. I have a few people who aren’t keen to let you go.”

Jack sighs down the phone. “I’m done,” he says, for what feels like the tenth time.

The NCO makes a sound of agitation. “Y’know what? Take a day. Sleep on it. Let me know in the morning how you’re feeling.”

Jack grits his teeth. “Okay,” he says, trying to sound professional. “I’ll call your office every damn day if I have to. I’m going home.”

“You’re too thin,” Amy says, glowering at him. “What were they doing over there? Starving you?”

Jack can’t help himself, grinning at her, digging into the take-out Thai in front of him, choosing not to comment on the fact he’s more toned than he ever was at home.

She settles herself at the table across from him. Her hair is more of a honey blonde now, having been near brunette when he last saw her in person two years ago. There are more freckles over her face, and her teeth are whiter. She doesn’t say anything more, but her eyes track him as he takes a long sip of the lemonade she had poured out for him.

When Jack looks up to meet her eye, it catches on the fridge behind her, and the pictures of his niece held up by magnets: one of her at prom, another at her high school graduation, and the most recent of her in a Dartmouth cheerleader uniform. Eventually, Amy stops staring, and begins to eat her own meal. There’s little noise, but the silence isn’t awkward. Companionable, more like.

Jack doesn’t remember the last time he ever heard such silence. Probably in the dead of night with Samira sitting across from him, he thinks.

His phone weighs heavy in his pocket.

“You ever get the roof fixed?” he asks, swallowing down the lump in his throat with lemonade.

Amy glowers at him again. “Yes. I did, in fact, manage to get around to fixing the roof in the past year.”

He levels a look at her. ”Why’re you so snippy?” he asks.

Her glare hardens. “Because you’re an idiot.”

He doesn’t choke on his mouthful, or glare back at her. It doesn’t even surprise him, really. She’s always had that annoying habit of seeing right through him. “Amy,” he says, trying to keep the sigh out of his words, because she’s not wrong, exactly.

”Forgive me for thinking it’s a little strange that you call me from the airport, letting me know you’re leaving the army, when last I heard you were loving it out in Aleppo.”

Jack shakes his head. He doesn’t want a fight. He doesn’t know why they would fight, considering Amy nearly killed him when he enlisted the first time. “What do you want me to say?” he asks, setting down his glass, all too aware of the fact that he’s sitting in his sister’s home in Maryland, with family photos all around him, which he doesn’t appear in. And he knows, unshakeably, like it’s a rule of the universe, that Amy loves him, but she’s always been a little too straight-laced to deal with him without them butting heads.

Amy crosses her arms. “I want you to tell me if this is your mid-life crisis,” she says. “Because if it is, and you ended your career because of it, I’m going to be the least of your problems. But,” she says, her voice softening by the slightest edge, her eyes losing the fire in them, “if this is something more,” she says, emphasising more like it means something, “then I’ll be here while you figure it out. But I need to know, Jack. This whole lone wolf thing doesn’t work with me.”

He looks at her for a moment. He considers what, exactly, she sees when she looks at him, his thirty-seven year old sister with a twenty-one year old daughter and an empty house.

“I just… needed a change of pace,” he says, repeating what he decided on while he was on the plane. His eyes are trained on his Pad Thai, because Amy’s staring at him like she can see right through him.

Amy’s silent for a long moment, blinking at him owlishly, the same look she used to give him when she had just woken up from a nap, standing in her crib, gripping at the bars, just waiting for somebody to come and get her. She never cried. She just waited, the corner of her blanket tucked under her nose, blinking with those wide eyes.

“This isn’t your mid-life crisis?”

Jack shrugs at her. “It probably is,” he says, revelling in the annoyed way she stabs her fork into her food.

“Doctor Mohan,” Milton says, shaking her hand firmly. “Happy to have you on board.”

Samira tries to smile, welcoming and enthusiastic, but her backpack strap digs into her shoulder and her hair is damp from the rain, flyaways multiplying the more that it dries. She’s wearing her boots, she realises. It doesn’t worry her, because she has them broken in and then some, the black leather creasing near her toes and cracking with age against her ankle.

She doesn’t know why she has them on. Instinct, maybe.

Jack wakes one morning to his phone going ballistic, and before he can look at the caller ID, he has a feeling something is wrong.

He answers the call before his eyes are fully open, and he thinks, for a terrifying half-second, that it’s Samira.

“Jack,” Robby says, relaxed. “You’re back in town?”

It’s not Samira, he realises, and the thought shouldn’t surprise him, because she hasn’t called him in the two months since she left, but it does regardless. “Robby,” he says, rubbing at his eyes. “I’m in Maryland.”

It sounds like he’s running, Jack realises, his voice uneven and his breathing coming hard and fast, the faint static sounding more like wind. “And you weren’t planning on telling me?”

Abbot laughs without feeling in it. “You good?” he asks, because while Robby is his friend, Robby never really calls him unless he has a problem.

Robby takes another breath, and Jack thinks he can make out the thud of his feet hitting the pavement. “What’re you doing in Maryland?”

”I’m visiting Amy,” Jack says, not caring for how gruff it comes out, turning to his side, not bothering to get out of bed.

Robby half-laughs. “So it’s true, then?”

Jack burrows further into the duvet. “Why’re you gossiping about me?”

“C’mon, man,” Robby says. “I’m not gossiping. I just heard that the Army’s golden boy resigned.”

”I don’t know who that is,” he says, “but yeah.”

He can hear the dull thud of Robby’s feet slowing to a stop. “You did?”

Jack doesn’t say anything.

“Shit,” Robby says, and Jack can imagine him running a hand over his face.

“Do you mind if we don’t talk about work?”

Samira’s wine is on the wrong side of tart and she shutters like a scratched DVD, her breath catching in her throat. After a pause, she laughs, and says “Sure, sorry,” with a voice high enough to conceal the fact that she’s lying.

That’s the last time she agrees to dinner on a date. From then on, it’s bars that are just dingy enough to justify her asking if they want to leave.

There’s never a second date, and that’s the way Samira likes it.

“Motor crush injury three minutes out,” Lena says, balancing the receiver between her shoulder and her ear.

Jack already has one foot out of the ED before he notices McKay following him. He can’t fault her efficiency. He might poach her for nights when she becomes a senior resident, he considers. She gets on like a house on fire with both Shen and Ellis, and Robby would probably let him, too occupied with his newest acolyte. She’d be a stellar addition, he thinks idly, as he ties the strings of his trauma gown behind his head. McKay does the same, her hands then coming down to cross in front of her chest.

A crush injury wouldn't usually warrant valet treatment, but the night has been smooth sailing so far. He has Shen posted up with a post-anaphylaxis patient, and a few of the unluckier med students following Donnie as he checks on the mundane cases which still haunt their halls, rejected by the wards they should be shipped up to.

Jack is, for lack of a better word, bored. McKay seems to be in a similar boat, neck craning around the side of the ambulance bay, as if she can conjure it faster, her eyes wide under the fluorescent light of the ambulance bay. Dust motes float over their heads, a chill creeping in. He doesn’t attempt to make small talk— McKay isn’t the type to need it.

The rush of sirens isn’t alarming. The ambulance speeds in and jolts to a harsh stop, Deering hopping out of the front and wrenching open the back doors. The other paramedic is one that Jack hasn’t encountered in his near eight months at PTMC, but she jumps out and pulls the gurney with her, revealing a man that smells so heavily of liquor Jack would deem him flammable.

Deering’s reading off the patient’s vitals when another blare of sirens hits his ears. The second ambulance swerves to avoid clipping the side of the first. Abbot meets McKay’s eyes and she nods, grip tightening on the first gurney, as Jack jogs to the next.

And then there’s a third.

He regrets even thinking of the ‘Q’ word.

The second and third gurneys are evacuated from the ambulances at the same time, practically down to the second. The paramedics don’t seem to acknowledge each other, both regurgitating their readings, overlapping with each other, and Abbot feels the urgency raise the hairs on the back of his neck. There’s a scream. Something guttural, and sharp, and awful enough to make his ears ring. A scream of my baby, and Stella, honey, look at mommy, and the ringing in his ears worsens like a shot just rang out.

Abbot grits his teeth, sending out a silent prayer when he has the wherewithal to notice that the second gurney– female, twenty-nine, pregnant, bleeding profusely vaginally and exhibiting symptoms of a ruptured spleen, including Kehr’s sign– is trying to sit up, flailing her left arm about and half-choking on her own pained cries. Blood puddles under her as she wraps one hand around her stomach and the other flies out to try and drag her child to her. Deering tries to get her to lie back down, but Jack catches as she calls out for her daughter, and then he looks at the other gurney, and the impossibly small girl laying in it, clothes soaked in blood and road grit, a paramedic towering above her as she administers chest compressions.

He needs more hands. Even if McKay were back, she’s only an R2, and Abbot needs someone autonomous– needs to cleave himself in two to save both lives.

“Mohan!” he calls out.

He doesn’t register what he’s said. It’s a knee jerk reaction. A type of survival instinct.

The mother keeps screaming, and the paramedic keeps compressing the toddler girl’s chest. Jack’s lips move again, before he can figure out why he’s still the only physician in the ambulance bay, yelling “Mohan!” with a steady urgency.

The ED’s door hits against the wall of the ambulance bay with how forcefully it is wrenched open, the tail-end of his call filtering through the doors. The second gurney is pulled out of his grasp. Something gives way in his chest. This is the closest he has to a second him– Samira, who knows his thought process better than he himself does, who will know it’s a ruptured spleen from the way the woman is flailing her left arm, and will have OB down within the minute. It allows him to turn his attention to the daughter, pulling his pen light from his pocket and probing at her pupils, gritting his teeth when he registers the left as blown and the right unreactive.

The mother keeps yelling. Abbot can’t blame her.

When he spares a second to look up, a watchful eye on the paramedic who tries to hold her to the bed, it isn’t Samira who’s attempting to explain what’s happening to the toddler girl in the bed beside them.

It isn’t Samira at all.

Shen looks the slightest bit confused, but pulls the gurney into the ED without comment.

Abbot takes a split second to glance at the ground. The name ghosts over his lips again. He can feel Lena’s eyes on him, one of the few who knew Samira, back when she haunted these halls instead of Abbot’s dreams. One of the few who knows enough to be confused at why he picked the name Mohan out of all others.

And then the mother screams again, back curling off the bed with effort, and he reminds himself that he’s supposed to have buried these feelings.

They lose the daughter in surgery. The mother loses her spleen, and her baby. He explains what has happened to Amanda McMahon when she is out of the woods, and holds her hand while she sobs that the man that hit her car was swerving all over the road. That her children are gone. That she wishes she had died on the table. That it’s not fair that she lived, and her babies didn’t.

“Can I see her?” she asks, mascara dripping onto her hospital gown, hair follicles clutched between her fingers.

Abbot takes as deep a breath as he can manage. He explains that she can see her daughter, but her baby— her 37 week, full term baby— was too badly injured.

He doesn’t mention the skull that was caved in. The chest that held eight broken ribs, and a stand-still heart. The skin that slipped when the OB resident carefully manoeuvred the baby out through the C-section scar that she will carry for life, an eternal reminder of the worst day she’s ever lived through.

Amanda sucks on her teeth and nods her head vigorously, pulling her eyes away from him, before she throws her head back into the pillows and wails.

Abbot feels his own loss deep in his chest, but doesn’t allow himself to dwell on it. It doesn’t seem fair, when there’s so much worse around him.

Samira’s an hour into her shift when her eyes catch the writing on her cup of coffee. Sameera, it says.

Something inexplicable makes her sigh that little bit harder.

There’s nothing that crosses the line. On lonely nights when he isn’t working but he can’t seem to find sleep, he tries to convince himself it’s better that way. There wasn’t any whispered admission, or a kiss shared in a medical closet, or the memory of his lips working down from her lips to her navel. There isn’t an aphrodisiac to wean off of– he goes cold turkey when she leaves, vowing not to linger on it.

He tries to convince himself it’s better that way. There aren’t any loose threads to tie, no broken heart to mend.

He fails.

He thinks about the million times he should have kissed her. He thinks about the god-awful coffee and how it made her scrunch her nose, and the way her eyebrows would furrow when she’d march into the hospital to debate the merits of a new study when she should have been sleeping, and the tears that would run off of her chin after she couldn’t save another brother in arms, and he thinks about how he should’ve threaded his fingers into her curls, should’ve placed a hand on her chin, should’ve pulled her close and kissed her softly.

He thinks about how he never did.

When Robby makes a sly comment about his dead dating life, he can burrow into his charts, or run to the ambulance bay, praying for somebody’s worst day to hurry up and hurtle in. When Shen groans exaggeratedly at his phone, complaining about some dating app or the other, he can send him a stern look that nobody takes seriously.

There’s nowhere to hide in his bedroom. There’s his book of crosswords hidden in his sock drawer, her looping script and his chicken scratch scrawl intersecting. There are the breezes that sound like her laughing. There are his dog tags, that she held gently between her fingers, hitting against his heartbeat when he moves.

He isn’t in the habit of denying that he loved Samira Mohan. That he loves her still.

He wishes he were able to.

It plagues him in the worst moments. It hits him when the new residents inevitably find out about his leg and gawk at him in the corridors. It hits him when Ellis will not stop complaining about her dad’s technological illiteracy. It hits him when he treats a vet that’s taken too many pills or tried to put a bullet through their brain. It hits him when Robby eyes Collins from across the ED and Langdon rolls his eyes, elbowing him in the side, with a sideways look that says, God, they should get a room, right? When he needs to tell a resident to get their head in the game, when he reads an article she would have liked, when he thinks, and thinks, and thinks, and can’t sleep for thinking.

Samira Mohan haunts him.

She’s not one of the hundreds he hasn’t been able to save. By all accounts, she’s stationed at the Boston VA, run ragged by the demands of treating traumatised veterans when you yourself are one. Stressed, most definitely, and too caffeinated for her own good, undoubtedly, but safe, and healthy, and alive, which is a lot more than most of Abbot’s unit members can say. And he has her number in his phone, a button-press away, her voice just on the other side, his phone burning a hole in his pocket.

And yet.

Samira Mohan haunts him. She’s always been a special case.

Samira’s flattened against the wall of her entryway, bags hitting her in the legs as she thinks about the overflowing laundry basket sitting beside her couch, and the food in the fridge she thinks must have moulded by now, and the trash can in the bathroom that must be overflowing.

“Samira,” her mom says, looking around the place, “You didn’t tell me you moved.”

She leans in the doorway, looking down at the shopping bags in her mom’s hands, stacked high with clothes that Samira will not wear, and food that she will not eat. “I haven’t,” she says, only slightly confused.

Her mom frowns, looking around at the empty shelves and boxes that are still tucked against the couch, their own colonies of dust bunnies beginning to populate her living room. She doesn’t say anything, but her squinting and furrowed brow says enough.

“You just going to sit there looking miserable?” Dana asks, elbowing him in the side, beer dangling from her hand.

Abbot rolls his eyes at her, but takes a drawn-out sip of his own beer to appease her. She settles down onto the bar stool beside him, tossing her hair out of her face. She sets her empty bottle onto the bar top, before beckoning the bartender over, and asking for another. “You should be socialising,” she says. “You need to stop letting all the poor kids believe that you’re going to bite their heads off.”

Abbot raises an eyebrow. “I have a reputation to upkeep,” he responds. “Plus, it’s easier to corral them when they’re scared of me.”

Dana laughs at his wry grin. “You can fool them,” she says, “but you can’t fool me.”

Abbot takes another sip of his beer instead of responding to that. He’s very aware of the fact that he can’t fool Dana. Her glasses give her some sort of x-ray vision that cuts through flesh and stares into his soul without mercy.

Dana’s smile gradually falls, until they’re shoulder to shoulder in silence, and she asks, her voice so low that Jack can barely hear above the buzz of music and the clink of bottles, “Everything okay with you?”

Jack doesn’t look at her. He keeps his eye trained on the bottles that line that back wall of the bar, and the mirror that backs them, enough visible for him to catch his own reflection. “I’m fine, Dana. Take a night off,” he says, not unkindly. He smiles. It must be convincing enough, because Dana smiles back.

“For the record,” she says, voice still just above a whisper, with that hoarseness that reminds him of his mom’s nicotine-stained fingers, “I don’t believe you.”

Jack laughs at that, because he doesn’t believe himself either. “Go enjoy your party,” he says, head nodding towards Princess and Perlah, searching for matches to light the gold 50th candles they’ve stuck into a Walmart cake.

Dana glances at them, and then glances back at him. “You take care of yourself,” she says. Her voice has lost the laughter in it, and it punches the breath out of him for a second, until he catches his own reflection again, and is reminded that he’s at a work function, surrounded by coworkers who won’t know why he’s so torn up about a birthday party, of all things.

Jack nods, and knocks his beer bottle against hers. “No promises.”

Samira’s thighs shiver as she settles herself on the seat of the toilet, blood thrumming in her head that makes her stomach flip.

She’s killing time, scrolling through her phone with too much attention, the light hurting her head. The hum of the bathroom fan is too loud, and her shoulder blades, skimming the back of the toilet, ache for respite. She crumbles until her elbows are on her knees, her eyes staring down at her phone and the tiles beyond it, and for the barest moment, her thumb spasms and opens her contacts, and Samira reads Jack before she comes back to her senses with a type of clarity that rivals the iciness of the water she runs her hands under.

She hears the bedsheets shifting, and prays that the guy on the other side of the bathroom door took the hint.

“Kelsey’s graduating next month,” Amy says, “and I know you’re busy but I got you a ticket, just in case you can get away for a few days. Just call me, and let me know.”

Jack hangs up on the voice mail, and promises himself that he’ll call her back in the morning.

It gets quiet at night. Jack doesn’t like to think of the word, because even he has the good sense to be wary of superstition, but it’s the truth.

“They’ve cleared a bed in psych,” Ellis says, finding him in the break room where he’s stirring his coffee, “Which of the boarders do you want out?”

“West thirteen still threatening to stab everyone?”

Ellis smiles at him, wide and sarcastic. “Absolutely.”

Abbot picks up his coffee and walks towards her. She walks out and he follows her, leaning against the hub as she does the same. Ellis says to Lena about their schizophrenic heroin addict, before glancing down at her smart watch, grimacing.

“Girl problems, Ellis?” he asks, shoulder checking her lightly, taking another sip of his coffee with an eyebrow raised.

Ellis grimaces again. “Don’t ask,” she says, “because you do not want to know.”

”What doesn’t Abbot want to know?” Shen asks, rounding around the other side of the hub, taking a gurgling sip of his Dunkin’, which is more melted ice than coffee.

Ellis shoves her head into her hands. “Let’s all stop talking about my love life,” she says.

“Your love life?” Shen asks, eyes widening. “Well, even if Abbot doesn’t want to know, I do.”

”Whose love life?” asks Walsh, appearing from out of nowhere.

Ellis groans.

Abbot raises an eyebrow, swallowing his urge to laugh down with another sip of bitter coffee.

On the rare occasion day and night overlap, Abbot notices the archetypes.

Every doctor in every ED, whether they notice it or not, are specialised for a type of patient. Shen is who he sends to the patients with health anxiety. Ellis is who he sends to the patients with bruises. McKay is who they send to the single mothers, and the drunk guys passed out with AA chips in their pockets. Langdon is who they send to the frat bros who are terrified of telling them what they took, and the little kids who can’t stop crying. Collins is who they send to those who seem wary of everyone around them, and the patients that come in with blood smeared over their thighs in the shape of handprints.

Abbot is who they send for when a vet comes in, overdosed on pain meds, or retreating to the ED as a last resort, in search of someone to stop them from doing something stupid, or with phantom limb pain that makes them want to break in two.

He tries not to lie to them. Sometimes, he pulls up his pant leg, and talks about it getting easier. When they ask if that’s why he left, he doesn’t tell them the truth, but he doesn’t lie, either.

“I was trying to find my way home,” he says, but he knows that’s not the whole truth.

Samira doesn’t always notice the years passing, but they do. The years pass, and Samira tries.

How desperately she tries.

She tries so hard, sometimes she manages to kid even herself. She goes out on dates. She shaves every inch of her body, and oils her hair, and laughs at their jokes earnestly, and thinks, surprisingly, that she’s having fun.

She finds little pieces of herself that she had forgotten about. She rediscovers her love of yoga and pilates. She rediscovers how good a shot of tequila can make her feel. She rediscovers the part of her that likes doing her makeup and finger-coiling her hair before she goes for a drink after work, and she finds men she might like to take home, and finds herself inevitably pushing them away and slamming the door as they go because she is too avoidant, too independent, too content with the way her life is to be bothered with moving things around to accommodate some boy who doesn’t know exactly how she likes to be touched.

(Sometimes, she thinks, when it’s too late in the night to lie to herself, that she just wants somebody who can take one look at her, and know.)

It hits her, standing in her kitchen, on the phone with her mom— who is once again hedging around the topic of dying without grandchildren being the biggest insult to mankind— that Samira is still single because she cannot move on from the only relationship which has ever filled that aching hole of need in her chest, which, crazily enough, was not a relationship at all.

She’s never been good at bluffing, but, miraculously, she had half managed to convince herself that she had buried her feelings somewhere between Syria and Boston.

It becomes all too apparent, as she stares at the empty walls of her apartment, her tactical backpack sitting right beside the door, ready for her to pick up and run, that could not be further from the truth.

This is good, she thinks. This is healthy.

Samira forces herself to keep repeating those phrases as she parks on the curb to look at the introductory email she’s had starred in her inbox for the past six weeks. This is good. This is healthy. Change is healthy.

She has a spot reserved at the front of the ED, she finds out, signposted with the text Attending Physician. She double-checks her mirrors as she parks, hoping that this will not be the day she decides to hit a colleague’s car for the first time, and sits, staring at the timestamped 06:17 displayed on her carplay.

She promises herself that she will not exit her car until 6:30 at the absolute earliest. This isn’t her first day of residency– there’s no need to be forty-five minutes early. God, the attending she’s shadowing probably won’t be there for another half hour at least.

Change is good. Change is healthy.

Unfortunately, Samira has never been that good at lying to herself, gritting her teeth as she rests her forehead on the steering wheel. Her coffee is on the wrong side of bitter as she takes a drawn-out sip, but it distracts her from the nausea building in her stomach.

The clock hits 6:25 and Samira wrenches open her car door, battling with her backpack as it catches on her gear stick. She yanks it up, slings it over her shoulder, and plasters on her best smile, the one that has won awards for most enthusiastic, most promising, most assuring.

Samira smiles until her cheeks ache.

“Doctor Mohan,” Dr. Robby says, finding her before she even makes it into the ED. The receptionist looks up at his voice, before returning back to Samira’s ID card, shuffling it amongst her paperwork. He claps her on the back as she turns around, an airpod still in his ear. “Glad to have you back, kid.”

Samira smiles, and, for the first time today, it feels genuine.

“Doctor Robby,” she smiles.

Robby pulls her in for a side hug that has the breath rushing out of Samira’s lungs. He smiles at her, his teeth showing, and she finds it hard not to laugh at the bizarre nature of it all. She never thought she’d get to see the inside of these halls again.

Dr. Robby looks better since she last saw him. He has a few more grey patches, both on his head, and in his beard, but he looks kinder. Smiley, in the way that it looks at home on his face. She’s missed this version of him. She wonders how long it took him to crawl out of that hole that Adamson’s death left him in.

Samira doesn’t question whether he’s being genuine when he says he’s happy to see her. Robby isn’t good at lying about liking people— she knows that intimately— but she doesn’t miss his eyes rove over her coat (black, waterproof, and practical, a far cry from the wine-purple cloth trench she used to use as a comfort blanket) and her shoes (practical, battleworn, steel-toed boots, rather than sneakers) with an edge of something analytical. She understands it. She understands him. Samira’s a cog re-entering his well-oiled machine.

Samira smiles, and her hands itch to get to work. God, she’s had one entire week off and she’s already going stir-crazy. It had gotten so bad, she was considering rewatching Grey’s Anatomy for the first time since med school to try and boost her ego by the slightest edge.

She straightens up, holding his gaze. She knows what kind of doctor she is, now. And, soon enough, Robby will know too.

Robby leaves her to finish her paperwork, and, by the time she makes it into the ED, he’s nowhere to be seen. Instead, Samira makes her way over to the hub. All the faces she sees on her way are foreign, which doesn’t surprise her, but still makes her stomach flip.

That is, until she catches sight of Dana, leaning over a computer at the hub, her head periodically looking up to reassess the board. Samira’s eye catches on it, but she doesn’t take the time to analyse it— she has time for that later. Now, she crosses her arms and leans against the hub, until Dana catches her in her periphery, and whips her gaze to her.

She’s missed Dana’s smile.

“Doctor Mohan,” she says, smile growing.

Dana has rounded the hub before Samira can blink, enveloping her in a hug that tightens the knot in Samira’s throat. “Hi, Dana,” she breathes.

Dana pulls back, but keeps her hands on Samira’s shoulders, analysing her like she would a patient. “You’re looking well, kid.”

Samira can feel her smile grow. “Thank you.”

Dana releases her grip. “You’re a sight for sore eyes. Admin’s been up Robby’s ass about patient satisfaction scores ever since you left.”

Samira laughs. “Nice to know you missed me,” she says.

Dana gives her a knowing look. ”We missed you. Don’t doubt that.”

Dana knows. She knows that Samira didn’t want to leave. If anybody, Dana remembers when Samira would camp out in the ED, running herself ragged, because time passed slower when she was in control of something. The fact she’s so great at reading people is what makes her capable of being a charge nurse. Samira takes a step back, as if it’ll stop the burn of her gaze. “Plus,” Dana says, “we have new kids starting today that need whipped into shape.”

Samira laughs, and, for a moment, the nerves leave her.

“Who left this mess?”

Samira spins around, and comes face to face with someone she didn’t think she’d ever see again. “Doctor Collins,” she says with a smile.

It takes Collins a second to register who, exactly, is speaking to her, but when she does she smiles back at her. “Doctor Mohan! Long time no see.”

Samira’s about to respond, but then she catches sight of another familiar face over her shoulder. One that makes her smile turn to a wry eye roll. “Doctor Langdon,” she says. “Somehow, I knew I’d find you here.”

Langdon returns her grin, unabashedly smug. ”Happy to have you boss me around again, Doctor Mohan.”

Samira remembers the both of them separately. Langdon, embarrassingly enough, as one of the first med students Robby had really tasked her with. “He’s got it,” he had said, and Samira didn’t need to ask for clarification on what it was, “but he needs a little healthy anxiety.”

Samira didn’t even blink at Robby’s implication, back when she consisted of bitten lips and torn cuticles. She herself knew that she had enough anxiety for all of the staff on the floor, and then some.

Collins was different. No less intelligent than Langdon, but more mature. Langdon was a med student fresh out of undergrad, cocky and overconfident in a way that made Samira hate him, a little bit. Collins had experience that rivalled Samira’s, with a background in social work that made her a quick study. She didn’t need the sensitivity training that Langdon would have crashed and burned without.

She remembers them both. She isn’t surprised to find them here, senior residents, with the well-won confidence to go with it.

“They had a rough night,” Dana says, sending a pointed look at Collins, and then the board that hurts Samira’s eyes, half of the beds made up of boarders, and even more crowding the halls.

“We’ve seen worse,” Dr. Langdon says. “I’m sure GI Joe here will have us suited and booted in no time.”

Samira raises her eyebrow and bites down on the urge to tell him to fuck off.

It’s easy for Robby to find them all when they’re crowded around the hub, one of the night shift nurses debriefing Dana on the horror stories that happened before they even stepped through the door. “As you can see,” Robby says, clapping her on the shoulder again, and using the momentum to pull her away from her perch against the hub, displaying her in the centre of their huddle, “we have a few new faces joining us.”

Samira notices with a startling clarity that their little circle has grown to three times its size, with everyone’s eyes on her. It shouldn’t surprise her— she still has her coat on and backpack over her shoulder, the camo green a contrast to her navy scrubs with her name stitched across the back, and she’s a different type of ‘new’ from the med students who cycle through on rotation— but she still fights the urge to curl in on herself. Robby’s hand is solid on her shoulder, but it feels more like he’s keeping her from bolting than trying to steady her.

“Doctor Melissa King, fresh from the VA,” Robby introduces, enough for Samira’s eyes to shoot up and drop again when she doesn’t recognise her. Once King introduces herself, an awkward smile splayed across her face, Robby nods his head at one of the others in their huddle, who begins speaking.

“Trinity Santos, intern,” she says.

“Victoria Javadi, MS3,” the next says.

“Dennis Whitaker, MS4,” the final student says.

Samira’s eyes run over each of them, and when her gaze happens to meet Javadi’s by chance, she tries to give her a smile that she hopes is reassuring.

Samira’s ready for her introduction— has constructed a script in her head that informs of her past residency at the Pitt, and her most recent posting at the Boston VA, lacking all mention of anything between those two periods— but Dana cuts them off.

This is what Samira has missed, she tries to convince herself.

As she has previously stated, she’s never been good at lying to herself.

Samira snaps back to attention with Robby’s voice, running through the same spiel he probably gave to Samira’s group of interns when they first fumbled their way into the Pitt’s ED, barely able to tell head from heel. “Your senior residents are Doctor Collins and Doctor Langdon,” Robby says, head nodding to both of them in turn. “You report to them, and they report to me.”

Samira wonders if Robby can feel her gaze trained on him. He must, because his head turns to the side, and as he catches sight of her, he says, “Or Doctor Mohan.” Samira forces herself to look up at her name, raising her hand half-heartedly. “Okay? Great,” Robby says, not waiting for anybody to nod at him. “Senior residents, you got your sign outs?”

When Collins and Langdon both confirm, Robby looks up, meeting her eye for the first time. “Doctor Mohan, I’ll take Langdon’s if you take Collins’?”

Samira nods, and tries to plaster on that same smile. “Sure.”

It doesn’t escape Samira’s notice that Robby is watching her.

Every new patient she sees, he’s bound to pop his head through the door, making some off-handed remark about “checking in”. Every time Samira cuts through the hub, updating charts, he’s there, one eye on whoever he happens to be conversing with, and the other on Samira.

She tries to be patient. She tries to be empathetic. Even when he steps in on a code for a 79 year old female on the LUCAS that she is running absolutely impeccably by herself— could have run with her eyes closed when she was in med school— she bites her tongue to keep from sighing.

Samira understands that she is a cog re-entering his well-oiled machine. It’s just frustrating that Robby has seemingly forgotten that Samira used to be the reason it was so well-oiled.

Samira thinks she’s seeing a vaso-occlusive crisis the second that the paramedics wheel the patient in, spouting off about the pain pills they’ve found in her pocket. Where they see drug-seeking, Samira sees a back that arches off of the bed in agony, jaundiced eyes, shortness of breath, and sharp, piercing groans of pain.

She knows she’s seeing a patient in vaso-occlusive crisis the second that the patient cries out, “I have sickle cell!”

“Okay, stop,” Samira says, trying to stop herself from yelling, but the paramedics just force the patient’s hands down, restraining her onto the bed.

Samira doesn’t think before she yells again. “Stop,” she shouts between gritted teeth. She sounds like she’s screaming. The paramedics let go. Samira can’t be fully sure whether it’s because of her shouting, or because they catch sight of her name badge, Attending Physician written in a font big enough to assert her authority.

She’s not a resident anymore, she reminds herself.

“I’m so sorry this has happened,” she murmurs to Joyce St. Clair. “You’re safe here.”

Samira keeps repeating those words, as if it’ll scrub the memory of the hands pinning Joyce down, forcing her contorted body into even more pain. “You’re going to be safe here,” she says, because those words are a needed reminder to the woman still writhing with pain in front of her. “I promise.”

(أعدك.)

When she ‘confers’ with Whitaker, she tries not to scare him. She tries to be patient. He’s an MS4, yeah, but she probably had her own biases when she was at his stage.

“You seem surprised by the opioid dosage,” she says to him, trying to keep her voice level. Not accusing him, because Samira takes pains not to jump to conclusions.

Whitaker looks up at her, swallowing. “It seemed a little high.”

”So was her pain,” Samira responds before she can think. She means it, but it comes out sharper than she was hoping. She takes another breath, watching as the cogs in Whitaker’s head turn. “You can’t fake a hemoglobin of six,” she explains. “She’s not drug seeking. She’s in sickle cell crisis. Her blood cells are caught, plugging up her capillaries and depriving all of her cells of oxygen. It’s been described as an electrical stabbing pain that feels like it’s breaking your bones and flushing glass through your body.”

Samira doesn’t know Whitaker. Whitaker most definitely does not know her. She tries to tread the line between educational and confrontational, because she can’t decipher whether he’s just ignorant or biased, and Samira is trying to be patient.

Samira can see him swallow heavily, like he’s digesting what she’s said. “I never thought of it like that,” he says.

Samira breathes again. She steadies herself. “A little empathy goes a long way with those suffering in real pain.”

Whitaker nods. “Yeah,” he says, and Samira is grateful for the fact that she didn’t completely tear into him.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “You’ll get good at spotting the fakers, and half the time all those people really need is someone to listen to them, and hear their story.”

Whitaker nods, and Samira hopes it’s because he agrees with her, and not because she’s scared him straight. Samira turns, ready to head back towards Joyce, before his voice stops her. “Doctor Mohan,” he says, and Samira turns. His eyes are still lowered to the ground. “I’m sorry.”

Samira realises that the response comes easily to her. “Don’t be,” she says. “Now you’ll know for the next time. That’s how you learn, Whitaker.”

Samira can feel Robby hovering.

She continues listening to Joyce. Not to make a point, exactly— that’s just an added benefit— but because Samira, contrary to popular belief, is a physician with four years of experience as an attending, who knows on a foundational level that her approach works.

If it didn’t, Samira wouldn’t still be a doctor. If it didn’t, she would have dropped out of her internship before her first day even began, switching to something where she could afford to be inefficient, like pathology. If it didn’t, Samira wouldn’t have survived the viper’s den of the Pitt the first time around.

When Robby pulls her for a conversation, she doesn’t think he’ll start berating her. Sure, she remembers his scathing remarks on her pace from residency, hearing the name Slo-Mo fall from his mouth just as often as she would hear it from anybody else’s, and she remembers him grinding his teeth hard enough to shave them down every time she received another stellar admin review, as though it would undo all of the conditioning he was attempting. But Samira, somehow, has this futile hope that Robby will see her as an adult. A professional, even. She has this futile-beyond-reason hope that he will not stoop to embarrassing her, on her first day, in front of the entire ED, by undermining her patient care.

Samira called it a futile hope for a reason.

“Is there a problem over there?”

Samira forces herself to breathe, her hands that are hidden behind her back shaping into fists as she digs her nails into her palm. “Patient with sickle cell in for a vaso-occlusive crisis,” she presents. “I’m getting her set up for antibiotics for acute chest syndrome, but other than that, she should be fine.”

Robby’s eyes threaten to fall back into his brain with how hard he rolls them. “You understand that’s my polite way of asking why you’re spending so much time with one patient?”

Samira almost laughs politely, before she forces herself not to. “I’m taking a history of her illness,” she says.

Robby brings a hand up to his face to sigh into. “Doctor Mohan,” he says, almost nicely enough to edge into patronising, “I understand that this is your first day back in a real ED, but I cannot have you compromising patient care by getting caught up in the nitty-gritty.” Samira surprises herself with how quickly irritation curls in her chest. “Please, please tell me,” Robby asks, hands out, extended in a mockery of prayer, almost looking like he’s begging, “that you’ve left Slo-Mo in the past.”

Samira’s teeth bite into her lip to keep from swearing, but she can’t manage to control her stare, her eyebrows furrowing down and her gaze turning into a glare. The words leave her mouth before she can think otherwise. “Doctor Robinavitch,” she says, not sparing him the decency of his nickname when he used hers for his benefit, “If you are interested in a conversation surrounding my attitude to patient care, we can discuss that in the break room. If you are interested in giving me a dressing down in front of the entire ED, I’m finished with this conversation.”

Privately, Samira admits she does feel the slightest bit of satisfaction as she watches Robby’s retort die in his throat. She isn’t mean, or unnecessarily cruel, but her tone is curt, and, unlike Robby’s, professional. “And I’ve been working in ‘real’ EDs for the past four years,” she adds, because she isn’t above being petty, and because people died in those EDs, their lives mattering just as much as the ones she is saving today.

Robby looks as though he’s about to say something, but when he doesn’t, Samira takes her chances. “I’ll be with Joyce St. Clair. If you decide to have that conversation, that is.”

Samira manages to get through a college kid who has had a drug overdose, a fourteen month old baby with a hair tourniquet, a twelve year old girl with an imperforate hymen, a patient with a perforated ulcer resulting in Whitaker being drenched in blood, and Joyce St. Clair’s intubation, all with Robby avoiding her.

Which, don’t get her wrong, is absolutely fine by her. She’s still a little light-headed from standing up to him earlier, as if she’s gone against the natural order of things— which, in a way, she has. When Collins comes to fetch her from Joyce’s bedside, Samira walks with her over to the hub without comment.

Robby’s barely begun speaking when Langdon tilts his head back, sighing at the roof. “Not this bullshit again,” he whispers to Collins, who tries not to laugh.

Samira, standing beside them both, leans in, disregarding how rude she must look, speaking while Robby is. “What is it?” she asks, trying to hide her mouth behind her hand.

Langdon rolls his eyes again. “He goes on this rant every month when Gloria comes down to spank him,” he says.

Samira almost laughs, but bites her lip, turning back to Robby, and trying not to smile in satisfaction as he goes through protocols to make patient care more efficient, which Samira has been implementing since she landed back on US soil three years ago. She ignores Langdon’s other smartass comments, before Robby lets them go with a self-loathing thumbs up and absolutely no glance spared Samira’s way.

“Keep me posted,” Robby says, staring at her with little emotion behind his eyes. “If it’s all negative, admit her to psych.”

He walks off without another word.

Samira knows what day it is. Adamson was her mentor too, once upon a time. When Robby reams her out for what seems to be the nth time today, Samira tries not to let the reminder of the date slip into her voice.

“This is a toxicology case,” she says to Robby. “She’s been using a face cream from Asia with a dangerously high mercury content. I’ve ordered a heavy metal panel, looking for mercury, lead, or arsenic.”

Robby slowly takes his glasses off, shoving them in the pocket of his jacket. “Why didn’t you consult me?”

Samira tries to remind herself that she is trying to be patient.

“Because I didn’t think I would have to consult you for a basic tox screen,” she says lowly, trying to be patient, trying to sound patient, trying to be a martyr for the cause.

Robby looks at her with the edge that used to make her crumble. She knows what day it is. She knows, logically, that he never really left the hole that Adamson’s death put him in. That today, of all days, he’s trying to keep his head above water, and probably failing miserably.

But Samira knows what kind of doctor she is.

“Are we done here?” she asks, and when Robby doesn’t answer her, she turns on her heel, and puts in the order for the screening without thinking twice.

“Hey,” Samira hears, the call coming from behind her. “Hey, Doc!”

She stops walking, poking her head into the room.

“Hey, Doc,” Louie says, laying placidly while Langdon gets him transferred from the ambulance gurney to a bed.

“Louie,” she says, unable to stop herself from smiling. “What brings you in here?”

”Ah, same old, same old,” he says, laughter bubbling in his words. “Here, last I heard, you were off in the desert.” His voice is light and sing-songy as he looks at Samira with a smile.

Samira tries to laugh, hands coming down to help Langdon get him situated, keeping one eye on Santos in her periphery. Langdon answers before she can. “Didn’t you hear, Louie?” he asks, voice absentminded as he tries to get him to lay properly, “Captain America came crawling back.”

Samira rolls her eyes. Santos, in her periphery, is counting the pills in the bottle she’s holding.

“Glad to have you back,” he smiles. His hand comes up, hitting Langdon’s arm to grab his attention. “She’s the best doc around,” he says, and Samira tries not to blush.

“No need to flatter me,” she says. “I have to treat you either way.”

That manages to get Langdon smiling, albeit sardonically. Santos is still counting the pills in the bottle when she leaves the room.

(Samira’s right about the tox screen. She knew she would be.)

Samira’s late to the scene, but when she walks in, she sees Trinity Santos by herself over an ice bath, ordering for hot saline. She sees her wide eyes, repeating herself when Princess asks about her labs, but Trinity is steadfast.

“Doctor Santos,” Samira says as she rubs sanitiser into her hands. “What’s going on?”

”This isn’t a CNS problem,” she says, almost breathless. “At festivals, you dance for hours, you sweat, you drink gallons of water, but nobody thinks to replenish their salts.” Samira bends down to help keep the patient’s head above water. “It’s low sodium,” she says, staring straight into Samira. “Hyponatremia.”

Samira doesn’t second guess her. Not when her knuckles are whitening from how hard she’s fighting to keep the patient’s head above water. “Do it,” she says, and Princess jumps to action.

Santos injects the first fifty of saline, and Samira doesn’t stop her. If they’re wrong, which she doubts they are, it’ll be her head on the line, and a bolus of saline is unlikely to cause any permanent damage. If they’re right, and they don’t, and her heart keeps seizing due to a critically low sodium level, she’s going to die.

Santos only starts breathing again when the heart monitors stop blaring, and Princess reads off the lab results.

She was right. Santos doesn’t look gratified, like Samira half-expected her to. Only relieved.

“Great catch,” she says, earnest. “You just saved her life.” Santos, despite her best efforts to remain invulnerable, looks the tiniest bit weary. It only worsens when Samira smiles at her. ”I have to go check up on my toxicology patient,” she says, “but I’ll ask Doctor Langdon to come and give you a hand de-icing her, okay?”

Santos freezes, for the barest second, but Princess answers the phone again. “Doctor Mohan, they need you in trauma two.”

Samira nods, and gives Trinity one last small smile. “Good work, Doctor Santos,” she says, before she leaves Doctor Langdon to take over.

An active shooter. An active shooter, and the Pitt is the nearest trauma centre. An active shooter, and the Pitt is the nearest trauma centre, and Robby is still refusing to look her in the eye.

He dismisses them all, but Samira doesn’t have family to call. She rounds instead. She gets Joyce into the ICU, Ondine hugging her as she’s wheeled away. She gets Louie and Earl into a room in post-Op, because they’re the only place with beds.

She busies herself until she manages to distract herself from the thing that’s curling in her chest. She refuses to call it excitement, because that would be— that would be cruel, she thinks.

Abbot can’t even find it in himself to be frustrated when his drive to the gym is interrupted by the announcement over the police scanner, too occupied with checking whether his bag is fully stocked or if he’ll have to loop home before he clocks in at the Pitt for the foreseeable future. The traffic is a slog, but typical of the post-work rush, not yet having devolved into the chaos and carnage of the aftermath of a mass-shooting.

He parks on the opposite side of the hospital to the ED. It’ll save him having to move his car later, when ambulances are outnumbered by minivans and convertibles barreling in with wounded. He’s not even wearing his orthopedic shoes, glancing down at the boots on his feet.

He breathes in. Reminds himself that he’s come out the other side of worse. It’s going to be a hell of a day, yes, but he’ll manage, the worst of his efforts being rewarded with back pain and knee swelling.

The ED is primed and ready when he walks in. The second he steps through the doors, his phone pings with three separate notifications, almost simultaneously: an email from hospital administration, invoking the MCI protocol, a text regurgitating the same information, and a text from the ED’s staff phone. MCI incoming, expecting ~50-80 GSWs/crush injuries, supremely curt, like Dana knows he’d drop any plans to come assist– which he would– and he turns his phone off, stuffing it deep into his bag before he drops it under the nurse’s station. Perlah gives him a tight-lipped smile, nodding before he can even open his mouth.

Jack makes his way to the lockers. He pulls out his spare undershirt and scrubs, shrugging them on before he can think about what he’s doing, and then walking out.

Robby looks at him like he’s brought the cure to their suffering. Jack tries not to be wary of him, because that won’t help, but he can’t stop concern from curling in his chest. Not when Robby’s arms wrap around him like he’s a lifeline, taking him off-guard.

He helps situate the disaster bins, ripping open the zip-tie holds and pulling everything out and lining it up. He sorts them by problem instead of type.

His leg’s already hurting.

Samira is late to the briefing. Sue her, she’s been trying to volley between answering questions and relocating beds and comforting scared patients while trying to calm down all of the med students which have seemingly decided that she is the one to flock to. Santos, Whitaker and Javadi are all following her wherever she walks, and Samira tries not to get overwhelmed with the amount of attention she’s being given.

She tasks Javadi and Whitaker to ensure that the straggling boarders get sent upstairs, and when they’ve confirmed, they scurry back. Samira sends them up to Robby, because she can bet that he needs more hands.

Santos, she keeps with her. She looks paler than she did this morning, her fingers ripping at her cuticles when she thinks Samira isn’t paying enough attention to notice. She doesn’t blame her for being a little apprehensive.

Samira ties up her loose threads before she rounds back to the hub. She should be at the briefing, yes, but she knows how to handle MCIs. It doesn’t scare her. She’s not going in blind. She knows what she’s doing.

She runs up in the nick of time. “Samira?” Robby asks, and she can catch a glimpse of him looking around for her through the swathes of people she tries to push through. “Where are you?”

Samira raises her hand before she gets a clear view of him, but when she does, her eyes are trained on Robby. When he catches sight of her, almost lost in the crowd, he says, “You are here, with Doctor Abbot.”

Samira takes a step forward before the last half of his sentence hits her ears, and she is undoubtedly sure, for one, ephemeral moment, that she is imagining things. But then, her eyes flick to the side, and somehow, somehow, she already knew that he would be staring back.

Abbot’s eyes bore into her. Samira is sure, undoubtedly, that she is imagining things.

There have been several instances in his life where Jack was irrefutably sure that he was going to die.

This outranks them. Severely.

Robby says something more. He probably needs Jack to jump in, and volley off of what he has said, but Jack is stuck, because he is irrefutably sure that he is dreaming.

Samira stands in front of him, an ocean away, the hub between them. And he would be lying, if he said he didn’t remember the last time they were this close, because it was a night in June where he held her hand and begged her to give him a reason to follow her home. Robby elbows him in the side, light enough for it to seem accidental, but Jack doesn’t snap himself out of it. Can’t, really, because he’s staring at Samira Mohan, who has haunted him for thirty-six months without knowing it. Has haunted him for thirty-six months like she was the only thing that mattered, because she used to be.

She still is.

Samira’s eyes are exactly as he remembered them to be. He would hope so, because he spent long enough staring into them, memorising how they would turn amber as she looked at the sunset. She’s staring back at him, her lips parted that slightest bit, and Jack does not, for one moment, consider that time passing has changed things, because he is still Jack and she is still Samira and he would still lay down at her feet if she asked.

He’s dreaming, he thinks, but he hopes against hope that he isn’t. It wouldn’t be the first time she appeared in them, but she’s never felt so tangible, so real, her hair frizzy and her lip bitten and her boots unpolished. If he’s dreaming, he hopes he makes it a few more minutes without waking up.

Robby keeps talking. Robby keeps talking, and there’s about to be an influx of the dead and dying through their doors. Jack thinks, for the split-second before he’s back on Samira, that it’s fitting for her to be beside him. He never worked as well without her, missing half of himself.

Robby elbows him again, and it’s enough for Jack to remember that he’s standing in front of twenty of his colleagues. He tries to speak, but it comes out too raw to be audible. He clears his throat before trying again. “You run out of room,” he says, head nodding to the wrist charts in one of Robby’s hands, and the sharpie in the other, “you write on their forehead.”

Abbot must be dreaming, because when his eyes flick back to Samira— always on Samira, really— she’s biting down on her lip, as if to stop from laughing.

Robby picks up from there. Jack doesn’t think he could say another coherent thing if his life was on the line.

She has a job to do, so she gowns up and grabs equipment and sets up shop in front of the ambulance bay doors.

Samira has a job to do, so she pushes aside how her heart is beating in her ears, and how her vision is threatening to white out, and how her knees are begging to buckle. She’s good at ignoring things that don’t matter, like her feelings. They don’t get a single second to converse before their first patient comes in. Samira doesn’t even get within ten feet of him until a gurney is in front of each of them, and even then they’re working at opposite sides of the trauma room.

She doesn’t need to remind herself that she took an oath. When there’s a gurney in front of her, it’s second nature to push everything else down and out so that she can zero in on what’s important.

Abbot knows that too. She doesn’t have to contemplate on that, because she knows it as a fact of life.

She stabilises her first patient with a unit of blood and an airway, sending them up to the CCU for monitoring. She stabilises her second with a chest tube that sucks out a dangerous amount of blood, which earns him a trip to the OR, courtesy of Dr. Walsh. In her periphery, she hears Abbot tell them to bring the gurney he’s working on to pedes. A tension pneumo, and Robby telling her that she’s on fire with that smile she can’t name as mocking or penitent.

Samira zeros in on the things that matter. The collapsed lung in front of her. The blood, flowing out from a lower extremity. The fact that her patient can’t breathe.

That awful thing curls in her chest again, because this is where she thrives, when everything is on the line and tomorrow is not promised, and she knows it.

A fifth patient. A sixth. A seventh, whose airway is so swollen and compromised that she’s having trouble intubating, but she grits her teeth, closes her eyes, and visualises the chords, distorted though the anatomy may be. When it becomes clear that she is not going to be able to intubate, she shouts, “I need help with a bleeder!”

Samira can push it down until she can’t, because Jack Abbot is standing in front of her, leaning over a patient, hanging on for her next word.

“GSW to the neck with expanding hematoma,” she says. “Probably hit the carotid. I need a 6.5 and a boujee,” she says to the nurse standing beside Abbot, who rifles through their supplies before handing it to her.

”Foley catheter with a thirty cc balloon!” Abbot shouts over the patient, looking behind Samira before his gaze turns back down to the wound.

Samira, for the barest second that she allows herself, finds her eyes on him, and his face that hasn’t changed at all. His face that she used to see everyday, tanner than he is now, but only just. And her eyes drift lower, down to the eleven blades in his pocket and—

“Are you donating?” she asks before she can stop herself, prepping to intubate again, Abbot beginning his work on the bleeder.

And that smile— that same easy, small smile that has haunted her— is faced towards her again. “O neg,” he says, like three years haven’t passed and the world has stood still for them, “Yeah.”

”I know,” she says, before she can stop herself, because she knows. She remembers reading it on his tags, as her fingers ghosted over his wedding ring. She knows, and she remembers, and she thinks she’s about to say something stupid, like Of course I know. She almost laughs, in that stupid, nonsensical way, because she can imagine them having this conversation in a room with dustier floors and thicker air. He still uses his pinky to readjust the drape for the sterile field. He still has that scar on his collar bone.

Abbot doesn’t look at her, too busy trying to stabilise the bleeder, but that smile grows by the tiniest edge, and Samira knows him.

Samira wonders how the hell she has managed to end up enamoured with him twice.

Abbot pulls away from her when the bleeder is stabilised. Had it been anybody else, Samira might have overthought it, but she knows him. She knew him then, and she knows him now, she thinks. They have lives to save.

(She notices though, like she notices everything about him. She notices that he hesitates for that split-second, before someone’s shouting his name with an urgency he can’t ignore. She notices that his smile never flickers when their eyes meet. She notices that they’re still in sync, like the world had stopped turning when she left.

Which, for her, she supposes, it had.)

He crichs their SWAT guy easily. He could do it in his sleep on his worst day, but he knows that his hand is steadier with Samira at the head of the bed.

Once he’s stabilised, she purposefully walks past him, ready to call another red into their room, and Abbot isn’t expecting her to say anything but she does. “What else have you got in your go bag?” she asks, and he suppresses the shiver that threatens to run down his spine, because he can’t fall apart into her. Not now, because the flow from the ambulance bay isn’t stopping anytime soon. She’s smiling unabashedly, and he reads her excitement plainly, because he knows her. He couldn’t stop knowing her if he tried.

His whole body follows her as she leaves, his head turning after her like a compass needle pulls north. He’s not ashamed of it, or that Princess gives him a quizzical, wide-eyed look, because if Princess knew Samira Mohan like he knew Samira Mohan, she’d be doing the exact same thing.

Abbot is trained on his patients, every movement instinctive and imperative to survival, but when Emery comes and makes a snide comment in his ear as she passes about the new hot-shot attending who drilled a burr hole with an IO, he laughs so abruptly that he snorts.

Samira catches herself spinning around him, flying from one patient to the next. Always passing him, but never colliding, because he steps forward without thinking to let her pass, and she can catch when he’s about to move, altering course.

She knows him, she thinks. She knows him, she knows him, she knows him, all of him, all of these years later, with her longer hair and his aged smile. “Nipples to navel is no man’s land,” he says, glancing up at her with a look she’s seen a thousand times and eyes that she has seen in her dreams.

She knows him, she thinks, and somehow, they still fit around each other seamlessly.

Samira is zeroed in on the guy in the gurney. Nothing else matters. Not Abbot beside her, their bodies close enough to touch. Not Dr. Walsh entering. Not Jesse repeating how her patient is de-sating.

It’s not a hemorrhage. Samira knows hemorrhaging. Samira has stuck her hands into body cavities to stop a patient from exsangination, resulting from hemorrhage. She’s irrefutably sure. This guy got shot and improvised a tourniquet better than Carver used to and then made laps to save lives.

Abbot exhales. “Holy shit,” he says, his voice low enough for only her and Jesse to hear. “Check out the four chamber apical view.”

”Dilated right atrium, and right ventricle. Right-sided strain, with bowing of the septum.” This is the easy part, Samira thinks, because she could make those observations blindfolded.

Samira can hear Walsh gloving up. “Sounds like a PE. He throw a clot from having the tourniquet on?”

“Way too soon for a DVT,” Abbot says under his breath. “Okay, lets get him in left lateral decubitus,” and Samira has a hand next to his in a second, rolling the man onto his side.

“Trendelenburg,” she says, holding her hand out for Jesse to give it to her.

“Intracardiac air embolism,” Abbot says, stating aloud what Samira is too busy to verbalise.

Walsh stills next to them. “We’ll need a CT to confirm.”

We don’t, Samira wants to say, because while she always double checks her gut instinct, they don’t have the time, or the resources, or the ability to send him up to CT, and even if she couldn’t see the heart for herself, she’d trust Abbot’s assessment. He’ll bleed out in the elevator, and not even Samira can help him when he’s dead. “They’re still backed up with other patients. It’ll be hours.”

“Well maybe the cath lab can take him,” Walsh says, and Samira bites down on her lip, because Walsh’s voice is short and, from Samira’s best guess, her temper is shorter yet. “They have fluoro. I’ll go check,” she says, and that’s the last she says before leaving.

Abbot says something after her, and it might have made Samira laugh if she was listening, and there wasn’t a body on the table in front of her. She can’t afford to let her thoughts linger on him when there’s so much at stake.

There’s a change when Abbot leans down, his temple almost touching Samira’s. His breathing deepens, and Samira thinks, before she can examine her instinct, What am I seeing? because Abbot has realised something that she has not— she can tell by his hand stilling and his breathing stopping.

Abbot speaks before she can ask. “I need a central line kit, and a five French pigtail catheter.”

The dots aren’t even close to connecting but Samira leans down further, her hair brushing his cheekbone, and oh, she thinks, and almost laughs, because oh.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?”

Abbot pulls his gaze away, and Samira thought that maybe time would kill his ability to make her feel a conduit for his electricity, but nothing has changed. He’s still the man that makes her feel horrifyingly seen, and mortifyingly known.

“You remembered,” he says, more so to himself than her, his voice more breathless than audible, but of course Samira remembered. Even if she avoids thinking of it, it’s still there, locked away in that part of her mind that she never allows herself to venture to.

She meets his gaze. “Of course I did,” she says, because her chest is tightening and she needs him to know so desperately that it’s threatening to break her in half.

Samira’s hands move before she can think about it. Abbot is at her side, and her instincts take the wheel, because she’s always more sure of herself when he’s there, beside her, watching her— not to see if she’s making a mistake, but because he can’t seem to pull his eyes away. She starts edging the guide wire in, another millimeter for every breath she takes, and she hears the door open but she doesn’t spare it a thought.

Walsh yells. Samira’s eyes are on the guide wire.

“Doctor Mohan is about to pull air from the right atrium and right ventricle,” she hears Abbot say, and his voice still cradles her name like it’s something precious.

“With what?” Walsh asks, her voice thick and defensive. Samira can’t allow herself to take any of that on. If she does, this guy is as good as dead.

“Five French pigtail catheter,” she says. Her voice is so steady it surprises even herself.

“Inside his heart?”

“Multiple side holes gives you a better shot at sucking out all the air,” Abbot says, his knuckles brushing against hers.

“Are you inventing procedures now?” Walsh half-yells. Her ire is wholly aimed at Abbot, which she thinks is unsurprising, since she first met Dr. Walsh twenty minutes ago, and if it wasn’t for Abbot calling her Doctor Mohan thirty seconds ago, she would swear that she didn’t even know her name.

Samira shakes her head. “It’s a South Korean report from 2017, published in the Journal of Geriatric Cardiology,” she breathes. “We studied it in the field.”

”In the field? Do you army guys get a kick from botching pen crichs? I just talked to cardiology, and they want a CT. Now. If it’s showing air then you need to dive him in the hyperbaric chamber.”

“He’ll be dead by then,” Abbot says. Samira’s glad he does, because she was about to say the same thing.

“Not if you kill him first with this banana-pants procedure.”

Samira’s eyes raise to catch just a glimpse of Doctor Walsh. She understands her, because she, too, would be wary of the new attending who decides to experiment with the fundamentals of medical equipment on her first day. If she were anybody else, she would probably be in Walsh’s shoes, just a few feet away, ready to body-block Samira. If Abbot wasn’t beside her, and was the one doing the cutting, and she didn’t know him inside and out, she probably would be the one doing the body-blocking.

“We don’t have time to wait for your fancy-pants machine,” Abbot says. “If we don't get the air out of his heart, he’ll die.”

“This is not the standard of care.”

“Oh, fuck standard of care.” Samira can feel him tense next to her. “We want to save him, we go in now.”

Samira’s reaching for the pigtail, extended in Jesse’s wary hand.

“Think I’ll stick around. In case you need another set of hands to resuscitate your patient when he crashes.”

Abbot leaves her to examine the x-ray, but he nods at her before he goes, and Samira has never felt so sure of something in her life. “Aspirating,” she says. “Pulling back blood from the heart along with some air.”

They’re almost there, she thinks. This is the home stretch.

(Samira doesn’t want to consider what she is supposed to do when she hits home.)

Jesse interrupts her train of thought. “BP’s still only 85 systolic,” he says, his face grave.

“No improvement,” announces Walsh.

Samira grits her teeth. “Aspirating,” she says, watching as another air bubble pops in her syringe. “More blood and air coming out.”

Samira is zeroed in. Walsh says something more about resuscitation, but Samira blocks her out, because this is going to work. They won’t need Walsh’s help resuscitating when he lives.

Abbot moves the smallest bit closer to her. “Step aside,” Walsh says.

Abbot’s voice is calm. “Pull the pigtail, Mohan.”

”Step aside,” Walsh demands, and Samira’s hand shakes imperceptibly. Without thinking, her eyes flick up to Abbot, only to find him staring back.

Samira remembers his blood type. O neg, she read as her fingers ghosted over his wedding band, dull with age. The universal donor, and her, AB positive, engraved on the tags she still wears around her neck, even now, when she’s three years clean from the war zone but wakes every day hearing the buzz of drones and the cries of men that never got to go home. There’s something there, she thinks, because they’re in perfect synchronicity, and Abbot is being threatened with a defibrillator paddle to the back and he is still resolute, his eyes meeting hers with nothing to hide. “Samira,” he says, masked by Walsh’s yelling, unintelligible to everyone but her because her eyes are stuck on him and her ears are attuned to his frequency.

Samira has pulled the pigtail before she has thought twice.

“Normal sinus rhythm,” Jesse says, the shake in his voice levelling out. “Pulse-ox is improving. BP’s 112 over 84.”

Samira’s hands are shaking, but Abbot’s are steadying them, his grip gentle. “Not too shabby, huh, Doctor Walsh?” he says, and Samira blames the adrenaline comedown for her laugh that she can’t fully swallow.

Walsh leaves. Abbot doesn’t release his grip. “Solid work,” he all but whispers in her ear, and Samira doesn’t try to restrain the urge to look up at him.

“Batshit,” she says, and she can’t help but bask in the unabashed smile he gives her.

She doesn’t get long, because there’s always another person who needs their attention more. But those few minutes before the sirens sound?

Samira isn’t ashamed to say she tries to absorb all of him that she can.

“I forgot how slow this elevator is,” she says. It’s not like she needs to state it, but Javadi looks like she’s one strong gust of wind from being knocked over. If she wasn’t wearing her scrubs, Samira could mistake her for a patient, settled on a gurney in the corner of the elevator.

“I thought—“ she says, before she cuts herself off to remove the abject exhaustion from her voice, “I thought this was your first day?”

”It is,” she replies, pressing the button on the elevator panel once more for good luck, “but I did my residency here.”

Javadi’s eyebrows raise. “You did?”

She leans back against the cool metal of the elevator. “Yeah,” she says, and she almost sounds wistful. “Years ago.”

”And you— and you left?”

Samira is too tired to come up with an excuse. “I enlisted,” she says, because it’s half of the truth.

“Did you,” Javadi starts. Samira can tell she’s verging exhaustion, not yet used to stretching shifts. “Did you like it here?”

Samira, her hands in her pockets, smiles. “Loved it,” she says, because it’s the truth. “There are tough days. This was one of them. But I loved it. And now I’m going to find something kickass to end the day with.”

Javadi doesn’t look like she believes her. “You don’t want to go home and sleep?”

Samira shakes her head. “You need to ride out the high,” she says, and Javadi nods with an awkward smile, like she’s a little bit afraid of her. “Otherwise you’ll go home and crash.”

Javadi purses her lips in something that looks like a grimace at the word. “I hope this didn’t turn you off practicing emergency medicine,” she says. She tries not to sound sly, but Javadi must pick up on her barely-concealed laugh anyways.

“I’m pretty sure today turned me off of practicing all forms of medicine.”

Samira looks back at her before the elevator dings and the door wrenches itself open. “Today was shitty,” she says, because it’s the truth, and she learnt a long time ago that there’s no use in hiding from that. “But trust me, after this, everything will be a cake walk. I promise.”

(أعدك.)

Javadi doesn’t look convinced, so Samira lets her wallow in her gurney for another ride of the elevator.

Samira doesn’t know McKay, but when she catches her in front of the board, finalising charts, she smiles at her. “Anything interesting up here?”

McKay turns to look at her. “My shift ended hours ago,” she says. She’s not apologetic, just certain. And exhausted. And defensive, like she’s pre-empting Samira asking her to stay for another minute, which she wouldn’t. Samira understands her, and her wariness, but she’s not trying to rope McKay into staying. She has a son, she heard earlier in the day. If Samira had something to go home to, she doubts she’d still be staring at the board, looking for something to fix or cut or break to shake off the final itching of adrenaline.

“I know,” she says. “I’m just looking for a chaser.”

”A chaser?”

”Something to end with,” she says. “Helps with the come-down.”

McKay gives her an odd look, but Samira catches a measles kid needing a spinal tap— something simple, verging on therapeutic— and she’s found her closer. “Have a good night,” she says to her, trying to smile, and McKay gives her a tight-lipped grimace.

There’s always tomorrow, Samira thinks. There’s always tomorrow.

Robby catches him after his speech. His eyes are still glassy enough for Jack to feel something unsettle in his chest, but this is not the worst state he’s seen Robby in. At least he’s still on two feet.

Robby claps him on the back. “Couldn’t have made it through today without you,” he says, and Abbot huffs out a laugh through his nose.

“Thank Samira,” he says. Thank Samira, because she was just what he needed to pull through.

Robby raises an eyebrow. “She managed to keep up?”

Robby expects him to take it as a joke, he thinks, but when Jack looks up from his computer, he’s not laughing. He’s not angry, though. Just confused. “Why wouldn’t she?”

Samira’s the fastest doctor he’s ever met, he thinks.

Robby laughs. There’s that meanness in it. Something that Jack thought they left back in med school. “Slo-Mo is no-mo’, then?”

Jack’s hand tightens around the mouse. “What?”

Robby’s looking straight at him, staring down the barrel of the gun, unflinching. He shrugs again. “The world’s full of surprises,” he says to himself.

Instinctively, Jack straightens up. “You called her that?”

Robby looks baffled. When he doesn’t answer, that cocky half-smile on his face, Jack feels his eyes narrow. “You called her that?”

In his head, before he allows himself to curl his fists and furrow his eyebrows, he runs through the list of things that have made Robby just a little bit bitchier than normal today: Adamson; Dana getting her lights knocked out; the headache that his false abortion measurements caused; new med students who, God love them, cannot tell their ass from their anconeus; Adamson, and having to turn the pediatric trauma room into a morgue once more; Gloria, who had been doing her rounds; an MCI, for which they ran out of both equipment and blood not even an hour in; Jake’s girlfriend, who he had to call time of death for; Adamson, and having to turn the pediatric trauma room into a morgue once more, and Robby having to look at the same walls that backed Adamson’s final breaths while trying to keep his head above water.

Jack doesn’t know how to tread the line with Robby, he thinks. Oftentimes, in other aspects of his life, that Jack wishes he were less accustomed to, Robby’s like a dog that likes to get kicked. Jack doesn’t kick him. He isn’t that cruel. He knows Robby. He understands him like a spine weeps for the skin stretched across it.

But he thinks of Samira. And Samira, who never learnt to trust herself, because nobody taught her what trust in her looked like, who still learnt Arabic, and still researched how to improve patient care when many military doctors viewed keeping their unit alive as the only care they need provide, and reminded him that flowers can grow in an arid desert.

Jack understands Robby, but he sees Samira. “Take a fucking walk, man,” he says.

She collides with somebody on her way into the room.

“Sorry,” Samira says, catching the arm that the other doctor shoots out to steady her. “Any word on the spinal?”

”Still refusing,” she says, her irritation barely concealed. “Last I heard they’re trying to get their kid shipped to West Penn. Y’know, where they commit malpractice for kicks.”

Samira bites down on her laugh. “Sorry,” she says again, “Doctor…”

”Ellis,” she says.

“Doctor Ellis,” she repeats.

Ellis smiles at her, flicking through tabs on her iPad. “Doctor…”

”Mohan,” Samira says. They’re almost blocking the hallway, but somehow, the conversation is enough to loosen the trip-wire in Samira’s chest by that inch that she usually needs a chaser to satisfy.

“The Doctor Mohan?” Ellis asks, eyes flicking up from her iPad with an urgency that unnerves Samira. Samira smiles politely, but before she can express her confusion, Ellis sets the tablet down on the hub. “I’ve read your paper,” she says, crossing her arms. “What’re you doing in this shit hole?”

Samira almost laughs, but she’s too caught on the first part of Ellis’s sentence. “You have?” Her voice is too high, she thinks. She’s not masking her surprise well.

Ellis smiles at her in a way that might be flirty. “It’s required reading around here. Abbot recommended it to me. He makes all the new kids read it— says it gives them a better understanding of racial disparities in the ED.”

The world flips.

Samira’s knuckles pale, her arms wrapped tightly around herself. She needs to remind herself to breathe, but the air feels like it’s caught in her throat. “He does?”

Ellis nods. Samira fights the strangest urge to cry.

“I’m sorry, Doctor Ellis,” she says, before she steps away from the exam room and retreats slowly to the hub, every step making her breathing more erratic, because Abbot has read her paper.

Abbot has read her paper. Abbot has read her paper. Samira swallows down the lump in her throat. Abbot has read her paper.

Abbot has read her paper. Her paper, that lists him in the acknowledgments. Her paper, that begins With eternal thanks to Jack Abbot, without whom this study would not have been possible.

With eternal thanks to Doctor Jack Abbot, without whom this study would not have been possible, (because I wouldn’t have been alive to conduct it.)

Samira’s hand grasps onto the half-wall of the hub, her grip strong enough to hurt.

This is what gets her, she thinks wryly. She can thread a pigtail in a novel procedure that has never been attempted outside of Asia without breaking a sweat, but she feels like her head is spinning over this. She pushes herself into the disabled bathroom with her shoulder, and when she’s firmly in there, door locked behind her, she falls back against it.

Samira had tried to push those twelve months down, but she never could. Never really wanted to, if she’s honest with herself, because she felt more human that year than she ever had since. She had tried— in vain— to forget those quick brushes of a hand on her lower back, and the looks they’d traded, halfway between awed and adoring, even when she was weighed down by exhaustion and existentialism. They didn’t matter if Samira didn’t acknowledge them.

If she could ignore them, push them down and pray them away, then Samira still had a hope of crawling out of this deep, all-consuming hole that falling in love with Jack Abbot had put her in.

Jack has read her paper. Jack has read her paper, half of which was written while he was sat across from her, the table shaking with how hard he could make her laugh. Her paper that cites studies she first learnt about through email. Jack has read her paper, and has made his team read it, from senior resident Parker Ellis down to interns, because he thought it would give them a “better understanding of racial disparities in the ED.”

The eye contact was enough to rattle her. His voice saying her name like a prayer was enough to throw her off balance. But this— this final nail in the coffin to the idea that he believed in her, that he always proved, but she never fully let herself trust— is enough to floor her.

Samira’s going to throw up.

She takes a breath. Her grip on the accessibility bar on the back of the door does not loosen, because it feels like her only tether to reality. She can feel the tiles beneath her boots, and can hear the bustle of the ED on the other side of the door that seems to be her last line of defence.

Jack has read her paper.

And Samira is still in love with him.

Jack feels the wind whip across his face, strong enough to push him off balance if he doesn’t cement his feet.

“You’re in my spot,” he tells Robby, and it comes off like a joke, but he knows that if Robby weren’t already on the other side of that railing, he’d be the one looking down.

He understands Robby, but he sends him downstairs with a hand on his back, pushing him in the right direction.

Robby doesn’t say a word when Jack doesn’t move to join him. He leaves, and he closes the door behind him.

He understands Robby, and Robby understands him.

She finds him on the roof.

It doesn’t surprise him in the least. He almost laughs, because he could have predicted it. She’s always been bright like that.

He can’t see her face, but he doesn’t turn around. The weight in his gut pulls deeper when he imagines what he may find splayed across her face, watching him on the wrong side of a railing a hundred feet off of the ground.

(If he were speaking to his therapist, he’d probably say that it was the not-knowing of it all. The fact that he used to know exactly what she was about to say before she said it. Would know what she needed him to do– clamp, suction, cauterize– before she had even opened her mouth to ask. The fact that he could take one look and know, inexplicably and unshakably, whether he needed to tell her to buck up and share in his confidence in her, or take the scalpel from her hand and take over.

He doesn’t think that it has. Today evidences that.

And yet. He used to know her so well. The fact that might have changed is something too terrifying to bear.)

She creeps up on him slowly. Her footsteps are light, barely audible as he listens to the sirens below, eyes screwed shut. He can hear the dull thud of her steel-toes shoes, and the soft, shushed noise of her hands wrapping around forearms as she crosses them.

“I thought I was dreaming,” he says before he can stop himself.

The words unearth themself before he can filter them through the sense of propriety he ought to have around a woman he hasn’t seen in thirty-six months, but, he thinks, he doesn’t know if he’s able to feel embarrassed around Samira. Not when she’s seen him in the pit of hell that was his final year of service, when the nights ran him ragged and the blood that pooled around his feet threatened to swallow him.

He can’t turn and look at her. He fears he’ll lose his balance if he finds her staring back.

The silence hangs over him, worsened by the knowledge that she’s right there, in arm’s reach for the first time since the last time.

He nods, trying to shake himself. He grits his jaw. He listens to the sirens below. “I thought I was dreaming when I saw you,” he says again, because even though he ought to have some sense of propriety around a woman who he hasn’t spoken to in three years, he can’t find it in himself to care.

This is Samira, he reminds himself. Not even his fear of change can convince him that she’s not as kind, as empathetic, as good as he remembers her to be.

Samira exhales through her nose. It might have been a laugh, but he doesn’t allow himself to hope. “Missed me that bad?”

Despite himself, he laughs. It breaks through the lump in his throat, coming out gruff and shaking. “That bad,” he confirms, without a hint of embarrassment.

Samira is silent. He can picture the face she’s making, turning the words over in her mind, biting her lip, the wind blowing the curls that frame her face into her eyes. When he examines it closer, it isn’t the backdrop of the PTMC roof behind her, but that of a dying sun and chaos incarnate.

She hums. She leans down, letting her crossed arms fall onto the railing. He can hear her bracelet clang against the metal. It’s the same sound he hears when his dog tags hit against his chest. “I thought I was hallucinating,” she admits. The force by which another bark of laughter is wrenched from him is enough to surprise even himself, but he finds Samira laughing too.

God, he’s going to fall off this roof. And it wouldn’t even be on purpose.

He wrenches his eyes open. He turns his head to the right, and is struck dumb by the sight in front of him.

Samira is looking at him sideways, head tilted, her ear leaning against her shoulder. The smudges of mascara under her eyes make her look more tired than Abbot knows she is. Her clip is fighting a losing battle to contain her curls, which have grown a few inches in the past few years. There’s a patch of rawer skin on her lips that she must have pulled at earlier– when Robby tried to explain that she needed to be quicker, curter, meaner, and that, contrary to her training in the VA, not everyone that walked into their ED was an active suicide risk that warranted a fifteen minute conversation— and the hint of a chain lying against her collar bone.

It’s her eyes that knock the breath from his chest. That look that’s seared into his memories. That look that’s worked its way into some of his darker nights. Her eyes that are bright and dancing, sparkling in the moonlight and festering with the type of carnal hunger that only the blood satiates. Those eyes and that look that he’s seen in the mirror a million times– after a shift sent straight from hell, before the adrenaline crash that renders him unable to stand on his own two feet– but look so much better on her.

“You regretting taking the job yet?”

He tries to lighten his tone and infuse it with the easy type of conversation they used to live in. It doesn’t work, coming out searching, and desperate, and wanting, for all he tries to contain it.

Samira’s head, tilted sideways, falls the slightest bit. Maybe it would be imperceptible if he hadn’t spent the past thirty-six months committing every part of her to memory. “No,” she says, barely audible over the wind.

It’s– she’s– too earnest for Abbot to entertain any idea other than her being truthful, and he thinks, in that self-loathing kind of way, that Samira couldn’t lie to save her life. The admission is enough to make him forget about the exhaustion that plagues him and has made itself at home in his bones. Samira reinvigorates.

Something thick and knotted releases in his chest, and he feels like he can breathe again. He doesn’t remember the last time it was that easy.

His gaze doesn’t move off of Samira. He catches her eyes roam over his face, before they come to settle back on his eyes, their gazes intertwined. “You read my paper?”

Jack swallows. “Of course I did.”

She tilts her head further to the side by the slightest inch. “What did you make of it?”

Broke me wide open, he thinks.

“Extraordinary,” he says, because that’s true, too.

Samira tries to smile at him, but her bottom lip is shaking. “Yeah?”

”Yeah,” he says as he exhales. “Of course it was. You wrote it.”

Samira doesn’t move— doesn’t breathe— but her eyes soften and her eyebrows fall into themselves, creasing in the middle, a sight that he wants to reach out and touch. She doesn’t say anything more, but even in the dead light Jack can see her eyes start to become shinier, like the stars migrated.

He’s leaning back against the railing now, and Samira’s fallen against it like it’s the only thing keeping her upright. Their arms are brushing, and he notices her looking at the bandaid in the crook of his elbow, a bead of blood staining it. He knows she wants to ask why he’s up here. He knows she has probably figured out the answer anyway.

I’d tell you, he thinks. I’d tell you anything.

Samira doesn’t move, but she scuffs her shoe against the roof. “I want to go home,” she says in a voice so small he could have missed it.

Jack could agree with her, or he could tell her that he has just found his again.

And instead of saying that, he ducks under the railing, and makes his way down the stairs behind her, grateful for the chance to watch her without the worry of being caught.

“So this is where all the cool kids hang out?”

Princess and Mateo laugh at her, and then seem to notice that the sleeve of her jacket is brushing against Abbot’s as they walk toward the bench, just close enough to skirt by each other, and their laughter turns to something more. When Samira slows to a stop, he does the same, and then they’re there, clinging to the periphery of the circle that feels more like a huddle.

“Nice of you to join us,” Princess says, her handbag beside her feet and her eyes alight with something that Samira doesn’t want to question. Javadi smiles at her politely, but it’s strained with exhaustion, the type of smile that would be mirrored on Samira’s own face if there wasn’t something deeper stoking in her chest.

“If there ever was a day,” she says, and the buzz of traffic in the distance is overtaken by hums of agreement. Donnie rifles through the beers and tosses one to Robby, and then Jack. He drops it, and when he bends to get it, his hip brushes against Samira’s and she wonders if he can feel her stop breathing.

He straightens, and laughs under his breath when Samira catches her own without difficulty. They’re still shoulder to shoulder when she reaches up, unclamping her claw clip, and shakes out her hair that is most certainly awkwardly indented from being up for fifteen hours. They’re so close she wouldn’t be surprised if her hair brushed the material of his scrub top over his shoulder.

Robby breaks her from her reverie, and from contemplating if Jack can feel the brush of her hair, laughing in that depicting way. Samira’s beer is warm and flat on her tongue, and Jack’s arm tenses against her when he lifts it to take a sip of his own. “I just realised this is your first day,” Robby says, looking at Javadi, and then Samira, his eyes softer than she remembers them last. Still not fully there, with them, but edging closer.

Samira smiles and rolls her eyes and takes another sip of her dead beer. Jack, next to her, tilts her head to the side. “That,” he says, angling his gaze toward Javadi, who is trying not to stand too close to Mateo, and is trying to look like she enjoys the taste of the beer, “was baptism by fire, baby.”

Javadi half-laughs. Samira takes another long, long sip of her beer, until she has to come up for air. Jack is still solid beside her.

The can is warm in her hands as she keeps it near her face. Her arm is angled so her elbow keeps brushing Jack’s bicep every time he breathes. Robby goes home with another beer in his hand and Samira tries to swallow down the lump in her throat with another sip.

Princess is next, picking up her handbag and shot-gunning the rest of her beer, gagging as she gets to the dregs at the bottom. Samira laughs as she leaves, yelling a goodbye.

Then Donnie. Then Mateo, offering Javadi a ride home that she stutteringly tries to refuse before he bullies her into it. Samira waves at her as she goes, a tight-lipped smile tugging at her cheeks.

And then there are two.

Jack takes a step back, and while Samira misses the contact, it means she has a better vantage point of his face that is half lit under the streetlights. But she catches, when he takes that step, that he grits his teeth, before bending his right knee, and then straightening it again, like he’s trying to shake the tension out of it.

She bites down a sigh that would not come out as condemning as she would hope it to. “Sit down,” she says, elbowing him in the direction of the bench that Robby has left warm.

Jack looks at her, before he gives her a slow-growing smile that has her directing her eyes at the sky in fear of doing something stupid.

He sits, and Samira settles herself beside him. She’s far enough away that she can’t feel his thigh tense as he bends down to remove his prosthesis, but when he lifts it up and sets it on the bench, she catches it as it falls into her on the slippery surface. Her eyes land on the curve of his upper back as he bends down to work on his leg. Samira’s gaze works into him like his hands work into the skin, disassembling the knots under the flesh.

He doesn’t look at her as he speaks, but it’s no less intrusive. “You never called,” he says, and Samira wonders if he planned to say this when Samira couldn’t look at him to know what he’s feeling.

She swallows. “Neither did you,” she says, both because it’s true and because she doesn’t know how to phrase her answer to the question he’s asking.

Jack’s hands still. “I thought about it,” he says, refusing to straighten up so she can look him in the eye. “I thought about it all the time.”

Her hand that isn’t holding his prosthesis, hidden in her coat pocket, flexes and unflexes with energy she doesn’t know how to expel. “So did I,” she says, because it’s the truth and there’s no use in running from it. Not when he can read her without even trying. “But I was scared,” she says, her voice coming out tentative, on uneven footing with this newfound vulnerability, “that if I called, you’d answer.”

”Of course I would answer,” he says, taking her pause to construct her thoughts as a need for reassurance, which it may as well be. She doesn’t stop to question his certainty. She’s never questioned it before.

“If you answered, I knew I’d never hang up,” she says. “And I was trying not to be selfish.”

Jack, finally, sits up. His face turns to look at her with something in his eyes that she can’t think to put a name to. “Samira,” he says, but before he can say something that’s going to break her she speaks instead.

“I was scared,” she says, her eyes never leaving his, “because it was hard enough to leave the first time. And I know myself enough to know that if I called, I’d never be able to give you up again.”

Jack breathes out, and that pained expression comes over his face. On anybody else, she would think they’re frustrated with how stubborn she’s being. But him— no, he just looks desperate to change her mind.

”Who says you’d have to give me up?” he asks.

Samira feels her eyebrows draw together, because it sounds so easy when he puts it like that. “Jack,” she says, and she doesn’t miss how his lip trembles when she says his name. The words come out of her mouth with such ease that Samira doesn’t second guess herself for the first time in a long time. “Take me home,” she all but whispers, and Jack stares at her for one long moment before he bends down, reattaches his prosthesis, and stands, offering her a hand up.

Samira takes it, and holds onto it.

On the walk up to her apartment, Samira tries not to overthink things.

There are still boxes cluttering every room, marked with sharpie shorthand. K means kitchen, and there aren’t a lot of those, because most days her dinner consists of drive-thru and a promise to try to cook tomorrow. Bed means bedroom, and of those there are fewer yet, just changes of sheets and her yoga mats rolled up tight enough to squeeze. Some surfaces, like the top of the fridge, are still caked with dust that she hasn’t bothered to clean in the two weeks since she moved. It’ll probably be freezing, because she still hasn’t figured out how the heating works. Her bathroom ledge is laden with everything she has not yet found a home for.

That is what she overthinks. Not Jack, because his hand is still in hers and it was for the whole drive home, and she hasn’t yet found something awful about herself that he manages not to like. The state of her apartment that she can’t yet call home, because she’s been looking for that for so long she forgot what it felt like, is secondary to his thumb brushing the skin of her hand.

But it's when she walks in first, Jack behind her, and she closes the door, letting her back rest against it, that she’s sure. Jack doesn’t look at the boxes on the floor or the streaky mopping she had half-heartedly attempted, but her face, his hand coming up to cradle her jaw before he whispers her name and Samira is so gone on him that she thinks it could pass for humorous.

Samira’s the one to lean into him, because she can tell he’s holding himself back. And later, she thinks, she’ll feel brave enough to tell him that he shouldn’t try and hesitate, because she wants all of him, and then some. Jack’s soft where she’s forceful, her lips pressing to his in something she can’t really consider a kiss but a gasp.

“Samira,” Jack says between gasps when they’re forced to come up for air, his hand solid on her lower back, snaking under her coat, pulling her flush against him, cushioning the backing of the door. He says it just to say it, she thinks, because she’s there in front of him and he’s always been no good at shutting up. She vows to try and make him.

Her tongue traces his lower lip, and his hand on her jaw tenses. Samira breathes out through her nose hard enough to constitute laughing, because she has Jack Abbot in front of her and a whole night ahead of her. Samira’s hand fists in his hair near the nape of his neck, keeping him firmly where he is, but when he pulls away Samira’s about to whine before his lips ghost over the corner of her mouth, and then her jaw, and then her neck, and that whine turns into a harsh intake of air, steeling herself. The blood thrumming in her ears and the tightness in her chest is a secondary sensation to Jack kissing down her neck, sucking delicately as he goes, torturing her with the occasional brush of teeth that has her bucking forward, pushing herself further down, further into the leg that rests between hers.

“I’ve thought about you every day,” he says, and Samira feels her breath leave her.

There you are, she thinks, because this is what she remembers, the steel grip and honeyed words that made her weak in the knees before she knew how to admit it. She misses having her hands in his hair, but instead, her hand rests on his collar bone, stretching out across the plain of his scrub top until her fingers brush against the lapels of his jacket.

Jack keeps moving, leaving no inch of her exposed skin untouched. Found you, she thinks, before she reaches down and yanks him up by the collar and kisses him hard enough to forget about the thirty-six months that she, he, they wasted.

Samira is minutely aware of the scratch of his stubble just above the neckline of her scrub top, and his hand on her back that keeps finding itself moving lower until it’s ghosting under the elasticated band of her pants, but she’s also aware of the fact that Jack’s been on his feet for hours, and, although he’s very devoted to his work, she can see him shifting his weight between his feet in search of respite. “Jack,” she says, her gaze moving from the ceiling back down to his face, “Bedroom.”

He doesn’t move, but his eyes flick up to her. They’re more uncertain than Samira would like, considering she’s two seconds away from yelling at him to hurry up and take her shirt off, but she moves her hand from his lapel to under his chin. She pulls him up, and he lets her with a clarifying ease. When he’s eye to eye with her again, she moves to his side and he flattens himself against the wall of the entryway to let her by.

Samira’s two steps away when she realises that he’s not following. She turns, and as her hands find the hem of her scrub top, she meets his eyes. “You coming?” she asks. She doesn’t mean for it to come out so low and heady but it does. It sounds like she’s dazed, which she is. Her top is over her head in an instant, her tags coming off with in, caught up in the fabric, and there's nothing inherently exposed about it, because her undershirt is still clinging to her skin, but Jack looks at the shirt in her grip and follows her to bed with eyes that almost look pleading.

Jack remembers, for a singular split-second, when his mouth is ghosting over the curve of Samira’s breasts, before he works back to her collarbone, that he hasn’t asked about the in-between.

He knows Samira, but he doesn’t know about the middle. He doesn’t know how her mom is doing, or how Boston treated her. If she found a life there that she left for a Pittsburgh pipe dream. He can’t begin to know what she thought of the VA ED— if it left her content, or wanting for something more.

For all he knows, there are boxers and socks and sweats tucked into one of these boxes that don’t belong to Samira. When they make it to the bed— which is looking like a bigger ask by the minute, because Samira is holding onto him with a grip harsh enough to bruise— he doesn’t know if he’ll smell aftershave and sweat along with Samira’s perfume and shampoo. He can’t predict that when he inevitably ventures into Samira’s kitchen in the after, if there will be enough plates and cups and silverware for two.

Samira’s hands curl into his hair again, and that line of thought ends as abruptly as it began, because he doesn’t care. He knows that as easily as he knows that Samira is humming into his touch, her breath coming faster when he travels further. Only a chance to touch her, he thinks, and he couldn’t care less if another man walked in.

The back of Samira’s knees hit against her mattress, and she falls back, laughing as she pulls him down on top of her.

Jack looks up at her, all thick lashes and mussed hair, and Samira can’t inhale. Samira can’t breathe. It’s stuck in her chest, her diaphragm contracting inwards with the force of it, because Jack is inching down towards the end of the bed, shirtless, and because one of Jack’s hands is on the tie of her scrub pants while the other is ghosting over the outline of her hip bone, light enough to raise a shiver.

“Stop,” Samira whispers, her voice so breathless it comes out inaudible. “Jack,” she pants, “stop—“

Jack pulls away from his efforts immediately. Samira’s grip on his jaw keeps him from pulling back completely, and allows her enough leverage to keep him there, in front of her, eye-level, as she looks down at him, her head on her pillow and his almost between her thighs. He doesn’t fight her on it, but he blinks, questioning.

Samira’s eyes rove over his face unabashedly, his pupils wide as he looks up at her through his lashes. His cheeks are dark and his lips are that little bit swollen, enough to send another rush to Samira’s gut. The odd curl falls onto his forehead. Samira has the brief thought that she wants to run her fingers through his hair, and then she does, little able to stop her.

Jack’s voice is heavy when he asks, “You okay?”, and Samira nods, and then nods again, quick enough to seem frantic. Heady, her mind supplies. Love-drunk, maybe. Her hand in his hair curls into it, keeping him there. She doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to let go of him.

She opens her mouth, and, at first, only breath comes out. “Just—“ she says, quiet enough that he would miss it if she weren’t so close. “Just want to look at you,” she says.

Just want to remember this, she thinks.

Maybe she should be embarrassed, the thought pouring from between her lips before she can stop it, but she isn’t, because this is Jack Abbot, and she’s loved him for four years and however-many days. She doesn’t think she could feel embarrassed if she tried. He’s a tether below her, one hand on the bed and the other on her stomach keeping her here, firmly in this moment, with her heartbeat in her ears, steady enough to keep her on planet earth.

Jack shakes his head slightly, a sigh ghosting over Samira’s navel as he exhales. She can’t put a word to the look in his eye other than reverent. “I’m not going anywhere, Samira,” he says, like he’s read her mind.

And, for the first time, Samira believes him.

Her stare bores into him, with his flushed cheeks and pleading eyes, and she uses her grip on his hair to give him the nudge to continue.

The tie on her pants comes undone as easily as Samira’s composure. Jack pulls them down carefully, with a patience that makes her want to break open, and she tilts her hips upwards to let him tug them down. He takes his time with her underwear, fingers brushing over the ineffectual lace at the top, before he works his fingers under the sides, and pulls them down too. The feeling of the cotton coming down over her inner thighs to her knees is almost enough to make her cry with the energy that’s pent-up in her core.

“Samira,” he says, before his mouth is otherwise occupied, “let me know how I’m doing.”

Jack says it so earnestly, like he’s scared to disappoint her, that she threatens to fall apart. “So good,” she says before she can grimace at the sound of her own voice, both because it’s the truth and because she needs him to put his mouth on her clit with a deadly urgency.

Jack does, and Samira gasps, and then moans at the contact. Her hands tighten in his hair, and when that makes him moan, Samira tenses with the reverberation. He says something, when he pulls away, that might pass for Gorgeous, but Samira’s heart is beating in her ears. “Fuck,” she says, because he’s good at this. Too good. Too good to feel fair. He licks at first, slow and tentative, and just when Samira’s hands in his hand loosen he sucks, hollowing out his cheeks in a display that threatens to make Samira orgasm at the mere sight.

Her head cranes further towards the ceiling with each minute that passes, cushioned by her pillow but tense enough for it not to matter. “Fuck,” she says again, when his hand move down from her stomach to the inside of her thigh, and he pulls away for a brief second to kiss at the crease between her leg and her opening. His attentions turn back to her clit before she can catch her breath, and, just when she thinks that she’s wound as tightly as she can be, he slides a finger into her with an ease that would be embarrassing if it were for anybody else. “So good,” she breathes out, because it has the effect of him making a noise that is pure sin. “So good for me,” she says, and Jack slides another finger in, pumping once before he crooks upwards with a delicacy she might not have expected if he weren’t him.

“Jack,” she says, choking on the moan that shudders through her, “So good. So, so good.” Once Samira starts talking, she can’t stop, babbling with an edge of something so guttural that she wonders if he can decipher it. ”Yes,” she says, fingers fisting in his hair, pulling him closer, but not close enough.

Jack makes that noise again, and Samira’s head digs into her pillow harshly enough to feel the mattress through the down. “So close,” she says, and this is what it feels like, to have someone who knows her so well that it just clicks. There’s no fumbling, or experimenting, because Jack knows what she likes just by feeling her under his touch. And, for once, the vulnerability of it doesn’t make her want to turn on her heel and bolt, because he’s proved that he’s the one that’s going to stay.

Not just tonight. He proved that years ago, when she took him to third base and he didn’t recoil.

Jack doesn’t change a single thing about what he’s doing. Just keeps crooking his fingers, hitting her g-spot with an agonisingly perfect rhythm, and sucking on her clit like he doesn’t need to breathe. “Jack,” she says, before she’s fluttering around his fingers and coming on his face with reckless abandon, missing the self-restraint to stop herself from using her grip on his hair to pull him further between her thighs and pushing her body down to meet him, her thighs clenching.

And Jack doesn’t stop. Not after the first, and not after the second.

O negative, she thinks. Endlessly, maddeningly giving.

Jack’s against her headboard, his back flush to it, and Samira’s angling herself over his cock, when he looks up at her and says, with such simplicity that it almost kills her, “I missed you.”

Samira’s on the verge of tears already, the coil in her chest loosening being enough to let her fall apart. She slides down onto him, wet enough and then some, and his hands are steadying her hips as she cants them, raising and lowering herself tentatively to try and find a rhythm. She can’t say anything, but she half-sobs into his ear, and his hands on her hips strengthen their grip, enough to keep her there. “I didn’t think you could get more beautiful,” he says, “and there you go, showing me up.”

Samira has no illusions. Her mascara is rubbed all over her lower lash line, and her hair is frizzy with how often he’s run his fingers through it, and she hasn’t shaved in weeks. But Jack missed her, and it’s such a small word for the feeling which has dominated the last three years of her life, but he’s solid underneath her, and gasping with want, and Samira needs him with a carnal hunger that she hasn’t allowed herself to feel out of fear.

“Jack,” she says as rides him. It’s breathless and unintelligible, but when she’s lucid enough to open her eyes he’s staring at her with his reverent eyes.

His eyebrows fall together just looking at her. “Samira, please,” he begs, as if that sound isn’t enough to make her come again.

“I missed you,” she says in his ear, between panting and moaning, “for three years. And I’ve loved you for longer.”

”Yeah?”

Samira hadn’t expected to say it but she doesn’t regret it, too clouded to care about anything but the building tension in the muscles her hands are resting on and the hands that grip her hips, thumbs rubbing circles into the space between her navel and the thick hair that covers her mons pubis. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah,” breathless enough to not make sense, and Jack comes in her with that noise that sounds like a whimper and makes her want to cry. It’s enough for Samira to clench around him, her nails digging into his shoulder.

In the after, Samira’s forehead falls into his, and she lets her eyes shut, riding it out. Her breath is coming in thick pants, her chest concaving and ballooning with the pressure, and all she can feel is his hands and his cock, still inside of her. She’s going to get a migraine with how hard she’s screwing her eyes closed, but she needs to focus on one thing at a time.

“Hey,” Jack whispers in her ear, one hand moving from her hip to beneath her chin, tilting it up by the barest inch. “Samira,” he says.

She nods, and his thumb comes to cradle her jaw. “I’ve loved you since I first heard you speak Arabic,” he says, so quiet and earnest that Samira chokes on a sob. “Because I knew you were smart when you saved Hamilton’s life, but I knew you cared when I heard you promise that man that he would be safe.”

Samira thinks she’s going to start bawling.

“You care so much it kills me,” he says. “You care so much it drives me crazy.”

He could stop there, she thinks. He could stop there, and she would still have half of a hope of walking out of this unscathed.

“I love you,” he says. “And I’m not going anywhere.”

And Samira kisses him again, because his lips aren’t even an inch away, and she forgot how overwhelming it was to be known by him.

Samira can’t hide from this. For the first time, she doesn’t think she wants to.

It’s the mundanity of it all. That’s what gets her.

Jack sleeps beside her, in her bed that is barely big enough for two, ruining his own sleep schedule in favour of giving her something to hold onto. He doesn’t let her burrow her head into the crook of his neck— no, he wraps a hand around the back of her head and guides it there, with the gentleness that makes Samira shiver.

She hears him rifling about in the kitchen, the hushed sound of cardboard box flaps sliding against each other, and the dull thud of her silverware drawer closing. He pads back to her, passing a mug to her, and she cradles it in her hands before lifting it to her lips.

It’s God-awful. She can’t help but grit her teeth and stutter over swallowing, her throat seizing up.

Jack’s face is hazy in the dim light, the sun not yet risen. Samira has work in an hour and somebody beside her that she doesn’t want to leave behind. ”You bought the shitty beans,” he says. His voice is soft enough to bruise, and his gaze finds her through his eyelashes.

Samira tries to keep a straight face until he kisses her at the top of her jaw, near her ear, his stubble tickling the skin there.

“Yeah,” she says. “Sue me.”

He doesn’t leave. Samira hums into his touch, and doesn’t push him away.

Notes:

thank you guys so, so much for reading!! all the comments on chapter one (which i am very excited to reply to immediately after posting this) gave me the strength to write 6k words in one day, and for that i am so grateful x

please please comment if you liked x this is me losing my smut writing virginity and its making me feel crazy. their eyecontactuationship will undoubtedly go down in history. seriously, count how many times i mention abbot looking at samira. it’s unhealthy.

thank you for reading <3
stargirl

Notes:

hello! happy pitt day! was bit by the mohabbot bug and hacked this up.

i was planning on fully writing this before uploading, but i was too excited by the ep7 leaks. good news: chapter 2 is currently sitting at 15k words and im hoping to have it up within the next few days. thank you for your patience!!

thank you so much for reading and i hope you enjoyed. if you liked, please please comment! they feed me and my ability to neglect my uni assignments in favour of finishing the second chapter x

see yall super soon!
stargirl

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