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

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.

God, he’s going to fall off this roof. And it wouldn’t even be on purpose.
-
Samira Mohan sells her soul to the army for medical school. Nobody understands that so intimately as Jack Abbot. Out in no man’s land, they manage to form something that neither can really understand.

After three years, it only takes one mass casualty incident to pull them back together.

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes.)

Chapter 1: the before

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Samira Mohan is twenty-nine years old and elbow-deep into a chest cavity the first time they cross paths.

She feels him walk into the trauma bay before she sees him. His eyes follow her hands as she cuts through the man’s t-shirt, intermittently looking up to take note of his devolving stats. Male, late twenties with penetrating trauma to the left anterior chest. It’ll be impossible to decipher whether it’s a GSW or faulty IED until she’s in there. He was conscious en route, but had deteriorated. Breath sounds diminished on the left, his sats having dropped to the high seventies on high-flow oxygen. Tachy at one-fifty with a systolic in the mid-sixties.

She looks down at the kid in front of her, his head lolling back against the gurney. His tanned skin is hollow, all of the blood in his cheeks drained, with a thin sheen of sweat sticking to his clammy forehead. Nauseatingly diaphoretic. GSC nine in the field, but now unresponsive. His dog tags are threaded with a wedding ring. No response to fluids. Lucas 08/08/2017, written in thick black script on his deltoid.

Samira takes little time to consider the man across from her. She’s silent as she works, holding her bottom lip between her teeth. She grabs a scalpel from the chest tray to her right and makes a clean incision along the 4th intercostal space, sternum to mid-axillary, surveying the scene in front of her. She discards of the ten blade and looks up, meeting his eyes for the first time, before moving to look at the nurse beside him. “Finochietto,” she directs, averting her gaze back to her patient, hand extended in wait.

The rib spreader lands in her hand from an awkward angle. It’s enough to knock her focus off balance, forcing her to look up. The other man— the other doctor, Samira can deduce from his plain clothes and trauma gown— has his hand around the end of the Finochietto. Small mercies, because Samira’s sure she would have dropped it otherwise.

It doesn’t last for more than a second. As quickly as Samira’s eyes flicked to meet him, they fall, her gaze narrowing as she cranks the chest open further with the Finochietto until the cavity is exposed.

He hands her the ten blade without waiting for instruction. Her surprise doesn’t come as easily this time, her hands making quick work of cutting through the pericardium. “Administering internal cardiac massage,” she states, eyes fixed on the cavity in front of her.

For the briefest of moments, Samira wonders if this is a good idea.

She’s ninety percent certain that this isn’t a GSW, but a faulty IED, and she’s two seconds away from sticking her hand into the cavity that is stabilising it so it doesn’t explode. And, even so, internal cardiac massage has an eighty-five percent failure rate. If Samira were a better doctor, she would cut her losses.

The incision opens the left hilum and left lung to their view. The other doctor’s view of the heart is inhibited by her gloved hand curling around it deftly, compressing it and releasing.

The doctor appraises the work in front of him. “Next steps?” he asks.

Across from him, Samira looks up, but her rhythm doesn’t waver. “Keep transfusing,” she says, voice steady. “Cross clamp the aorta to reduce distal haemorrhage. Reassess for signs of life.”

She sounds like she’s reading from a textbook instead of being stuck in a dying man’s chest. Her voice is impossibly steady. It doesn’t even sound like hers.

The doctor doesn’t patronise her with an approval. Instead, he asks for the clamp before she can, and extends it out to her. Samira grasps it and carefully exhales as she clamps the aorta, holding out for hope. It occurs to her, once it’s clamped, that he wasn’t asking to check she knew what she was doing. The extended clamp proved as much.

The nurse at the head of the bed nods. “I’ve got a carotid pulse,” he confirms. Samira watches as his systolic climbs from sixty-four to sixty-eight to seventy-two, and some of the tension in her jaw loosens.

“Send him up” the other doctor says, tilting his head in the direction of the trauma OR. “Carver, stick with him.”

Carver and the other nurse, whose name she still hasn’t had a chance to find out, flank the guy as he’s wheeled out of the trauma bay. Samira watches them go, eyeing the monitor which shows his stats stabilising, albeit agonisingly slowly. She tries not to stare at the man across the room, whose eyes are still trained on her.

Samira carefully peels off her gloves and throws them in the biowaste bin, before bending over the small sink and beginning to wash her hands. She works the bar soap into her skin, foot pressing down on the water pedal. She works the soap under her nails. Between her knuckles. She must look awkward, she thinks, curled over the sink, all too aware of Dr. Abbot’s eyes on her.

She knows that this is Dr. Abbot. There isn’t another option. Samira is the second doctor on base— a fact that had haunted her since she first learned of the fact— or, she will be, once Karzai ships out within the week, returning home. Samira’s here to fill the shoes of a trauma surgeon. She already knows that’ll be an impossible task.

Samira hears him laugh. Not meanly, she doesn’t think, but lightly. As if he hadn’t meant for it to escape him.

Samira spins around. “I’m so sorry,” she says before he can try to explain himself. “I’m–”

She holds a hand out to shake, before realising that it’s still covered in soap. He bites his tongue to tamp down on another laugh.

Ten seconds later, her hands are rinsed and dried, and she crosses the room to shake his hand earnestly. “Doctor Samira Mohan,” she introduces. She’s trying her best to smile enough to look enthusiastic, but not frantically enough to look nervous.

He reaches out and shakes her hand. “Jack Abbot,” he says, watching as she dips her head. She already knew that, but doesn’t mention it.

Samira pulls her hand away first, too conscious of what she’s doing. “Good to meet you,” she says. “I’m excited to work with you.”

It isn’t the truth, but it isn’t exactly a lie. She’s not excited about any of this, but she’s heard of Abbot through the nurses she’s been working with for the past few hours. Calm, they said. That was repeated often. Smart. Humble. Kind, they said, in an earnest way that had Samira hoping.

Abbot considers her as he begins to clear the chest tray. Samira supposes that that’s what doctors do here. “Excellent work,” he says, head tilting towards where the gurney had been moments ago, blood pooling on the floor, mingling with the dusty footprints, congealing in the heat, and suddenly, Samira thinks she understands what the nurses meant by kind.

“Thank you, Doctor Abbot,” she responds. Despite her firm belief that he’s just being nice, she can’t help but feel her cheeks warm that little bit.

Ripping off her trauma gown, she ducks her eyes. Abbot does the same, stuffing his in the biowaste bin after her. Samira catches his boots, finding that they managed to avoid the majority of the bleeder. When her gaze finds her own sneakers, she notes that hers were not so lucky.

“How many of those did you manage to pull during residency?” he asks.

Samira busies herself with amending the paper chart in front of her. It takes longer than she would like for her to wrap her head around how she’s meant to amend a paper chart, but she figures it out while Abbot dumps lap pads into the biowaste bin, his boot hitting the pedal hard.

She shrugs, following him as he exits the trauma room and begins to make his way to the cramped closet that counts as both a rec room and storage closet. “That was the first unsupervised.”

Abbot laughs and turns around, in a way that enlightens Samira to the fact that he thinks she’s joking. Her lips are pursed as she stops short behind him. There’s not a hint of mirth in her face.

Instead, he settles a hand on her shoulder, and repeats, “Excellent work,” with a little bit more surety.

Samira gives him a tight smile, and averts her gaze, sheepish.

Samira is good at going through the motions.

It’s easy to remove herself from everything around her when she can talk herself through an intubation or the treatment for a tibia stress fracture. She pretends she’s flocked by a gaggle of faceless med students, and she numbers her steps and debunks misconceptions and avidly avoids thinking about anything that is not the task at hand.

She tries to prove herself. She makes an effort to transform herself from resident to practicing physician, infusing herself with what she believes to be confidence typical of the role. She thinks of the attendings she’s shadowed, but then she thinks about Robby, and ends up feeling even more inadequate than when she started. It’s a challenge, not being the one who is answering to orders, but being the one who is giving them, but she tries to meet it as best she can.

She tries. So, so goddamn hard.

She’s not stupid, or blind, or ignorant. She, objectively, knew what she was getting into.

Samira mops the floor, wringing the blood out of the mophead with a force that threatens to crack the metal drainage bucket. The water she dips into is copper with the runoff, but she’s powerless to change that. The water is thickened by sand and dirt, trekked in by hospital staff and servicemen alike. Under the thin curtains that separate their two trauma bays, she sees another set of feet skirting around a puddle of blood, steering the dry mophead, attempting to soak up the remains.

Maybe their first mistake was not fully drawing the curtain that separated the two bays when Private Cross stumbled in, complaining of a fever and nausea with a rock-hard abdomen. Samira half-guessed he had a perforated ulcer the second that she was finished palpating, but she wasn’t quite quick enough to hand him an emesis bag. She had sent him along to surgery, thankful for Karzai’s grace period beyond belief, but not before he had sprayed blood over every surface she could see.

Samira plunges the mop back into the water.

She wishes she was the type of person to groan at grunt work. The type with thicker skin that wouldn’t hesitate to leave the blood on the floor, watching as it congealed in the warm air, leaving it for someone else to clean up. She wishes she hadn’t felt a burning behind her eyes as Cross looked up at her, blood running down his chin and pooling in his smile lines, and asked if he was going to die with such conviction it paused Samira’s internal dialogue of courses of treatment.

She doesn’t know many of the others deployed here. She’s only been here for a few days. That’s the issue with her line of work– she meets them when they’re dead, or dying, and rarely shares a word with them otherwise. But that doesn’t make it any easier. It doesn’t lessen the weight in her chest when a boy, freshly nineteen, looks up at her with glazed eyes and clutches at the tag around his neck as if it’s a crucifix and asks, blood mixing with the saliva in his mouth, if he’s going to die.

The water threatens to spill over the edge of the bucket as she thrusts the mop into its depths.

Her eyes find the shadows of footprints under the curtain again. Tactical boots, dark enough to swallow the colour of blood, skirt around the final smears over the tile, until the mop washes them away. Her side got the worst of it. She docks the bucket in the corner of the cubicle and reaches for paper towels, tearing off an inch worth of sheets and piling them on top of the exam bed.

Dr. Abbot rips the divider down with ease, stuffing it in the biowaste bin. He keeps his foot on the pedal until Samira’s collected all of the paper towels, now saturated with blood, and she stuffs them in on top of the paper curtain.

There’s still a novelty to watching him spray disinfectant over countertops and floor tiles. She can’t help but compare him to other doctors she’s trained under– those who relegated Samira to a coffee runner and scapegoat, those who yelled at nurses for their own mistakes. She’s hesitant to make any judgements yet, because she’s three days into a Sisyphean deployment, but she watches as he waves off Mendoza’s help with disinfecting with a quiet type of amusement.

At the end of the day, for all Samira prides herself with her tether to patients, often so connected the rope threatens to turn itself into a noose, it wasn’t her that had soothed Cross while yelling for surgery to batten down the hatches and shoving an emesis bag into his white-knuckle grip. That had been Abbot, while Samira had turned to her imaginary group of med students and talked about the diagnostic criteria of sepsis resulting from a perforated peptic ulcer and tried to talk herself down from letting her tears flow down her cheeks like Cross’s blood flowing down his neck.

"You're gonna be fine, kid,” Abbot said, raising the sidebars of the gurney they transferred him into. “All you need is a patch in your stomach and antibiotics. You’ll get a few weeks of bed rest out of it.”

It sounds so calm when Samira recounts it. He was calm as he pushed the gurney around the corner into their makeshift OR. The memory of his voice might have been enough to convince her that she had been calm too, until she remembers the desperate shuffling as she tried to raise the side bar, hands slipping on the sluice of blood, and Cross covering his mouth with his hands, only for blood to spurt from between his fingers like water from a geyser.

Samira lets the lid of the trashcan smack down, metal hitting against metal.

Cross will be fine. She’s sure of that. A perforated peptic ulcer is always more bark than bite.

Her hands are still shaking.

Mercifully, Abbot doesn’t comment on it, although she catches his gaze on her enough to know he’s considering it. There’s a crease between his eyebrows that makes it obvious he’s attempting to discern whether he should, but he doesn’t, and Samira isn’t above thanking God for small mercies.

The triage bays look perfectly sterile when they’re done, countertops shining as the edges catch the overhead light. Samira’s hands are still shaking. There is no catharsis here in no man's land.

Small mercies persist. Samira wonders, absentmindedly, if she’s somehow gotten into the army’s good books, because she has a super-single with a bearably comfortable mattress and a private, if cramped, en suite, which often has warm water. Her quarters adjoin the hospital, which she appreciates greatly on her second day, when she manages to sleep in for forty whole minutes, writing it off as adjusting to the time difference. The singular window is on the western side, golden light spilling through the pane as she collapses on top of the sheets. The screen over the windows is perfectly sound, and she manages to get through her first few nights without any nasty bug bites.

There is one glaring issue that she doesn’t allow herself to think about.

She stumbles into the kitchenette just after six, hair frizzy around her face, twice its normal size in the heat. Her scrubs pants cling uncomfortably to her waist, sweat already pooling and running down her back, and the undershirt she was loath to put on sticks to her skin. She thinks she must reek of factor 50.

Despite being dressed, she’s barely awake. Her eyes threaten to drift shut as she shuffles through the doorway, but they snap to attention when Samira is met with Dr. Abbot at the kitchen table– if a fold-down fit for two can be classed as such– nursing a cup of coffee and book, laying cover-down on the table, obscuring its title.

Samira fights the urge to spin on her heel. She persists.

There’s no door in the frame. He catches her easily as soon as she has a foot past the threshold. She’s very aware of her bright pink crocs peeking out from under the curtain of her scrub pants.

“Morning, Mohan,” he says.

Samira smiles as best she can, afraid it comes across more as a grimace. “Morning.”

Her hands are on the coffee pot before she can look back at him. It’s still half full from when he’d made his own. Finding a cup with minimal grappling through cupboards, she pours one out.

Even though Dr. Abbot is not looking at her, eyes fixed on the book in his hands, Samira still feels as though she’s being watched. It’s a heaviness that settles over her, that, by all accounts, is unwarranted, fuelled by her own unease.

She has no illusions. She’s counting down the days until she fucks up a central line, even though she could place one in her sleep, or she manages to kill someone who came in for sunstroke, and Dr. Abbot loses any misplaced hope he may have ever had in her.

But she’d like to at least attempt to prolong that. The idea of shared spaces makes the inevitable seem even more daunting, edging in on the corners of her periphery.

The handle of the mug is slippery with sweat when she lifts it to her lips, her mouth curling around the rim and sipping. Thankfully, Dr. Abbot is still engrossed in his book when Samira’s nose scrunches, barely managing to suppress her gag. It’s bitter and acrid, even with the milk she’d added with a generous hand. Her eyes screw shut for the briefest of moments.

She doesn’t know if she can live without both coffee and air conditioning.

She takes another sip, even though her teeth subconsciously grit to bar her from doing so.

Lifting the cup from the counter, she makes her way back to her room, where she pours it down her bathroom sink.

The hospital is quiet.

It’s a dichotomous experience to the Pitt’s wide hallways, bustling ED, and irate patients. Samira spends half the day doing inventory on their fraught supplies, as if recounting their units of O negative will make them double in quantity. Cleaning preoccupies her when the trauma bays are empty, the floors perpetually covered in dust. Boredom is a malignancy that wraps a hand around her brain and threatens to squeeze the longer she lingers on anything but her work.

Samira had expected the big things. She’d mentally prepared herself as best she could for the GSWs, the shrapnel injuries, the amputations. The death. The fact it wouldn’t just be soldiers she’d be treating, but civilians caught in the crossfire. In reality, her days are taken up by fractures from rough housing, and head lacs from slipping over debris– Cross, with blood that she can still feel covering her, soaking through her epidermis– and everted ankles, shoulder dislocations– Hamilton, whose heart she had held in her hands before he had been med-evaced to Germany— and heatstroke.

“Hi there,” she says, entering the triage bay, rubbing sanitiser over her hands, the sensation cutting into the mosquito bite on her wrist. Her eye catches on the bright patch on his arm, marking him as SDF. “I’m Doctor Mohan. What are we looking at?”

The guy on the bed looks younger than Samira, but not by much. His eyes are wide as he looks up at her, before he lifts his hand, revealing a nasty burn covering eighty percent of his palm. Samira settles herself on a stool and looks at him, asking for permission, before she gently pulls his hand into the light.

The flesh is raw and blistering, swelling with bloodflow. Samira smiles. “All this needs is a bit of debridement,” she says, hoping her tone conveys what her language can’t.

The guy nods.

She wants to ask for his name. She wants to ask about how this happened. If he has children at home who will be annoyed that their father can’t hold their hand.

Samira treats the burn with a practiced ease, eyes constantly flicking back to his face for signs of discomfort. She bites her lip when he winces and her hushed Just a few more minutes does nothing to console him. The words don’t mean anything to him. They’re starting to lose meaning to Samira.

When he leaves, hand wrapped in gauze and dressed with silver sulfadiazine, she wrenches open the Arabic dictionary she had stuffed into her suitcase, and begins to make use of it.

Samira keeps pouring coffee from the same pot, and still winces at the horrid taste.

She’s a creature of habit.

She’d like to make a comment on her life outside of work, but that’s all her life is. That’s not even a change facilitated by her deployment. She’s been living this way for the past four years.

“Okay,” Samira mumbles to herself.

She’s decided, after this shift, that her crocs are getting thrown in the trash. The dirt and dust fly through the vents on the sides and settle under her feet. A particularly sharp rock bites into her arch, and her teeth dig into her lip to keep from swearing. Hair falls into her eyes, and she tries, and fails, to blow it out of the way.

Her stupid braid falls over her shoulder as she bends over the gurney of one of five guys that had barreled into the hospital. She checks his pupils, exhaling sharply when they prove equal and responsive. Something akin to relief that is unable to be fully actualised, because five men are laying down in front of her, two passed out, one whose heart has flatlined and Carver is trying to bring back to no avail, and two more who are screaming and writhing in pain.

A hand wraps around Samira’s wrist, tugging her to the third gurney. The bays are cramped as is. In a perfect world, there would be three more doctors in here with her, and each gurney would be wheeled into a bay of their own. She wouldn’t have to split her attention, cleaving it down the middle, waiting for the most horrible displays to award with the biggest piece.

She spins around. Spit flies over her face, the man trying to sit up as Mendoza holds him down, yelling and yelling and clutching at his thigh and torso, shrapnel tearing the flesh into ribbons. The sheets under him, soaked with blood, crease as he tries to get off the bed, his voice not so much breaking as already broken. His hand claws into Samira’s wrist, nails digging into the skin. He does leave blood, but it is not Samira’s.

He’s yelling for his wife, Samira knows. She can recognise the word as it leaves his mouth, garbled with pain. He grabs at his leg, yells, and pulls his hands away, tearing at his face. There are grazes marbling the flesh, from eyebrow to jaw, and Samira can’t decide if they were there when he came in or they’ve been put there by his own nails. Mendoza struggles against him as the man tries to bolt again, falling back onto the bed when his leg gives out from underneath him. Mendoza had attempted a tourniquet, but the more he struggles, the more unsteady it looks. She knows that when they get him back down she’ll have to tighten it before she can start to deal with his massive amount of blood loss, and then she’ll have to turn her attention back to the others, leaving him to writhe.

Abbot is cracking a chest. She sees him in the corner of her eye, acutely aware of him, and his hands. He has his patient under control. One less thing for Samira to worry about. For the briefest moment, his eyes shoot up, and meet Samira’s, as if he could feel her watching.

He’s calmer. Calmer than either of them have any right to be.

Samira swallows her nerves down.

She’s always liked to be prepared, but she feels like she’s out in open water without a hope of catching land. Her sweats threaten to trip her up and she darts closer to the patient in front of her. He hits out again and Samira catches his wrist. She doesn’t force his hand down, but holds it there, grip gentle. “Everything is going to be okay,” she says. She hopes her voice comes across as soothing, but her Arabic is shaky, despite her dedication to her dictionary. “We are going to help you.”

It’s probably stiff. Wooden. Unfeeling. She’s scared she’ll ruin the coherence of her words if she tries to inflect them with meaning. The man is still crying, hands over his face, but he becomes pliant enough for Mendoza to lower him back and tighten the tourniquet. “Everything is going to be okay,” Samira says again. Her grip moves from his wrist to his hand and she squeezes it. “Everything is going to be okay.”

”My wife,” he says— groans out through gritted teeth, head forced back into the pillows, back arching with agony. “My wife, please—“

”We are going to help you,” Samira says, eyes flicking up to look at Dr. Abbot once more, eyes landing on his gloved hands, knuckle-deep into another man’s chest. “You’re safe here. I promise.”

She’s only committed the necessary phrases to memory— What’s your name? Do you have any allergies to medication? Where does it hurt? I’m going to help you— over the brief moments of downtime she managed to snag between patients. She had written them down, attempting to perfect her handwriting, and then wrote them phonetically, each phrase spanning over a page in one of her notebooks. She’d reread the pages until she couldn’t see straight.

Samira knows that many doctors would not view the phrase I promise as vital vocabulary. She had been berated with as much during her residency. She’s not God. She can’t make promises. Not to families, not to a dying man, and most definitely not to herself.

But nevertheless, she had written it out. And had written it again. Had written it until it spanned over two pages in her notebook, and the words didn’t sound like words to her ears, she had repeated them that often.

أعدك.

I promise.

“I promise,” she whispers again, before she has to pull her hand from his grip to begin CPR on another victim of the roadside bomb their humvee had run over.

Samira shouldn’t make promises. Her attendings used to chastise her for less. She’s not God. She shouldn’t look this man in the eye and promise him that he’ll live.

But she does.

Abbot finds her out on the front deck to their makeshift hospital.

Well, Samira doesn’t suppose he set out to ‘find’ her, per se, but it’s cramped in the infirmary at the best of times, never mind when there are three beds out in the corridors and the air is miasmic with the scent of blood, throttling the atmospheric pressure until Samira’s migraine grows to the point of agony, and there’s only two doors to escape through.

If she weren’t exhausted beyond all point of reason, she may have stood up, dusted herself off, and tried to disguise the fact that she’s still in her pyjamas, but Samira can’t move from her perch on the front steps. Her head is buried in her hands, braid messy over her shoulder, and, from Abbot’s view from behind her, he can most definitely see how threadbare her shirt is. A yawn escapes her involuntarily. She doesn’t quite manage to smother it in her hands. Her crocs are covered in dust and dried blood. She’ll never be able to wear them around her room again.

Abbot sits down on the step beside her without preamble.

A more lucid version of herself tells her to straighten up and fix her posture, but she’s so tired. She’d barely been asleep for an hour when she’d woken to the screams and smell of charred skin, and that was after a twelve hour shift where she hadn’t been able to sit down once. She hadn’t thought anything through. Her sweats are clean, but the cuffs are stained from Pittsburgh rain water. The collar of her shirt is stretched with age, exposing her collarbone awkwardly. For the first thirty minutes of the chaos, the shorter curls in her hairline had been falling into her eyes, until she managed to snag a hairnet. She looks— and feels— a wreck.

A more lucid version would probably care. A more lucid Samira would most likely be mortified at the idea of appearing in front of her boss like this.

She’s so, so tired.

Samira yawns again, the night air doing little to rouse her. It’s never really cold here.

Abbot rifles around in his pocket. Samira expects him to pull out a pack of cigarettes, but he doesn’t. He just finds what he was looking for, and holds it in his hand within his pocket.

“How long have you been speaking Arabic?”

Samira’s head bolts up. She shakes her head. “I’ve just— I’ve just picked up a few things.”

Abbot looks at her wryly, raising an eyebrow. “I thought you were fluent.”

Samira half-laughs. “I don’t know about that. But thanks.”

Abbot rolls his eyes, smiling easily, disregarding her modesty. Something defensive flairs in her chest, albeit lightly. “Doctor and polyglot,” he says. “Impressive.”

Samira shakes her head as if she can shake off the warmth burrowing into her chest. She fixes her gaze on some undefined point off in the distance, as if meeting his eye will make his words bury themselves deeper.

Samira is self aware enough to know that she collects moments like these. She always has: her dad, sitting in the audience of her third-grade spelling bee, watching as she was crowned the champion; her undergrad anatomy professor, during office hours, meeting her eye and smiling in that professional way, pointing at her perfect 100 on her transcript; Dr. Adamson, clapping her on the shoulder, telling her that she’d either burn herself out or be a leading mind in medicine by the time she was thirty-five; Dr. Robby, and the edge of fondness that would creep into his eyes every so often, and that rare fist-bump that would always lead to Samira’s cheeks burning with how hard she was smiling. She knows she hoards praise like a dragon hoards treasure. Inevitably, at some point in the undetermined future, when Samira needs that extra inch to her step, she’ll think about Jack Abbot, and his unrestrained grin and unabashed approval.

She’s self aware enough to realise that she’ll think about this moment when she needs to remember that she can do this. She’s good enough to weather the storm that is medicine.

Abbot seems unaware of her musings. “You should head back to bed,” he says. “I’ll hold down the fort.”

Samira looks down at the sand again. “I’ll stay until they’re out of the woods.”

Abbot shrugs. “Five out of five ain’t at all bad.”

Samira resists the urge to bury her head into her hands. It doesn’t make sense, the fact that she can feel her cheeks warming and her heart racing that little bit faster. Abbot was equally, if not more so, responsible for their successes tonight. Samira had been acutely aware of him, sometimes even more so than she had been aware of herself. Catching his hands as they delved deeper into a chest cavity or tied a tourniquet had satiated her anxiety for the briefest of seconds, knowing that he was working just as hard as she was.

The other residents used to call her a control freak. When they weren’t giggling about her being Slo-Mo, that is. If watching Abbot helps alleviate that need, she isn’t shy of indulging it.

Samira’s gaze is still turned towards the sand when Abbot says, “You rocked in there.”

He says it so casually that it takes a few seconds for Samira to catch it. When she flicks her eyes up to look at him, there’s nothing sarcastic, or altruistic, in his eyes. He’s half-grinning, but in that exhausted way that Samira can read easily as euphoria that only comes from saving people that, by all accounts, were too far gone.

Samira likes explanation. She is research-focused. Data-driven. She’s still editing her research paper between stress fractures and sunstroke cases. She isn’t used to not being able to back herself with evidence. But she doesn’t think she can convey how peaceful it is to look at another person and know, unshakeably, that they are just as dedicated to their work as she is to hers. Everything here is do or die. There is no room for self-consciousness— if there were, Samira would have changed into scrubs before charging into the hospital and beginning to intubate. Her passion, her drive, is nothing to scoff at here. Abbot’s never made her feel small for caring, and he doesn’t know, something like respect in his eyes when he calls her a polyglot.

She may not have known Jack Abbot for long, but he quiets that all-engulfing anxiety by the slightest edge.

Even realising all of this, Samira shakes her head.

Abbot doesn’t laugh about her dismissal. When Samira catches his eye again, he looks confused, eyes wide.

“Thank you for saying that,” she says.

Not thank you, because that would mean that Samira agrees with him, on some level. Thank you for saying that, because it cements this night as a moment she’ll hoard in her chest of when someone important to her said something she, someday, might be confident enough to believe.

“She’s taking night classes to get her Masters right now,” Private Rossi says, grinning while Samira rifles through drawers for blister plasters. “I’ve been trying to get her to enroll for years— I’ve always said she’s too smart not to study as much as she can. Next up is med school,” he says.

Samira stops her search and looks up, smiling. “Where is she studying?”

“North Texas,” Rossi says, leaning down to pull his sock back on, the blister that had been bothering him now neatly dressed. He’d been waiting for Carver to finish up with a lice check, but Samira had ushered him into the second triage bay, forgoing her vain attempt at leaving on time. It wasn’t as though she had anything waiting for her but a hot shower. “She has family up there. We figured it would be easier for her to move back home while I’m touring. Save up for something nice when I get back.”

Extending the pack of dressings to him, Samira says, “It’s nice for her to have a support network while you’re over here,” hedging her bets.

Rossi’s smile grows. “Oh, yeah. Don’t know if I’ll be able to convince her to move back in with me, when this is all said and done.”

Samira laughs, settling herself back on her stool. “You probably know what I’m about to say, then.”

”You don’t need to remind me, Doc. Alyssa practically forced me to take her nursing exams with her, I tested her so much.”

Samira smiles again. “Just keep it dry, and come back if there’s any unusual redness, pus, or pain.”

Rossi nods resolutely, his right hand spinning the ring on his left. “Thanks, Doc,” he says, stuffing his foot into his boot and standing again.

“Don’t mention it.”

Rossi pulls back the curtain and steps out, Samira closing the drawer to the cabinet she had just searched through, righting the stacks of dressings she had knocked over and straightening them. Pushing herself back on her stool, she leans to the side to grab up the dressing pack she had discarded, stuffing it into the bin, the lid coming down with a dull hit.

“You’re here late.”

Samira spins around in her stool, pretending that she hadn’t almost fallen off of it. “Doctor Abbot,” she said, more out of courtesy than anything else. “Sorry. I was just— Rossi needed his dressings changed, and I was free. I didn’t want to make him wait when I had nothing better to do.”

Abbot, one hand holding onto the upper pole from which the divider curtains hang, shrugs at her. “Was he telling you about his wife?”

Samira nods. “Yeah.”

”It’s hard to get him to stop once he starts up,” Abbot says, half-smiling.

Samira takes a breath, deep enough to steady her. “I’m sorry. I’ll get out of your way.”

She busies herself with closing the other drawers she had opened and picking up the few things she had managed to discard throughout the day, gathering pens and a hair clip into her palm. In her periphery, Abbot drops his hand. He’s looking at her, mouth opening and closing awkwardly. Samira stands, and, giving another cursory glance, pulls back the curtain, her feet moving to walk out.

Samira knows, logically, that she would not be as good of a doctor if she weren’t so invested. That was the word Robby used to throw around— that, and over involved and inefficient and a drain on resources— and Samira knows that that is what makes her somebody that people trust, but she has had to drain an infected blister and deal with a lice outbreak today. Sue her if she isn’t in the mood to be reamed out.

Abbot catches her forearm as she leaves.

Samira spins around, some of her hair falling out of her clip.

For a moment, he just stares at her, as if lost for what to say. “I’m sorry,” he says without hesitation. “I didn’t mean to imply—“

”No,” Samira hurries out, her voice high. “No, Doctor Abbot—“

“I’m sorry, Doctor Mohan,” he says again, voice not harsh, but steady enough to make Samira stop talking. “I didn’t mean to imply that there was anything wrong with you— with you talking with Rossi. I’m sorry if it came off like I was trying to undermine you.”

Abbot’s words are short and considered, like he’s laying out steps for himself to follow. Samira’s so embarrassed she wouldn’t be surprised if she were blushing.

She’s reeling, she thinks, because this conversation has come out of nowhere and hit her square in the chest.

Samira blinks. “No,” she says. “No, I’m sorry. I didn’t think that you meant that at all,” she says, which is technically a lie, but she isn’t above that. The mortification that is curling in her chest is enough to render her robbed of morals. “I’m sorry,” she says, once more, trying to calm her voice, attempting to draw a line underneath this conversation.

Abbot considers her, and, as if he has just noticed that his hand is still wrapped around her forearm, he drops it like it’s on fire. “I think we’ve got our wires crossed,” he says, smiling again, in that exhausted way. Samira nods.

He takes a step closer to her, and then leans in even closer. ”Some of these guys,” Abbot says, dropping his voice so Samira can barely hear him, nevermind Carver in the bay beside, “They just need someone to talk to. Don’t ever apologise for being that someone, Mohan.”

Samira’s instincts lay out a clear forward path: nod frantically, agree with anything and everything Abbot says, and bury her long-repressed fears of inadequacy once more. It’s a path well-worn, carrying her through high school and undergrad and residency, and it’s the path of least resistance, allowing for her to run back to her solitary bedroom where she can distract herself until she has to get up and face the world again.

Samira feels that instinctive response rear its head, but Abbot has given her the decency of a mature conversation. In a bid for being the new Samira, she tries to steel herself. This isn’t one of many med school attendings who wrote her off to family medicine when they observed her take intricate histories or make dithering, off-topic comments on a patient’s wedding ring or polaroid stuffed in a wallet. This certainly isn’t Robby, she thinks, with a clarity that threatens to give her whiplash.

“Thank you, Doctor Abbot,” she says, breathing through her nerves. “You didn’t— You didn’t offend me. I just— They used to call me Slo-Mo,” she says, like that explains everything. She supposes that it does. She doesn’t have to get into the taunting that would drive her to work doubles just to keep her numbers similar to her cohorts’. Nobody ever bothered to wonder if Samira was spending so much time with patients so she didn’t have to interact with the other doctors.

Abbot’s eyebrows furrow at the name. “Any of the guys here bothering you?”

Samira does give herself whiplash with how quickly she shakes her head. “No!” she almost shouts. “When I was a resident. It didn’t bother me. I’m just— I’m just more conscious of it,” she lies, again. “I know I can be slow. I’m sorry if I came off as—“ she stalls, looking for the word, “—as defensive,” she settles on. She almost groans at how much worse she’s managed to make a situation that wasn’t even bad in the first place.

If anything, Abbot’s eyebrows furrow deeper. “You’re not slow,” he says, voice level, like he’s stating a fact.

Laughing, Samira tries to control herself. “I am,” she states in the same tone, because that is a fact.

Abbot shakes his head. He almost looks bewildered. “Mohan,” he says, “You’re not slow.”

Samira tamps down on the response that first comes to her, because she doubts Abbot wants her to keep disagreeing with him. Instead, she says nothing. The inside of her cheek, caught between her teeth, is bleeding.

“Don’t—“ Abbot begins, before cutting himself off, shaking his head slightly. “You care about your patients,” he says, for the first time saying something that Samira can agree with. “That’s not something to be ashamed of.”

Samira takes one long, deep inhale, before she nods. “Thank you, Doctor Abbot.”

Abbot’s eyes are still trained on her, as if waiting for her to continue. When it becomes evident that she won’t, he crosses his arms. If she didn’t know better, she might say that he was drawing inwards.

Abbot doesn’t say anything more. Maybe he’s waiting for Samira to explain more, or maybe he doesn’t care— she can’t be expected to know. Instead, Samira ducks her head, smiles, and goes home, with a quick, muttered Goodnight sent his way.

Samira flips the calendar over, the new month staring her down.

She blinks at it for a few moments, before she sets the trifold down onto their makeshift receptionist desk. Her gaze catches the letter left there, her name written in nimble script, before she’s pulled away.

One month down, she thinks. Only eleven more to go.

Private Mason stumbles into the infirmary clutching onto his buddy’s shoulder.

“He just passed out,” Private Danvers says, struggling to hold him up.

Samira grabs him under the other shoulder without preamble, pulling the two towards the bathtub and lowering him in, taking off the clothes she can and cutting off those she can’t.

Two hours later, she’s sat in a stool while Mason looks at her sheepishly, cheeks still flushed.

“You’ve got to start taking better care of yourself,” Samira says, not unkindly. “Heatstroke puts massive stress on your organs that can be irreversible. If Private Danvers hadn't been there, this would be a very different conversation.”

Mason’s young, all gangly limbs and crooked smiles. He blushes every time Samira looks at him, which she tries not to notice. “I will, Doc. Just had a lot on my mind.”

Samira tilts her head to the side. She doesn’t ask anything, but Mason curls in on himself under her gaze, arms crossing involuntarily.

Samira shuffles closer on the stool, lowering her voice enough so not even Mendoza on the other side of the curtain can hear. “Is everything okay?” Mason stares up at her. “You can talk to me, if there is something. You’re not alone out here.”

Mason considers her for a moment, before he shakes his head. “It’s my girlfriend’s birthday, back home. That’s all. I was just thinking about her. Passed out in the humvee and started cooking.”

Samira smiles. Genuinely, despite the tiredness weighing heavily on her. “I’m sure you getting heatstroke would be the last present she’d want.”

Mason laughs, gap-toothed, and Samira sends him on his way.

Samira takes a sip of bitter coffee, attempting to disguise her growing nausea.

“You’re not contractually obligated to drink that,” Abbot says, pen tapping against the paper he’s reading. His binders take up half of the table in the kitchenette. Samira’s eyes rove over the covers as she leans against the countertop. They’re labelled in his chicken-scratch handwriting, sandwiched between loose papers. When he looks up at Samira, he lifts a hand to shield against the sunlight filtering through the windows.

Samira’s surprised to see him in his scrubs, eyeing her watch. 5:45, meaning Abbot is fresh off his shift, and Samira’s has yet to begin. Funnily enough, she dislikes their rotation of twelves more than she ever did her unpredictable residency schedule. Abbot takes nights without complaint, but, more often than not, Samira finds herself awake, staring at the ceiling, her hands itching to be useful.

She shrugs at his comment, and takes another sip. She doesn’t exactly have another option— there’s nothing else to power her through the next twelve hours. For the first time in her life, she misses the taste of Red Bull.

Abbot rolls his eyes and laughs under his breath when she grimaces at the taste again. He sets his pen down and takes a sip of his own mug. Samira doesn’t question why he’s drinking coffee when, by all accounts, he should be heading to sleep soon.

Despite herself, she stares at the cover page of the stapled stack of papers he’s reading. “What do you think?” she asks, head nodding towards it.

Abbot shrugs. “You’ve read it?” he asks.

Samira nods, taking a step closer. She’s read every published paper on REBOA outcomes, it feels like. She doesn’t say anything more.

Abbot looks down at the paper again, until his hand curls around the handle of his coffee mug, lifting it to his lips. “I get my buddy from back home to print them for me,” he says. “Easier when cell service drops.”

Samira takes another sip of her coffee. Something crawls down her back at the idea of knowing something about Abbot’s life at home, wherever that may be.

Abbot picks up his pen again. “What did you make of it?” he asks, pen gesturing to the study.

From: <[email protected]>

To: <[email protected]>

Subject: REBOA: Annotated (Thrailkill et. al)

Dear Dr. Abbot,

I’ve attached a link to my annotated copy of that REBOA study. Please excuse any shorthand. Excited to hear your thoughts!

Resuscitative_Endovascular_Baloon_Occlusion_of_the_Aorta_(REBOA):_update_and_insights_into_current_practices_and_future_directions_for_research_and_implementation_ANNOTATED.pdf

Very Respectfully,

Samira Mohan.

Abbot catches her at the end of her shift, leaning over the hub’s countertop and looking down at her. “I read your annotations.”

Samira looks up. Her back is breaking from standing all day. It wasn’t even especially busy. She puts it down to abandoning her coffee cup a third of the way in.

“Will you keep sending them my way?”

Samira takes a moment, and then nods. “I mean, sure,” she says. It comes out confused, and immediately, she wants to chastise herself. She doesn’t want to come off as nervous, but she is hesitant. Her head spins, trying to come up with reasons as to why Abbot would want her annotated studies, but she comes up blank. “Sure,” she repeats. “If you’re sure you want them.”

She gives him an out that he doesn’t take. “Trust me,” he says, leaning further over the counter, almost conspiratorially, “I want them.”

Samira is smiling before she can think better of it. “Yeah,” she says. “Okay.”

“Hey,” Abbot says in her ear, so low she struggles to hear him over the blare of the cardiac monitor.

Samira looks up once she’s finished drilling the IO, trying to push aside the groans of the man underneath her. She fists her hands into her scrub pants to stop them from shaking.

Abbot’s eyes meet hers easily, not having looked away the entire time she drilled. “Mohan” he says, like he’s trying to snap her out of something, “Take a breath.”

Samira shutters like a camera with a delayed flash, her eyes trained on Abbot, before she does. She takes a breath so deep it threatens to engulf her. Abbot’s taken over care, directing orders to Carver with a hushed urgency.

Slowly, like she’s pulling blood from stone, she unfurls her fists. Her hands are still shaking, but her head feels clearer.

There’s nothing in particular that rattles her. Private Lee passed out after an ill-timed football to the head, his vitals tanking. Samira knows he most likely will be fine, with a hell of a concussion for the next few days, and a sore forearm from the IO that was necessitated by his dodgy veins. It’s not a massive trauma, and he’ll live, but somehow her legs are threatening to give out from under her.

Samira doesn’t shake Abbot’s gaze until she retreats to bed, forgoing her dinner in the mess.

It takes her a week to send another email. She keeps talking herself out of it, stuck in the endless loop of He was just being nice that leads to But what if he was serious and you don’t and then he thinks you’re disobeying a direct order?

It’s completely nonsensical, and Samira gets so tired of listening to herself think that she wrenches herself up and out of bed, unlocking her laptop and saving the newest copy of her annotated PDF.

From: <[email protected]>

To: <[email protected]>

Subject: REBOA (partial vs.complete in exsanguinating trauma patients): Annotated (Heindl et. al)

Dear Dr. Abbot,

Found this and thought it was an interesting addition to the previous study I’d sent along. Please note that this is just some recreational reading.

Partial_Versus_Complete_Resuscitative_Endovascular_Balloon_Occlusion_of_the_Aorta_in_Exsanguinating_Trauma_Patients_With_Non-Compressible_Torso_Hemorrhage_ANNOTATED.pdf

Very Respectfully,

Samira Mohan.

Samira agonises over what to say in the body of her email for far too long, and it’s early enough in the morning that her head spins the longer she stares at her laptop.

She shouldn’t send it, she thinks. It probably comes off pushy, like she’s expecting him to read it, which she isn’t, because she of all people understands how busy he is. How busy they both are.

From: <[email protected]>

To: <[email protected]>

Subject: REBOA (partial vs.complete in exsanguinating trauma patients): Annotated (Heindl et. al)

Dear Dr. Abbot,

Found this and thought it was an interesting addition to the previous study I’d sent along. Please note that this is just some recreational reading. Offers an interesting perspective on complications associated with complete REBOA as opposed to partial in regards to both metabolic alterations and mortality. Excited to hear your thoughts if you have a chance to read!

Partial_Versus_Complete_Resuscitative_Endovascular_Balloon_Occlusion_of_the_Aorta_in_Exsanguinating_Trauma_Patients_With_Non-Compressible_Torso_Hemorrhage_ANNOTATED.pdf

Very Respectfully,

Samira Mohan.

Samira sends it before she can think better of it.

Water runs down her arms as she douses her face, and Samira tries not to cringe as she scrubs off yesterday’s sunscreen.

She’s halfway to the kitchenette when she glances at her laptop, and the small red dot above her email.

From: <[email protected]>

To: <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: REBOA (partial vs.complete in exsanguinating trauma patients): Annotated (Heindl et. al)

Dear Dr. Mohan,

Thank you for sending this along. Was an interesting read, but, between you and me, your annotations were the most enlightening part.

Keep sending your thoughts my way. (It’s nice to have something to read between Carver bugging me with inventory)

V/R,

Jack Abbot.

From: <[email protected]>

To: <[email protected]>

Subject: Developments in REBOA protocol— Annotated (Stokes et al.)

Dear Dr. Abbot,

Thought this was an interesting outlook on future changes to REBOA protocol. Please let me know when you get sick of my handwriting, and I’ll lay off.

REBOA_in_Combat_Casualties:_The_Past_Present_and_Future_ANNOTATED.pdf

V/R,

Samira Mohan.

From: <[email protected]>

To: <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Developments in REBOA protocol— Annotated (Stokes et al.)

Dr. Mohan,

Any chance you can expand on what you mean in your notes on table 2? Not a knock at you. I think I’m just misreading what you’re saying. Ill be hanging about after shift change if you’re up for the discussion.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Abbot.

She doesn’t meet Abbot in the kitchen that often, but when she does, it’s a fifty-fifty on whether they’ll end up debating the merits of another study, or end up recounting the shift’s horror stories.

“Mason came in for heatstroke again,” she says idly, flipping through a binder. He’s taken to leaving his physical copies around the hub, and Samira manages to get through them when it’s slow. Her pencil markings are almost too light to read. She’s scared to mess them up for him, but she’s noticed that he’s taken to highlighting some of her more substantial stuff. The least she can do is sort them back into the folder for him.

Abbot rinses out his cup and stares out at the base beginning to wind down for dinner. Samira will head over in a bit, and grab her plate from the mess hall before it gets too rowdy. “You think he enjoys the attention?”

Samira laughs. Honest to God laughs. “I think he likes having someone to talk to,” she concedes, though it feels slightly mean. Mason’s a good kid, with his girlfriend back home he never stops gushing about. Samira figures she’s the only one who’ll listen to it without making fun of him. She does so gladly, enjoying herself a little bit too much.

Abbot only gives her a small smile in response. Samira had kind of ambushed him, if she’s honest. She’d cut her shift short by ten minutes to catch him— if they really need her, she’s only a yell away— and give him back his printed copy of a study about whole blood administration within USCENTCOM. She doesn’t like hanging onto them for too long, in case he thinks she’s forgotten. She never could.

Abbot turns. “Can’t blame him there,” he says.

Samira always feels eerily visible when he looks at her.

She ducks her head and stacks the binders again. They’ve found a home on the fold-out table, forever in the corner, unless either of them are rifling through them. Samira’s neat stack is slotted into the corner against the wall, hopefully less likely to fall over. Her hand catches a smaller book stuck between the binders, and she pulls it out to sit on top.

Abbot’s hands deftly dry the mug in his grip as he stares at her hands, now holding his well-thumbed travel book of puzzles, ink smeared over the pages. The faint shadow of the whirls of his fingertips catch on Samira’s gaze. It’s flipped open with the spine folded back, exposing his current crossword to her view, almost finished. She respects Abbot’s choice of completing it in pen, even though he’s had to cross a few things out.

“My sister sends them to me,” he says, causing Samira to look up. He almost looks sheepish, and that’s enough to get Samira smiling.

“Am I allowed to help?”

Abbot raises an eyebrow. “Only if you’ll let me take the credit.”

There are two versions of Dr. Abbot, she thinks.

The first: that which she sees in the hospital. His steady hands. His gaze which bores into her, reminding Samira that she’s a doctor who knows how to save a life. His voice which never wavers. The weathered physician who is a little too disillusioned for Samira to fully believe she knows him.

The second: the Abbot she sees now. That which she is less acquainted with— the one where everything is undercut by a grin, or a joke, or such earnestness it punches all air from her lungs. It feels intimate, in the strangest way. The darkness makes her less sure of herself, but it also makes Abbot more visible. Tangible.

Samira cuts off that line of thinking.

She rolls her eyes and grabs a pen. 20 ounce size at Starbucks, she reads, noting that Abbot already has a T from 22 across’s answer of Brontë. Venti, she fills out, before moving onto 14 across: Actress Donovan of “Sabrina the Teenage Witch”. Abbot’s already figured out the first letter as E, and the third letter as I, and Samira has to bite her lip when she makes out his guess of Emily under his cross-hatching scribbles. Elisa, she writes in.

Abbot leans over the table. “You’re showing me up.”

Samira rolls her eyes again. “I’m good for something,” she says, half-smiling.

Abbot’s hands come to rest on the table, and he leans that little bit closer. “Trust me, Mohan,” he says, and Samira can’t quite meet his eye, “Your crossword skills are the least interesting thing about you.”

And Samira laughs, because she feels like she should, but she can’t breathe properly until Abbot leaves for the hospital a few minutes later.

From: <[email protected]>

To: <[email protected]>

Subject: Hemostatic dressings on swine model link

Dr. Mohan,

Thought you’d find this interesting

https://academic.oup.com/milmed/assessment_of_hemostatic_dressings_for_compressible_wounds_in_a_swine_model_simulating_prolonged_field_care

Let me know what you think (if Mason doesn’t come bothering you again)

V/R,

Abbot

PS: Beloved in Arabic? 5 letters. Contacting you as our resident polyglot. I’ll mention you in my acknowledgements if you take pity on me.

From: <[email protected]>

To: <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Hemostatic dressings on swine model link

Dr. Abbot,

Thank you for the recommendation! I’ve been following the literature of hemostatic dressings for field settings pretty closely. Pretty sure I have some notes on some past studies that I’ll add to my pdf response.

V/R,

Samira Mohan.

(Pretty sure it’s “habib”. Don’t quote me on that, though. I’m only fluent in English and Tamil.)

From: <[email protected]>

To: <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Re: Hemostatic dressings on swine model link

was in fact habib. thank you for your services. ill mention you in my acknowledgments as promised.

Jack

Sent from my iPhone

Samira’s awoken to somebody screaming and the smell of smoke.

Her hip hits against the edge of the kitchen table as she rushes out, taking the steps into the hospital two at a time. Abbot probably has it covered, she thinks, but the screams keep getting louder and the smell isn’t subsiding, curling in her nostrils and sticking in her stomach.

The braid that she puts her hair in to sleep has slowly gotten tighter each night without her realising. There aren’t any loose strands to blow out of her face as she rounds the corner, noting the empty hub and the trail of blood that is smeared across the tiles, still vibrant and fresh. She tugs out a glove pack and douses her hands in sanitiser before she rounds into the trauma bay, fitting herself into a gown as she comes to an abrupt stop.

Samira knows what type of doctor she is. She’s the type that asks questions before she makes observations, trying to catch answers in the way a patient speaks, or winces, or curls in on themselves. That specific type of medical practice was born out of survival instinct— a type of retribution, in a way. She knows, deep in her chest, even if everyone she’s ever shared a trauma bay with has tried to convince her otherwise, that she has saved countless more lives that way. It’s the one thing that differentiates her. She wears it as a badge of honour, like another heart on her sleeve.

There are few times where she wishes she was the type to cut before thinking.

This is one of them.

Abbot’s hands are tightening the tourniquet against the thigh of the kid they’ve brought in.

Samira’s stuck.

The kid— the boy, no older than twelve, but scrawny enough to pass for much younger— is still screaming. It shouldn’t be possible, with how much blood he’s lost, to still be conscious, but medicine is rarely right about those things. His cheeks are hollow, his eyes screwed shut.

Samira’s eyes flick back to Abbot. Carver has his hands on his shoulders, pinning him down. Abbot is silent— he doesn’t say anything about the mechanism of injury, but Samira can tell it was a jagged cut, the flesh tearing like ribbons near the kid’s knee.

“Let’s get a femoral nerve block going,” Samira orders. Her feet are still glued to the floor but her mind has always worked faster than her body. “And a sixty mig ketamine bolus.”

”Ket’s in,” Carver says. “Working on the femoral.”

Samira nods. Her eyes catch on shattered bone and charred muscle, before they move back down to Abbot’s hands.

Her feet move before she can think, carrying her up to the head of the bed. She doesn’t even know what she’s saying, but she doesn’t stop talking. The words pour from her lips without her knowledge, her eyes watching as Abbot finishes tightening the tourniquet and the venous oozing slows to a dribble. “We’re going to take care of you,” she says in a broken language.

The boy is out of it, head falling to the side, both from the shock and the meds, but Samira doesn’t quit talking. Doesn’t think she can stop, the practiced phrases blending with the sound of cicadas and crickets and Abbot breathing, exhaling harder than he should be, forcing the breath out through gritted teeth.

Samira keeps talking, the words pouring from her lips like blood from a wound.

A mosquito bites into her ankle. She bats it away half-heartedly.

Samira’s knee knocks into Abbot’s, squeezed on the same step of the porch. The blood on his scrubs has dried now, rusted into the fabric, flaking onto the ground when their limbs make contact.

The cicadas don’t stop singing. She breathes so deeply her chest threatens to fall in on itself.

She doesn’t look at Abbot. She keeps her eyes straight ahead, fixed on the outline of the empty mess hall, locked up for the night. Her eyes, half-lidded with an exhaustion that sleep will never cure, threaten to close of their own accord. Samira fights not to burrow her face into her hands.

Samira read the articles. She studied the figures, and the methodology. Made notes to help her remember, until it was etched on the walls of her mind for some archaeologist to discover in the distant future. She made conversation about the improvements in the REBOA medical protocol over bitter coffee as Abbot noted down what she was saying, purely out of his own interest.

There’s still a bed in their trauma bay, drenched in enough blood to soak the mattress clean through, a sheet pulled over top.

That weight in her chest threatens to throttle her.

Samira doesn’t say anything when she hears Abbot sniff that little bit too aggressively, his head craning back to stare at the starred sky. She just sits there, as their knees knock, and they both pretend they’re not crying. It’s not an ugly thing.

The coffee mug is blisteringly hot in her hands as she holds it up to her lips, and, for the first time since she shipped out, she doesn’t wince at the taste.

Abbot leans against the countertop, taking a sip of his own mug slowly. “Who’d you kill to get this?”

Samira takes another sip. “My mom sent it a while back.” Her hands tighten around the handle of the mug, her knuckles paling. “Just didn’t get around to opening it,” she says.

Abbot pulls the mug to his lips again, and, thankfully, doesn’t ask why it took her a month to open a care package from her mom, or why it took until today, the morning after the shift from hell, to push her to do it.

Samira wonders why he doesn’t ask, but figures he can see how exhausted she is. He’s thoughtful like that, she thinks, surprising herself with how quickly the idea comes to her.

“I’ll swap it out before I make a pot,” Abbot says.

Samira almost gives herself whiplash with how quickly she looks up. “No,” she says, more forcefully than she had meant to. “It’s— It’s a communal coffee pot. With communal coffee beans.”

Abbot turns on his heel, closing the cabinet door as he does. “And I’ll keep drinking the shitty communal beans. You should hoard this, Mohan,” he says as he raises his mug, as if toasting. He’s not fishing for her to say that he should keep drinking her good coffee. She doesn’t think Abbot is capable of fishing.

“No,” Samira says again. “We’ll share.”

Abbot lowers his head slightly, now looking at her through his eyelashes.

Samira rushes to explain herself, the words coming out hastily. “She sent me enough to last my whole deployment. I couldn’t drink it all, even if I wanted to.”

Which is a lie, because she doesn’t think her mom sent her more than a couple pounds of the stuff. But she doesn’t let Abbot know that.

Abbot stares at her for a moment, and that awful feeling of visibility swamps Samira again, like she can’t hide from his gaze. “Okay,” Abbot says, after a moment that feels like eternity. “Thank you, Mohan.”

Samira ducks her gaze. “No problem,” she says. Not even the good coffee is enough to fix the headache she can feel encroaching.

From: <[email protected]>

To: <[email protected]>

Subject: No Subject

Mom,

Thank you for the care package. I can’t tell you how much I needed the coffee. The stuff here is like tar. And the playing cards have already proved handy— one of the nurses keeps trying to teach me poker, but apparently I’m not great at bluffing (probably comes as no surprise to you)

Things here have been good!! Schedule is actually less brutal than residency so at least that’s a plus. Im 12 on 12 off, so I just work and sleep mostly, but the heat isnt as bad as I was expecting. Dr Abbot, the other doctor here, is a great teacher. Things could be worse, I mean.

Just writing to check in with you, really. Im doing okay here. It took me a bit to settle in but its honestly way better than I was expecting it to be. Haven’t managed to completely mess up yet, at least.

Love you. Thanks for the coffee.

Samira

Delete Draft?

Draft Deleted.

There’s a false sense of security that comes with the day shift, Samira thinks. She felt it during residency, and she feels it now. Nobody expects a DOA domestic violence victim to roll into the ambulance bay at one o’clock in the afternoon, or a pedestrian crush injury resulting from drunk driving on a clear, summer morning.

It happens. It has always happened, and it will always continue to happen, but that doesn’t mean that Samira doesn’t find herself becoming complacent. Even here, when the drone strikes hail down, it's always under the cover of darkness. Humvees only seem to run over roadside bombs after midnight. The worst that she sees on days are cases of heatstroke and indigestion.

She finds herself trying to intubate and can’t. Samira isn't used to not being able to do something as simple as an intubation. Her hands shake the slightest bit, before she bites her tongue to tamp down on it. She knows the steps. She could intubate blindfolded, with one hand behind her back.

The laryngeal edema is severe enough that it’s making it almost impossible. Carver’s readying a crich tray, the sound of metal hitting against metal echoing in her ears.

Samira breathes. She closes her eyes. She visualises the vocal chords, and hopes against hope that she can secure an airway.

Mason has been without oxygen for at least three minutes. That’s how long it took for somebody to find him, raise the alarm, and get him in front of Samira. It’s probably longer than that. She doesn’t know how long he was hanging there, but she can make an educated guess.

His lips are blue.

She visualises the vocal chords. The rough sketches she drew on her carry-whiteboard before her anatomy exam.

Samira, miraculously, manages to get the tube down.

“Bagging,” she says, not to anybody in particular.

She knows the rhythm. She’s known it since she took first-aid at fourteen.

Squeeze slowly, about a second in length. Release gently. Hold for four seconds. Squeeze slowly, and try not to look at Mason’s blue lips under the mask. Release gently, and try not to think about his girlfriend back home. Hold for four seconds. Try not to think about the mark of the belt around his neck. The belt that Samira has had to rip off of his body twice, before dunking him in cold water to combat heatstroke.

Samira lays out her next steps.

“Carver,” she says, and Carver steps forward to take the bag from her hands unquestioningly, crich tray forgotten.

“Mendoza, switch,” she says, once her hands are free, and Mendoza gets down from the bed, leaving room for Samira to climb up, allowing her enough leverage to compress his chest with all of her weight behind her. “Let’s get another round of epi,” she orders, before her attention returns to her hands.

The rhythm is one well-worn. Samira’s been a practicing physician for almost five years— she knows CPR. She knows how many lives it has saved.

She knows that Mason’s life will not be one of them.

His lips are blue. Realistically, he was without oxygen for over twenty minutes, if he committed as soon as he returned from dinner. The epinephrine isn’t working. His heart doesn’t have a rhythm.

The belt marks have mottled the pale skin of his neck beyond recognition.

It’s not going to work, but Samira’s the type of doctor to try anyway.

Carver switches out with her after two minutes, sweat building on her brow. Samira orders another round of epi. She checks her Hs and Ts. Hypoxia is the only thing she can’t correct. His heart isn’t getting oxygen.

“Switch,” she says, after another two minutes.

“Doctor Mohan—“ Carver says as he steps down from the gurney. Samira climbs up. Her hands depress his chest by two and a half inches. Mendoza squeezes the bag every six seconds.

All of the conditions are optimal.

Mason is still dead.

Samira looks down at his blue lips, her hair sticking to the back of her neck. Thinks about his girlfriend, and the money he sent her for her birthday. Enough to cover for her nail appointment, he’d said. They were high school sweethearts, he said, dating since the ninth grade. He had talked about his plan to marry her when his tour was over. He ducked his head as he said it, as if he was hiding from Samira. As if she would laugh at him. She didn’t.

Samira doesn’t know why he decided not to follow through with that plan— the big proposal with the lilies he knew she loved. She can’t know why he was found hanging from the light fixture.

It isn’t Samira’s place to know those things.

“Doctor Mohan—“

Samira forces herself to pull away.

“Time of death, 17:56,” she pushes out through her locked jaw.

Samira stares down at her hands, laid on her knees. The raw, bitten cuticles make an ugly sight, slivers of scar tissue framing her nails, inflamed by constant alcohol hand sanitiser. She’s settled herself on the back stairs to their pop-up hospital, eyes glossed over.

The sun burns her eyes, falling down under the horizon.

She doesn't say a word. She doesn’t know what she would even attempt to say, all words falling short every time she tries to string together a coherent sentence.

Stupid, nonsensical Samira, she thinks.

Abbot doesn’t try to coax anything out of her. His feet are planted on the same step where she’s sat, steel toe of his boot angled towards her by the slightest edge. Imperceptably.

“I was homeless in highschool,” she says.

It’s out there before she can snatch it back and twist the ugly words into something palatable enough to share with him. Her stomach rolls, nausea growing.

Stupid, nonsensical Samira.

“My dad died when I was thirteen, in a hospital ER, three hundred miles from home. We didn’t have insurance and the bills went to collections. My mom and I slept in her car for eight months,” she rushes out. Her voice, surprisingly, doesn’t dissolve into sobs. It’s forced and mechanical, like her hands moving through an intubation. Maybe she’s just a little too good at handling stress, she thinks wryly. Her gaze is still glued on some untrained point in the distance. She wonders if he can even make out the individual words as they all end up falling into each other, a cascading, humiliating set of dominos that run together into an inaudible mess.

Abbot takes a step forward, moving down a step, and then another. For the briefest moment, Samira thinks he’s about to walk off, and she takes another deep breath, as if that’ll be enough to steel her against the hole he’ll undoubtedly leave.

He bends his knees and settles himself on the step next to her. It’s cramped enough that their thighs brush. It’s enough to drain the little composure that Samira has left. Her scrubs rustle as she bounces her knee unthinkingly.

She has a way that she tells this story. She has a way that is rehearsed and polished, that toes the line between informative and vulnerable, and is fully vetted for exposure to new friends and guys that ask about her dad on the third date, unaware that this is Samira’s version of third base. There’s the version that is perfectly in line with Samira Mohan, PTMC resident, who balances studying and a comprehensive gym routine and a healthy diet and the occasional boyfriend whom she inevitably pushes away by being too scared of the future that is hurtling towards her like a freight train off of its tracks and ready to derail her entire life with it.

This is not that version of this story. This is something so much more awful, more visceral, and it startles her that the words are falling from her mouth. It’s missing the cushioning that a glass of wine gives her. This lacks the easy lines that she laughs off when things start to become a little too tense, and the soft smiles that dissuades her audience from becoming uncomfortable.

She cannot, for the life of her, figure out what has possessed her.

But she just keeps talking, the words practically pouring off of her tongue. “She never took out another loan, or got another mortgage– God, she never even applied for another credit card,” she says, half-laughing in a strangled sort of way. “I couldn’t– I couldn’t put more onto her. It nearly killed her the first time.” And it did. What she says isn’t at all an exaggeration. “So I talked to an army recruiter and sold my soul for med school, and I think she’s hated me since I told her eight years ago.”

Abbot’s thigh brushes against hers as she bounces her knee. Samira’s teeth dig into her lip, and she tastes the faintest metallic tinge of blood.

She laughs again. Away in the distance, a wild animal cries as if it's been mauled. Samira can't differentiate between the two sounds.

“I know I’m too emotional. I get overly involved. I care too much. If I knew how to not be that way, I would stop,” she says. “I’m too soft to be here.”

She doesn’t say the rest of it– that she feels like the most unqualified person in every room, that she thinks she hates herself, too, that she has been counting down the days until she fucks it all up, and it has finally arrived. Abbot is probably already drafting the email he’s going to send about getting her discharged, citing her as mentally unstable and medically incompetent. She doesn’t need to add fuel to that particular fire.

She can’t bring herself to meet his eye. It’s bad enough to feel like a fraud. She doesn’t need to look him in the face, down the barrel of the gun, as he tries to persuade her otherwise– because Abbot would, she thinks. He would try to lie to her, and Samira doesn’t know if she can survive it.

Medicine is not a passion that Samira has always held. It snuck up on her, in the same way that her father’s death did. It was a passion built out of a need to survive: the need to satiate that teenager inside of her that thinks if someone had cared, her appa might still be with her, and the need to feel secure in something– she never did manage to decipher whether that sense of security was supposed to come from a steady job, or a career that allowed her to swallow down the gut-wrenching grief that still, all these years later, manages to plague the quietest corners of her life, rearing its ugly head when she meets another lost kid who did what Samira never had the guts to do. It’s a passion that has grown out of a foundation of necessity into something that sustains her. It’s the reason her heart has a reason to keep pumping oxygenated blood around her body.

None of that means she isn’t fucking terrified every time she takes a step towards a patient.

If she were to take a second and compose herself, she would know, logically, that this whole outburst has been creeping up on her since she stepped onto the military aircraft, hands burning as she dug her fingers into the plane’s armrests. The ticking timebomb that is Samira Mohan was primed and ready to explode the moment she left American soil, beginning her sentence of four years hard labour. She’s self-aware enough to know that. An inevitability, like her dad dropping dead in front of her, or her mom bursting into tears if Samira leans against the kitchen counters in the wrong light.

The more she talks, the worse it gets. Nausea spins deep in her stomach, and the sheen of sweat on her forehead takes on a new air of sickness that isn’t borne from the stifling heat. If you were to ask her– the her that occupied hospital hallways in Pittsburgh, instead of the her that is sweating out in the desert, thirsting for something greater than water can quench– she would know that the impending doom that is settling over her is a long overdue anaphylaxis to the anxiety she has carried since before she knew the word.

Abbot’s thigh is warm against hers.

It doesn’t do much to ground her. She wishes it would. Now, this feels like an impossibly slippery slope that she can no longer claw her way back from, and as her nails dig into her forearms, she’s trying to content herself with the idea of forfeiting her ironclad contract and defaulting on her service and dealing with whatever fallout arises from the timebomb exploding.

Samira’s eyes remain fixed in the distance, but Abbot’s gaze is set upon her. The hairs on the back of her neck raise with it. It’s too piercing for comfort.

“So that’s what makes you so damn good.”

Samira, despite herself, looks over.

His eyes flick to stare out onto the dying sun in front of them, the night about to break. The sunlight in their eyeline forces him to raise a hand, shielding his vision from the worst of it, and blocking Samira’s analysis of what, exactly, is going on behind his eyes. His face is glowing with sweat as the sun ghosts over it, and it’s enough to make the pit in Samira’s stomach deepen for reasons that she cannot comprehend at this moment, even if she wanted to. Her brain is trying too hard to remind her to breathe to deal with this particular piece of aftermath.

Despite herself, and despite the ground beneath them that threatens to swallow them, Samira’s eyebrows furrow. She has no illusions that she’s hiding her confusion. Her eyes are probably wide and searching and analytical in a way that she would feel embarrassed about if it weren’t Abbot, and if she hadn’t already laid her entire life bare for him— if she hadn’t laid herself bare for the past five months, between coffees and crosswords and rounds of CPR.

He’s been chipping away at her for the past 150 days, she thinks.

It’s a realisation that doesn’t come as a surprise. Abbot is a doctor that writes letters to the families of the patients they couldn’t save. A doctor that prays with injured SDF soldiers in perfect Arabic, whispering every word with a reverence she doesn’t think herself capable of. A doctor who pledged his life to the military and lost his leg for the trouble, and then came back to save more lives. It doesn’t surprise her that he’s been trying to figure her out. He’s too thoughtful not to, she thinks.

Abbot claps his hand down onto his knee. The sound echoes within the walls of Samira’s mind. He turns his neck. His eyes meet hers, and it feels like coming up for air, because she doesn’t see the quiet revulsion or overwhelming pity that she had become accustomed to expecting in response. No, there’s only Abbot, and the spark in his eye that Samira sees over a body every time she does something risky in the operating room.

There’s only Abbot, and Samira’s heart stops thrumming in her ears.

“You’re the most intelligent, empathetic doctor I’ve ever worked with,” he says, voice low and casual, as if he’s reading off a chart, seemingly unaware of Samira’s throat tightening. “That doesn’t just happen, Mohan. You have to work for that. And you have. That much is obvious– and not just to me. And it wouldn’t be half as important if you weren’t in the viper’s pit.”

Samira expects him to laugh, then, but he doesn’t. His eyes bore into her, and she’s seen this look a thousand times before, when he’s using her hands as his over the bodies of men he may as well call brothers. There’s no word for it but earnest, and it knocks her for six.

“Medicine would be light years ahead if everyone was more like you. That shit matters here, more than it ever could in some hospital back home. I’m not going to try and convince you that this is a better situation, because it’s not– and trust me, I’m disillusioned enough for the both of us– but you matter here, Mohan. All of that shit has made you one hell of a doctor.”

Samira stares back at him. Their thighs are still touching, and it burns now, his touch molten hot. Her teeth dig further into her lip, and the curls around her face stick to her forehead and the back of her neck, and Samira can’t swallow this down and ignore it, because he’s staring back, and for one, ephemeral moment, she believes him.

Isn't that the most horrifying thing?

”You care about your patients,” he says, and Samira remembers the last time he said that. He wasn’t her friend then, she thinks— is he, now?— but those words meant the same that they do now. More, maybe, because it was the first time somebody hadn’t looked at her capacity to care and scoffed. “Mason was a good kid. You tried your best. That’s all you can ask of yourself.”

She’s the first to rip her gaze away. They’re toying with something she needs to ignore. For the first time since she was thirteen and watching her dad choke on his own blood, Samira feels like she’s tethered to something bigger than herself, and the longer she looks down the barrel of the gun, the more solid it feels under her feet, and it hurts, in that horrifically childish way, to almost have something and have it ripped away. Because it will be ripped away. She’ll say the wrong thing, give the wrong diagnosis, be too needy or attentive or empathetic and Abbot will realise she’s a scared little girl in a labcoat, and he’ll rescind any feeling of trust or care or belief.

“Thank you,” she chokes out, barely audible as the wind scatters the sand at their feet. She doesn’t try to rebuke him, or convince him otherwise, because she has the nagging feeling that he won’t stand to hear it, but she knows, innately, that he’s misjudged her. That she’s tricked him, in some nauseating way that has her hating herself that little bit more.

He knocks his knee into hers. “I’m just telling it like it is,” he says, and she can hear the smile in his voice, and she tries to reciprocate, the weary faultline of her lips bending to form easily.

She nods, trying to digest his kindness, but it gets stuck in her throat.

“You’re wrong,” she says before she can stop herself, because her knee-jerk reaction is to self-destruct.

Abbot laughs. “You think so?” he asks, that same laughter colouring his words. Not mean, or mocking, but familiar in a way that suffocates something in her chest.

She doesn’t need to respond. Her silence is enough. She’s afraid if she opens her mouth that she’ll start believing it herself.

Abbot elbows her lightly. “Then stop proving me right.”

From: <[email protected]>

To: <[email protected]>

Subject: No Subject

carver has a two pair hand

Jack

Sent from my iPhone

From: <[email protected]>

To: <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: No Subject

I’m pretty sure that’s cheating, Dr. Abbot

Samira

From: <[email protected]>

To: <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Re: No Subject

I’m evening the playing field. Hate to break it to you but you can’t bluff for shit

Jack

Sent from my iPhone

From: <[email protected]>

To: <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: Re: Re: No Subject

no offence taken

(im kidding, in case that isnt clear)

you should come play a round instead of staring ominously from the corner. Carver can tell youre snooping on his hand

Samira

Abbot does come play a hand, and absolutely smokes her, to nobody’s surprise, but he bodies Carver, who’s left a spluttering mess when Abbot rakes in the dollar bills they’ve been betting.

“Drinks on me,” he whispers to Samira conspiratorially, and it takes her so off-guard she snorts.

She doesn’t have much time to work on her research, but she manages to snag a few minutes every so often. She can’t exactly conduct studies from a continent away, but she refines what she has and plans what she needs.

When the heat gets too stifling, she treks out to the porch and sets up there, rereading her drafts until the words start to annoy her. The sun dips below the skyline as she reads over and over, barely looking up, until the strain in her neck forces her to.

Abbot’s out on the porch of the hospital, throwing a bucket of murky water onto the ground. He’s laughing, and Carver’s laughing too.

Samira forces herself to look back down.

To the family of Daniel Mason,

My name is Samira Mohan, a doctor of your son’s unit. I served alongside your son. Daniel was an extraordinarily kind person, and would talk to me about anything and everything. He often spoke of his girlfriend, and how much he loved her, and his great respect for his parents. He told me that his father was a veteran, and he hoped to one day be held in as high a regard by his own children.

I wish I could give you answers. All I can hope to console you with is that Daniel did not feel any pain. We attempted to revive him for as long as possible, but his injuries prevented us from resuscitating. Please know we did everything we could.

Daniel was a light to his unit. I am so sorry for your loss. You have my deepest condolences.

Samira Mohan.

Samira doesn’t say anything when she stumbles into the kitchen. In all honesty, she had expected it to be empty, with two o’clock in the morning firmly falling in Abbot’s shift.

He’s there anyway, eyes catching her before she catches sight of him. ”Hey,” he says.

Samira doesn’t think she’s ever heard his voice that soft before. She raises a bleary hand before she fumbles for a glass, filling it under the tap.

She slides into her seat at the table without thinking. They’ve somehow become the people with unofficial assigned seats which they never deviate from. It makes her stomach flip. She has the one backed by the wall, and Abbot has his, facing hers. Samira watches as his hands flip through the pages of another binder, tracing his fingertips.

She takes another sip of her water, and rests her chin in her palm.

“You okay?”

He says it so quietly that Samira almost misses it. “Yeah,” she says.

Abbot stares at her for a moment.

Samira wants to tell him that she’s been replaying what he said to her on loop for the past month. She wants to tell him, in as soft a voice that he had used, that he’s the reason she can’t sleep.

Abbot opens his mouth, before closing it again. If Samira’s gaze wasn’t focused in on his lips, she might have missed it.

That’s how they pass the next twenty minutes. Samira doesn’t say anything more until she stands, and sets her empty cup in the sink. “Night,” she says.

“Goodnight, Samira,” Abbot says.

Samira is very, very grateful for the fact that he can’t see her face, because she truly cannot bluff for shit.

From: <[email protected]>

To: <[email protected]>

Subject: Treatment of intracardiac air embolism using intracardiac catheter aspiration pdf (Her et al.)

Mohan,

Found this unicorn and would appreciate your insight

Treatment_of_intracardiac_air_embolism_using_intracardiac_catheter_aspiration.pdf

Jack

Samira finds him by the hub. She doesn’t bother changing out of her pyjamas. When the email came through she was tossing in bed with nothing better to do.

She took a few minutes to read the article he had attached before she set out looking for him. “I think it’s unconventional,” she says without preamble, crossing her arms on the raised counter of the hub, watching as he clicks off the tab he’s viewing and leans back in his chair.

“That’s a generous way of putting it,” he replies. Samira isn’t sure how to label his smile. Grinning, almost, but she can’t imagine why.

Samira leans on the counter so that she’s looking down at him. “There’s not enough research on it for me to feel confident saying either way.”

”It’s a pigtail in a heart.”

”Do you want me to say it’s crazy?”

Abbot grins at her.

“It is,” Samira replies. “It’s crazy.”

Abbot’s grin grows.

Samira doesn’t know what he’s angling for.

“It was a good read,” she concedes.

Abbot leans further back. “It’s cool as hell.”

Samira finds herself laughing. It’s three in the morning at the hospital is silent enough for one sound to break it and she looks down at Abbot and laughs so loudly the sound reverberates.

“I still haven’t written my mom back,” she says in the dead of night when Abbot has somehow managed to pull her out of bed with the thrill of another batshit study. She wishes she could delude herself into thinking she doesn’t know why she’s so comfortable divulging this part of her life, but she knows with a foundational certainty that Abbot has somehow made her feel like she can breathe for the first time in a while.

Abbot leans back in his chair as Samira does the same.

He doesn’t say anything. It gives Samira room to continue. “I keep trying to and then saying the wrong thing. Or overthinking it, and over-writing it until it sounds like I’m reading off a teleprompter.”

He shrugs. “You don't have to lie to her,” he says. “You can tell her that it's shitty out here.”

Samira appreciates the honesty, but she’s not sure if her mom would.

He doesn’t mention her mom again, and Samira isn’t sure how to express to him how grateful she is for the fact.

From: <[email protected]>

To: <[email protected]>

Subject: Sickle Cell Gene Therapy link

Mohan,

Thought this would be an interesting addition to your research. You’ll have to forgive me for snooping, but once I started I couldn’t stop. I’m in the mess if you feel like coming to ream me out.

http://nejm.org/CRISPR-Cas19-Gene-Editing-for-Sickle-Cell-Disease

Jack

Samira doesn’t bother to turn around when she hears the tell-tale creak of the kitchenette door hinge. There’s only one person it could be.

Abbot’s footsteps still when he catches sight of her, but only momentarily. As soon as he pauses he resumes, rounding to the cabinets and pulling out a mug. Samira, despite her own curiosity, doesn’t look up to see what he pours in it.

She’s sitting in his chair, she realises. His chair that faces the wall, and the chair that backs it. She tries to straighten her back, as if that will make breathing easier. It doesn’t.

The next time she looks up she meets Abbot’s eye, he’s slid into her chair, facing her.

Samira doesn’t say anything.

Abbot stares at her for a moment. Long enough for her to say what’s bothering her, if she wanted to. She’s noticed that he’s wary of pushing too far.

Instead, she looks down at the book in front of her. “‘Slugger’s stat’, three letters.”

Abbot’s still looking at her.

What would happen if she started talking?

Samira knows him well enough to know he’d listen. That’s a fact. He would sit there and keep looking at her while she told him that she thinks she’s going to die out here, and he’s the one thing that abates that fear, and that she still hasn’t responded to her mom, even though she’s sent another box of coffee and mosquito bite cream and blister patches, and that she sees the blue lips of Daniel Mason every time she administers oral electrolytes for heat exhaustion.

Abbot would listen. He’d sit there, in Samira’s chair that strains her back, all night, if she asked.

Samira won’t ask. Both of them know that.

They’re at an impasse.

“RBI,” Abbot breathes.

Samira keeps her eyes firmly on the grid, even though Abbot’s burn into her. She notes down the three letters, the nib of her pen threatening to break through the page with how hard she presses down.

She wishes he wouldn’t look at her like that. It makes it a lot harder for her to keep her mouth shut.

Abbot’s eyes look darker under the low light, like they’re all pupils and no irises. She shouldn’t have looked up. What does he have at home? Who does he have? Samira’s never asked, and he’s never said. His sister, she remembers, feeling the paper that her hand is now resting on top of. Just her, or more? Are his parents still alive? More siblings, who have given him nieces and nephews?

A wife?

Samira’s never asked.

The night does something to her, she thinks. Everything feels like fair game. There’s no false sense of security. Everything’s out in the open when there’s nowhere to hide.

“Are you married?”

He doesn’t wear a ring, but none of them do. If he has one, it’ll be threaded through his dog tags, one more form of identification.

Abbot doesn’t move a muscle. “I was,” he says. He swallows, and Samira keeps looking at him through her lashes. “She passed before our first anniversary. We got married straight out of college, before I enlisted.” He pulls his tags out from beneath his scrub top, letting them rest against his chest. Samira catches the inscription on his tags and the gold ring that rests against them, the shine dulled with age. O neg, she reads, and the fact doesn’t surprise her. Endlessly giving, Jack Abbot, she thinks.

Samira can’t breathe.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

Abbot’s eyes burn into her. “She would’ve hated this. She never wanted me to be a combat medic.” His hand comes up to run through his hair. “She said it would ruin me.”

It doesn’t feel like Samira’s place to correct him, but she almost allows herself to.

Without thinking, her hand reaches across the thin table, fingers ghosting over his tags, and the ring that hangs there. Would he still be here, sitting across from her, if he wasn’t a widower? If he hadn’t lost the life he had fashioned for himself, and decided to stop others from losing the same?

Even though Samira jumps back when she realises what she’s doing, Abbot doesn’t move. “She would’ve liked you,” he says, as though it doesn’t make Samira’s heart stop for reasons she can’t identify. “She always said I needed someone to keep me in line.”

Samira’s heart has stopped but she finds herself smiling anyways, because now Abbot is too. Tired, but undoubtedly smiling.

Samira breathes in. “It’s thankless work, but somebody has to.”

Abbot kicks her under the table. “Watch it.”

Samira raises an eyebrow. “Or what?”

Abbot just huffs out a laugh and shakes his head, his gaze still as piercing as it always is.

Everything comes in extremes, Samira thinks. She’s either invisible or much too seen.

“Take a breath,” Abbot whispers in her ear as he passes by her, trying to get a better angle at the head lac he’s tending to. His hand ghosts over the small of her back as he goes.

Samira takes stock of what’s in front of her. Blast victim with head trauma, decompensating rapidly. It doesn’t matter that she knows him and knows he has a two year old at home who already knows the alphabet. It doesn’t matter that he grinned when he told her that fact, smile threatening to blind Samira. It doesn’t matter that his name is Alex Morales and Samira has treated him for a strep.

Samira takes a breath. Abbot nods at her.

Samira drills the burr hole without her hands shaking.

Her birthday creeps up on her, suddenly thirty with little more than tan lines and bug bites to prove that she still inhabits her own body.

Obviously, she doesn’t say anything. She gets an email from her mom that she ends up replying to half-heartedly, because she’s scared if she doesn’t that she’ll think she’s died out here. Abbot has a cup of coffee waiting for her when she drags herself out of bed, which is something he does now, a granola bar sat beside it. Samira catches the back of his head before he turns around and wonders, absentmindedly, when she let her guard down.

“Hey,” he says, before turning back to his phone in his hand.

Samira doesn’t respond, grabbing her mug and sliding into her seat, running a hand through her hair and burying all of her feelings deep in her chest. Her head leans back against the wall behind her, and she closes over her eyes momentarily. Not long enough for Abbot to notice, she thinks, but just long enough for her to gather herself.

She comes back to her senses when Abbot half-snorts, and when she opens her eyes, his phone screen is pointed towards her. It’s a stupid video about medical mysteries, and he’s paused it on the frame that shows something nondescript lodged about a foot into somebody’s ass over x-ray.

Samira doesn’t laugh, because it’ll only make her headache worse, but she smiles as she tilts her head back again, exhaling harshly through her nose in something that might pass for a chuckle.

Later, when Mendoza starts reaming Carver out over cheating at poker, Samira almost forgets about her migraine. “You’re pocketing!” Mendoza seethes, standing up to collect everyone’s cards and reshuffling them, ignoring Carver’s spats of indignation. Samira gives her own up with little reluctance— she didn’t have much of a hand anyways.

“I was not,” Carver says, hitting his hand against the table. “And, anyways, who gives a fuck if I was? This is the brotherhood of the travelling five bucks.” He crosses his arms and shuffles back in his chair. If Samira were in the mood to make fun of him, she would say he’s whining.

Abbot remains steadily uninterested in their antics as Mendoza re-deals, sighing the whole time. Samira’s not paying attention when his hand brushes against her thigh, the touch enough to make her shiver.

Because she’s smart, she doesn’t look at Abbot. If she did, she’s sure she wouldn’t have a chance of hiding whatever she’s feeling. Instead, her hand drifts down to his, her fingertips ghosting over his hand as she moves to grab the card in his grip. His loose grip falls when Samira’s thumb and forefinger grip it, and the side of her finger brushes against his.

Samira is good at keeping her cool, she reminds herself. Maybe if she keeps repeating it, she’ll start believing it.

When Mendoza redeals, Samira carefully manoeuvres the card up, backing her three of spades against her stolen card, carefully maintaining her two-card illusion.

Abbot is already smiling when Samira’s eyes flick to him. Small enough that it's imperceptible to the nurses surrounding them, too busy bickering, but a type of beacon to her.

The queen of hearts stares up at her. Samira rakes in their betting pool easily, revelling in Mendoza’s confused splutters, and Carver gloating that nobody was cheating, “You’re just shit at poker.”

Later, when the night has firmly descended, and Samira has long-since lost her winnings to a game of blackjack that Abbot was nowhere near as merciful with, she meets him in the kitchenette over mugs of hot chocolate.

“It’s my birthday,” she says, the silence begging to be filled.

Abbot stills. “You should've said,” he whispers, voice soft enough to break.

Samira shakes her head. “Don’t be sorry,” she says. “It was the best one in a while.”

Abbot wins their first game of jack changes, and then the second. Samira doesn’t understand how, because he can’t cheat, and it’s majorly a luck based game. It frustrates her to no end, and he can tell, she thinks, as her teeth sink into her lower lip and her eyebrows furrow.

“You could go easy on me,” she says. It comes out less humorous than she intended it to.

Abbot sends her a sideways smile. “I’d never insult you like that,” he says.

Samira is good at ignoring things. Great, even.

She notices how Abbot looks at her when she says something sarcastic, her mouth opening before her mind can second guess herself. She sees how Abbot will smile at her when it’s just them, sitting in their kitchen, the lights low, trading remarks over dinner and drinks, if carry-out from the mess and glasses of root beer can count as such. She memorises the feeling of their hands brushing when they’re crammed into a trauma bay, gloves against gloves but still electrically charged.

Samira isn’t surprised to notice they’re inexplicably in sync, Abbot’s hand moving to clamp or cut before Samira can verbalise the thought. She can read what he needs before she even tries. Yes, it’s because they’re experienced in their own rights, but it helps that Samira feels like she knows him inside and out.

Samira is good at ignoring things. She pushes it down, and she prays.

The world changes on a sunny day in June.

Samira downs her coffee, gagging when she hits the dregs at the bottom. She hadn’t taken the time to stir it properly, too caught up in making sure she isn’t egregiously late. Abbot wouldn’t care, but it would make her feel guilty regardless.

“Sorry,” she says, dumping her things at her desk at the hub, before running her hands through her hair, twisting it, and clipping it up.

Abbot raises an eyebrow, glancing at her half-eaten protein bar and crocs-clad feet. “Everything good, Road Runner?”

Samira glares at him, tying the knot on her scrub bottoms. “This is your fault,” she says, before she runs over to the window, trying to decipher her reflection from what’s outside, her hands flying up to smooth the flyaways from her hair and rub at a patch of bitten skin on her lip.

Abbot, leaning against the hub, tries to hide his smile behind his mug. Samira can only see the edge of it in the reflection of him in the window, and by the time she spins around he’s managed to tame it to something neutral. She doesn’t know why he’s smiling at her when she looks like she’s just been dragged through a bush, and then mauled by coyotes.

“How is this my fault?”

Samira glares at him again. “Don’t play dumb.”

Abbot snorts. “Whatever you say.”

Samira feels like her vision has dropped from 20/20 to legally blind, her migraine like a rubber band wrapped around her head.

It is Abbot’s fault. He’s the only reason she would stay up for twenty-four hours straight for the first time since finishing residency, because his sister had somehow smuggled a travel-size DVD player into her most recent care package, with a catalogue of DVDs to go with it. Samira can’t even remember how Top Gun ended— all she remembers is Abbot groaning about how much he hates the navy.

Abbot’s eyes remain trained on her as she falls into her desk chair, hands coming up to cover her face as a long, drawn-out groan escapes her. His voice is low when he speaks. “Go back to bed,” he says. “I can tough it out for another hour or two.”

Samira pulls her hands down, low enough to be able to open one eye and stare at him. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

Abbot shrugs at her. “C’mon. It’ll remind me of my residency glory days.”

Samira gives him a look that she tries to make serious. She’s afraid it comes off as touched instead. “I’m fine,” she says, her voice soft enough to make sure that he knows she’s telling the truth. “Seriously.”

Abbot considers her for a moment, as if he’s wondering whether to keep pushing the issue. Samira makes a show of biting down on her protein bar and stretching, arms extending up beyond her head as her neck cranes upwards, to reassure him. “Only one of us needs sleep,” she says, “And it’s not me.”

Indecision flickers over his face before he shrugs again, eyebrow raised. “I mean, if you want me gone so badly-“

Samira smiles softly even if it hurts, her head falling back and lolling to the side. “Get out of here,” she says. “Come bother me later. Once you’re well-rested.”

Abbot rolls his eyes, but collects his things. He walks backward as he leaves, rambling incessantly about how little he needs to sleep, nearly tripping over the wheel of a gurney, and Samira laughs so abruptly that she snorts.

It’s only after Samira listens to Mendoza complain about Carver and treats a mild case of heat exhaustion that she gets a second to herself, flopping into her desk chair and opening up her email. There’s one from Abbot, with the subject line “Re: link to expanded study” but has devolved to talking about anything but, and Samira’s about to click into it when she sees the email below.

Your travel arrangements, she reads in the subject line.

Samira keeps reading. She reminds herself to breathe. She rereads the email again, making sure she isn’t hallucinating.

Samira’s going home.

Abbot comes back about an hour before their shift change, leaning in the gap in the curtain and making conversation about baseball with Private Dean. He asks Samira’s opinion on something, and she doesn’t realise until he nudges the wheels on her stool with his foot, shooting her a concerned look. Samira swallows it down. She wraps the cut on Dean’s hand, before extricating herself from the triage bay and marching to the hub, ignoring Abbot’s hand that shoots out after her.

He comes after her. Samira expected that he would, but hoped that he wouldn’t. Abbot leans over the wall that backs her desk, looking down at her, silent.

Samira, resolutely, does not look at him. She can hear his breathing— could hear his heartbeat if she strained.

Abbot waits until he can’t. “Do you want to step out?”

“I’m fine.”

”I believe you,” he says, although it’s obvious that he does not. “Do you want to step out?”

Samira grits her teeth, looking up to meet his eye for the first time since this morning. He doesn’t even look irritated. Just concerned.

The pit in her stomach grows.

When they’re outside, Samira sits on the step and stares at the sand under her feet as Abbot does the same, settling beside her. She rests her chin on her knees, looking down, the sun that hasn’t yet set burning the back of her neck.

Abbot doesn’t push. It would be easier if he did.

The sand whirls around them, kicked up by the slight cross-breeze. Samira can’t figure out how to phrase what she needs to say, so she doesn’t say anything at all. Eventually, Abbot’s eyes flick to her, with that look that burns through her, evaporating any type of composure she claimed to still have. “Samira,” he says, and, funnily, that’s enough to break her. The softness in his voice cradles her name.

“I’m going home,” she says.

Abbot’s thigh, pressed against hers, stops bouncing.

“They sent me the email this morning,” she says, voice steady despite her shaking hands. “I’m on a flight out of here in five days.”

She doesn’t look up, both afraid that Abbot will see the tears building behind her eyes, and afraid that she’ll see the same reflected back. There’s a silence that Samira is terrified to break. Right now, she can pretend that he hasn’t heard her. She can pretend that this is one of their normal conversations, where he says something vaguely flirty that she cradles in her chest and analyses in the dead of night.

Samira wants to go home.

She does. She misses her mom, and she misses the rain, and she misses the simplicity that came with it.

She misses home, but she knows that she’ll miss Jack Abbot far more.

Samira hears the breath he takes before he speaks. She understands the language of it, heavy with something he can’t bring himself to say. “Congratulations,” he says after an age, smiling at her.

Samira’s eyes flick to him, and his best impression of a brave face that is dissolving more by the second.

“I’m serious,” he says, noticing her disbelief.

“You are?”

Abbot nods. “I know it hasn’t been easy for you, being out here. And yeah, I’ll miss you. More than you know,” he says, eyes boring into her, not a hint of embarrassment in his face, despite his words making Samira want to curl up into a ball and never move again. “We all will. But you’ve served your time. Get out while you have the chance.”

Samira knows he’s trying to joke. He’s almost laughing as he talks, in that sardonic way.

Despite that, Samira still feels a tear streak down her cheek, before she can stop it. She uses her hand to bat it away, but Abbot’s seen it. Of course he has. He always sees the ugly part of her.

“Samira—“

Samira doesn’t want to describe his tone. It’s too heartbreakingly kind for what she deserves. “Thank you,” she rushes out, hushed. “Thank you, Abbot.”

Abbot opens his mouth, but before he can say anything, Samira opens hers. “For everything,” she adds. “Thank you.”

Abbot considers her for longer than she can chalk up to concern. There’s something deeper in it that she can’t name. If she tries to, she isn’t sure that she’ll make it out of Syria alive. “I should be the one thanking you.”

Samira almost laughs at the absurdity of it all.

“I guess we’re at an impasse, then,” she says, and, somehow, despite it all, she manages to smile.

Abbot returns it, his best attempt at a brave face. “I guess we are.”

That’s all they speak of it.

Samira half-manages to delude herself into believing that if they ignore it, the time won’t pass. She lies in bed instead of packing. She starts her shifts two hours early and leaves two hours late. She doesn’t tell Carver or Mendoza or any of the men she sees that she’s supposed to be shipping out, even when a few of them tell her of their own homecomings through blinding smiles.

It chips away at her. She can’t bluff to save her life.

The night before the world ends, Samira sits across from Abbot in their kitchen that is littered with binders, used coffee spoons, half-empty pens, and a DVD player that neither of them pay attention to. It’s the mundanity that kills her. Abbot throws a cereal bar at her, and after she catches it, Samira finds herself holding back tears, turning away from him to hide it. He laughs at a shaky joke she makes, and she has to bite down on her lip to keep from marching off and taking an ice-cold shower.

The night passes without any major traumas. Samira doesn’t sleep, because Abbot is in the kitchen and Samira can’t force herself to move away from him. It’s pitch black outside and Samira thinks, looking at him, that she could stay. It wouldn’t be perfect, and she’d hate herself in the morning, but she could stay.

“Give me your phone,” Jack says. Samira hands it over, and thinks I could stay. She thinks about opening her mouth and telling him, even if she’s scared of what he might say in return. Jack types something in, and then hands it back to her, and Samira thinks I could stay with such surety it’s a wonder he can’t read her mind.

“There’s my number,” he says.

I could stay, Samira thinks.

“Call me if you have a problem,” he says, nudging at her arm. “I mean it. Anything.”

“Okay,” she says, because she’s a scared little girl in a lab coat. She takes Abbot’s phone from where it’s sat on the table, punching her own in. Samira, she writes in the box for the contact name, hoping against hope that he’ll read her mind. “There’s mine,” she says. At his look of confusion, she adds, “In case you have a problem. Or just— Or just want to talk.”

Abbot inhales. “I have a problem,” he says.

Samira thinks she must look pained, her eyes wide. She grits her jaw, attempting to swallow down the three words that rise to her tongue. “I’m sorry,” she says instead, because she means it.

Abbot shakes his head. “Don’t be.”

”I am,” she says, with a fresh urgency, because she has to make him believe her— has to make him certain of the fact that she isn’t leaving this— leaving him— by choice. “I’m sorry,” she says again, watching as Abbot grits his own jaw and blinks up at the ceiling as if he’s trying to stave off tears of his own. The paradox inside of her threatens to split her in two.

After a moment, Abbot’s eyes return to her. “I’m serious,” he says, eyes pointedly looking at her phone. “Day or night. I’ll find a way.”

”I don’t doubt it,” she says. In another context, those words might be flirty, but here, they’re painstakingly sincere, because if there is one thing she could never doubt, it’s Jack Abbot’s devotion.

Samira looks at him, eyes roving over his face, because this is the last chance she may ever have to do so. It’s her last night alive on death row, and this is her last meal.

“Samira,” he says, his voice pained and honest, and Samira wants to quieten him with her mouth, but she can’t be that cruel. It would kill her.

(Abbot would leave if she asked, she thinks. But she can’t be that cruel.)

“Thank you,” she whispers, her final confession. “You’re the first person in— in a long time, to believe in me”

Abbot’s head tilts to the side, and Samira hates herself.

His hand reaches across the table, grabbing Samira’s without remorse. “Don’t thank me for that,” he says, voice barely audible. “You’d have to be the stupidest man alive to not believe in you.”

His hand is warm around hers. Samira turns her hand so that she can intertwine their fingers. “Thank you anyway,” she whispers, her bottom lip shaking.

Jack lets out a noise that breaks Samira wide open. Her fingers dig into his hand, nails and all, only to find that he’s squeezing back, as if his grip is enough to keep her there.

It’s not.

Samira leaves the next morning.

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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