Chapter Text
A neat pile of CD’s were always rotating in and out of Jack’s car, reshuffled and replaced on the last Saturday of the month, ferried back to the boxes and crates enshrining a set of shelves already stocked with a lifetime’s worth of physical media. Two would be fed into the CD player, two would sit rigid in their cases under the console, one was left in the passenger side glovebox to be routinely dusted off when he got sick of the first four but couldn’t switch them out for a few more days.
Early in the morning, it was alternative, The Cure, 1985, shuffled until “Close to Me” was queued up first, filling the silent buzzing of the car after a double shift when the sun barely peeks past the horizon while Jack tried to side-step an incoming headache. When it was his turn to make a lunch run for the street teams clothing repair and sorting session every third week, he switched on some motown, Stevie Wonder, 1973, skipped to the 8th track for “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing” while his phone chimed with an updated order list. It was post-hardcore, Fugazi, 1988, opening with “Waiting Room” when he leaves the house after any extended break from work, dragging himself through mid-afternoon traffic towards the promise of over ten hours on his feet and the siren call of the fire escape stairs.
His fingers would pry open the slightly cracked case of the CD after a long night; rock, The Psychedelic Furs, 1988, but it’s by always track 10, “Pretty In Pink”, when on his and Robby’s walks home when one can’t trust themselves or the other to drive that he mishears something and has to shut off the CD Walkman he keeps charged in his locker to hear him properly. If it was the end of a marginally successful shift and he still wanted to walk, he’d use headphones and queue up the same album.
Reaching across towards the glovebox, his forearm catches against the roughened edges of the jacket. As he unlatched it and pulled out the burned CD, he wondered if it was worth trying to fix. It was already pushing the tipping point of being salvageable, dried up and in dire need of softening. He might just have to throw it out in the end or see if anyone could salvage some decent leather scraps from it. But someone could still miss it, so he drags the jacket away from the edge of the seat as the CD begins to spin.
And I’d give up forever just to touch you / ‘Cause I know that you feel me somehow
Before pulling away, Jack eyes the door to the parking lot for a few extra seconds. Maybe someone would run out and ask him to come back in to help with a difficult patient, maybe Robby would have a sudden realization that he needed help and would finally admit it. Jack would only admit in short, stilted sentences between the remarks of his progress and shortcomings that Pittfest hadn’t reignited his incessant compulsions; they’d never left. Only doorknob confessions were the spaces he could confess that the police scanner had never been buried in the back of a closet, just switched off temporarily. He could admit to faltering, wavering in his routine, just on his terms.
—
Three sessions in and his skin felt like it had been scrubbed raw with bath salts. Jack could feel every thread in his clothes, singular drops of sweat that soaked into his skin, even the slight vibration of his vocal chords with every word. It hadn’t taken much to slip away, just a quick two thumbs up before hitting the top button of the elevator.
“So, it’s been a while since I’ve seen you Jack. How are you? Did anything specific bring you back?”
‘Well,’ he thought, sitting stiffly on the edge of Dr. Erikson’s newest installment of uncomfortable couches, ‘I sold my gun at a buy back program last week.’
Instead, Jack stared down at his overly polished shoes. “It’s been rough. I finally started working full-time again at a teaching hospital, now I’m an ER attending. It’s been nearly a month now, and it’s coming up to the anniversary of my last tour. I’m fine on shift, but the moment it ends I feel like I’ve been hit by a car.” A bitter laugh winded him, knocking Jack’s head into his hands as he stared at the carpet.
The air is just as sticky and thick on the roof as it was on the ground, rushing around him as he staggered away from the door. Both of his hands latch in his hair, dried out and coarse in the sweltering humidity of summer, nails digging into his scalp as he fought the urge to pull. It hadn’t been nearly this long since med school–now he could find purchase in it once more, as well as the satisfying sting that promised relief.
There’s barely any safeguards around the roof, just a single row of railings he could slip through or climb over.
Jack’s convinced the office’s decoration itself is a method of psychological warfare. It’s nearly indistinguishable from a living room, warm lighting casting soft shadows in each corner, like he’s just stopping over at a friend's place late at night. Then the couch itself is uncomfortable enough to leave him on edge, ever reminding him he’s supposed to be uncomfortable here, ready to confess so he can escape a second round of spinal torture.
“I’ve been having trouble sleeping, I thought that twelve hour shifts would finally start knocking me out but,” he sighed, dragging his nails across the arm of the couch, “whenever I get home, I just can’t. I get in every night and I can’t. I’ll get maybe four, five hours on the days I work. Any day I have off, I’m asleep for nearly all of it.”
“I’m scared of driving, so I’m walking home and well,” he slapped the top of his right thigh, “I’m getting some complaints.” A handful of blistering sores were being kept at bay, boiling beneath his irritated skin.
Jack knew he wouldn’t jump. He wouldn’t leave as a spectacle to be powerwashed off the side of the road. Not with his prosthetic shattered under him, his leg scattered around him in pieces like it was Fallujah all over again. He needed escape, he needed containment. Outside of the railing, confined in the small space between the railing and the edge. Letting the railing dig into his back, he stared down at the specks of people crowded around the entrance to the hospital, slowly filing in. No fights have broken out yet, but by the time he gets back down he’s sure someone would get fed up with something and start it.
It wasn’t even a bad shift by his standards–but it’s over now. It’s late July, the sun will stretch out through the sky for longer, but it will drown in the horizon soon. Darkness didn’t bother him, Jack slept with blackout curtains down 24/7. There was just too much of it, smothering him in the blanketing night sky. His palms press against his closed eyes.
“If you didn’t feel satisfied with your work at the hospital, why would you stay?” Dr. Erikson has broken a new record; the stiff couch lasted a total of two sessions, now replaced by a yellow settee with a back too low to lean against. Jack picked at a small groove in his wedding ring, nails click-click-clicking against metal.
“I have my reasons: I’m good at it, I like doing it, and there’s other things.” There’s been moments, prickly exchanges between him and a trauma surgeon that are all in good fun, mainly. “I just don’t like leaving. When I’m at home during the day, it’s fine. It’s the nights that get me. I think about Liz a lot. And it’s not like I’m back to the first stages of grieving, I just think. Loudly.” Wringing out his hands, Jack squeezes the ring again.
He hears. He hears milliseconds ahead of people. He hears the cacophony of cars beneath him and a siren moving closer. He hears people, their non-descript voices echoing into one sound. He hears the scrape of a door behind him, the creaking turn of a doorknob.
“We’re just about out of time today, can I give you a suggestion? Since it might take some time to work through this feeling, it could be helpful to make some changes that can support that process.” Grimacing, he nods. He’s done it all: support groups for veterans, for grieving spouses, for amputees. Half a dozen different permutations of medication that have only just settled into routine. A shelf of books all about processing and mindfulness and acceptance. He’s social and active and productive, the model of recovery. It’s only when he’s been dosed with a few too many hours in a dark house he can’t sell that he moves from fond remembrance to a quiet yet unyielding sense of hollowness.
When he’s tried to phrase it verbally, it feels like he’s about to be put on an emergency watchlist. He doesn’t want to go, he doesn’t want to disappear. Sometimes, he wants to just sit in the place where he thinks he’s supposed to feel that. Where it was.
Footsteps inch closer, making no effort to be quiet or hidden.
“Have you ever considered working the night shift?”
“You don’t have to go all the way up here to smoke, there’s a spot right by the ambulance bay.” It must’ve been nearly ten minutes since he left the ED for the roof, missing handoff entirely with Robby. Refusing to turn around, Jack slowly opens his eyes to glance at the street. An ambulance pulls out of the bay and heads south; the line of people is still the same length. “I don’t smoke, that shit’ll kill you. Shouldn’t you know better?” If it was still legal, there’d be a vending machine selling cigarettes in the break room.
“I do, most of the time. But,” he paused, fumbling with some type of packaging until something pops. “It would be easier to find you if you took your break there. The roof is the last place anyone would check in a hospital. But I don’t blame you, the view’s great from here.” No more footsteps, just the rustling of something being shoved back into his pocket. Jack keeps his shoulders pulled back, tense and ready for something, not that he’d know.
Careful and steady, he turns his head back to glance at the other attending, expecting him to be readied, prepared to drag him away from the ledge and pin him down to the ground until there’s an intervention team up on the roof. Instead, Jack gets to learn that if given gum, Robby will chew with his mouth open a little too often.
“Dana said we’ve got a fun one in South 15, is it fun in the ‘object stuck and a ridiculous excuse’ way or is it ‘you can’t wait to hand them over to me’ way?” The humidity had made his skin stick to his shirt and scrubs, clinging tightly as he ducks beneath the railing, leg clanking against the pole.
“Man, you know that’s the same thing.”
–
Switching off the engine and draping the jacket across his arm, Jack pulled himself out of the car and started on the half a dozen or so steps towards the front door. Both his scrubs and the jacket were itching and dry, like sandpaper across his forearms. ‘Just a little longer,’ he thought, flipping through his keys before slipping them into the lock.
Emptiness is almost right; however, there wasn’t a single shelf, cupboard, or stable surface left untouched. Jack’s organization only occasionally intersected with neatness, otherwise vaguely categorized piles appeared across the house. Half-compartmentalized, half-broken open like a resuscitative thoracotomy.
The jacket stayed balanced across his arm as he shouldered the door open, sticking his good foot through the door as Jack sneaked through his own front door.
Swinging one leg over the side guard and planting the other just in front of the footrest, Jack let himself fall straight into routine. Fingers pressing into the pin of his prosthetic and releasing the suction while he settled into the chair, the clicking of the door lock signaling the start of his own debrief. There’s a science to it—scraping off antiseptic and the general texture of hospital from his skin, separating himself from all his honorifics before sleep finally takes him out.
He’d never felt the need to question it, not when it kept proving itself like a routine overachiever. It slipped into the background of his mind, white noise buzzing in increasing amplitude as he moved into the kitchen, the jacket half-folded into his lap. There’s a strange, slightly fuzzy layer across it like a peach. Jack could hypothesize and speculate what awful kind of mold is now covering his skin and, but his semi-frequent testing was due soon enough anyways.
Spreading the jacket across the kitchen table, Jack pushes aside the few scattered belongings he’s never bothered to put away succinctly. A half-finished journal that got abandoned a month ago (though he won’t admit defeat), a singular cleaned mug that belongs in the left-most cupboard (though he won’t make space), and a second go-bag, packed identically down to another—albeit smaller—portable ultrasound (though he won’t be caught short).
Even in its degraded state, the leather still folded without cracking or cementing in a brand new fissure. Patting it down and turning up only empty pockets, Jack pushed himself away from the table as a countdown slowly ticked down in his head. An arbitrary timer that kept him moving like clockwork, forcing the task at hand to begin. Pulling the last of his premade salad mix from the fridge while he scrolled through his phone, Jack flicked through a series of missed messages in the quasi-abandoned softball group chat for the ‘Cherry Pitts’.
Ellis: Ik it’s too cold for any practices but there’s some indoor arenas we could book at the rec centre.
Shen: Games aren’t until May?
Ellis: The surgery team's been practicing since October.
Shen: Did Garcia tell you at your monthly mean lesbian meeting with her and Walsh or was it a rumour
Ellis: I want to win! Since someone 🫵couldn’t make it to third base since he got muscle cramps from dehydration. Who drinks coffee before running?
Shen: I can make it to third base just fine
Jesse: Do you always need an IV when you try for third base?
It’s not until he was already reaching for his crutches at the top of the stairs that he finally finished the text chain, squinting at the slightly blurry text. Glasses were a conversation his vanity—not age—kept delaying. Jack practically had a hoard of assistive devices, a few probably on “long-term loan” from the basement storage of the PTMC.
Not even the talk of his stairlift drew the same particularity of his appearance; especially since Robby had likened him to a character in one of his beloved historical novels (one of many books he’d see photos of in Facebook with Robby almost hiding behind the covers) when he’d offered to help install one for the basement.
“It’s actually called a carriage? And it’s travelling on a rail? I think I read about you last week, have you ever read The Kreutzer Sonata?”
Eight minutes: that was all the time he needed (slowly running out from the moment the fridge door opened) to shower, change, check and recheck the patch of reddened skin before he’s back downstairs and resettled into his chair, parking himself beside a cupboard to seek out the leather cleaner.
“C’mon you bastard, come to daddy,” he grunted, his hip digging into the short side of the chair while he precariously leaned toward the cupboard. Plastic wrapping eventually hits his fingers, dragging out an oversized ziploc with a collection of bottles rolling around inside. Years ago, in a long-gone phase, buried somewhere in a photo album and beside his first (now decrepit) prosthetic, he would’ve had a good reason for why he’d bought so much for leather upkeep. Little baby-punk Jack Abbot who kept his boots embarrassingly polished, the only part of that image that didn’t disappear after med school once he’d signed for recruitment.
His hand came back slightly sticky, purple dye clinging to his fingers like Deoxy-HbV (though nothing would ever beat the real thing). Jack didn’t even want to breathe in, holding his hand up and away to avoid the familiarity of the floral scent. Not tonight. It disappeared the moment his hand went under the tap, leaving him wondering the point of dyeing detergent if it wasn’t meant to be seen.
Locking the wheels of his chair, he started unpacking the mess contained within the bag while stabbing at the Tupperware with his free hand. Barely one, maybe two uses had been squeezed out of the bottles, still as neat and shiny as their promised results.
Switching between picking at the remains of a Greek salad and typing in new guesses for the type of leather, Jack squinted while zooming in on each photo the results turned up. Types of leather. Grey dyed leather. Types of leather damage. Signs of leather damage. Spot damage on leather. He even tried to search with a photo of the jacket, but the marks kept being mistaken for poor lighting or glare.
Dusting off the sleeves and reaching to his side, he hesitated over the first bottle of leather cleaner and the cloth wrapped around it. There hadn’t been that much thought around what happened once the jacket went back to the lost and found; if it would be picked up within the next month or join the ever diminishing pile of clothes for donation. Would it still be recognizable once fully cleaned? Or would it be too changed, too foreign to be brought home again?
A little change wouldn’t hurt. Right?
Tiny dots of leather cleaner mask the darkened spots, carefully wiped over until it disappeared into the dehydrated edges. Bright, shiny and oily like his photo in his sophomore yearbook. Bristles still caught against the cloth, refusing to settle fully no matter what direction Jack tried to soothe them into.
The spots seemed to be permanent fixtures in the jacket, fading around the edges and spanning across the back like freckles. A pair of thin lines cross both lapels and disappear into the side seams, stitched into seemingly undamaged material.
It smelt of almost nothing, of chemical reactions attempting to neutralize the other so they remain unnoticeable. Unassuming as possible, but it still lingered heavily in the empty air. Devoid of the lavishes of syrupy sweetness like the collection of cleaning products tucked beneath the sink, just hollow space.
He could break off of autopilot in the morning, just let routine take over, conforming around the deviation so he could crash into bed. For now, it’s all one-track: scraping out the plastic container before leaving it in the dishwasher, repackaging the products and placing them between the monoliths of the journal and mug, gingerly picking up the jacket to hang by the front door, retrieving his leg from the front door before finally ascending the stairs.
Foolishly, he’d found a few online journals on melasma and varying causes for skin pigmentation once he’d settled into bed. Suddenly, he’s become a nightmare patient with just a little more research; scrolling through articles and reviewing studies on everything from how liver spots develop to rapid and aggressive melanomas and the range of treatment available. All he needed was a plastic bag of loose pills and a staunch belief in pseudoscience healing and he’d become the newest nuisance in chairs. Jack had to forcibly close each frantically opened tab, half-heartedly remarking “He’ll be alright,” before switching off the lights.
–
An even stillness emerged in his sleep, a thoughtless, dreamless blessing that he slipped into on occasion. A sign of a good shift, a good routine. Blackout curtains kept it dark enough to sleep, rarely ever opened even on his days off. Not a ray of light could make it through.
Light. That was what he was. A lightweight fighter in middle and high school when he got bullied, scrawny, pale, and waiting for a growth spurt. A lightweight drinker throughout his undergraduate years that had to be helped up the stairs after four drinks and his stomach pumped after six. A light sleeper since birth, always a little twitchy and anxious, bolting up in bed whenever something fell downstairs or a pipe creaked too loudly. It served him well most of the time, covering emergency shifts within minutes of being called or kitting himself up at the first round of gunshots. Nowadays, it only took a few moments for the palpitations to disappear.
So when they persisted, thumping against the inner cavity of his chest as he reached for his phone, he didn’t have too many guesses as to why. And he was right, clocking the caller ID Robby and the photo taken at some pretentious IPA event. Swiping across the top of the screen, he finally adjusted his phone to answer the call.
“Hey Jack? Did you see anything near the parking lot when you left? My riding jacket, I thought I chucked it in my bag but it was unzipped when I got to my locker. Nothing in the lost and found either or on chairs and—“ he sounded out of breath, faintly breathing down the line while desperately trying to sound unfazed. A heavy, wheezing sound that he’s only heard when they’ve both gone to the gym and Robby insists he doesn’t need a warm up.
It’s not the wheezing or the call jolting him awake that almost made Jack tachycardiac; it’s the muted, persistent whistling of the wind that crackles through the phone alongside the bit-crushed beeps of the traffic below.
Not even a text—their unspoken warning system that one of them was itching to go up the elevator—just a call. God forbid what it would’ve been as a voicemail. Jack shifted up in bed, dragging himself towards the edge of the bed and staring down at the ground. Not the first, not the last, he’d get another call like this whether it was Robby or another army buddy who couldn’t get through to the VA helpline again.
“Slow your roll brother, first of all, good morning and good…afternoon?” Jack feigned checking a watch he never wore, pausing and shaking his head. A joke to get through to him, benign and easy to mask whatever cancerous thing had reawoken in the man clinging to the other end of the line. “Leather jacket? Kind of grey, kind of spotted? I picked one up from the lost and found after my shift, it looked like hell, thought it would be a nice surprise for whoever lost it if they got it back clean.”
“What the hell are you doing, taking stuff from the lost and found home?” Harsh and snapping, Robby’s voice was just loud enough to temporarily disguise the swell of traffic below him. “For fuck’s sake—yes, yeah, it’s mine. It’s mine.” Wind hissed down the phone, shrill and pitchy like a whistle.
“You’re not driving back without it, right?” They’d just gotten him riding with the (faceless) helmet again, even if Jack only ever saw him wearing it once. It’s all he saw: A red streak left on the road. Thoroughly grated against the sidewalk, more skin to be grafted back on than there was still clinging to him, leaving Robby a patchworked, raggedy man drowning in tubes and wires.
Something shifted on the other end of the line, scraping against the concrete ledge that was barely a step away from the railing. “I walked in today, remember? It was nearly freezing.” Right, the great revelation of the day; Robby wasn’t actively seeking to become a patient today. Yesterday. Whatever day it was twelve hours ago.
“Yeah, right. You should’ve worn the jacket then, even if it doesn’t look that warm. You’ve got better ones than this, do you really want frostbite?” Briefly, he considered trying it on just to see how ineffective it was, to make sure it wasn’t another iteration of the helmet. Too much and too strange a thought for any hour. Jack carded his hands through his hair, staring over at the outline of the window.
“Thanks, I’ll pick it up on Sunday then. And be careful with it! Thing’s nearly as old as I am, I’d like it back in one piece.” The noise he responded with was non-committal, too tired but still too awake to come up with a funnier response, like a joke twilight zone.
“And Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“Really. Thank you. And I’m sorry.”
“…What for?” he tentatively asked, quietly attempting to pull the liner up the remainder of his leg while angling it towards the opening of the socket. Jack’s fingers brushed across a newly aggravated blister, but the stairlift down wouldn’t be fast enough for his purpose. If he’d been twenty years younger, he could’ve run to the hospital within ten minutes, Robby still on the right side of the railing.
“Waking you, you sound awful.” Knots of tension that had built up over the call suddenly released, posture deflating until his forehead almost rested against his knees. Jack tried to quieten the uncomfortably thick sound of swallowing into the back of his hand, staring down at the floor until he was burning holes in the carpet.
“Well, you know I value my beauty sleep. I’m the people’s princess of the ER you know, I have to look my best.” There had to have been a few more newly turned white hairs somewhere on his head, carding his hands through his hair as if he could feel out the colour. “Get home and get some sleep brother. You’ll need the energy, it takes a lot out of someone when they face loss. Crosby can’t save you.”
“Aw fuck that, at least we didn’t trade out a player right before he became a powerhouse!” There’s a heavy scraping sound, the fire escape door opening and shutting, Robby’s voice echoing in the stairwell. Jack eventually found some kind of laugh stuck in his throat, reattempting to get his liner on. “Thorton was twenty years ago! You really do need sleep, I’ll see you Sunday.”
