Chapter Text
The hours drag on, but between patients, Samira eventually learns bits and pieces about what’s going on at Philly First National Bank.
Not enough for a full picture, but—enough to make at least some of what Jack said in that message to make sense.
Chairs isn’t her preferred way to spend a shift, it never has been, but these cases are no less important than the traumas that roll in from the other side of the ambulance bay. Plus, not being in the middle of it all means she can avoid the curious stares from pretty much all of her colleagues.
Like she told Robby, she knows what everyone says about her and Jack behind their backs. She knows what they’re probably saying about them now, as word gets around to all corners of the ED where Jack is, and her lack of attendance on major cases is all the more conspicuous as the hours go by.
She also knows that Jack has heard it all too, but he’s never implied that he has a thought about it, positive or negative.
Of course, in light of that text, it probably means he’s been hiding his real thoughts about it from her for, well, a while.
Fuck, she needs to stop thinking about it.
Donnie was kind enough to take her clipped “I’m not going to talk about it, let’s get to work.” for what it was, nodded without any hint of bemusement and introduced her to their first patient.
It’s why he is her favorite NP. He’s also the only NP on shift, but that’s beside the point.
She’s in the middle of taking a history on a teenage boy who has probably broken his wrist while playing field hockey, if the angle of his hand is anything to go by, when she catches Walsh, still in her purple scrubs, sauntering into triage. This is a case Samira can handle in her sleep, just like every other case she’s taken since—
Since.
Samira catches Walsh’s eye for just a moment as the surgeon props her elbow on the counter, and turns back to her patient to finish putting the x-ray orders in. Hopefully they’ll come be read before the kid’s red-tinged skin turns black and purple from bruising.
The clock in the corner of the screen says it’s 4:27 p.m.
Jack has been a hostage for four hours now.
When she’s done, she steps outside the triage hall and finds Robby staring at her from clear across Central. He’s been watching her like a hawk all afternoon, when he has the time to nose into this side of the ED, but hasn’t actually said a word to her since the break room. Once, that was normal. They'd go hours on shift together, not saying a word to one another. His sabbatical changed things, just a little, but even now, months after his return to work, he still insists that he's letting her run the show, when really he's just hiding from all the ways he failed her.
This though, today, is far from that.
Now, he looks like all he wants to do is call out and say something along the lines of time for you to get the hell out of here, Dr. Mohan.
Fortunately, he manages to restrain himself, merely tilts his head pointedly to where Dr. Walsh is waiting for her. Similarly, Walsh is pointedly ignoring the curious looks she’s gleaning from the doctors and nurses on this side of the ED, wondering why the hell she’s down here and not trying to domineer her way into either one of the trauma rooms.
“Ready to get out of here?” She mutters out of the side of her mouth.
No, not really, except for the part where she keeps flinching whenever anyone mentions what’s going on at the bank, or when her patients’ phones ping with texts and social media updates. It takes everything in her to ignore the news running on all the screens in the waiting room when she pokes her head out to call in the next patient.
Last she heard, via chatter between Princess and Perlah, the standoff is still on-going, and she has to keep reminding herself that no news is just that.
No news.
“I have to finish the chart on my last patient and then we can go,” she carefully places her iPad back into the charging station, does not look Walsh in the eye as she speaks, honestly doesn’t even want anyone to know that they’re talking right now.
Walsh is Jack’s best friend. She is Jack’s—whatever.
Her colleagues aren’t stupid. As oblivious as she can be to social situations, even Samira can do the math.
Robby knowing is embarrassing enough.
“I don’t want to make a big deal about this.”
“Couldn’t agree more, Mohan,” Walsh says with her trademark smirk, pushes off the counter. “I’ll meet you on the parking deck. Third floor.”
—
Of all things, Walsh drives one of those absurd, oversized trucks with an extend cab and an extended bed. Barely fitting into its parking space, it idles in one reserved for attendings as Samira climbs—actually climbs, because the truck is also lifted for reasons she couldn’t attempt to fathom on a normal day, let alone a mess like today—and twists around to toss her bag next to Walsh’s in the back seat.
Sometime between their run-in at Triage and Samira finding a second to quietly murmur to Robby that she wrapped up her current cases and was going to go, unless you changed your mind and need me to stay, to which he responded with a firm, go home, Dr. Mohan, Walsh changed out of her scrubs and into a pair of jeans and a t-shirt layered under a hoodie and a black leather jacket. It’s the most human she’s ever seen of her, which is a little terrifying, and also kind of feels like that one time Samira ran into her seventh-grade English teacher while she and Amma were at the grocery store.
The whole time, Walsh has spent scrolling through her phone, and she rolls her head against the headrest to look at Samira once she’s buckled in, “You good, Mohan?”
Good?
She’s been on the verge of a panic attack since, well, the panic attack she almost had at just before 1 p.m. in the break room.
Instead of answering, because she has no idea what she’s supposed to say, let alone why she’s allowing herself to be taken off hospital property in the middle of shift by one of the senior trauma surgeons she only barely knows. She manages a helpless kind of sound instead, and Walsh lets out a low chuckle as she tosses her phone into a cup holder and pulls out of the parking space, “Yeah,” she mutters, the wheels screeching as she accelerates down the ramp toward the exit. “Me too.”
—
She knows Walsh doesn’t know where she lives, not unless Robby told her—which, he’s been meddling, clearly, but she’s pretty sure he didn’t tell Walsh to waste her time just dropping Samira off on her way home—so she can’t help but feel a little silly when she asks, “Where exactly are we going?”
Walsh gives her a sideways look, the kind that clearly says, do you have to ask? So, Samira settles in to wait out the rest of the drive to get any answers.
A few minutes of expertly navigating this sailboat of a car through traffic later, and Walsh pulls into the underground garage of a high-rise in the middle of the Golden Triangle. It’s one of the newer builds, and the top-three floors of the building are broken up on alternating sides with small terraces, in a way that makes it look like it's fragmenting the closer it gets to the sky.
It’s the kind of place Samira couldn’t imagine living in, even once she starts making that sweet, sweet attending physician salary. These apartments are so expensive, and she just looks forward to the day she can afford to move into a building with a functioning elevator, maybe a place with a second bedroom she can turn into an office.
500 more square footage, and a separate room for better work-life balance.
Cute.
Mutely, Samira follows Walsh into the elevator, where she taps a fob on her key ring on a reader built into the panel above the number buttons. It chirps and glows green along the top edge before she jams the side of the fob into number 10. The elevator doors reopen to a wall of windows that look out onto the city skyline, and Walsh leads her to a door with the letter B next to it in brass. She enters a code on the keypad on the door and pushes it open, but instead of leading Samira inside, she tosses her bag into what looks like a small foyer before pulling the door shut with a, “Come on.”
“What?”
Walsh stops in the middle of the carpeted hallway, tilts her head in that way that she uses when she’s about to throw down in favor of surgery in the middle of a trauma, “We’re not about to camp out for the rest of this at my place when Jack has the better booze.”
“You two are neighbors.”
She looks at her like she’s not about to bother confirming the obvious, “Major Pain In My Ass swooped in and closed on the last unit with terrace space before Rocky and I could.”
Samira can’t help the tiny laugh that escapes her, in spite of it all, “Why do I get the impression that it was on purpose?”
As she approaches the door to Unit C, Walsh side-eyes her again, “Yeah, you really have got him figured out.”
Something deep in her stomach twists while Walsh busies herself with inputting the door code to Jack’s apartment.
Like, of course Samira knows him.
They’ve worked together for years, since she started doing clinicals when she in med school at Carnegie Mellon before the pandemic. And yeah, they do text all the time now—but that only started because Admin made him write up a case report on the pigtail catheter after PittFest and he insisted she take credit as the doctor that actually performed the procedure. And, okay, sure, sometimes the work on that case report was done at coffee shops or diners, depending on who was coming on or off shift, but it’s not like she sees him outside of work all that much or anything.
It’s not like she knows where he lives, or what he does in his spare time when he’s not on shift or with TEMS, or that Emery Walsh is close enough to him to both live next door and have her own code to get into his apartment when he’s not home.
So, to have someone who’s actually known Jack for—and that’s the thing: Samira doesn’t even know how long he and Walsh have known each other—say to her face that she knows Jack, the off-duty, snarky, somewhat dorky nerd version of him, it’s both heartening and heartbreaking when she’s really only scratched the surface of what it means to know him.
And there’s every chance that this, right here today, is all she gets, if things go wrong.
There’s a bench on the right side of the foyer, under a row of coat hooks—the Carhartt he’s owned forever isn’t accounted for, but his raincoat is—and she drops her bag on the other side of it, next to a bucket containing two umbrellas and a pair of forearm crutches.
She’s always lived in a shoes-off household, but even more so since that first clinical rotation, when it really hit her just what kind of nasty could end up on the soles of her on-sale Hokas, so she kicks them off and toes them under the bench, out of the way while Walsh peels out of her leather jacket and hangs it on the open coat hook.
The foyer leads to a narrow hallway that opens up to an expansive living area, one of those absurd kinds that has not one, but two distinct sitting areas alongside the kitchen and dining spaces. Being a corner unit, the room boasts massive walls of windows that look out to the junction of Pittsburgh’s three rivers. On the near side is the first, the main sitting area, with a u-shaped sectional that faces the interior wall, a massive flat-screen mounted to it. The smaller sitting area, between the first and the dining area is little more than a chaise and an armchair bracketing a small side table being used as a bookshelf, both seats positioned to take in the view. Then there’s a six-person dining room table—which feels massive compared to the coffee-table-for-one she eats most of her meals at at her own apartment, when she’s not just choking down calories over the sink to say she’s eaten something—and an island that splits it off from the open kitchen.
Walsh heads in that direction, grabs a pair of rocks glasses from one of the upper cabinets—another thing she knows that Samira doesn’t, Walsh probably doesn’t have to guess about anything in here—fills them with ice from the dispenser and takes them to a bar cart set up by the first pane of windows.
“Watch your toes, Dissertation’s around here somewhere,” Walsh says absently as she pours more than a healthy amount into each glass, because they’re going to need it.
Already feeling more than a little out of place as she trails after her, looking at the furniture, like something straight out of a Pottery Barn catalogue, but not really taking it all in, and Samira’s frown deepens, “Dissertation?”
“Please,” Walsh scoffs. “Jack doesn’t shut up about that cat. You can’t possibly not know about her.”
“Oh, no, I do,” she knew that, has seen more than her fair share of pictures of the black and white, long-haired tripod. They made her feel a little less sad after she had to put Lil Wayne down last year, but Jack doesn’t send them all that often. “I thought her name was Dizzy?”
“Yeah. Short for Dissertation.”
“Wait, seriously?”
Walsh opens her mouth, and then seems to think better of it, shakes her head, “Ask Jack,” she says instead. “He tells the story better.”
“Right,” her response is rote, as if she can focus on anything in the future when Jack’s present is so uncertain.
She takes one of the glasses, and while Walsh doesn’t necessarily say anything in salute, she does have a pointed tilt to her head that Samira returns, too nervous to even think about what they’re silently toasting for, before she clinks glasses and takes a slow sip.
Samira doesn’t drink much, purely by virtue of the fact that she has no interest in wasting money she can use to pay off her student loans one hour faster with alcohol, of all things, so she’s not sure what’s in her glass, but she takes a sip of the amber liquid anyway, winces a little at the smoky burn.
It’s strong, stronger than she thought, and while being drunk may help the hours pass faster, it probably won’t help with much else.
—
They end up migrating to the couch, where Walsh grabs two remotes from one of the drawers on the near side of the coffee table. She messes around for a few minutes, before bringing up one of the local news apps, and pulling up the current broadcast. The volume ticks up even as subtitles flash over the bottom of the screen, obscuring the lower chyron at points.
Samira lets her body sink into the cushions, and holds her glass on her lap until Walsh opens one of the other drawers in the coffee table and produces a pair of coasters, tosses one in front of her, and the other a few feet away, where Samira can reach.
She debates placing her glass on it, makes an aborted shift toward the coffee table, but ultimately decides it’s better to have something to hold onto right now, so she doesn’t dig her short nails into the palms of her hands. Walsh, busy mashing the rewind button to scroll through the broadcast to see the last time they gave an update on the situation at the bank, doesn’t notice.
The sun is diving toward the horizon, bathing the living room in golden light, and Samira can’t help but count the hours since Jack texted her—coming up on five and a half—while Walsh tosses the remote on the cushion next to her with a grunt, goes for her phone muttering something about trying to find a better update on the public cable access channel.
“What’s on your mind, Mohan?” She asks, eyes focused on her phone’s screen. “Other than the obvious.”
Samira looks away from the TV screen, “I just don’t understand why you’re doing this,” nor does she really understand what she’s doing here, in Jack’s apartment, of all places, and there’s a part of her that rails against the fact that she’s not at work when she should still be on shift. “I know you weren’t about to just drop me off at my attending’s apartment, where I’ve never been, and leave me alone here, but you absolutely could have just left me off at my apartment and waited this out alone, or with your family, or with Jack’s family, or something.”
That makes Walsh look at her, and Samira feels like she’s reading every inch of whatever’s on her face, before she says, “Who would you have called for support, if I did that?”
Dropping her gaze down to her glass, Samira takes a long sip.
Who would she have called?
Hi Amma, sorry I’ve been avoiding your calls for so long. Yes, I’m home early today, and I’m freaking out because our hospital’s senior night shift attending—who I have never spoken of to you—has told me, over text, that he is in love with me, right before he walked into a hostage situation he may never walk out of. He is a white man at least fifteen years older than me, and I need you to talk me down from the panic attack I’ve been sitting on since lunchtime, because I’ve only just realized I probably feel the same way, but also haven’t had the time to actually work through my thoughts about it yet. And I need you to stop whatever it is you’re doing 350-plus miles away from me and my crisis, completely upend your schedule without asking me about the massive power imbalance between us and what this means for the end of my residency, and stay on the phone with me until he gets out and calls me, or he doesn’t and it’s Dr. Emery Walsh, one of our trauma surgeons and his best friend, who calls me instead to tell me that he’s grievously injured or dying or dead.
Yeah, that’d go over real well.
Everyone else who could maybe help keep her calm about this, she knows through the hospital, but they’re also the last people she wants to know about any of this, because all it’ll do is throw a lit match on the tank of gasoline that fuels the hospital’s fire pit of gossip.
Which leaves Robby as the only other person who knows.
And there’s no possible way he could help her, let alone would she want him to.
Okay, so maybe Walsh has a point.
But why does Walsh want to support her?
They barely know each other. Walsh is one of the senior trauma surgeons on the faculty, and Samira’s just a fourth-year resident who works with her from time to time.
It occurs to her, then, that the same way Jack will sometimes tell stories of the intense professional discussions he and Walsh have over tricky cases, read: he wants to do something batshit he used to do in a cave halfway around the world and while she knows he can do it, she’d rather take care of things up in the surgical suite, but that also means that he may be telling Walsh stories of their work together too.
Because that can be the only reason why she’s volunteer for something like this.
And that—yet another piece to the puzzle she had no idea she's been accumulating for months now, but is still just one tiny corner compared to the full picture.
She really doesn’t want to know what Jack’s told Walsh about her.
Fortunately, Walsh doesn’t force Samira to voice aloud that this all goes back to the fact that she doesn’t have anyone to support her through something like this, just goes back to her phone, jabbing at the screen with her index finger, and finally casts a video from a press conference timestamped about an hour go to the TV.
—
“How much does Jack’s family know about what’s going on right now?” Samira asks after the video of the police department’s press conference ends, bristling at the lack of new information outside of the refrain that negotiations for safe release of all the hostages is ongoing, and they look forward to a peaceful resolution to this nightmare.
She might be the only person in the general public who knows that one of the hostages is pregnant—potentially in labor.
There’s something about having the kind of privileged information makes her feel nauseous, but that could just be the fact that she only has two granola bars and some alcohol in her stomach today.
She told Walsh too, a little while ago when she realized that Robby, for all his eye-roll inducing nosiness, had only told her there was a patient in distress in the bank.
Walsh took in that news with a look of grim determination, like she would have been right there with Jack in the bank if she’d been given a chance. Hell, if given the chance, she’s just as likely to dart out of the apartment, get in her absurd truck, and head straight to the scene too.
“They know enough.”
Walsh’s comment draws her back from her thoughts.
Samira knows Jack has two sisters and is pretty sure they’re both local, everyone making the move up from West Virginia over the last decade or so. There are a couple college-aged nieces he texts with regularly, and a bunch of younger nieces and nephews he tries to keep up with.
“I’m Jack’s emergency contact right now because it was hard enough for Nora, let alone Erin and Amelia,” Jack’s late wife, his older and younger sisters, respectively, Samira knows this. “Back in Afghanistan, he was busy doing his best imitation of Schrodinger’s Cat on the med-evac, and they didn’t know if he was alive or dead for almost two days. Hell, it took me almost twice as long to get word where I was stationed, shit with the military can be slow like that. After Nora passed away, Jack asked me to be his go-between. Not that I want to try to dive into the man’s brain, but I think he doesn’t like the idea of him putting his sisters out again, especially after something like that. I’ve been keeping Erin and Amelia up to date since I found out.”
“And they’re okay with that?”
Walsh shrugs, “It’s not like Jack really gave them much of a choice. They’ll let him hear it later.”
Well, that tracks.
“Fortunately, there haven’t been many times since he was discharged that I’ve had to cover for him like this. I’d make much more of a stink if he made this a regular thing.”
Well, that can almost be comforting, if she considers those words with a squint and tilt of her head.
“He did say,” Samira doesn’t know why the words are coming out of her mouth, can only credit it to the half-drunk glass in her hand. “In the text he sent me, that he wasn’t trying to get himself killed.”
At that, Walsh lets out a derisive snort, and the TV screen reflects the way she flips through apps on her phone to her social media folder, “For once,” she breaks off, looks sidelong at Samira. “You know he ends up on the roof at the end of some shifts for a reason, right?”
“I do,” she says into the glass, takes a sip.
It’s kind of something she’s always known, heard the gossip about that habit early on, during the pandemic. It didn’t surprise her that it got worse after Jack returned from bereavement leave a couple years back. Even after they started getting close, she’s never gone up there after him—she always left that to Robby and Dana—has never considered if she’d be welcomed up there.
Considers now if she would be any more or less welcome now that she knows how he feels.
“Like I said,” Walsh shrugs. “It happens sometimes. You think you can live with that?”
Depends on how this day ends.
Samira nods once though, slowly, “I think so.”
Once again, Walsh does that thing where it feels like she’s reading every inch of her, the things she can and can’t say, the things she does and doesn’t know, but seems to be satisfied by what she finds if her, “Fair enough,” is anything to go by.
On the flip side, it’s a little surprising—she honestly thought Walsh would push her for something more definitive.
—
Samira’s not sure just how much time passes between getting to Jack’s and the sun finally disappearing over the horizon, and she and Walsh have spent that time scrolling through bootleg YouTube videos and Instagram Reels posted under the hashtag #firstphillyhostage for any information that the news reports have left out, any conjecture they could try to peel away through to the truth.
Most of the videos are just people who live in the apartment buildings near the bank talking about how there is a hostage situation, and the others focus on the victims from the other robberies, the ones who were grievously injured, the one who died.
Not very helpful.
Sometime around then, Dizzy finally decides to show her face, meeping curiously as she trots in from the hallway that leads to the bedrooms. Her face markings are mostly white, except for a black smear between her ears, and in pictures, Samira always thought she looked like a skunk, and even more so now that she’s seeing her in person.
Dizzy hops with that funny little three-legged trot of hers onto the open cushion between her and Walsh, and her whiskers tickle the backs of Samira’s fingers when she holds her hand out for her to sniff.
Walsh flaps her hand out when Dizzy turns in a circle and goes to her for some pets, clearly familiar with her neighbor, but then she comes back over and steps right into Samira’s lap, purring loudly as she curls into a little ball. Eventually, she hums a half meow, half sigh, and settles her her little head by Samira’s knee.
The weight of her body is grounding and her fur is soft. Not much comes away on the hand she runs over Dizzy’s back, feeling every little bump in her spine, all the way down to the flat bit by the base of her tail, and part of Samira can imagine Jack sprawled out on the couch after a long day, Dizzy purring just like this as he meticulously untangles her fur with one of those wire brushes, or even one of those grooming gloves.
Walsh brings up yet another video, and when Samira’s hand settles on Dizzy’s side rather than continuing to pet her as she watches the 60-second vertical of a man talking about the alleged, but probable FBI snipers stationed in the apartment above his, Dizzy, the demanding little thing, thumps her tail over Samira’s arm, pointed, until she relents and starts petting her again.
Samira’s focus ends up almost entirely on the little purring cat on her lap, and eventually Walsh finally gives up on the hunt through Instagram and TikTok. She goes back to the local news when a loud growl echoes from the depths of Samira’s stomach, loud enough for not just the cat to startle and hop up, her three little feet digging into the tops of her thighs, but also for Walsh right next to her to hear, and—
Oh, right.
She’s had two granola bars and alcohol to eat today.
She clears her throat, “Um-”
“Come on, Mohan,” Walsh cuts her off as she gets up. “Half the hospital’ll be on my ass if I let you die of starvation.”
She highly doubts that, especially considering how, until today, Robby has pretty much ignored her for most of her junior year and almost all of her senior year of residency so far, but she nudges Dizzy off her lap and follows Walsh over to the kitchen anyway. She slides onto one of the barstools lining the dining area side of island while Walsh starts rummaging through the refrigerator, produces a couple boxes that look like leftovers.
Dropping them on the island, Walsh pries the lid off one, and then the other, tilts them both to get a good look at what’s inside, “Chicken and rice or leftover lo mein?"
Her stomach still isn’t exactly settled, so Samira opts for the blander option. Walsh directs her to one of the upper cabinets for bowls, and when she turns around with a pair of forest green ceramics, her eyes land on her phone, resting innocently on the counter, and that’s when she realizes—
Samira drops the bowls, but they’re close enough to the countertop that they just rattle on their bases a couple times before settling, the sound loud in the quiet of the expansive space.
Walsh stops in the middle of prodding at the microwave to look at her, “You good, Mohan?”
“I, um, I just—I never responded.”
“What?” Walsh asks, sharp, as she grabs the bowls and dumps the contents of the Tupperware into them.
Samira scrubs her palms over her face, brain going a mile a minute, “Jack texted me, and dumped out basically everything he’s ever felt for me, then walked into one of the craziest situations I’ve ever heard of, and I’ve been so wrapped up in my own bullshit and this thing that’s been in front of me for I don’t even know how long, that I never said anything back, and what if it goes wrong and he thinks I’m gearing up to go to HR and—”
“Mohan,” Walsh barks, cutting her off alongside the slam of the microwave door. “Breathe. You’re going to give yourself another panic attack.”
Samira glowers at the thought of Robby telling tales, since he’s the only way Walsh would have figured out that she didn’t exactly have the best reaction to that video of Jack walking into the bank, which is entirely reasonable under the circumstances.
That said, she sighs, squeezes her hands around the back of her neck, “I still shouldn’t leave him on read like that.”
Walsh turns, crosses her arms over her chest as she leans against the double ovens stacked next to the microwave, “I’m not going to tell you to calm down, because god knows the least helpful advice ever, but I can tell you for sure that right now, he’s focused on—well, no, he probably is thinking about you, at least a little bit, because you're a damn good doctor and he's fucked up in the head enough to want you in on this with him, if there weren't a bunch of assholes with guns around, but he’s not going to be upset if he doesn’t see a text back from you when he gets out. Honestly, I don’t think there’s anything you can do to actually upset him.”
“But-”
“Please,” she scoffs. “You’ve had him in the palm of your hand since that bat-shit with the pigtail. And don’t get me started on his reaction to the EZ-IO stunt. He can be patient, Mohan.”
Samira stretches across the island for her glass, takes another healthy sip, “I don’t know how I feel about you guys talking about me behind my back.”
“If you haven’t figured out that all attendings talk about their residents behind their backs, I don’t know where you’ve been. We even have bingo cards,” she smirks, and Samira can’t tell if she’s joking or not, but refuses to ask. “Don’t worry, Jack has no interest in derailing your career as the future of medicine,” she says as if she’s repeating something she’s heard from him often, which—there’s no way. “Your career matters more to him than his own.”
That is—impossible.
Jack has been one of the leading combat medics turned ER physicians east of the Mississippi for longer than she likes to think about. He’s published in almost every major medical journal, and speaks regularly at medical conferences all over the country about the applications of advanced combat medicine techniques in emergency medicine to minimize critical patient mortality, but she’s the future?
He can’t possibly think that.
But it’s also not like Walsh to lie.
“Still,” she huffs, trying to put all the thoughts of, well, all of that, behind her for now. “I should say something.”
She knows she’s being more than a little ridiculous, and god, Walsh is being so beyond patient with her. And, probably, once this is all over, will never let her live any of this down.
But that’s future!Samira’s problem.
“Mohan, he doesn’t even have his phone on him right now. It’s fine. I promise you.”
Grabbing the glass and her phone, Samira pushes away from the island, “I’m going to get some air.”
Without waiting for Walsh’s response, Samira makes a b-line for the doors that lead out onto the terrace.
It’s a decent-sized space, with a small corner sectional wrapped in all-weather fabric, a square table and four chairs, plus a tiny herb garden hanging off the balcony railing filled with what looks like rows of the same leafy plant, growing sparse now that the weather is starting to turn. Samira steps up next to it and braces her forearms against the railing, the rocks glass in both hands as she stares out at the river.
Now that the sun’s gone down, the temperature has plummeted from the decently cool of the afternoon to the actually cold of impending winter, and Samira would shiver without her jacket, if not for the fact that the cold is helping ease away her panic attack and raging anxiety.
She finally finds her way to the bottom of the glass, and carefully balances it on the corner of the planter next to her knee.
Slipping her phone into her palm, Samira opens her Messages again—Robby sent a text around shift change, both checking in on her in a way he never has, and also telling her not to come in tomorrow, as Mel’s volunteered to take her shift. There’s also a text from Mel herself, saying she hopes all is okay, and something else that’s cut off by the message preview, which means she knows at least a little about what’s going on and fuck half the hospital probably already knows where she is.
And if not, they’re speculating like hell.
Samira’s going to owe her big time, feels bad enough Mel and the others already ended up with whatever workload she would have had today, had she not been relegated to Chairs, and the fact that another shift covered means less time with her sister.
She ignores both texts and thumbs down to her thread with Jack, already mostly memorized. She looks back out at the river, and bites down on her lower lip, thinking of all the things she wants to say to him. The water shimmers a bit, turning gray as fog starts to roll in.
So many of those things, they’re impossible to put into words, and so many more that she wouldn’t dream of sending to him through text—ironic considering the depth of what he sent her, but she just can’t bring herself to do the same. She muses so long the screen dims, and she lets her phone automatically lock, looks back out at the water.
Through the closed glass door, the microwave beeps when its timer expires, and even with as little appetite as she has, her body is clearly signaling loud that she needs to eat anyway.
Finally, she unlocks her phone again and dashes a quick message to him, hesitates just a moment before she hits send.
—
Eating doesn’t help her feel any better than she felt when she was anxious and borderline hypoglycemic, but at the very least, she won’t pass out now. At least, not from hunger.
She eats at the island with her elbows propped on either side of the bowl in contravention to every ounce of etiquette she’s ever learned, but Walsh stands on the other side, digging through her lo mein over the sink, so she’s probably not being that offensive.
“He may be pasty white boy, but he does know how to eat like a normal person,” Walsh cracks when she sees Samira start picking at the chicken and rice undoctored, gestures at the refrigerator with her fork. “Hot sauces galore in the fridge.”
Samira has the tolerance for more spice than probably exists on the entire floor of this building, but it’s enough that she’s getting food in her mouth and sending it into her stomach, even if it tastes like textured nothing on her tongue.
“Thanks,” she says, but doesn’t move to get up, cuts a piece of chicken in half with the side of her spoon.
Walsh pauses with her down fork halfway to her mouth and regards her for a moment, must see that she’s not about to completely lose her shit again, and goes back to her own meal.
After, Samira insists on doing the dishes, since it’s the least she can do. She dries the bowls with a green and white kitchen towel, places them back in the cabinet where she found them. For a moment, she glances at the rest of its contents—a matching tableware set for at least eight, though there’s dust gathering on the tops of the stack of bread plates, so they might not get much use.
Feeling way too nosy, she carefully closes the cabinet door.
“Silverware drawer?” She calls across the room to where Walsh has returned to the public access broadcast.
“Drawer next to the far left cabinet.”
It’s organized by a drawer insert, one of the nice wood kinds, not plastic, clearly bought from a place that isn’t Target or Walmart, or where she gets most of her kitchen ware when she bothers to try to make her shoebox of a one-bedroom apartment feel like it’s lived in by a real person: the Dollar Store.
Walsh is busy looking for new updates, and after wiping down the countertop where they ate their food with that same towel, Samira finds a basket under the sink with a couple dirties and adds it to the pile. There’s a shelf above it with a stack of matching clean towels and she grabs one off the top, hangs it on the handle to the dishwasher.
She wanders through the great room, her socked feet smooth on the hardwood floors, finds herself drifting toward the smaller sitting area by the windows. Trailing her fingertips over the back of the chaise, she stops in front of the small table between it and the armchair.
There are a couple books, some hardback, some paperback, stacked neatly in one of the middle shelves. On top, next to a framed picture of Jack and a small auburn-haired girl with matching freckles—one of the littles, taken recently, she thinks, if the specific spectrum of his hair color is anything to go by—are a small stack of medical journals, with half-sized, neon green sticky tags poking out at random intervals.
Grabbing the top-most journal, she flips it open to one of the tabs, finds an article on new research on tourniquet applications for victims in combat zones.
She feels a sympathetic twinge in her right calf as she carefully flips over to the next tab.
Fortunately, that one is less traumatic, a report on a new kind of suture material for combat medics, as are the other four tabs in this journal, so doesn’t seem like he uses this quaint little sitting area to self-flagellate on if his leg could have been saved with the advent of new methodologies.
She pushes that journal aside and finds a couple old copies of The Lancet, a few more JAMAs, including one she’s already read through, and another obscure combat medicine journal. Picking one of the copies of The Lancet at random, she flips open to the first tab, brows hiking up to her hairline when she finds an article breaking down race-based incidents in veterans, and another article in one of the other editions on the study of minority experiences in rural emergency departments.
One is an article she’s already read, the other, she hasn’t, and she narrows her eyes at Jack’s cramped handwriting in one of the margins that says ask Mohan re: her research.
Oh.
Distantly, she registers the sounds the local evening news echoing from the TV, talking about another one of those absurd discount airlines being carved up and sold for parts to the other airlines where you can’t breathe without being charged another $30.
The tags in the other journals mark a combination of both combat medicine and race-based articles, plus one random article about recovery times for incomplete juvenile growth plate fractures that looks like it could be an interesting read.
For months now, whenever they share shifts, Jack will, at random, pepper her with questions or offer up random facts that pertain to her research, but always disappearing into another room, another case, another trauma before she has the chance to ask where he got the information from.
Eventually, it’ll end up in one of those journals he’s sent her, another case report, but the interest he’s taken into her work, well, Robby, her actual faculty supervisor, has never really cared all that much—for reasons Samira chooses not to think of—and for so long she just thought that Jack was taking interest in his role as one of the senior attendings in her department.
But now?
Yeah, she’s not going to be able to focus for shit on what’s on the TV, so she grabs the journals to pour through what Jack's seemingly hand-picked for her and brings them with her to the couch, curls up in the corner opposite Walsh.
Shock of all shocks, she can barely focus on the journals either, which is unfortunate, since there’s a really interesting article on new proposed teen sedation recommendations in the same edition as the juvenile growth plate article.
Dizzy ends up back on her lap though, so at least she has a purring, built-in heating pad kneading biscuits into her lower abdomen while Walsh grumbles at the TV for continuing to provide them with no news about the hostage crisis that they haven’t already heard for the last few hours.
As she tries to read, Samira can’t help but think about the pregnant woman inside the bank. She’s been there for, what, at least thirteen hours by now? Is she still in labor? How long has she been in labor? Was Jack able to stop it? Has another hostage been added to the list, this one mere hours old?
She takes a long, slow breath, counting the rise and fall of Dizzy’s back with the palm she pressed to it. None of this train of thought is helpful in any way, the last thing she needs is another panic attack. A continuation of the panic attack from this morning. Whichever.
Pinching the bridge of her nose, she digs the tips of her index finger and her thumb into the corners of her eyes, blinks until her eyes feel less dry.
“You know, Jack’s my best friend.”
“Huh?”
Samira drops her hand, blinks again to clear her vision and finds Walsh looking at her. She’s melted into the couch, bleary and a little soft at the edges in a way Samira’ never seen her, likely due to the hour, the fact she’s probably been awake as long as Samira has, if not longer. Not to mention was in surgery for hours before she could get coverage and step away.
“He’s my best friend,” she says again.
Hospital scuttlebutt has said many things about Jack and Walsh’s relationship, from just that, best friends, to the absurd kind of speculation of all the hate-sex they have in PTMC’s on-call rooms.
Of course, she knew that was bullshit, Jack jokes about the weird ones the nurses come up with all the time, and not just with her.
The dynamic they share in the middle of intense traumas, of course you have to be close to argue and snipe and almost come to blows over their differing definitions of standard of care.
“I kind of figured.”
Walsh’s mouth twists as she fiddles with the remote, turning it over in her hands, “Not to get all sappy or anything,” as if Samira would ever think that of her. “But it’s important you know who he has in his corner, especially on days when shit like this goes down. This won’t be the last.”
“I understand. You’ve been evaluating my reactions all afternoon. His sisters come next, right? Then the older nieces? Does Nora’s ghost come into the picture before or after all the littles?”
Turns out her filter is completely obliterated, and her tone is probably a little borderline, but Walsh just cackles, loud enough to make Dizzy pick up her head with a meep before resettling on Samira’s ribcage.
Still chuckling, Walsh shakes her head, her hair dragging against the couch fabric, a few strands starting to float from the static, “Oh, Nora would have loved you.”
Something weird flutters in her chest at that.
If Nora Abbot was still alive, she wouldn’t be sitting here right now.
She cuts herself off from that train of thought, labels it as unproductive and shoves it into a box in the corner of her mind where she keeps the other things she likes to avoid.
Where she used to keep her thoughts about Jack, until one text message dragged everything out into the open kicking and screaming.
“You’re doing just fine, Mohan.”
Pursing her lips, Samira nods once, and then again, “Thanks.”
—
She completely gives up on trying to read.
It’s a truly futile effort, and the articles Jack tagged, plus a few that he didn’t, Samira knows are too good to just give a half-assed attempt at reading without truly absorbing. There’s so much information here that is not just interesting and groundbreaking, but will make her a better doctor.
Somehow, even with how the day has dragged, it’s suddenly just a little easier for her to think there is a world where she’s going to have another chance to come back here, have time to read them again.
The evening news gives way to the late-night shows, which are as un-funny as ever, and Samira doesn’t have a clue who either of the two guests are. The first is a string bean of a man with curly hair and pale skin who looks like a sickly Victorian child but is greeted with the cheers of a Beatles-era heartthrob, while the second is a comedian who barely deserves the name.
She’s been awake since before her alarm went off at 5:30 this morning, but as out of it as she is, as tired as she feels, there’s no way she can go to sleep until this finally resolves.
Walsh is right there with her, slumped over on her side of the couch, one arm crossed over her chest, impatiently flipping through broadcasts, trying to find any late-late news report when—
“Oh shit!”
Walsh bolts upright, feet thumping onto the floor as she mashes her thumb against the volume button to bring the sound back from the low murmur they've mostly just been ignoring. Samira is much slower to follow her gaze to the TV, where the late-night news has broken in to show the street outside of Philly First National, now filled with first responders and EMS tending to the hostages.
“Oh my god.”
Gently pushing Dizzy off her lap, Samira follows Walsh as she gets up, rounds the coffee table to narrow her eyes at the oversized TV screen from closer up.
She knows what Walsh is looking for, peers up at the TV too, trying to find Jack somewhere in the background, tending to the other hostages.
The broadcaster’s report distantly registers—something about all the hostages accounted for with minor injuries, but nothing specific, and still nothing about a pregnant hostage, or a baby. Ambulance lights flash in the corner for just long enough for them to see it pull away, the whoop of its siren muffled behind the main audio.
Walsh waves the remote at it, “Ten bucks says that’s where he is,” she pulls out her phone and types something, quick, before returning it.
Samira nods slowly in, well, agreement, exhaustion—both, really—and scrubs both hands over her face.
Walsh turns to look her straight on, “You with me, Mohan?”
She lets out a raw, pained laugh, muffled by her palms, “Oh my god,” she says again. “I think I need to lie down for a while.”
“That’s fair,” Walsh leaves the remote on the console below the TV, cocks her heads toward the hallway that leads to the bedrooms. “I’ll grab you something to change into. He’s probably going to be a few more hours anyway. You might as well get some sleep before, well-”
She trails off with a pointed smirk and Samira rolls her eyes, but follows her anyway. They pass a den Jack’s turned into an office—where the rest of the apartment is relatively minimalist in its decor, this room is stuffed wall to wall and floor to ceiling with medical reference books and of old journals, waist-high stacks of cases full of what she can imagine is the obscure kind of medical shit the hospital will never pay for. They're in front of a desk there’s somehow space for in the middle of the room, and a copy of what looks like the most recent copy of the British Medical Journal left on his deck on top of his still-open laptop. Behind the desk is a matching console table, and on the right side is the famed police scanner, on, if the glowing on the front means anything, but with the volume turned all the way down.
Samira fully figures Walsh will leave her to gather herself in one of the guest bedrooms, though probably not the one that looks like it’s been taken over by the cat, but they walk past both before reaching the last door at the end of the hall.
Walsh flings the door open and doesn’t hesitate as she steps inside, but Samira does, stopping short in the doorway, “So should I-”
Looking back at her over her shoulder, Walsh does that tilt of her head, shoulders and hips she usually does in trauma rooms when she knows she can’t just say she’s surrounded by idiots, “Oh, come on.”
Somewhat cowed and feeling very awkward about it, Samira steps off the hardwood and onto the carpeted floors of Jack’s bedroom.
The room is dominated by a neatly-made bed, the head piled with the kinds of specialized, orthopedic pillows that might just, combined, cost more than her rent. On either side of the bed are a pair of wood nightstands with matching lamps atop, though the one on the near side is much more cluttered—the lamp pushed back toward the wall to make room for a box of tissues currently making use as a small trash can, a shoebox sized plastic bin full of prescription bottles in various sizes, a couple more medical journals with a printed case report on top and half-annotated, plus a pen, a pair of reading glasses, and Jack’s phone charger clipped to the side, the cord neatly tucked out of the way.
It’s so much more surreal, to be standing here, than it is to be eating his food or waiting impatiently in his living room.
This is where Jack lives.
Hospital corners on the bed, hard-shell cases that look like they contain even more medical equipment stacked next to the dresser, which is covered by pristine stacks of black scrub tops and white undershirts, a row of family photographs behind them. Blackout curtains cover the windows, which are completely expected, except that they’re a deep green instead of the usual black, and they blend pleasantly with the cool gray-blue painted on the walls.
Unaware of her whirling thoughts, or maybe just ignoring them, Walsh passes the bed and goes straight through the doorway opposite it, a walk-thru closet that leads to the en suite. It was clearly conceived as one of those his side versus her side closets, but since it’s just Jack, the open shelves and spaces for hanging clothes are all generally sparsely occupied, though she can imagine everything is strategically placed depending on what he needs on hand when coming out of the bathroom versus coming in from the bedroom.
There’s a built-in dresser stacked four drawers high on the right side, and Walsh drags open the second from the bottom, starts rifling through a bunch of sweats. She grabs a faded olive green crewneck sweatshirt from one side, and then a pair of bleach-stained sweatpants with the elastic cuffs cut off, thrusts them both at her, “Feel free to change—and snoop—in the bathroom.”
Walsh leaves without another word, and Samira stands there with her bounty cradled in her arms for just a second before she huffs, shakes her head, and shuffles her way into the en suite.
The sweats are long enough to cover her feet, and Samira has to pull the drawstring as tight as she can to keep them in place over her hips.
She very much does not snoop through any of the drawers or cabinets, thank you very much, as she makes her way back into the bedroom.
A glimmer in the closet catches her attention, just for a moment, and when she looks closer, she finds it’s from the overhead can-lights reflecting off the armrest of a wheelchair, folded neatly and tucked in the corner against the wall, half-covered by a suitcase stored on its side.
It gives her pause, if only because Samira’s never thought of Jack as a wheelchair user, ambulatory or otherwise, which feels so obvious now that she’s looking at it. She’s never seen him walk with the assistance of anything other than the prosthesis, and sure, he’s got forearm crutches stashed in almost every corner of the apartment, because it’s not physically healthy to wear the leg all the time, but of course a man like Jack would be prepared enough to have another backup option on hand, just in case.
Stepping back into the bedroom, Samira pauses a few steps away from the padded bench at the foot of the bed, regards it for a moment before shaking her head and leaving the room.
In the living room, she finds Walsh spreading a fleece blanket she must have grabbed from the hall closet onto the side of the couch she’s spent most of the evening on, the part of the couch she’s probably claimed as hers for at least as long as she and Jack have been neighbors.
“Um-”
Walsh doesn’t give her a chance to come out with whatever gibberish is waiting on her tongue, breaking in with, “Jack’s room, the guest room, hell, the cat room—it doesn’t matter which one you pick. Wherever you are, that’s where he’ll end up when he gets home. Your call.
“Okay.”
“But FYI, the bed in Jack’s room is a hell of a lot more comfortable than the guest rooms.”
There’s a tease in her tone that Samira wordlessly calls bullshit on, but nods anyway, “Right. Rest well, Doctor Walsh.”
“Get some sleep, Mohan.”
—
In the fall and winter months, walking into a building in daylight and walking out of it at nighttime will never not fuck with Jack and his already-delicate circadian rhythm.
The fluorescent lights in the bank break room he spent the better part of the last ten hours working out of were had already given him a headache, not to mention the buzzing from one of the lightbulbs that had a faulty connection and kept fucking flickering while he was trying to concentrate.
The lights in the back of the ambulance aren’t that much better, and it feels like Javi is driving over every fucking pothole in the city between Third and the hospital. Each jolt radiates up through his sore back where he’s perched on the bench, out of the way as Renee tends to mom, Caroline and healthy baby, TBD, not three hours old, on the gurney.
He strips out of his soiled quarter-zip and starts cleaning off, scrubbing sanitizing wipes up and down his arms, clearing away blood and viscera and a whole other host of fluids that make him feel a little bit like Whitaker on a bad day.
He’s practical about it, pulling one wipe at a time as he cleans from wrist to elbow, scrubs between every crease in his palms, between his fingers, under his nails, until he’s as clean as he’s going to get until he can find a shower.
Mendoza shoved his phone into his pocket before they left the scene, so at least he has that, even if he’s going to have to head back to the station to grab his go-bag, and hell, his car, before he can actually go home.
At the very least, his hands are clean enough not to contaminate his phone any more than it already is, even if he feels like he’s still covered in a thin layer of scum. He fishes his phone from his pocket and summarily swipes away from the notifications, mostly texts, covering his Lock Screen.
The part of his ego that attempts to protect him from discomfort: see: the part he’s been relying on for way longer than he can wrap his head around to keep his feelings for Samira buried deep, deep into the recesses of his heart, sends him the thought that, maybe he can just ignore all the texts waiting for him, even after the day he’s had, so he doesn’t risk seeing something from her along the lines of ugh, you weird old man, as soon as you’re not busy throwing your idiot self into danger, we’re going to have a long conversation with Robby and HR, and then I never want you to look at me again, and he can just apologize for word vomiting all over her texts the next time he sees her in person.
But that plan is thoroughly derailed when a new text comes in, the banner flashing at the top of his home screen, from Robby, which says, Lena just got the call from EMS that…
He taps the banner with his index finger, which does him the courtesy of opening his texts without showing all the messages waiting for him.
That said, he has accumulated a handful of messages from Robby to read through before getting to the most recent one at the bottom.
Mike Robinavitch - 1:37 p.m.
Wanted you to know I know what
you’re up to right now.
And—Samira’s okay. I’m going to
try to get her out of here soon. I
didn’t see what you sent her on
purpose, I SWEAR. But she’s
okay.
Stay safe, brother.
Mike Robinavitch - 6:42 p.m.
FYI I’ve given night shift L&D a
heads up on your patient.
They’re ready for anything,
including a crash-C.
I don’t even know why I’m texting
you this, you clearly don’t have your
phone on you.
Well, you can mock me for giving
a shit later.
Mike Robinavitch - 12:49 a.m.
Saw you walk out of there. Call me
when you can.
Mike Robinavitch - 12:58 a.m.
Lena just got the call from EMS that
they’re on the way with a pair of
priority patients, plus a SWAT officer
who might have some broken ribs.
That better be you.
Me - 12:59 a.m.
Not a SWAT officer.
Ribs ain’t broken.
Mike Robinavitch - 1:01 a.m.
How about you leave the diagnoses
to the professionals?
Jack snorts and rolls his eyes, sees the questioning looks from Renee and Caroline—the baby is not nearly old enough to hold her head up or have object permanence, just continues dozing on her mother’s chest—and Jack shakes his head in dismissal before he taps out:
Me - 1:03 a.m.
Brother, what the hell are you
still doing in the ED? Go home.
Mike Robinavitch - 1:05 a.m.
The fuck do you think, man? Hurry
your ass up so I can look at you.
As much as Jack wants to send back something snarky, or even just a middle finger emoji, Mike probably has had as shit a day as he did, so he just sends a thumbs up back, knows he already knows the ETA from Lena, so he’s not going to bother repeating it.
Without taking any more time to overthink it, he swipes out of their text thread and finally takes in the mess that is the rest of his Messages app.
Since he’s about to see them, he bypasses the messages from Lena, Parker and Shen and a couple of the night shift nurses he’s worked with a while, sends All clear to a couple of his old army buddies who are local and listen to the police scanner as often as he does, and then settles on that plus, I’ll call you tomorrow, which he pastes into his group chat with his oldest nieces, Lola and Gracie, and also to his sisters and his brother-in-law Derrick.
There are a few more messages to read, but they’re around the corner from the hospital, and she’s already been waiting on him long enough, so he opens the single text waiting for him from Samira.
Dr. Samira Mohan - 7:56 p.m.
You wouldn’t be the man I admire
as much as I do if you chose to
stay on the sidelines. Keep yourself
safe, we can walk about everything
else when you’re out.
Okay, well, that probably means she’s not about to report him to HR, right?
Me - 1:06 a.m.
I’m out. Get some sleep.
I’ll see you soon, Samira.