Chapter Text
Now that he thinks about it, Jack realizes he should have seen it coming. It was almost inevitable that he was going to end up here. But the way it suddenly slammed into him, leaving him breathless and stunned — that was the part he never could have anticipated.
It was like — it was like he had been stranded at sea. Used to treading water. The constant movement was what kept him afloat, kept him alive. Waves crashed over his head and he let them. But now he could see something in the distance, a beam of golden light he didn’t know was there before. And once he’d spotted it, he felt — he knew it had always been there, steady and sure. He had just been too busy keeping his head above water to notice. Samira. She was the beacon. And he was fucking terrified of what might happen if he managed to reach it.
He wasn’t one to pinpoint cause and effect so concretely, at least not in his personal life. Yes, in his line of work, people lived and died by cause and effect. Diagnosis and prognosis, et cetera. But he still had a hard time pinning down the root of his feelings. Hell, it had taken him long enough for his therapist to help him start feeling his feelings in the first place — and now he had to try and understand them too?
But. If he had to say. If someone was really asking him. He could tell you the day — the hour, even — that he first noticed that beacon shining. And lately, it had been keeping him up at night. Shining in his goddamn eyes every time he thought the darkness was going to envelop him for good this time. Every time he closed them, he couldn’t see anything but wisps of dark brown hair falling across the smooth plane of her forehead, bed of curls fluffed out by her poised hands. Bright adrenaline-rush smile buoying him from across the room. Big, coffee-black eyes looking up into his, searching for reassurance. From him. Thank god he hadn’t had a shift with her since the MCI, because he needed a moment — several fucking moments, actually — to collect himself before he could see her again.
The thing was, he had noticed all these things about her before. Of course he had. It was impossible not to. He wasn’t blind. He’d worked with her before, knew the occasional patient, or sometimes the EMTs, would flirt with her; once a green intern even tried to shoot his shot, but she didn’t seem to reciprocate.
But now it wasn’t just her smile, her hair crossing his mind, plaguing his thoughts. It was her — her eagerness, her quick thinking, the way she found her confidence and strength and stride under his wing, the way she buzzed around the floor helping wherever she could, couldn’t stop moving for fear of the crash that would come when she stopped. He recognized that in himself, too. That was what drew his attention to the light she emanated. He felt — proud of her, admiring, like he understood something new about her. And he just — he wondered what else he could find out. That was all.
So, okay, maybe he was getting the hang of this understanding-the-root-of-his-feelings thing.
Where he would go from here, that was the next big thing to figure out. There were the obvious ethical considerations. There was their age difference. Fifteen if he was lucky, but probably pushing twenty. Not that that mattered much to him, but. There was the incessant teasing he’d get from Robby, from Dana. There was the gossip — from everyone, not just the usual suspects. There was, of course, the issue of reciprocation.
(But if he thought about it, though, he thought — maybe — he had seen something glimmering in her eyes that day. When she made eye contact with him as she took an instrument from his offering hand, or asked a question so only he could hear, or reflected the admiration he felt for her right back at him. Those moments sent a thrill up his spine. And so, maybe the issue of reciprocation wasn’t really so much of one. Or maybe that was just his desirous, traitorous brain sending things through a rose-colored filter, making him see things that weren’t really there. In any case.)
And so he settled himself firmly in the camp of doing absolutely nothing when it came to these feelings. He’d zip ‘em up, and anything that happened — if anything were to happen, that is — it would be on terms she set. He just had to trust himself to keep his shit locked up.
He could do that.
Samira felt like she was tiptoeing on a crumbling rock face.
As soon as she got the notification that Dawn was dropping a night shift later that week and they needed someone to cover, Samira picked it up before she could even think about why she was so quick to hop to it. It wasn’t even because — she hadn’t even — okay, maybe she had started to reconsider some certain things regarding a certain doctor who typically presided over the night shift.
She already knew what Dr. Abbot was like. Incredibly composed. Wicked smart. Cool under pressure. A phenomenal doctor and a great mentor. Yet somehow, in the times she had worked with him prior to the PittFest MCI, she hadn’t seen him… like that.
He truly led — not just her, but the whole team swarming the floor of the ER. He was endlessly prepared, always knew just what to do and how to do it. It wasn’t that this was necessarily surprising to her. It was, she guessed, the way he did it that set something off. An alarm bell ringing in her head. It was the mature confidence he held alongside this youthful recklessness. A belief that he was doing the right thing, and a sense of humor in the face of unnameable tragedy.
It was that he was like living proof that you were going to get through it, and you were going to be okay.
She was sure it would take her more than two hands to count the number of times that his guidance — or his assured eye meeting hers, or his crackling wit — made her feel like a sparkler that evening. The tips of her fingers felt lit up, electrified, sending off fizzy little flickers of energy. But she knew it would burn out eventually, and then she would be left with a mess of ashes.
The comedown that night, once she got into her bed, scrubbed clean and bundled in her most comforting sweats, felt like her feet slipping off the cliff, her knees scraping as she fell into a dark cavern. In order to get herself up for work the next day, once she was rested, she felt like she had to scramble back up, knuckle by knuckle. And now here she was, feeling on edge. The smallest spark, she knew, would send her back into a dizzying frenzy. Keep your firestarter away from your flammables. But she knew at any moment there always existed the possibility of Dr. Abbot walking through those sliding doors again. She knew he could never stay away from the hospital for long.
But wasn’t it kind of exciting? She hadn’t felt that kind of aliveness thrumming in her veins in god knows how long. It wasn’t just him, or how he made her feel (like a pool of sugar syrup melting into a popping-hot jalebi, by the way, or the fresh, cool summer scent wafting off of Lake Arthur, where her dad used to take her kayaking). It was how he made her believe in something, how he drew this tranquil confidence out of her, like turning on this light she knew was inside of her but she had a hard time uncovering. He made her feel wild and calm at the same time. That was the part that was fucking her up, making her hope simultaneously that she would and wouldn’t see him anytime soon.
So she took that shift, and waited with bated breath to see him again. But anticipating the whirlwind of sensations she’d feel once she was in his presence again was nothing compared to feeling them. And when she showed up on Saturday at 6:50 pm, the wall of those feelings hit her like a heavy gust of air pressing on her windpipe as soon as she stepped across the threshold and saw him standing there, across the room, already assessing the board. His eyes flitted to hers immediately. She felt pinned in place.
It felt like a layer of loose pebbles crumbled away beneath her toe, edging off that rock face. And now she had the next twelve hours here with him.