Chapter Text
MEL
Mel King loved having a crush. She thinks it’s because a lot of people don’t expect it from her. They latch onto the emotionless stereotype they have of people like her in her head and make assumptions that she doesn’t get the same butterflies that people write songs and books and movies about.
But she gets crushes. And she quite enjoys them.
There was Stephen O’Connell in the seventh grade, the first one she remembers. They traded math answers back and forth, until one day Mel realised that only her answers were right and the crush dramatically ended there and then.
Michael Urbanowitz in her freshman year of high school. He was a senior, so the crush was fleeting. He was assigned to give Mel's freshman class a tour around the school on their first day, and Mel would look for him in the cafeteria every lunch until he graduated.
Josh Mitchell spanned the summer between Junior and Senior year, and then became her boyfriend for two short weeks when school started again. He was her first boyfriend, and also made her realise that whilst she liked crushing on people, she maybe wasn’t the best at dating them. At least, not when she was seventeen.
There had been boys at college, but once she hit medical school properly she truly just didn’t have the time for them anymore.
Anyway, what is true is that she very rarely acts on them. Crushes were for observation, not action. Which is why she’s currently in such unfamiliar territory. With Frank Langdon breathing on her neck, arm around her waist, and leg slightly on top of her own. She doesn’t really know what to do next.
It started on her first day. She felt it almost instantly, the tugging at her stomach that made her want to stand next to him all the time. It didn’t help that he constantly asked how she was doing, somehow able to see through and break down the hundreds of “I’m fine”s she had muttered that day to everyone else in the ER. He put her in a room with a dog to calm her down. He let her pick gravel out of a leg. He told her she’s a good doctor because of her emotions, rather than despite them.
Then there was the fact that he was handsome, of course. Piercing blue eyes, swoop-y brown hair, and mean to everyone but her, it seemed. She couldn’t help herself. She was crushing hard and she hadn’t even known him 12 hours.
The very next day, she learnt two things about Frank Langdon.
The first: he was married. This was understandable. He was older than Mel and had kids. It tracked.
The second: he was an addict. That part in itself wasn’t necessarily a problem for Mel, because addiction was an illness and she was a doctor. It became a problem when it was revealed that he was stealing from patients. Selfishly, it stung that he had been high the entire first day that they had spent together. The day that they had spent laughing at each other’s bad jokes and Mel learning so much, and him apparently learning from her. Mel wondered how much of the Frank she had met then was him, and how much was the drugs.
Had she been so overwhelmed by his very presence that she had failed to miss obvious signs? She thought she was better than this. She was trained to be better than this. But Langdon had dazzled her, and Mel supposed that she was just thrilled to be along for the ride.
She felt awful. She knew, realistically, that there was very little she could have done in the short space of time she had known him, but the doctor in her wished that she had done something to help.
When she learnt that he wouldn’t be working at the Pitt for the foreseeable, that he was going to be enrolled in a two month rehabilitation programme, she tried not to let anyone else notice how crushed she was. Reality crashed down hard around her and she tried to convince herself it was because she had been looking forward to learning from him. But she knew it was more than that. She had never clicked with someone so quickly, had never intuited that someone understood her so well, either. Something about the two of them just worked.
She knew it wouldn’t have been his fault, but she was also a little bit angry that he had left without saying goodbye.
But he had also shown her that he was a bit like that, too. He would float away from her when she was in the middle of a sentence, but he would insist that she tell him later. There were things she wanted to tell him later.
She told herself to get a grip. She hadn’t known him long. She could get over this. She would get over this.
She did.
Mel lost herself in her job, and got good at it. The Pitt was possibly the best education she had ever had. In four months she learnt more than she thought it was possible to learn. She cried alone in stairwells, until McKay saw her once and insisted that she find her from then on. Half the time, she would.
She began to understand a handful of Santos’ jokes, even if she still didn’t particularly like them. With an absence of a mentor, she earned a mentee, and found Victoria and her got on well, even if the eight year age difference might as well have been eighty years. She went to Whitaker’s after work and learnt that Santos was rooming with him, and they shared a very strange, drunk night together as their three very different personalities all slowly learned to gel together.
And she did learn to gel with the rest of the people in the pit. When she heard that people had been sending Langdon gifts for his treatment halfway point, she wrote him a letter and slotted it in with the packet, truly wishing him all the best.
He had replied to it, which she knew was part of the programme, but the words she read felt honest. So she wrote him another when the two months passed, this time just sending it herself, rather than with a larger group gift.
She didn’t know when, or if he was coming back to the Pitt, so she put him out of her mind. Because Mel could be good at that when she needed to, as well. When he came back, she truly wasn’t thinking of him anymore.
It was a random Tuesday, she was coming off of a night shift, and there he was, hovering in the hospital entryway, breath as steam in front of his face. Hair longer, but still swoop-y, eyes still blue.
He looked good.
And Mel was right back where she started.
FRANK
Frank Langdon was having a shitty day. He didn’t want to deal with a bunch of newbies and he especially didn’t want a resident shadowing him all day. Abby had been an ass that morning, the puppy still wasn’t potty trained and he was, of course, in pain. But he was always in pain, so he told himself that last thing didn’t count.
His shadow in question was a Dr. Mel King. She wasn’t what Frank expected, which was a bonus, because Frank thought he had seen it all when it came to medical professionals. But Dr. King was unlike anyone he had met before. She was funny, if strange, in the way she spoke to you but Frank could tell it came from a place of earnestness. She was a wickedly good doctor, and she was kind. He warmed to her. Which was new to Frank, he rarely warmed to people so quickly. She laughed at his jokes (when she got them), which people rarely did. She listened to him attentively, and he listened to her. Because she was a good doctor. She was the kind of doctor he should be learning from.
She lit up when he told her that, and Frank didn’t quite know what to do with the feeling that bubbled up through his stomach when she smiled at him. So he pushed it down.
Then the rest of the day went to complete shit, and he was yelling at Robby and Robby was yelling at him. And then he was gone.
He realised that Mel was going to tell him about her sister, and she never got too. That he never said goodbye to her.
For some reason, that haunted him for four months.
Rehab was shitty, at first. McKay’s gifts and Mel’s letters were the only things that felt sincere in the bullshit that people told him and gave him about the process. Santos came to see him to apologise. He couldn’t say anything to her at the time, because he was burning with embarrassment that it had taken someone like her to trigger him to get his act together, but he wrote to her thanking her once his emotions simmered back down to a manageable state. His handwriting was a mess, but he figured Santos could just spend time trying to work it out. It was cynical of him, but he liked the idea of wasting her time. He clung onto any joys that he could find.
Something he came back to a lot, because it was a way to get himself out of a spiral of thinking about that last day, was thinking about the few hours he got to spend with Mel. She had reminded him of why he liked being a doctor, and he had been looking forward to working with her more.
Thinking about working with her again helped a lot. So rehab got better. When he was discharged, he didn’t feel quite so lost. He had a goal.
He wasn’t allowed to go back into the hospital straight away. It was getting into Christmas now, and realistically he knew that the ‘punishment’ was more of a blessing. Christmas was the worst time of year to be working at a hospital. Plus, it meant he got to spend actual time with his kids. Tanner and Millie didn’t really understand what was wrong, only that he was poorly, but getting better. He spoilt them rotten when he was home, taking them for unsanctioned trips to McDonalds and arcades. He swore it was all for them, but he knew he was doing it to keep himself busy, too. To keep himself away from Abby.
The fights with Abby got worse. They were never in front of the kids, but he had taken to sleeping in the guest bedroom.
After Christmas, he had looked up at her and suggested a marriage counsellor, but she looked at him with such pity that he knew what was coming next. The second she had uttered the word divorce, he had a feeling of lightness that he hadn’t experienced since his last good high. The separation had been disturbingly fast.
Standing in front of the hospital was the worst feeling of those past four months, though, by a mile. He was a confident, cocky bastard. That was his schtick. But suddenly he felt desperately unsure. He had fought to be able to work again and suddenly he wasn’t sure if he could. He knew Robby would be looking at him like a wounded animal, knew he would never earn the respect of anyone new, knew Santos would never trust him. Which, well, that didn’t bother him too much, because he didn’t think she would trust him even if he had never stolen so much as an aspirin. But the part of him that he would never reveal to anyone else, that sought the approval of everyone around him, even if it was begrudging, would always sting with the rejection.
There were simply so many people inside of that building he didn’t want to see.
And then, a voice.
“You’re here!”