Chapter Text
It was a pretty tame day considering the amount of exhaustion that hung off of her frame as Cassie McKay made her way through the ED of the Pitt to her locker. Granted she focused on Chairs today so that’s probably why it was so tame to begin with. But, her shift was finally over and she could make her way back to her apartment where she would be able to rest for a few minutes before her dad dropped Harrison off.
She grabbed her stuff and made her way to the pedestrian entrance, waving goodbyes at the night shift and the few day shift stragglers as she went.
It was a good day.
You would think that given her luck she would know when not to tempt fate. Thinking that her day could be relatively calm for once was, of course, asking too much of the universe. Just as Cassie had made it to her car, she and a few others were called back because a few of the night shifters apparently forgot to mention that they wouldn’t be in the fucking state this fine evening. She had barely suppressed a groan while she texted her dad about what had happened, asking that he take Harrison for the night.
She had finished up her rather rushed explanation quickly, but she was still the only one left in the parking lot besides Jesse Van Horn, the perfectly calm, sarcastic, down-to-earth trauma nurse that she has had a conversation or two not pertaining to work with. He too was staring at his phone, typing fast with his perfectly manicured eyebrows furrowed slightly on his thin face.
Putting her phone away she made her way across the darkened parking lot back the way she came, which just so happens to pass in front of Jesse. She tried to be as quick as possible, not wanting to disturb him from his important looking text thread. She was almost in the clear, a few feet in front of him when the relative silence was broken. “Hey, wait up.” She turned a bit to look at him over her shoulder. He jogged a bit to catch up to her and the two made their way back to the Pitt.
It was silent between them once again, something that usually made Cassie anxious, but Jesse doesn’t seem to mind it. In fact he’s filling the stillness in a way that she’d never thought of ever doing in front of another person. He was humming . It was small and a little off-key but it had a nice tempo and it was a familiar song. “Are you humming Fleetwood Mac?” came the question from her throat, a little loud and brash considering the circumstance that spawned it.
Jesse’s thin but sturdy frame shuttered a bit in surprise, but otherwise continued in its loose path. Her own shorter build relaxed despite the embarrassment that rushed through her at his calmness. He looked at her from the corner of his eye and hummed an affirmation before continuing his song. Cassie quirked her head a bit and let the simple exchange fade into the strange comfort between them.
Eventually his song ended, and it was just the buzz of the street lamps and the kicking of gravel in the air. “I didn’t know you liked them,” she said, once again jarring herself out of the quiet. She tilted her face up at him, watching his reaction.
“They’re one of my favorites.” he hummed out in that calm-bordering-on-exasperated way of his.
She hummed in response and the stillness came again. That happens a lot between them she’s beginning to realise, the lull in conversation, the comfortability in their stillness. “I think I’m more partial to Ghost.”
Jesse snorted and looked at her with an eyebrow raised and a scrunched expression that shifted his nose ring paid perfectly with the amusement in his eyes and smile, “The Swedish metal band that has biblical imagery?”
She tries to suppress the smile that stretches her cheeks as she replies, “Yes.” Simple and blunt and a little giddy.
“That tracks,” He states, a spark of laughter in his face, “You look like you’ve survived a mosh pit fueled by caffeine and spite.”
They laugh a little as Pitt comes into view, “Yeah well,” she’s still looking at him, “At least I don’t look like I’m in a cover band.”
He gasps in faux-hurt, hand clutching invisible pearls, “The slander.” His hand moves to shake her shoulder as they bump into each other, “the blasphemy.” A siren peels through the air and they find themselves standing just outside the pedestrian entrance to the emergency department. They glance at each other, all secret smiles and jokes, like two kids at school planning a prank on the teacher.
They walk past the doors and metal detectors, through the gray doors separating the waiting room from the rest of the department. The same silence between them is now full of shared knowledge and laughter. They stay in that silence as they pass Central and make it to the lockers. Jesse finishes shoving his things into his locker first, a soft look out of the corner of his eye as he walks to his trauma bay. A new song hummed at her on his way.
Cassie smiles a little in response, and if others notice her humming a tune despite being called in for a double shift she didn’t want, they don’t mention it.
It’s been about four hours since she was supposed to leave. Four hours of overdoses and screaming and unnecessary violence and general night time craziness that has Cassie beyond exhausted. She’s about to start the chart for the guy in triage who came in for a suspected heart attack when the call comes in. She’s moving to take the trauma before she even realises she’s snapped on gloves and asked for the presentation. Jesse is already hooking up the monitors and setting up for intubation when she looks at the patient. A girl in a pretty dress is laying there with her black hair falling in curls around her head like an oily halo. Her face is smeared with blood and makeup. Her legs are broken, one of which has her mid tibia sticking out oher muscle and skin.
As Cassie is examining the girl, it becomes evident that her skull is cracked open in the back. Soon enough her BP’s dropping and it’s a race to get her stable.
In the end the blood loss and the broken legs and the apparently fractured and broken ribs and the suspected punctured lung and the damaged abdominal cavity and the cracked skull and everything this poor girl has suffered through is too much. And everything Cassie and Jesse and Abbot and Walsh and everyone has tried to do isn’t enough. It never is.
In the aftermath, when Cassie has called time of death and the nurses are cleaning up and restocking the trauma bay, Cassie really looks at the girl, and finds that she’s no older than Javadi. Not much older than Harrison , and definitely older than Hannah . And it all suddenly catches up to her, the exhaustion and anxiety and anger and despair comes tumbling down from the sky like some fucked-up rainstorm. It’s all too much and not enough and if she looks too hard at the dead girl on the gurney all she sees is Hannah. But she’s not Hannah, not even close, because Hannah never got to be 20.
Cassie goes to complete her chart in a state of numbness that is so fake even Bridget sees through her. It’s while she’s completing her chart that she learns that the girl on the gurney’s name is Libby, and she fell off the balcony of her best friend’s apartment because she stood up too fast and got dizzy and lost her footing. They had been drinking, and Libby was a notorious lightweight and clutz. Libby also was in the process of getting her POTS diagnosis. And it’s all too much again.
Jesse must see her run for the first available room without her noticing. It’s the only reason for him following her a few minutes after she presses herself into the couch in the staff break room. He’s looking at her, not unkindly, but his stare makes her feel defensive anyway. Like a dog that doesn’t know how to stop biting.
His eyes never leave her but he doesn’t say anything as he opens the fridge and pulls out two juice boxes. He doesn’t say anything as he opens them both and comes closer to her. And he doesn’t say anything as he sits next to her, not too close or too far, and passes one of the juice boxes into her hand. The condensation on the box leaves her hand wet and slightly sticky.
They’ve done this once before, except the roles were reversed. Jesse needed a moment and Cassie had pressed water into his hands. She didn’t speak or touch him, she just sat and she drank her water and held her breathing at a steady pace. She watched him crack and let him have the space to shatter and she didn’t ever expect him to say thank you or return the favor or be in her debt. She knows what it feels like to have your vulnerability be treated as a commodity so she just existed in his space. It was the start of the silences between them.
Now, as he drinks his juice box and breathes a little loudly, she can’t help but feel thankful that he doesn’t try to make eye contact or talk her through it or touch her. He exists in her space but he never encroaches, and just when the silence became unbearable to her, he started humming. The same song from earlier that night, soft and a little raw but precious and safe. She let herself close her eyes and relax into the sound of his off-key murmurs. Minutes or hours could have passed but she didn’t care, not right then, not when she knew she was safe with him.
He switched from song to song, a steady soundtrack to piece herself back together to. It was therapeutic in a really tragic “I've had a really shitty day and now I’m crying in the shower” kinda way. But as the toll of that specific loss finally loosened enough for the catharsis of emotional exhaustion to appear she could finally tell what song he was humming.
When Cassie was little, she used to sing a lot. She was in the church choir and even got to have a solo during Christmas Mass one year. But Chad had said that her constant singing was an irritation no matter how pretty her voice. But after getting sober and medical school and the divorce and the beginning of her residency and the restraining order and everything else life has thrown at her, she stopped singing.
She hasn’t wanted to sing for a very long time, but the words to the song Jesse’s humming spill from her mouth without her permission. It was stilted and horribly off-key and a little nasally, but it seemed to encourage Jesse to hum louder. He was fiddling with his long empty juice box to try and hide the beginnings of a smile. It was nice. Fleetwood Mac wasn’t her favorite band, but she still knew enough of “Dreams” to sing along anyway.
When the rain washes you clean, you’ll know
That thunder only happens when it’s raining.