Chapter Text
Maybe surprisingly for a doctor, Frank wasn’t a natural student. School, at least the graded part, was difficult from the beginning. He spent elementary school counting down the minutes to recess. Once he hit middle school he joined the track team, and classes were just a boring, mandatory activity that took up the time before practice. It wasn’t until his 10th grade chemistry teacher, Mrs. Boyd, sat down next to him during lab and whispered, “you know, you’re actually pretty good at this,” that things changed.
And she wasn’t wrong — lab was easier because they moved around a lot, collecting various supplies, standing up to titrate solutions, adjusting the Bunsen burners, and so on, and Frank found the words and concepts and equations and lectures and all the other boring stuff he normally couldn’t remember was actually secretly and miraculously lodged in his head right there for easy extraction as long as he could move around a little.
Plus he enjoyed lab, all the different experiments were actually interesting, and — only decades later, in the closed confines of the therapist-patient confidentiality would Frank ever admit this — it made him feel good to finally be trusted by an adult for the first time ever and handed semi-dangerous chemicals with the belief that he wouldn’t just fuck everything up.
So, after Mrs. Boyd’s intervention, school became not necessarily easier, but more understandable. She spent time after class lecturing him about wasting his potential, and Frank pretended to hate it but really was giddy off of someone actually thinking he had potential to waste. So he started actually trying, and it wasn’t fun, and it took time, but he figured out that around mile three on the cross-country trail he could go back over what they’d learned in class that day and it would stick, and suddenly his grades skyrocketed out of the ditch he’d originally abandoned them in.
It wasn’t until college that Frank really unlocked the key to studying. He was dead set on being a Chemistry major, one of the most promising freshmen on the cross-country team, and, yeah, he was partying a little too much. There were a lot of different balls to juggle, and he happened to be more interested in the balls that involved running really fast and leveraging his athletic prowess to impress girls at parties. His grades started to dip and he found himself ambushed by his coach and the academic chair of his fraternity. Mortifying.
At the end of the day, Frank was a pretty prideful guy. And he knew he was capable of the work, more capable than a lot of people, actually, so he owed it to himself to figure out how to get it done. And it didn’t help that he still had that echo of Mrs. Boyd's voice saying, “it’s such a shame, a smart kid like you wasting it all,” in his head on a loop whenever he got back an assignment with anything under a B+.
So Frank buckled down, curbed the partying (somewhat, he was still in a frat after all), and started hitting the tutoring center. That’s where he had his breakthrough. It turns out there are different learning styles, you see. Obviously, in retrospect, he was a kinesthetic learner. But he could work with that. College allowed him the freedom to take breaks between classes, move while he studied, and his science lectures always made since once he could tinker away in lab.
Frank was just starting junior year with his Chemistry major (on the pre-med track, of course) officially declared and he was doing well enough that the tutoring center had actually offered him a part-time job. And that’s when everything clicked.
He was trying to explain how to differentiate the three major metabolic pathways to a very befuddled sophomore and, frustrated, snapped a little.
“Purple, orange, grey!”
“Frank, literally what the fuck does that mean,” Bryce responded, slowly and with a somehow even more confused expression on his face.
That’s when Frank realized not everyone saw concepts in colors. An earnest apology and a promise to make flashcards for them to go over next session, and he was off to his dorm to spend the rest of the afternoon googling synesthesia.
Which, honestly, was pretty cool. And explained a lot. And playing into it really, really improved his grades. Look, he wasn’t going full-on decorated notes here, but using the associated colors really helped the concepts stick. Frank ended up graduating summa cum laude, single-handedly responsible for keeping his frat’s GPA high enough to maintain on-campus eligibility.
So yeah, it was helpful, it was interesting, and, plus, it was a great faux-personal-but-actually-pretty-impersonal fun fact in those annoying, forced icebreaker situations which happened all the time in med school. As if the debt wasn’t enough torture.
To Frank, a perfectly done crike leaves a faint cobalt halo around the patient, sitting silently in the car before driving home smears the windshield with a dusty taupe, and a late-night run washes over him in a wave of saturated coral. This is how he’s always experienced the world.
It enriches experiences and makes his nostalgia a little more robust. Or at least that’s how he feels when he remembers it’s unique. Most of the time, Frank just assumes everyone experiences everything the exact same way he does — until he inevitably slams into the glass wall of misaligned expectations. This happens most with Abby. Obviously.
He distinctly remembers that moment his second year of residency where he and Abby were reminiscing over their first year of parenthood after Tanner finally fell asleep. For a beautiful moment, they giggled together over Tanner’s pronunciation of “magazine” (”mas-a-geen”) and the adorable way he’d pretend to read books on his own (not realizing the book was somehow always upside down), and Frank felt so intensely connected that he could feel all the cells in his body straining towards her. But when he shyly mentioned how Tanner memories were the most delicate shade of sun-warmed orange, she rolled over and muttered something about an early morning.
Frank felt more wounded than the situation deserved (Abby did have an early morning), but it kinda seemed like he had put out a hand to bring her into his head and she had firmly rejected that invitation. And him, by extension. But that was their whole problem. It’s not like he did any better when she gave him an opening.
But after his life explosion (his therapist, Adam, keeps saying that self-deprecatingly calling it “The Explosion” is a pervasive way to avoid directly confronting and taking accountability for what happened, but, honestly, it saves a lot of time so who’s to say if it’s good or bad), things have become a little, well, desaturated, for lack of a better word.
The Pittfest shift — when his entire professional and personal worlds crumbled — wasn’t the worst day of his life. It’s not even top five. Which is embarrassing. But, as Adam loves to remind him, “embarrassment is a sign you’re approaching something real.” It mostly just feels really bad though.
The dubious honor of “worst day ever” goes to three days after Frank’s first rehab stint. He relapsed, overdosed, and had a seizure in the playroom in front of Tanner and Madison. He remembers hearing wailing from some distant space to the left of his head and the rest is a blur. He knows (because he was told afterwards) that Abby rushed in, physically dragged him into the car, and drove to Presby at nearly 100 miles per hour.
After being discharged, his mother-in-law showed up at the hospital in her stupid fucking Mercedes. Frank slumped guiltily in the extremely comfortable leather passenger seat for the entire four hour drive. Lilian, for her part, didn’t speak until they had to get gas about halfway in, primly announcing their destination (a rehab facility in the Poconos) and that Abby packed a bag for him in the trunk and would speak to him after he had successfully completed a 90-day inpatient program.
What else was there to say? Frank had managed to make the already fucked up situation even worse. And honestly, he didn’t like thinking about any of it too directly.
(In therapy, Adam tries to get him to talk about how his default coping mechanism is avoidance. Frank avoids this.)
So Frank spends the beginning of his second rehab stint on a physician-supervised taper. This is another period of time he has little to no memories of, just a general sense of shame clouding over the whole thing like old headlights. Which he's fairly grateful for, actually, because the parts he does remember are extremely physically painful.
Frank knows treatment is a special hell for everyone but he feels a particularly heightened sense of self-loathing (and his baseline is already pretty high) whenever he has to interact with a medical professional. Which is roughly every single waking hour of the day.
The next 30 days are equal parts grueling and mind-numbingly boring. Frank exercises, goes to group, meets with his psychiatrist, goes back to group, makes shitty crafts that are somehow supposed to be about his feelings, suffers through individual therapy, group again, then bed.
Spitefully, Frank is convinced Abby picked such a far-off facility to punish him. She doesn’t visit or call, but she does send him weekly emails with updates on the kids written in the same dull tone he used on boring patient charts. But he really doesn’t want to think about work right now.
Overall, Frank’s memories of rehab are a resounding grey. The color of dryer lint. And that’s how he feels most of the time, too.
There are a few bright spots, though. A lighter grey, like a friendly pigeon.
Week three, Cassie sends him a ridiculous child's birthday card that she’s defaced in her cramped handwriting to celebrate (?) his rehab stay:
“The SWEETEST MOST CHALLENGING 1825 90 days of my YOUR life!
Love, Regards,
Your mom co-worker
It’s the first time he’s laughed in months.
They start exchanging letters, and eventually Frank realizes he can saddle her with all of his wretched therapy crafts. He gets a kick out of imagining what she’ll do with yet another misshapen beige crochet hat.
He doesn’t get a letter from Robby, nor does he expect one. A pretty substantial amount of his time in therapy circles around their last conversation. Frank quite literally doesn’t have the words for how he feels about it. He does, however, eventually write Robby a first draft of a letter and immediately shoves it into the darkest corner of his duffel bag. Step nine and all.
Around the halfway point of his stay, Garcia starts slipping postscripts into Cassie’s notes — usually something so egregiously antagonistic and rude that Frank is rendered completely speechless upon reading. It touches him deeply though he’ll never, ever admit that to her.
And then, two months in, Frank gets a bright yellow envelope in the mail. The back is sealed with a holographic blue fish sticker (kind of a mix between Dory and Rainbow Fish — Frank is very well-versed in aquatic children’s media), and it glimmers in his hands in the dull grey room. He carefully peels the sticker off the back without ripping it and gently places on the front of his not-required-but-STRONGLY-recommended journal. It shines pleasingly against the plain black cover.
He turns back to the envelope, gingerly opens it, and is greeted by a three-page handwritten letter from Mel — that Mel, the one bright spot in the midst of Explosion Day.
He’s shocked. Shocked that she remembered him, shocked that she cared enough to track down his address (presumably from Cassie), and shocked by how emotional he feels about all of the above. Disconcerted, Frank rubs at his eyes, takes a deep breath, and begins to read.
The letter is nothing special. It’s blessedly mundane. Mel briefly asks how his treatment is going, and then rambles for two whole pages about the hospital goings-on since he left.
Frank rolls his eyes at the latest betting pool (Who could get closest to the listed amount of calories in a Sheetz chocolate chip cookie without looking it up), frowns at the conspicuous absence of any mention of Santos or Robby (Does she really think he’s that sensitive? Wait, is he that sensitive?), and when he gets to Gloria’s latest patient satisfaction improvement scheme (She had seriously pitched a “Workplace Appropriate Humor Training” that had immediately gone off the rails when the instructor brought in to teach them about how “laughter is the best medicine!” made the fatal mistake of asking Shen to be the first volunteer to deliver a joke to the group. The joke was so morbid and offensive that it actually triggered a stress cardiomyopathy attack in the instructor, but, luckily, they were all doctors who used actual medicine so the instructor is going to make a full recovery.), Frank laughs so loud and for so long that he gets angry bangs on the wall from his neighbors.
The letter concludes with Mel wishing him well, apologizing if she’s overstepped by writing him, and expressing that he shouldn’t feel obligated to write back, although she would greatly enjoy a response from her “most problematic teacher” — which is then immediately followed by a very long parenthetical explaining that this is actually a joke referencing their conversation in the break room and that she hopes it didn’t offend him, but rather provided a humorous callback to their past conversation which had actually meant a lot to her, by the way, especially considering that it happened on what the rest of the hospital calls “the worst first day ever in history” which, for what it's worth, she actually disagrees with, pointing out that Ben Sliney had his first day of work as head of the FAA on 9/11 so it really could’ve been worse!
Frank smiles so broadly his cheeks begin to hurt.
He delicately folds up the letter, then unfolds it again, looks at Mel’s extremely precise and orderly handwriting, shakes his head, and places it in the top left desk drawer where he keeps Tanner and Maddie’s preschool photos. That Mel. What a doctor.
Frank picks up his journal and absently rubs the blue fish sticker. He feels too keyed up to fall asleep, but can’t articulate why. It’s not his normal sleep difficulties (being depressed by his small, grey, extremely expensive, lonely room in a remote treatment facility, thinking in circles about traumatizing his children/fucking up his job/letting down his colleagues/wasting his potential/his whole marriage generally, etc.) so what is it?
He feels almost itchy with the frustration of a puzzle he can't solve, a feeling he can't name. Frank forces his eyes shut and begins counting down from 1000 by sevens in hopes he’ll drift off somewhere before 713.
When he reaches 132, Frank accepts that this strategy isn’t going to work. He sighs, opens the desk drawer, and unfolds the letter again, running his fingers over the slightly raised ink. He thinks back over Explosion Day, and, for the first time, skips over the bad parts (there are a lot and they have a habit of replaying on a constant, tortuous loop). Nearly all of the good parts involve Mel. Mel smiling up at him, Mel working miracles with difficult patients, Mel going to him for advice, Mel trusting him.
The room fills up with a dark midnight blue, inky, almost black. Frank sinks down into the feeling.
He broke her trust.