Chapter Text
Jack Abbot wasn’t a whack-job.
But there had to be something fundamentally off about how steady he felt on nights like this: short-staffed, three code-blues, two MVC traumas incoming and one spitting psych hold patient into his shift.
Chaos like this should rattle anyone. Did, on occasion, rattle even the best. Just three weeks ago the PittFest MCI had almost broken his brother. But Jack? It put him back together. Sliced through the slow-rolling existential crisis he’d been nursing on and off since—
—since he woke up in Ramstein short one-third of his right leg would be a tidy answer.
Since the whole damn mess with Leah, that landed him in Incirlik on a tour he wasn’t supposed to go on and which ended with three days under mortar fire trying to keep five good men alive while gangrene ate his leg—that was the honest one. And his therapist stressed the importance of honesty every damned meeting.
So yeah, fucked up. How dancing on the edge of other people’s death centered him. How the way adrenaline was coursing through his veins felt like both fuel and a drug.
But it worked, again, finally—for now—and he decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth.
On the flip side, his prosthesis was chafing like a bitch tonight.
The side gig as a tester for a vet-run medical tech start-up had its highs, but every now and then something like this happened and it turned his crankiness up a notch or two.
He stopped the patrol of his little chaos empire just long enough to make a futile attempt at readjusting the fit of the socket through the leg of his cargo pants, when his well-honed trouble radar pinged.
He looked up and spotted the culprit immediately.
Trinity Santos was stalking past the nurses’ station like she was on the hunt for something exciting, gruesome and loud—preferably stab wounds.
She was his and Robbie's newest problem child and three hours and seventeen minutes into tonight’s shift she had earned herself a time-out after freelancing a chest tube on a patient that could absolutely keep for the twenty seconds it took Jack to get to Trauma 2 from a hallway conversation with parents of a kid that came altered, with projectile vomiting and a fever.
Santos had terrific instincts and absolute fearlessness. Both of these would make her into a hell of an emergency medicine physician one day—if her restless, young-alpha-smelling-fresh-blood-for-the-first-time energy wouldn’t bring her a career-ending malpractice lawsuit before the end of her intern year.
She needed tempering, and so he put her on triage with Moretti. Which she apparently ditched the first chance she got.
He intercepted her like a misbehaving kitten.
„Forgot your way to the Chairs, Dr Santos?”
She at least had the good sense to try for an innocent look. Pity, that it really wasn’t one she could pull off with any sort of conviction.
„Ugh, I—, I just escorted a forty-seven-year-old male omega, with cough, fever and excessive nasal mucus, to North 7.”
„Excellent,” Jack grinned, all teeth and no give. „That’s your new patient. Check his breath sounds, temp, and throat and confirm your management plan with Dr Shen.”
„But that’s the fourth case of flu I’ve gotten today.”
“Don’t let the disappointment show too much,” Jack said dryly. „You’ve got experience and preliminary diagnosis, so you should handle this in no time. Which is good, because we need free beds. Now go, and free one.”
Santos’ scrunched nose clearly telegraphed that she thought her talents were wasted on playing urgent care, but she scuttered towards North 7 without another word. Jack decided to count it as pedagogical success.
Just then the two MVC traumas rolled in, and he spent the next half hour bouncing between Trauma 1 and 2 like a freaking ping-pong ball. When he finally shipped off both patients—one straight to the OR, the other to radiology—he leaned by the door to Trauma 1, stripped off the gloves, slathered his palms with disinfectant and took one slow breath.
Then he turned to scan the floor.
Parker Ellis, beta, his senior resident, stood by the trauma board, reviewing pending cases. Jack caught her eye and gestured at her to walk up to him.
“Update me,” he said.
Ellis didn’t miss a beat.
“It’s not devolved into a complete mad-house yet and Moretti tells me that Chairs seem to be actually slowing down, compared to an hour ago. But we’ve got a tricky one in South 10. Nineteen-year-old omega female, five weeks post her first heat, febrile, suffering from prolonged insomnia, joint pain, muscle spasms and generalized anxiety. Her endocrine panel is an absolute mess. Could be Heat Cycle Dysregulation Syndrome.”
Jack frowned. “That’s rare.”
„Yup. But the onset of the symptoms coincides with her moving into a sorority dorm with 5 other omegas, two of which experienced similar but less severe symptoms over the last two weeks.”
„Ok. Sounds like you’re onto something,” Jack agreed. „Keep Javadi and Whitaker out of her room. And page OB/GYN.”
„Yes, boss,” Parker’s words said.
Her tone said: I am the best senior resident you’ve ever had the privilege of teaching and we both know that, so I will let this go, because I’ve seen you limp like a three-legged dog for the entire night and I’m magnanimous like that.
„Whitaker is managing the projectile vomiting kid and I sent Javadi to Mel—West 2, 29-year-old beta female with dizzyness. And I did page for the consult.”
Something in her inflection on that last sentence prompted Jack to ask “How long ago?”
“Hour forty,” Ellis replied.
Before Jack could even open his mouth for the ritual rant directed at damned upstairs attendings, who were never in a hurry, and especially not when ED called for them at 1 a.m., Moretti rolled in a nasty head lac & broken nose & black eye & bruised fists combo—the barfight special.
Jack had already started to move in that direction, but Ellis stopped him with a firm „I’ll take that, boss.” She fixed him with a stare she usually directed at especially mullish patients. „And you’ll go to the staff lounge, eat a protein bar from the vending machine and take the weight off your leg for 10 minutes. Or I’ll snitch to Bridget and she’ll snitch to Dana and do you want to be the reason she’ll break her promise to herself to not step foot into ED until retirement?”
How Jack had raised such a mouthy senior resident, he’d never know—and would never ask Robbie to weigh in on that question.
„I hope your stitchwork is as good as your guilt-tripping, Dr Ellis.”
„You know it is!" she called at him, already walking away.
Jack watched her go, grab Whitaker—who just stepped out of the peds room—and continue at a brisk pace towards South 4, where Moretti had just disappeared.
He had an honest to god intention to do exactly what Parker had suggested, but then the stroke patient waiting for the ICU bed started coding again.
And that took another 40 minutes before the only thing left to do was call the time of death.
After that, Jack stopped by the nurses’ station for a quick glance at the board on his way to a five-minute-breather in a staff lounge—when a figure in lavender scrubs stepped off the elevator and into his ED.
Lavender scrubs. That was the tell.
Five-feet-four in her sneakers, dark bangs neatly parted down the middle, bouncy ponytail, scrubs slightly rumpled as if she had just rolled out of the on-call cot. And she moved with the hesitant gait of somebody who was still mapping the terrain, which now that he thought about it… Robbie did mention that OB/GYN hired somebody new, because Myers was put on notice after that shoulder dystocia delivery. That was a clusterfuck Robbie and Collins skirted by on sheer, dumb luck.
Well, apparently Lavender Scrubs did not get a memo about the fuck-ups of her predecessor. Or just didn’t give a shit. Wouldn’t be the first upstairs attending with that attitude.
Her gaze passed over him and honed in on Bridget shuffling paperwork at the nurses’ station. She walked up to the counter, stopped three feet away from him and—
When he recounted the incident later—and he did it at least seven times during the rest of the shift—he blamed what left his mouth on the pain in his stump and dangerously low blood sugar.
„You sure took your sweet time.”
The flat, unimpressed glare, was his first warning that he let his snark slip off the leash at the wrong moment.
„Forgive me—,” the glare slid over him like a laser sight and stopped on the badge clipped to the hem of his scrubs, „Dr. Abbot.” Then big, forest green, frigid eyes fixed on his own. „I was busy preventing a twenty-seven-weeks pregnant patient with placenta previa from bleeding out. But I always welcome my colleagues’ input on the priorities in the management of my cases.”
It was a verbal slap across the face delivered with style that would make Walsh weep fucking tears of pride and joy.
It made Jack feel like an utter ass. Deservedly so.
He hasn’t felt this particular brand of shame since his CO at Brook grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, pointed him towards his three buddies and fellow residents at the best military trauma center in the States—with seven broken bones, countles contusions and lacerations and one subdural hematoma between them, all resulting from the gurney derby the four of them organized in the morgue corridor during the 3 a.m. lull—and asked him very calmly „You came here to learn how to put people back together or how to smash them like fucking bowling pins, Captain?”
But Lavender Scrubs couldn’t give less of a fuck about his shame, if she tried.
She turned to Bridget, as if she didn’t just swat the chief night shift attending like a bothersome gnat, and said in a perfectly even, pleasant voice: „Hi, I’m Dr. Hannah Turner, OB/GYN on-call tonight. I’m here for a consult for Dr. Ellis. Could you point me in the right direction?”
„Sure, Dr. Turner”, Bridget replied, her voice holding just the faintest edge of something Jack decided not to examine too closely for the sake of his dignity. „The patient’s waiting in South 10, which is that way. And Dr. Ellis is just leaving South 4, right there.”
„Thank you, Bridget, right?”
„That’s right. Hug Dana for me.”
„Will do. She’s sending hugs as well.”
And with that Dr Hannah Turner moved towards South 4 with swift steps.
She didn’t spare Jack another glance.
___________________
Hannah clocked ED Die Hard as an alpha the moment she stepped off the elevator.
Mandatory suppressants for all emergency department personnel or not, some things didn’t need scent to be obvious. His broad shoulders, focused gaze and casual but coiled way he was leaning against the charting station telegraphed alpha-on-his-home-turf better than any pheromone signature could.
And then, of course, he opened his mouth.
You sure took your sweet time.
It still lashed across her nerves like a live wire.
Delivered so casually, as if she wasn’t even worth the exertion of actual anger. Just disdain.
And just like that the red flare of indignant rage lit at the bottom of her soul and the freeze-dried retort spilled out of her mouth before her brain was even fully engaged.
She shouldn't have done that.
Not because pissing off the chief night shift attending of the ED—yes, she recognized the name on the badge from the countless rants Emery graced her with over the phone in the last six years—was unwise for a new hire. But because never rising—or rather stooping—to the level of such alpha bullshit was a point of personal pride for Hannah.
As any omega who dared to venture into alpha territory—and medicine was certainly that—she ran face-first into that attitude more times than she cared to remember. She wrestled with it through med school, weathered it during residency and absolutely refused to entertain it as a senior attending.
Which, incidentally, was why she had spent the six years since finishing her fellowship in complex family planning on the road with the mobile reproductive health clinic—miles away from big-city hospitals, surgical hierarchies, and power plays. Out there, where her hands and her instincts mattered more than her designation.
And now she was back.
Getting into a spat with an alpha attending before she even worked a full two weeks at this place.
In front of a charge nurse, no less.
It was damn unprofessional for a woman one short step from crossing over onto the other side of forty.
“Not your best first impression,” she muttered under her breath as she pushed through the double-winged doors and beelined for the L&D nurse’s station.
Dana Evans, charge nurse and Hannah’s favorite person on the entire OB/GYN floor, glanced up from the monitor and gave her a once-over developed through decades of triage experience and raising three kids.
„You look like somebody stomped on your tail.”
„More like I’ve got singed by the dragon that prowls ED at night.”
Dana tilted her head. „I see you’ve met Jack Abbot.” Then she gave Hannah a wry smile and said „C’mon, don’t hold it in, hon.”
Hannah’s wary glance must’ve been readable even in the dimmed light of the L&D corridor, because Dana added „Hannah, I love Jack like a younger, unruly brother I’ve never had, but I’m not blind to his faults. What did he say to you?”
„Nothing much. Just snarked at me like I was a med student showing up late for rounds.” Then, because Dana was still looking at her with a patented out-with-it expression, she ground through a clenched jaw: „You sure took your sweet time.”
Dana clucked her disapproval.
Then smiled a slow, sly smile. „And you gave back as good as you got?”
Hannah felt the hot blush creep up the back of her neck. Really not one of the proudest moments of her pretty badass career.
„I might have thrown Amelia Richards' placenta right in his stupidly smug face. And possibly told him I always welcome input on how I should manage my patients.” Dana’s face was totally unreadable in the light and shadow casted by the harsh light of the monitor. „Was I supposed to bare my throat and whine like a kicked puppy?”
Like a good, little omega, who knows her place in the pecking order would not come past her lips, but she was sure Dana understood.
She didn’t get where she was now by being a good little omega. In fact, the only place that could’ve gotten her was a morgue.
Dana gave her a long, wise, all too knowing look and said „No, hon. You did good.”
Tension she didn’t even realize she carried, slid off Hannah’s shoulders.
„You stood your ground. And Jack, he gets tunnel vision sometimes. A reminder that the Emergency Department is not the only place in this hospital where emergencies happen will do him good.”
Hannah hummed noncommittally, then went for a graceful—not—segue. „How’s Amelia doing?”
Dana, to her credit, rolled with it without so much as a hitch.
„Minimal spotting since the last dose of methylergonovine you’ve ordered for her. Her BP is stable and the fetal heartbeat looks good, no decels.”
„Good. And the rest of our guests?”
„Vicki Choi and Martha Lewis are both progressing nicely—they were at six and eight centimeters respectively fifteen minutes ago, when Lucy did the check-ups. Martha wants an epidural. I’ve paged anesthesiology, Dr Golding should be here any moment.”
And when he comes, he’ll be Martha’s favorite person in the entire world. Martha’s husband’s as well. Or maybe even more so.
„Isla Nkem has been hanging at seven for fours hours now, fourteen overall”
„This is her third pregnancy?”
„Yes.”
„Then, if there’s no change in an hour we’ll have to start considering oxytocin. And Carmen Isidoro?”
„Three centimeters, she’s napping now. And Lily called from maternity—Mina Frankovsky finally has milk.”
„Oh, that’s great,” Hannah smiled a wide, happy smile. „She’s getting discharged tomorrow, if everything holds well, and I’m so happy we’re not sending her home with that still stressing her. That mother-in-law of hers would pester her straight into postpartum depression, if that hasn’t resolved itself.”
„You’re so right. I was considering setting her up with a social worker just so somebody would check up on her at home, but then apparently her sister finally got here from Tampa and started playing the bouncer.”
„That’s good to hear. Thank Lily for the update. I’ll go check on our resident now.”
She turned to go down the halway, but then paused and pivoted back to Dana.
„And thanks for the sanity check earlier. You really made me feel like less of an overreacting wuss.”
„Anytime, hon.” Dana smiled gently.
Hannah was ready to go, when she added „For what it’s worth, Hannah, that charming little nugget of Jack Abbot’s snark that you’ve got tonight had nothing to do with you being a wuss”—an omega—„and everything to do with the fact that he reserves his company manners for patients, panicking med students and nurses running on fumes—attendings, especially the ones working upstairs, he considers fair game.”
„So that was his acknowledgement of my professional reputation?” Hannah could not hold back the sarcasm.
Dana did not bristle, she huffed up a laugh.
„Honestly, that was probably mostly his leg giving him hell. But yes, also a proof that whatever he pegged you as, in those five seconds before his mouth got ahead of his good sense, was not a wuss. Emery Walsh must’ve told you how he trades barbs with her, and you can’t tell me that has anything to do with her giving off wussy vibes.”
No, Hannah couldn’t do that. Em was as alpha as they got.
„Very well, I’ll hold off my final judgement on Dr. Abbot,” she said eventually.
But if he calls me a ‘sweetheart’, I’ll shove the biggest speculum I’ll be able to find up his conceited alpha ass.