Chapter Text
At 7:05 a.m., just as handoff is about to begin, when Samira Mohan all too casually announces she’s accepted the fellowship at Presby, a fifteen-minute drive from the Pitt, only 5 from her apartment, Jack feels it as he almost breaks, knees just on the edge of buckling. Standing at a workstation at the Hub, eyes firmly on the monitor as he waits for John Shen to arrive, he nevertheless takes one precious, precious moment to feel the voracious sense of relief flow through him.
“You didn’t want to stay with us mere mortals?” Trinity Santos is asking Samira with a smile, needling but in that good-hearted way of hers, her sensitivity more often than not buried under the snark.
There’s a pause, as Jack can feel it, as Samira very carefully doesn’t look at him, and he very carefully doesn’t look at her. There is a pause, as he keeps his gaze locked only on his charting, even as he can feel Dana’s eyes boring into the back of his skull from where she stands off to the side.
When Samira speaks, it’s quiet, soft, merciful.
“No. I’ll always appreciate the, uh, mentorship I've received here, but I think it's time for a change.”
Time for a change. Yes.
Samira Mohan, it transpires, will be leaving the Pitt as of June 15th, two weeks before she takes up her new role at Presby. June 15th, her final day, is almost exactly two and a half months from today; for one more, precious moment, Jack allows his mind to wander, calculating in ways never before whether he has enough PTO for a three-month sabbatical (he does).
He’s not a coward, though; he’s not a child; he’s a professional, so he sucks it up.
Finishing up, he swipes his badge and heads to greet Shen as he watches him stroll in through the ambulance bay doors. Jack Abbot is a professional, and he is practiced at this; he can handle it.
He’s survived these last few months; he can survive two and a half more.
*
Later, as he stands in his foyer, he almost can’t remember how he got there, has to concentrate to remember the trip, the details simply reported to Shen, the walk to his car in its accustomed spot in the parking garage, his short, simple drive, parking, the walk up the drive, the lock inserted in his front door.
Later, standing in his foyer, he forgets, for just one simple moment, what he’s meant to do next.
Routine has been his saviour since mid-February, though, and, he knows, routine will be his saviour now. So routine it shall be. Removing his boots if not his prosthetic, he wanders into the kitchen, pulls out eggs, milk, butter, places them on the island alongside the container of pre-cut peppers, onions, and chives. Places bread in the toaster, hits the switch, pulls out a glass, pours orange juice, sets the glass to the side, and resists the siren call of coffee.
The pan on his stove soon hisses, the omelet he prepares is soon crisp, slid on a plate next to the toast, and so he’s soon sitting at the kitchen table in his quiet house to face his breakfast. He makes it through three bites before he wants to throw up; pausing only a second, he takes a breath, swallows the bite, then, another deep breath finishes the meal. It’s as the last sip of the orange slides down his throat, it’s as he’s contemplating a run before shower and bed (surely that will help him sleep), the day is nice enough – routine has saved him before, it will do so again – when he hears a demanding knock on the door, the one he’d been expecting, if dreading.
Robby never could help himself from sticking his nose in.
Sure enough, his oldest friend is standing on the porch in the crisp morning air, fist still raised to pound again on the door as Jack opens it. He’s barging in, heading into the house, shoes off even before Jack can speak.
"Knock, knock, come in,” he grouses, hearing the temper, muted as it is, in his voice, but follows nevertheless as Robby walks toward the kitchen. Joining him there, he finds him brewing coffee from the Keurig Jack only ever uses in desperation, his friend making himself at home with the casual ease of someone well used to it.
“And ‘good morning’ to you, Jack,” he says wryly as he reaches into the fridge for the milk.
Rolling his eyes, Jack gives up, grabs a second cup; it looks like it’s going to be a while until he gets to bed will after all, no matter how the thought of it calls him like a siren after a sixteen-hour shift. It certainly looks like he won’t be going for a run this morning after all.
“Can we make this quick?” The pod coffee tastes like shit, he remembers at his first sip. “I’m running on fumes here, man.”
With hardly a flicker of the eye, Robby leans back against his kitchen counter, mug of doctored coffee clutched greedily to his chest as it cools. With only a small groan, Jack grabs his own and moves to sit again at the table. With only a small whimper, he reaches down to hit the release button on the prosthetic, heaves a small sigh as he feels the relief of having it drop to the floor, and as he swings out his right leg to prop it up on the kitchen chair next to him.
“I hear Mohan finally bit the bullet and told everyone her news.”
Narrowing his eyes, Jack looks over at Robby, feeling the residual annoyance at the tone he can’t quite identify but so often hears in his friend’s voice when he speaks of Samira, feeling, as always, the hint of anger for his failure, still, after almost six years, to get the pronunciation of her name correct.
“Dr. Mohan,” he snaps – it’s ‘Mohuun’, not ‘Mohan’ - pronouncing it just as Samira had taught him a year ago, shaping the vowels just as he’d practiced for days to ensure he’d absorbed it into his bloodstream, until it was muscle memory – “did mention she’s accepted the position at UPMC Presbyterian, yes.”
What’s it to you? he doesn’t ask.
“And how do you feel about that, brother?”
Another eye roll, for Jack simply cannot help himself. He’s been up since three yesterday afternoon, been on his feet for over sixteen hours since, after Robby had called him, begging to come in early, and if he’s lucky, he’ll manage to grab five hours before he heads back into the Pitt to clock in for his regular night shift. Five hours, that’s if he’s lucky, that’s if he manages to actually fall asleep with any ease, and that’s if Robby manages to get to the point at some point this century.
“Our loss.” A shrug. “Obviously. They are lucky to have her – what’s it to you, brother?”
He can hear the passive aggression in his voice, but, man, he’s so fucking tired.
Robby, though, is relentless.
“It’s disappointing, obviously. I had hoped she would stay, but she’s made up her mind, and you’re right, they’re lucky to have her. I imagine it’s different for you, though.”
A pause.
Ah, for fuck’s sake.
“After all, I’m not the one who was sleeping with her until two months ago.”
Low blow, Robby, low blow, and Jack doesn’t flinch at the knife to the guts, but that’s only because he’s already broken. There it is. So it is that as he very, very carefully places his half-drunk mug of coffee onto the kitchen table to sit in front of him, he takes a deep breath, calms himself, centers himself, pauses in turn. As he very carefully ensures his voice is steady – rough, but he can’t help that, not after sixteen hours in the Pitt, not after – anyway, he ensures there’s no waver to his voice before he responds.
“You got something to say to me, brother,” the impatience in his voice is clear; he can hear it, but he can’t help that either, “you should spit it out.”
Robby’s coffee cup is all but thrown into the sink, the water to rinse it is run with almost too much force, and Jack can see it, literally see it as his friend’s temper slips. Jack’s almost surprised it took this long for him to snap; it seems the therapy sessions Robby’s been going to have had an effect after all.
“I fucking told you this would happen, Jack, I fucking told you. Now here we are, down another person, Samira’s a fucking mess, you’re a fucking disaster, neither one of you is sleeping, and all just because you couldn’t keep your– you just couldn’t help your-fucking-self.”
No. That much is true. He really hadn’t been able to.
His mouth opens, though to say what exactly he’s not sure, even as Robby aims for his ribs, slips the second knife in.
“Dana found her crying on the roof the other day.”
There’d been a mass casualty in the Pitt on Wednesday, a car accident, Jack remembers all of a sudden; he’d heard about it from Ellis as he’d relieved her five hours later. It had been bad; a head-on collision between a truck and a car carrying a family of four; only the three-year-old, safely strapped into the child’s seat in the back, had survived.
“Fuck.”
It’s a soft exhale Jack gives, more than a breath than anything as it leaves him. Samira, he knows (again, he’d heard from Ellis), had been in charge of the trauma team working on the mother, had been the one to call it.
“Yeah. Fuck.”
Robby’s voice is harsher, accusing, as a thick finger is pointed his way.
“It isn’t the first time, apparently, that Dana has found her there; but then, you would know that if you weren’t so keen to avoid her.”
Not fair, Robby, not fair.
Jack had been doing his best to avoid Samira; that much is true. He’s been doing his best to avoid all their former gathering spots, avoiding, too, even his usual spot on the other side of the railing on the hospital’s roof, knowing she had begun taking comfort from going there, too. He’d avoided it, knowing they might run into each other there, knowing that, while he had stood there long before she had ever arrived at the Pitt, she likely needed that comfort more.
“I have treated Samira Mohan with nothing but professional courtesy and respect these last months, Robby, just as I always have.”
He has been avoiding her, true, more than that, he has stayed out of her way. He doesn’t push in any way, not questioning when she had given away or traded her night shift rotations, staying away when she’d worked doubles where the two of them overlapped.
He has done his best to avoid forcing her to see his face.
That doesn’t mean he interfered with her education in any way, or has in any way acted to impede her professional development. He has still left her journals printed in her locker when he’d run across them, expecting no response in return but knowing that she doesn’t have access to the ones he pays for, not changing the password to the online portals so she can still log-in as she pleases (not that he’s sure that she does), calls her in for the complicated cases when they come in, urges her to take the lead.
Medicine is the only thing that will save the patient, not hope, not emotion. Medicine is the only thing that will save him.
Save his sanity, if not his soul.
Avoiding her doesn’t mean he doesn’t love watching her work; it doesn’t mean he doesn’t gorge himself on it. Avoiding her doesn’t mean he can’t observe when given, stores up the feeling brought by seeing her bloom as a doctor, as a squirrel stores nuts, builds a hoard for the drought of oncoming winter.
She doesn’t feel the same; that’s fine.
If her eyes don’t sparkle when she sees him coming, if she treats him with the cold, common civility she would her dentist – “Do you agree with the treatment plan as outlined, Dr. Abbot?“ – that doesn’t matter. If she doesn’t eat the food he leaves her, if the hot beverages he places near her go untouched, if she refuses even to acknowledge his presence unless she needs to; it doesn’t matter.
What Samira Mohan needs, she gets, even if it cuts him the way she looks straight through him.
“Yeah,” Robby is saying, still rambling on, oblivious to Jack’s thought process, “the two of you have all but insisted on acting professionally – and we’ve all seen these past months how well that has gone down.”
For fuck’s sake, Jack thinks again. What does the man want from him?
“I told you it would end in disaster.” By now, Robby’s voice is rising, he’s pacing, clearly ramping up as he tears a stripe off of him even as Jack looks calmly up at him. “I told you you would fucking mess it up, I warned you about fucking hurt her, and here we fucking are, because you fucking did–”
Jack’s speaking before he realizes it, the full truth coming out before he thinks it through, bursting out louder and sharper than he had intended.
“Robby. She doesn’t want me.”
He regrets the vulnerability immediately, regrets the pity and shock in Robby’s eyes as he processes what Jack has just told him; regrets more disregarding Samira’s choice in any way, so he hastens to correct himself.
“We ended it–”
She had ended it, whatever, it doesn’t matter, it’s over, that’s what matters – ‘I can’t do this anymore, Jack, I’m sorry, I can’t– I need–’, she had decided that he couldn’t be what she needed.
“Anyway– it’s over, we decided it was best. It fucking happens, Robby, it sucks, but you of all people should know. It happens.”
His voice falls even as he knows he’s not fooling anyone, least of all himself – or his friend.
“Fucking hell, Jack.”
Surely enough, the pity is written clear across Robby’s face, damped down now as the shock has passed, but still there as his voice goes quiet, soft, and Jack hates it, hates it, hates the truth of it. Hates how it reflects the truth; he’s a walking cliche, a pitiful old man who fell in love with a shining star of a woman, a decade and a half his junior, his better in every way. He’d fallen in love with a woman smarter, faster, unbroken, brilliant, beautiful, with the world waiting to fall at her feet.
What had he expected to happen?
Samira had plucked him out from the pile of misfit toys, took him for a whirl and then decided he was too broken for even her to fix, and then had tossed him back without a second look. Even now, he can hardly blame her, looking at him, she had seen every truth of him, knew him for what he was; he could hardly blame her for wanting something better.
“Fucking hell, Jack,” Robby says again, hand rubbing hard against his face. “I thought–”
“You thought I ended it?” Truth was, he’d let him, he’d let everyone think that, but still. “I look that fucking stupid to you?”
He’d let everyone think it, yes, but still, it stings to think that Robby would think that he’d fuck up, that badly, the best thing that had happened to him in over a decade, to think that he’d throw away even a chance with a woman that remarkable? It’s insulting. He hadn’t taken his luck for granted when Michelle had taken a chance on him all those years ago, had loved her until the moment she died, still does; he’d known enough not to throw away a chance with Samira either, at least not once she’d given him the barest hint of a chance.
Robby, though, seems to be just putting it together now.
“I know you had concerns–” he waves his hand in a general acknowledgement of that which they’d spoken off in the past when it came to this; Jack and Samira’s respective positions at the Pitt, the difference in position, his role as her attending when she’d work night, his age – ‘it’s not so much the years so much as the mileage,” Jack had used to joke – hell, the hit to their reputations from the way people looking at them the way Robby is looking at them now.
So, yes, he’d had concerns.
Yes, it is unlikely he would have acted on his feelings, at least until she had finished her residency. Yes, he would have been happy to sit there, hopelessly entranced by her brilliance, at least until she had decided, on her own accord, as to the shape of her future. Yes, he’d had concerns, but once she had decided on him being hers, once she had arrived at his house one late Thursday night after they’d shared an unusual (for him) day shift, once she’d simply walked in, sat him on his own couch and ridden him into oblivion as he’d watched every bliss cross her face; he’d been hers.
He’d committed himself to her right then, for the rest of his life, or as long as she’d have him.
“Not once she’d made up her mind to have me.”
It had lasted four months. Four months, the happiest four months he could remember since forever. It had lasted even though he’d worried the reality of it would have her running, even through the Christmas season, during which, with a quiet panic, he’d been afraid she’d bail, even when the Valentine decorations had started going up, and he’d seen a hint of panic in her eye. Four months, even when other people had soused them out; four months, even when the jokes had shifted from those regarding his adoration to simple assumptions that they came as a package deal.
Four months, paperwork filed with PTMC’s HR department, arrangements made, people told, and still, she’d held. Month after month, until – and Robby’s right about that at least – Jack had fucked it up, just not the way his friend had so clearly assumed.
Maybe he was always meant to fuck it up – it’s certainly possible.
Because Jack Abbot is many things, but he’s never been chill, certainly not around Samira Mohan. He’s never been able to be chill or measured or casual when it comes to her. He’s never been able to be all that she needed; it seemed, it’s more than possible he never could have been. Because Jack Abbot had fucked up one of the greatest things ever to have happened to him, and he’d fucked it up because he couldn’t be chill, or casual, and, worse of all, he couldn’t seem to keep his big, stupid mouth shut.
‘I can’t do this anymore, Jack, I’m sorry, I can’t– I need–’
He hadn’t been able to keep his big mouth shut – the three little words dripping off his tongue despite himself that had Samira paling – and she’d left him behind. Excised him from her life with surgical precision, the cut clean, sharp, simple and straight, her hands steady, no hesitation, focused.
(As clean as the cut had been, it doesn’t mean he heals.)
She’d excised him from his life with as little effort as she would have used to stitch up a simple cut. She’d excised him from her life with as little regret as she would have cut into a trauma victim. She’d cut him loose; he bleeds, the wound still open, raw, and all the while, he works at her side, intimate and close, more days than not.
She’d cut him loose, leave him behind.
All the while, he watches her move forward with the life she’d always meant to have, one where she leaves him behind, gorges himself nevertheless on watching her brilliance, and relies on muscle memory alone to keep him breathing.
So, yes, hearing today that she’d matched with PTMC Presbyterian had been a relief.
Samira Mohan will badge out of the Pitt for the final time on June 15th, two and a half months from now. She’ll complete her final shift as she completes her residency, and then she’ll leave it – and him – behind, permanently. She’ll leave them behind, as completely, as easily, as she was perhaps almost meant to do; she’ll walk away from that place, and that part of her life, and she’ll never look back.
He’ll love her until he takes his last breath, probably beyond.
But maybe if he doesn’t see her every day, maybe if he doesn’t work by her side every day, close and intimate – as intimate as the ghost she treats him as – maybe, he can figure out how to sleep without reaching for her.
He can hope so at least.