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"Do you want to talk about it?" Frank asked, two or three hours later.
Mel paused, fingers hovering over an iPad. "My peanut allergy in South 6?"
He hadn't seen her since he'd left her in the dark in Central 3, but she looked all right, mostly. Maybe a little dishelved, but it had been one hell of a morning and her posture was fine. Eyes still clear, reaction time adequate. He wondered how the goose egg on the back of her head was feeling.
"Ah, no," he said, "although if you need me to look over the chart I'm happy to. Ordering the allergy tests can be a little tricky on nuts, you want to order a bigger panel than you think, learned that the hard way on coconuts—"
She handed him the iPad, watching over his shoulder—well, over his arm, she was pretty short— as he clicked through the forms, checked boxes, explained that the standard of care on nut allergies was changing all the time, and recommended a mommy Facebook group he lurked in for news on the latest studies.
"Faster than waiting for the next journal," he explained. "These women are experts."
Then he said, "I meant the deposition, though."
Mel cringed, curling her whole body in on itself a little. She took a step away. "Not really." She shot a look down at South 6, South 9, Central 4. Patients waiting. "Have you ever done one?"
He nodded. Just once in a malpractice suit, which he'd eventually been dropped from, but once in the divorce proceedings too. "It can be a little intimidating," he admitted. "Not as bad as testifying in court. It's a good baby step."
"I hate testifying in court," Mel mumbled. Her hands wrung around her wrists, pulling at herself. Frank didn't reach to stop her. He'd done that back in Central 3, when the cops started talking about testifying, about her being a material witness, and her hands had flown up to her wrists and started wrenching at them. She'd flinched away hard.
"I thought you might," he offered instead, lowering his voice to something confidential. "I noticed when the cops were here earlier that you weren't really, uh, at ease with the idea."
Mel snorted, but it lacked heat. "I had to testify a bunch for, um, Becca. To be her legal guardian. She was mad at me for months afterward."
Becca. The sister, right, he'd forgotten there was a sister. High needs, he remembered. "She didn't want you to be her guardian?"
Mel shook her head. "I don't think she was upset about the concept, not really. She's self-aware, you know? She knows she needs a little extra help with things. But before, with our parents, she hadn't needed a legal guardian, I mean not formally, because they looked after her, but then they were, um, gone, and she was an adult—she's older than me, actually, by a few years—so the guardianship proceedings were new. Her life totally destabilized and then it was like, four days of every person she had left that she'd ever trusted getting up and testifying about everything she can't do."
Her face was going red. Her hands wrenched and wrenched at her skin. "It was really horrible," she added, small.
Frank looked around for a moment, spotted nothing urgent, and herded Mel gently away from the charge desk toward South 3, careful not to touch her. There was an extremely sedated and presently unconscious twenty-nine year old guy with a broken leg and shattered collarbone from a skateboarding wipeout in the bed, waiting for surgery; Frank had done his intake. It wasn't private, exactly, but it would do.
"Langdon," she protested.
"He's out cold, Mel, don't worry about it. Look." He tapped his fingers across the guy's hand. Nothing. "Come on, just take a second with me. Talk through it with me."
"It's just silly," she said, but her voice was tense, strained. Her wrists twisted and twisted. "I just—everybody says doctors usually win malpractice cases, everybody gets sued eventually, but it's not just that, it's—"
Mel's hands tightened again at her wrists, pulling hard, corkscrewing around them. The skin underneath was beginning to look angry; she'd probably bruise. Her breath turned shallow, anxious. Frank wanted to stop her. He wanted to catch her up, let her twist her hands into his shirt instead, breathe the right rhythm for her, in, now out. In, now out.
He didn't. It was painful not to, but not as painful he thought it might be for her if he did. Frank wondered if, ten months ago, he'd have been able to stop himself. If he'd even have known he should stop himself.
It never affected patient care, he'd said, and Robby had agreed, and a panel of independent nurses and ED physicians who reviewed a bunch of his charts had hemmed and hawed but ultimately agreed too. I always provided the standard of care.
But sometimes the standard of care wasn't enough. Sometimes you had to do a little digging to know to ask for coconut to be added to the tree nut panel.
The benzos didn't make Frank a terrible doctor and thank Christ for that.
But they did stop him from becoming a better one.
Frank took a deep breath, shoved all that regret away. It wasn't a useful emotion here. He couldn't go back and redo all the things he wished he'd done differently. He could only take the lesson and move forward.
He could do something differently right now, for Mel.
"You're worried about Becca," he guessed. "About how it will look as her guardian if they get you on malpractice."
She nodded. "I know I'm not her doctor, I don't provide her that kind of care, but I already had to go have our guardianship order modified so she could live in her group home, but then they had all these questions like they thought I was booting her out because I couldn't take care of her anymore as a resident, but that's what she wanted and that's the whole reason I even chose Pittsburgh, because this was the home she wanted and she'll get to be so much more independent and I still get to see her all the time, but our case manager left so we have this new woman and she's kind of a jerk and I already have to file all this documentation every year and now I'm going to have to disclose the malpractice suit and the material witness thing and if they get me on malpractice and I can't be a doctor I won't be able to pay for all of this and—"
"Mel," Frank said, softly.
"And maybe they're all right. Maybe I can't take care of her anymore," Mel finished, and she finally let go of her wrists to bury her face in her hands.
She was going to have palm prints on her glasses. Frank turned to rummage through one of the bins, looking for the wipes Dana preferred for her own glasses. Give her a moment of privacy. Give himself a moment to control that hammering instinct to go wrap himself around her.
He breathed loudly, mouth open so she could hear it. In, one, two, three, out, one, two, three.
It took a minute. Frank, ten months ago, would've been shaky with the need to move on to the next thing. Good thing he'd spent a lot of time, these last months, learning how to breathe.
When Mel's rhythm finally matched his own, Frank turned back and offered the wipe. She smiled shakily and took it. Behind her glasses her eyes were a little red and her cheeks a little sticky.
"Oh my god, I'm so sorry," she said, wiping off her lenses and then dabbing at her face. "That was so unprofessional, Dr Langdon, I'm so—"
"Shut up," Frank cut her off, as gently as he could, and he smiled so she'd know. "Everyone needs a minute sometimes. I wouldn't have brought you in here with unconscious Tony Hawk over there if I didn't intend you to take it."
Mel frowned. "His name is Ben, I think."
His name was Brad, actually, but that wasn't the point. "Feel any better?"
She sniffed a little, wiped her eyes again. Her color was already starting to even out, though her wrists were still rubbed red. They were definitely going to bruise; he made a mental note to grab some arnica cream for her. "Yeah. Surprisingly, yeah, I do." Her smile was a little steadier now.
"Good." Carefully, slowly, Frank reached a hand out, waiting to see if Mel would take it now that she'd come down. She only looked at it for a long moment, like she was expecting something else to happen, but finally she brought her own hand up and delicately laid hers in his. "Don't let stuff like this fester, all right? You can always come tell me."
Mel eyed him skeptically.
"You can," he insisted. "You don't want to be distracted out there on the floor. And I'd like—" God, was he going to say this? He really was. Rehab really did change a fucking person. "I know I was, um, gone. For a long time. But to be honest, Mel, I could really use a friend."
Cringe king of the world. It's a good thing Mel was so—well, herself, because she only furrowed her brow at him a moment more before setting her hand more firmly in his. "I could really use one too, I think."
"Good. We're decided. And as my friend, you get special new privileges." Frank squeezed her hand once, let it go. The moment was over; they needed some levity to get them back to their patients. "First and foremost, you get name privileges—it's Frank."
She made a face, the knee-jerk reaction most people had at his first name when they really heard it the first time, and Frank laughed. "Don't laugh, it was my grandad's name. Francis. Don't tell Santos."
"You do not get name privileges," she told him primly, and there was the smile he remembered, that big-broad-with-her-whole-face kind of thing. "No one calls me Melissa. It's what my mother called me when I was in trouble." Her nose wrinkled. It was cute.
"Oh, Dr King, a troublemaker," Frank teased. "Should've known, it's always the quiet ones."
"You're not quiet," Mel pointed out, still smiling, a good sort of blush crawling up over her cheeks.
"Well, damn, Mel, don't pull any punches with me," he said, but they both laughed as they ducked back out of Tony Hawk's room. The floor buzzed around them, the usual pleasant hum. Nothing devastating yet. Frank hope it lasted. "What am I supposed to call you then, if you do get in trouble?"
"Mm. Second-year resident Dr King."
"The whole thing?"
"The whole thing. Just to keep me humble."
Frank pretended to think this over, choking back a laugh, then nodded. "Agreed. Second term of the friendship: come find me after your dep, okay? We'll dissect it. Full body autopsy. You'll feel better if you don't spiral over it alone."
That was another deep therapy trick: talking about your feelings helped. Who'd have fucking thought.
Mel agreed, a little more readily than he expected, and he wondered that she didn't really seem to have anyone else she might have wanted to talk it through with more. "I get first name privileges and an autopsy, but what do you get?"
"Aside from the very great honor of calling second-year resident Dr King my friend? I," Frank grinned, "get your patient in Central 4."
Her eyes narrowed in confusion, then suspicion. "You want…my patient?"
"Robby's had me on Chairs all morning, but if I tell him you asked me to take over one, I doubt he'll argue on it. He likes you. It's part of my master plan to get back on the floor."
"I suppose as a friend I'm somewhat obligated to take part in any schemes, shenanigans, or plots," Mel mused judiciously, a giggle rising into her voice at the end. Frank wanted to see her in some shenanigans immediately. He wanted to go all in on some cahoots. Make her smile like that again. Make her laugh some more. She didn't have any laugh lines yet around her mouth and it was a damn shame; he wanted to put some there. "All right. Central 4. He's got bloody diarrhea and what appears to be a bunch of screws in his upper intestine."
"Ooh. A good one. Pica?"
"I think it's a symptom of something else, not the base issue. Waiting on labs. Just be aware going in that there's, um, not a zero percent chance of there being a biohazard issue."
Frank groaned; should've gone for the peanut allergy in South 6. Damn. "You would do this to me?" He put on a stupid voice, trying to imitate Don Corleone—not Italian, not even close. "You come into this ED on this, this day we become friends, and you offer me biohazards?"
Mel grinned. "Accept this justice as a gift," she said, in an equally stupid voice, and Frank was delighted, he hadn't been sure she'd get the reference, "on this, the first day of our friendship."
"Neither of you missed a calling in theatre," Dana said dryly.
They looked at her, caught. Frank rolled his lips into his teeth to keep from laughing. He could feel Mel next to him, trying to do the same.
"Your labs are back in South 6," Dana told Mel, eying both of them dubiously. "And you are very missed in Chairs, Langdon."
"I asked him to take Central 4 for me," Mel cut in. She lied like it was a breeze.
"You clear that with Robby?"
"No, but it's my bloody diarrhea case." Her face did something significant that meant Dana knew exactly what was happening in Central 4 and none of it was pleasant.
"Oh, well, in that case," Dana said immediately, turning to Frank. Yeah, that easy acceptance was suspicious as hell. He had a strong feeling he was about to learn an important lesson about counting his chickens before they hatched. Or was this a Murphy's law situation? He was never strong on his adages. "His call button just went off."
"Have fun, Langdon," Mel said. Butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. Oh, she was a troublemaker. "See you later?"
He watched her go, ducking into South 6, her hello again, how are we feeling, filtering out to him. "I deserve that, don't I?"
"What, the diarrhea? I don't know about deserve," Dana considered, "but I'm willing to bet you really did it to yourself."
"No idea what you mean, Dana."
"I bet." She rolled her eyes, turned to go back to the charge desk, but almost instantly seemed to change her mind and turned back. She leaned in, close, and it was only because he knew her that her stare didn't scare him. He knew how to find the approving little tilt to her mouth. "You be good to Dr King, will you? She doesn't have enough people on her side."
"Well, I've got none on mine, not sure how useful I'll be."
Dana's smile turned into something a little more reassuring. She put a hand on his shoulder, squeezed gently. "You've got at least one, kid. And you're gonna want a full face shield for Central 4. Good luck."