Archive of Our Own

The Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center has seen plenty of things.

If only these walls could talk. If only the nurses could talk less.

Robby is a man of habit, at his core. But he is also a teacher who believes in a well-rounded education. So when Samira showed interest in working with Abbott after Pittfest he put some more effort into his residents’ schedule. That is, any effort at all, since scheduling was a task avoided successfully for the last couple of years by signing off on whatever color-coded chart was on his laptop at any given time.

One night shift became two, became more. Became doubles pulled by both Mohan and Abbot, swapping hours with other residents, covering people. Became something Robby wasn’t really interested in - unlike other gossip-prone members of the ER - but could see the ripples of in the people he worked with every day. He moved along without paying too much attention.

He wouldn't have told anyone but he was a little bit relieved that Mohan could be on someone else's service for a while. She was sharp and smart, but he had been struggling to really challenge her or nurture her talent. He couldn’t break through to her, so if Jack could, all the better for everyone.

The whole thing was nothing, really. Jack would have said something, Robby was sure.

When Dana, careful of anyone noticing, slowly moved around the calendar to put Samira back on more days he barely registered. Deep in restructuring meetings with the higher ups, left without senior residents with Langdon in resident limbo due to rehab and Collins off to Portland, getting Samira back had been a bigger save than he was able to admit. He could see the change of the last few months in the decisiveness of her movements. He wondered what really happened for a second. 

Then went back to running a department held with tape and glue.

18th August 2026

“I’m sorry about last night.”

Taken aback, all Samira can say is: “I was a willing participant.”

Jack wants to scream right there. Last night, driving home in his truck while the city enjoyed the warm August night, he almost convinced himself her soft lips and her hand on the nape of his neck were tracing truth on his skin. He knows he’s only seeing what he wants to see. For better or worse.

“It would be frowned upon, at work. Attending and resident. It’s the cliché of clichés.”

He doesn’t mention that all it would take is signing a form.

Samira thinks there’s regret hanging in the air, she doesn’t regret that kiss one bit, but convinces herself she does, if he does. Walking home to the sound of laughter and the future shining in the buzz of Summer was nothing. The foundations of the wall they’ve slowly unpicked through many months of friendship are being laid again. How silly was she, to let herself think letting people in wouldn’t end in disappointment.

“And with our age difference… We’re in completely different stages of life.”

There goes the bricks, mortar layered in.

“I agree.” Samira says.

Because he is right, after all. This would be tricky, and she’s got herself to think about. She’s been the only one thinking about herself for a long time, she knows what’s right. She must have been tipsier than she thought last night to even entertain the thought. Samira Mohan, unguarded, supported, loved and cared for by a man who thought she was absolutely brilliant? It was not reality. It never could be. She knows what kind of love is for her, and pure, unconditional love is not.

“I’m a handful. With one half leg and a full list of symptoms, physical and not. You know how close I stand to the edge.”

‘I could never do that to you’ is what Jack doesn’t say. Because the thought of letting this fixing-obsessed woman take care of him is possibly the worst thing he could ever do. Samira deserves all the sunshine this world is willing to dapple her in, and he’d only be in the way of that. He doesn’t see how making a choice like that only robs her of her autonomy. But the thought of being rejected, or even worse, of her folding herself around him to then resent him is too much to bear.

“You don’t know what it’s like.”

That somehow hurts more than anything else, stabbing in Samira’s side, as if the times she has seen him struggle in the last year, the way he’s opened up to her about the nightmares, the way they’ve built a friendship on truly seeing each other, all of it doesn’t matter one bit.

The first time she placed a cup of coffee in front of him when he was sat in the break room staring at the wall for too long, the first time she let her hand rest on top of his after a veteran killed himself, the first time she’d shaken him out of a panic attack with firm hands and a kind heart staring right into his eyes.

The times he’d told her stories, when the night was warm enough to sit on a bench for hours, about what life in the army was like even if it was hard to find the right words, the times he’d limped after a long shift and she’d convinced him to sit down to chart, the times she’d caught him with tears in his eyes, hanging onto his dog tags for dear life, and he’d asked her to stay. That night they sat on the floor side by side, shoulders a whisper apart, for hours.

The way she’d slowly unpicked her past to show him the ugly parts, the time she’d talked about her mother after two glasses of wine and her father after one coffee, the time she’d let a single tear roll down her cheek at the end of a shift and let him see it.

Like none of it matters. As if it wasn’t a sign of how much she cares, how much she’s willing to lend him everything she can, how much she would support him.

“I’ll see you next week.” When he walks away Jack has made a choice for both of them.

The last brick lands, the wall is up. Samira can’t breathe. But she’s become so good at holding her breath.

Samira thought for a really long time that “feeling things in your body” was just a saying, that people with hope in their chest and happiness in their cheeks were just talking in metaphors.

Metaphors were never really her thing.

Now, feelings in other people she was really good with. Endless was the list of friends who had cried on her shoulder for their latest heartbreak, plenty the occasions in which her mother would complain to her in ways that shouldn’t be so easy for a parent, many the patients who’d tell her their sorrows. But if feelings in others were easy, pain was even better: she could point at it, pick it apart, and most importantly fix it.

Growing up she was labelled “a big empath”, the words in slanted handwriting on report cards over and over hanging on their fridge. Samira would shrug her shoulders if you asked her. Being empathetic only means you’re good at pattern recognition, to her. It doesn’t mean you have to feel it, she’s not a mirror, she can’t feel it but she can read it. Faces, hands, bodies are open books to her. The ability is so sharp by now that it’s easy enough to catch the emotions without actively looking for them.

At 30 all she knows about real feelings is the texture of old memories yellowed at the edges, of lazy Summer days, of college afternoons in study halls with fellow students, of walking a stage towards her career, of watering a plant in her new flat.

What she knows is that if you keep balancing yourself on the right line you can avoid the lowest lows.

It hadn’t occurred to her that foregoing the lows means also giving up the highs.

And sure, maybe sometimes in the last year she’s caught joy in the apple of her cheeks or frustration under her sternum, but living in your body is a dangerous game. Especially when you can feel it long for something that you know will hurt you, and find out it already has.

Jack works nights because he wants to, not because he has to. There’s no one at home worrying about the up-ended schedule, no one to take out for dinner at a regular time, no one to fight over wallpaper colors. But also no one to remind him to take his meds, or to make him coffee before work, to drag him out of bed when he wants to feel sorry for himself. Well, Emery did a number on his phone and somehow weaseled herself into his calendar which means that he is forced out of the flat with no excuse to fall back on once in a while.

It had taken him a while to give in to the new lifestyle. So few things in his life had gone completely to plan, and giving up the appearance of a “normal” life would have meant admitting that he didn’t fit the mold he thought he’d be living in now.

Did he ever, with a deployment in the cards, a high-pressure career, crazy hours?

Night shifts had actually been the first thing that made sense in a while. He wouldn’t give it up now, the way he runs that department when all the higher ups are asleep and the rules are just a touch looser.

Years of therapy don’t save you from falling into yourself sometimes though, he’s learned in all his sessions. If he indulges the darker thoughts that cross his mind sometimes, then he tries not to feed them too often. He tries to walk outside while the sun is still out to remember what the world looks like outside of the fluorescent glimmer of the ED and the antiseptic smell on his shirts, he spends time with his friends even if occasionally all that means is seeing someone who smells of sanitizer just as much as he does.

It’s not on him, he thinks, that the house creaks of loneliness when he turns the key in the lock at the end of every shift.

There have been a few women who have seen these walls, mused at the pictures on the bookshelf, made coffee in the kitchen, rearranged the pillows, but Jack has a tendency to give people a reason to leave. It’s better if they do when he can remove traces of them easily from his shelves and his heart. That way he can still live in the safety of being a mess.

And sure, maybe sometimes in the last year he’s unearthed the easiness of being connected to someone else purely because his breath fell in rhythm with hers, but letting yourself look at what you can’t have every day is a game he has to stop playing. Especially if he’s sabotaging his own hand.

17th August 2026

If they kiss after a very long shift on a warm summer evening, with a couple of beers running through their bloodstream, who is there to fault them but the sunset burning the horizon to ashes?

“Doctor Abbot?”

It’s been two months.

September has come and gone, bringing shorter days and longer sighs, throwing the city into an unseasonably chilly October that has everyone reaching for scarfs early.

On the day of the Pittfest memorial, when they all stood in the park with candles listening to speeches and songs, Jack had stood in front of Samira, words caught in their throats, grief shining in the corner of their eyes. He had hovered a hand towards hers, not daring to touch her, before thinking better of it and stuffing it back in his pocket. She’d walked away, the flame casting a warm halo on her face, to stand near Trinity and Mel, an ocean away. He’d lost the right. He knows she didn’t care, probably didn’t even notice.

It’s been two months and Samira doesn’t even think about it, really. She doesn’t think about how their relationship has turned back into what it was a year ago, back when they’d work the occasional swapped shift together, when he’d throw an interesting case her way, set to teach her something - but is also worse somehow, because he doesn’t look at her as if she’s the smartest in the room anymore. Because he doesn’t look at her a whole lot.

“Right” is something Samira has been many times throughout her life, so she’s not too surprised to be right about this too. Right about not being enough. Right about closing off the side of herself that’s longing. She is still the smartest in the room, whether he looks at her or not.

“Jack?” Samira tries again, thinking he didn’t hear her. Or worse, didn’t recognize her.

He turns, but he doesn’t need to. He’d know her from voice alone. He’d know her from a whisper in a crowded room on the other side of the city asleep in the depth of the night. He shakes the thought out of his head, hoping if he keeps doing it, one day she’ll just fall out of it and not find her way back in.

“Mohan, sorry I didn’t see you there.”

They both know there’s a time when she would have asked. When she would have been up here mere minutes after him, stood beside him, and unpicked the threads of whatever he was caught in.

“Well that’d be hard unless you had eyes in the back of your head.”

“Don’t worry, one day I’ll figure that out too.”

“Dana sent me up, you left your pager and your phone downstairs.”

He feels in the pockets of his scrubs, sure he brought at least one means of contacting him along, coming up empty.

“Everyone’s busy. Incoming motorcycle accident, 3 minutes out.”

Jack turns. Samira is holding the door open.

“Let’s get to it then.”

25th July 2026

“Well, no better occasion to get together than to celebrate our oldest doctor getting even older,” Dana lifts a glass to close off her quick speech.

“I’m younger than you,” Jack reminds the crowd.

“And still. You look so much older.”

“We should do this again.”

“We so should!”

“Maybe we’ll invite your mother next time,” Trinity suggests, which earns her an elbow in the side from Victoria.

“Don’t joke about that.”

“Only took ten months to coordinate schedules, what’s everyone doing March next year?”

“Retiring,” Dana laughs, lifting the wine glass to her lips.

“Call me when you actually put the papers in,” Cassie retorts.

Abbot, Robby, Dana, and a couple of the night shift people usually go to a bar for Jack’s birthday, but a “big number birthday” (Dana’s words) deserved a little more established celebration.

How this group has ended up in Dana’s garden is an easy-to-solve mystery that rings of high school dynamics: Dana invited McKay, who in turn dragged along Javadi to make up for all the babysitting, who couldn’t face the idea of being in a room of superiors without backup, hence Santos, who surprisingly mentioned it to Mel, joined at the hip by Langdon since he’s come back, who extended the invitation to Whitaker in an attempt at building “workplace friendship”.

Jack himself, however, had told Samira about the small get together while she was pulling a double the week before, in the break room. It had been an off-hand remark, not even an invitation really. Just a thought. He’d been careful to point out that her friends would be coming along too.

So she’d showed up to Dana’s porch with a bottle of red and her curls falling on her shoulders. Her cuticles torn to shred and her heart working double-time, but no one could see that.

“Don’t you dare, Dana, you did so much already,” Jack warns the nurse, who’s starting to pick up plates and cutlery.

She backs off from the table, letting the man take over instead, in a tactical sweep of all dirty dishes.

The sink is filling with warm water when he slumps his head forward, a heavy sigh shaking his frame slightly.

“Long day?”

He hadn’t noticed Samira making her way through the door quietly so as not to disturb him, and stopping to lean on the doorframe.

“Just… Birthdays,” He says.

The acknowledgment is silent. Celebrations always carry a person-shaped hole, it doesn't matter how much time passes. She’d know, she still sees her father’s silhouettes behind her in every picture of her blowing out candles.

“Are you going to work later?” Samira asks while getting a beer out of the fridge. Abbot does his best to avoid looking at the way she twists the cap off and then takes a sip.

“No.”

“Good,” She smiles, setting the beer on the counter. “More time to enjoy life.”

Is that a glint in her eyes? A sparkle of something? Jack reaches for the dish soap, before he gets too caught up in birthday wishes he’d never dare to think.

“Need to go through these first.”

“Why don’t you let me? It can be my birthday gift,” She gestures at the sink.

He throws her a tea towel instead.

“You’re on drying duty, Mohan. And I warn you, I wash dishes faster than I cric’.”

Samira rolls her eyes.

“Thank goodness,” She whispers smiling.

Dana’s kitchen isn’t small but it feels like it, their shoulders never touching but close enough they could if they dared.

It’s like running a trauma, really. Without the pressure or the logistics or the blood or the high stakes or the beeping monitors or the other people around. So it’s nothing like running a trauma, maybe. But it’s the same easiness in knowing each other’s rhythms and movements, in breaths syncing up without meaning to.

As Samira wipes down plate after plate, filing away forks after trying a couple of drawers, Jack hums to himself.

Another year. Some days Jack wakes up and thinks he has little to show for all the years he’s walked this Earth for. Some days he stands on the roof and thinks maybe the fall will be sweeter than waking up in his bed in the darkness. But some days. Some days your friends show up at someone else’s doorstep to say they’re glad you’re alive. Some days the kitchen you wash the dishes in smells of flowers and citrus because that’s what the woman standing next to you is wearing. Plenty of years behind him and Jack had no idea the future would be lavender until he smelled it on his shirt when they hugged for the first time.

The sun has finally set, the last golden light of the day dancing on the ceiling, while the muffled chatter and laughter from the living room filters through, and in the evening marking another journey around the sun, Jack’s laugh lines seem deeper when Samira sneaks a look at his profile. He keeps his life in those lines. She marvels at how some of them were because of her.

Samira thinks she could stretch out her arms, touch all the walls in the room and hold the world if she was brave enough.

Jack’s in the pitt, Samira next to him, both reading a chart on the same tablet.

The kid who was on a motorcycle without a helmet first in line for a CT, somehow alive.

The bustle of the ER mumbles around him: families, squeaky gurney wheels, vitals, tapping, running, crying, shuffling. A kid bumps into a nurse, a cleaner mops the floor, a patient on the other side of the hub struggles against the hands trying to help him.

A day in the office, really.

Jack is not on a battlefield.

Jack is just at work.

The noise, though. It’s ingrained in his bones.

By the time McKay has shouted “Gun!” at the top of her lungs the bullet is already tearing through the air towards them.

It’s pure instinct as soon as the shot echoes through the room, to get Samira to the ground, tablet sent flying across the floor, wind knocked out of them both. He feels the impact of the floor, of his body on hers, of their limbs against each other, maybe even of the bullet somewhere in the one form they’ve become.

It’s a second, maybe less than that. It’s the space between heartbeats.

Jack remembers that lesson in training, that’s when snipers shoot, in the space between heartbeats.

It isn’t enough to pray, but it’s enough to wish he’s wrong.

Ahmad tackles the man so quickly he can’t even think about shooting again.

“Shooter secured,” The security guard shouts, as people slowly stand back up dusting themselves off.

“Everyone alright?” It’s Dana’s voice that cuts through the rising volume of the space.

Jack props himself up, scanning Samira, running his hands quickly and clinically around her head and then along her arms and torso, while she can only stare up at him with hazy eyes as everything comes back into focus. She tries to take a full gasp of air, struggling to fill her lungs after the fall, but Jack sees it then, while the adrenaline in his veins is running overtime, how her scrub top has a blooming red patch on her abdomen.

“It’s… You’re…”

He can’t fully form a sentence, all he can do is reach for her and try to stop the bleeding.

“It’s not mine,” Samira struggles out, pushing herself off the floor against his hands. “It’s not my blood, Jack.”

The world stops spinning for a second.

Jack is sitting back on his heels, Samira’s in front of him, hands around his arms.

In a second Samira is going to shout for a gurney, she’s going to load him onto it with the help of Jesse and Robby only a few feet away, and she’s going to be pushing down on his chest with as much force as she can muster to keep him from bleeding out. Nurses are going to hook him up to monitors, to IVs, to blood bags. Someone is going to check for a bullet entry and exit point - left side of the chest, through and through - and run an ultrasound, put in a chest tube, maybe even crack his chest. They’ll call to surgery and wheel him as fast as possible to an OR to try and save his life.

But for now, for one second, less than that, they’re just looking into each other’s eyes.

They’ve never been good at this, either of them, staring at possibilities. There’s a version of reality somewhere in which Jack isn’t so terrified of wanting, in which his wounds don’t prevent him from being loved, maybe he’d think himself a burden in every world but in that one he’d let her decide if she wants to carry him home at night. Maybe Samira would let herself rest, gently, would open herself up to be held for the woman she is, no need to perform, no need to run.

Jack has been at Death’s doorways many times, he knows what it feels like, he knows he’s knocking now. He knows in the way his vision warps at the edges and he can feel reality thin out around him. He’s good at walking away from it, he’s done that many times too, come back when he thought it might have been the end.

If he had any strength left he’d raise a hand, place it on her cheek maybe, tell her something, anything. All he can do is let himself drink her in as if he was allowed, finally, as if he hadn’t made such a colossal mistake pushing her away, as if she was looking back at him with the same regret, which he knows is impossible. All she can do is helplessly hope that time will stay suspended in the hourglass, all the words she should have said dead on her lips, all the courage she didn’t have spilling onto the floor along with everything that could have been.

There’s stars in their eyes as they fall into each other, the shine of promise, the glimmer of knowing loss, the sharpness of what’s already gone.

In a moment, the world will snap back like a pulled elastic band and it’ll bruise their faces and their hearts.

All they have is the time between heartbeats.

Then it ends.

16th June 2026

“Let me go, please, just let me-”

“Mrs Ansari, you need to try and calm down,” Jack says, stepping closer to the bed.

Mrs Ansari - Mariam like Samira wrote in her chart - is trying to tear at her IV sites and roll out of bed, but her mild concussion makes everything a touch harder, enough that Jack can reach over and stop her without difficulty.

“Mrs Ansari please, you’re going to hurt yourself, I know this must be scary but you’re safe,” Samira tells her, helping Jack to settle her.

The woman keeps trying to free herself from the doctors’ hands, twisting and turning, tears wetting her neck, whispering a litany of words in broken sobs.

“Lorazepam?” Samira asks, holding onto the woman’s arm.

“I’d rather not, I- What is she saying?” Jack asks, “Mrs Ansari? Mariam, can you hear me?”

As both doctors quiet down, their hands still on the patient, her words ring out. They freeze the blood in Samira’s veins.

“Let me go, please, let me die.”

Mariam is slowly getting tired, and her pushes are weaker against the hands trying to help her. Her body eventually goes limp, her eyes still shiny of tears.

Her lips are still mouthing her wish, her prayer.

Jack and Samira look at each other across the bed.

Mariam’s husband, Amir, was in front of her when a bike ran him over. She was on the pavement holding him, his head in her lap, when the ambulance arrived. She wouldn’t leave his side to be checked out, standing right at the edge of the trauma room while Jack and Samira tried their damnedest to bring him back. She had watched him die.

Samira had never heard a wail like the one that broke the air when they had to call it.

Jack is no stranger to what Mrs Ansari keeps begging for, hell, he’s begged for the same thing himself. 

Samira has seen him struggle a couple of times, but this isn’t a tough case or a blooming panic attack, this is Jack grabbing a stool and sitting next to a bereaved woman, holding her hand.

The lines in his face are deeper, his eyes softer, the weight on his shoulder heavier.

“Let me die,” Mariam begs still.

“I know, I understand,” He repeats back to her.

When the woman has calmed down enough to breathe at regular intervals she finally looks at him. Her eyes are empty.

“How could you?”

The words punch the air out of Jack’s lungs.

“I’m sorry we did everything we could-”

“No. How could you know?” She corrects. “Amir was the only person who made sense to me. We have only been married two years. I thought we had a lifetime.”

Grief isn’t a stranger to Samira, of course, but rather a lifelong friend who started walking along her at 13, her father’s gait and all the words she never heard him say filling the space between them.

When she lost him she remembers the world just dulling out. She remembers how she didn’t tell anyone for a while, for saying things out loud makes them real. Some people say the five stages of grief are bullshit, she didn’t, she went through all of them. What they don’t tell you though, she always thought, is that you go through all the stages over and over in random sequences all the time until you think you’re done. And then it starts over again. She’s still surprised now, 16 years later, to be hit by the anger.

She should leave, she’s aware. This feels like a confessional she’s eavesdropping on, a conversation she shouldn’t be privy to. Yet she stays, knowing Jack would have gestured for her to leave if he wanted her to. A small part of her wants to stay, needs to see this, hear this.

“I understand you, Mariam,” Jack says, holding the woman’s hand.

Samira knows. She found out a long time ago, back when Jack Abbot was just the night shift attending she’d run into a couple of times, through the ever-reliant gossip mill of nurses. She knows that he was married, a while ago, that he’s been a widower for a while too. She never asked more, never tried finding out more.

There are things in life you shouldn’t try to pry out of people. She might have seen his jaw clench when dealing with a bereaved husband once or twice, but she never mentioned it, never brought it out in the open. If Jack wanted to keep this in the dark forever, she wouldn’t have pushed to know.

However, she can’t help but feel that him talking to Mrs Ansari now, is also him talking to her a little bit. She doesn’t move an inch for fear of upsetting the balance in the room. He’ll speak honestly, she can see it in his eyes. Maybe to finally let this into the light, maybe to atone for his sins.

If this is a sanctuary she’ll walk on her knees to carry his truth for him.

Mariam searches his hand for confirmation of her thoughts.

“I stopped wearing it on my finger,” Jack says, noticing what the woman is looking for, “Here.”

He pulls his dog tags from under his scrub top. And there, hanging from the same chain as the constant reminder of the hand he’s been dealt by his own choices, is his wedding ring. Golden band that catches the light.

“I’m sorry,” Mariam says, squeezing Jack’s hand.

“Thank you. I’m sorry too.”

He hated hearing people say that for a while after it happened. It was fine at first, but after the funeral he couldn’t stand it, all these people being sorry. What was that going to do? He couldn’t bring her back with ‘sorrys’, he could only build himself a house on them, a house of pity and loneliness and self-destruction and let the walls cave in slowly on his misery.

Loss makes you a different person, and Jack had let it consume him for a while. He had a right to, his wife had died, leaving him to face the rest of his life alone. He’s not proud of the anger he felt towards her in the depth of the night when he’d turned to a cold pillow. She had died on him, and despite all his best efforts he could not save her.

“It hurts so much.”

“I know. It will for a long time. It will forever. At some point it will hurt less often. But when it hits you it will be with the same force. You will just learn to live with it.”

It’s taken a long time for Jack to see where grief ends and where he begins, and longer for him to realize that grief is woven into every part of his life, but he doesn’t need to unpick it, he needs to grow around it. It’s one day at a time, sometimes one minute at a time.

Sometimes the memories of a Spring wedding in his parents’ gardens, of laughing over breakfast, of future plans drawn in the air, of coats drying on the radiator, of calmness and understanding, are the biggest things in his life. Sometimes he feels them pass through him as if he was still there, interlacing his fingers to hers, smiling on her lips, pouring her coffee.

He feels in his bones how soft it was to be loved.

God, what a thing it is, to live. To love. Sometimes he remembers how it feels, to be truly known, to feed the longing, to let go.

“I don’t want to live with it.”

“I didn’t either for a long time,” Jack admits, and Samira is a shadow on the edge of his field of vision.

They’ve done the roof dance enough times to both know he’s telling the truth.

“What happened?”

“I remembered the plans we’d made. There’s a lot of life I got to have that she didn’t, it’s only fair I live it.”

The room is silent.

People die, the world keeps turning.

For one second all three people breathe at the same time.

Then, and only then, Jack looks up.

When he looks into Samira’s eyes she’s already carved him a soft place to land.

“You can’t be in here Walsh.”

Robby steps in front of the door just as Emery is tying a gown around herself.

“What’s your problem, you’re the one who paged surgery.”

She doesn’t have time for this, they’ve barely got any ORs free on a Wednesday morning - if anyone else in plastics dares schedule an elective surgery before 10AM she’s going to single-handedly revoke everyone’s privileges. There’s ice cream waiting at home, and with three hours left on her shift she really has no patience left for Robby.

“Not on this one.”

“Why not?” That’s when she casts her eyes over his shoulder and catches a glint of the patient’s hair.

Emery prides herself on sharpness of mind even in the most stressful situations. So it’s with absolute calmness that she just says: “Move.”

“Walsh, you can’t treat him.”

“Move or I swear on my license I will move you myself.”

Robby steps aside, turning on his heels back to the trauma because he knows when he’s in a lost battle.

“What happened?”

“Gunshot to the chest. Left side hemothorax, chest tube went in a second ago.”

“We need control of that bleeding, Mohan start cracking his chest.”

“Walsh, you can’t operate on him,” Robby repeats, while getting back to the man’s bedside.

“What, but you can run the trauma?”

“It’s different and you know it, we’re swamped and I was there.”

“You’re the poster child for two weights two measures Robinavitch. You know I’m the best.”

Their voices are inevitably rising, not in frustration, or better yet not just in frustration, but also to reach above the climbing noise of drawers open and shout, screaming monitors, vitals being thrown about.

Samira is cutting open the chest of the man who’s become her friend and she can feel him bleeding out under her fingertips. Jack isn’t Jack anymore, he’s a patient, he’s dying. Samira focuses on the pulsing of the blood gushing out of him as she reaches for the source. She’s good, she’s smart, she knows what she’s doing. She has to do this.

How is she going to ever walk through the door again otherwise? How is she ever going to walk out?

“You might be but you’re too close to this.”

“What, and you’re not? Mohan’s got her hands in his fucking chest cavity!”

“What’s she got to do with this?”

“Enough!” Dana’s in the doorway, not running the code but running the room because someone has to. “Walsh is right, Robby.”

“Thank you.”

“But, he’s right too. You’re too close to this, we all are. Unfortunately, we’re all he has right now.”

The charge nurse is right, of course. The rest of the ER is overflowing and with the latest road closures it would take too long for the next on-call surgeon to get here.

“No one is immediate family,” She reminds them. It’s the truth, really. Yet something in the depth of Samira’s body flips.

“So get a grip, both of you. You don’t want to be sorry later.”

There’s no time to breathe in that room so they don’t, they keep going.

“Fine, Walsh’s running point on this.”

“He needs more blood, now or he’ll lose more than we can give him.”

“He’s in V-Tach.”

Emery walks around to Jack’s left side.

“You can take over.” Samira would give anything to hand his life to someone who can save him, because it can’t be her. It can’t be her.

“Asystole.”

“You’re there Mohan, start cardiac massage.”

“There’s not enough blood I think.”

She’s massaging an emptying heart. It would be thrilling if it wasn’t terrifying.

“Hang another unit. Here’s the epi,” Samira moves her hand aside so the surgeon can inject straight into the heart.

“Pulse check.”

“Emery…”

“Back off Robby. I only need a shred of a rhythm and then I’m running him upstairs.”

Time lengthens in an eternal soundless void as all Samira can focus on is keeping her eyes on Jack’s chest. She can’t look at his face. He’d go back to being a person if she did.

“There!” Jesse, Robby, and Samira shout, picking up on the line change on the monitor.

When someone hands her the paddles all that’s left of Samira is her muscle memory. She knows it’s impossible but she could swear she feels the shock through her own body.

It only takes one to get him stable enough to get him upstairs.

“Run, clear the corridors. I’m getting him to OR2.”

Emery bumps Samira out of the way to pack his chest quickly and get him out of there as fast as she can.

Samira promised herself she wouldn’t, but in a moment of madness she lets herself indulge and looks at his face. Jack is himself again. He might never be himself again.

When the doors close, all that’s left in the room is the puddle of blood Samira is standing in.

14th May 2026

“I’m gonna stab you with your fucking straw if you dare, Shen.”

“So feisty for an intern, Santos.”

When the ED is quiet the night is a long slog.

Time expands in what appear to be endless hours, dragged even longer by the hated task everyone has to fulfill with a lack of patients: admin. Everyone has seen horrible things between these walls but they would all agree that few things are worse than filing follow-up documents, checking rotas, writing up notes properly, drafting emails, reading seminar briefings. Anything to be spared tapping away on a keyboard for hours.

Ellis, Shen, and Santos, fulfilling her occasional night shift assignment, are all draped over chairs in different versions of origami-like shapes that would make a physiotherapist cry. Samira is desperately trying to find the will to finish the chart she’s got open on the computer screen, her brain not able to focus.

Maybe sixth time the charm reading the same sentence?

Of course it doesn’t help that everyone voices every thought that crosses their mind out loud.

“Santos don’t worry, he threatens to say that every shift when he’s bored,” Informs Jack walking over digging into a packet of crisps. It promptly gets snatched from his hands by Ellis.

“It’s a disgrace that everyone in this building is so superstitious.”

“The disgrace is the noise you make when you slurp that damn coffee.”

“That one’s broken,” Jack warns Samira, pointing at the chair she’s on, staring at a computer screen.

“So glad General Obvious is making an appearance,” She bites back.

“What’s got into you?” Ellis raises an eyebrow.

“I’ve been charting for so long I’m not sure I can read English words anymore.”

“You spelled your name wrong,” Points out Trinity craning her neck to have a look.

“This is agony.”

“I need a case to come through those doors so we can stop doing admin,” Laments Shen, scrolling on his phone.

“You’re not doing any admin.”

“I’m emotionally supporting Mohan who is.”

“Hard at work, I see,” Notes Lena, approaching the hub.

“Saving energy to save lives.”

“Could you all save energy in a break room like you’re meant to?” Asks the charge nurse checking her schedule.

“They’ve taken the sofa away.”

“Six months ago, Ellis.”

“The chairs in there give me back pain.”

“And that position won’t?”

“This is actually a good stretch for your calf, you should try it.”

“Five minutes and you should at least pretend to do some work,” Warns them Lena walking away.

“She’s right, this is terrible behaviour. Go save some people,” Jack says.

“Don’t see you running Abbot,” Notes Ellis, popping the last crisp in her mouth.

“Do as I say, not as I do.”

“How about leading by example?”

Samira leans back without thinking. Despite the warning.

Jack’s reflexes are as fast as they come, catching her back only after a beat of flailing arms and a sound resembling a yelp that Samira will deny having ever emitted.

He looks down at her, smirking without meaning to. She’s glaring up at him, half-annoyed, half-embarrassed.

People’s faces upside down are a curious painting of all the features you know so well but rearranged just enough to make you smile at the surprise of it.

“I don’t like saying ‘I told you so’ so I won’t.”

“Saying you don’t like saying it is like saying it.”

“Think you can get another ‘saying’ in that sentence?”

“I’m sure I could try.”

Samira swaps chairs, to one that doesn’t make her worry about flipping over and ending up with a concussion. Jack leans against it, because it’s the closest thing to him. His hand on the backrest, her head against his arm, the weight of it on him. He doesn’t register it, not really.

At some point along the line, amongst long conversations about medical articles and even longer shifts, the gravitational pull between them has gotten stronger, and their personal space smaller. There was no grand gesture, really. No moment where they walked over the line, physical intimacy in a place like this is a quick agreement anyway. All the way back to Pittfest, when they didn’t know each other as well as they do now, she could feel his breathing on her cheek, her curls swaying to his breaths.

They’ve been an extension of each other for a while now, so if sometimes their hands brush when handing each other cups, their knees touch when discussing cases on wheely chairs in the hub, or their shoulders bump when treating a patient then it’s just what their life is. If Samira’s fingertips rest on his arm when his breathing quickens, Jack’s arm drapes over her shoulder in the booth of the bar on a Wednesday night, or their weights rest against each other, the sides of their bodies continuously connected, outside the double doors searching for the strength to go home then it’s just instinct and not a thought.

Two bodies orbiting each other will eventually collide. Neither of them ever listened in physics.

“I’m starving,” Declares Santos.

“Vending machine is no good. Keeps eating money,” Throws in Samira.

“It knows we're desperate.”

“It can sense fear.”

“It took five dollars from me yesterday and even made a noise,” Says Ellis.

“What did you get?” Asks Trinity.

“Nothing.”

“Well, that's disappointing foreplay.”

Samira feels Jack shift his weight behind her, adjust his stance slightly. She stands up without asking - knowing that if she did he’d just ignore her - and if he motions to her to sit back down, all it takes is a glare to make him relent. A soft huff escapes his lips as he extends his legs in front of him. He shouldn’t be pulling doubles anymore, he knows what they do to him.

It’s seamless, they do it without thinking, in the way you already know what the person next to you needs and you give it to them because you can.

Not seamlessly enough for Ellis, a skilled multi-tasker who can keep up with the chaotic conversation happening but also raise her eyebrows at the silent chair swap.

“Lena’s coming back around, hide.”

“Or go find something to do please. Don’t make me threaten you with day shifts.”

“You wouldn’t do that to me.”

“Trust me Shen, it would be as much of a punishment for the rest of us,” Quips Santos.

When everyone has dispersed to go find patients, Jack rolls his chair over to a computer and Parker folds her arms, leaning forward against the desk.

“So…”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Come on, Abbot.”

“I’m being paged.”

“You are a liar and that’s disappointing.”

“I need extra hands on this please!” McKay calls as soon as Samira steps outside the room.

“Where’s Mel?” Robby asks Dana. “She could probably…”

“I’ve got it”

“Mohan, don’t-”

But when Robby reaches out all he grabs is air, Samira already bumping shoulders with McKay.

They wheel the patient into Trauma 1 and the women work on him quickly, rattling off orders to the nurses’ vitals.

Samira doesn’t notice when McKay smiles at her, once the patient is stable. She jumps on the next one, and the next one, and the next one. Writing off prescriptions, inputting medical history, taking names down.

Robby would be proud of her. Efficient, unfeeling, detached. Fast.

She doesn’t know how many patients she’s seen since it happened, jumping from bed to bed, from person to person, to dull out the pull of the thread in her stomach. To drown out the knowledge that two floors up and only so many doors away Jack is lying on an operating table. If he isn’t already dead that is.

“Mohan, I’d like you to step away from the patient please, Doctor King can take it from here.”

“I’m fine Doctor Robby.”

“I’d like you to step away now, please.”

“We’re kind of in the middle of something here,” Santos throws in, holding onto one side of the sheet wrapped around the patient’s hip to stabilize his fracture, Samira on the other side.

“Now. That’s an order from your superior.”

The tension is thick, as Trinity and Mel, poking her head from behind Robby, wonder what exactly is going on. Samira throws her hands up in defeat.

“I’ve got it,” Whispers Melissa squeezing her friend’s arm before coordinating with Santos to reduce the fracture.

“I’m fine,” Samira spits at Robby on the door. Then she looks him in the eyes, and she’s suddenly transported back to Earth, as if she’d been running around outside her body from the moment that gun went off.

“I’m glad.” It sounds like his words are travelling from underwater.

He’s glad she’s fine. He isn’t fine. She can see it pool it in his eyes how un-fine he is, actually.

He looks down at her hands, that’s when she realizes it.

Jack’s blood.

It makes her dizzy.

“Go clean yourself up.”

She doesn’t falter. She doesn’t move.

All the universe has been reduced to one crux that everything is revolving around: Jack Abbott’s blood under her fingernails.

30th March 2026

This thing happens after you work with someone for a long time in close proximity: you learn to read them without meaning to. For someone like Samira, the ability to read people has always been an incredible asset, but when the book in front of you is your coworker/boss/teacher/possibly-mentor/friend-question-mark it’s suddenly a double-edged knife.

They’ve had a horrible morning, Jack covering for Robby on days, Samira trying to teach something to the new med students on rotation, both of them running from bed to bed, faster than humanly possible trying to will life into every patient who seemed particularly determined on shuffling this mortal coil.

It’s their third patient coding in an hour when Samira notices. Jack’s breath is just a touch fast, as he tears the blue gloves off, the nitrile clinging to his fingers. She looks over at him while tapping away at her tablet, to avoid being too obvious.

It’s been long enough, she thinks, after months of smiles and codes ran side by side and polite chatter and research updates and, dare she say, friendly banter. Long enough that she can ask, after she sends the intern standing next to her on a lab errand.

“Doctor Abbot, are you okay?”

He looks at her but he doesn’t see her, he’s looking through her.

Samira wouldn’t know this, but all Jack can see is a mass of colors clashing together, shapes at the edge of his visions, pinpricks of pain shooting up from his leg running havoc in his body. He's doing the thing where you focus on one point and name things in your field of vision without moving your eyes, but it doesn't work when your job is a constant stream of movement.

There's a loud clash in the background and for just a moment, Jack loses his grip on time. He's done this before, he knows how it works. He focuses, he works. He keeps going.

“Can I pick your brain about South 15?” She asks tentatively.

It snaps him into focus enough to nod, enough to follow her, but not enough to see the edges of people around him, or to shake the low thrumming in his ears.

“I need a patient to give you my thoughts Mohan,” He says, in the empty exam room.

“Yes.” She hesitates now, he does seem to be responding fine after all. “Well, I just thought- I thought maybe we could just stop for a minute.”

Then she sees it again, the flash of something in his eyes, so fast, the terror- no, the panic. His body is reacting to danger that isn’t here, threats that don’t exist except in his chest.

“There’s people out there who need us,” He says, trying to walk past her.

“Shen’s on the floor and Parker’s in triage, you’ve seen the board,” She sidesteps in front of him, “No one needs us for now.”

Samira has no idea what she’s thinking, this man is a trained field combat medic, he could probably knock her out with his thumb if he wanted to. Not that he would, but still.

“I’ve got labs on North 4 to check on.”

“Diagnostics is backed up, Dana mentioned.”

“There’s a kid in chairs I want to see before shift ends.”

“If it’s the kid with the split lip, Mel took him back two hours ago.”

“I left my pager in Trauma 2 and if-”

“Damn it, Jack, will you just sit down and shut up for five minutes?” She really didn’t mean to snap, all the training she got on her psych rotation out the window so quickly, “I’m so sorry, I meant- Doctor Abbot-” She tries to back track, but the damage is done.

“Where’s this coming from Mohan?”

For a beat she has the impression he’s colder, harsher.

“After… After we sent Mrs Walker up to CT, you looked- Unfocused.”

“I appreciate the concern but I’m good,” He tries again to go past, but she’s faster this time.

“Okay, fine.” She’ll do it his way if she has to.

In blocking his escape route she actually walks towards him, Jack taking a step back by instinct. “Patient presents with sweating, blurriness of vision, shortness of breath, and-” She grabs his wrist to check his pulse. “Elevated heart rate. All consistent with a heart attack. Do you think you’re having a heart attack, Doctor Abbot? Cause I don’t.”

“I’m not.”

“I’m not gonna make you say five things you can see out loud cause neither you nor I have the patience, but you will sit here until your breathing has evened out at least.”

Her defiance and determination have flushed her cheeks a bit, and Jack can’t help but sit on the bed right behind him. When he looks up at her he’s lost in the map of her face: furrowed brows, laser focused eyes, the halo of unruly curls around her, the curve of her upper lip.

Samira has crossed a line and she knows. She knows, she knows. But he was the one standing next to her on the rooftop on the wrong side of the railing a couple of months ago. She owes it to him, more than that, she wants to help. Maybe she did too much. How does she tell him it’s only because she cares?

When she speaks she isn’t as sure of herself as she was before.

“Do you want to do some box breathing?”

“I thought neither you nor I had the patience.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean- you’re just so stubborn sometimes.”

A smile forms on his lips, she’s right. He would have fought the panic for the rest of the shift, pushing it as far down as it could go, cemented it away, ignored it until lying in bed in the middle of the night, trying to get some sleep, when it would have come back to eat away at him. That’s what he knows, pain and panic that he faces alone, that he can shove and shout at and tear apart in an empty room, when being human does.

This is not wholly new, Robby has seen him at the end of the rope many times, Emery has forced him to speak through hard days when he needed to talk and poured the wine when he didn’t, his therapist has sat through plenty of bad hours with him, giving him the tools to make it through these moments by himself.

A lot of the time he does just fine. Sometimes all it takes is an extra breath, a swapped patient, a view from the roof, a walk by the river, a punch at the wall, a run in the park, a glass of whiskey, a hug - not all of it is healthy or right, but not everything is linear.

This is different, though. This is shiny, smart, star 4th year resident (by default as she’s the only one left) Samira Mohan, with her worried eyes and the fear she’s fucked up hanging off her parted lips.

“I’ve had a long week,” he finally says. “The VA is being particularly shitty with bureaucracy. I’ve pulled three doubles. The new med students are a pain in the neck. It was my wedding anniversary on Tuesday.”

“Full week, uh.”

They both chuckle slightly.

“Yeah, you could say that,” His voice lowers for a second, as he digs to find something resembling vulnerability, “Thank you.”

“Anytime.”

In the quiet moment after the storm, Samira realizes the heartbeat she feels thrumming against her fingertips isn’t her own, but Jack’s, her hand still circling his wrist.

She lets go swiftly, hoping not to draw attention to it, but it makes no difference to the thrumming, her own heart is now roaring in her ears.

Jack feels the ghost of her fingers on his skin for days, even if he doesn’t notice it until she brushes his hand again in the next shift they work together, two weeks down the line. Only then it feels familiar again.

When she sees herself in the mirror, for a second, she wonders if the person looking back at her isn’t the real Samira, and she’s merely a reflection of herself.

Dana kindly guided her to the bathroom around the corner, when she saw her stuck in place. She’s now running Samira’s hands under the faucet, water splashing outside the basin intermittently, dotting their tops.

Samira isn’t sure her hands exist anymore, after all, she can’t see them in the mirror. Maybe all that’s left of her now is what fits in the shiny surface on the wall.

Down the drain goes his blood, watered down to pink, scrubbed away by Dana’s capable and quick strokes.

It circles in the sink. Disappears.

It’s quiet and she’s tired, that’s what this is. That’s what the rising marble in her throat is. It’s been a long shift already, with little sleep to hold her up. That’s why she wants to rip her own skin open.

This is only tiredness and stress.

The shot rings through her ears again. And again. And again.

His blood was so warm.

It bloomed on her scrub top too, it’s still there, dried in a big patch of rust.

Maybe she’d take it instead.

If it would get him out of the OR.

His empty heart in her hands.

The tap is turned to cold but it doesn’t matter. It could be boiling. Samira kinda wishes it was. It would burn her skin off, leaving her hands as raw as she feels.

Two floors up Jack is lying on a table.

A man can only lose four pints of blood before dying.

The shot again.

His blood.

His body.

His eyes.

Her reflection.

The marble in her throat.

When she bends her head forward she’s worried she’s going to throw up.

Her tears are pearls falling clean and round, bouncing in puddles, no sound.

There’s no sound as she slams her palms to the sink. And then her fists. The impact of her bones on the porcelain sends jolts up her wrists, shocks that should make everything else stop, that should make sense.

It’s not enough, but it’s a start. She chases the feeling. Chases what she can easily pinpoint, the effect with a cause.

It’s in her wrist, it’s electric, it’s travelling all the way to her shoulders.

Nothing’s broken, not yet, she knows. It probably wouldn’t break anything, slamming your fist down, but if feelings live somewhere, if you’re supposed to place a hand on your chest and say “this is anger, swirling, dark orange”, then this is “torn apart, burning, in the hands that maybe couldn’t save him”.

Dana’s hands are on her, around her shoulders, around her arms trying to restrain her, but Samira is stronger than she looks - 50 lengths in a swimming pool and 20 miles ran on the hills of Pittsburgh every single week of her residency will do that to a lonely woman - and she keeps hitting the sink in a desperate attempt at justifying the pain.

Where is it coming from if all her bones are intact?

In a move too fast for Dana to catch, in an instinct that she later won’t recognize as rational, Samira throws her fist against the glass in front of her. It shatters like she knew it would in a spiderweb of a dozen versions of herself that stare into her soul.

The droplets of blood that trickle out of her knuckles finally make sense.

The floor digs into her knees when Dana manages to drag her away in the second of distraction that follows the punch. She wouldn’t have resisted anyway, not anymore. With nothing to hang onto, she’s met with the inevitable fall.

Out of the frame of the mirror now, she’s not sure she exists at all.

February & March 2026

“Mohan!”

Samira whips her head from the computer she’s charting at.

“Catch,” Jack says before throwing a protein bar her way.

“I’m good.”

“Keep it for later then.”

She’s mindlessly biting down on it before even finishing the sentence she’s writing.

Dana rolls her eyes.

“I think you should switch those paragraphs around.”

“It wouldn’t make sense surely.”

“It would if you cut…” He gestures for her to scroll back up. “Those two lines.”

“I don’t want to cut that line.”

“You’re the one who asked for advice.”

“I didn’t realize you were a research butcher.”

“Okay, keep the lines, but still swap the paragraphs.”

Samira does as instructed, Jack pushes his reading glasses up his nose.

“Great, just rewrite that bit.”

“Here.”

Samira hands Jack a tangerine in the break room.

They sit in silence. For 6 minutes and 37 seconds. Not that they’re keeping tabs, of course.

When they run back out called by their pagers their hands smell of the same orange.

“Now, we all know cric’ing isn’t a competition…”

“It really isn’t Doctor Mohan.”

“Of course, of course, Doctor Abbot,” She says, all innocent, waiting for him to ask, she knows he’s dying to.

“How long?”

“One minute 49,” She smiles. He’s grinning too.

“That’s my girl.”

They both pretend he didn’t say that.

“Do you need a ride?”

There’s no stars to look down tonight in Pittsburgh.

There’s the shine of something in his eyes, though.

“No, Ellis is driving me back.”

‘Time After Time’ plays from the radio on the way home. Both women hum along.

“Abbot stop looking like a beaten puppy, she’s back next week.”

Jack doesn’t even look at Lena, tapping away at a keyboard.

“Stop it now.”

Lena smiles.

“Go home.”

“I can finish my shift.”

“I don’t think you can, actually. You apologized to the crash cart you just walked into.”

Samira wishes she could argue but all she can do is stifle a yawn after 21 hours of grueling cases.

“Please get out of here.”

“Donuts in the break room.”

“Shen, you really do the lord’s work.”

“Can you tell your old man that? Cause he’s still annoyed at me for spilling coffee in his car two weeks ago.”

“I will never get between Abbot and his car.”

“Disappointing, Mohan.”

“And he’s not my old man.” She shouts at his back as he’s making his way to the ambulance bay, “He’s not,” She repeats to Dana, who’s looking at her over the rim of her glasses.

“Y’know Sarah’s been waiting for that call.”

“Do we have to do this now?” Jack groans, lowering himself onto the sofa in the break room. First break in God knows how many hours and Dana picks this moment to lay into him.

“She’s not gonna be single for long, that woman’s a catch.”

“I do not doubt that.”

Samira is staring at the vending machine pondering her choices.

“I gave you her number three weeks ago.”

The young doctor finally punches in a number and waits for the whirr of the machine.

“I never said I’d call her, you just shoved her number in my hand.”

“Yeah, cause you said you were thinking about getting back out there.”

“I most certainly did not.”

Samira slips out of the break room.

“You are evil Dana Evans.”

 “50 on before the end of the year.”

“20 on three months after the end of her residency.”

“I think it’s less, in two months.”

“You have no clue what you’re talking about Shen.”

“40 by end of the summer.”

“Not fair, Walsh you’ve got the inside scoop with Abbot.”

“What do you think the two of us do, talk about our feelings and braid each other’s hair?”

“No influencing the board, Walsh,” Warns Ahmad, writing another post-it and sticking it up.

“That is exactly what I think you and Abbot do by the way.”

“Want in, Lena?”

“Put me down for whatever Dana bet on.”

“I’m fine.”

“Right.”

“I am, Dana.”

“Okay.”

“You can let go now.”

“Sure.” But she doesn’t loosen her grip yet.

“It was just the pressure, you know, I’m fine.”

“I’m sure you believe that.”

“You don’t?”

“You came close to shattering your hands to pieces, kid. Forgive me for being skeptical.”

“It was just a moment. I’m fine.”

“Say it again, maybe I’ll believe you.”

They both smile.

“You can let go, Dana.” It’s a whisper, really. It bounces off the tiled surfaces. The woman finally relaxes and sits a bit straighter.

Samira, however, doesn’t move. She stays on the floor, slightly leaning into the nurse.

“Walsh is the best you know.”

“I do.”

“And no one’s gonna fight like her to keep that man alive.”

“I know.”

Samira notices that Dana is fiddling with her necklace. A cross for a faith the young doctor doesn’t have. She hopes god listens to Dana, if there’s anyone out there who’s supposed to be listened to it’s her.

“We…” She starts a sentence she’s not sure how to finish.

In the coldness of a soulless bathroom that bears the evidence of her vulnerability it’s almost easy to say the things she’s been holding onto so tightly. Especially with the warmth of Dana next to her, sinking into her side but not looking at her face. Maybe she wants to let it all spill out of her.

“I...” She tries again. Dana doesn’t prompt, doesn’t nudge, doesn’t even smile.

“I care for him.”

Samira feels her nod next to her. Then gently stroke her hair.

“You could have fucked your hand and your career, you know that right?”

Dana finally stands up and helps Samira up too.

“I was never gonna go into surgery anyway.”

“You still need good hands to make it out of this place.”

“On days like this I feel like none of us will make it out of here with enough left to live.”

“I see you’ve picked up Robby’s philosophy lessons as well as his medical ones.” Dana rolls her eyes. People in this ER need to stop being so dramatic.

“Let’s get you actually cleaned up. You’ve still got his blood on your hands.”

Samira’s breath catches in her throat. And she knows exactly what Dana means, after all she’s right, his blood is still under her fingernails, but her body doesn’t. All she can do is run out of there.

“I didn’t mean… Samira, wait!”

But Samira is hopping steps two at a time with no intention of stopping.

17th January 2026

“Nice view, uh?”

“I’ve been here for four years and I’ve never done this before.”

“Yeah, I’m impressed you took this long.”

Jack carefully bends under the railing and straightens up on the other side of it, Samira holding onto her stethoscope for dear life, shivering in the freezing weather of January.

“You don’t have to-”

“Sorry Mohan, you’re not exempt from rules. One of us is up here, two of us are up here.”

It’s 6:43AM in Pittsburgh, some of the city is still asleep but some of it is screaming of life already, lights on in teachers and nurses’ houses, cars lazily driving down icy roads, trains rattling on the tracks. The building they’re standing on top of never went to sleep at all, bright fluorescent lights overhead and sharp sanitizer smell in everyone’s clothes.

Three more bodies in the morgue. Family coming back from vacation and drunk driver at an intersection. Ran a red light.

Samira was pushing down on the daughter’s chest for 35 minutes. She called it at 5:48AM.

She could hear the mother code next door. Called at 5:56AM.

The father had already been called at 5:35AM.

Samira is good at compartmentalizing, she’s been doing it for a long time, shutting away her empathy in a corner, blurring her ability to read emotions for a while. To get some respite. To get some breathing space.

She’s been doing this job for years now, she’s seen all kinds of things, all kinds of grief, tragedy, injuries. Some days, or some nights even, it just feels harder to carry, to ignore.

Pittfest has done a number of her in some way she’s not able to fully put a finger on. It’s made it harder to keep running. She who’s always been so good at running.

“If something happened to you, Gloria would find a way to make it about your patient satisfaction score.”

The silence is deafening.

“What, no funny remark? I thought we had a rapport going,” He smiles, hoping she will too.

“Sorry Abbot, not tonight.”

Jack was the one who had tried to save the dad, a guy younger than him, he’d fought tooth and nail like always. He still had to call it.

“What do you think of when you’re up here?” Samira asks in a whisper, goosebumps she can’t feel breaking out on her arms.

Jack considers lying, of course he does. He could say anything to make her feel better. He could say ‘I think of the hope we build’, or ‘of the people we did save’, or even ‘I try not to think at all’.

What he says, though, is the truth: “I think of how I failed.”

He’s been here throughout his life. Not here on this roof, here on the edge of a knife, playing fast and loose with his life. Bullets flying through the desert, drunken fist fights, car racing on the highway. He doesn’t do it anymore, after the loss of a wife and the deployment that left him with a lifetime disability, he’s listened to enough speeches by his friends about self-compassion and seen too many families torn apart by grief to play Russian roulette with his own heart.

Just the thought sometimes though, just the feeling that with surgical precision he could slit his carotid so quickly he wouldn’t feel it or that bones crushing on tarmac won’t hurt if you go head first. He wouldn’t, would he? He’s come so far, been in therapy for too many hours to actually do it. It’s a leftover gut instinct that he’s working hard to untangle from his life. But sometimes when he holds a lighter the impulse is still to glide his hand over the flame. Or to be close enough to the brink it would take him three steps to go.

Friends have been here before, you don't get to enlist or work in an ED without a couple of haunting nights. He's seen Emery's eyes dull while downing whiskey, for on a night when a child dies on her table the harsher the burn in her throat the better, till he didn't think he'd see light in them again, or heard Clarke, the youngest guy in his unit, toss and turn for the whole night before walking out of the barracks unsure whether he'd return. And there’s Robby, of course.

This is the first time he’s seen Mohan in this state. She’s seen worse cases, he knows because he was standing next to her for them, he’s seen her handling much worse and much heavier loads, yet here she is, on a January night, staring out at the city. And a bit too much at the drop, if he’s honest.

It’s the way she doesn’t smile, doesn’t cry, doesn’t joke, that gets him. What he’s seen so far is her skill, her focus, her fast hands, her brilliant mind, her ability to push through, what he hasn’t seen is the toll this job takes on a young woman wanting to rest the world on her shoulders thinking it’s not going to pulverize her. It will. If she’s standing on this roof, it already has.

He’s used to Robby standing in the spot, in a back and forth they seem to have every couple of months, and he hates being the one on the opposite side, the one looking at a face, not at the skyline. Seeing a friend so close to the edge is terrifying.

He wonders when he started thinking of Mohan as a friend. He wonders if he shouldn’t.

“The thing about stepping is that it ends,” Jack says, “But the thing about not stepping is that tomorrow you get to wake up and try again.”

There’s nothing else he’s going to say, he won’t lie, he won’t try. He knows how strong the pull is in a night when everyone reminds you of someone else, of yourself, of the ghosts you thought you’d left behind and the ones you’ve never wanted to face.

Samira appreciates the truth in his words, appreciates that he takes her seriously, as if she could really jump. Did she ever want to? When she rushed up the stairs without thinking, was she really planning on flying? Or did she only want someone to come running after her? How pathetic, to scream for help when you need it. Jack must have gone up to reprimand her, probably, missing out on treating patients. She rewrites history so easily and so quickly, in her memory his voice flattens of the slight scared edge it has. This is colleagues getting each other through a bad shift. Hardships make friendships right? Nothing else.

So focused on the hazy outline of the city all she knows is that he’s standing next to her at a respectful distance. What she doesn’t fully realize is that his body is close enough to hers that if she even just thought about jerking forward he’d slam her back into the railing without blinking.  Because he might know how strong the pull is but he’s not going to let this woman give - she’s too kind, too brilliant, too good to patients and to him, to crumble away. The world needs her in it, and he can’t lose- a great working partner is all he’ll let himself acknowledge for now, archiving ‘friend’ for later.

“We’ve got three hours left on this shift, we should go back to work.”

Samira slowly bends under the railing, Jack following her. She doesn’t see the way he grips the railing until his knuckles go white. Just something else to haunt his nightmares every once in a while.

“Samira?” And the way her name rolls off his tongue would be intoxicating if she weren’t only seeing the professional concern in his eyes. “Promise you’ll page if you want to stand on the other side again.”

The dawn is threatening to break on the horizon. This night is almost over. What did Jack say, ‘tomorrow you get to wake up and try again’. Tomorrow is almost today. All she’s got left is trying. 

She nods.

“I promise.”

“We usually tell each other there’s a reason for coming back.”

Robby is standing next to her, leaning forward on the railing like she is - the promise she made Jack all those months ago still upheld. Tears tracking down his face like hers are.

“Is there?”

“There always is Samira.”

“Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“Don’t call me Samira only ‘cause you think he might die. He’s your best friend, aren’t you furious? Aren’t you terrified?”

“Mohan I’m… I am doing my best to not come undone at the seams.”

The wind pricks their faces of a thousand cuts that might never heal if the man downstairs doesn’t pull through. They both know it.

“He thinks he’s damaged goods, you know,” She dares.

“I do know.”

“I think you think that about yourself too sometimes.”

“You’re being quite bold, Doctor Mohan”

“If this isn’t the time to be bold I don’t know what is. It’s probably why you get each other. But just because you’re hurting yourself it doesn’t mean you’re not hurting other people too.”

Jack’s fighting for his life and all she wants to do is tear him apart for the mess he’s reduced her to. He had no right.

“I’m so angry at him. For convincing me he was right, that the friendship we’d built together didn’t mean anything, that it’d be a mistake. And I’m angry at myself for letting him do that.”

“Jack Abbott is good with words. And sometimes it’s easy to let him do what he wants,” Robby sighs. He’d know, he’s spent years on this roof with that man. “Especially if a part of you thinks you’re just as damaged.”

Samira is not sure if he’s talking of her or himself, but it cracks her heart a bit more anyway. 

Throughout her life she’s never let go of something she wanted, she’s always had the determination to see things through. So giving him up, giving Jack up, believing his words in circles around her, maybe it was because she was just as scared of him wanting her back.

They stay up there for a long time. Robby offers Samira his coat after a while, and she wraps herself in it. The weather is changing, the cold air is starting to seep through the windows. Change comes for everyone relentlessly.

When his phone buzzes in a pocket, it’s Samira who pulls it out without thinking.

“It’s Walsh.”

28th December 2025

“Read this one.”

The journal dropped in front of her is folded open to a page with a yellow post-it note hanging from the edge as a bookmark.

She was just enjoying her early morning coffee. Sure, ‘enjoying’ might be an oversell considering the quality of the liquid spat out by the octogenarian coffee machine on the counter, but anything with enough caffeine to keep her going would do.

Jack, a few feet away, is rummaging through the cupboard for a mug, before pouring himself a decent helping of coffee.

It’s been a long shift, one where the patients never stop coding and there’s a constant influx of people through the doors. It’s only now, at 7AM as the clock on the walls ticks, that the ED is calmer, before people start getting into traffic accidents on their way to work or slip in the shower as they’re getting ready for the day.

“Dana mentioned you’re finally writing up your research. Thought I’d help, I read that a while ago but it might be useful.”

“Thank you, I’ll read it when I get out.”

“Hope you get some sleep first, did you pull a double?”

“Sort of, Mel needed to leave halfway through her shift, something going on with her sister I think. So not a double, a one-and-a-half,” She smiles behind her cup, thinking he’s going to go back out to the floor or to eat something or literally anywhere else to get away from a resident.

It’s not that there’s a line of demarcation between residents and attendings, they’ve all shared the occasional post-shift beverage together, including the med students, and the conversation flows easily enough, no matter who you end up sitting next to, but the true friendship circles tend to develop in separate spheres, naturally - attendings share scheduling duties, car insurance advice, reminiscing chats, while the residents share flats, evenings out, movie nights, laundry loads, cups of coffee.

Not that Samira would know. She sometimes lets herself be dragged out of the house by Mel, but both of them have such limited free time - Mel spending her productive hours with Becca and Samira reading up on medical journals to keep her fellowship options open - that all they manage to do is go for brunch around the corner, which inevitably ends in discussing cases and exchanging the small morsels of gossip coming out of the hub that the two most out of the loop doctors can gain intel on.

Sure, she’s gone with Shen for coffee runs, chatting in the Dunkin’s queue about the latest movie releases which neither of them have time to see, took Ellis up on a ride home here and there after shifts particularly harsh on her feet, both of them humming off-tune to the radio, and even exchanged pleasantries with Abbot when the siren of caffeine called to both of them at the same time on a night shift. But she wouldn’t think of any of them as friends. She wouldn’t think of anyone as a friend.

Maybe her mother has a point sometimes, when she paints the picture of a lonely daughter with no one to come back home to at night or to do… Normal things friends do together, of which Samira would be able to name plenty, thank you very much.

After all, her skill and talent isn’t natural, it takes time and commitment, and devoting herself to being the best doctor she can be did results in missing out on relationships. In the grand scheme of things she’s sure it won’t matter. Not when she’ll have published research and her pick of fellowships to show for all these years of loneliness.

So, with his mug full, she expects Abbot to slip out the door.

Against all her expectations he sits across from her. She’s surprised but tries not to let her eyebrows shoot up too much. She isn’t completely oblivious to the way they’ve been working in the last few months, since September she’s picked up more night shifts, happily swapping with anyone who needed, and she’s been stitched to Abbot’s side as much as possible, to learn from that man with slightly disheveled hair that had given her so much trust during a mass casualty event that she’d walked away from drunk on confidence.

They’ve learnt each other’s ways of working so that now running traumas is, if not easy, lighter. She just didn’t think he’d be interested in talking to her outside of a trauma room.

Also she has no time for friends, maybe no one’s told him.

“I’m glad you’re finally pulling something together, getting published will surely help with your fellowship.”

“It’ll also help with my mother. She can frame it,” She smiles.

“My mother insisted on keeping my medical degree, she thought I’d just throw it in the back of the closet.”

“You, hiding your achievements? Could never believe that.”

“I didn’t realize you had jokes Mohan.”

“I’ve got plenty you don’t realize Abbot.”

“I’m sure you do.”

All the sound in the room is the hum of the pitt outside the door, the buzz of the fridge, the ticking of the clock. And underneath everything the crackle in the air when they look at each other.

“Where does she keep it?”

“Above the fireplace.”

“A classic.”

“Indeed.”

“Thanks for the journal.”

“Of course. It’s nice to see someone passionate enough about a topic to write up a study.”

Samira has no clue what possesses her to say the next sentence.

“Maybe I could send over a draft?”

Jack doesn’t reply instantly, which of course gives her a split second to second-guess what she’s done and overcompensate.

“If you’re not busy or too tired-”

“Send it through,” He interrupts her. “I’m sure I’ll have plenty of useful insight to impart.”

Jack can’t help it, really. He loves a joke, he always has. The ED has been no stranger to his friendly banter with his residents and night shift colleagues for the last few years, everyone knows Doctor Abbot’s favorites are the ones who can hold their own, but there’s something about the young woman in front of him that has been drawing him in for the last few months.

Maybe it’s the way she was willing to give a crazy procedure a shot during one of the most stressful days they’ve had in years, the way she seems to understand a patient's emotional state without needing them to explain, or the way they’ve slowly become an extension of each other.

Jack has taught a fair amount of residents in his years at PTMC but there’s something in Samira’s determination and focus that he really admires. It could never be admitted publicly lest he be killed on sight by Robby - who unfortunately still doesn’t see Mohan’s talent - but sometimes, when they’re running a code together and he doesn’t have to really think because she’s already finished a thought for him, he almost forgets there’s so many years between them.

Sometimes he forgets they’re so far apart.

Because sometimes he likes to think if they weren’t, if the distance was less, maybe they could be friends.

As if this young promising, shining woman would want to be his friend. Him who lives therapy session to therapy session to slowly extinguish the fires he’s set and been burned by in his life, who comes into work early every shift because with nothing else to do he might as well be useful, who has a police scanner he can’t turn off on Sundays.

He doesn’t entertain himself in hypotheticals, so all he does is banter, because that won’t ruin her.

She’s rolling her eyes.

“And here I was, thinking you were trying to help.”

“Hey, I’m just trying to get you in that frame.”

She’s got a reply on the tip of her tongue but both their pagers go off at the same time, and before they know it they’re running across to North 4.

The room is already swirling with controlled chaos.

“Mohan, can you…”

“On it.”

Jack turns for a central line kit, Samira has already grabbed one.

Meds are administered before he can ask.

At the end, he reads out labs and stops halfway through when he realizes she’s not writing anything down because she’s already ordered them.

And maybe Jack’s a little struck by the way her cheeks have a dimple in them when she smiles. Maybe it’s just the end of a long, long shift. Maybe it’s a hypothetical he can’t let go of.

“Well done.”

“Patient made it easy.”

“Patient was doing his best to die, actually.”

“Maybe I have a way with people then.”

“Maybe you do, Mohan.”

His pager goes off again.

“Frame-worthy that was,” He says as he turns towards the next emergency.

“My mother will be thrilled,” She shouts after him.

The corridors of the hospital have never felt longer.

Emery’s holding onto her scrub cap as tightly as she can, unravelling is a business that comes too easy on a Wednesday like this and she needs a focus point. When she spots Robby and Samira all but running towards her, she stuffs it in her pocket.

“He’s alive,” She says, and Samira is sure many sentences follow but the sounds are muffled, one word a pinprick of clarity in the blur of the waiting room. Alive.

Walsh reaches out to put her hand on Samira’s arm, the young doctor feels the warmth of it. When the two women look at each other they find a mirror of their own relief and the knowledge of everything they could have lost. But didn’t.

7th November 2025

The overlap between Abbot and the day shift is always a bit bigger than it should be. He makes his way into the hospital too early, he can’t help it. There’s only so many times he can turn the TV on and off.

When he makes his way through the double doors, Mohan is sitting at the hub, typing away at a computer. He’s not particularly well-versed in schedules but he’s pretty sure she’s not on shift tonight. 

“Did I forget I swapped someone for you tonight?” He asks.

“No, just finishing up some notes,” She replies without looking up.

Jack nods before busying himself with the mountain of cases awaiting for him. Every once in a while he’ll cast a look over at the hub, Samira’s head of black curls still in sight. She’s a force to be reckoned with that one, he knows. He knows he has to teach her all he can because one day she might run this place. But tonight she’s at a computer, he won’t pull her into a trauma room, convince her to stay, even if it would be fun to share the adrenaline, he’s made himself a promise that he will leave her alone.

When Ellis is approaching the hub, 15 minutes ahead of shift, Samira is still sitting at the desk.

When Shen shows up at 9PM on the dot with an iced coffee in hand, Samira is still tapping away.

They see a child with his hand stuck in a glass vase, treat a waiter with second degree burns from a hot tap, a car and bike collision, two students passed out from dodgy use of Adderall.

It’s only three hours into his shift that Abbot breaks his own promise and approaches the resident, which shows quite decent restraint if you asked him.

“I’m pretty sure staring at the chart that intensely is gonna set it on fire.”

She mutters something along the lines of: “I wish.” Then she remembers that looking down at her isn’t one of her fellow residents but Abbot, and she straightens her spine a little bit.

“I was going through today’s cases, make sure everything is as sharp as it can be.”

“Pretty sure Mrs- Stenheim doesn’t need her chart updated at this hour. Especially since she was in for… A hand lac. That you treated perfectly fine it seems, by the way. And probably could have left to an intern.”

“I needed an easy case, it was a full morning.”

What she doesn’t say is that she could feel Robby’s eyes boring a hole in her skull for the whole time she sat by Mrs Stenheim’s bedside, slowly stitching her hand up with surgical detail.

Maria told her everything about her morning, of how she was baking apple cake and sliced her hand open with the good knife. It was her son’s birthday, ten years old, a family gathering awaiting that evening. Samira had nodded along, incapable of stopping the woman from describing her son’s achievements, and had made her laugh recounting a story from her own tenth birthday party which included chocolate cake, a pink dress, and four balloons. Seeing Maria smile had eased the tension in Samira’s shoulder.

Read, absorb, fix. What she’s good at.

“That’s allowed, doesn’t mean you have to suffer through charts at 11PM,” Jack reminds her.

“Need to make up for the slowness somehow, you know,” She says with a bitter note in her tone that almost makes Jack flinch. 

How unkind it was of Robby, to label one of his own residents with a nickname she didn’t deserve. How unkind to herself to believe she had to somehow make up for thoroughness and dedication. And apologize for empathy.

“You’re not slow.”

“Tell that to Robby,” Samira mumbles.

“I did.”

Samira is surprised, mainly by the fact that Jack’s hearing is a bit too sharp, but also by his words. 

Doctor Abbot had seemed a little more lenient towards her on the shifts she’s picked up with him, more eager to teach her, less concerned about her time performance and more focused on her skills and concentration. But she didn’t think he’d picked up on the day shift dynamic, and not only that but also intervened on her behalf.

“Can’t afford to slow down.”

“You can afford to stop. It’s way past the end of your shift, that chart will be here tomorrow,” He says, “Unfortunately,” He adds, which inevitably pulls the corner of her lips in a smile.

She hasn’t smiled in a while in this place.

Samira turns to look at him for the first time in the whole conversation. He’s got a hand on the desk leaning against it, she knows his weight is on his good leg. His hair is still in good shape, only a couple hours into the night. It’ll be a mess by the time he makes it home tomorrow. Not that she’d ever think of that, she just happens to have worked a few shifts with him and knows they’re both in a state when they walk out the doors.

“I’m going.”

“Good. Go be slow somewhere else,” He offers, and he hopes he hasn’t crossed a line because he’d hate to make fun of her like others do. He wants to laugh with her, not at her.

She smiles, logging out of her computer, waves off Parker and Shen who are looking up at the board.

“Slow-Mo finally going home?” Shen asks, glancing at his tablet.

“My night shift will not engage in calling each other names, that’s a day shift pastime. Chairs, now.”

“I didn’t-”

“Chairs.”

“Good. She doesn’t deserve all the flak she gets on days.” Parker says looking at Abbot who’s taken over Samira’s chair.

“She doesn’t. She’s smarter than all of us.”

“Jack?”

Her voice travels to him - he would still know her by sound alone. He wonders if that will ever change.

“Dana said you were discharged, I’m pretty sure that means going home, not climbing to the roof.”

“I’ll be off work for a while, I wanted to see this one last time before I go.”

“Nice view.” She leans forward on the railing, he turns to look at her, curls framing her face.

“Indeed.”

The silence settles between them. They’re no strangers to it, they never were.

Silence was there when they first became friends, slowly through the quietness of breaks in night shifts, on walks through the park when each was wrapped in their own thoughts, after life stories were shared that would hang in the air between them

 Silence has been there in the last few weeks, when Samira sat at his bedside for hours after surgery, alternating with Robby, and there when Jack finally woke up and she couldn’t say anything at all, because she didn’t know what words could make sense of what had happened.

Silence in the times she’d swing by his room with the excuse of checking his chart, while he slept to make sure his heart was still pumping blood, when they got him to walk again, in that vulnerable moment when all she did was slip her hands under his arms and help him back to bed, his face screwed up in pain he would never admit to.

“I never said thank you, so thank you. For helping to save my life.”

“Any day. But don’t do it again.”

“I’ll try.” He laughs, and Samira does her best not to look at the way he hangs his head between his shoulders. There was a time when she thought she might never hear him laugh again.

“Jack-”

“I should go.”

He pushes himself off the railing, one hand lingering still for balance, now that everything takes so much more effort while the stitches on his chest pull all the time.

If he was damaged before, now he’s an absolute car wreck, probably, and the woman in front of him is bright golden, of course, and he has to leave or he might convince himself she wants him too.

“Right, of course.” Samira smiles at him. Polite.

Jack walks away.

Samira has seen people be given second chances, she’s given them to patients before with her own hands. And she knows there's a ‘sliding doors’ reality in which she's standing on this rooftop alone. She'll be grateful for a long time that she's in this one. But now, in the stillness of the aftermath all she hears is the echo of Jack walking away from her again. And she'll be damned if she doesn't say her piece before he does.

“Jack, wait,” She says, just definitive enough that he would.

Jack is a few strides shy of the door, so close to shutting this away. Him turning to face her is invitation enough for the woman.

“I don't know if it's due to you being an attending or your age or your hero complex but you've made too many choices in this. You walked away before. You said it wouldn't work. You pushed me to the ground.”

“In my defence I wasn't planning on getting shot,” He interjects, but she's fast on his heels.

“It's not about being shot, and you know it. You knew what was best, didn't you? You thought pushing me away would leave me free to live life and you holed up in your sadness. You decided I didn't get a say. All I know is you've got me tangled into this- this relationship without wanting to commit to any part of it. Was this all just some sort of twisted game so you could get your emotional fix from me but still go home to feel sorry about yourself?”

“Samira-” And the breath she takes in is sharp enough to remind her how long it's been since she's heard her name in his voice, “I never meant you to feel used. I stayed away for so long. But you were just- it was so easy to let you in. It made sense to teach you, to run a trauma, to tell you about my life. When I thought you'd been shot nothing made sense anymore. I'm sorry. About all of it. Of course, I am. If you think I don't regret-” He has to steady himself, “Everything I said months ago is still true. You've got the brightest future ahead of you and I'm- I'm up on this roof too often to let you throw it all away. I was doing this for you.”

“You don't get to do this anymore, Jack. You don't get to pick and choose how people care about you. That's their choice. It's my choice. I didn't get to tell you that carrying you isn't a burden. Not to me. You didn't want to hear it. Maybe you still don't but I don't care anymore. You could have died,” She tells him, “God, I wish you wouldn't think I don't know what I'm doing by loving you!”

All Jack knows is the way those words reverberate through his chest, and maybe he’s been wrong about many things in life and maybe he’s broken and bruised and maybe he doesn’t deserve any of it and maybe all life has given him was on loan and maybe he could never do this to her and maybe she'll resent him and maybe she'll walk away and maybe it'll end in heartbreak and maybe hurting now is the safest thing. But maybe. Maybe she's right.

Samira stands beautiful in all her fury, stark against the white clouded sky and the vastness of Pittsburgh stirring to life.

“Walk away if you want. But know that I don't want you to.”

Samira’s body is lit of a thousand burning pinpricks. She thinks it may be worth it, feeling every single one of them on her skin.

Jack has had a lot of responsibility in his hand throughout his life, but this is unfamiliar. This is the responsibility of not only the heart of the woman standing in front of him, but more importantly of his own happiness.

When he looks at her he knows he doesn't have the strength to fight himself anymore. He steps towards her.

“I'm not going anywhere.”

Samira and Jack have both made a lifetime career of building walls around themselves and relying on their own strength to make it through the day. But some days, the sun warms your cheeks and life sings the right song, enough that everything strips away.

10th October 2025

October might bring a chill in the air, but the doctors and nurses in the park don’t care. After a long shift the way the wind needles in between your clothes is the last of your problems. Beers pass hands, until everyone is drinking, sharing stories from the day and inevitably making fun of each other.

The buzz of the day dies down slowly, and as the evening gets darker everyone finds a reason to leave. Jack and Samira stay. The only light on them is the harsh white of the lampposts and the red halo of the hospital sign.

When the last group of stragglers head off to cars and buses, Samira is sure Abbot will rise too. He doesn’t, he stays.

There will be many words between them in the months to come, a lot of talking, of sharing, of seeing each other, of trusting. There will be moments of perfect synchronicity and of conflict, personal and professional. There will be plenty of occasions for brushing hands and leaning shoulders, smiling, staring, understanding. There will be so much woven between them that at some point they’ll have to admit that unspooling their lives from each other would take long and meticulous work. There will be fear and hope and despair and guilt and fireworks and bruises and coffee and hours.

But for now, all there is between them is the chilly air.

Samira turns to look at him, dimples in her cheeks from a half-smile, and Jack can’t help but smile back.

If she wasn’t the kind of tired you can only be after a sixteen hour shift, she’d swear his breathing slows.

If he wasn’t the kind of tough you can only be after your life has been more loss than you ever thought you’d get, he’d swear her eyes soften.

But they can only be what they are, so they only sit for a little while longer in the silence of the night before going home in opposite directions.

Samira walks towards him until the space between them tastes of promise.

“For someone who lives on the edge so much, you’re pretty bad at jumping.”