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"It's too early in the day for you to get stabbed," Walsh declares with a groan the moment she walks into her office to find Abbot doing his best not to bleed out on her furniture.
Of course, the text he sent asking if he could entice her into doing some minor surgery wasn't a joke. So much for mainlining Below Deck in peace for the rest of her shift. The Hippocratic Oath says to prioritize the sick, but what did the ancient Greeks know about getting blood out of a two thousand dollar saddle white Arhaus swivel chair? To his credit, Abbot had the good sense to put down a chuck, but that is hardly an impermeable solution and certainly does not stop her from threatening to kill him if the tetanus doesn't beat her to the punch.
"Can I help it if some drunk frat boys pre-gamed a little too hard before the parade? I would've sutured it myself but…"
He gestures vaguely in the air with his left hand like he expects her to fill in the blanks herself to justify why he bypassed the ER to take the elevator up five flights so he could die in her office instead.
Meanly, she suggests, "Maybe you didn't want everyone downstairs to know that you spend holiday weekends cosplaying as GI Joe."
"That's not what this is! My therapist said…" Her incredulous look makes Jack sigh before he counters after a beat, "You know, there was a time when you thought it was hot—"
"Not true," Walsh cuts off sternly before pulling him forward to get a better look at the annoyingly jagged laceration along his external obliques.
"No?"
"Never. Camo is hideous, Jack! Why do you think I was always trying to get you out of it?" Before he can open his mouth to say something incredibly infuriating but undoubtedly true, Emery holds up her index finger and warns, "Don't."
"So all those Tom Cruise movies where he's wearing—"
"Navy whites," she corrects. "Acceptable before Labor Day."
She pokes at the edge of his wound with her index finger, smirking when Jack can't suppress his wince. It's not that Walsh wants to be mean, but she's too annoyed to be Florence Nightingale by way of Florence Henderson. If Abbot could go a month without getting stabbed or impaled, she'd commission Christina Tosi to make the celebratory cake.
"Would it kill you to handle me with care?" Abbot huffs. If he's going for put-upon, it completely backfires as soon as the words come out in a pathetic wheeze. When she pokes him again, he yelps, "Come on, be nice!"
"I was going to be very nice," Walsh reminds him. "In Mallorca. Where we would be right now if—"
"Your grandmother guilt-tripped me about the Walsh Foundation Golden Jubilee!" he insists again, like maybe saying it a fifth time will garner some sort of sympathy that the previous four times did not.
Jack's argument doesn't hold water when she has told him numerous times in no uncertain terms to always, always let Helene Walsh's phone calls go to voicemail. Old money socialites from Philadelphia are like Venus fly traps – once they ensnare you with their honeyed words, there is no hope of escape. The only reason Emery can talk to the Walsh family matriarch without getting bamboozled is because Nana Walsh shared the playbook with her once she got tired of pretending that she didn't have favorites.
If Jack had just listened to Emery, they'd be sipping mai tais on a Balearic island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea while she traced his freckles with her tongue. Instead, she's plucking Abbot's penlight out of his cargo pocket and thinking about how his wound is going to be a bitch to approximate to her standards but will look right at home among the slipshod super glue patch jobs littering the rest of Jack's body.
"Your compulsive need to be liked by my family is—"
"Normal."
"Unattractive."
"That's not what you said last Christmas!" he pouts, which, unfortunately, is kind of attractive, but she's not about to let him know that. Or that last Christmas, Emery was swayed by his ability to charm her grandmother into wearing "an unfortunate Christmas sweater," which Nana defined as ugly simply by virtue of not being Hermès.
"Think of how easy this relationship would be if you learned how to read between the lines," she quips.
He crosses his arms in front of his chest and frowns.
"Why is it only a relationship whenever you want to call me an idiot?"
Emery shrugs her shoulders and grins at him.
"Have we finally uncovered the mystery of why you're an idiot most of the time?"
Is it annoying that he can't tell the difference between fulfilling familial obligations that Emery knows she can't get out of – Thanksgiving, Christmas, Nana's birthday – and adding on familial obligations that the rest of the Walshes knew better than to expect her to attend before they met Jack? Of course! But it is also kind of endearing that he still asks her father to tell the story of how he almost pulled off a casino heist every time they're at a family get together.
"I think you mean dashing."
Walsh rolls her eyes. Instead of letting his head inflate even more, she asks Abbot, "Did you bring lidocaine?"
"Don't need it. Just give me—"
"A ball gag?"
Jack raises an eyebrow, but Emery doesn't bother dignifying it with so much as an eye roll before viciously pressing a gauze pad against his wound and ordering him to go lay down on the hideous couch belonging to her predecessor that she has been dying to replace. She is searching through his extensive DIY suture kit for Prolene when he starts, "You wouldn't have to look so hard if you also had a go-bag…"
"Go-bags are the survivalist equivalent of doing meal prep! As you very well know, I simply do not—"
"Believe in committing to a week's worth of decisions on Sunday afternoon," he finishes in that same obnoxious tone he uses whenever he pretends like she's being the unreasonable one for telling him that Taco Tuesdays as a dinner theme is counterproductive to embracing variety as the spice of life. "This is not the same thing, Em! Having a go-bag is like fasting for eight hours pre-op! It's essential!"
"I'm a trauma surgeon, Jack. No one is ever NPO before I cut them open."
"And think of how much that annoys you!"
*
Walsh has just about finished tying the last knot when her phone goes off with a call from The Pitt. Her forehead furrows. The only perk of working the Fourth of July is having Garcia as her trauma fellow. Yolanda is a known entity – she doesn't have to prove her reliability because Walsh has spent five years molding her into the kind of resident who won't call her for bullshit. If the ER is calling her, it's because the shit has truly hit the fan. Walsh motions for Jack to put the phone on speaker as she snips the excess tails of her suture material.
"Garcia tell you about the code black at Westbridge?" Robby asks by way of greeting. Before she can rack her brain trying to figure out where that lands on the color-coded disaster system, Robby offers, "Not a bomb. They're diverting because there was a minor explosion after a firecracker went off in their MRI machine."
"They can't possibly use their MRI that much!"
"Firecrackers also went off in the ER. It was a TikTok prank." Robby doesn't attempt to hide his disdain about social media ruining his cushy pre-vacation shift. She'd feel bad for him, but Walsh already knows that Robby wouldn't be calling her if he wasn't also about to ruin the six hours she has left in her shift too. "Now they're on diversion and it's our problem."
"Your problem, Robby."
"Our problem." He takes a little too much joy in telling Walsh that EMS called with an expect for a four-car collision at an intersection. "All hands on deck, Emery."
"Don't sound so happy about it, Robinavitch," she grumbles.
"Is Jack still there?"
"What makes you think—"
She doesn't need to finish her sentence to know that Robby is rolling his eyes at this futile attempt at discretion.
"Ahmad saw him come in." After a beat, Robby says, "Brother, I sure could use your help until Shen gets here."
Jack doesn't even wait a beat before replying, "You got it, man."
"We have an eight o'clock flight to catch," Emery reminds Robby while mostly reminding Jack, who is already wearing the maniacal gleam of a man who has just been invited to dive headfirst into chaos.
They reassure her that neither one of them has plans to stay here past seven, but Walsh has been both the perpetrator and the victim of just one more case while dinner reservations go bust way too many times to believe either one of them.
*
"What do you mean you're hitching a ride to Westbridge?" Abbot directs Langdon to be primary for the patient EMS is wheeling into the ER before he follows Walsh to the ER lockers. "You don't work at Westbridge!"
Emery punches in Jack's combination – her half birthday because he's such a sap – and puts her phone on the top shelf so she can take his fleece off the hook. Paulson always keeps his rig at five below and she will be damned if she gets hypothermia in July because of it.
"We make the residents rotate through a Level II trauma center so they gave me privileges a few months ago."
"And?"
"And Gloria said they need a hand."
She rummages through the Whole Foods bag of snacks in his locker and pulls out a granola bar that doesn't look too deformed. Walsh has only been to Westbridge a handful of times so there's no telling what their vending machine situation is like. She also takes out a sleeve of Oreos and asks Abbot if these are left over from last year's Christmas party.
"They're on diversion," Jack says, taking a juice box from her and placing it next to her phone. "We're already getting all their surgical patients."
"The mayor's brother is a patient at Westbridge and is, apparently, too unstable to be moved."
Jack mutters something about nepotism before reminding her that they have capable surgeons at Westbridge too. She arches her brow at him but Jack stares right back at her like they're fighting to see who will be the first to break. Unfortunately for him, Emery's poker face is the stuff of legend so he barely makes it thirty seconds before he blinks. Releasing a deep exhale, Jack reminds her with a frown, "They didn't lift the code black yet. What if there are more—"
"Rogue sparklers?" Emery laughs as she shrugs into his jacket. "They confiscated everyone's phones so they wouldn't be tempted to engage in any more performative anarchy. If you don't film it, they won't come."
"This is such a stupid idea."
She raises her eyebrows. "Are you worried, Abbot?"
He sighs, leans in, and confesses, "Emery, you know that I am. Just make Nelson—"
"Nelson is not as dazzling as I am." Walsh presses her hand against Abbot's chest and feels his heart beating faster than usual. Softly, she adds, "I'll be in and out before you can even miss me."
"You know that's not possible."
One of the EMS guys calls out to Walsh from the automatic doors that they should get a move on. Begrudgingly, Emery takes a step back and shoves the pilfered snacks into the pocket of her stolen fleece before flashing one last smile at Abbot and telling him, "It might do you some good to see what life is like on the other side for a change."
"Other side of what?" he calls out as she heads towards the ambulance bay.
"Bearing witness to someone else's stupid decisions," she shouts back.
*
An OR suite explodes five minutes before they arrive at Westbridge. She hears chatter over the radio about an oxygen line they forgot to shut off – fucking Westbridge! – but before EMS can suggest turning around, dispatch tells them that it was self-contained and they have gotten the all-clear to proceed. The firefighters are still hosing down the radiology floor when Emery arrives at Westbridge and is led to one of the outpatient surgery suites where they do minimally invasive day procedures.
"Just to be safe," their head of surgery says as if removing a massive tree trunk from the mayor's brother's abdomen is as simple as doing a breast biopsy. "We brought down everything and RT is getting set up right now. I know it's a little unorthodox but…"
"It's like doing surgery in the Wild West," she deadpans. "Phil, are you sure we can't just take him to PTMC?"
"In the last hour, we've given him six units of blood and packed around the area of concern three times because he keeps soaking through the lap pads."
As if he felt his ears burning, the patient in question is wheeled into the room a moment later. To say that there is a gaping wound around the foreign body would be an understatement.
"Phil, that's a fucking tree."
Phil grins. "Actually, we cut off most of the tree before you got here."
"How does something like this even happen?"
"He was shooting a commercial for his used car dealership and pretending to be Vin Diesel," Phil answers with a frown. "I'm sure you'll see it on the ten o'clock news tonight."
Walsh reaches into the pocket of Abbot's fleece for her phone to take a picture for Ellis' collection and comes up empty. She pats down the rest of her pockets before realizing that she left it on the top shelf of Abbot's locker while she was giving him an impromptu lecture about being more responsible. Pointing to one of the third-year residents from PTMC, she tells him to snap a before picture and send it to her.
When Phil asks her what she thinks, Walsh sighs and replies, "We're going to need a lot more blood and some toys from the ortho guys," before rattling off a wish list.
*
The temperature difference between the back of Paulson's freezing ambulance and The Pitt has to be in the double digits because the moment Walsh walks back into PTMC, she practically tears off Abbot's fleece as she shoves it back into his locker and grabs her phone. The screen now shows that she has missed seven calls from Jack alone in the last four hours. Rolling back her shoulders, she takes a deep breath and heads back into the ER in search of her fellow but quickly realizes that Garcia is probably where all the commotion is.
It turns out that doing major surgery in an outpatient suite is somehow still less chaotic than what is going on in Trauma 2.
"What the actual fuck?"
"Oh hey, you're back!" he exclaims happily with a sigh of relief that she's pretty sure no one else clocks except her. She'd read into it, but she walked into the room in time to see Abbot crack a guy's chest open. "How was—"
"Why are you doing surgery in the ER again?" she asks before hip checking him out of the way.
"He was crashing!"
"No, he wasn't," Garcia counters dryly, "but he sure is now."
Walsh motions for the PGY-2 to hand her fellow a Gregory clamp and Surgipro. The problem with having both hands in some guy's chest cavity as she walks Garcia through a figure-of-eight stitch along a macerated aortic arch while snapping at Abbot about his inability to follow standard of care is that Emery does not register that it's her phone vibrating like they're working through a California earthquake when she barks, "Apologies if this life-threatening trauma case is getting in the way of someone's social life, but can whoever it is answer their fucking phone already?"
Abbot flashes her the shit-eating grin of a man who is more than happy to have an excuse to touch her ass during working hours before handing the Yankauer off to his intern and reaching into her back pocket to pluck her phone out. He flips the phone so Emery can see the picture of her grandmother subtly decked out in Swarovski at her sister's wedding.
"Your grandmother," Abbot says as if she can't read the Helene Walsh identifier across her screen.
"Definitely let that go to voicemail."
"What if Nana is worried?"
"Nana?" Javadi squeaks, her very wide eyes suddenly flitting between the two of them like she's Nancy Drew on the cusp of a breakthrough. Victoria looks around to see if anyone else is as alarmed as she apparently is, but when she doesn't get any sort of reaction from the peanut gallery, she sputters, "You know Dr. Walsh's grandmother?"
"Maybe I should answer it?" Jack suggests, the phone still vibrating in his hand.
"No! The last thing I need is for you to promise her that I'll give a speech at the thing."
"There's a thing?" Javadi asks.
Walsh rolls her eyes and turns her attention back to the bloody field to tell Whitaker that he needs to aim the suction at the rapidly filling pool of blood in the thoracic space for it to work. The kid practically falls into the patient's chest in his haste to follow her instructions.
"What if Nana thinks PTMC is on lockdown—"
"You call Dr. Walsh's grandmother Nana?" Javadi chirps again. She turns to Jesse and whispers, "That's weird, right?"
"The stitch should hold long enough to get this guy to the OR," Walsh declares. Her phone has stopped vibrating, but Jack is now reading off a text that Nana has sent threatening to disown Emery if she is not at the house for brunch tomorrow morning.
"Should've answered the phone," Abbot smirks when Emery groans at the start of a new migraine.
"And you shouldn't have cracked this guy's chest open without first checking to make sure it wasn't keeping Old Faithful at bay," she replies irritably as she pulls off her sterile gloves and motions for the RT to put the guy on the transport vent so they can go upstairs.
"I wanted to keep it interesting for our sub-I here."
Javadi chuckles nervously, the plethora of questions about Nana Walsh gone now that she is the focus of Walsh's very pointed glare.
*
"What are you doing here?" Emery asks when she comes out of the OR to see Jack pacing the hallway.
"You have a second?"
Walsh makes a face as she looks at the board that has filled up with more transfers from Westbridge since she scrubbed in to stop Mr. McCloud from exsanguinating. It's a mixture of urgent and emergent but for the sake of crowd control, it's all vaguely emergent because there's no other place to put the transfers except to fix them up and send them to post-op.
She looks down the whiteboard for her name and then answers, "I've got a necrotic bowel in fifteen, but I really need some sugar first."
"Okay," Jack says with a nod.
He grabs her hand and pulls her down the hallway to what Emery realizes is the storage closet the moment the door shuts behind them and the motion sensor lights come on to reveal a cramped space with stacks of unopened letter size paper and toner.
Abbot crowds her against the door, his eyes darting down to her lips and then back up before he confesses, "I didn't like being on the other side of it."
"Who does?"
"You could've called."
"My phone was in your locker. Anyway, Westbridge is fifteen minutes away." She rolls her eyes. "Besides, you never call."
"I always call!"
"Because you need me to bail you out," she snickers. "Not applicable in this scenario. Phil needed a surgeon, not someone who pretends to be one when it is convenient."
"Emery—"
When her stomach audibly growls, Jack pulls a plastic covered square from his pocket and offers it to her. Her mouth spreads into a slow smile as she takes the Little Debbie Cosmic Brownie packet from him. Jack begrudgingly takes a step back as Emery slumps a little against the door before tearing into the flimsy plastic and biting into a terrible dessert that hits the spot every time she is in such dire straits as to consume it.
"Dana is a godsend," she proclaims as she inhales her food.
"We should've gone to Mallorca," Abbot admits.
His confession is such a surprising non-sequitur that she looks up from examining those sprinkles of questionable origin in time to see Jack lean onto one of the shelves before dropping down on his good knee.
Walsh raises an eyebrow and reminds him that she's now got ten minutes. "You're good, but you're not that—"
But Abbot doesn't reach for the back of her legs to pull her closer. He stretches to grab the hand that isn't holding a convenience store brownie and says in a voice so low that she feels the room vibrate with his words, "Emery Walsh…"
Her eyes go big.
"What are you doing?"
"What I was planning on doing in Mallorca."
She looks around in panic. Maybe she's been having a very vivid heat stroke induced delusion and they really are surrounded by white sandy beaches. But nope, all she sees are sterile walls illuminated by harsh fluorescent lighting.
"We cancelled Mallorca," she says, her voice so shrill that she has to take a breath to center herself before she alerts every dog within a five-foot radius of the hospital to their presence.
"I thought there would be another Mallorca, but—"
Calmer now, Emery reminds Jack, "We're not in Mallorca so if you could just get up—"
"I don't care if it's not Mallorca."
They have said Mallorca so many times in the last minute that her quickened pulse is now beating out the syllables of the word. She tells him that whatever this is – she knows what this is; he threatens to do it at every major Hallmark holiday – it's just an adrenaline response to a heightened situation.
"This too shall pass, Jack."
"I don't want it to pass. I want you to marry me."
She nods at the ring on his left finger. "I already married you, Abbot."
"Only so they'd have a next of kin to call if I died overseas. That was a paperwork thing so it doesn't count!"
Walsh rolls her eyes. "What's on paper is quite literally what counts, Jack!"
They also live together, sleep with each other, have been debating for the past two years about whether it is irresponsible to adopt a dog, and her sister Vanessa's kids have taken to calling him Uncle Jack because he keeps sneaking them out of fundraiser dinners to have ice cream sundaes in the kitchen with back of the house staff. They could not be more married if they tried.
"But we should have a real wedding."
Emery slides down the door until she's sitting on the floor. Jack sighs and follows her lead. He stretches out his bad leg as much as he can in this sardine can until Emery scooches forward so she can curve her hand around the dome of his patella.
"Jack, it's been five years. You can't put toothpaste back into the tube."
"You can if it's a vow renewal. Maybe let other people know this time."
Emery rolls her eyes. What's wrong with their marriage being the best kept secret in the world?
"If you're going to freak out like this every time, maybe I'll stick to being the responsible one."
"It's not…I was planning on asking you in the Poconos after the jubilee this weekend."
"No, you weren't."
"Yes, I was."
"Then where's the ring?"
At their courthouse wedding, Emery had simply moved a ring she already owned from her middle finger to her ring finger because they needed to file the papers before the end of the business day to make sure it was a done deal by the time Jack deployed. Over the years, he threatened to get her something legitimate on every Valentine's Day to which she replied that she vigorously scrubbed her hands at least four times a day for the OR so the last thing she needed was to worry about it falling down the drain and then having to explain to everyone why she was wearing a wedding ring in the first place. All of his whining about how everyone just assumes that he's pining over a dead wife – "It's ageism, Emery!" as if the only reason people don't make the same assumption about Robby isn't because he's a man whore – is not enough to get her to budge on the more practical arguments for why she doesn't want or need him to buy her jewelry. But for the purposes of this argument, it can serve as her gotcha moment.
"It's sandwiched between two button downs in a duffel bag in the back of your car and, before you ask, it costs more than that espresso machine you had imported from Italy."
Emery whistles.
"Have you been talking to Nana?" When he doesn't reply, she groans, "Oh God, you have been talking to Nana!"
"Do you want me to go get the ring?"
"I liked it better when I thought this was going to be a sex thing," she mumbles under her breath.
Abbot waggles his eyebrows and tells her that it can still be a sex thing if she answers his one very simple question first. Off her silence, he sighs, "It's important, Em!"
"It's redundant, Jack!"
"You're always telling me that you want me to be more stable."
"I'm always telling you that I want you to be less reckless."
"It would be reckless not to have redundancies." Jack grins at her. "Is it so bad to want to marry you again under the eyes of God—"
"You're a lapsed Catholic, Abbot."
He laughs. "Actually, I was talking about your grandmother, Walsh."
"This!" she exclaims as she jabs her index finger into his chest. "It is because you egg her on by saying things like this that Nana then shows up to my cousin's law school graduation in a crown like she's attending the opera in Vienna!"
Jack rolls his eyes. "I'm sure the people at Ainsley's Harvard Law School graduation are not unfamiliar with a crown, Emery! In fact, they spent most of the ceremony trying to poach Helene as a client!"
"Which is exactly the kind of attention that my cousin who was going into environmental law was trying to avoid!"
Granted, Ainsley only went into environmental law because she had a trust fund to fall back on if it didn't work out, but that's not germane to this conversation. Jack seems to agree because he goes right back to saying, "We got married because you felt bad for me—"
"That's not why we got married."
"And then I came back with half a leg and it was probably just easier to stay married than—"
"Is that what you think? Do you know how easy it is to get divorced?" Walsh hooks her index and middle fingers against the V-neck of his scrub top and pulls Abbot closer so that there is no mistaking how serious she is when she tells him, "Do you know how stupid you sound right now?"
"Remember when you kept that Bialetti for months even though it burned your fingers every time you tried to make an espresso simply because you were too lazy to replace it?"
"You think I'm not replacing you out of convenience?" He shrugs. "Jack, you're the least convenient person I know!"
That at least gets a chuckle from him.
"Thanks, Em."
Before he can counter with some other ridiculous theory, Walsh's pager goes off, the incessant beeping telling her that the only thing this conversation is accomplishing is getting her patient one step closer to being left with a short gut.
She leans in and kisses him once on the forehead before apologetically telling him, "I have to go."
"I know."
Once they're both back on their feet, Emery turns to Jack before she opens the door to say, "For what it's worth, it wasn't just so you'd have an emergency contact."
*
The stupid thing is that she is the one who proposed to him!
Which is insane, but ultimately also Jack's fault for not being able to make it more than four months of dating before dropping a casual I love you on his way out for a Sunday morning run. Emery still remembers hearing the door shut behind him and deciding immediately that they had to break up as soon as he came back since only a crazy person would make that kind of declaration when they were still in the first quarter of the game. Walsh wasn't a monster so she would let him down gently. It's not that he wasn't a good guy or they didn't have fun together, but how was she supposed to commit to someone who was clearly insane?
She had a whole speech planned out, but then Jack came back from his run holding two brown paper bags from two different bagel places and started telling her about how he'd run all the way downtown to get her a breakfast bialy but her favorite place ran out of lox so then he'd gone to that other place they went to that one time and got talked into buying half a pound of smoked salmon that they were never going to be able to finish before they left for the Cape, but then he figured maybe he should get stuff for a spread which led to doubling back to the first place for more bialys and—
"Lots of room for trial and error to Frankenstein the perfect breakfast sandwich now that I've got all the accoutrements. Maybe we should throw in those onions I pickled last week—"
"I love you too," Emery had blurted out like she was also a crazy person. She expected his face to go on the same journey that hers had in silence an hour ago now that everything was flying off the rails, but Jack just smiled at her with so much affection that it almost felt like this whole thing was normal.
"Really thought you were going to ignore it."
"Me too."
After a beat, he lifted one of the bags up higher in the air and asked, "But will you still love me if we mess up this breakfast situation?"
"Did you get dill cream cheese?"
"Obviously. I'm not an asshole, Em. I also bought a whole jar of non-pareil capers because—"
"They taste better," they said in unison and that's when she knew that they were both so very, very screwed.
*
Surprising no one, they miss their flight and the later flight they could have begged their way onto because an hour before hand off, the ER get a heads up about a mishap at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center involving outdoor fireworks going off indoors amongst eighteen thousand very flammable people dressed like cutesy dragons and sexy aardvarks at Anthrocon. For the next few hours, the air is heavy with the smell of burning Lycra and faux fur. The plastic surgery department comes down en masse, finally being forced to earn their overinflated paychecks as they set up a second color-coded system to triage the burn victims.
By the time Walsh finishes with the final wound vac and signs out the last of the loose ends to general surgery, she has been in the OR over a dozen times today. Jack must have just finished signing out to Shen because he's waiting for her outside the PACU with a white paper bag from Dunkin'.
"Thanks from Shen for not letting the horse guy die on his watch. Apparently, it would've brought him so much bad luck this year if he had."
Emery peeks at the French cruller in the bag as they start to walk towards her office.
"He just has gratitude donuts on retainer?"
"He DoorDashed this one specifically for you."
"I'm going to need something a little stronger."
"Park beer?" Abbot suggests. "Can't buck tradition."
She feels like a barbecue skewer that has spent the last several hours trying to hold patients together enough for the patchwork to take before shipping them off to be someone else's long-term problem in two days. Emery can still smell the burning flesh from when they took the phoenix costume off her last patient to reveal a massive retroperitoneal bruise from a traumatic kidney injury when she scrambled to get out the convention hall.
"Keep me company while I get changed," Walsh says as she waves her ID card over the sensor to unlock her office door.
She doesn't have to turn around to know that Jack is wearing an unbearably smug smirk when he quips, "Nothing like a furry convention gone bad to bring out the patriotic spirit, huh Em?"
Jack starts to tell her about a woman dressed like a duck when Emery blurts out, "Having a wedding ceremony wouldn't change how very married we already are, you know?"
"I know."
"You also hate parties!"
"Only the ones with piñatas!"
"Putting aside that the last party you apparently attended was when you were five—"
"I just want people to know that you're my person, Em. For the longest time, the only person I had was Robby and he was always one breakdown away from driving off a cliff—"
It takes everything in Walsh not to tell him that Robby is still like that. It gave her pause when the poster child of bad decisions and avoidant behavior agreed without hesitation to be the witness for their impromptu courthouse wedding, but maybe saying yes when the more logical choice would be to take a beat has always been the price of loving Jack.
"Hey, you have me."
"I know."
"So then?"
"At least Robby lets me tell people we're friends."
"Meaning?"
"Emery, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to—"
Walsh hooks her arms around his neck until she can smell the sandalwood on him. She leans in to whisper in his ear, "Are you going to propose to me with a thought experiment?"
Jack grins. "Well, I was going to do it with a ring."
"And yet you didn't put it in your go-bag. So much for being prepared, Abbot."
*
Eleven hours after Robby's phone call ruins her day, Walsh is nursing a lukewarm Iron City Beer on a park bench and only half paying attention to the conversation when Jesse asks Abbot, "Weren't you supposed to be flying somewhere tonight?"
"Philly."
"Who flies to Philly?" Jesse asks incredulously in a tone that makes Walsh think that he would lead the charge if it came down to eating the rich.
Abbot raises his hands.
"Don't start with the carbon emissions thing again! You know how bad traffic gets on Independence Day weekend!"
"Aren't you from Philadelphia, Dr. Walsh?" Victoria Javadi asks, the picture of innocence as she cracks open her first almost-legal alcoholic beverage.
Normally, Emery dislikes trainees who pry because it's usually in the service of a letter of rec or a high honors on the rotation, but she knows that Javadi has no desire to impress any surgery program directors so her ulterior motives basically boil down to a desire to play Young Sherlock and sheer nosiness. It's so entertaining how Javadi doesn't even try to hide how badly she wants to solve this puzzle that Walsh decides right then to give Shamsi a plus two so she can bring the kid.
Jack replies, "Lots of people are from Philadelphia, Javadi."
"Oh, she knows," Walsh says. "Javadi was born at CHOP."
"How do you—"
"Every time Eileen is mad at your father, she brings up how he almost missed your birth because he was on the checkout line at Jimmy John's while you were crowning."
"Oh my God."
"Oh, that's cute!" Princess says.
"It's mortifying."
Before Javadi can burrow her way into the Earth's core, Robby shows up with half the ER staff in tow attempting to convince him to have a more sensible midlife crisis that involves renting a little red Corvette to drive up to Alberta.
"A Harley-Davidson is a perfectly safe method of transportation!"
"Only if you have a death wish," Donnie scoffs.
"Robby wants to be like Evel Knievel," Emery says with a shrug. She has already told him that she'll kill him if he kicks the bucket so, as far as Walsh is concerned, she has done her part.
"Evel Knievel died," Jack reminds her.
"Of pulmonary fibrosis!" Robby points out with the smugness of someone who is proud to miss the point entirely.
"You still smoking, boss?" Jesse asks before hiding his smirk behind his beer.
Walsh always forgets how much she enjoys Jesse's dry humor until they're in the middle of a code and he says during compressions that maybe this experience will teach their unresponsive patient not to light Roman candles if they insist on maintaining fidelity to their sloth fursona and not hauling ass away from the launch site.
"At least wait until tomorrow, man," Abbot tries again.
"You're the one who told me to live a little!"
"I told you to see a therapist—"
"Who probably would've told me to live a little!" Robby groans as he bends down to gather his stuff. "I'm grabbing life by the horns!"
"I don't think this counts."
Robby rolls his eyes, pats Abbot on the back, and tells him not to worry so much.
"I promise to be back in time for the thing."
"The thing?"
Jack raises an eyebrow and turns to Emery, who simply shrugs and tells him that she is not going to remember two anniversaries for the same thing. Before anyone can butt in to ask for details, Robby cracks his back and declares, "Good night, good luck, and I will see you all in three months, hopefully with a tan."
Robby shoulders his backpack and the helmet that Walsh has never seen him wear before giving them all a tiny salute and heading towards the parking garage. They watch until he becomes a Lego figure in the distance before Emery wonders out loud, "Is now a good time to mention that I paid a rockabilly eagle fifty bucks to slash his tires?"
Jack smiles at Emery in a way that would have been the kind of dead giveaway that would've pissed her off a few hours ago, but she has since learned that most of their colleagues are oblivious.
"See? She's a doer," Perlah tells Whitaker.
"I lost all my money in the Westbridge pool!"
"Told you to contribute towards retirement instead," Mohan says.
"Or groceries," Santos mutters.
"I brought—"
Garcia snickers. "Homemade cheese from the farm doesn't count!"
"Real high and mighty for someone who doesn't even live with us!"
"Does no one else want to know what the thing is?" Javadi asks over the bickering roommates.
"What thing?" Santos asks.
Javadi sighs. "Why would I be asking if I knew?"
"What happened to your finger?" Garcia asks Emery as she peers at the band-aid around her ring finger. "Was it the guy with the talons?"
Abbot covers up his grin by taking a sip of beer.
"Well, he did make them out of Ginsu knives," Walsh says.
Santos mourns, "There was an Edward Scissorhands furry and I missed it? Where the hell was I? Probably charting! Un-fucking-believable!"
"He came right as they were wheeling the bowel perf guy out of Trauma—" Javadi stops mid-sentence to stare at Abbot and Walsh. Emery can practically see the computations hovering over her head in a thought bubble as Javadi points at her and says, "You told Garcia to take care of it while you went upstairs with the ischemic bowel. But the patient only told us about the Ginsu knives after we gave him Narcan, which means you couldn't have known unless…"
"What's happening right now?" Whitaker asks no one in particular.
"Oh my God, you're dating each other!" Javadi gasps.
"Are you out of your mind, Crash?"
Javadi looks around for back up but everyone is staring at her like she's insane. Jack glances at Emery as if to ask if they can put the poor med student out of her misery now. There's no point in protecting a secret that will soon come out anyway.
"She hasn't dated me in years," Jack says.
"Excuse me?" Princess exclaims.
"How many years exactly?" Perlah asks with the kind of interest that can only involve collecting on a bet of some sort.
"Don't congratulate me on dodging a bullet just yet," Walsh says with a dramatic sigh. "I only stopped dating Abbot to marry him instead."
The sound of their exploding brains rivals the fireworks in the distance. Maybe Jack was right about those falling trees after all: it is a lot more entertaining when everyone is around to hear it.