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They hurt, is the thing.
People without marks cling to that: “it hurts, it always hurts, I’m lucky to be free from the pain, actually,” they say. “I don’t want a mark.” No one believes them, of course. But everyone nods: it does hurt. The rest they’ll allow out of courtesy.
Few describe the pain well, in Jack’s experience. It’s not an ache — too sharp around the edges — and not quite a sting — too dull in the center — but something different, special, in between.
It’s forgettable most of the time, and that’s the usual counter for those unkind enough to argue with someone without a mark: it becomes background noise eventually. You learn to ignore the pain. It’s a part of you. Jack knows this well, is used to that particular kind of forgetting.
A few don’t ever forget. A few struggle with it. He’s seen only a few attempts at excision over his years in the ER, and their reasons are often all too similar: too much pain, physical, emotional, it can’t be them, not them, get this off me— He supposes he understands the desperation. After all, as long as it’s on your body, it’s constant, from the moment it forms until, well—
He rubs his hipbone aimlessly as he stands on the edge of the roof, hissing when he presses just right against the center of the circle there.
Most people forget about the pain. Most people, though, don’t get two marks.
The circles spawn instantaneously, and no one knows how. Scientists have studied them, of course. It’s a cottage industry nowadays, tests and kits and quizzes that tell you if you’ll get a mark, when, for whom. No payment unless you match. Ten signs you’ll get a mark soon.
Most of it is hogwash; some is dangerous.
Jack thinks of a teen gone septic, having let another kid tattoo a circle on her arm underneath the bleachers of the football field, desperate for the attention of her crush. Weeks of antibiotics had healed the infection, but the scabbing had distorted the ring.
Nothing could distort a real mark. He presses his hipbone again. His original mark had come in college, just about the average age. Halfway through sophomore year, struggling through O-Chem, mind set on medicine half because of the challenge of it all.
He had always liked a challenge. He’d been eager to leave his Appalachian small town in the first place, and he’d do anything to not have to return.
Jack had left the library late, toed off his shoes and socks in his dorm room door and gasped at the pain that arced up his leg and into his heart.
“Fuck,” he gasped. His roommate had looked up. Jack looked down. “Sorry. Sorry, uh— Stubbed my toe.”
It’s an area that’s significant, always. Somehow. A lot of people get marks over their heart, and in his cynical moments he’s always found it all a bit overwrought. But here is his, just above his right ankle.
He had met Diane two weeks later at a party, thought she was cute. He had seen her again a week after that in the dining hall, asked to sit at her table. She glanced around: there were plenty of empty seats. She had looked back at him slowly, smiled, and nodded.
They ate entirely in silence.
She had asked him out the third time they met, when she sat across the table from him in the library, told him he looked like shit, and asked if he wanted to get coffee as a pick-me-up. He was already half in love with her by the time he paid for her latte.
He didn’t understand why it was on his ankle, but he knew it was for her. The pain spiked every time they touched, he admitted one night a year later.
“Mine too,” she whispered back. The burn had ebbed at the recognition, the acknowledgement of their pairing.
It never hurt that much after that. It was more— More an itch. A reminder. Stronger when Jack wasn’t near Diane, but he never liked being far from her anyway.
And then— He enlists to pay for medical school because the amount of loans he has is unfathomably large already, and she rolls her eyes and says she’ll support him, always. That she hates the military but loves him, that she loves how much he wants to help people. That he’ll probably be stuck on some boring base treating sprained ankles.
He learns why it’s on his ankle when he awakens without it, goes home to her with one fewer limb and infinitely more nightmares, and she swallows down her tears and hugs him tightly.
It can’t hurt anymore, the mark. But everything else hurts more.
Two years later she gets diagnosed with breast cancer, and six months after that — it’s fast, brutal, ruthless — she’s dead, and he’s used to phantom pain by now but not like this, never like this. His ankle, the one that doesn’t exist, the one that’s in ashes somewhere just like Diane, hurts, and hurts, and hurts.
Jack knows Samira has a mark.
Most people do, so it’s not a particularly profound realization, but it sticks in his mind anyway.
Trinity’s mark is on her inner elbow, visible in the short sleeves she wears to work, so they all know. One day, she pokes at it, scoffs, scratches again. A minute later, she repeats the process.
Samira raises her head to look at her, eyebrow quirked. “You should stop messing with it. It’ll only irritate your arm.”
Trinity rolls her eyes, but Jack can see the smirk on her lips; there’s no heart in her annoyance. “Yeah, yeah, mark expert over here. Where’s yours, by the way?”
Samira gestures vaguely, one hand waving up and toward her shoulder. Jack watches the motion carefully.
“I sometimes hate that mine’s so— Here,” Trinity complains.
Samira nods thoughtfully: it’s not something she’s had to deal with, a visible mark. “You could wear long sleeves. It’s definitely cold enough in here.”
He’s summoned by Lena then, the rest of the conversation lost behind him.
Jack looks back as he walks away, though he isn’t sure why he cares. He lost his mark years ago, and he tries to think about it as little as possible.
The next time he sleeps, his mind is filled with the image of that careless flip of her hand. Toward her back, he wonders? Upper, lower? Shoulder? Arm? There’s a circle somewhere, a perfect black line that swoops across her skin.
He wakes up, and his hipbone aches. He figures he’s getting old. He knows he needs to take better care of his leg, use his crutches more at home.
It isn’t until he’s seated in the shower, body wash in hand, that he sees the new circle.
He doesn't think about the mark. He thinks about work.
The journal articles start on a random summer night. It’s not quiet — he’d never dare call the ER quiet — but listless, somehow. Jack knows they all feel it. Parker spins half-moons in her chair, once, twice, again, before standing, and he looks up at her from his own ruminations.
“I’ll go check out chairs,” she says, and he nods. They have enough people there already, they both know, but their patients here are steady, stable, fine.
That’s it, isn’t it: fine. They’re fine. It’s an uncomfortable feeling, like his father’s suit he had worn to prom. A little long in the arms.
Samira has her head ducked down, and she’s squinting at a stack of paper. He’s leaning on the hub counter near her before he even realizes he’s stood and walked over.
“Looks like some light reading,” he teases.
She glances up sharply, bewildered for a beat before she manages to school her expression into polite neutrality. It’s something Jack’s been trying to train out of her, this careful deference. It’s what Robby likes. It isn’t what he does.
“Oh, uh— A study from last month’s AJEM. For my research. I can— I’ll go check on patients, I’m—“
“Whoa, Mohan, hold on. You’re fine. What’s the study about?”
She shows him, and she’s right: it is perfect for her research. He’s heard about her project in passing, through the updates she gives John and his impressed nods in return, through Robby’s unfairly critical mutterings. She should focus on clinical speed, not research. He tells Robby he’s wrong then.
Now, he tells Samira he knows a few other studies she should read.
She looks over at him, eyes wide and sparkling, and he shifts his weight. His pelvis aches; he’s getting too old for this.
“I’ll send them to you,” Jack says, and she nods quickly, eagerly.
“Please! Yes, please do.”
Jack sends her three articles the next day.
She sends him back annotated PDFs and then a minute later sends an apology. You don’t have to read all that! Sorry. Got a bit excited. I know you didn’t need my thoughts when you sent me the studies.
Mohan, he replies. I always want your thoughts.
She texts back a smiley face.
They don’t text for a month until Samira sends him a journal article. Could have helped the patient last week.
It’s early morning, bedtime for both of them: she’s on nights for a week, adjusting well to lack of sunlight and sanity.
His hip aches. He rolls onto his back.
Jack doesn’t need to read the study to know she’s right, to know that she’s filing this information away so that no one under her care ever dies the same way that man did. He reads the study anyway and sends her back his notes.
They text regularly after that until PittFest.
Jack gets it. It had been overwhelming, that day, in every sense. The onslaught of it, the ceaselessness of the pain and the blood, and he had seen the way her posture had shifted over the hours. At first: too-straight, all tight shoulders and manic pride, even when the patients stopped coming.
Then later, in the park: small. Smaller than he’d seen her before.
So he wasn’t surprised when she didn’t send an article that day or the next. He didn’t either.
He knows why he does this every day, why he keeps showing up to those cursed hallways and white-bright lights. He’s pretty sure she knows why she does too. But there’s a difference between the duty of it and relishing in that duty.
Then one day Samira texts him a file.
I’ll read it tonight, he replies.
Aren’t you working tonight?
Between patients
Now that you’ve said that, you won’t have a break, you know, she replies. Jack swears he can hear her voice say the words.
I would’ve until you jinxed it
He does read it that night, and she awakens to an annotated PDF. Samira doesn’t need to know that he makes John take three of his patients to make that happen.
It’s Parker’s idea to get breakfast.
It’s edging on winter but not there yet. He likes these days, when it’s still chilly in a way that can be described as pleasant, when the mornings aren’t yet a wall of snow and frost. The sun beams down, dazzling and nearly too much. Nighttime is easy. Mornings are too bright, and he fears that the faults in his psyche are visible somehow, cracks in his skin, down to the bone. He wants to look up at the brightness, dare it to overtake him.
He’s always liked a challenge.
They pile into a booth of the nearby diner, Jack rolling his eyes as he gets shoved in next to John and his ever-bouncing leg.
He allows himself a small smile when Samira orders blueberry pancakes with a toothy grin, as if ashamed of her decadence. He looks at the menu in front of her — not at her, not directly: she’s too much like the sun, too bright, too risky — when he orders the same thing.
“What a week,” John murmurs, and they all sigh in agreement. It wasn’t different, this week, from any other. They’re all like that: on the edge of too much to bear, heavy in a way that sits like the snow will.
Jack watches her fiddle with her mug, warm her hands around it.
She’s beautiful, he thinks. She glances up from her cup, catches him watching, and something flickers across her face that he can’t decode.
His hip twinges, and he glares at John. The bouncing ceases.
Their waitress walks by — “food’ll be out in a minute, dearies” — with a latte, and Jack thinks suddenly of the latte he bought Diane that first day, the ones he bought her so many days after, the coffee maker he’d simply left set up on the counter the day before his deployment for her to find.
He swallows hard.
No one knows where the marks are from. No one knows if they’re destiny or chance or even an accident entirely.
Diane hadn’t been an accident. College sweethearts, first loves— His hands fall together, right fingers idly spinning the ring he still wears on his left.
That mark had made sense. That mark had led him to his match, had been the kind of fate the believers talk about. This one—
Samira giggles at something Parker says, and he blinks, realizes his pancakes are on the table. They’re warm, a tendril of steam curling upward.
“Not hungry after all?” Samira says, ducking her head to catch his gaze, and it’s disconcerting, the sudden realization that he’s met her eyes the same way countless times. Her tone is mild, curious.
“No, I—“ He shrugs. Takes a bite. They really are delicious pancakes.
John’s back to bouncing. Jack’s leg is sore, and his hip aches, and he can’t wait to remove his prosthetic, massage the aching muscle underneath.
Samira’s too good for him. Too young, too smart, too— Bright. He looks back at the window.
He doesn’t deserve Samira, he thinks resolutely. He’ll forget these feelings. He’ll move on.
Maybe, he thinks for a moment, this mark will fade. Maybe he created this one out of sheer force of will. Scientists don’t understand the marks yet. Maybe this is a new kind, an accidental kind, a mistake.
They leave the diner with murmurs of needing sleep, all heading in their separate directions toward the siren song of silence at last.
“A—Abbot—“ he hears her say, uncharacteristically rushed. “Dr. Abbot.”
He turns around, head cocked in question.
“Are you okay? At breakfast, you were…” She hesitates for a beat, eyes widening. “Sorry. It’s none of my business.”
He finds his own eyes widening to meet hers, both shocked still.
“I’m okay,” he says eventually. Shakes his head like it doesn’t belie his words. “I’m okay. But thank you.”
She gives him a smile and a quiet “Okay. Good” before she walks away.
They are a flawless unit, two halves of a whole being in the operating room. They always have been.
Jack knows what their colleagues think. Knows it infuriates Robby because he wants to be right about all things, and he’s wrong about Samira, and that cuts him somewhere behind his clavicle near Adamson and Langdon and all the other things he takes personally.
Knows it perplexes Walsh in that just-quite-not-mean way she feels all things, like she’s split between acquiescence and annoyance at their combined skill. She is one of Jack’s oldest friends; he is used to this.
Knows, too, that it amazes plenty of the others, the way they can pirouette through a cric so wordlessly, easily.
There is a woman near death before them now, and they are going to save her life. Jack knows this too.
He takes the bougie from Donnie, taps her shoulder blade from his position at her side to get her attention, hand it to her. She flinches at the contact, eyes slamming shut. She takes a deep breath.
“Hey. You’ve got this, Mohan,” he says, and she nods.
After they’ve saved the woman’s life, she strips off her gloves with efficient motions, thanks Donnie, and nods at Jack without quite looking at him.
“Your leg bothering you?” Robby tips his beer toward Jack, as if they weren’t the only two at the table, as if he weren’t the one here with a missing limb and an occasional limp.
Jack must look confused, because Robby continues: “Been rubbing your hip all night. I didn’t know it hurt there.”
He tilts his own bottle toward his mouth, letting it clack against his teeth. “Nah, leg’s been fine.”
“Don’t tell me you’re just getting old. That’ll mean I’m old too.”
Jack smiles at that, angling his head: Well…
“I, uh— I’ve got a mark,” he admits.
Robby’s lips part, though no sound escapes. He ponders this for a beat and then another, and then he takes a long sip of his beer.
“Oh,” he finally says.
Jack nods. “Yeah.”
“A— A new one.” Robby’s words are flat, but Jack hears the question in him. He nods again.
“Yeah. On my hip.”
Jack looks down into his bottle like there’s anything there for him, shrugging limply. Robby doesn’t answer, and Jack can’t bear to look up at his friend, see what he can only imagine is shock or pity in his eyes, so he speaks to the table: “Didn’t know you could get a second one. I looked it up, though. Apparently it happens, but it’s rare.”
The research is unclear. There aren’t enough cases to know when it happens or why, but there are some patterns: a deceased partner. Check. A dramatic life change. Check. He’s the perfect specimen.
He hears Robby’s grumble, looks up. Robby’s brow is furrowed, and he twists his lips with an audible ugh.
“Look, brother— I don’t know how to say this, but— This could be good. Diane would’ve wanted you to be happy.”
The words, Jack knows, are true enough: Diane would have wanted him to be happy. His gut buckles, and he feels suddenly nauseous.
“I miss her,” he blurts. He reaches for his ring, a lifeline. It doesn’t help. He twists it once, twice, and all he feels is the metal pulling at his skin.
“I know.”
“I’m not supposed to—“ He isn’t sure what the end of the sentence is. Have a mark again? Love again? Be happy? They’re all true enough. He shrugs again.
“But you can.” Robby knows him well. Robby answers all of the possibilities.
There’s a long pause until Jack finally tsks. “Yeah. Yeah, sure.”
“Do you—“ Robby’s words fade off, the question going unasked.
Jack knows Robby just as well. “No. I don’t… I don’t know who it is.”
Robby picks his beer up again, tips it against Jack’s. “Well, damn.”
That night, Jack looks at the ceiling, and his mind conjures colors and beings in the pitch darkness. Eventually, he makes his diagnosis: sleep has eluded him again.
He sits up, swings his legs over the edge of the bed, turns toward his bedside table. He flicks on the lamp. It bathes the room in light and shadows, casting real shapes along the blackout curtains.
His dog tags lay on the small ceramic plate. He takes off his ring and threads it onto the chain. He stares at it for a long while.
They go to the diner again, just the two of them. They’re sat in a smaller booth, knees bumping occasionally under it.
Samira had wanted good coffee, he tells himself. Said as much three times during the night as her break room mug chilled into something even less appealing than how it started.
So here they are.
They have matching blueberry pancakes in front of them, and she eats with gusto, mm-ing her delight into a bite in a way that makes his lungs hurt.
Then she stops, tilts her head toward the table and then up toward him.
“You…” She shakes her head and bites her lower lip into her mouth. He watches as she goes through the same expressions she does in front of a patient: curiosity, doubt, diagnosis. “You stopped wearing your ring.”
His hand flexes of its own accord, and her eyes follow the motion.
“Yeah,” Jack says, voice gravelly. He clears his throat. He reaches for his dog tags, pulls the chain out from under his t-shirt. “It’s here. I— I thought it was time to try.”
Samira smiles at him, the left corner of her lips slanted upward, and he wants to trace the curve with his tongue. He pushes the thought away.
“That’s a big deal,” she says, kindly. Always kind; he’s never seen her be anything but.
She opens her mouth again, hesitates. He waits, but she just shakes her head slightly and takes another bite of pancake. She rolls her shoulder as she does, a small stretch, and he wonders if she slept wrong.
He shrugs. His hip flares then, suddenly and blindingly, and his thumb and pointer finger grip the chain until the metal bites into his skin.
The circle on his hip is the same shape as the ring around the chain, the same perfect graceful curve. He doesn’t know how to untie them, doesn’t know if he can.
Samira texts him another annotated study that night.
“You did everything you could,” Jack says. His voice is soft, practiced. He’s good at this conversation, at carrying the weight for those around him.
She doesn’t look at him as she shakes her head, gaze trained instead at the spatter of red on the floor of trauma one.
“Mohan,” he tries again. Then: “Samira.”
Jack knows these cases hit her the hardest. He thinks of the teenage girl in the family room waiting for an update, unaware that her life has just fundamentally changed, thinks of Samira doing the same years ago: waiting, hoping, until the worst was confirmed.
He takes a step forward, makes sure to do so with his prosthetic foot so it makes a sound. His arm lifts from the elbow, a puppet on the universe’s string, and his hand lands on her shoulder. His thumb arcs over her scrub top, and he’s not sure who the motion is trying to sooth.
She stiffens and breathes out a choked noise, but it spurs her into motion. She shakes her head again and turns, and his hand falls limply to his side. They’re perpendicular now, and Jack stares at the lone curl that has escaped her bun, the way it forms a perfect ringlet against her ear, and he thinks about how he can relate to things that spiral by impulse.
“I’ll be fine,” she says, resolute even through the shakiness.
“You don’t have to be. Not immediately.”
“I’ll be fine,” she says again.
He doesn’t believe her, but he nods. He brings her coffee an hour later and hates the way his heart pounds at her reluctant smile.
He doesn’t remember the last time he took a break, certainly doesn’t remember the last time he sat down on something that wasn’t an exam room stool for the briefest of moments. He knows he’s limping, leg sore all the way from the scar up.
It’s not something he can deal with now. He walks into North 10.
The man there is smiling. It’s what Jack notices first, always does: what is the body telling him that the words might not? It’s a shy smile, rueful almost. Ashamed. He doesn’t look at Jack as he enters the room.
“Dr. Mohan,” Jack says. She turns, gesturing between the men.
“Andrew, this is Dr. Abbot, one of our attending physicians. Dr. Abbot, this is Andrew Murray. Had a run-in with a kitchen knife last week and is here because he’s noticed some redness around the wound. I was hoping you could take a look with me. I’m not sure if it warrants antibiotics right now or if we can wait and see.”
The man — Andrew, he reminds himself — is probably in his late 20s, lean and tall even seated, and he looks up at last, head moving before his eyes do, like they’re reluctant to leave Samira. He nods at Jack, and Jack’s lips flatten.
“Kitchen knife, huh? That’s no fun,” Jack says.
“I’ve never been a good cook, but I’m trying,” Andrew replies, but he’s looking back down at Samira. He brushes his hair — loose, dirty blonde — out of his eyes with the hand that’s not propped on the exam table. Jack wants to keep talking to him, wants to draw his attention away from Samira and her dimple and kind eyes and humidity-wild bun. Wants to poke at the cut, split the stitches, crow in victory—
He needs a break. He needs to stop thinking about Andrew cooking for Samira, himself cooking for Samira, Samira— Samira— He shakes his head, clearing the thought.
Andrew rolls up his sleeve as Jack pulls the other stool close, murmurs, “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
He leans forward, angling around Samira, and their arms brush as she reaches for Andrew’s wrist.
She reacts immediately, gasping and turning away, hand that had just brushed the patient now flying to the base of her neck, fingers curling around her shoulder blade, a gesture that would look like an awkward tic if it weren’t so rash.
He leans back as well, almost losing balance, and must tug something in his leg because pain immediately pangs upward to his hip, and it burns. He exhales through gritted teeth.
She's in pain, he thinks. He wants to ask if she's okay. He wants to be the reason she's okay.
Andrew looks between them, hair falling back over his eye as he considers them. Jack looks away, can’t bear to see it.
Samira’s mark just reacted to the patient, he thinks.
Samira’s mark hurts.
So does his leg. He rubs his hip idly. He needs a break.
Days pass.
Jack leans against the hub counter, shifting his weight back and forth. Robby’s off somewhere doing something with someone, so handoff has to wait. He rubs his hip unconsciously.
“You have a mark,” Dana says. He looks over, briefly unsure who she’s talking to. They’re alone at the hub, he realizes. So: him.
He glances away. “I did, yeah. You know that.”
He’s never been sure how Dana can roll her eyes so— loudly. He knows it’s what she’s doing despite his gaze being trained on the cup of coffee near Samira’s computer, the one he brought her an hour ago.
“Unfair for all those markless folks that the stupidest man in the entire world gets two of ‘em,” she says.
That gets a snort out of him, at least. He'd like to think it's humorless, that he can feign offense, but the smirk on Dana's face says she knows better. “You come over here just to bully me, Evans?”
“Not just.”
Jack sighs. “Then yeah. Yeah, I’ve got a new mark. I— I didn’t want it, okay? Didn’t even know I could have another one.”
“Hm, interesting. I’ve had my suspicions for a while, y’know.”
He hums at that: of course Dana would know. He is fully willing to believe she knows everything.
“You’ve always been a special one, Abbot,” she continues. “Does she know?”
Dana Evans has never pulled her punches. His head whips back to her, a prey response. “What?”
Her voice softens: “Does Samira know?”
Jack scoffs. “Why would she need to know?” His chest tightens. He thinks of the diner, the shoulder roll, the way she didn't quite look at him after the OR.
“When did your mark appear?”
The day I found out about hers, his mind provides. He swallows the words down.
“Men,” Dana continues, sighing. “You’re all idiots. You know she probably thinks you only ever had a mark for Diane?”
“She— There was a patient— Her mark—” It’s barely half a thought, but it’s still too much information, a confession he doesn’t mean to make.
“She’s been complaining about her shoulder hurting all week. Stretching it a whole lot. Mel keeps inviting her to pilates,” Dana tells him softly, gently. He’s always admired Dana, always watched closely as she comforts patients, teaches the students, so he knows this tone. “I don’t think that patient helped at all. Whatever happened that day seems to have made it worse.”
“I don’t— She doesn’t need to know,” he says, and his tone is just as quiet as hers but not nearly as sure.
Every once in a while, he’s forced to work a day shift. And that same week, Robby’s forced to work nights.
They both hate it.
The beat of the ER is different during the day, a more frantic thrum than Jack is used to, and it puts him on edge from the moment he walks through the ambulance bay doors. His therapist would tell him it’s totally understandable PTSD-induced anxiety, a need for control, consistency. Sometimes he even agrees.
His gaze wanders, cataloguing: Trinity talking to Perlah and oh, that’s dangerous, Dana with her head down, buried in work already, and—
There’s a giggle, too high-pitched for this wretched place, and he spins toward Central 6. There’s a woman in the bed, red around her tired eyes, but there’s a lightness there, and he realizes why when the giggle sounds again. He has to lean to see it around the wall, but Samira is there, waving a wand adorned with ribbons at a little girl.
“She went and got it from pedes,” Dana says from behind him. He looks over; she hasn’t lifted her head, knows what he’s looking at anyway. “ER princess, that one.”
He’s looking at Samira again, can’t even help himself when he nods.
The day doesn’t let up.
He looks for her whenever he can, always, instinctively, cheeks flushing when his gaze finds hers looking back.
They get three traumas before noon, lose one. They get children, too many children, all that will live but some that will remember these sights, noises, moments forever.
There’s a young nurse he doesn’t know yet. His first thought is that she’s too young to be here. His second is that he’s getting old.
She’s a little too wide-eyed by early afternoon, not yet able to box it up the way the rest of them can. Jack is glad Dana’s watching out for her, has stopped her from vibrating anxiously near the hub twice already, sent her to chairs and to work Donnie.
But she’s back now and eyeing the North restroom like it’ll save her, and Jack knows from experience that it won’t. He also knows that his own brand of compartmentalization, the winds and risk of the ledge, are not what this young woman needs right now.
He turns to get Dana, but he stops after two steps: there’s a voice behind him.
“Hey, Emma,” Samira says. “Why don’t I make you some tea, and then you can come help me check on the little boy with the broken arm? He’s been thinking about what color he wants his cast to be.”
He hears a bit of a sniffle and a shy “Okay.” He smiles down at his shoes, glances behind him. Samira is already looking at him over her shoulder as she leads Emma into the break room. There's something in her expression he can't quite read, but then she turns, and it's gone.
No one, Jack thinks, looks good under hospital lights. It is a fact of the universe, just like birth and death and marks. Samira is the exception.
God, I love her, he muses, and he sways backward at the realization, about-faces and walks away. His mark hurts— Or is it just his hip? He’s long since stopped being able to tell the difference.
No one knows if every mark has a pair. Everyone assumes they do; that’s what the research shows. But some people never find them, so the whispers linger in people’s vulnerable moments: maybe they’re marked for no one, maybe they only get the pain, maybe they’ll never—
Samira’s mark isn’t for him. It can’t be. He had his match. This mark— It’s a mistake, a fluke, a curse, and he knows he has plenty to atone for, so the thought of this being penance is very nearly a soothing one.
Robby shows up early for his night shift, trying to capture whatever hours of the daytime rush he can before the rhythm changes to one he finds stifling.
Jack only hears part of his conversation with Dana as he works: “—That fellowship position Samira took in New Jersey—“
The pain curls from his hip outward in an instant, down to his scar and up to his left ventricle, and his hand lands on the wall as he forces air into his lungs.
Jack doesn’t remember the next few hours. He saves multiple lives, and it doesn’t matter. It all blurs.
The roof is an inevitable end. He’s on the right side of the railing at least, forearms pressed against the metal so they hurt.
The ring on his chain is cold too, branding another circle into his skin, and he hates it. He has too many circles already, doesn’t need another. The wind swirls, and he watches the leaves on the trees in the park, and he wonders why there’s a circle on his hip. Why he got another one, why he had to lose Diane and still have the pain, why he finally was able to tell his therapist he was moving on only to have this chance ripped away as well.
He hears the door open and doesn’t care. Robby, Dana, whoever—
“I’m fine,” he says, preemptive.
“Okay,” Samira replies, and oh— It’s—
She leans against the railing next to him, and Jack wonders what she sees in the distance.
“I got a fellowship offer. Partner track. In New Jersey,” she says, and he nods, isn’t sure whether she’s offering this information because of what he overheard or if the timing is just another trick from the universe.
“That’s amazing.”
“I should have told you sooner.” They are friends, after all. Jack knows this, cherishes it immensely, hates it even more. It had taken him some time to realize it, that their texts and coffees added up to something, and now he doesn’t know how to let go. “I think I was avoiding… making it real.”
He shakes his head. “It’s a big deal.”
Her teeth clack, and he can see her jaw move out of the corner of his eye.
“I’m not taking it,” she blurts.
“What?”
“I’m not taking it. I’m staying here.”
He is confused, utterly and completely. He glances toward the door to the stairs like it’ll reveal this is a dream, a vision, then looks back at the horizon. Perhaps he’s dead, he thinks idly. He is silent long enough that she grimaces.
“My mom— She’s going on this cruise. Moving out of my childhood home, and I was so pissed off at her, so mad that she’d throw away all my plans like that. But those— Those aren’t her dreams. She should get to have her own.” Samira shrugs. “I can’t keep holding onto the past. I’ve been telling myself I’d get to have a life after med school, after residency, always after— But maybe I should just start now. I like it here. So I talked to Robby. He said I should apply for the ED Fellowship position, that he thinks… He thinks I’m a shoo-in.”
There’s a tinge of awe in those final words, disbelief at the praise, and Jack wants to compliment her over and over and over again until she’s full of it, bursting with the kind of pride he has in her.
“Oh,” is all he can manage. He can’t feel the ring against his sternum anymore.
“Yeah.”
They’re silent for a long while.
Eventually, she bumps her hip against his, right against the mark, and it throbs.
“I, uh— Heard something else,” she says, oddly shy. “Heard you have a mark.”
Jack looks at her then, unsure of what his own face is doing, but she seems to see something in his expression because she smiles.
He has been up on this roof too many times. Stood on both sides of the railings, with Robby in front of him, behind him, beside him. It has never felt like this, where the wind brings new air and potential.
“I do,” he whispers. Her smile grows.
“Interesting. Wonder if we can figure out who it’s for.”
“Interesting?”
“I’ve always liked a challenge.”
So has he. He can’t help it: he laughs, a choked noise at first and then a real one.
The wind rustles the leaves below, and she bumps him again, and this time he turns to face her fully.
“You amaze me,” Jack admits. “I don’t know what to do with myself when you’re nearby. I can’t stop staring at you, and my hip hurts, and my heart feels like it’s going to explode.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“You might want to see a doctor about that, Jack.”
He laughs again, reaches out for her, but she’s already stepping closer.
They kiss, and her hand is on his hip, and his curls around her shoulder. The mark under her palm, for the first time since it appeared, doesn't hurt.