Chapter Text
The cacophony of noise around Jack is not too dissimilar from that of Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center’s Emergency Department, but with the added benefit of fresh air, weak pre-winter sunshine, and a lot more natural green thanks to the small, tree-lined park across the street. Sure, the park is going brown as the seasons turn, but it’s still a larger spectrum of color than what he usually sees at work.
It shares that same hive of activity, though the patient alarms and beeping monitors and aggravated commentary from the waiting room are replaced by sirens and running engines, radio chatter coming from all over, including the earpiece snugged into his left ear, and orders called out by someone shouting into a megaphone.
There are people moving with intention from one direction to another to another around him, but Jack tunes it all out as he marches around an ambulance parked in the middle of the cordoned-off street. Behind it is a large, white pop-up tent, and Jack ducks under the flap, makes a b-line for the men and women clustered in the far corner. They’re all waiting around a man in a truly ill-fitting suit, who has a phone pressed to one ear and a hand covering the other to block out the ambient sounds around him.
Jack stops just off Jerome Mendoza’s shoulder, the Pittsburgh SWAT Captain standing with his arms crossed over his chest. He spares Jack the quickest of glances, just to confirm that it’s him standing there, and goes back to listening to the suit when he says, “We all want this to go well, I promise you that,” into the receiver. “Help us help you.”
Hooking his fingers into the top of his bulletproof vest so it pulls away from his chest to let the cool fall air flow against his already sweat-soaked undershirt, Jack tunes out most of the negotiator’s side of the conversation, instead glances beyond to the other tables groaning under the weight of a bank of hastily set-up computer monitors, one of which is focused on the front facade of this branch of the Philly First National Bank.
It’s windows are all covered by vinyl decals—advertisements featuring a life-size image of their brand ambassador speaking with the banks mascot, because this bank has a mascot for some reason— in front of rolled-down sunshades, so it’s impossible to see what’s happening inside, but next to that monitor is the infrared view, which doesn’t give much more information, other than a bunch of red blobs, some of which are moving around, and others placed evenly around the edges of the room.
Five members of a bank robbery ring, and about twenty four hostages inside with them.
Jack rotates into SWAT through the city’s Tactical EMS program a handful of times per moth, and first heard about the specter of the Five Aces on page one of a PD bulletin packet handed to him about six weeks ago. It was less than a day after they hit a bank in upstate New York, killing one of the managers on their way out. The crew has been vaguely heading west since getting their start in Massachusetts, and wreaked some havoc at a local credit union outside of Philly about three and a half weeks back. One of the bank’s patrons lost their life in the ensuing shootout, while one of the tellers came away with a lifelong disability.
This is the first time the police have reached a bank branch before the crew could execute their escape plan.
Jack reported to Metro SWAT downtown at just before eight this morning, changed into his drab camo uniform and was in the middle of double-checking the inventory of the room they refer to as the Trauma Closet—which pretty much has all the makings of a fully functioning trauma suite—when they were called out to the bank.
It took less than 10 minutes for Spike—Mike Scarlatti, the Canadian tech wiz on loan from Toronto’s Special Response Unit for one of those international training exchanges—to get access to the building’s security cameras, and it was another five after that when they realized one of the hostages was pregnant.
And just like that, their tactical options were cut in half.
Agents from the Pittsburgh FBI office showed up about a half hour after, and they’ve been waiting on their lead negotiator to do their thing, end this with talk instead of bullets, in the hours since.
Jack checks his watch—it’s coming up on lunchtime.
He’s far too aware that most of the time, the gig is just a bunch of sitting and waiting for the call-up and running drills in the meantime—a flashback to his deployment days when they did the same thing, except out in a desert clear on the other side of the planet. On rougher weeks, when the memories cling to him like oil, and those first few minutes after putting on the uniform usually send him back to that day of the explosion, when he thought he was in for a day of eating bland MREs and going out on a reccie, which ended abruptly when his humvee drove over an IED.
His therapist would very much prefer that Jack find a different out-of-work hobby to occupy his spare time, but that’s what Darlene gets for giving him the idea to find a side gig and attempt to be less nocturnal in the first place.
Their biggest problem of this whole hostage situation, other than, well, all of it, goes back to that pregnant hostage.
Right now, the only parts of the timeline they’re sure of are the fact that one of the bank tellers managed to trip the silent alarm at 8:17 a.m., and the first officers reported on scene five minutes later, which is the same time the bank went on lockdown.
It took almost an hour to get one of the robbers to open up a line of communication, and he and the negotiator went back and forth for another hour after that before the guy casually mentioned the pregnant hostage was experiencing symptoms that—while he didn’t know it, but Jack does—indicates she’s in the early stages of premature labor.
Problem is, they don’t know when that premature labor started. Either way, they need to get her out of there before her water breaks, and this early labor turns into actual labor.
The negotiator’s spent the next forty-five minutes that trying to convince them to just let her go as a show of good faith, which hasn’t gotten anywhere, and Jack finally turned to Mendoza and said, “Fuck it, tell the FBI to convince them to let me in and evaluate her instead.”
Because the longer Jack spends out here, waiting, the less likely he’s going to be able to stop her labor in time, or at the very least get her into the back of the ambulance and get ready to catch en route to the hospital.
Eventually, Jack goes back outside—too many bodies in the tent makes everything feel humid and sticky, and he doesn’t need to sit around, listening to the suits, when he could be doing literally anything else. He heads back to the SWAT truck, where he grabs his gear bag and takes it to the ambulance.
Javi and Renee, the two paramedics assigned to the rig, give him free reign of their supplies, so Jack is sorting through what he’d need when Mendoza comes around, bangs the side with his fist before stepping up into the back with him.
“Did they agree?” Jack asks without looking up from counting packs of hemostatic bandages.
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Mendoza nod, “One medic, minimal supplies, nothing that could be used as a weapon.”
“Fine,” Jack knows how to disable a grown man with nothing more than an ace bandage and two tongue depressors. “I can make that work.”
“You sure you’re up for this, J-Rab? I don’t like how twitchy these guys are.”
Jack chooses not to react to the use of his old call sign, nor the fact that no one wants to see the Five Aces add him to their body count, and Mendoza probably had to convince them to add another hostage to the roster, “I can do a hell of a lot more with a hell of a lot les, and you know as well as I do we need to get eyes in there.”
“Copy that,” he says over his shoulder as he steps back out. “I’ll let them know.”
Distantly, Jack nods, already digging into his go-bag to discard anything that could be considered a weapon.
—
Thumbing the inside edge of his wedding ring, Jack considers it for a moment before he digs under all the layers at his neck to grab at the bead chain he wears his dogtags on, yanks them out and pulls them over his head. The rubber-edged tags thump against the side of his hand as he fishes around the chain for the clasp to pop the strands apart. He pinches the ends of the chain between his thumb and the side of his index finger while he works the ring off with his right hand.
When it comes to hostage situations, or being around criminals in general, he knows you want them to learn as little about you as possible, to be as unidentifiable as you can. It’s why he’s not bringing his usual go-bag with him—his last name stitched in capital letters across the front—and he’s re-packed one of the ambo-bags with everything he needs instead.
When he steps into that bank, he won’t be Major Jack Abbot, retired: son, uncle, war veteran, volunteer combat medic, amputee, PTMC attending, widower.
He’ll just be Jack, the medic.
He threads the ring onto the chain and slips it back over his head, tucks them all back under his t-shirt as Mendoza makes it back to the ambulance.
“All right,” he says, shoving his hands in his pocket. “They’ve agreed to clear the doors in fifteen minutes, Scarlatti and the FBI techs will be ready for you five. Last chance to back out.”
Jack just snorts, refocuses on coiling the tubing attached to a small bottle of oxygen so it’ll fit better in its compartment. He’s already prioritized packing anything that will be of use during a premature birth, when what he really needs his a hospital, a couple L&D nurses, and a surgical suite prepped and ready for a possible crash C-section.
God, he hopes this woman’s pregnancy has been normal up until this morning’s chaos. He doesn’t even know if the fetus is viable yet.
This can go bad in so many different ways.
Mendoza huffs a sigh, a wordless acknowledgment that there’s no way he’s about to back out now, and as much as they know it’s the best option, they both also know it’s not a good one. He claps Jack on the shoulder, “If you’ve got anyone you want to reach out to before you go in, better do that now.”
Jack emphatically zips the ambo bag, leans back against his seat as Mendoza steps back out. He unzips his flak jacket and pulls his phone from the inside pocket. He won’t bring it in with him. The robbers will at best confiscate it, at worst, assume the cops are using it as a listening device and crush it under one of their boots. The last thing he wants is to have to deal with buying and setting up a new phone, so Mendoza will take custody of it until this mess ends.
Turning it right-side up in his hand, Jack considers the darkened screen.
What he should do, is text Emery, give her the heads up.
He taps the screen with his thumb, enters his passcode and opens his Messages, considers the most recent threads.
He does not give Emery a heads up.
—
Samira’s phone buzzes in the pocket of her scrubs, but it’s not until she’s done stabilizing her patient in Trauma 2—aortic dissection on his way up to surgery with Garcia—and confirms that all her other patients are currently stable and waiting on labs, that she has a chance to look at it.
Since it was the buzz of just one text, she can already hazard a guess that it’s not from Amma, who likes to send a new text with each sentence, even though Samira’s tried to tell her a million times how it’s so distracting, not to mention hell on her battery.
Other than Amma, she’s not sure who else it could be—most of the people she knows and talks to on any kind of regular basis are right here—plus, they’d call her on her department phone if they needed her—or asleep getting ready for their night shifts, and everyone else in her life is either too busy to bother texting her, or is also in the middle of their workdays like she is, just in a more normal 9-5 kind of shift.
Finally freeing her phone from her pocket while she takes a second to rest her back against the counter at Central—taking as quick of a breather as she can get away with after running that code for forty minutes, before Robby has the chance to pop out of the ether and yell at her for resting too long, which he does when he decides he’s tired of ignoring her for hours on end each shift—her brows rise when she finds the text waiting for her is from Jack, who should be in the middle of his TEMS shift, and therefore out of contact for the day.
They’ve been texting regularly since that nightmare Pittfest shift. He sent her a couple case reports in the middle of that same night, following up on the report on the pigtail catheter that she’d speed-read mere minutes before attempting the procedure for just the second time ever.
One of the reports was from an obscure combat medicine journal that she had no way to afford on her meager resident’s salary. She thanked him for sending it over anyway, and he responded with his username and password and a go to town, let me know if you find anything fun.
Over the intervening months, she’s ended up with a note on her phone with the login information for more journals than she knows what to do with, and their messages have evolved from just passing journals and case reports and annotations back and forth to conversations about oft-absurd the things they see on their respective shifts, the ongoing war between Ellis and one of the radiology techs (now in its fifth chapter), and their never-ending gripes about the closure of their favorite coffee shop. It was a family-owned operation right around the corner from the hospital that boasted both good coffee and was comparatively inexpensive, and the fact that it’s turned into a dirty soda shop, of all the gimmicks, is practically a war crime.
Sometimes, she’ll walk by the renovated storefront on her way in to work and her chest will twist with this, well, it almost feels like a pang of regret, like a missed chance, that she didn’t know about their mutual enjoyment of it until after they became, well—she hasn’t ever been sure if the right term is friends, she’s never been good at reading people, at knowing if they like her as a person, or not. And Jack is still one of her supervising attendings, no matter how close they’ve gotten.
But friend or acquaintance or colleague or whatever he is to her, she always tries to make sure she’s not bothering him on his TEMS days—he’s busy, and the job is by no means safe, so it’s beyond important that he stays focused on what he’s doing. God knows it’s annoying enough when Amma texts her incessantly when she’s in the middle of a trauma, or even just trying to take a patient history, which makes this text in the middle of his shift all the more unexpected.
There’s no message preview, not with the angle she’s holding her phone at and the light reflecting from behind her, her technological marvel of a phone four generations old refuses to recognize her face, not until she begrudgingly types in her full, six-digit password.
The app opens to two very, very long paragraphs.
Dr. Jack Abbot (PTMC Attending - NIGHT) - 12:29 p.m.
I know it’s a dick move of me to do
this over text but I’m about to walk
into something dicey and need to
get this out in case things go sideways.
I swear to god I’m not trying to get
myself killed, I’m really, really not, but I
won’t lie and tell you it’s not going to be
dangerous. If you haven’t already, I’m
sure you’ll hear about what’s going on
sooner or later, but there’s a pregnant
hostage who just went into labor, and
if I can help, I’ve got to try.
But before I go in, I need you to know
that I’m in love with you. I’m so
goddamn in love with you I don’t know
what to do with myself sometimes.
You’re the most brilliant doctor I’ve ever
met, and the last thing I want is to
jeopardize your career, or our
professional relationship. I swear, if I
was going to say something, I’d wait
until after the end of your residency, so
it’s a little less pathetic that you’ve had
some old man who also happens to be
one of your superiors sniffing at your
heels for the last couple years. But after
losing my foot, not to mention Nora—fuck
I shouldn’t be bringing her up when I’m
spilling my feelings for you, but—I’m just
saying, because I've learned better than to
leave things unsaid, even if my timing is
so stupid. And you can tell me to fuck right
off if I’ve overstepped, don’t let what I’ve
got going on right now stop you if that’s
what you need to do. Anyway, I gotta get
moving, but they’ll call Emery if it goes
wrong. Either way, I’ll see you on the other
side of this. And just—I love you, and I’m
sorry for dumping all this on you.
Samira gapes down at her phone long enough for the screen to dim, and she hastily taps at it with her index finger to bring the message back before it locks, to confirm that this isn’t just some exhaustion-induced hallucination or a figment of her imagination or that this entire day has been some kind of weird, hyper-realistic dream.
But her dreams are not often hyper-realistic, and strangely, considering the amount of time she spends in the ED, and almost never of work.
She re-reads Jack’s text, reads it a third time, and it feels like a punch to the gut, like her lungs have been filled with lead.
And as much as she’s filled with dread by his I swear to god I’m not trying to get myself killed, none of it makes any sense.
If you haven’t already, I’m sure you’ll hear about what’s going on sooner or later—well, that’s the thing about working in the ED. It can be so insulating, so isolating, that the rest of the outside world just tends to fade away while she’s busy flitting from patient to patient, trying to save the lives of people having their worst days and having next to no time to do it, let alone to take a break and scroll through the news.
So no, she doesn’t know what’s going on outside the front doors, let alone wherever Jack is with TEMS, but what she does know is that it’s probably going to be the only thing she’s going to be able to think about for the rest of the day.
And that just can’t happen.
She can’t afford to be a distracted physician.
Distraction—with more than a little dash of racism—was what got her father killed, and from the moment she decided to join the ranks of those who do no harm, to fix this broken system from the inside out, she promised herself that she was never going to put herself in any position where she wouldn’t be giving all the focus she has on those who need it most.
She just needs to put this behind her, just for now, and get through the rest of this shift.
She can figure out what she’s supposed to say to Jack, what she’s even supposed to think about all of this after she badges out.
He’s in love with her?
How is that even possible?
“Holy shit, guys, it’s Doc Abbot!”
Distantly, Samira realizes she’s near the entrance to the ambulance bay, by the security office Ahmad emerges from, waving his phone to the handful of EMTs, nurses, and orderlies loitering in the area. It’s like her feet aren’t functioning by input from her frazzled brain as she joins the small cluster, fitting into a small gap between shoulders to see what’s on his phone’s screen.
A loud buzzing sounds between her ears. It drowns out the ED, the commentary of the other nurses as Ahmad hits play on a video cued up from a local news’ YouTube channel that reads HOSTAGE SITUATION AT PITTSBURGH BANK in the lower chyron.
The video shows a shaky camera zoomed way far in as, yeah, that’s definitely Jack, walking toward the front doors of a Philly First National branch with his hands held up in surrender.
The camera angle tilts as one of the glass doors opens, the muzzle of a machine gun and a pair of gloved hands poking out before Jack disappears inside, the door closing with a rattle that somehow manages to echo through the tinny speakers, sends Samira scrambling backwards toward the support of the counter behind her.
Her fingers flex around her phone, and she scrambles to unlock it again, thumbs the brick of a message to the side to see exactly when Jack sent it, compares it to what time it is now, tries and fails to do the math on what kind of delay there may be between that broadcast airing and Ahmad actually showing it off, and—
Something twists, deep in her gut.
The last thing Jack did, before walking into that bank, was text her.
—
Strolling out of the hall around the south side, Robby rubs sanitizer between his palms as he rounds the corner into Central, and—something is off in his Emergency Department.
There’s an undercurrent of tension, but not the kind that comes hand-in-hand with a challenging patient, a tricky trauma, or an avoidable loss. In fact, there’s no one in either of the trauma rooms right now, and the ED is moving like the bee hive it typically is, except—
The cluster of people gathered around Ahmad, looking at something on his phone.
Robby claps his hands together, “Okay guys, what’s going on here?”
His tone is one of let’s break it up and get back to work, but nicer than if Dana caught them messing around on the clock, and the small cluster disburses.
Instead of looking cowed for watching TV when he should be on duty, Ahmad thrusts his phone into Robby’s hands, “Doc Abbot just walked into that bank that’s being held up.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Robby sees Mohan flinch back against the counter.
Oh boy.
Dread pools in his stomach as Ahmad reaches over and presses play, and he stares numbly as the Jack on screen steps into the bank he overheard one of the patients from Chairs tell Perlah he retired from six months ago. Robby taps the left side of the screen a couple times, rewinding to show Jack’s approach, takes in the maroon ambo-bag slung across his back.
Fuck.
He knew this TEMS gig was a bad idea.
More movement from that corner of his eye pulls his attention away from the video, and Mohan presses one hand to her mouth as she looks down at something on her phone—also the video? Something else? He’s never seen her like this.
“It’s insane, man,” Ahmad drags his focus back as he slips his phone from Robby’s grasp. “I couldn’t find anything about what’s going on in there, but it’s got to be bad if Abbot’s walked into an active hostage situation, yeah?”
A clatter sounds, and Robby blinks back in time to see Mohan’s phone on the ground, but she hasn’t made a move to grab it off the linoleum.
First things first—Robby holds up a finger pointedly at Ahmad, “No betting pools,” he says before pivoting sharply toward the hub. He sweeps Mohan’s phone off the ground, can’t help but glance down at the screen when it lights up in his hand.
It’s still open to—oh yeah, that’s definitely not the video. It’s her text thread with Jack, and Robby can’t help but skim the massive paragraph he—
Oh fuck, Jack must have texted her right before he went inside.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
The words leap at him, and Robby tears his eyes away before he can entirely process what Jack means. They land on Mohan herself, as she stares vacantly at the same spot on the floor where her phone no longer rests.
That Mohan’s been thrown for a loop by the news is not entirely a surprise—since he’s been back from the long months of his time off, and the less he thinks of it, the better, he has picked up on the way Jack looks for her when it’s the end of the night shift, when she comes in early enough to overlap with him on a case or two before Jack takes off—but the way she’s holding herself speaks to her not at all being prepared for this revelation in her phone.
Hell, he kind of figured Jack would just get over it once she moves on, takes that fellowship position out in New Jersey or whatever.
It’s a pity she doesn’t want to stick around after her residency ends. She’s a damn good doctor, one of the best they have, and would be an asset to the faculty.
Either way, he needs to get her off the ED floor, now.
“Mohan?” He doesn’t wait for her to respond, it’s mostly for pretense anyway, places a hand between her shoulders, gently lifting her away from the counter. “With me.”
Robby nudges her in the direction of the break room, and she paces just slightly ahead of him, one foot mechanically moving ahead of the other.
As it so often is, the break room is empty, and Robby kicks the doorstop out of the way, hooks the back of his ankle on the lower corner of the door with a shove of his heel that encourages it to shut faster, leaving them alone.
Mohan presses a hand to her chest as she lets him guide her into one of the chairs tucked under the round table in the middle of the room, “Um, I, I’m-” her breath catches on whatever she tries to say, and she fumbles to keep that shaking hand pressed hard on her sternum.
Robby yanks one of the other chairs around, sits close enough that their knees almost touch, and he hunches down just enough to try to meet her eye, but she’s not really seeing him, seeing anything, “Hey, Mohan?” If she could physically go pale, she would be, her skin taking on a worryingly grayish pallor. “Stay with me.”
She takes a shaky breath and there she is, her brown eyes big and round, and he thinks she might be a little dizzy with the way she won’t really look at him, “Here,” he says gently, holds her phone out to her.
Her free hand fumbles around it, but once she slips it from his grasp, Mohan flicks a glance down to the screen long gone dark, and flinches hard, drops it on the table with a clatter that is loud in spite of the sounds of the ED on the other side of the door.
“I just-” she folds her hands over her mouth, elbows dropping to her thighs, and her shoulders start so shake, breaths coming in loud, uneven gasps behind her palms.
“Hey, Mohan?” He curls his hands around her forearms, but doesn’t try to tug her hands away. “Samira. Samira, I’m going to need you to put your hands down and try to breathe normal for me.” Slowly, their hands fall down to her knees. “Come on, in for four and hold—yeah, just like that for. And out. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.”
She follows his quiet directions once, and then again as he counts her down, slowly sits back up in the middle of the third time, and after a minute, he’s pretty sure she’s not going to end up passing out from the throes of a full-blown panic attack.
“Okay?”
She takes another slow, steadying breath, and then nods, “Fine,” she says, though her voice is high and a little shaky, he has seen her pull herself back together from cases that elicit strong emotions not unlike this more than once. “I’m fine, Robby.”
Mohan is definitely not fine, but at least he doesn’t have to call Dana in with a half-dose of Ativan.
“Samira,” he says, pointed but kind. “You should know, I saw what Jack sent you.”
Her brows furrow together, and her wide-eyed gaze turns into a scowl that he has to fight back from laughing at, holds his hands out in surrender, “I’m sorry for snooping, but if you want to talk about it, I’m here to listen.”
Mohan tilts her head, her mouth twisting in—is that disbelief?
“Look, I don’t give a shit about the optics right now. Just, I’m here for you, whatever you need.”
“I just-” Samira breaks off, losing that focus again as she pinches the bridge of her nose. “I didn’t know.”
Robby snorts at that, can’t help it, but it makes Mohan rear back, like she’s trying to get away from him. Her whole face shuts down, emotions locked up tight, “Look,” she sounds like she’s gearing up for a fight, like when they disagree on her course of patient care, already putting together fact and stats and research to back up her emotional decision making. “Nothing untoward has ever happened, he has never once been inappropriate toward me, and if you think for one second that-”
“Hey, hey, Mohan, it’s okay, it’s okay. I believe you.”
The look on her face says clearly that she doesn’t entirely believe him, her lips pursed to a thin line to keep from responding.
He’s only ever been on her side, but today is not the day to try to make her understand that.
Robby sits back in his seat for a moment, doesn’t really know how to move this conversation forward without bringing up the elephant in the room in the form of their night shift attending, and instead slaps his palms onto his thighs before standing up, “When’s the last time you had something to eat?”
Her gaze casts down to her lap as she tries to think, “I ate something at some point today, I think. It’s fine. I’m fine.”
Robby does stifle a groan, but isn’t entirely surprised. Resident hours are seemingly never-ending, worse than all the way back when he was doing his own residency in New Orleans, and Samira works more OT than most of his residents. So much so, that he’s had to put her on mandatory rest more than once since her R2 year. He vaguely remembers she used to bring a bag full of snacks during her Intern year, but would mostly just leave them in her locker since the never-ending COVID shifts made it a pain in the ass to switch out their already limited PPE.
He moves to the counter, where there’s a handful of granola bars in one of the drawers, and grabs a green-wrapped Nature Valley, the kind that are more crumbs than bar, because he’s pretty sure it’s a brand she’ll actually eat, and one of the eight-ounce water bottles they keep stocked in the fridge.
She seems to be settling better with him farther away, which feels unfortunate, but he pushes his feelings about it down deep and retreats to the counter. He rests his back against it as he supervises her picking at the bar, eating it almost crumb by crumb, “Jack’s going to be all right, you know.”
Mohan swallows hard enough he can see the way her throat works, and takes a careful sip of water, “I just—I don’t,” she trails off, looks helplessly at her phone. “I don’t know what-” She breaks off again, frustrated, waves the hand not holding the bar in some vague attempt at replacing word with coherent sign and slumps back in her chair.
To be fair, he doesn’t know what the hell they’re supposed to say or do either.
“Sit here a minute,” he says. “I’ll be right back.”
Robby slips out of the break room, pulling the door shut behind him. He leans against the wall next to it while groping for the department phone in the pocket of his hoodie. Flipping it over in his hand, he dials a familiar extension and presses it to his ear.
“What’d you do this time, Robby?” Walsh picks up on the second ring. “I’m about to scrub in on that lung resection.”
Robby scrubs his free hand over his face, “You hear anything about that hostage sitch over on Third?”
Walsh doesn’t beat around the bush, she never has, and Robby can almost hear the way she stops in her tracks, some four floors above the ED, “Why?”
“Abbot just walked into the bank. Patient in distress, or something, I don’t have a lot of details. He’s a hostage now.”
“Oh, for fucking-”
“And that’s not the only problem.”
Walsh heaves a breath that echoes over the phone line, “Do I even wanna know?”
“He texted Dr. Mohan right before he went in.”
Another sigh, “Oh boy.”
“Did you know?”
“Do not ask me what I know, Robinavitch. How is she?”
Yeah, of course she knows. Go figure.
“Not great. She shouldn’t be here, trying to deal with this on shift.”
“I’ll take care of it. Just—give me a couple hours to wrap this case. I’ll have someone call Miller in early.”
“Got it. I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”
“You better. Fuck.”
—
The granola bar tastes like crumbly nothing, but Samira forces herself to eat it all, while she has the time.
Sitting alone in the break room for this long makes her skin itch, makes her feel like she shouldn’t be here while there are patients to treat out there.
But Robby was the one who left her in here, and it feels weird to get up and go, to go against what he asked, even if he’s the one who’s usually pushing her to work faster, to take on another patient, to free up another bed, to treat and street regardless of what she feels in her gut.
She twists the cap of the water bottle into place, puts it back on the table, right next to her phone. It’s lying there face up, the screen dark, showing a warped reflection of the fluorescent light bars mounted to the ceiling.
There’s nothing to be done, right now.
Jack is, well, wherever he is, doing what he needs to do, and she’s here, at work.
Thankfully, Robby comes back in before she can spiral even more.
He closes the door behind him, rests his back against it, “Do you want me to grab Mel or Santos to keep you company for a bit?”
Samira’s jaw ticks, and she feels her face go hot. She takes a very pointed breath, counts backwards from ten in her head, before she responds with a careful, “I don’t need to be babysat, Robby,” it takes everything in her not to spit the words at him. “I can work just fine.”
“No, you can’t. It’s okay, Mohan.”
Now, she does glare. The kindness in his tone grates against her already thin nerves—he can’t just say things like that to her, not now. Not after nearly four years of either berating her to be faster, to do more, to be more, or just straight up ignoring her like he has since Pittfest.
“Mohan? Samira?”
She blinks, realizes he’s been trying to catch her attention for at least a minute or two.
“I’m fine, Robby.”
“Okay,” he nods, like he’s considering something, and then he says, “I promise this is nothing against you, but you’ve got to go home. I’ve talked to Walsh, and-”
The heat in her face spreads all the way down her chest, “Are you kidding?” She hisses, eyes wide as she finally meets his. “Sending me home because Jack’s having a difficult day with his side job would be insane, Robby.”
Sure, difficult might be an understatement, but that’s not the point.
“Except his day is impacting you. There’s no way it’s not.”
“Of course it is. I’m not going to try to pretend otherwise. But there’s no way you can tell me what’s going on hasn’t spread through the department.”
Robby inclines his head, an allowance, “Yeah, it’s making its way around.”
“So how do you think it’ll look to everyone else if I leave not even halfway through the shift because of a man? For our night shift attending? I know everyone likes to gossip—don’t think I haven’t heard what people say about me and Jack. It’s nicer than when people would call me Slo-Mo behind my back, but I’d still really rather not set the so-called narrative the nurses cooked up because they’re bored on fucking fire. It would make us both look bad, and you know Jack would never want to put me in that kind of position, let alone have you put me in one.”
Robby scrubs his palm over his beard and sighs, “Fine,” he concedes. “But no traumas. You triage Chairs with Donnie until Walsh is done upstairs with her case. Then I want you both out of here. We don’t have to make a big production out of it. I’ll cover the end of shift for you.”
Her brows tilt together in clear annoyance. She can make it to seven, she knows she can, but of course he won’t let her.
But finally, she nods, “Fine.”
—
“Take a few minutes to get your feet under you. I’ll let Donnie know you’re on your way.”
Robby opens the break room door, props it open with both palms as he shoves the doorstop back into place with his foot. Out of the corner of his eye, he watches Mohan slowly pick her phone off the table, her thumb sliding across the screen in what he can only guess is to reread the giant paragraphs Jack sent her.
Even on a bad day, Mohan can run Chairs in her sleep, he knows that, but still resolves to keep an eye on her, as much as he can, until Walsh can get her out of here.
Mohan’s right, the nurses have been talking about her and Jack, and as funny as it may be, they still have been professional, Robby knows Jack well enough that he’s absolutely been holding back, when it comes to her.
She may, fairly, want to maintain as much professionalism as she can about Jack and whatever they’ve decided to call what’s going on between them, he is very much not asking, but—Robby’s pretty sure any real sense of decorum has sailed long before Jack decided to spill his feelings at her and unceremoniously walk right into a hostage situation.
Fucking asshole.
He better get out of this in one piece, if only because Robby is never going to let him live this shit down.